Hi Marco, Elephant and Group:
MARCO:
You can say that you are going to the top or to the bottom only if you
already know the road, or if someone else gave you a map. But if this is
the first time you run a road, and you have no maps, you can't say
where the road is leading. The only thing you can say is if the road is
comfortable or not. The only road you really know is the one under your
feet.
At last someone has brought quality back into the discussion. For
Pirsig the question is not whether the road goes both ways or whether
gravity presses down or pushes up but whether you’re “comfortable or
not.” From the MOQ perspective, reality isn’t surfaces or forces. Reality
is values.
Too often on this site which is supposedly devoted to a discussion of
the MOQ the MOQ is ignored, not doubt due to the pervasiveness of the
scientific meme of substance, force, mechanism and chance. It’s hard
to see the world through different spectacles other than those you’ve
been brought up to wear and/or have invested an education in. So I’m
glad to see that Marco keeps pushing the conversation back to
metaphysical basics where the MOQ spectacles come more easily into
play.
MARCO:
But IMO it's also useful to keep in mind that the distinction is itself an
intellectual creation: of course, the NLG(Newton Law of Gravity) has
been created as a static pattern in order to handle reality, but in the
same exact moment, it begun a *real* existence of its own.
Yes, all distinctions are intellectual patterns in the MOQ. They are
patterns “left in the wake of DQ,” real in their own right but secondary to
“cutting edge of reality,” namely, values.
MARCO:
I love Heraclitus. Yes, his fragment about ways is very interesting. I
think it is not about circles at all. The Italian writer Luciano de
Crescenzo in his book about Heraclitus "Panta Rei" shows the
similarities between Heraclitus and Lao Tze. They both describe reality
as an harmony of oppositions. Actually, the "UP" exists only if the
"DOWN" exists too.
Yes, in the world of intellectual patterns which is all we can think and
do metaphysics with (and write posts like this one), reality exists in
differences and opposites—no black without white, no up without
down, no in without out, etc. so that a statement like “All is one” is self-
contradictory.
But intellectual patterns, as Pirsig says, are secondary reality. Primary
reality, our everyday experience prior to intellectualization, is a harmony
of opposites. Everything is there all at once in a state of pure
Quality—the aesthetic continuum..
To experience this prime reality intensely without filters is beauty’s role.
In the presence of a great painting or a stunning jazz riff we witness the
normally separate dichotomies of freedom/order,
sameness/difference, simplicity/complexity, depth/surface,
response/energy, grace/seriousness, truth/imagination, one/many, etc.
together as single, overwhelming, egoless seizure of delight—value at
its very peak.
As Plato argued, when you see one beautiful thing, it it’s truly beautiful
and you deeply appreciate its beauty, it will lead you eventually to see
the beauty of everything. Pirsig makes the same argument, bringing
the artist and scientist together in a quest for value, as explained in his
paper, Subjects, Objects, Data and Values:
“In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance art was defined as high
quality endeavor. I have never found a need to add anything to that
definition. But one of the reasons I have spent so much time in this
paper describing the personal relationship of Werner Heisenberg and
Niels Bohr in the development of quantum theory is that although the
world views science as a sort of plodding, logical methodical
advancement of knowledge, what I saw here were two artists in the
throes of creative discovery. They were at the cutting edge of
knowledge plunging into the unknown trying to bring something out of
that unknown into a static form that would be of value to everyone. As
Bohr might have loved to observe, science and art are just two different
complementary ways of looking at the same thing. In the largest sense
it is really unnecessary to create a meeting of the arts and sciences
because in actual practice, at the most immediate level they have never
really been separated. They have always been different aspects of the
same human purpose. “
To harmonize opposites in beauty. What higher purpose can one hope
to aspire to?
Platt
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