[Bo] You escaped at once. My "X" was just to indicate reality being something - TAO for example. That it is undefined and nothing can be said about it goes without saying, but we have the term TAO. What improvement did it bring in its wake? Was there anyone before Lao Tsu who claimed that there was no Tao? Don't bite my head off, I would like to know.
[Krimel] I think reality is "something." I am sure not sure what. Every time I think I have it nailed down it changes into something else. It always seems to run faster than I can. I find myself always talking about what I thought it was just a bit ago but then it is gone again. And so I call it Tao. That's kind of what Lao Tsu says. I call it Tao because it is a strange word from a strange culture and that helps remind me that I don't actually know what it means. I think it is infinitely better than Quality because regardless of what Pirsig says I always think in the back of my mind somewhere that I do know what that word means. But Lao Tsu was writing around 500 B.C. within a tradition that dates back some 1000 years before him. As any student of intellectual history should know, even a poor one, Lao Tsu was one of the writers in the Axial Age, that flourishing of philosophical theology that includes the Buddha, Zoraster and the unknown prophet in Isaiah. [Bo] Well what did Lao Tsu mean by TAO if not the source from which everything emanates or are "carvings" out of? [Krimel] He said he didn't know what to call it so he called it "The Way" and that you could recognize it through the common relationships that underlie all opposition. Rough and smooth, dark and light. It is like water. In a cup for example it is not the substance of the cup that is of value but the space it encloses. It is the possibility of sculpture inside the uncarved block. You can define all of the term you use to talk about it but it is also in what escapes your talking. Lacan talks about "the real" kind of like this as what is left over and beyond our conceptions. 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
