Greetings Matt,
Well I thought telos was at the base of Aristotle's
Metaphysics. Later to be adapted and extended into a theological
argument by Christianity, but really I don't care.
The 'beauty is divine' comment was from a dictionary definition, not
my definition of whatever it is you've decided is
important. Actually, I kind of like Ron's explanation, "the ecstasy
of existing in the now. yes. the experience of being is Quality, for
me. For it is dynamic and mysterious." minus the "supreme being"
label. Picky. Picky. Picky...
Thanks for replying. I know you've written a thoughtful post, but
really I want to be finished with this topic. Hopefully, others will
respond.
Marsha
At 03:43 PM 2/7/2009, you wrote:
Hi Marsha,
Marsha said:
Were Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato or Aristotle's philosophy theistic?
Matt said:
I take this to be a good example of a "mu" question, at least one
that doesn't have a clear cut answer because of intellectual evolution.
We all remember that Pirsig, following Aristotle, said that "first
philosophy" is called "metaphysics." We should bear in mind that
Aristotle's redactor is the one that named that collection of
manuscripts "Metaphysics." What did Aristotle actually call "first
philosophy" in the Metaphysics?
Theology.
Marsha said:
I thought that was teleology.
Matt:
I'm not sure Aristotle ever used a word or phrase translatable as
teleology, but certainly what came to be identified as that position
had its origins in Aristotle's account of causes, four of them to be
exact--material, formal, efficient, and final. It was the last, the
final cause, that Galilean science eliminated in its formulation of
causation and created the antithesis between teleology and
mechanism. (Pirsig, for his part, doesn't wish to eliminate
mechanism, but simply the antithesis between the two--we can have
purpose in a cause-and-effect world of rocks.)
Aside from the academic trivia, Marsha, I did want to answer your
original, brief question about knowledge and theism. There has
clearly been an extraordinary outpouring on the topic, but I don't
like most of them--they are too fast and dirty. Particularly
Pirsig's quick identification of the MoQ as anti-theistic. If the
MoQ is to retain it's identity as a system and not simply one dude's
philosophical beliefs (which almost everyone here wants to
distinguish, though at almost all points I do not), then the MoQ
most certainly cannot simply _be_ anti-theistic. It is too general for that.
The starting point has to be answering something like your starting
question, "What is the relationship between theism and knowledge and
how is it determined?" That is a good beginning question. And I
think the answer has to be something along the lines of--
1) Theism is a collection of intellectual static patterns.
2) Knowledge is a general kind of subset of collections of
intellectual static patterns that displays a high degree of internal
valuableness, so much that degradation of that value is reason to
think one is exclude from that collection. (In colloquial terms,
"No, you are _wrong_" or "No, that's _false_." Such rebuttals to
degradation are exclamations that you have evacuated the static area
of typical valuing. Of course, brujos are told that, and they are
also the ones that--by challenging the typical--help the areas,
these collections of static patterns, evolve.)
3) Theistic knowledge is a particular subset of intellectual pattern
within the larger collection of intellectual static patterns called
"theism." This means that "Christ has risen" is both a statement of
fact within that collection _and_, by virtue of that fact (that the
statement is taken to be a fact), an announcement of participation
in that particular collection of static patterns. This also means
the denial of the statement is an announcement that one is _not_
participating in that collection (one does not _value_ those static
patterns of value).
This, I think, is broadly all the MoQ can say as a system. Anything
else, like how the MoQ tells us reality is evolving towards X and
therefore we shouldn't do Y anymore (and here we can substitute for
X "Reason" and Y "God" and pretty much get the standard MoQ-inspired
answers I've been seeing from others and Pirsig, which also look
suspiciously like the standard 18th century Enlightenment answers),
is just more Marx-like tea-leaves reading, trying to find the
pattern of history and then arguing, in a non sequitor, from "this
is how things have been" to "this is how things should be"--which is
exactly what the brujo story suggests we shouldn't do.
Orienting ourselves to theism and knowledge as (1)-(3) does above
also suggests to us the better question we should ask, both others
and ourselves--what is it that these collections of static patterns
are valuing and why should, or shouldn't we, value them, too? And
since these are _collections_ it shouldn't surprise us if
individuals vary between them on what parts of the larger collection
they share with each other and if different pieces of the
collections can be evaluated separately and with different
results. (I mean, fer Criss sake, religious people have never
agreed with each other on what they should exactly believe, so why
do us non-believers keep painting them with one brush?)
The result of this kind of inquiry would then fall along the lines
of 1) finding pieces that are bad and should be extirpated from
everyone ("God told me to invade that country, so I must do it"), 2)
finding pieces that fulfill a need that others fulfill otherwise
("you read the Bible on Sundays, I read Shakespeare, and that chick
watches the sunrise--all of us getting our spiritual nourishment
where we most receive it"), and 3) finding pieces that fulfill a
need we don't really have anymore, but are otherwise harmless even
if we think it is archaic ("I will go to Heaven when I die"; "I
can't eat pork, it ain't kosher").
None of the above answers any questions about what to think about
theism, God, or religion. The MoQ doesn't answer questions, it
gives us better questions. This would, I would think, be the
perfect place in which a re-orientation is desired and I think the
above is the kind of re-orientation engendered by the MoQ.
So, all in all, if you, Marsha, have a religion-of-one that says
that beauty is divine, and you seek no converts and receive no help
from others in articulating your religion save the few odd books you
might happen to come across or what-have-you, than I think that is
great, and beautiful, and as religious as any other religion, even
if only in its very Emersonian fashion (which I take to be even more
beautiful for it). We don't need a church to have a religion; we
don't need a sense of the divine that transcends spatiotemporal
boundaries; we don't need to think that science is bad. All we need
is enough imagination and desire to deploy a certain, if kinda'
creaky, vocabulary of articulation.
Matt
p.s. Yes, this was for everyone who thinks I couldn't speak MoQese
if I wanted to. I don't have any proof-texts for the things I've
said, but I do think they're fairly reasonable extrapolations of the
vocabulary Pirsig developed.
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