Hi Bobby, Diana, Richard, all Moffers
BOBBY:
Yes, intellect is not in charge, as intellectuals should have
realised by now that Science and Technology have not by themselves
led to a higher Quality (Moral) of human life. Rather, if you study
history, Science and technology have emerged NOT out of man's desire
for a moral existence but out of the basically immoral desire to
conquer, dominate or wage war. Not as an attempt to understand nature
but to control and dominate nature.
MARCO:
Moral, immoral.... Conquests and dominations are social methods, and you
are considering they are immoral from an intellectual viewpoint, I
guess.
I'd prefer to tell social and intellectual rather than moral and
immoral. In this sense, it's easy to see that wars of conquest and
pillage of natural resources are leaded in order to attain the social
dominance of a nation upon another nation (intra-level conflict) or upon
biology (inter-level struggle).
BOBBY:
Mankind has yet to comprehend the fact that man cannot and does not
control nature, it is nature that is and will always be in control.
MARCO:
I think by "nature" you are meaning biology. Seen from an intellectual
viewpoint, society and biology are inferior levels, so it's easy to say
that they must live in balance. But from a social viewpoint, nature has
to be devoured. The problem is the term "mankind". The behavior of
"mankind" -as a whole- is social. Intellect is more about single
individuals. To a certain extent, the struggle of intellect against
society IS the struggle of individuals against "mankind".
BOBBY:
Science has yet to discover this truth and announce it. Even the
advancement in avionics,electronics, nuclear technology, computing, etc
has been motivated by the need for military domination.
MARCO:
Agree. IMO that's because they have been developed mostly during the
social age, when mainly social demands were leading the evolution.
BOBBY:
All other applications, like information technology, entertainment have
been secondary offshoots.
MARCO:
I.T. is, after all, technology. Instruments. Society will use I.T. for
its
purposes. Intellect will use it for its purposes.
BOBBY:
The biggest lie that has been perpetuated is that Science is a search
for the truth. Truth for whom and for what ?
MARCO:
A wise consideration about the goals of human activities. Science has
been created and used during the social age, searching for good
solutions for social purposes. Lately, it has begun ALSO the
investigation of reality, but, as Pirsig says somewhere, it's a recent
(intellectual) passion. But don't be so negative about science: it has
provided many good things. Concentrate your efforts against society.
BOBBY:
Art has tried to give man glimpses of the Good so that the moral force
latent in every being can awaken. Tragically this has only been taken as
only a liesurely activity. Rhetoric - the art of language should have
been the intellectual's forte.Instead dialectic precision is the
intellectuals tool today and so has to rely completely on Science to
figure out anything at all. Rhetoric is used only for scoring political
points.
MARCO:
In a MOQ vision, art must be considered as "high-quality endeavor",
using Pirsig's words. It's the activity when the *artist/subject* is not
separated from the *masterpiece/object*. Leisurely activity? Yes, from a
social viewpoint it could be. Society considers useless many things
intellect loves.. as long as they are not part of the market. So the
social value of painting, today, are Christie's auctions. And the social
value of science is its concrete application: technology.
MARCO (previous):
>IMO science needs intuition, as well. And actually, science is an art.
>It is creative and methodic. The actual divorce is not science/art,
it's
>art/technology (offered by Pirsig in ZAMM, as you know). I think this
>divorce is probably definitive, as technology is the intellectual
>application for social purposes, while art has been able (to a certain
>extent) to get rid of society. It is not technology which has abandoned
>art, it is vice versa! Technology has become awful when artists
>abandoned it to engineers... A possible fusion should come when people
>will pretend firstly beautiful products, and possibly useful. Only that
>day engineers will be necessarily firstly artists...
BOBBY:
There is a divergence of opinion here. Science does not care for
intuition or art. It tries to shut out intuition and at best only uses
creative intuition to establish or prove "truths".Thus intuition
is wholly subservient to scientific methods and goals.
MARCO:
I think you have a divergence with Pirsig, too:
PIRSIG (SODV):
«..one of the reasons I have spent so much time in this paper describing
the personal relationship of Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in the
development of quantum theory is that although the world views science
as a sort of plodding, logical methodical advancement of knowledge, what
I saw here were two artists in the throes of creative discovery»
«As Bohr might have loved to observe, science and art are just two
different complementary ways of looking at the same thing. In the
largest sense it is really unnecessary to create a meeting of the arts
and sciences because in actual practice, at the most immediate level
they have never really been separated. They have always been different
aspects of the same human purpose».
MARCO:
...and, Bobby, you will find more about the role of intuition in
science in the Poincare section of ZAMM.
BOBBY:
Any intuitive idea that is not supported by scientific methods and goals
is not even given a second look.
MARCO:
Of course. Also, any intuitive idea that is not supported by a technique
(like painting), can't become an artwork. Intuition and method;
creativity and technique; Dynamic and static... in all cases, both are
necessary.
BOBBY:
And what are the goals of Science? - to hunt for "truths" that can be
used for political domination and control by the political masters of
the scientists.
MARCO:
Why don't you simply say that these are the goals of society?
BOBBY:
A possible fusion is needed not in products but in attitudes. Science
has proven to be destructive and art has not been so. Art should have
dominated science, and only then the application of science ie
technology could possibly have been non-destructive. But before
everything else, comes our attitudes and values. If the attitudes and
values are all wrong, nothing will subsequently work out right. That is
the tragedy - having more value for Science and technology and less for
nature is the final and fatal act that has sealed mankind's fate. I
can't see how we can blame art for this or what the artists could have
done. Fight wars with pens and brushes ?
MARCO:
Well, Leonardo was popular at his times more as designer of war
machineries than painter... Actually at his times the strength of
society was huge, so no artist was able to be independent of society.
No, IMO the MOQish way to face the question is the social/individual
struggle.
Look at the diagram provided by Diana (good job Diana, even if I guess
you swapped "objective" and "subjective" in the picture... :-). Pirsig
clearly puts science in the top intellectual block. We could put it
simply and tell that "Science is intellectual". But I'd prefer to say:
"The *right place* of science is intellect". I mean that it is immoral
for science (as well as other intellectual activities such as
philosophy... ) to be subjugated by society. Like when Hollywood tries
to take Phaedrus' book:
«... what he saw at this point was a social pattern of values, a film,
devouring an intellectual pattern of values, his book. It would be a
lower form of life feeding upon a higher form of life. As such it would
be immoral. And that's exactly how it felt: immoral. [...] They think
that because they pay you money, that is a social form of gratification,
they are entitled to do as they please with the intellectual truth of a
book. Uh-uh. Those gods. They'll pull anything».
(Lila, ch. 20)
But also it means that it must be possible somehow for science to get
rid of society... How? IMO the task is on all of us. The only
possibility for intellect to completely lead the evolution is to reduce
society to the role of servant of the individuals, rather than devourer.
It will be possible when the normal attitude of ALL single people will
be to pretend from economy, politics, family, church and so on... a
complete attention on the rights of every single individual. Commencing
from one right they did not consider in any constitution: the right to
Quality. Quality of life, in the widest possible sense. Claim Quality!
This is the slogan I'd suggest for the MOQ party.
======
DIANA:
So there it is, does anyone have any comments? Richard, you must have
had something in mind when you suggested the topic...
MARCO:
I'd add also the voters.... Anyway, I thought Richard was having in his
mind: "what is the best diagram". The diagram you have put in the top of
your message is one (by Pirsig). Another one recently suggested a four
dimensional vision, in which "things" are in the same moment possibly
*all-levels*, depending on their relative position within the
coordinates (levels). I can't draw it now, hope it's clear.
I don't know if this was Richard's question... anyway, what is the best
diagram? I'd say that, according to the complementarity, there are
multiple good ways to figure the MOQ out...
Ciao
Marco
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:30 BST