Dear John B.,
Congratulations with your birthday! Expulsion from which
brotherhood?
Back in July under the smoke of mount Etna I read a Dutch summary
of nearly 400 pages of Ken Wilber's writings by Frank Visser, the
Dutchman behind www.worldofkenwilber.com . I have been preparing
a posting on this list ever since with a proposal (addressed to
you) of a synthesis of Pirsig and Wilber. It was phrased as a
return to your posting of 12/7 19:58 +1000 addressed to me (and
Platt). Discussing with Glen D. on libertarianism, with Platt on
doctors and germs, with Platt, Rog and Sam on socio-economic
issues and with Sam on religion took all my (limited) time
however, preventing me from finishing it.
What follows is (more or less) what I had already prepared
(without a satisfactory reply to your 12/7 19:58 +1000 posting as
yet):
As I understand Wilber's work, it is primarily a very thorough
exploration of the whole breadth, height, dept, chronology (and
maybe even more dimensions) of consciousness. Consciousness is
something he ascribes not only to human beings but to all types
of "individual holons" (quarks, atoms, molecules, cells,
organisms etc.) and -in the form of distributed or
intersubjective consciousness- to all types of "social holons"
(galaxies, planets, crystals, ecosystems, families, tribes,
communities etc.). (See
wilber.shambhala.com/html/interviews/interview1220_2.cfm/xid,6587
424/yid,88470152 if anyone doesn't know where else to find this.)
If consciousness in the sense in which he uses
it is a necessary and sufficient condition for experiencing
value/quality (I am not sure of that), he would support Pirsig
who sees everything (even inorganic "things") as patterns of
value and disagree with your "Quality has no meaning except as it
refers to an individual organism" (quoted from your "Quality with
a
human face", I forgot where).
Pirsig's work could be integrated in Wilber's work (as he has
integrated the work of so many other theorists) as simply another
crude typology of levels of being. There is also a way however to
integrate Wilber's work in Pirsig's work. That seems to me the
best way to follow up your suggestion of 15/6 15:33 +1000 to
relate to Pirsig Wilber/Whiteyead's approach to "first look to
the higher levels for the general principles of existence, and
then, by subtraction, ... see how far down the hierarchy they
extend.". I hope you are (still) interested.
First of all I would want to take to heart what 3dwavedave wrote
7/7 11:13 -0500:
"The trap that Phaedrus, and many of us, falls into is trying to
immediately apply metaphysical insights to solve all
philosophical problems without development of the other
philosophical systems."
I would take as a starting point Pirsig's metaphics of quality
and forget about his suggested applications of this to ethics,
sociology, psychology etc., for these applications are far less
thorough than the thinking of Wilber. (On the other hand, I am
disappointed with Wilber's thinking -as reproduced by Frank
Visser- in that it is based in a metaphysics which presupposes
and therefore takes beyond the realm of rational testing a lot of
the most controversial parts: the existence of a spectrum of
consciousness that is rooted in different irreducable spheres of
reality.)
If we take "metaphysics" to mean a set of answers to the
questions "How can we know?" (epistemology), "What can we know?"
(ontology) and "How can we know what we should do?" (deontology),
Pirsig's metaphysics can be summarized in:
'We can know by experiencing value, we can know static patterns
of value and the (dynamic) value of changing those patterns and
we know what we should do by ... experiencing value, for
evidently no-one would want to take a lower value course of
action if a higher value course of action is available.'
Pirsig's equation of epistemology and deontology runs into
problems (as you have pointed out), because you don't experience
the value of a course of action before you take it and can't
always retrace your steps to try an alternative.
I propose another deontology: 'We know what we should do by
experiencing Meaning.' We can evaluate alternative courses of
action by their "fit" into the story of "our" life (which can be
understood as a part of the bigger stories of the groups we
identify with. The best course of action is the one that makes
our life into the most Meaningful (chapter in a) story.
This was as far as I had come on 18/8.
I don't agree with you that "Wilber takes us miles ahead of
Pirsig ... in his detailed mapping of a
large number of levels in the holarchy. He generally
discriminates at least 13 such levels, but would agree that the
number is somewhat arbitrary." I think the arbitrariness of the
number of levels and the large number itself is a weakness in
Wilber's thinking. For me is essential Pirsig's idea that a level
is only a separate level if it constitutes a static latch for
Dynamic Quality (a new type of patterns of value that prevents
the re-constitution of lower-level static patterns of value once
they are dynamically disturbed). There may be one or two
intermediate levels overseen by Pirsig, but not more. (For
instance: Maybe there is or was an intermediate level between
inorganic and biological patterns of value: strings of DNA/RNA
with only a little added proteins "swimming" freely in the ocean
and reproducing themselves with spontaneously formed amino-acids.
The biological level then only started with cellular life.
Viruses would be the only remaining remnant of this intermediate
level.)
The "levels" Wilber distinguished might be more accurately
described as different types of stories that constitute/give
Meaning.
With friendly greetings,
Wim
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