Ian said to Krimel:
(I didn't need to re-order or re-interpret Dan's words, I quoted his phrase
verbatim "Dynamic Quality Defined is static quality".) But yes, there is no
"need" for the circularity. The circularity is simply a "good thing" to
discover however, when people are looking for definitions, because it confirms
that it's definition is in fact "undefined". That's a good thing, it confirms
our hypothesis. To define it any other way is to turn it into sq. DQ Defined is
"NOT DQ".
Krimel replied:
About all I can say here is, thanks for reminding me of something I forgot
earlier. How does what you call "circularity" and a "good thing" differ from a
platypus? Is the MoQ really about expanding the number of things we want to
call "undefined"? How is that helpful or "good." I think one central undefined
Quality is plenty. After all what good does it do to rid ourselves of SOM
platypi if all we are doing within the MoQ is breeding platypi of our own?
dmb says:
Yes, there is an interesting paradox in defining something as undefinable but
it's really not that complicated and it doesn't involve the reproduction of
platypuses. The idea is simply that there are two distinctly different ways to
experience; conceptually and non-conceptually. This is why DQ can't be defined,
because definitions are conceptual and DQ is non-conceptual experience.
Please take a careful look at the things McGilchrist is saying about the two
hemispheres of the brain and what those differences mean in our culture and its
ways of looking at the world. I think you'll see how neatly this fits with the
DQ/sq distinction. And Krimel, please pay special attention to the way
McGilchrist is using neurological facts without being reductionist about it. I
hope the Rorty fans will notice how postmodernism only perpetuates the problem
that Pirsig is trying to solve. I hope everybody notices that this author also
happens to support the idea that pre-Socratic Greece was one of those periods
when the whole brain was working in a balanced way, was not yet dominated by
the rational side. The Sophists would fit right in there, right before the
slide into rationalism began.
According to McGilchrist, interviewed for ABC Radio National's All in the Mind
programme, rather than seeking to explain the social and cultural changes and
structure of civilisation in terms of the brain — which would be REDUCTIONIST —
he is pointing to a wider, more inclusive perspective and greater reality in
which there are two competing ways of thinking and being, and that in modern
Western society we appear increasingly to be able to only entertain one
viewpoint: that of the left hemisphere.
The author argues that the brain and the mind does not simply experience the
world but that the world we experience is a product or meeting of that which is
outside us with our mind. The outcome, the nature of this world, is thus
dependent upon "which mode of attention we bring to bear on the world".
McGilchrist sees an occasional flowering of "the best of the right hemisphere
and the best of the left hemisphere working together" in our history: as
witnessed in Athens in the 6th century by activity in the humanities and in
science and in ancient Rome during the Augustan era. However, he also sees that
as time passes, so the left hemisphere once again comes to dominate affairs and
things slide back into "a more theoretical and conceptualised abstracted
bureaucratic sort of view of the world." According to McGilchrist, the
cooperative use of both left and right hemispheres diminished and became
imbalanced in favour of the left in the time of the classical Greek
philosophers Parmenides and Plato and in the late classical Roman era. This
cooperation and openness was regained during the Renaissance 1,000 years later
which brought "sudden efflorescence of creative life in the sciences and the
arts". However, with the Reformation, the early Enlightenment, and what has
followed as rationalism has arisen, our world has once again become
increasingly rigid, simplified and rule-bound.
Looking at more recent Western history, McGilchrist sees in the Industrial
Revolution that for the first time artefacts were being made "very much to the
way the left hemisphere sees the world — simple solids that are regular,
repeated, not individual in the way that things that are made by hand are" and
that a transformation of the environment in a simar vein followed on from that;
that what was perceived inwardly was projected outwardly on a mass scale.[8]
The author argues that the scientific materialism which developed in the 19th
century is still with us, at least in the biological sciences, though he sees
physics as having moved on. McGilchrist does not see modernism and
postmodernism as being in opposition to this, but also "symptomatic of a shift
towards the left hemisphere's conception of the world", taking the idea that
there is no absolute truth and turning that into "there is no truth at all",
and he finds some of the movements' works of art "symptomatic of people whose
right hemisphere is not working very well." McGilchrist cites the American
psychologist Louis Sass, author of Madness and Modernism, pointing out that
Sass "draws extensive parallels between the phenomena of modernism and
postmodernism and of schizophrenia", with things taken out of context and
fragmented.
Asked in an interview whether he blamed the loss of "our relationship to
beauty, to body, to spirit and art" on the left hemisphere, McGilchrist pointed
to an article by Stanley Fish, entitled Does Reason Know what Reason Doesn't
Know? and stated that the essence of the problem is "that the left hemisphere
is not aware of what it is not aware of" and that the difficulty we are faced
with is giving the right hemisphere a fair hearing. Whilst agreeing that
beauty, spirit and art are not the sole preserve of the right hemisphere, the
author does see a REDUCTIONISM not only in science but in popular culture and a
loss of "the power of art to alert us to things beyond ourselves", to the
transcendent.
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