Greetings,
PLATT:
You misrepresent me. I did not seek to do away with good and evil as you suggest. If you read my
posting again you will see that I seek only to do away with evil. Morality (the good) is intact in
my version but it no longer has a dualistic opposite. All of your quotations, with the exception of
the one reproduced below, mention only good thus giving weight to my own argument.
"Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source
of all things, completely simple and always new. It was the moral force
that had motivated the brujo in Zuni. It contains no pattern of fixed
rewards and punishments. Its only perceived good is freedom and its
only perceived evil is static quality itself--any pattern of one-sided fixed
values that tries to contain and kill the ongoing free force of life." LILA,
Chap.9."
This is all very well so long as we realise that the 'perceived evil' is from DQ's point of view. DQ
is good and SQ is evil only according to itself which is of course very different from evil in the
sense of human morality, or as a universal reality, ( I can feel a contribution from Ken coming
here ). This leads on to Roger's point about evil being conflict between value forces.
ROGER
Your argument is not contrary to mine but I think mine expresses it better. If evil is the name
given to conflict between two or more goods then it is not a separate reality in opposition with
good, rather it is good arguing with good. To use an analogy: If two boys fall in love with the same
girl then only (at most) one will have the feeling returned - the other is going to lose out and
feel pain, rejection etc. There is no 'evil' here whatsoever. Love is good and the girl must make a
choice. It is just that two loves have collided and one is left unrequited. Was one love 'evil?' Is
the rejection an 'evil' act, or is the pain evil? No, love is good, the choice was good and pain is
simply an unavoidable corollary of good.
Another related point is that an insistence upon the reality of evil as well as an insistence that,
'Quality is all,' requires Quality to be (at least in part) evil and with that admission we enter
into all sorts of coherence problems which have plagued most religions for thousands of years.
Finally, I want to emphasise again that I am certainly not trying to eliminate morality and good
from the MoQ, I merely claim that evil is not a separate reality distinct from good and that the
dualistic notion this belief entails does not have a place in the MoQ. Again this might sound like
a linguistic point, but I actually think it is a very important one in view of the accepted notion
of good and evil in religious and philosophical circles.
HORSE
"That sounds reasonable enough. Now all we have to do is determine what a 'coherent
materialism' entails and its repercussions with respect to the MOQ. Piece of ... er,
cake!"
I thought I had already done that on an earlier thread Horse. Let me know what your objections are
if it is not to your satisfaction.
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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