[MD] Is this the inadequacy of the MOQ?

[plattholden at gmail.com]

"Beauty lifts us into a state of pure knowing." -- Schopenhauer



On 12 Nov 2010 at 12:56, John Carl wrote:

Tim the friendly skeptic,



> about art, and its being the leader, well, I'm skeptical.  I can
> understand beauty as an accompaniment, and even perhaps as the quickest
> (maybe fear is faster though) route to active perception of what's
> 'important', but I don't see beauty in itself as a sufficient goal.


Truth is beauty and beauty truth, that's all we know and all we need to
know.  Somebody said that once and I agree completely.

Perhaps it would help if I pointed out that logic itself is an art.  That
the rules of logic and rationality are themselves a species of art.  These
rules were created, chosen and selected because they fit our experiences in
a pleasing and "beautiful" manner.  The aesthetics of simplicity and
transferability had a lot to do with their cultural codification.  This
would be going all the way back to the Greeks, of course.  But not only the
rules, in an of themselves, but the consequences of following the rules in
achieving harmonious social agreements and subsequent environmental
manipulations of lasting strength and power were the test of these rules.
Truth/Beauty  has always been a species of what is good.

You mention "beauty in itself" as insufficient, and you make a good point,
If "beauty" is considered from our common paradigm - which is intellectually
dominant.  But the point of Pirsig's work has been to rectify this
separation, to reunite art and science and to promote a new paradigm where
beauty makes sense, and scientific truth is aesthetically pleasing.

I think what blocks this realization, is that so much of our society and
education centers upon an increasing specialization.


Tim:


> I
> haven't spoken with Platt yet, but I wonder... nevermind.  The garden of
> eden was great and all, but man needed the bone of his bone, and flesh
> of his flesh.  And, the garden of eden was great and all, but God was
> building up to Man - if I can use this resource.
>
>
John:

Well, this is a problem for Deep Ecology.  They even refer to it as "the
resource view of nature", and fundamentally destructive to the environment
and man's only context.  It is possible, We Seventh day zen rastafafarians
aver, as Francis of Assisi did, to interpret man's role differently as a
steward rather than an owner.  That man's original task was described
thusly:

And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress
it and to keep it.

So man's ultimate task is art and protection.    God made everything good,
and it was man's task to create with it and for it.  When man turned away
from that task, and bent himself upon self-improvement rather than
garden-improvement, that's when the problems started and persist today.

And yeah, I know that's not the way G. Bush and his cronies see it, nor any
large Christian denomination in extant today.  Bummer.  Sometimes I'm an
anti-theist too, when we're talking about theism as it's turned out.

So "no".   God was not "building up to Man", in my lexicon.  "God" is
"building up to the Great Community".  The Great Community includes all
realizable existence, from quarks to quasars and worms and conceptions of
God, and you'll note that my use of quote marks denotes "is" as an
equation.  "God" is just a term then for "the whole universe which causes
itself"  Pragmatically, you can't really logically separate a creator from
creation.  I think the root of our conflict on this list, is between the
question, Is the universe random (valueless) or intelligent (Quality)?  At
the roots, it's this question of whether DQ is a line or a vector, that lies
at the heart of all our heated discourse.  ( and I use "our" mainly to
designate that which I'm involved in, to be sure)

So many words! I have inundated thee.  I must be starved for some ID,
(intelligent dialogue) for a change.

yours for a change,

John
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