From: Steve & Oxsana Marquis (marquis@nccn.net)
Date: Fri Jun 24 2005 - 18:31:20 BST
Allen wrote:
___________________
The beauty a mathematician finds in creative activity is not romantic in the
SOM
sense, it is a beauty of participation and being included in the work.
Caring. Art. There is no split here between romantic and classic because
everything works as one flow.
__________________
Allen, what you are describing in all your examples when applied to life in
general as opposed to specific activities is eudaimonia, a 'smooth flow of
life'. Another word I use is 'engagement', which I think came from the
phrase 'being in the moment'. My favorite example is the painter who is
engrossed in the act of painting, not the finished paintings, so much so
that he really doesn't care if the finished works are burned right in front
of him. It is the creative flow, not the product of the creation, that is
valued.
We all experience this, maybe more so as children. As adults I think it
mostly occurs when we are pursuing a favorite hobby or sport without any
obligatory constraint by others. If we can grasp this idea it follows that
we can enjoy whatever we choose, for it is the engagement in the activity,
not which activity we are engaged in, that results in eudaimonia. The
pre-Socratic person of excellence was excellent in every aspect of life,
which is evidence that selecting the correct activity is not the key.
What I was after when asking you to expand on harmony was why choose this
particular word as opposed to Quality or nothingness or the Tao, etc. My
guess: Harmony has connotations of parts working together to contribute to
a healthy wholeness. One label for our perception of this positive
cooperative, this getting a sense of the 'orchestra', is beauty. Analysis
can't do this for it looks at individual pieces and misses the context. It
is impossible, therefore, for analysis alone to have a grasp of the Whole.
This has been left to 'spirituality' consequently with the harmonic
contribution of the parts to the Whole completely missed and claimed not to
exist by the SOM Church of Reason. So, harmony may be a good term to use,
but I just need it clarified.
Pirsig does replace his classic / romantic split in ZMM with the static /
dynamic split in Lila. Although Pirsig does define the romantic aesthetic
in ZMM as the immediate surface appearance of things I don't think he meant
superficiality, which he criticizes later on as the tinsel of the appearance
of quality, like chromed plastic.
Intellect, or reasoning, appears to have two constituents, much like Pirsig'
s duality in either ZMM or Lila. Analytic differentiating reason is what
most of us mean when we use the words rationality / reasoning. The modern
west has come to accept this as the totality of reason it seems, or mostly
so, and it's no wonder that SOM is dominate, for that is the world of
analytic reason (ie, breaking reality into discrete parts).
Synthetic or inductive reason has to make 'leaps of faith' to reach
conclusions. IOW, with this type of reasoning we end up with more than we
start. The only thing that can fill in the gaps is intuition. The premises
that inductive reasoning starts from are not necessarily parsed SOM
concepts. Apparently our greatest breakthroughs originate with intuitive
understandings, and this is the creative aspect of reason.
So, with language pretty much limited to SOM speak, we talk about reason and
intuition as two separate things. But really both occur together always
(that's my 'belief' anyway ;)). We must be careful, once again, of
realizing the limitation of language in describing experience.
Intuition is the part of intellect that grasps your harmony. It is no
accident that mathematics derived through intuition models very well SOM
parsed experience.
If we accept intuition as part of rationality then this frees reason from
SOM. I am not sure how this fits in with Bo's SOL.
Thanks for your response.
Live well,
Steve
PS Incidentally, my sign off, live well, reflects the end for both Quality
and aretê.
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