[MD] Intellectual Discussion and Dialectic - Finding agreement, Quality and beauty in the world.

[david buchanan]

Dan said:
...Remember, ideas are patterns of value. Morals and quality are synonymous in the MOQ. I doubt anyone here only keeps an eye on logical consistency. But if a contributor consistently contradicts themselves it points to a lack of quality.


David H replied:
I agree here. But why is there a lack of quality? Why does a contributor, in your eyes, consistently contradict themselves? That's what I'm pointing towards.  Everyone has different values. So at some time or another - no matter who you discuss anything with you will at some stage come upon a disagreement.  They value something which you don't which causes them to deem their words with coherence, and you the opposite. ...If your values are better than mine - why is that? Or are there other values which are better? Why do you have the values which you do? Why do you deem them of value?  We live in a society today where people are almost frightened of openly discussing their values and morals for fear of offending or appearing insensitive.  But the values/morals of the participants in a discussion are not irrelevant and to be actively avoided (as is traditionally thought) - but are the *most* important part of a philosophical discussion.

dmb says:
I can see that you're trying to hook up values and intellect, even saying that values are the MOST important part of a philosophical discussion. And yet there is still a SOMish separation implied in what you're saying. This is contained in the questions you pose; everybody has different values, you say, which causes us to disagree about what is and is not coherent. If your values are better than mine, why is that?   This implies that the meaning of logical consistency differs from person to person, that the distinction between coherence and incoherence is just a matter of one's personal feelings and attitudes. It just doesn't work like that, David. It's not as if each individual has their own private mythos or that each person is a culture of one, an isolated individual with no real way to communicate with another soul, excepts as two ships passing the night. That kind of solipsistic alienation is what you get with SOM, wherein each individual has her own way of representing reality. But in the MOQ, we are composed of the static patterns of our time and culture and language. Marsha is not from some other place or time. She speaks English (sort of) and lives in the 21st century West, just like everybody else here. 

But the thing is, as people keep saying to you repeatedly, intellectual values are values in and of themselves. You don't arrive at them by way of some other species of value. I mean, health is a biological good, fame and fortune are social level values, while truth is what's good and right intellectually. Again, in the MOQ intellectual quality is the highest form of value, the most moral. This is protected in the MOQ's moral codes and it's supposed to be protected in the Bill of Rights. This is supposed to be an evolutionary advance over social level morality - what usually counts as morality in the church, as well as the over the worship of fame and fortune. Intellectual level morals are even opposed to these lower level in very important ways. 

Long story short, intellect is not the enemy. SOM and amoral objectivity is the enemy. And those are two very different things. 

And then there is the distinction between concepts and reality, the difference between a knowable, definable metaphysical system and the reality (the undefinable Quality) that it talks about.