From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Jan 16 2005 - 22:39:26 GMT
Chin, Matt, Paul and all MOQers:
Chin less-than-absolutely suggested:
........................we are born with an innate understanding built up
from previous fathers and mothers and of fathers and mothers of these
fathers and mothers. In this we hold an inherent understanding which we
could build upon without the need of understanding prior philosophical
concepts or philosophical rules of engagement other than hints to remember
what we already know.
dmb replies:
Hmmm. I don't know. And by that I mean that I'm skeptical AND I really don't
know. Its not clear to me, but want to speculate anyway because it might be
fun. If Chin is saying what I think he is, he's talking about the premise
behind the Socratic method of questioning. We already know everything on
some level and all we need to make that knowledge conscious is the right
questions. These questions will jogg our memories, so to speak, and make
that knowledge explicit. It also occurs to me that "latent" might be a
better word for that "forgotten" knowledge.
Maybe its just a matter of absorbing the culture and its concepts as we
mature. Maybe common sense is built upon the wisdom of the past and so we
all inherent a kind of warmed-over and unexamined collection of what used to
be fabulous new ideas. And this is certainly part of the picture, at least.
I'm sure we could take a page from anyone's book and discover that ideas and
assuptions there are derived from very explicit historical sources that the
author is completely unaware of. And I don't just mean literal authors. The
same thing would be apparent in the utterances of an illiterate cowboy.
I also get the impression that false ideas can persist this way for
centuries and Pirsig's examination of "substance", I think, is an attempt to
show exactly that. We can see these ideas evolve too. RHT and all its
descendents is a good example of how ideas can even seem to have children as
they are passed along. Or, in the case of creationism, we can see how
unsuccessful ideas will mutate in order to survive. So now we have
"intelligent design" instead. But I also get the feeling that there is also
something SOM and not quite right about the idea of passing philosophies
around as if they were genes.
There is a Pirsigism that may be apt at this point. I forget exactly how he
says it, but basically wants to dispel the notion that you have static
pattens. Rather, he says, static patterns have you. This goes along with the
idea that there is no self independent of the static patterns. You ARE the
patterns. Our worldview is such that we imagine the subjective mind filling
itself with knowledge and the subjective mind creating new knowledge, but
Pirsig's comments turns that on its head in a rather strange way. I mean, if
the self is a fiction, then who is forgetting and remembering? Who is
creating new ideas? Can it be the subjective self if the subjective self
itself is an idea? No. This stuff makes my brain hurt just trying to think
about it, but its pretty clear that intellectual creativity is a response to
Dynamic Quality...
"Poincaré had been working on a puzzle of his own. His judgment that the
scientist selects facts, hypotheses and axioms on the basis of harmony,
also left the rough serrated edge of a puzzle incomplete. To leave the
impression in the scientific world that the source of all scientific
reality is merely a subjective, capricious harmony is to solve problems
of epistemology while leaving an unfinished edge at the border of
metaphysics that makes the epistemology unacceptable.
But we know from Phĉdrus' metaphysics that the harmony Poincaré talked
about is not subjective. It is the source of subjects and objects and
exists in an anterior relationship to them. It is not capricious, it is
the force that opposes capriciousness; the ordering principle of all
scientific and mathematical thought which destroys capriciousness, and
without which no scientific thought can proceed." [ZMM Ch22]
It must be the same way with social level static patterns. The ordering
principle, the non-subjective harmony Ponciare talked about, produces static
patterns in its wake on all levels, no? And I think this is one of the major
distinctions between Pirsig's view and the postmodern view that our reality
is a linguistic construction. Because the underlying metaphysical
assumptions are still largely unchanged, the postmodenist sees the
construction process in terms of convienience and usefulness, as essentially
arbitrary and judges their value accordingly. But in Pirsig's view we get a
radically different idea. If the implication of his epistemology is what I
think it is, then all of creation is a manifestation of the same ordering
principle. And I think that the "intelligent designers" have discovered this
principle without quite having the metaphysical concepts to deal with it. I
think this is what the mystics say, that all things are a manifestion of the
One. And if our deepest Self, our deepest identity is that One. The small
self, the one we think we are, is a manifestion of our true Self. And the
whole world is a manifestation of that ultimate Self.
So if you ever felt as if you knew a thing before it was taught maybe its
because you did. Its not the kind of onmiscience we might normally imagine.
Its not like we all have a PhD in everything but smoked too much dope and
forgot it all. But I think in a sense DQ doesn't really care if an idea
seems to be 10,000 years old to us or if from our perspective it hasn't even
been invented yet, because time and evolution is just another one of those
ideas. As far as DQ is concerned, I guess, there is no time and everything
that ever was or ever could be, now is. And we know it, cause we are it.
See what I mean about speculation? Know I don't .mmmH
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Jan 16 2005 - 22:43:39 GMT