[MD] Ideas and Gods

[Bennett Jon]

Hi Matt,

Yes I agree archetypes can be confusing, although I think a true
description. But for now let's just say fundamental, or root ideas. And you
are right in picking the 19th cent. as the time when the whole paradigm
(another loaded term), when the world view and metaphysical roots of the
west began to change-no pun intended.

But change was just one of a constellation of fundamental ideas that make up
a world view, or a metaphysics. The others are logically related to it, and
interwoven and inter-related to it, and to a kind of parental category from
which they are derived and that's where the idea of archetypes comes to
play.

Yes modernism is unique, its the same and unique, so to speak. In any event
its important to understand the ideas that led to it and that are behind it.

One thing I think is being missed or unappreciated judging by all the
railing against theological ideas. My point is that these ideas originated
in an understanding of God, and hung around and were applied in new ways in
new areas, even when the culture was becoming secular and atheistic. This
was the point of Sheldrake's quote as well. Someone may apply the idea of an
absolute uniform or changeless principle, or of an absolute determinism or
reductionism without recognizing the pedigree of these ideas.

But when you speak of modernism, that's a bit confusing too-understanding of
modernism to be that age that started with the birth of modern science. But
whatever you call this age, or the one that preceded it, what do you see as
the root ideas, the metaphysical roots of this age. Or what do you see as
the root ideas of the age that preceded it.

We know that the changeless, the eternal was a core principle, a root idea
of the metaphysics of previous age. At the beginning of the 19th cent. we
see the birth of a "new" metaphysics, of a new age in the West. And one of
the core ideas of this new metaphysics, is change! The temporal, not the
eternal now takes the stage, we are now focusing on Earth not Heaven, the
creation, not the Creator.

This is what Nietzsche meant by the death of God, the death of the Christian
God to the mind and soul of the West. And it is what was meant by his call
for a return to earth, of which the Dionysian element is the
personification. I have a great quote by Niet on the return to the body and
the return to earth somewhere.

But back to the point-what are the two ages under consideration here-that
Pirsig is dealing with-and what are the respective root ideas of their
metaphysics.

Jon
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 9:47 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> Jon said:
> And Matt, changelessness, or the eternal is one of those
> archetypes of modernism I was speaking of, derived from
> God's nature.
>
> And the with our new paradigm in science and the rest of
> culture what we have is absolute changlessness being
> abandoned, and explained away in terms of an absolute
> change. This is what moq does, it absolutizes change. Even
> if change is supposed to freeze as sq, it is only relative,
> not eternal. The absolute principle here is Change. This,
> Matt, again is one of the archetypes of this age-change-and
> it is traceable back from physics to philosophy to theology,
> as was the case with the paradigm of modernism.
>
> Matt:
> I still find talking about "archetypes" clumsy, but I take
> your point that "change," which the Greeks began struggling
> with conceptually after the birth of a literate culture began
> pushing over the oral one, is a more central feature of
> European cultures since, say, the 19th century.
>
> However, I take that to be a good thing.  And, following
> the work of people like Hans Blumenburg in The Legitimacy
> of the Modern Age and Bernard Yack in The Longing for
> Total Revolution, I take several forms of life and
> conceptual difficulty to be distinctly modern, as similar as
> they may seem to problems in ancient Greece or medieval
> Rome.  Their work counteracts the flattening of historical
> change that intellectual historians like Eric Voeglin and
> Karl Lowith enact when they reduce modern dilemmas to
> (largely) theological ones.
>
> Progress, or secularization, is not simply the Christian view
> of history sans God.  That's usually what is eventually
> suggested, and that without God "modern progress" is fake
> and bad.  I think there have been many significant, if
> occasionally subtle, changes that throw up new problems
> that require new solutions, and old problems that simply
> fade away.
>
> Matt
>
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