[MD] "RMP: Ignoramous or fraud?

John Carl ridgecoyote at gmail.com
Wed Nov 2 12:44:18 PDT 2016


Adrie,

The quote I provided, I provided word for word from the source - and I
cited the source.  It was from the intro to Religion in the Making and any
editing or selectivity was on the part of the author of the intro, and not
me.

Evidently Whitehead believes that quality drives the creation of religions
and that this quality is indefinable.  In the MoQ, Quality is also the
impetus for both religion and science and art.  I don't think Whitehead and
Pirsig are too far apart and I think having this theism bugaboo is a
serious impediment to your  study of historical philosophers.

imho.

jc

On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 2:02 PM, Adrie Kintziger <parser666 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Anybody?
>
> As John writes, *between the stars*,
>
> *There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life;
> and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the
> quality of the quality.  (RM 80)* , see the stars? apparently ending the
> quote or sentence.
> The quote is in this form present on wikiquote, without the last part of
> the concluding sentence of the lecture .The asterisks and the notation "rm
> 80" is apparently added by John to make us believe he actually did read the
> lecture.
> Should he have done so, he should or should have presented it as
> follows.(imho).
>
> Quote from the lecture.
> "There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life;
> and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the
> quality of the quality. It is not true that the finer quality is the direct
> associate of obvious happiness or obvious pleasure. Religion is the direct
> apprehension that, beyond such happiness and such pleasure, there remains
> the function of what is actual and passing, that it contributes its quality
> as an immortal fact to the order which informs the world."--
> from lecture 2 religion and dogma.
>
> (this is clearly the correct context,and it is a theistic one), and that
> does not show on wikiquote or is derivable from the way Johs likes it to
> appear.
>
> Now given the above one should also read the whole lecture
> to observe that Whitehead is pointing towards a sort of religious quality,
> with a quality beyond the quality.A holistic quality probably.
>
> *most certainly not the Quality from zam or LILA*
>
> http://www.mountainman.com.au/whiteh_2.htm
>
> Ignoramous or fraudulent by implication?who is the real f**l?,pun
> intended.
>
> Adrie
>
>
> 2016-10-26 14:36 GMT+02:00 <mail at tuukkavirtaperko.net>:
>
> > John,
> >
> > you know, I've always been curious about something Pirsig wrote in ZAMM:
> >
> > "Some things can be said about Phædrus as an individual:
> > He was a knower of logic, the classical system-of-the-system which
> > describes
> > the rules and procedures of systematic thought by which analytic
> knowledge
> > may be structured and interrelated. He was so swift at this his Stanford-
> > Binet IQ, which is essentially a record of skill at analytic
> manipulation,
> > was
> > recorded at 170, a figure that occurs in only one person in fifty
> > thousand."
> >
> > Where in Pirsig's work does this knowledge manifest? One can have a
> higher
> > IQ than that and still never have proven a theorem Hilbert-style or with
> > natural deduction. And before one has done something like that it's
> > unlikely that they could be considered a swift knower of logic.
> >
> > As a knower of logic, Pirsig could probably tell whether there's a
> mistake
> > in the Heinous Quadrilemma.
> >
> > In any case, I didn't even know Whitehead made other than analytic
> > philosophy. And funny that Dan just mentioned Gödel and now you mention
> > this, because Gödel proved Whitehead's and Russell's project - Principia
> > Mathematica - to be impossible. Pirsig convinced me of the importance of
> > the MOQ but I mightn't have understood undefinability without Gödel.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Tuk
> >
> >
> >
> > Lainaus John Carl <ridgecoyote at gmail.com>:
> >
> >
> >    It's got to be one or the other.
> >>
> >>  Probably not the latter, makes more sense the former.   He himself
> >> admited
> >> that he wasn't much of a scholarly philosophologist.  And who has time
> to
> >> be?  Academics in their lairs, maybe.  In this busy age life is too big
> to
> >> keep your nose in books all the time.  So "ignoramous" non-perjorativel
> >> then, but the fact is, he DID at least read some AN Whitehead.  Quotes
> him
> >> from reading his book on history of philosophy, in the bowels of the
> >> troopship.  You'd think he might have followed up on the man's thinking
> a
> >> bit?
> >>
> >> All these questions I mumble to myself are bound up in my reading the
> >> introduction to a book by Whitehead, Religion in the Making, starting
> with
> >> a quote from said book,
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> *There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of
> >> life;
> >> and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the
> >> quality of the quality.  (RM 80)*
> >> Now, dear fellow MoQers, I don't know about you, but that statement
> kicks
> >> me right in the gut.  Quality?   That's OUR term, right?  What's
> Whitehead
> >> doing stealing it from us?   In 1926, even.  That takes some chutzpah
> AND
> >> a
> >> time machine.
> >>
> >> The introducer, goes on to say,
> >>
> >> " Religion in the Making is a book about value.  The intriguing passage
> >> quoted above suggest several important aspects of Whitehead's
> >> philosophical
> >> thinking about the reality and metaphysical significance of value (here
> >> termed 'quality') and reveals one the central objectives of the present
> >> text.  First, the sentence manifests Whitehead's typical approach to
> >> intuitive experience, especially the qualitative and emotionally clothed
> >> dimensions of our immediate contact with reality.     As a corollary to
> >> this, Whitehead is implicitly asserting (against much of the critical
> >> tradition in philosophy) that we do in fact,have such immediate contact
> >> and
> >> that it can serve as a starting point, if not a justification, for the
> >> kinds of claims made by metaphysicians."
> >>
> >> That is, Quality cannot be defined, but you KNOW what it is.  And THAT
> it
> >> is.  And this can be a starting point for discussion and logical
> >> analysis.   Pirsig and Whitehead seem to be perfectly harmonious,
> >> fundamentally,   So was Whitehead an influence on Pirsig's thought?
> >>
> >>
> >> OR, did they take separate trails up the same American mountain of
> thought
> >> and reach the same perspective?
> >>
> >> Who knows?
> >>
> >> Anybody?
> >>
> >>
> >> JC
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