From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Sat Nov 15 2003 - 16:23:03 GMT
Steve,
> I probably should have asked this a very long time ago that I could have
> understood your last 100 posts, but could you please explain what you mean
> by "the logic of contradictory identity"? Where does this term come from?
The phrase comes (translated from Japanese) from Nishida Kitaro, and is also
referred to as "self-contradictory identity" and in other ways. One can find
a discussion of it in Robert E. Carter's "The Nothingness Beyond God: An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro". I also believe that
Coleridge's use of polarity is the same thing. For that, see Owen Barfield's
"What Coleridge Thought".
The basic idea is that the only way to handle the basic words of
metaphysics, or religion, or psychology, is to treat them as poles in a
polarity, or -- same thing -- in contradictory identity. Each pole depends
totally on the other pole, and at the same time negates the other. So, for
example, the self is and is not the non-self. DQ and SQ are, in my opinion,
polar, or as Coleridge puts it, "two forces of one power", each determining
the other as each negates the other.
Carter makes the point that the L of CI differs from Hegel's dialectic logic
(thesis, antithesis, synthesis) in that in the L of CI there is no
possibility of synthesis. This can be treated as a metaphysics by looking on
polarity as eternal creation by means of negation, that all that exists
(including our finite/infinite selves) is the expression of the One and at
the same time the negation of the One.
My reason for continually bringing it up in this forum is that I see
intellect -- normal everyday human intellect -- as our most immediate
exemplar of the L of CI. All that it produces is SQ, is finite, but the
producing of it is DQ. Thus it is, so to speak a microcosm of DQ/SQ tension,
and not, as Pirsig says, just SQ. So I want to scream NO when Pirsig
characterizes DQ as "pre-intellectual", and claims that intellect takes us
away from DQ. Instead, though it does take us away from the DQ involved in
what we perceive with our senses, it takes us toward DQ in the intellect
itself.
- Scott
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