Tim the friendly skeptic,
> about art, and its being the leader, well, I'm skeptical. I can > understand beauty as an accompaniment, and even perhaps as the quickest > (maybe fear is faster though) route to active perception of what's > 'important', but I don't see beauty in itself as a sufficient goal. Truth is beauty and beauty truth, that's all we know and all we need to know. Somebody said that once and I agree completely. Perhaps it would help if I pointed out that logic itself is an art. That the rules of logic and rationality are themselves a species of art. These rules were created, chosen and selected because they fit our experiences in a pleasing and "beautiful" manner. The aesthetics of simplicity and transferability had a lot to do with their cultural codification. This would be going all the way back to the Greeks, of course. But not only the rules, in an of themselves, but the consequences of following the rules in achieving harmonious social agreements and subsequent environmental manipulations of lasting strength and power were the test of these rules. Truth/Beauty has always been a species of what is good. You mention "beauty in itself" as insufficient, and you make a good point, If "beauty" is considered from our common paradigm - which is intellectually dominant. But the point of Pirsig's work has been to rectify this separation, to reunite art and science and to promote a new paradigm where beauty makes sense, and scientific truth is aesthetically pleasing. I think what blocks this realization, is that so much of our society and education centers upon an increasing specialization. Tim: > I > haven't spoken with Platt yet, but I wonder... nevermind. The garden of > eden was great and all, but man needed the bone of his bone, and flesh > of his flesh. And, the garden of eden was great and all, but God was > building up to Man - if I can use this resource. > > John: Well, this is a problem for Deep Ecology. They even refer to it as "the resource view of nature", and fundamentally destructive to the environment and man's only context. It is possible, We Seventh day zen rastafafarians aver, as Francis of Assisi did, to interpret man's role differently as a steward rather than an owner. That man's original task was described thusly: And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. So man's ultimate task is art and protection. God made everything good, and it was man's task to create with it and for it. When man turned away from that task, and bent himself upon self-improvement rather than garden-improvement, that's when the problems started and persist today. And yeah, I know that's not the way G. Bush and his cronies see it, nor any large Christian denomination in extant today. Bummer. Sometimes I'm an anti-theist too, when we're talking about theism as it's turned out. So "no". God was not "building up to Man", in my lexicon. "God" is "building up to the Great Community". The Great Community includes all realizable existence, from quarks to quasars and worms and conceptions of God, and you'll note that my use of quote marks denotes "is" as an equation. "God" is just a term then for "the whole universe which causes itself" Pragmatically, you can't really logically separate a creator from creation. I think the root of our conflict on this list, is between the question, Is the universe random (valueless) or intelligent (Quality)? At the roots, it's this question of whether DQ is a line or a vector, that lies at the heart of all our heated discourse. ( and I use "our" mainly to designate that which I'm involved in, to be sure) So many words! I have inundated thee. I must be starved for some ID, (intelligent dialogue) for a change. yours for a change, John 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
