[MD] Good Faith ?

[David M]

great post

David M
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Arlo Bensinger" <ajb102 at psu.edu>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 4:39 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Good Faith ?


> Steve, Ian, all...
> 
> Good discussion. My quick two cents is that underlying all this talk 
> about "faith" is Pirsig's seminal point from ZMM, "All this is just 
> an analogy". And when you start with that simple observation, you can 
> see that the problems with "faith" occur as one tries to solidify or 
> literalize the metaphor. Yes, at the root of our experience is an 
> inescapable black hole of Godelian incompleteness. We must accept 
> that the deeper and deeper we dig into the layers of language and 
> symbolic representae we build to describe the world, the closer and 
> closer we come to the inexpressable, unknowable, indescribable abyss. 
> Towards this, yes, we cannot escape "faith" in that this core is 
> always beyond our intellection, never capturable in symbolic language.
> 
> But as we move farther and farther from this one simple premise, we 
> must remember that the symbolic edifice we construct in attempts to 
> understand this abyssal core are always metaphoric. We can cast this 
> core as "God", and write anthropomorphic stories in an attempt to 
> paint aspects of this "God" into understandable symbolic code. These 
> "myths" are always and everywhere undertaken out of a desire to, like 
> art, approach the indescribable by creating symbolic markers in the 
> hopes that these markers will serve to point people towards the 
> moment of enlightenment, what Pirsig calls "pre-intellectual awareness".
> 
> In this way, "myths" are like "paintings" or "symphonies" or 
> "sculpture". They are textual-artistic creations made in the hope of 
> capturing, in the fleetingest of moments, a glimpse into that which 
> can never be approached directly, that which can only be approached 
> tangentally, that which can only ever be seen out of the corner of 
> our eyes. And like visual or aural art, textual art serves a grand 
> purpose of giving us the only means we have to see the "Godhead", 
> "Quality", "the Tao".  Often this is expressed as "esoteric versus 
> exoteric meaning". We know what the stories say, for example, but 
> what do they mean? A literal read, an exoteric read, misses the art, 
> misses the metaphor, and instead replaces the path to enlightenment 
> with the path to power. No longer are "myths" textual paths to the 
> undefinable core but instead paths for human power, control and the 
> manipulation of others. We replace the fundamental, indefinable point 
> of similarity with a hierarchy of supremacy.
> 
> We would think it idiotic to proclaim any painting, no matter how 
> artful, to be "the One True Painting", and banish and burn all other 
> paintings as wrong or evil. We would no more think to elevate Bach's 
> "Die Kunst der Fuge" as "The One True Music" and wage a campaign to 
> ridicule, ban and dismiss "infidels" and "barbarians" who dare listen 
> to Beethoven, than we would lift ZMM up as "The One True Book" and 
> look down at those who read Yoshikawa or Dostoevsky as inferior 
> heathens. And yet this is precisely what occurs when exoteric, 
> literal readings of "myth" trump a deeper exoteric, metaphoric read. 
> Instead of facing the mono-myth with philosophic curiosity, we create 
> hierarchical walls of power and supremacy (and ultimately alientation).
> 
> We can never escape the incompleteness, and we must have faith 
> ultimately in the power of our metaphors to point as best as possible 
> towards this void, but while faith built upon this recognition will 
> produce ever-better artful glances into the face of god, faith built 
> upon the literalization of any one given metaphor will only lead to 
> power, hierarchies, and a hindering of human enlightenment.
> 
> To this end, I have no problem describing the "Theory of Gravity" as 
> a work of art, any more than I have of describing the Occidental 
> texts or Lakota stories as works of art. When seen from a metaphoric, 
> esoteric perspective, it is like traversing a large museum, with 
> different representations undertaken to point towards that which 
> ultimately can never be seen. And while one must, ultimately, have 
> faith in the process of art, placing one's faith fully in one 
> particular work of art moves one away from the Godhead, the Void, the 
> Abyss, Quality, the Tao rather than towards it.
> 
> My two cents, anyways...
> 
> Arlo
> 
> 
> 
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