Hugo Fjelsted Alroe (alroe@vip.cybercity.dk)
Thu, 2 Oct 1997 20:24:09 +0100
<Jarod and Miss Parker:
Is DQ to be construed as flux itself, or perhaps the essence of flux? Then
if DQ is "higher" than SQ, perhaps we have a return to the philosophical
"urstoff" of the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who maintained that
the essence of the Universe is flux. His classic formulation is: "You
cannot step twice in the same river, for new waters move on as you take the
second step."
:Jarod and Miss Parker>
We could go even further back to Anaximandros (~600-550), by some
considered the first metaphysicist (that we know of). Despite the obvious
sources of error and misunderstanding I will give an (my) english
translation from a danish translation of the reproduction of Anaximandros
words made by Simplicius. There are other interpretations of course.
Simplicius: "Anaximandros said, that it is 'apeiron' which is the 'arche'
and essential element of the existing things; he was the first to use this
word: arche. He thinks that it is neither water nor any of the other
socalled elements, but something else, apeiron, of which all worlds and
their order [or structure] arise. [Anaximadros:] "That, which the existing
things arise from, is the same [that] they are annihilated to by the law of
necessity, for they serve sentence and pay penalty to each other for the
wrong they are doing, according to the order of time." - thus he expressed
it in a somewhat odd way. It is obvious, that having observed how the four
elements transformed into each other, he did not find it proper to make one
of them the principal instance, but to find something else, which was
different from them. So he does not let creation arise from the
transformation of an element, but from the seperation of opposites as a
result of the eternal motion."
Beware of language, the terms above are judicial, and we are only slowly
establishing an independent language for metaphysics. It is analogous to
Bo's (and Pirsigs) use of 'morality' in areas where it cannot be used in
the same sense as human morals.
According to Anaximandros becoming makes up a debt which is to be paid
'according to the order of time'; things have to pay back the debt, undo
the wrong of becoming, in order for other things to become, and so on. We
can see this debt as the 'stable unbalance' which is the very static
patterns of value in Pirsig. An example can be, that this (natural) life on
earth has to vanish before any other form of life can arise; life on earth
is 'guilty' by precluding a host of other possible beings.
Apeiron is the limitless, that without distinctions, which cannot be
described. And apeiron has (or is) an inner force, an eternal 'motion', an
urge for being, a potency for becoming.
Aristotle arrived at the distinction between potency and act in his
unfolding of logic, and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), in connection
with his development of relational logic, distinguished between Potential,
Actual and Necessary (habitual) Being.
This is a second source for a new metaphysics, which may provide something
beyond Pirsig, just as Pirsig provides something beyond Peirce, and they
seem compatible to me, once the logical side of Peirce is held within its
fence.
In balance to my remarks on the logical Peirce I can give his triad ;-) of
evolutionary processes: tychastic (by chance), anancastic (by mechanical
necessity) and agapastic (by creative love) from his article 'Evolutionary
Love'. Peirce was a remarkable man.
Hugo
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