From: ml (mbtlehn@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Wed Sep 29 2004 - 06:09:47 BST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Roberts" <jse885@earthlink.net>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2004 8:26 AM
Subject: Re: MD A bit of reasoning
> 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'.
mel:
This is not about Peirce or his conceptions.
It is about what comes before...
>
> > {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?
mel:
Non-intellectual sounds like a very different thing.
Pre- preceeds, Non- is contrary to.
>
> 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".
mel:
Thoughts are not dead, but they have passed into a
position of the intellectual present, after the experiential.
Relationships, forms, universals, particulars, and any
other associations then come into play.
However, he goes on, the source of our
> dead thoughts is not something pre-intellectual, but is living, or pure
> thinking.
mel:
This may be becoming a problem of terminology/translation
and usage... I would substitute a statement in this case that
thoughts are intellectual, but the source of thought comes from
two souces 1) other thought and 2)experience. Both are living,
but experience is from living awareness...
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.
mel:
Sounds like he may be pointing towards a "mind control"
insight similar to many other traditions, possibly even
analogous to the same countryside as zen...
>
> 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.
mel:
Sorry. Each level has both SQ and DQ. Some thoughts are indeed
more dynamic in character than others. But as I stated above,
thought can be recursive and are possible in the present about
other thoughts, but the point of the experience on the present cusp
of being just is prior to whole lones of beautiful and rewarding thought.
Thought isn't dead, it can be wonderful, but it is not to be confused
with the original experience.
> >
> > 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.
mel:
This is not just a definition, it is functional, but the celebration
of beauty and the relating of one subject of beauty to another
must be recognized as indeed living thinking, which follows
the experience of what you assign the label of beauty to.
>
> >
> > 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.
mel:
Sounds like a fascinating work to read. With the occasional
attempt to describe a wonderful experience, I am well aware of the
feeling of a cascading flood of experience evoking language in reaction.
>
> >...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.
mel:
Yes, our Swiss-army-mind does many things and pointing towards
structures to incite transcendence is one possible function. (I am
working to try and describe this in another work...) I am not sure
that I have sufficient understanding of the limits of Pirsig's
explanation of his view of zen to agree or not. My familiarity came
from elsewhere. Much of ordinary language appears to discuss
Zen in dual appearing terms but they are usually to express paradox
or departures of meaning from the ordinary.
>
> 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.
mel:
Your insight on *use* is the key here.
If we bring in outside systems of thought, as elegant as they may be,
we risk raising the "noise" level and burying the "signal"
Pirsig uses Static and Dynamic as protean terms. In one sense
he shows a relative state, with some positions within or between
levels as more or less dynamic. In another sense, he is looking
for a way to share with us the insight of "Tao-ish" Dynamic
experience on the present cusp of being and the settling of
that experience into a nest of less dynamic Static structures of
or within our lives' processes.
>
> >
> > 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.
mel:
As a philosophical system, Pirsig's thought is indeed
little but an initial insight. It is not rigorous, it fails to
relate to all other formal systems in the set of either
Continental or Anglo-American (or Existential-Phenomenal
or other) schools of thought, it fails to make many traditional
internal causative relationships explicit.
But then it need not do so, that is not what his writing is
about. It is a bridge to another place outside the recursive
limits of such systems.
As a tool in a universe of indeterminate possibility or of
manifesting being it is a good entre. It is up to us to
step through the door...
>
> And since when is thinking not doing? Don't tell Poincare that.
mel:
Depends I suppose on just what you are trying to do. Thinking has
yet to mow my lawn, but Poincare is free to come do that. ;-)
thanks--mel
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