From: Steve Peterson (peterson.steve@verizon.net)
Date: Sat Feb 14 2004 - 17:44:40 GMT
Hi Platt,
>> Steve:
>> But can gears really be compared to music based on degree of
>> reflecting
>> Spirit? Can the Mona Lisa be compared with Beethoven's Moonlight
>> Sonata, or
>> The Grapes of Wrath, or fine crystal stemware, or Einstein's Theory of
>> Relativity? I don't think so.
>
> Platt said: I don't see why not. Excellence is excellence regardless
> of its physical
> manifestation.
How would you rank them?
>
>> You might also ask, "which would you rather store jelly in?" Some
>> things are better than others within a specific context.
>
> Platt said:The contexts I think important are Pirsig's evolutionary
> levels. Storing
> jelly is a biological level good. Drinking champagne out of a crystal
> goblets is an aesthetic level good. Higher levels always trump lower
> levels in the moral hierarchy, though the lower levels are necessary to
> maintain the higher.
>
Pretty much agree.
>> Such
>> comparisons can be made, but the postmodern claim that truth is
>> context
>> dependent is important.
>
> Platt said:Truth is a species of good whose 'context' is always the
> intellectual
> level. Perhaps inadvertently you have run into the postmodern paradox
> by
> asserting truth is context dependent. What "context" can you cite that
> makes your assertion true?
I don't think the statement is self-refuting. I can't think of a
context in which the statement "truth is context dependent" is false,
but there are countless contexts for which the statement would be a
meaningless non sequitor. The statement "truth is context dependent"
only makes sense in specific contexts.
>
> Platt said:The "everything is relative" mantra is passe, having been
> hoisted on its
> own petard. Postmodernism will be replaces by Valuism.
The "everything is relative" mantra takes a wrong turn when it is
thought to mean that we can't say that anything is better than anything
else. I think that you take a wrong turn in thinking that everything
can be ranked in a one dimensional hierarchy. I, on the other hand,
think that some things are better than others within specific contexts,
and contexts are limitless.
I think that Valuism gets us out of the Materialism/Idealism dilemma.
It is better alternative to those metaphysical positions, whereas I
think of Postmodernism as a worldview that will be replaced by a more
evolved worldview that includes an integral aperspectival (Wilber
speak) intellectual framework like Pirsig's MOQ that recognizes
evolutionary progress of worldviews. Pirsig provides a philosophical
foundation for what the integral-movement Wilber-types are talking
about. I wonder if they will catch on to what Pirsig has accomplished.
Has anyone (DMB?) ever written to Ken Wilber about the MOQ?
>>
>> What Pirsig concludes in ZAMM in his discussion of building up
>> analogues is that if we have similar experiences we will make similar
>> judgments. I don't think that Pirsig would agree with you that all
>> will
>> experience the same thing when they hear a song or make the same
>> comparison
>> when they hear two songs. A child who has never before heard music
>> for
>> example is likely to be turned on by sing-songy melodies that have
>> long ago
>> gone stale for us and also likely to hear more sophisticated music as
>> noise. With enough experience of sing-songy melodies a song with a
>> simple
>> harmony may make the hair on the back of their neck stand up and
>> cause a
>> shiver down the spine. Later, hearing simple harmonies will not be
>> such a
>> dynamic experience. It will be a while before the child will have the
>> prior experience that would be needed to appreciate one of Bach's
>> fugues.
>
> Platt said: Well, in making my observations I assumed an adult
> perspective. What you
> say about children applies I think to adults who claim banging on
> garbage
> cans is high quality music. :-)
>
In your writing-off of my example you accept that truth is context
dependent.
It's fine if you want to only consider adults if you will also consider
how they came to have an adult perspective on music. Adults in
different cultures grew up with completely different musical
constructions that are not based on the same scales that Western music
uses. Chords that sound harmonious to us with our western upbringing
sound dissonant to others brought up on different musical structures.
(I've heard this is true, anyway. Some music can not be played on our
pianos for example because other scales use notes that fall between the
notes on a piano. Perhaps there is someone out there with more
expertise in the area who could shed some light.)
It is wrong to say that the quality of Bach is universal in the way you
suggest. You take such ideas as "Quality is the track that directs the
train" to mean that we are all headed to the same place. The is your
one-dimensional hierarchy of value that I deny. We are on the same
track in the sense that we are driven toward Quality, but Quality is
not the same for everyone. It *is* universal in that anyone with the
same collection of analogues as you would experience music in the same
way as you, but since no one has the exact same collection of prior
experiences we will all experience quality differently. See below for
support in ZAMM.
Thanks,
Steve
From part III of ZAMM:
"He then proceeded in terms of the trinity to answer the question, Why
does everybody see Quality differently? This was the question he had
always had to answer speciously before. Now he said, ``Quality is
shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to
intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms.
The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on
the Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have
accumulated in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality
event, analogues to our previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be
unable to act. We build up our language in terms of these analogues. We
build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues.''
The reason people see Quality differently, he said, is because they
come to it with different sets of analogues. He gave linguistic
examples, showing that to us the Hindi letters da, da, and dha all
sound identical to us because we don't have analogues to them to
sensitize us to their differences. Similarly, most Hindi-speaking
people cannot distinguish between da and the because they are not so
sensitized. It is not uncommon, he said, for Indian villagers to see
ghosts. But they have a terrible time seeing the law of gravity.
This, he said, explains why a classful of freshman composition
students arrives at similar ratings of Quality in the compositions.
They all have relatively similar backgrounds and similar knowledge. But
if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems
out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the
students' ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well.
In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines
him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but
because people are different in terms of experience. He speculated that
if two people had identical a priori analogues they would see Quality
identically every time. ""
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