Monday, June 13, 2011

Filiality

One of the wonderful things about pangrammatical homology is its ability to extract one wisdom out of another by an almost deductive method. In Pound's translation of the Analects we find the following: "Mang-I-tze asked about filiality. He said: Don't disobey" (II, v. 1). Filiality, or what is also called filial piety, is of course the affection that is ideally felt between parents and children. It is, I think probably rightly, seen as essential to any broader social bond.

Now, obedience is the poetic homologue of understanding in philosophy.

Our question is simply: what is to understanding as filiality is to obedience? In thinking about this just now, it occured to me to keep another homology in mind: causation is to knowledge what morality is to power. This means we're looking for something that is to causation what feliality is to morality. Well, feliality is the root of morality, it is more fundamental and more subtle form of morality, far less categorical, if also far more robust. What is this subtler root form of causation: relativity. So we have:

cause/moral
relativity/filiality
category/disposition

This may also be why a concept is a category of thought while an emotion is a disposition to feel. The disposition is rooted in filial piety, while the category is grounded in our relative ________. See? It never ends. What is to knowledge as piety is to power?

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