Group, Picking up on the idea of the metaphysical roots of our age, and the previous one, consider these two quotes by Susan Langer, and the one by Herman Hesse.
Those familiar with Hesse, and especially the Glass Bead Game should see some striking similarity to what Pirsig was trying to do with the moq. Both were trying to find solutions to the same problem and both went in the same direction for the answer. Susan Langer wrote a classic book called, "The New Key in Philosophy", which deals with this "key change" in philosophy. "The "new key" in Philosophy is not one which I have struck. Other people have struck it, quite clearly and repeatedly. This book purports merely to demonstrate the unrecognized fact that it is a new key, and to show how the main themes of our thought tend to be previous passages, so the reorientation of philosophy which is taking place in our age bestows new aspects on the ideas and arguments of the past." "The universality of the great key change in our thinking is shown by the fact that its tonic chord could ring true for a mind essentially preoccupied with logic, scientific language, and empirical fact," That is the point it, it IS a universal key change! It cuts across the whole of culture, and effects all of our thoughts, actions and institutions. And chords of this new tune are the archetypes. We hear them play throughout the culture. Langer continues- "But the people who recognized the importance of expressive forms for all human understanding were those who saw that not only science, but myth, analogy, metaphorical thinking, and art are intellectual activities determined by "symbolic modes"; and those people were for the most part of the idealist school." Herman Hesse won the Nobel Prize in literature for his book called "The Glass Bead Game" The idea of the Glass Bead Game very much describes what I mean by a paradigm, or the metaphysical background to an age. The way the Game is described also shows the universality of certain key ideas, and how they are interrelated across the whole of culture. Listen to how the narrator describes the Game. The Glass Bead Game "The rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the contents and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode for playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts, a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts and works of art that the human race has produced in it creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property-on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on the organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe" A fact that shouldn't be missed here is that both Langer and Hesse have been influenced by the same trends in philosophy. Their thoughts flow naturally from the dike that burst when Kant awoke from his metaphysical slumber. In Langer you see the influence of Kant and the neo-Kantians, and Hesse is steeped in Hegel and Eastern thought, and neoplatonism. Hegel was a teenager when he heard the news of the French Revolution which he thought the greatest event in history. And he was enamored with the Greeks, and Greek religion. What do you see as the archetypal ideas, the notes that make up this new key? What of the old key, what notes comprised it? Jon Jon 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/md/archives.html
