From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Fri Aug 29 2003 - 16:08:00 BST
Ian:
> Sorry Platt, but I just do not see where you get those distinctions you
> say I seem to be making ??? On each of your points I believe I see
> exactly the opposite.
>
> You said
> Subject/Object view.
> Humans apart from the world ?
>
> I said no such thing.
> On the contrary - I say there is no world to speak of independent of our
> interaction with it, and it with us (in every sense, mental and
> physical) This interaction is the quality we know.
It takes two to tango and at least two to have an "interaction." Your
two are "us" and the "world," translates into self/other, man/nature,
in other words, your basic subject/object division. The "quality we
know," that is, the quality we can talk about, is not the interaction
between us and the world out there, but interaction between direct
experience (DQ) and our static intellectual patterns of value (static
quality).
> You said
> betterness is a value judgment that is immediately
> apprehended by direct experience prior to "making sense."
> Recognition of Quality is pre-intellectual
>
> I say I've seen those phrases before, but I haven't a clue what
> distinction your making. I guess your words "direct experience" are
> analogous to my "interaction" above. But "immediate", "prior", "pre-"
> you lose me.
Perhaps this will help. From Chap. 9, Lila:
"Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of realty, the
source of all things, completely simple and always new. It was the
moral force that had motivated the brujo in Zuni. It contains no
pattern of fixed rewards and punishments. Its only perceived good is
freedom and its only perceived evil is static quality itself--any
pattern of one-sided fixed values that tries to contain and kill the
ongoing free force of life."
> You said
> denying that the world has no purpose
>
> I say (I suspect you have an unintended double negative there) I do not
> deny the world a purpose, I just can't imagine what that might mean, nor
> can I see any reason for it to have such a purpose in order to explain
> anything I need to understand about the world - so far anyway. I said
> "no evidence the world needs any transcendental purpose" ie it may or
> may not have a purpose - I can't see what difference it makes, so I
> doubt (rather than deny) there is such a purpose.
A world without purpose means a world of flukes. Humans are flukes on a
fluke of a planet in a fluke of a galaxy in a fluke of a universe.
That's the inspiring view that subject/object science has left us with.
If on the other hand, in the nature of things, there is a purpose
expressed as a drive towards goodness as the MOQ claims, then our moral
systems will derive their validity from this. If not, then morals must
be our own inventions and thus wholly relative. That's the prevailing
belief today among intellectual elites, and why intellectual control of
society has failed so abysmally, as evidenced at the sorry state of
U.S. public education and the garbage comprising popular culture.
So, transcendental purpose makes a big difference.
Platt
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