Steve, Ian, all... Good discussion. My quick two cents is that underlying all this talk about "faith" is Pirsig's seminal point from ZMM, "All this is just an analogy". And when you start with that simple observation, you can see that the problems with "faith" occur as one tries to solidify or literalize the metaphor. Yes, at the root of our experience is an inescapable black hole of Godelian incompleteness. We must accept that the deeper and deeper we dig into the layers of language and symbolic representae we build to describe the world, the closer and closer we come to the inexpressable, unknowable, indescribable abyss. Towards this, yes, we cannot escape "faith" in that this core is always beyond our intellection, never capturable in symbolic language.
But as we move farther and farther from this one simple premise, we must remember that the symbolic edifice we construct in attempts to understand this abyssal core are always metaphoric. We can cast this core as "God", and write anthropomorphic stories in an attempt to paint aspects of this "God" into understandable symbolic code. These "myths" are always and everywhere undertaken out of a desire to, like art, approach the indescribable by creating symbolic markers in the hopes that these markers will serve to point people towards the moment of enlightenment, what Pirsig calls "pre-intellectual awareness". In this way, "myths" are like "paintings" or "symphonies" or "sculpture". They are textual-artistic creations made in the hope of capturing, in the fleetingest of moments, a glimpse into that which can never be approached directly, that which can only be approached tangentally, that which can only ever be seen out of the corner of our eyes. And like visual or aural art, textual art serves a grand purpose of giving us the only means we have to see the "Godhead", "Quality", "the Tao". Often this is expressed as "esoteric versus exoteric meaning". We know what the stories say, for example, but what do they mean? A literal read, an exoteric read, misses the art, misses the metaphor, and instead replaces the path to enlightenment with the path to power. No longer are "myths" textual paths to the undefinable core but instead paths for human power, control and the manipulation of others. We replace the fundamental, indefinable point of similarity with a hierarchy of supremacy. We would think it idiotic to proclaim any painting, no matter how artful, to be "the One True Painting", and banish and burn all other paintings as wrong or evil. We would no more think to elevate Bach's "Die Kunst der Fuge" as "The One True Music" and wage a campaign to ridicule, ban and dismiss "infidels" and "barbarians" who dare listen to Beethoven, than we would lift ZMM up as "The One True Book" and look down at those who read Yoshikawa or Dostoevsky as inferior heathens. And yet this is precisely what occurs when exoteric, literal readings of "myth" trump a deeper exoteric, metaphoric read. Instead of facing the mono-myth with philosophic curiosity, we create hierarchical walls of power and supremacy (and ultimately alientation). We can never escape the incompleteness, and we must have faith ultimately in the power of our metaphors to point as best as possible towards this void, but while faith built upon this recognition will produce ever-better artful glances into the face of god, faith built upon the literalization of any one given metaphor will only lead to power, hierarchies, and a hindering of human enlightenment. To this end, I have no problem describing the "Theory of Gravity" as a work of art, any more than I have of describing the Occidental texts or Lakota stories as works of art. When seen from a metaphoric, esoteric perspective, it is like traversing a large museum, with different representations undertaken to point towards that which ultimately can never be seen. And while one must, ultimately, have faith in the process of art, placing one's faith fully in one particular work of art moves one away from the Godhead, the Void, the Abyss, Quality, the Tao rather than towards it. My two cents, anyways... Arlo Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
