[MD] freewill

[Ian Glendinning]

Ron / dmb,

Agreed. "Killing" the intellect - I always read as "switching it off"
temporarily - completely, but not permanently was Pirsig's emphasis,
at moments when it gets in the way of other considerations - the
openness to other new possibilities as dmb put it. But you always need
to be able to switch it back on in the right contexts.

;-p
Pity dmb, like James, can't decide if his right leg is better than his
left - so wishy-washy to look for the alternative exclude middles or
maybe choose both in some dynamic combination.
;-)

Ian
What's so funny 'bout ...

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 3:50 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ron said to dmb:
> ...He or she understands the rational relationships between all the parts, even some unconsidered at the time. But thats not killing the intellect, thats aligning the intellect, it is a rational understanding. Quieting the mind, engageing in the moment is a useful method to free the intellect. If there is a consistency in ideas with an MoQ , it must then follow that if the intellectual level is the highest good, Pirsig must not then be pointing away from it as Dan seems to suggest.  ...what I thought Dan and I had agreed upon previously, is that intellect should be harmonized and aligned with dynamic quality, then the quote above and your comments are continuous with the concept of the expansion of rationality.
>
>
> dmb says:
> Right, I don't think of it as killing the intellect. That's what's so useful about the bike repair metaphor, I think. You can't be an artful mechanic without some level of mastery. Following DQ is not some kind of magic where you get to skip the hard work. You gotta learn the static stuff first and then you can let it flow. On this point, James asks a rhetorical question: Does a man walk on his right leg more essentially than his left? No, he says. The whole point and purpose of concepts and abstractions is bring them to the task of living. They're supposed to function by being put to work in experience and if they only ever remain aloft among other abstractions and never come back to the earth of things, like fixing a bike, then they are useless and empty at best.
> This is another sense in which static patterns are secondary; they are the mutable servants of life, not the final answer to the riddle of the universe. They are supposed to be subservient. But killing them? I don't think we ought to take that literally. How intellectual is the book that says intellectual patterns are only the highest static good? Very. I think the idea is to loosen up our theories and cultivate an openness to novel possibilities but that doesn't mean we can forget the difference between a wrench and screwdriver or hammer nails with a stick of butter.
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