ARLO said to Platt: So I'd say the "moral revolution" is just what Pirsig says, away from society AND intellectuality and TOWARDS Dynamic Quality. ..And if "art" is towards DQ, then a few lutes and drums are a good thing. But don't worry, an orchestra playing "highbrow" music would also be permitted to tag along. :-)
dmb says: I think its important that the code of art not be taken so literally that we confuse it with the fine arts, either high or low. I think the idea is that our situation at this point in the evolutionary story is such that we can no longer be quite happy with mere conformity or obedience to our inherited cultural forms. This is not to say we should mindless rebel against them or otherwise reject them, but recognizing that fact that we are not only responsible for maintaining the forms of civilization, but, as Campbell puts it, each one of us is now called upon to also be a creative, innovative center and to thereby participate in the ongoing evolution of the culture. In this sense of creativity, physicists are artists too. It need not involve paint brushes or any kind of sensual beauty. In fact, one could make a case that elevating beauty to the status of DQ is a species of the same mistake the hippies made in confusing biological quality with Dynamic quality. One could make a case that this is a form of hedonism, the kind even Victorians could allow. I think the notion of beauty has to be expanded in the same way that creativity is expanded so as to accomodate the assertion that E=mc2 is beautiful, for example. The elegance of a physical equation is just one example of one kind of non-sensual beauty. I mean, it seems that Platt often confuses DQ with whatever pleases the eye and I think that would drastically undercut the importance and scope of what the MOQ is saying on this point. Recently I learned from Wilber that this mistake was taken to new heights by the post-hippy era. There were some edgy European, quasi-Freudian intellectuals like Foulcat who pretty much took the orgasm as divine. (Now there's a church service I'd like to see!) As Wilber puts it, they confused the basic with the profound and regression with ascent. On this point, Pirsig's case seems even stronger than I thought. dmb _________________________________________________________________ Mortgage refinance is hot 1) Rates near 30-yr lows 2) Good credit get intro-rate 4.625%* https://www2.nextag.com/goto.jsp?product=100000035&url=%2fst.jsp&tm=y&search=mortgage_text_links_88_h2a5f&s=4056&p=5117&disc=y&vers=743 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
