From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Sep 28 2004 - 15:26:58 BST
Mel,
[Stuff about computers deleted. I know that computers are incapable of
anything other than mechanistic calculation. My point of bringing it up was
that the questions raised are not all answered by the MOQ, which has
trouble even addressing them. Some of those questions are SOM platypi, but
not all, for instance, the question of how the S/O distinction arises.]
> mel:
> Good.
> Surely by now it should have occurred to us that the monopolar views
> materialist/idealist/whateverist miss the boat by looking at the thing
> itself. Instead we should realize that the relationship between the
> "things" is where the meaning resides, where the dynamic plays.
> It's like the difference between the block of marble and the sculpture.
> The emptied space defines relationships, forms, mythos...
Yes. The trouble is that the word 'Quality' is insufficient unless it is
buttressed with a word like 'Intellect', where Peirce's semiotic triads
come more obviously into play. There is no value unless there are
particulars AND universals AND interpretants, where each one exists only in
relation to the other two. If you've got relationships or forms, and you've
got value, then you've got intellect. But see below about the word
'intellect'.
> {Scott:] On their beauty, absolutely. Even as a student of mathematics I
> have experienced that beauty. But "responded to DQ" does not quite fit the
> experience. The beauty is inseparable from the pure intellectuality (if
> that is a word) of the moment. It is humdrum intellect momentarily being
> Intellect. That's why calling DQ "pre-intellectual" is such a bad move.
The
> quality and the intellectuality are one and the same.
>
> mel:
> DQ in full can ONLY be pre-intellectual. In the present, Perception
> is only open to largely unmediated experience prior to the separation
> of intellect and knowledge, which are of the past. There lies only the
> memory of the Dynamic or the processed model of the dynamic, not
> the dynamic itself.
Why can DQ in full only be pre-intellectual? How can the non-intellectual
produce the intellectual?
There is an author you might be interested in, named Georg Kuhlewind. He is
an expositor of Rudolf Steiner's philosophy. He also describes our normal
thoughts as dead, as "already past". However, he goes on, the source of our
dead thoughts is not something pre-intellectual, but is living, or pure
thinking. Further, he describes a method of training that brings the
experience of living thinking to whoever has the discipline to carry it
out. That discipline is concentration and meditation on thinking, to learn
to think purposefully, and mindfully.
Goethe once said: "Man is only really thinking when the object of his
thought is something which he cannot think out to a conclusion." This is
living thinking, a thinking which is dynamic. If you choose to restrict the
words 'intellect' and 'thinking' to that "which are of the past", you
cannot speak of the kind of activity that Goethe is talking about. What is
it that creates new thoughts, if not living thinking? If you say it is DQ,
and if DQ is pre-intellectual, then you've got a problem.
>
> Pirsig's choice of "quality" as a term for the apprehensible attributes
> of the present cusp of being may be arguable, but whatever term you prefer
> must express the "pretellectual" rather than what is past.
> Otherwise you are speaking of something no longer real.
>
> Beauty, as you say is intellectual, but it is a judgement of something
> that is now past, something not on the present cusp of being.
That's where your definition that all intellect as past is misleading you.
In the aha! moment, the beauty IS the thinking. That is living thinking, in
the present.
>
> Language is not made to communicate experience of NOW, but
> rather to process abstractions of the past
But isn't the processing in the present? In any case, communication of
abstractions is only one function of language. Another is creative
expression, when the poet is writing the poem. You might be interested in
Owen Barfield's book "Speaker's Meaning", where he goes into how these two
functions are at odds. It amounts to a DQ/SQ polarity.
>...that is the point
> of what Zen's view of the mind as an addictive disease is in
> ordinary consciousness. If you reduce Pirsig's message to
> philosophical terminology, you remove the insight it contains
> and create another competing philosophy or a dogma, but it
> is empty, then and useless.
As I gave examples in another post to DMB, the mind, besides doing things
like "reducing a message to philosophical terminology", is also the means
of transcendence, in the view of Eckhart, Shankara, Plotinus, and
Merrell-Wolff. If you stick to Pirsig's view of Zen, then you're basically
working in a dualist situation, one where we have an external goal (DQ)
which we reach by casting off all SQ.
Of course, this is all dependent on how one *uses* the words 'mind',
'intellect', 'reason', and so forth. Pirsig has chosen to assign them all
to SQ. That leaves nothing for speaking about how mind works, since in its
activity, it is creative. Creativity, though, has been assigned to DQ,
about which we are not allowed to think. Well, there is an interesting body
of philosophic work done, some by mystics, none of it SOM, which the MOQ
has just shut out, all in the name of this limited interpretation of Zen.
I'm referring to people like Goethe, Coleridge, Steiner, Kuhlewind,
Barfield, and Merrell-Wolff.
>
> Look at the structure of what he sets up as oposed to the
> assumptions of the SOM and then step forward to surf on
> the present cusp of being. It is not an exercise in thinking
> from that point on, it is doing, being.
In comparing his structure not to SOM but to the work of the thinkers just
referred to, Pirsig's comes up short. It leaves no space to think about
thinking, about transformation through living thinking, for how new
thoughts come into being.
And since when is thinking not doing? Don't tell Poincare that.
- Scott
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