David Harding said to dmb: That's right. ...She [Marsha] talks to us all as if we're absolutist intellectuals about truth and that her brand of mystic relativism is the answer. To prove her point it seems whenever she is forced to explain an idea of her own she'll keep demanding definitions or complain about context. 'I mean we all know they're relative!' She just keeps fighting these imaginary absolutists to wriggle out of ever confronting ideas of her own.
dmb says: Maybe you can walk Marsha through it. I really don't have the patience. Explain how the MOQ's critique of SOM's rationality isn't supposed to be used against the MOQ's intellect. Show her how she is inappropriately using Pirsig's attack on Objective truth to attack MOQ's intellectual values and the MOQ's pragmatic truth. Use the quotes from Pirsig to show her how she has confused the sickness with the medicine. Show her how this confusion results in the denigration of intellectual values, of truth, and the MOQ itself. Take her piles of incoherent drivel, iron out the meaning of the operative terms, and make her contradictory nonsense go away forever. Please. She cannot hear it from me, obviously. THE PROBLEM - Our modes of rationality are no longer adequate. "Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. ...the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is...emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty." "I think the basic fault that underlies the problem of stuckness is traditional rationality's insistence upon "objectivity," a doctrine that there is a divided reality of subject and object. For true science to take place these must be rigidly separate from each other." "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." "the thing to be analyzed, is not Quality, but those peculiar habits of thought called 'squareness' that sometimes prevent us from seeing it. ..The subject for analysis, the patient on the table, was no longer Quality, but analysis itself. Quality was healthy and in good shape. Analysis, however, seemed to have something wrong with it that prevented it from seeing the obvious." "He did nothing for Quality or the Tao. What benefited was reason." The problem is that "Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other" back in the days of Plato. THE SOLUTION - A root expansion of rationality through the inclusion of Quality at it's center; rationality, like motorcycle maintenance, becomes a form of art. "He [Phaedrus] felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw it as even broader than that...a new spiritual rationality...in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to be "value free." Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality." "What's emerging from the pattern of my own life is the belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can't be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who're solving it are solving it at a personal level by abandoning 'square' rationality altogether and going by feelings alone. Like John and Sylvia here. And millions of others like them. And that seems like a wrong direction too. So I guess what I'm trying to say is 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." "Now 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." "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." "A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself." 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
