Ron (xacto) said: Dig this. The reason why they termed the Parmenidian "one" as fixed and eternal was that they realized change was conceptual. Zeno's paradoxes are supposed to illustrate this. Ergo that which is changeless does not perish and come to be, so it was deemed eternal. ALSO what is changeless does not move, movement must be conceptual too, therefore the "one" is fixed. BUT are they REALLY saying that the "one" is fixed and eternal? or that it lacks change and motion? We say that DQ is without change, that change is conceptual, we say that Quality is a monism and if we really look at what the ancients were saying about what we call dynamic quality then you can see where there is quite a bit of misunderstanding going on. ...
dmb says: I don't think Pirsig tackled Zeno's paradox, at least not by that name. But William James did, with some help from his pen pal Henri Bergson. Like Pirsig, they use this quest for the fixed and eternal as a way to criticize the vicious intellectualism of the ancients. Very much in opposition to them, Pirsig, James and Bergson too (in his own way) say that reality itself is ever-changing. If you're interested, here is Lecture VI of James's Pluralistic Universe, titled "Bergson and his Critique of Intellectualism". http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/plural/chapter6.html Basically, James turns their argument upside down. They want to prove, through math and logic, that change and motion is impossible and so its appearance is an illusion. James says, no guys, you are making motion and change unintelligible in your efforts to "treat it by static concepts". He and Bergson make a case against their "intellectualist logic". They illustrate the "impotence of intellectualist logic to define a universe where change is continuous". [Ron responds] Right we can begin to see how Parmenides and Zeno use mathematics as co-related to reality much in the same way the Pythagoreans do. Aristotles critique of the "reducto ad absurdum" is very similar to Pirsigs or James in that what we are talking about, can only ever talk about, is that which holds meaning. For experience and concepts to have meaning there must be a limit and that limit is its "good". Dmb continues: Please notice the opposition being set up here. "Static concepts" as distinguished from a reality "where change is continuous"? Sound familiar? Pirsig quotes James's on this very point as he is connecting James to the MOQ. "James had condensed this description to a single sentence: 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous, while the latter is dynamic and flowing.' Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality." The language is slightly different but this is the same opposition. Static concepts are opposed to a "dynamic and flowing" reality instead of "a universe where change is continuous" but the idea is the same. Pirsig quotes James in the previous paragraph and in that case this same dynamic reality is referred to as "the immediate flux of life," "the basic flux of experience" and "pure experience". No matter what you call it, they're talking about an empirical reality that cannot be defined because it is continuously changing, a flowing dynamic flux. And so there will ALWAYS be a discrepancy between static concepts and dynamic reality. To define a flowing flux is to stop the flow and arrest the flux and then it's not dynamic anymore. That's where Zeno went wrong. [Ron] Right this is where we can see where these assertions began to contradict experience and posit that appearences are illusionary we can trace the consequences even though we can understand why those assertions were drawn because there are those on this forum who are attempting to draw the same conclusions whether they are aware of it or not. The subject of "Change". the Philosophical question Dmb explains: Paraphrasing William James, the problem is that guys like Zeno, Socrates and Plato deified conceptualization and denigrated the ever-changing flow of experience, thus forgetting and falsifying the origin of concepts as humanly constructed extracts from the temporal flux. In other words, they used concepts derived from experience to deny the experience from which they derived. It was profoundly un-empirical whereas Pirsig and James are radically empirical. [Ron ] Conceptualization was deified because it was reasoned that they shared qualities associated with the Parmenidean "one" and the "one" was associated with "nature" and nature with the good, conceptualization was god-like and divine the highest order of nature and good. The origin of concepts being the mystic "one" most like and coordinate with it. They were left with these conclusions: The one is knowable because intelligibilty exists (all virtue is knowledge] The one is fixed (motionless) and changeless (eternal) appearences can be deceptive [plurality] And they certainly did use the concepts derived from experience to deny the experience from which they derived. But you can see how they reasoned themselves into believing that the true nature of things is one,eternal fixed and knowable just by what one can say of dynamic quality. But what is often missed is the dialectical method that was being demonstrated in these works, the method of inquirey employed to elimenate concepts and arrive at the best concepts and how this is closely related to scientific hypothesis and Pirsigs criticism of never actually arriving at a truth simply more hypothesis. Trying to connect how dialectic was to arrive at a single fixed eternal truth when one never actualy got there. ..having some problems hooking these two up . .. 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
