> > dmb says: > Following DQ is not some kind of magic where you get to skip the hard > work. You gotta learn the static stuff first and then you can let it flow.
'cept sometimes you can skip all the hard work and go straight to the solution or conclusion. It happens - a sudden flash of insight, intuition, what have you, just seems to arise and there you have it. Do you throw out such insights because they come too easily? Or do you admit they are true? > On this point, James asks a rhetorical question: Does a man walk on his > right leg more essentially than his left? No, he says. It depends on if you're right-legged or left-legged. If you're right-legged, you push off harder and get your kicks from the right. Isn't this essential? > The whole point and purpose of concepts and abstractions is bring them to > the task of living. They're supposed to function by being put to work in > experience and if they only ever remain aloft among other abstractions and > never come back to the earth of things, like fixing a bike, then they are > useless and empty at best. > agreed. But if you're gonna tie the whole enterprise to utilitarian functionalism, then you're not so far from empirical materialism and I think you're missing the important point. > This is another sense in which static patterns are secondary; they are the > mutable servants of life, not the final answer to the riddle of the > universe. They are supposed to be subservient. But killing them? I don't > think we ought to take that literally. How intellectual is the book that > says intellectual patterns are only the highest static good? Very. I think > the idea is to loosen up our theories and cultivate an openness to novel > possibilities but that doesn't mean we can forget the difference between a > wrench and screwdriver or hammer nails with a stick of butter. > > speaking of butter and other slippery substances... all you're doing is basically saying that "we can't go too far to the left nor the right." Advocation of the middle way ain't big news, dave. 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
