Hi Platt,
I think we're in agreement! I am very much taken with the view of emotions
as (at the intellectual level) being refinements of what has gone before. To
my mind (and this is what I'm working up something on) the elements of
character (eg courage, perseverance, compassion - virtues, in other words)
are intellectually moderated emotions, and the building blocks of the self.
So refinement of the emotions is firstly a social virtue (more moral in a
straightforward sense - you're less likely to assault someone who annoys
you) but beyond that it becomes an intellectual virtue - in other words it
is impossible to see the truth clearly unless you are a person of good
character!! (Think of the way that the scientific method depends upon a
certain level of distancing from a person's own emotional reactions. That
can only be achieved by someone at a certain stage of character development.
However, this is taking me away from what I wanted to say in this post).
Just a couple of things. You wrote:
> No, I didn't mean to imply a moral hierarchy, such as philosophy is
> better than physics. I was trying to make an analogy between areas of
> knowledge and Pirsig's levels in order to clarify where I think certain
> subjects belong, a question that has provoked considerable debate
> here before. Pirsig claimed "nothing gets left out" of the four levels. So
I
> thought it might be helpful to show what I think gets put in and where.
> Using departments in a university seemed a reasonable way to
> accomplish this without going into endless, numbing detail.
>
I'm still not clear on what you mean by "where...certain subjects belong".
Are you saying that there are different activities (all at the intellectual
level) which take as their subject matter these different areas (at
different levels)? If so, I'm quite happy with that.
Secondly, you asked: How does a fifth level of "art" grab you? This is
something we've touched on before, but I can't remember exactly when either.
But briefly I'm sympathetic to it, subject to how "art" is defined. A
different way of putting it might be to talk about transcendence, or that
which provokes feelings of transcendence within us - which is another way of
talking about DQ. What exactly do you have in mind as "art"? And in what way
would it function as a fifth level, analogous to the social and
intellectual, as opposed to being purely DQ? Happy to pursue that one
further.
Sam
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:01:47 BST