[MD] MacIntyre, Pirsig, Crawford & Damasio

[X Acto]

Ian,
Thank you, I am in a state at the moment where I am devouring ideas without chewing and
digesting like I should, I'm really turned on and I think this is the experience of the love of wisdom,
it's a passion. It's a kind of euphoria one gets when things click and fall into place, it's almost
like a high. I am really aware of the emotional aspect at the moment.

The danger, I can see now, is letting this emotion corrupt it, I think there is a paralel between this
state and religios/mystical/ in terms of nirvana/heaven and the confusion with biological phenom
of cerebral palsy/dimentia and drug induced experiences. The temptation is in conflagrating
them and equating them as the same. The love buzz of eudiamonia, Socrates called the "muses"
in his mythos explaination in "Phaedrus", he described how they may take one over and this is
where the metaphor of the charioteers comes into play.

In the east, the metaphor is more direct in the term "desire" and as I explained to Krimel, I think
the focus in buddhism is to hone and shape desire not disconnect from it. To disconnect
is to disconnect from life.

Desire, love, is an applicable term for the drive of DQ, value implies a sort of mathematical 
nuetrality, while desire or love is an uncontrollable urge, an urge that seems to pervade all.
The term desire also describes objective phenomena rather well too. Where Pirsig used
"prefference" of atomic bonds, which implies a certain intellectual decision making, desire
implies an uncontrollable urge inherant in existence, one that becomes more refined and
complex the farther up the MoQ levels it traverses.

The east says that to live is to desire to escape desire is to escape life
thus orienting and crafting our desire is orienting and crafting toward our
own death. The ancient martial arts masters said that living well was preparing
one self for a good death, so that if we may die at any time we die with the
satisfaction of having lived well. This was the orientation of their "virtue"
and what seperated the life of humans from the life of animals.
Their own translation said the "life of men and the life of a dog"
if one lives as a dog one dies as a dog.

This makes me wonder if indeed this is related to celebrity
for if one lives as a person of renoun they become an example
of the way of virtue. celebrity being the emulation of such example.
Intellectual celebrity fits in somehow, a unifying factor in the urge
of desire. Crafting this celebrity seems to be an important aspect
of the love of wisdom.
Just some thoughts

-Ron