[MD] The MoQ and Politics?

[david buchanan]

John said:
Since we all know what Quality is; since we all have access to the apprehension of this fundamental guide, why is there anything wrong?

Why? Because somewhere back in ancient Greece the Good was subordinated to the True, because the passions were denigrated and rationality was made divine. The reasons are historical and evolutionary. 

"In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part. At present we're snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there's no rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts ... thin art ... because there's very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue." (ZAMM p. 294)

“…, the one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and anticipatory of as anything else we have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly be denied. But what hope is there if squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will old parley on this common ground; and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical help us, and the truest of which will at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best diving power? (William James, “Absolutism and Empiricism” p.96)