[MD] To Matt from A Short History of Decay

[MarshaV]

Hi Matt,

You've written a bit over my head, but I have been 
wondering about the particular versus the general,  
and finding them both to be false.  I'm really kind of 
stuck in the 'not this, not that' mode, especially as I
interact with my own thinking.  

I sense that you have depth, and you are kind, and
that you hold an important question.  i cannot 
explain the 'question' so you are correct not to pay me
too much mind.  


Marsha   






On Jul 13, 2010, at 4:25 PM, Matt Kundert wrote:

> 
> Hi Marsha,
> 
> Heh, very nice riposte to the questions-thing.  Obscure, 
> but I think know what you are saying.  Or at least, since 
> this version wasn't attached to the thing with Craig in 
> "[MD] Decisions," I think I know why you read what I said 
> and thought of Cioran.
> 
> I find it too intimidating to try and explicate my sense 
> that I can be both a Hegelian semanticist (someone who 
> thinks that meaning is generated by words and that there 
> is real evolution) _and_ agree with nearly everything 
> Cioran was writing, but it has to do with my sense that 
> Cioran is holding two distinct visions of Hegel in his mind 
> at the same time, and that if we disentangle them, we 
> can have most of his entertaining polemic along with 
> thinking that we have better beliefs than people in the 
> past.
> 
> I would pair this line:
> 
> "Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism.  How 
> could he have failed to see that consciousness changes 
> only its form and modalities, but never progresses?"
> 
> with this line:
> 
> "That History has no meaning is what should delight our 
> hearts."
> 
> Those two thoughts, that there is evolutionary progress 
> _and_ no meaning in History, are both, I would suggest 
> (though I can do little more than that), attributable to 
> Hegel's influence.  What is meant by "Absolute Idealism" 
> (which Pirsig refers to in both books, I think) is that 
> there is a perfect whole to which we are evolving.  What 
> is that whole?  Whatever it is that greets us at the End 
> of History.  And that means that the _beginning_ of 
> History holds the seeds of the End of History, and that 
> nothing _really_ changes because History is just the 
> unfolding of a preordained internal logic.  (Think of the Big 
> Bang in physics.)
> 
> I think that's bad philosophy, and I think Pirsig thinks so, 
> too.  However that may be, when we take the widest 
> view--Universe-as-a-whole, or History-as-a-whole--it 
> seems damn well unavoidable (as it did to, e.g., 
> Parmenides, Spinoza, and Horkheimer and Adorno).  What 
> I think that should suggest is that _if_ we are going to 
> talk about retailing various beliefs as being of higher or 
> lower value (which Pirsig seems to suggest is a person's 
> default position), then we cannot very well take "the 
> widest view": taking that view (in Pirsig's vocabulary) just 
> yields you "Quality" (or in Joe Mauer's suggestion, 
> "Dynamic Quality" over and over).  And _that_ means that 
> delimiting what view you are taking is a prior commitment 
> to the weighing of higher and lower values, which _then_ 
> means that to take "the widest view," as the Buddha did 
> and Pirsig sometimes does, has a specific, 
> conversational-contextualized meaning-effect: which in 
> its essence, I think, is "mu."  When hearing someone's 
> "smaller view," and not liking the options it accords you 
> as available for choice, you might pop out a Zen koan to 
> suggest that the smaller view defined by the kinds of 
> questions it implicitly is answering are the wrong kinds 
> of questions.
> 
> Matt
> 		 	   		  
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