Zam part III section 2

I’m going to focus on the 2 Chautauquas. Both are allegedly about “down to Earth Practical Information”, but the second is much more so.

The First deals with quality in Science, with some mentions of quality in religion and Art.

His main focus for this is the ideas Poincare. He said that science had lost it’s foundations because mathematics was revealed to be only conventional because of Lobachevsky and Reimann. We now have 3 geometries which contradict each other. Convenience decides which one is true. But isn’t it the one that fits the facts. The problem is, what facts? There are an infinite number of facts, science can’t just collect them all. P. said there is a hierarchy of facts. First of all, the more general a fact is, the more precious it is. Important facts are repeatable, but once we have lots of those, they get boring. The important facts then become the anomalous facts that don’t fit with the others, and are thus in some sense not repeatable. The goal of science than becomes to create a harmony between the repeatable facts and the anomalous facts. How do we do this. Poincare claims that this unity can only be found by what he calls the subliminal self, which the Narrator saw as the same as Phaedrus’ pre-intellectual awareness. This harmonious order of parts is the goal that shapes science, and only an awareness of quality enables one to recognize it. This is classical quality, and it is fundamentally the same as Romantic quality. It just contains an awareness of interrelated parts, rather than a single “groovy’ whole. Poincare contemporaries thought he was saying “truth” is whatever you like. But if quality is seen as a third entity, and/or the ground of all being, there is nothing subjective about it.

Brief interlude about Care and quality as the subjective and objective aspects of the same thing. People who care about what they do have a sense of quality. Similar concept to Heidegger’s.

Stuckness is basically the same thing as Heidegger’s concept of present-at-hand. It is produced by a loss of harmony between the self and an object.

Maps the relationship between Classic and Romantic Quality to the relationship between the Train and the Cars. The Romantic sees the Train, the Classic sees the individual cars. But if you don’t see the train as going anywhere—if you divide it up into cars and ignore the Unity—the train doesn’t go anywhere. There has to be a kind of leading edge of quality awareness that pulls the train forward.

Stuckness occurs when the flow is lost, but it can be the basis of the discovery of a new kind of flow, if you stop being attached to where you were trying to go, and get in touch with where you are. Then it is possible to discover a new leading edge of quality that will pull you forward again. Reasoning won’t help you, the awareness of quality is behind reason, makes it possible.

Stuckness is produced by an attachment to Classical reasoning. There’s also a kind of Ugliness produced by the Romantic point of view. If there is a lack of awareness of the Underlying classical beauty, the Romantic compensates by superimposing an artificial “style” over it, which is phony and inauthentic. (note: These are quality judgments, they can’t be defined.) This phoniness can only be removed when classic and romantic understanding are reunited at a basic level. I think the reference to Omar Khayam is meant to be an example of this romantic attitude of alienation from the world, that sits passively by, and drinks.

Gumption: What you have when you are filled with quality. Stuckness is one kind of “Gumption trap” that drains quality. It can be restored by taking a break when your stuck (a fishing trip.)
He wants to give examples of gumption traps, and how to avoid them, but is afraid anything to specific will not be universal enough to be useful to anyone but him. (read catalogs.) But he takes a chance and creates an Aristotelian Heirarchy of Gumption traps. (for Gumption 101 course.

Setbacks Hangups

Out-of-sequence intermittent failure parts problems Valuetraps, truthtraps, Muscletraps.
Reassembly {ego, anxiety {Logic}{Kinesthesia}
Boredom Impatience}