[Bo]
Before I have tried the same example in a lesser scale, about
Newton's Physics place within Newton's Physics, but I don't think it
got through.
[Arlo]
Maybe this is stating the obvious, but the problem here
("containment" as you refer to it) is one of self-reference, that is,
trying to use something to define itself. This puts us right
smack-dab into the paradoxes and recursions of Goedel and, to a
lesser but important sense, Pirsig.
For young Phaedrus, a critical point was the attempt to apply the
"scientific method TO the scientific method", then it was "turning
analytic reason back on itself", and later was his recognition that
NO symbolic system was ever capable of containing Quality, "Since the
One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it
cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what
thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something
less than the One itself.", along with a final "nod" to
self-reference when he laments the Chairman's approach "He might
learn something. Once it's stated that "the dialectic comes before
anything else," this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity,
subject to dialectical question."
When you try to "put the MOQ into the MOQ" you are at a stall point.
You simply can not contain a system within itself without leading to
the "strange loops", paradoxes and recursions that brings. As
Hofstadter refers to it, this is the "essential incompleteness" of
any system, it can never contain itself. And so, as Pirsig points
out, the only way to reference a system from within its system is by
allegory, analogy and indirect pointers.
This is what you are doing (and I add, correctly), and why it is not
only "not easy" to define the MOQ in terms of itself, but IMPOSSIBLE.
And this is why saying "the MOQ is an intellectual pattern within a
system called the MOQ" is immediately self-referential and hence paradoxical.
Maybe the MOQ is not a thing (I am just speculating based on recent
thoughts), but a "doing". Maybe it is better to think of the MOQ not
as a pattern, but as a Verb. This would tie somewhat into Platt's
"Weltanschauung" which translates almost as a "thing" (worldview) but
in German means something more "active", more like a "way of
being". And that certainly gets as well to your suggestion that it's
"how we live".
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