[MD] still going?

[Dan Glover]

Hi Adrie!

Great to hear from you!

I've been doing a bit of winding down too. Not retired altogether but
cutting back on the day work to have more time for my writing. So yes,
still tap tap tapping away at the keyboard every night. As long as the
words keep flowing I guess I'll keep on writing them down. Still
trying to figure out if I have anything worthwhile to say but nobody's
told me to shut up yet so I take that as a sign.

And but so anyhow I've been going over The Guidebook to ZMM and came
across this tidbit which I found muddlingishly interesting:

"In the Taoist scheme of things, the Tao, the unnameable One, gives
rise to the myriad nameable things by way of the Two, yin and yang.
The Tao is neither yin nor yang but is the ground of both and
permeates both. Yin and yang produce by their interaction all that can
be named and defined. In Phaedrus' parallel scheme, as I understand
it, Quality, the unnameable One, gives rise to the myriad nameable
things by way of the Two, subject and object. Quality is neither
subject nor object but is the ground of both and permeates both.
Subject energy and object energy produce by their interaction all that
can be named and defined.

"If this is a genuine parallel, there must be a similarity between the
yin-yang polarity and the subject-object polarity. Is there? I believe
so. When subjects and objects interact, something asserts and
something receives; something acts and something undergoes; something
works and something is worked upon. All of which amounts to yanging
and yinning. But which is which? Is subject energy yang and
object-energy yin or vice versa?

"What makes that question especially fascinating is that you can
divide the whole of Western philosophy down the middle in terms of
your answer. If you say that the subject is yin and the object yang,
your answer echoes the keynote of Western philosophy from the time of
the first ancient Greek philosophers (sixth century B. c. ) up to the
time of the first "modem" philosophers (seventeenth century A.D.). If
you say that the subject is yang and the object yin, your answer
echoes the keynote of Western philosophy from the beginning of the
modern era up to the present. The ancient tendency was to think of
knowing primarily as a kind of receptivity, an openness to reality. To
be a knower was to allow yourself to be acted upon by what is. For the
most part, the active, shaping role of the knower was unnoticed.

"And where an active role was recognized, as in the case of
Aristotle's "agent intellect," the role was limited to some sort of a
nonshaping, preparatory phase in the process of knowing. Aristotle
viewed the "agent intellect," the active part of the knower, as a sort
of light-thrower. The "agent intellect" did not shape the object or
impose categories upon it. It simply provided the light within which
the object might be received by the "passive intellect."

"There, in the "passive intellect," in the receptive part of the
knower's consciousness, is where knowledge as such occurred. And
knowledge as such was objective for the very good reason that the
knower's consciousness was determined by the object. The to-be-known
object yanged, and the knowing subject yinned. (I am speaking here of
the keynote of ancient and medieval Western philosophy and don't want
to suggest this was the only view. Phaedrus, for one, tuned in to the
alternative philosophy of the ancient Sophists and found in its "man
is the measure" theme an echo of his own philosophy, which gave a much
greater role to the human subject-see ZMM, pp. 337-345, especially p.
338.) [Guidebook to ZMM pg 115-116]

Dan comments:

As per the final paragraph... how can knowledge be objective? What I
see the author doing here is taking the subject and object as literal
entities existing independently forever apart. The trip-up occurs when
subject and object touch (in a metaphoricalish philosophical sense of
course since if subject and object are simply terms denoting a
worldview they [as independent entities] can never touch) and the
known becomes the knower, or the object becomes the subject.

This seems to nullify the argument. But if you (or anyone) have a few
minutes to spare and fancy a chat, please let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Dan

http://www.danglover.com


On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 2:46 PM, Adrie Kintziger <parser666 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Dan.
> Maybe this will appear strange to you, but i was never gone, or never left.
> There are diffences nowadays.
> I retired from Honda and took the year off to sedate.Worked on my pond,
> worked on my daughters house, motivated my son to buy a nice loft in Gent
> and tried to untangle the chains this workingjob attached to me.
>
> But i did read your postings.......and the messages they carried;labels of
> honesty Dan, difficult to ingnore, as were the postings of Arlo, and mr
> Buchanan, i'm still extremely pissed that an environment was created here to
> make mr Mc Watt to leave....shame really what a disgrace that was.
>
> do you still write?...you really should.
>
> Adrie
>
> 2016-01-21 20:03 GMT+01:00 Dan Glover <daneglover at gmail.com>:
>
>> Hark! A voice in the wilderness!
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 10:26 AM, David Blake <dave at blake.net> wrote:
>> > is the pirsig discussion site still in operation?
>> >
>> > dave blake