Greetings,
PLATT WROTE:
"I can't answer your question, but I do know that without ugliness and death
we would not know beauty and life. Our knowledge and understanding
depends on contrasts. "White" means nothing without "black," "up" is
necessary to comprehend "down," you must know what "in" means to
understand "out." Or, as Plato said, "There must be one for there to be
many." Implicit in every concept is its opposite."
ROGER WROTE:
"I thought Platt's first answer was right on target. Without evil there can be no good, and evil is
a negative quality that can actually drive life and the other level patterns forward. This was one
of the problems that caused our morality discussion to break down, as I remember."
Are we not introducing an unwarranted dualism here? Zen rejects the notion of evil as a reality and
this rejection is also one of the defining features of mysticism. I submit that evil has no place in
the MoQ either.
In a dualistic sense one could, for example, argue that shadow is a real and necessary corollary of
light. How can we know shadow if there is no light? But, is it not more accurate to consider shadow
as the absence of light? Shadow is the place where light isn't, rather than a reality in itself. In
the same way evil can be seen as being a lack of good not as a separate reality. This is one of the
major contentions of Zen Buddhism which argues that it is perfectly possible to have good without
evil - if everything were light there would be no shadow.
The connotations for the MoQ are that there can be no evil, only a lack of Quality. 'Evil' is merely
the default position of an amoral and empty universe while Quality is the moral force and pattern
which populates it.
I'm not sure this helps the morality question much, but it does strike me as quite important that we
don't get bogged down in dualism.
HORSE & JONATHAN:
I agree with your points. However I don't like your term, 'scientific materialism.' I think it might
be better to stick with 'popular materialism' and 'coherent materialism' simply because there are
many materialist scientists who do hold a coherent view. If you told my brother (a research
astronomer at Keele University) that his coherent materialism is therefore not 'scientific
materialism' he would respond in an agitated and negative manner while giving you a lecture about
how scientific his coherent materialism really is. We are discussing terms here not concepts, but I
think this is important if the MoQ is to be 'sold' the academic community.
Struan
------------------------------------------
Struan Hellier
< mailto:struan@shellier.freeserve.co.uk>
"All our best activities involve desires which are disciplined and
purified in the process."
(Iris Murdoch)
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