[MD] Betternes - 4 levels of!

[plattholden at gmail.com]

Hi Dan, 


On 8 Nov 2010 at 22:30, Dan Glover wrote:

Hello everyone

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 5:31 PM,  <plattholden at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Dan,
>
> Yes, I agree. But, even though Beauty lies beyond subject and object, we use
> subject-object assumptions to think about and discuss it anyway.

Dan:
Do we? I thought we used Quality to think and discuss.


Platt
I thought all rational (as opposed to poetic) language was subject-object 
based. (My favorite poem begins, "Twas brillig and slithy toves . . .") 

Dan
And yes, it is
deceiving, this language we use, but looking at it logically, it is
clear that when we say, oh! what a beautiful painting! that we are not
talking about an object that we are observing, but rather the
experience itself. The feeling that arises isn't from the painting.
And it isn't from the self. It just is.

Platt
Hard to express in language isn't it? To express the "is" you have to create an 
observer who experiences and feels. But, "is" comes before that. That's why I 
look askance at "thinking." It's always late to the party of reality.   

Dan
Some years ago, I visited my sister in California. She said that we
just had to go to this little art museum... that there was something
that I had to see. When we arrived, the place was nearly empty. But
when we walked around a corner, there must have been fifty people or
more gathered around this one little painting.

It was a Van Gogh... one little iris. Just a little thing... it
couldn't have been a foot square. But oh my God!

Platt
Yes, yes, yes. A witness to the passing of the soul's beam, an experience we 
live for. 

Platt (Previously):
> I've tried to
> read and comprehend academic aesthetics, but shortly give up. It's all BS as
> far as I'm concerned. I'm a romantic, as expressed in this poem:
>
> "WHEN I heard the learn'd astronomer,
> When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
> When I was shown the charts, the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
> When I sitting heard the learned astronomer where he lectured with much
> applause in the lecture room,
> How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
> Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
> In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
> Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars." -- Walt Whitman
>
> What kept me glued to Pirsig's words was my feeling that between the lines he
> was like a Walt Whitman, affirming a romantic rather than a materialist
> worldview -- a view I've held for many years.
>
> In ZAMM, Pirsig divided experience into Classic and Romantic. I think he
> Lila he came down on the Romantic side. Maybe not, but at least John Wooden
> Leg's dog was a romantic "good dog," not a classic poodle or bassett hound.

Dan:

I think it is both. And that's what's kept me here all these years,
trying to figure out how on earth it can be both at the same time.

Platt
You're right, of course. I've tried to figure out how speaking, hearing, 
understanding and judging my thoughts all occur simultaneously, not to mention 
the simultaneity of sensing (empiricism) and valuing (Quality). Also we hear 
from our science friends that photons are simultaneously both wave and 
particle. And people wonder why I call "critical thinking" deficient.   

Warm regards,
Platt