Hi Marco, ( also Platt, Squonk, 3WD, Erin)
I am not surprised that you, Marco, have understood my little submission to
this thread better than other respondants.
You said "I love the first one. I think also that the most beautiful things
humans have produced came from GREAT INDIVIDUALS."
Yes, you are right. At the intellectual level we are dealing with the
individual's response to quality in three fields, (a) the inner experience
of quality that we experience as beauty, and which leads to the realm of
art, (b) the outer experience of quality which leads to understanding and
the development of science, mathematics, logic, and so on, and (c) the
intersubjective experience of quality which we experience as compassion, and
which leads to experiences of community, fraternity, personal love, and so
on.
You argue that 4(c) is social. This is understandable but too limited. See
what 3WD said to Squonk about this.
"Buddhists in general, and Wilber in particularly divide this into
"compassion for ones own kind" which probably is biological, "compassion for
other things" as social and "compassion for everything" which is high
intellectual bordering mystical, and just "compassion" with "no-thing" as
enlightenment."
The level I am pointing to here is the 'high intellectual' one I suppose,
though I have some problems with the schema 3WD presents. What is important
is that compassion is an individual's response to the value encountered in
another person, regarded as a sentient being. This puts it in the
'intellectual' level.
I guess I have some sympathy with those who would like to see reason or
something similar as the level 4 moral principle. However this is far too
limiting. What role does reason have in appreciating the song on the radio,
that Pirsig uses as his paradigm case for the next level? That Pirsig chose
to utilise a metaphysics to spell out his views is understandable, but it
can cause us to assume, quite wrongly, that quality at the fourth level is
all about ideas. I think Pirsig does not so limit it, and rightly so. Wilber
gives us the mental map to understand what is going on.
Also coming from Wilber, building on Whitehead, is the understanding that no
amount of study of atoms will 'explain' life, or society, or intellect. You
can't get an ought from an is, and yet we keep trying. If Wilber is right,
the experience of each person is a progressive opening to quality, which
just is. But since the opening is progressive, and the development is
staged, the quality that is encountered at each level is NOT explicable in
terms of the lower level. It is encountered, experienced, and then some sort
of static latching is applied to make it 'understandable', that is, to fit
it into our evolving mental map of reality. Therefore the quality that will
eclipse the intellectual level can never be built from ideas, reasoning, and
so on. Marco said "It is well possible to think something wrong..." Well,
yes, and as Wilber put it, metaphysics can be "thought without evidence".
Erin put it well, introducing the term schema "A pattern imposed on complex
reality or experience to assist in explaining it, mediate perception, or
guide response." This debate is stuck in a schema, the one Pirsig uses, in
which intellect is king. Unfortunately, it will never take us beyond level
4.
The problem with level 4 quality is that it is potentially extremely
isolating. It is the end of the line for the egoic personality. I can
appreciate art, enjoy all kinds of understanding, and feel compassion for
others, and still feel a huge lack in my life. This is also the problem with
creativity.
While I understand where Platt is coming from, he is wrong to pin his hopes
of salvation on art. Poor Van Gogh is the paradigm case. He sold one
painting during his lifetime, lived in poverty dependant on handouts from
his brother, and finally blew out his brains. That he is now acknowledged by
many as a genius is no help to him. Pirsig constantly refers to the
isolation of modern life, but has no solutions that I can see.
So a level 5 transformation will overcome the isolation inherent in the
three quality realms experienced at the fourth level. This will come not
through intellect, which is already exhausted, but from a new integration.
It is at this level that the subject/object divide is overcome, through
experience of unitary consciousness, not by rattling on with ideas about
unity. The MOQ is indeed just the menu that Pirsig said it was, and it
offers no nutrition, no fulfilment, only the chance to play ever more
twentieth
century intellectual games.
The meal is yet to come.
John B
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