The intellect’s evolutionary purpose has never been to discover an ultimate meaning of the universe. That is a relatively recentfad. Its historical purpose has been to help a society find food, detect danger, and defeat enemies. It can do this well orpoorly, depending on the concepts it invents for this purpose.
The cells Dynamically invented animals to preserve and improve their situation. The animals Dynamically invented societies,and societies Dynamically invented intellectual knowledge for the same reasons. Therefore, to the question, “What is thepurpose of all this intellectual knowledge?” the Metaphysics of Quality answers, “The fundamental purpose of knowledge isto Dynamically improve and preserve society.”
“Knowledge has grown away from this historic purpose and become an end in itself just as society has grown away fromits original purpose of preserving physical human beings and become an end in itself, and this growing away from originalpurposes toward greater Quality is a moral growth. But those original purposes are still there. And when things get lost andgo adrift it is useful to remember that point of departure.”
The most sinister thing about the fall of the Roman Empire was that the people who conquered it never understood that theyhad done so. They paralyzed the patterns of Roman social structure to a point where everybody just forgot what that struc-ture was. Taxes became uncollectible. Armies composed of hired barbarians stopped receiving pay. Everything just lapsed.The patterns of civilization were forgotten, and a Dark Age settled in.
— Robert Pirsig’s “Lila, An Inquiry into Morals”
Thursday April 11 to Sunday April 14
Discover PRESERVATION, curated by Paul Hameline and Paige Silveria
Vernissage: Thursday, 7-10 pm