ELEPHANT TO MAGNUS AND ALL IN AN APOLOGY:
I'm sorry Magnus, I think I got cross, and that can't have helped the
quality of that last post. It was late, and the mind/matter thing really
rankled. But there are better ways of dealing with that than the one I
adopted. I'm sorry. By way of an apology I'll start over from the
beginning and try yo explain myself better and more simply.
IMO the static/dynamic split is the split between discrete and therefore
conceptualised entities on the one hand, and the aesthetic continuum on the
other. If I am right about this, then the static world is the
conceptualised world. IMO this means that the static is the intellectual:
that which depends on intellects. Concepts don't just apply themselves. So
I posit an intellectual/non-intellectual split that exactly corresponds to
the static/dynamic split, because I think that it is just the static dynamic
split, differently expressed.
This way of reading Pirsig has a lot to do with my sympathy for his
mysticism. His mysticism is the idea that what is fundamentally real
(dynamic quality) cannot be rightly expressed in any linguistic expression.
Language is something other than the mystically real, it is the something by
which we arrive at discrete entities: statements, theories. The thought
that language is something fundamentally other than the mystically real is
the thought that grammar cannot be superimposed on Dynamic Quality. Dynamic
quality is neither a subject nor an object, nor a participal nor a verb nor
an attribute. There is the linguistically framed world (where language
includes the 'language of pictures'), and there is dynamic quality.
Now the linguistically framed world must be the intellectual world because
language is something that intellects use. That is almost a definition of
intellect. So the intellectual world depends on the existence of
intellects. Unsurprisingly.
In constrast the continuous reality cannot depend on the existence of
intellects, because, being continuous, it has to have existed before any
intellect. After, too.
I'm hoping that none of this is too infuriating, and repeat my apology for
my own loss of temper.
Elephant.
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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