Marsha to dmb:
So that's it? Somebody asks how does the MoQ put feelings and passions
back into rationality, science and mathematics, you tell them you do not
understand the question. You did state that your version of "the MOQ's fourth
level gives us an expanded form of rationality that includes feelings,
passions,
alternate modes of consciousness" but you cannot explain how.
The question was about the fourth level within the MoQ, intellectual patterns
of
value.
Thanks.
On Sep 18, 2010, at 6:31 PM, david buchanan wrote:
>
> dmb said:
> According to the MOQ, the intellectual level includes all intellectual static
> patterns and all intellectual thought styles, such as classical and romantic
> for example. These patterns are derived from experience and their veracity
> depends on their ability to function in experience. The MOQ's
> reconceptualization of the intellect is predicated on a rejection of
> subject-object metaphysics, the conceptual framework that reifies subjects
> and objects. (The MOQ says subjects and objects are concepts, not entities.)
> Unlike SOM, where the paramount demand is for objectivity and disinterested
> observation, the MOQ's fourth level gives us an expanded form of rationality
> that includes feelings, passions, alternate modes of consciousness and all
> the other categories of experience formerly dismissed as "merely" subjective.
>
> Marsha asks:
> How are feelings, passions and other modes of consciousness included back
> into rationality? How are they included back into science? How are then
> included back into mathematics? How?
>
>
> dmb says:
>
> I'm really not sure what you're asking. There isn't just one way to include
> the affective domain and there is not a set of rules or procedures that will
> tell you. And that's sort of the point. Pirsig is saying that philosophy and
> science are art forms and so is motorcycle maintenance and so is putting your
> outdoor grill together. As the title of David Granger's book indicates, the
> Pirsig's work (and Dewey's) is about the art of living. Pirsig identifies
> attitudes of scientific objectivity as the problem. Millions of people
> respond to this, he says, "by abandoning 'square' rationality altogether and
> going by feelings alone. Like John and Sylvia here." But Pirsig says that
> direction is just as wrong. He's saying, "that the solution to the problem
> isn't that you abandon rationality but that you expand the nature of
> rationality so that it's capable of coming up with a solution." (ZAMM, p.
> 169) That's what the MOQ is all about. In all of the following quotes, the
> emphasis is Pirsig's in the original:
>
>
> "But we know from Phaedrus' metaphysics that harmony Poincare talked about is
> NOT SUBJECTIVE. It is the SOURCE of subjects and objects and exists in an
> anterior relationship to them. It is NOT capricious, it is the force that
> OPPOSES capriciousness; the ordering principle of all scientific and
> mathematical thought which DESTROYS capriciousness, and without which no
> scientific thought can proceed. What brought tears of recognition to my eyes
> was the discovery that these unfinished edges match perfectly in a kind of
> harmony that both Phaedrus and Poincare talked about, to produce a complete
> structure of thought capable of uniting the separate languages of Science and
> Art into one." (ZAMM, p. 269-70)
>
> "No, he did nothing for Quality or the Tao. What benefited was reason. He
> showed a way by which reason may be expanded to include elements that have
> previously been unassimilable and thus have been considered irrational. I
> think it's the overwhelming presence of these irrational elements crying for
> assimilation that creates the present bad quality,.." (ZAMM, p. 257)
>
>
> "But now we have with us some concepts that greatly alter the whole
> understanding of things. Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific
> reality. Quality is the goal of Art. It remains to work these concepts out
> into a practical, down-to-earth context, and for this there is nothing more
> practical or down-to-earth than what I have been talking about all along -
> the repair of old motorcycle." (ZAMM, p. 276)
>
> "I want to show that that classic pattern of rationality can be tremendously
> improved, expanded and made far more effective through the formal recognition
> of Quality in its operation." (ZAMM, p. 278)
>
>
> "The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference
> between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to
> SELECT the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to
> CARE! This is an ability about which formal traditional scientific method has
> nothing to says. It's long past time to take a closer look at this
> qualitative preselection of facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored by
> those who make so much of these facts after they are "observed." I think
> that it will be found that a formal acknowledgment of the role of Quality in
> the scientific process doesn't destroy the empirical vision at all. It
> expands it, strengthens it and brings it far closer to actual scientific
> practice." (ZAMM, p. 281-2)
>
>
> "This eternally dualistic subject-object way of approaching the motorcycle
> sounds right to us because we're used to it. But it's not right. It's always
> been an artificial interpretation SUPERIMPOSED on reality. It's never been
> reality itself. When this duality is completely accepted a certain nondivided
> relationship between the mechanic and the motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling
> for the work, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world
> into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're really stuck
> it's Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to
> go." (ZAMM, p. 282)
>
>
>
> "In the past empiricists have tried to keep science free from values. Values
> have been considered a pollution of the rational scientific process. But the
> Metaphysics of Quality makes it clear that the pollution is from threats to
> science by static lower levels of evolution: static biological values such as
> the biological fear that threatened Jenner's smallpox experiment; static
> social values such as the religious censorship that threatened Galileo with
> the rack. The Metaphysics of Quality says that science's empirical rejection
> of biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also
> morally correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher
> evolutionary order than the old biological and social patterns. But the
> Metaphysics of Quality also says that Dynamic Quality - the value-force that
> chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant
> experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one - is another matter altogether.
> Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than static scientific truth, and it
> is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality
> as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value
> is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific
> progress itself." (LILA, p. 365-6)
>
>
> "In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of
> escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's
> been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the
> emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's
> order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of
> nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled
> from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's
> consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part." (ZAMM p.
> 294)
>
>
> “…The ‘through-and-through’ philosophy [Absolutism] …seems too buttoned-up
> and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast
> slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown
> tides.…Their persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with
> the question, that it is a pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever
> out of the pale. …To speak more seriously, the one fundamental quarrel
> Empiricism has with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the
> personal and aesthetic factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all
> of us have feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as
> prophetic and anticipatory as anything else we have, and some of them more so
> than others, can not possibly be denied. But what hope is there of squaring
> and settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common
> ground; and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our
> faculties, emotional as well as logical help us, and the truest of which will
> at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose
> faculties on the whole had the best diving power?" (William James in
> ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM, p.96)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 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
___
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
