Khoo to All: Bo concludes after commenting on the half-baked SOM of the Orient and the woolly mess in its wake that:
The Western MOQ will be a better "Buddhism"! Khoo: I would certainly like to see this if it were to be so: } Andre: Great to see you contribute once in a while Khoo, your thoughts are refershing and like koans. Must take Northrop as the guide here. As he states in 'The Meeting of East and West' we live in the 'real' conventional world and young Phaedrus complied when the dropping of the atomic bombs were considered an 'illusion' he left the classroom. I think what Khoo says is very important: that different cultures have developed different paths toward the good, and we judge them from our Western cultured glasses. 'Half-baked SOM' sounds like 'you better get your arses up in the intellectual level' and until you do so your ideals, your path to the 'good' is 'wooly-headed' , stupid, socially based and not 'evolved' properly so we do not take you seriously. Perhaps I am too harsh in this. Northrop, after analysing the Western and Eastern ideologies has the following to say (a la Marsha): 'The Orient, for the most part, has investigated things in their aesthetic component; the West has investigated things in their theoretic component'...The East and the West, when analysed to determine their basic scientific and philosophical foundations are found to be saying...two different yet complementary things'. For a possible 'meeting' between these two to take place there are two requisites: 'First, the specific relation between the aesthetic and theoretic components must be determined (something Khoo hinted at) and second, the aesthetic component and the specific character of the Oriental culture which is based upon it must be must be fully understood'. This must be attempted without prejudice, without judgement as to whether 'they' have made it into the intellectual level yet ( as such defined by...) . As krisnamurti said: Truth is a pathless land. Pirsig, in LILA (Ch 8) ' The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with, and the concept of the primacy of subjects and objects is built right into these glasses. Of course he is referring to Western culture. The Orient designates the Tao, Nirvana, Brahman or Chit to be something which is not given through the specific senses but which is immediately experienced as opposed to the Western mind-set which means that it is 'a speculatively postulated, syntactically designated, and only indirectly and experimentally verified entity...' (Northrop p377). (This is why I was getting so cranky about how to 'view' my girlfriend!) You see, there are already many MoQ's. ...by other names...in other cultures. Pirsig named his: 'Quality/ Value/ Morals' because it would be socially acceptable in the West... and because the West has lost all sense of Quality! All sense of Value/ Morals (bar the religious interpretation perhaps). 'All I am good for is theory, Phaedrus thought'. It is in this sense we may understand the difference between East and West when Pirsig writes about Descartes' proclamation and the way it would have been received in China of the seventeenth Century. Or the way ZMM was received in Japan... 'so whats new?" was the response. The meeting of the East and the West lies perhaps in fusing the aesthetic and theoretic components as they appear to be complementary. Both 'sides' have made tremendous, albeit different investigations into the static and dynamic parts of the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum. To suggest that the one is 'wooly' and the West's is 'solid'? is a value judgement that needs to be backed up by hard evidence!! The MoQ may be seen as an attempt at such an undertaking and we should not lose sight of differences: there are many interpretations of what is 'good' . The West is so easily judgemental about this. Freedom as 'good' so easily defined as having a trillion choices. Yea, choice MEANS freedom! This is an obvious reference to the choice of the 'free-market' an economic choice but I thought we are a little more than just economic units. It is easy to get 'lost' in the idea of Quality in a static way...too easily. Thanks Khoo, for having pressed on my 'refresh page' button. Andre 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/
