[MD] Is Morality innate in the cosmos?

[Scott Roberts]

Arlo,

[Arlo said to SA]
I'm not sure if Ham would say it (although I doubt it), but I think its a
fairly good statement for any named "It". Included, as the snake swallowing
its own tail, "monomythism" itself. The paradox is, even if you step back
and say, "what is it behind all these cultural analogies?", your answer is
still in the form of an analogy. It has to be. The monomyth is no less an
analogy than the MOQ, or Essentialism, or Nihilism or Christianity. It may,
as Campbell attempts to, help de-harden hardened metaphors by keeping the
attention ON metaphor, but it is part of the mythos it tries to explain.

Scott:
Another way to avoid hardening is to have metaphors that don't harden. 
That's why I preach the logic of contradictory identiy (LCI), and the 
Buddhist tetralemma the LCI is based on. One can also find it in Coleridge's 
'polarity' and Derrida's 'differance'. However, Derrida thinks that 
'differance' also can harden, and so kept moving on to new ones ('trace', 
'supplement', 'margins', etc.). I'm not sure I agree with him that it's a 
problem, however. After all, the tetralemma has been used to unharden for 
almost 2000 years now.

In any case, it looks to me that the 'metaphor' metaphor is, in a certain 
sense, final -- where does one go next?. With the LCI, the snake swallowing 
its tail business ceases to be a paradox. Instead, it is reality. Of course, 
in order to appreciate this it helps if one has jettisoned nominalism. 
Otherwise, the 'metaphor' metaphor becomes Kantian in that there is assumed 
to be something (in the MOQ it is DQ) that is beyond all metaphors -- a 
non-thing-in-itself.

- Scott