[a note to Jonathan, Wim, Bo, DMB and the others: I've seen your messages,
many
thanks. Let me a couple of days...]
Hi Platt,
A bit on delay... I was not home these days.
Many thanks for your comments (27/1), I think you help me in testing my MOQ
interpretation.
> > M:
> > Thanks Platt. My intention was not to show that this or that pattern
> > "belongs" to one level, rather that the best we can do is to find out
where
> > do patterns have their birth.
P:
> Your view doesn't square with Pirsig's.
It's nice that few days ago Magnus blamed me for my lack of originality.
Anyway, it is not a terrific problem if I find myself in contradiction with
Pirsig. Just, I'm not sure I'm not anymore orbiting around planet MOQ.
Let's see.
P:
> Not only does he say that the
> levels are exhaustive but that they are discrete. "They have very little
to
> do with one another." Your "birth" metaphor suggests that what
> originates at one level grows into a higher level and becomes
> influential in the higher level. Maybe so, but I find nothing in the MOQ
> that supports your view.
Pirsig says that *levels* are discrete and have very little to do with one
other. But actually I was talking of *patterns*. My point is that when a
level
becomes leader of evolution, lower patterns can be used, empowered and
refined and even enclosed into it. That's why biological emotions (you
agreed that emotions are also biological) play an important role at the
social and intellectual levels.
P:
> I like your idea of considering the levels as resources, but I can think
of
> them that way without changing "belong" to have "birth." Birth and
> resources don't match very well in a metaphorical sense.
I don't follow you about this *metaphorical mismatch*. What are you meaning
exactly? Anyway, I do prefer dropping "belong to" as it sounds very
exclusive. If we say that marble "belongs to" the inorganic level, how does
it happen that a monument has a great social and intellectual value? Pirsig
speaks of hardware/software relation (that is by the way very similar to the
matter/form concept of good old Aristotle). Saying that the artist uses
inorganic marble as resource and then the monument is *at the same time* an
inorganic and an intellectual pattern of value is IMO perfectly coherent
with the MOQ, with common sense, and does not contradict the discreteness of
the levels. In no way.
> >M:
> > And this way we can reconcile Pirsig's fixation on the "clash between
> > levels" with Rog's good points on the possible "cooperation".
P:
> I wonder who is fixated here. Recall Pirsig's observation: "The ideal of
> a harmonious society in which everyone without coercion cooperates
> happily with everyone else for the mutual good of all is a devastating
> fiction."
This sentence happens to be one of your favorite! But IMHO you are making a
bit of confusion: Pirsig is here speaking of a supposed natural cooperation
between human beings. By the way, he adds: "if man is basically good, then
maybe it is man's basic goodness which invented social institutions to
repress this kind of biological savagery in the first place" and IMO that
means that while cooperation is not natural (biological?) it has been a
conquest of mankind at the social level.... and we have to be watchful to
keep it working, if possible.
Anyway, I was talking of the clash between levels. That is a clash we all
can firstly find even in ourselves, and has nothing to do with the quote you
offer. I think Roger has made good points about the possible cooperation
between the levels. My example of the river wants to include both Pirsig's
and Roger's points. It is a resource we have to tame as long as it behaves
according to pure inorganic patterns, an ally when it has been *convinced*
to cooperate with / to behave according to our intellectual patterns of
technology. Water technology is intellectual, and it could not exist without
the river. That is: the river has become part of technology.
> > M:
> >So, why do I state that
> > religion has birth at the intellectual level? Because IMHO it is not
> > possible at all to Believe without abstraction and without
self-awareness.
P:
> You suggest that abstraction and self-awareness were not present in
> the social level before the intellectual level rose to full prominence,
> meaning I suppose that a pre-Greek individual like an Egyptian had no
> language or sense of self. This I doubt. By all accounts, religion arose
> with earliest man, with the cave dwellers.
Quite please. I've never said that "abstraction and self-awareness were not
present in the social level before the intellectual level rose to *full
prominence* ". I think I have to make myself more clear. Pirsig says that
the predominance of intellect over society begins during the XXth century.
He also shows that the first clear steps in that direction were made
probably in Athens 3000 years ago. But he never says exactly (he could not)
*when* the first intellectual patterns did emerge.
In Lila, chapter 30, we can clearly read (and this happens to be my favorite
passage:-) ):
«.. anthropological studies of contemporary primitive tribes suggest that
stone
age people were probably bound by ritual all day long. There's a ritual for
washing, for putting up a house, for hunting, for eating and so on - so much
that the division between "ritual" and "knowledge" becomes indistinct. In
cultures without books ritual seems to be a public library for teaching the
young and preserving common values and information».
« These rituals may be the connecting link between the social and the
intellectual levels of evolution. One can imagine primitive song-rituals and
dance-rituals associated with certain cosmology stories, myths, which
generated
the first primitive religions. From these the first intellectual truths
could
have been derived».
As you see, the "first primitive religions" are connected with the
development of the "first intellectual truths" (I'd add also with the first
forms of art). And this is more or less what I'm trying to say. If we ask
"which comes first?" I guess that abstraction comes first than religion, as
it is impossible to Believe in a supreme Spiritual Entity without
abstraction. It was still an intellect completely servant of social
patterns, nevertheless it was intellect. The process I think we can sketch
from these pages (and from Pirsig's Cruising Blues paper) is that ritual
division of labor leads to isolation, and isolation leads to self awareness.
« As one lives on the surface of the empty ocean day after day after day and
sees it sometimes huge and dangerous, sometimes relaxed and dull, but
always, in each day and week, endless in every direction, a certain
understanding of one's self begins slowly to break through, reflected from
the sea, or perhaps derived from it.
This is the understanding that whether you are bored or excited, depressed
or elated, successful or unsuccessful, even whether you are alive or dead,
all this is of absolutely no consequence whatsoever. The sea keeps telling
you this with every sweep of every wave. And when you accept this
understanding of yourself and agree with it and continue on anyway, then a
real fullness of virtue and self-understanding arrives. And sometimes the
moment of arrival is accompanied by hilarious laughter»
(RMP, Cruising Blues)
Again, IMO I'm perfectly coherent with the MOQ, and with common sense.
> Further, if you look at today's
> religious fundamentalists you won't find much intellect there.
Maybe they are merely still at that stage: intellect servant of social
predominance.
Thanks again,
Marco
(still orbiting around planet MOQ)
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