Jim Tantillo wrote:

<snip>
>What I'm thinking of relates to the philosophical problem of 
>tertiary qualities (there are
primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities).
<snip>

I enjoyed reading your thoughts, Jim, but I am rather uneasy about 
your starting point.
It appears to me that you begin here with a foundation, a legacy, 
that is fraught by
unwarranted assumptions, perhaps the most obvious being that this 
trinitarian structure
you propose ( may I ask from whence it derives, if you do know ?) 
assumes a kind of process,
stepping or division of our experience, which, though it may be a 
fruitful analytical tool, is
an artifice, a contrivance, and a crude imposition upon something as 
magnificent, baffling,
and vast as our sensorium, our perception, our comprehension of 'that 
which exists', be
it self, landscape, planet, or cosmos, and our heterogenous responses 
to experience and
being.
Your foundation implies and requires the modelling a particular kind 
of sensory and cognitive
framework embedded in an ideological worldview. I think you will, as 
ever, seek to justify your
stance, from your humanist perspective. But I do not think your 
framework finds support from
the sciences does it ? How does this framework stack up against the 
findings of quantum physics,
neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, sociology, anthropology, 
semiotics, etc, I think such a
simplistic analysis as you present might be derided from many 
quarters as naive, obsolete,
riddled with covert metaphysical prejudices ?
For instance, can you really proceed so blithely from primary 
qualities to secondary, tertiary, and
the rest of your argument, without any consideration of the 
implications of quantum physics
for epistemology and ontology ?  How can you utilize the concept of a 
primary quality that
is "true, scientific, strictly empirical " if you then proceed to 
ignore what science tells us about
the nature of the fabric of our universe ? Your "shape" and your 
"color" only 'become' when
an observer observes them, furthermore are 'changed' by that 
observation. It seems quite
impossible to find any logical guidelines which correspond with your 
triplicate division
( following the correspondence theory of epistemology and truth ) if 
the observer and
observed has no clear dichotomy but is some kind of weird interaction 
between what the
materialists like to convince themselves is a concrete shared 
objective reality, and what the
pantheists, etc, like to think of as 'Cosmic Mind' (the various 
notions following Plotinus, Spinoza,
Leibniz, Berkeley, Jung and on up to Penrose and Hameroff, etc ) then 
there is no way that you
can convincingly state that your quality three can be seperated out 
from quality one, or vice
versa.
I suggest it is your localised predisposition to reduce experience in 
this quasi-mechanical-
mathematical way because you have faith that such reasoned deduction 
is illuminating. But
hasn't Goedel's Theorem shown the futility and limitations of that 
approach  when it comes
to the establishment of ultimate or absolute truths that could 
provide the logos or foundation ?
Hasn't Derrida and Deconstruction and logocentrism shown that your 
whole intellectual tradition,
anglo-american analytical, humanism going back to the Renaissance and 
ancient Greeks
is to a considerable degree vain and deluded ? Ideology posing as 
wisdom. Dogma and propaganda
consciously or unconsciously manipulated in the service of social 
control and the will to
power. What is missing is that elusive concept *meaning*. In the 
domain of your "tertiary
properties" we have all the intellectual and political wrangling that 
goes on endlessly.
My personal route out of that morass is zazen, the taoist/buddhist 
teaching of emptiness,
that allows connection to deeper sources of wisdom than the socially 
constructed cerebral
patterns, the nets woven by words, reason and logic, which confine 
our understanding rather
than liberating it. My position is that zazen, silence, emptiness, 
gets past the problem of
foundationalism, in the logocentric sense, in that the source of 
being is not socially constructed,
thus it provides a phenomenological base to an individual, whilst 
avoiding the entanglements
which the intellect encounters once drawn into discourse concerning 
definition of such
tricky, intellectually slippery, notions as Plato's 'Good' or 
anybody's God or god.

Jim  wrote:
>In a very important sense, then, all education is really a kind of 
>aesthetic education, that is in the
>sense of cultivating the appropriate response to whatever object or 
>entity is being studied.

I find this conclusion dubious and suspect. The "appropriate 
response" according to whom ?
This is a politically loaded remark. Knowing something of your 
opinions and attitudes, I
suspect that "appropriateness" will be screened through the same 
filter that enables you to
find affinity with the beliefs of Roger Scruton and similar vermin 
who take pleasure from
rationized cruelty killing foxes for fun, emotional and social rewards.
What you are attempting to justify is indoctrination into a 
particular way of structuring
the experience of being and assigning value and priority to notions 
which suit a particular
cultural ideological and philosophical agenda. You have implicit 
faith in the roots and ongoing
integrity of that agenda. It is a faith which I do not share with you.

C.L.


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