[MD] Static latching & faith

[Platt Holden]

Hi Ant,

Thanks for taking the time and trouble to quote at length from Northrop 
about the nature of "pure fact." As you know, I have beat the drum for 
beauty as being essential to understanding Dynamic Quality. Thus, it 
warmed my heart to read someone of the intellectual stature of Northrop 
emphasize the aesthetic nature of reality.To savor "flavors and 
fragrances and sensuous images in their ineffable immediacy" seems to 
me to be about as good a way to live as one can ask for. His words also 
reminded me of this:
  
"To experience prime reality intensely is beauty's role. In the 
presence of a great painting or a stunning jazz riff the normally 
separation of self and other suddenly vanishes. We are seized by 
egoless delight."

 
 . . . and this from Pirsig's SODV talk:

"This aesthetic nature of the Conceptually Unknown is a point of 
connection between the sciences and the arts. What relates science to 
the arts is that science explore the Conceptually Unknown in order to 
develop a theory that will cover measurable patterns emerging from the 
unknown. The arts explore the Conceptually Unknown in other ways to 
create patterns such as music, literature, painting, that reveal the 
Dynamic Quality that produced them. This description, I think, is the 
rational connection between science and the arts."

Thanks again, Ant.

Best regards,
Platt
     

> As Northrop (“Logic of the Sciences & 
> Humanities”, 1947, pp. 39-42) confirms:
> 
> “Pure fact may be defined as that which is known by immediate
> apprehension alone. It is that portion of our knowledge which remains
> when everything depending upon inference from the immediately
> apprehended is rejected.  Strictly speaking, as has been previously
> noted, we can say nothing about pure fact, since the moment we put in
> words what it is, we have described fact rather than merely observed
> fact. Nevertheless, we can use words to denote it, providing we realize
> that these words are concepts by intuition which require us to find in
> the immediacy of our undescribed experience, what the words mean.”
> 
> “But to recognize this is to learn a great deal about the character of
> pure fact. Words point it out; by themselves they do not convey it. This
> means that pure fact must be immediately experienced to be known. At
> least its elementary constituents cannot be conveyed by symbols to
> anyone who has not experienced them. But to say this is to affirm that
> pure fact is ineffable in character. For the ineffable is that which
> cannot be said, but can only be shown, and even then only to one who
> immediately experiences it.”
> 
> “Furthermore, since ineffability is the defining property of the
> mystical, it follows that the purely factual, purely empirical,
> positivistic component in human knowledge is the mystical factor in
> knowledge. The pure empiricists are the mystics of the world, as the
> Orientals, who have tended to restrict knowledge to the immediately
> experienced, clearly illustrate
.”
> 
> “The belief that there is a material table with constant, right-angle
> corners existing as an external object, independent of our sense
> impressions of it, is not given by sense awareness alone, even when one
> is immediately apprehending these sense impressions. For all that
> immediate apprehension or mere observation gives is what one's senses
> convey to one.  And clearly, all that the senses convey are colors and
> sounds and odors, pains and pleasures. These are not external material
> objects.  They are ineffable, aesthetic qualities, the kind of thing
> which the impressionistic artist rather than the physicist gives one.
> Thus again we come to the same conclusion. Pure fact is a continuum of
> ineffable aesthetic qualities, not an external material object.”
> 
> “Consequently, if one prefers to be thoroughly hard-boiled with respect
> to one's beliefs, rejecting all inference and theory as belonging to
> soft-minded speculative philosophers sitting in arm chairs, and if one
> forth with proposes to restrict oneself to facts only, then it is not
> with the belief in external material objects or the other persons of
> common sense, or with the electrons, protons, electromagnetic waves and
> other unobservable scientific objects of the physicist that one can have
> anything to do. For all these common-sense and scientific objects are
> theoretically inferred objects; they are not purely empirically given,
> immediately apprehended facts. Instead, it is to impressionistic art
> with nothing but its sense impressions that one must restrict oneself.”
> 
> “In short, were the supposedly hard-minded empiricist really to
> understand what he would be left with were he to reject all theory and
> restrict himself to pure fact, and were he then really to practice what
> he so glibly preaches, he would turn out to be, not the hard-boiled
> fellow he prides himself on being, but a very sensitive aesthetic
> dilettante, savoring flavors and fragrances and sensuous images in their
> ineffable immediacy and letting all solid natural objects go.”