Arlo, On 5/12/14, ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR <[email protected]> wrote: > [JC] > I would say intellect evolved through an artform. > > [Dan] > I'll have to think about this a little more. It doesn't sound right, > somehow, but I can't quite put my finger on exactly why that is. > > [Arlo] > I think the language is imprecise. Perhaps "intellect evolved AS an artform" > (understanding that "art" is a "high quality endeavor"), and it has been the > divorcing of 'art' and 'intellect' that led to the crisis in ZMM. > > In other words, intellect itself is an artform, no more and no less than > abstract painting or sculpture.
Jc: I struggled a bit with my terminology there Arlo, but what I wanted to convey aligns nicely with the way you put it. > > [JC] > But both art and intellect are best when they inform each other - ideas that > are beautiful and works that are true. > > [Arlo] > Here you're using these terms to restate the romantic/classic distinction > directly (art=beautiful, intellect=true). I think we should be careful here > when we're using these terms in the 'problem space' (art as being divorced > from reason), and when we're using them in the 'solution space' (art has > high-quality endeavor that applies to reason, painting, all forms of human > activity). > > Perhaps better to say, "intellect is best when done artfully"? But that's a > sort of tautology, isn't it? Or maybe "intellect is best when it is not > artificially divorced from notions of aesthetics and beauty"? "Inform each > other" seems, to me, to normalize a distinction that isn't there, the very > distinction Pirsig argued was inherently artificial. distinctions that when taken absolutely are false, can still be useful when held lightly and relativistically. So it depends on whose doing the interpreting. I believe that when Pirsig stated in ZAMM that we ought to aim for science that is beautiful and art that makes sense, he wasn't conflating disparate realms but harmonizing them in an overall scheme of value. yours, John 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
