Hey Chris (L.),

I should have known the bullfight/hunting aesthetics remark would likely
spark a response from any lurking zen chairmakers from Wales on the list .
. . <grin>.  You know, with Veggie Biggs gone . . . .  Anyway, I
appreciated your comments, well, okay, all of them except maybe for the
following:

>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.

As much as I'd like to go into THIS discussion right now <smile>, I'll just
have to pass by the "Roger Scruton and similar vermin" comment for the
moment.


>  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 ?)

This question, however, I'll respond to.  Actually, Chris, this is a good
question, and one which sent me back to my "history of philosophy" basics
to figure out exactly where this framework (primary, secondary, tertiary
quality) comes from.

Now, assuming you won't be content with a response of, "It's all footnotes
to Plato," (well, it *is* you know <smile>), I guess I won't mention
Aristotle's "categories": quality is among them.  My first hunch upon
reading your question was: Locke, Hume, and Descartes.  I wasn't far off.
In picking up a copy of Berkeley's *Philosophical Works: Including the
Works on Vision* (Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), I read in M.R. Ayers'
introduction:

"Locke and his teacher and colleague in the Royal Society, Robert Boyle,
saw the physical world by analogy with a vast, intelligible machine
constructed by God in such a way as to maintain the fairly striking, but
less than complete, order and regularity that exists at the humanly
observable level. In place of the innumerable 'substances' or natural kinds
of the Aristotelians, a single, comprehensive substance was proposed with a
single, determinable essence or nature; that is to say, an extended, solid,
mobile substance, divided into minute particles, which they called 'Matter'
or 'Body.'  The laws of mechanics seemed to follow intelligibly and even
necessarily from these 'primary qualities' of extension, solidity, motion
and the rest.  Particular changes were thought to be intelligible rather as
the interior motions of a clock are intelligible: by observing the
particular rigid shapes involved and how they fit together, we can conclude
how and with what consequences they must interact.  For most physical
change, however, the relevant structural properties of things are beyond
our powers of observation; as indeed is the *ultimate* structure of a clock.
--"The theory generally involved a dualism of Spirit and Matter, but did
not essentially do so. . . " (vii).

Now, I add that last comment by Ayers because I take it that the bulk of
Chris's comments below are aimed at villifying me as some sort of evil
Cartesian dualist who favors the torture of live animals  for fun in the
form of vivisection (er, uh, how did you put it above, Chris? I am linked
to those "who take pleasure from rationized cruelty killing foxes for fun,
emotional and social rewards").  Of course we ALL "know" every proper
"Cartesian" must include that particular form of recreational activity in
their intellectual party platform.  Well . . . I must be no different, I
fear.  <grin>

Anyway (keeping "my eyes on the prize," Ray), getting back to Locke,
Berkeley, et al.  The point of the above quote is that it mentions the
appropriate players, Locke and Boyle.  The terms primary and secondary
qualities appear in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Bk II,
chap. 8), a usage which Locke in turn appears to have "borrowed" from his
friend Boyle (editor's preface to William Collins ed., 1964, p. 13)--e.g.
Boyle's book, *The Origin of Forms and Qualities* (1666).

Berkeley is relevant (and came to mind when you mentioned him, Chris) not
only because many people interpret Berkeley as the bridge between Locke and
Hume on perception, but also because many people seem to assume, mistakenly
(as you seem to do below I might add), that Berkeley dismissed the idea of
the objectivity of Lockean primary qualities as well as that of secondary
qualities.  Ayer suggests in his preface to Berkeley that it "ain't
necessarily so":

"I have tried to suggest . . . that [Berkeley's role] is more complex and
interesting than that usually ascribed to him of an empiricist critic of
Locke who did not go far enough. . . .  On the topic of primary and
secondary qualities, it is widely supposed that Berkeley merely extends to
the former Locke's arguments against the objectivity of the latter.  Yet it
is difficult to say how much or how little of Berkeley's philosophy
constitutes criticism of the distinction. . . . "

I'll spare people the gory details of Ayer's analysis, but suffice it to
say that Ayers' conclusions lead me to suspect that Chris's linking of
Berkeley with the other "Cosmic-Minded" pantheists he cites might be just a
wee bit faulty, e.g. when Chris writes:

>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

But that's just a hunch.

Now, as far as tertiary qualities goes . . .  geez Chris . . .  I DON'T
KNOW <grin>, but it seems to me to be a pretty standard item both in recent
philosophy of mind stuff, but more importantly (for my purposes <g>), in
the aesthetics literature; which makes sense, since aesthetics has
historically dealt with the themes of vision, perception, etc. etc.  You
know Chris, if I'm not mistaken, your old pal and verminiferous
philosophical mentor, Roger Scruton, discusses "tertiary qualities" in his
writings on aesthetics . . . .  You might take a look, for example, at his
book *Art and Imagination* or his *The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in
the Philosophy of Art and Culture*.  :-)  And I don't think there's a
mention of fox hunting ANYWHERE AT ALL in either book--imagine that!

A word of friendly advice: don't look at (repeat: DO NOT LOOK AT) his book,
*The Meaning of Conservatism*.  I'm sure it will just upset you.  :-)

I am gently kidding you, Chris, and hope you take it as such.

Honestly, I'd really like to come back to some of your other comments when
I've had a bit more time to digest them--there's some good stuff here (as
well as some not so good stuff).  A little like your basic everyday milk
chocolate, I should think . . . .

gotta run--but I did enjoy having to think a bit about where the
terminology came from.  thanks,
Jim




>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.



%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%