Hi all,
The following quotes are from "The Meeting of East and West" by F.S.C.
Northrop:
"In fact any complete thing whatever must be regarded as made up of
a) the ineffable, emotional, aesthetic materials of the equally ineffable
and emotional aesthetic continuum common to oneself and all things, and
b) the unseen theoretic component which can be adequately designated only by
thought and postulationally prescribed theory checked through its deductive
consequences.
Thus to be any complete concrete thing is to be not merely an immediately
experienced, aesthetically and emotionally felt thing, but also to be what
hypothetically conceived and experimentally verified theory designates."-450
So,
"The aesthetic self is a continuum which is as much, and with precisely the
same immediacy, in the aesthetic sky, the aesthetic other person, the
aesthetic table, the aesthetic flower, the aesthetic molecule, the aesthetic
electron, and the aesthetic ionization, as it is in the aesthetic self."-461
"There is an all-embracing indeterminate continuum of feeling common to all
creatures in their aesthetic immediacy."-461
"And as the Taoist painters have noted in their quiet contemplation, the
all-embracing aesthetic continuum which is nature is the same emotionally
moving aesthetic continuum which is man in the aesthetic ineffable spiritual
componenet of his being...In the language of Hinduism, Brahman (the cosmic
principle in the universe) and Atman (the psychic principle in man) are
one."-462
"One is able to say with the Spaniards, the Mexicans and the Tantric Hindus
that in part at least the essence of the soul is passion."-462
"...it is no longer necessary in the conception of the other end-term, the
theoretic component, to include within it an inferred or postulated mental
substance. Instead, the theoretic component of human knowledge can be
restricted o precisely what the expert natural scientists with their
scientific methods of hypotheses, deduction, and experimental confirmation
indicate it to be."-464
"This means, in the case of man, that in the theoretic component of his
nature he is precisely what experimental physicists, chemists, biologists,
and psychologists find him to be. Thus the theoretic component of man is man
conceived as a physical-chemical system, an electrodynamic field, with the
particular structure which exhibits itself in man's body and especially in
his nervous system and cortex."-464
"...a person, like anything else in the universe, is the aesthetic component
of the nature of things joined to the theoretic component of the nature of
things by the two-termed relation of epistemic correlation."-466
Anyone who reads this book will quickly see that Pirsig's philosophy is
-essentially- an extension of the ideas presented by Northrop, as very
barely indicated in a couple sentences in ZMM.
rich
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