Hi Adrie! Great to hear from you!
I've been doing a bit of winding down too. Not retired altogether but cutting back on the day work to have more time for my writing. So yes, still tap tap tapping away at the keyboard every night. As long as the words keep flowing I guess I'll keep on writing them down. Still trying to figure out if I have anything worthwhile to say but nobody's told me to shut up yet so I take that as a sign. And but so anyhow I've been going over The Guidebook to ZMM and came across this tidbit which I found muddlingishly interesting: "In the Taoist scheme of things, the Tao, the unnameable One, gives rise to the myriad nameable things by way of the Two, yin and yang. The Tao is neither yin nor yang but is the ground of both and permeates both. Yin and yang produce by their interaction all that can be named and defined. In Phaedrus' parallel scheme, as I understand it, Quality, the unnameable One, gives rise to the myriad nameable things by way of the Two, subject and object. Quality is neither subject nor object but is the ground of both and permeates both. Subject energy and object energy produce by their interaction all that can be named and defined. "If this is a genuine parallel, there must be a similarity between the yin-yang polarity and the subject-object polarity. Is there? I believe so. When subjects and objects interact, something asserts and something receives; something acts and something undergoes; something works and something is worked upon. All of which amounts to yanging and yinning. But which is which? Is subject energy yang and object-energy yin or vice versa? "What makes that question especially fascinating is that you can divide the whole of Western philosophy down the middle in terms of your answer. If you say that the subject is yin and the object yang, your answer echoes the keynote of Western philosophy from the time of the first ancient Greek philosophers (sixth century B. c. ) up to the time of the first "modem" philosophers (seventeenth century A.D.). If you say that the subject is yang and the object yin, your answer echoes the keynote of Western philosophy from the beginning of the modern era up to the present. The ancient tendency was to think of knowing primarily as a kind of receptivity, an openness to reality. To be a knower was to allow yourself to be acted upon by what is. For the most part, the active, shaping role of the knower was unnoticed. "And where an active role was recognized, as in the case of Aristotle's "agent intellect," the role was limited to some sort of a nonshaping, preparatory phase in the process of knowing. Aristotle viewed the "agent intellect," the active part of the knower, as a sort of light-thrower. The "agent intellect" did not shape the object or impose categories upon it. It simply provided the light within which the object might be received by the "passive intellect." "There, in the "passive intellect," in the receptive part of the knower's consciousness, is where knowledge as such occurred. And knowledge as such was objective for the very good reason that the knower's consciousness was determined by the object. The to-be-known object yanged, and the knowing subject yinned. (I am speaking here of the keynote of ancient and medieval Western philosophy and don't want to suggest this was the only view. Phaedrus, for one, tuned in to the alternative philosophy of the ancient Sophists and found in its "man is the measure" theme an echo of his own philosophy, which gave a much greater role to the human subject-see ZMM, pp. 337-345, especially p. 338.) [Guidebook to ZMM pg 115-116] Dan comments: As per the final paragraph... how can knowledge be objective? What I see the author doing here is taking the subject and object as literal entities existing independently forever apart. The trip-up occurs when subject and object touch (in a metaphoricalish philosophical sense of course since if subject and object are simply terms denoting a worldview they [as independent entities] can never touch) and the known becomes the knower, or the object becomes the subject. This seems to nullify the argument. But if you (or anyone) have a few minutes to spare and fancy a chat, please let me know what you think. Thanks! Dan http://www.danglover.com On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 2:46 PM, Adrie Kintziger <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello Dan. > Maybe this will appear strange to you, but i was never gone, or never left. > There are diffences nowadays. > I retired from Honda and took the year off to sedate.Worked on my pond, > worked on my daughters house, motivated my son to buy a nice loft in Gent > and tried to untangle the chains this workingjob attached to me. > > But i did read your postings.......and the messages they carried;labels of > honesty Dan, difficult to ingnore, as were the postings of Arlo, and mr > Buchanan, i'm still extremely pissed that an environment was created here to > make mr Mc Watt to leave....shame really what a disgrace that was. > > do you still write?...you really should. > > Adrie > > 2016-01-21 20:03 GMT+01:00 Dan Glover <[email protected]>: > >> Hark! A voice in the wilderness! >> >> On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 10:26 AM, David Blake <[email protected]> wrote: >> > is the pirsig discussion site still in operation? >> > >> > dave blake 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
