Murdock, Mark (Mark.Murdock@Unisys.Com)
Thu, 11 Dec 1997 04:42:24 +0100
Martin,
Thanks for all of your thought provoking posts. Yes, it's all religion,
isn't it.
"Faith" engenders some passion here and in other communities. Religion
has failed many people, or rather blamed for the failings of people.
Afterall, people lie and cannot be trusted.
So we have built a religion from rational thought. It doesn't lie. We
can separate the imperfect observer from the observed. Truth is capable
of perfection, we believe, so we construct this Library of Babel, full
of knowledge concerning this objective reality. People are relegated to
building measuring instruments -- the only thing which can be trusted.
The measurement instrument for Quality, however, is people. It is felt
in the heart and not in the head. Now we're back to the frailities of
humans, the imperfections, of Lila, of ourselves. How will we manage?
Forgive the cliche, but love is the answer. The real hero of Lila
wasn't the narrator at all. It was Rigel.
What was more important to Phaedrus wasn't Lila as a person, but Lila as
an object for analysis. Phaedrus tried to understand Lila. True, he
understood the concept of Good, but Rigel practiced it as a percept.
Rigel loved Lila. Phaedrus' rational thinking prevented him from loving
her. Rigel came for her in the end not out of a sense of responsibility,
some "social value." It was love, a deep caring for her well being.
And that is how the dialections will fall.
I am writing my essayette over the holidays.
M.
> Mark,
>
> When you used the word "faith" you were met with the same
> sort of resignation the word "catechism" was met with. Old,
> stale words that people don't want to associate with what
> Bodvar calls "the theory of the next millenium." Using
> "presupposition" would have been just as accurate and
> probably a more acceptable term. Presuppositions are those
> assumptions we make before we rationalize, they are the
> foundations of our thinking. We can't begin to reason
> without them. For example, and I try to point this out
> whenever I can, Ayn Rand espouses a philosophy called
> Objectivism in which she says reason is man's only absolute.
> She builds an entire ethical code by reasoning. What she
> doesn't realize is that she has already presupposed
> ontological materialism and epistemological realism and
> didn't rationalize her ethical system until afterwords. If
> you drill an Objectivist on the rationality behind their
> materialism and realism, you're bound to draw blank stares.
>
> So the MOQ is similar to this. Mike Hardie wants a syllogism
> to prove Quality and the MOQ. He wants the rationality. But
> as Pirsig points out, it's a presupposition (taken on faith,
> as you called it). You can use polar coordinates or
> rectangular coordinates, and neither one is more rationally
> "right" than another. This is what I'm having a hard time
> getting him to accept. But I'm working on it. If I can
> break down a great dialectician like him, it's a great
> accomplishment. :-)
>
> So I understand what you meant by faith.
>
> Many truths to you,
> Martin
>
>
>
> --
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>
>
>
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