[MD] The Hero's journey

[david buchanan]

Matt said to Dan:
The problem I was attempting to elucidate is whether or not a  _particular_ set of intellectual patterns can get in the way of Reality/DQ better or worse than another.  For example, it might be thought that SOM is worse than the MoQ because the SOM gets in the way of DQ.  (I have no idea if this _has_ been thought, or assumed or elaborated, but it still might be important to reveal why this may or may not be the case.)  _All_ static patterns are, in the  same way, _not_ DQ, and thus a distance from it, which is the point you pressed with "Intellectual patterns always get in the way of reality. That is the nature of ideas."  ...Your point about intellectual patterns always getting in the way because of the nature of ideas flattens them out, and suggests that their worth is all equidistant from DQ, and thus there's no point in distinguishing between better and worse ideas.  



dmb says:
I was covering this same ground with Steve, who was saying that DQ "is what it is regardless of what we think about about it". But I think the issue is very much about bad interpretations and whether or not we have good concepts. The MOQ's point and purpose is to ditch Platonism in general and SOM in particular. That's what we get in the conceptual glasses handed to us by the culture and those glasses have a blind spot with respect to DQ. Those are the glasses that produce attitudes of objectivity, that tell us truth and science should be value-free, that reality is what it is regardless of how we feel about it and morality is just a comforting fiction. The glasses we wear are formed by the history of our culture. He's talking about those SOM glasses when he says, "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 RE-ASSIMILATING 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." As you might recall, the MOQ's central task is to expand rationality at its roots so that even science is no longer to be value-free. As we see in the case of Poincare, math and geometry have their own kind of aesthetic beauty and intellectual creativity operates on the basis of intuitive leaps and felt harmonies.

And THE POINT here is that the MOQ is a rival set of glasses, one that's meant to replace SOM because of the way it largely ignores and excludes DQ. The problem (SOM) is being out of touch with DQ and the MOQ is the solution to that problem. The glasses we wear were forged by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and 25 centuries of Apollonian imbalance, as in Nietzsche's complaints. All of my intellectual heros have identified this problem one way or another. It's a cultural criticism that comes in many excellent flavors. 

Remember the Cleveland Harbor effect? The SOM glasses are another version of the static filters he talks about there in terms of maps and charts. The conceptual filters are contrasted with experience as such, with the dismissed "facts" and rejected "observations". 

"It was a parable for students of scientific objectivity. Wherever the chart disagreed with his observations he rejected the observation and followed the chart. Because of what his mind thought it knew, it had built up a static filter, an immune system, that was shutting out all information that did not fit. Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing."
"If this were just an individual phenomenon it would not be so serious. But it is a huge cultural phenomenon too and it is very serious. We build up whole cultural intellectual patterns based on past 'facts' which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don't throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people will see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too."