John, Bo,
John Beasley wrote:
>
>
>
> Scott, you say you have a problem with "the idea that each q-level *came
> into
> existence at some point in time* from the next lower level". I have always
> thought that Pirsig's thought was confused here too. His mistake, in the
> most general sense, is to take evolutionary theory as an explanatory
> principle, which it certainly is, but to apply it to quality issues which
> are more fundamental to reality than any scientific theory can ever be. In
> my view Pirsig is prone to take science in general, evolution in particular,
> and metaphysical thinking generally, as adequate vehicles to express what is
> just not expressible in those modalities. Much of the awkwardness of his MOQ
> derives from this misplaced 'objectivity'. It's hard enough to get language
> to work for us in talking about quality, without using the very language
> which epitomises the SOM worldview.
I agree, but I don't think I mind so much. I treat Pirsig's work as a
beginning, and that a great deal of the surrounding ideas (like the four
static levels and what you mention) will be revamped almost out of
recognition. Sort of like Freud's ideas. All the particulars (Oedipus
complex, etc) are pretty much dismissed, and even his work with patients
is now pretty much thought of as bad work, yet the basic idea that we
have a subconsciousness that greatly influences our actions has
survived and greatly permeated our thought.
It is the core idea (Quality is Reality, and produces our dualistic
consciousness) that matters. There is also the question of how far he
could have gone and still had readers. Even so, ZMM was rejected by 30
publishers, or whatever.
>
> You summarise as follows "our intellect is S/O thinking, and with that we
> cannot
> understand the source of S/O thinking. But we *can* understand -- and this
> is the MoQ -- that subjects and objects are not primary, rather they are
> created in each instance of our awareness, and Quality is the driver of that
> creation".
>
> Here I have some concerns, mainly with the word 'understand' above, since it
> can refer to the S/O activity of thinking, which as you say is not adequate
> to examine what underlies the S/O realm. But you go on to say "Reason is the
> same non-thing as Quality, just a different name when we are focused on
> intellect", and with this I agree. So we need to take the word 'understand'
> as implying something more than reasoning, or thinking. In my view it comes
> very close to the meaning of the word intelligence, as Krishnamurti used it,
> and which David Bohm pointed out means literally 'the ability to read
> between the lines'. This is dynamic.
If you recall, I made reference to Coleridge's distinction between
reason and understanding, but before I get into that, we need to
remember that which word we choose to privilege over the other is a
somewhat arbitrary choice. So what I meant by "able to understand" and
"not able to understand" is really only referring to whether or not one
has the experience to be able to make sense of the words. In Coleridge's
case, translating to MoQ, one "understands" static patterns, or
combinations of same, but it requires reason to discern new patterns
(which then become static with use). This is not to deny that DQ is
needed in *any* mental act, including reading the newspaper. But one
only notices the DQ in "Aha!" experiences.
Having said that, and rereading what I said previously, I think I was
wrong. We can understand that SOM doesn't work (and so that subjects and
objects are not primary), but saying things like "they are created in
each instance of our awareness, and Quality is the driver of that
creation" is (to me) *not* understood, since I have no experience of
that creation. That is, without mystical experience, this is more of a
hypothesis that I consider worth exploring because of what mystics have
said, and because it is more inclusive.
>
> What I found really challenging was your assertion that "SOM didn't really
> happen until about 400 years ago". I have read Jaynes, with great enjoyment,
> but am not familiar with Owen Barfield. I must get hold of his books. But
> your comment stirred my memory of a peculiar little book by Francis Barker,
> entitled 'The Tremulous Private Body - Essays on Subjection'.
I'll look out for it. See below for a remark on postmodernism in
general.
>
> So while the change in understanding that Barker refers to is somewhat
> different to what Barfield describes, it may be no coincidence that they
> occur in the same era, and they may have a complex interrelationship.
>
> "Barfield also makes the point, as I believe you do in the SOLAQI, that SOL
> is a necessary stage on the way to the next stage, which he calls "final
> participation" and which mystics call the transcendence of subject-object
> duality"
>
> I thought Bo was very opposed to the mystic inclusion in the levels, though
> from my point of view it is absolutely clear that the MOQ is an attempt to
> integrate values that are fundamentally accessed through mystic experience
> into a metaphysics. I think the attempt is valid, but unlikely to have a
> satisfying outcome since the intellectual level (at which metaphysics
> resides) is by definition incompetent to incorporate a higher level, but
> that does not mean that it is not possible to talk about mysticism. Insofar
> as Pirsig talks about values, and thereby validates the interior realm from
> which values arise, his metaphysics has the valuable effect of 'pointing to
> the moon' of a way of life (mysticism) where the subject/object divide is
> genuinely transcended. Insofar as his emphasis is on intellectual system
> building, which it largely is, it is in fact a regressive attempt to contain
> new wine in old bottles.
I'm not sure what "the mystic inclusion in the levels" is about, so I
don't know if I am opposed or not. Could you explain?
I have a more optimistic view of what metaphysics can accomplish. True,
it cannot take you to the moon, but it can make the messages of those
who have made the passage the basis of normal, everyday intellect, just
as today the normal, everyday intellect assumes the independent
existence of material reality, and once (and still for many) the normal,
everyday intellect assumed an authoritarian deity that ruled everything.
I view post-modernism as a stage along this way. Several writers have
noted that Nagarjuna was the original deconstructionist. I like to think
of
metaphysics as applied semantics. That is, it attempts to change the
meaning of key words like "reality" and "truth", and therefore the
meaning of "metaphysics". So a "metaphysics of mysticism" will be one in
which continuously bites its own tail, so that one is never forgetful of
Nagarjuna's "whoever makes a philosophical view out of 'emptiness' is
lost". This ceases to be paradoxical once one ceases to treat
metaphysics as description of Reality. Rather, I see it as mental
exercise to change ones intellectual habits.
So maybe I don't agree that the intellectual level is necessarily S/O.
I'll have to think about this some more.
>
> The other aspect of all this that your post neglects is that each individual
> life, if Wilber is correct, passes through similar stages to the historic
> transformations you allude to. You suggest this when you say "even though we
> are more out of touch with Reality (Quality) than those in "original
> participation" (as of course Pirsig is saying in Lila) we are in a
> progression of some sort". Hence the development of an egoic self in infancy
> allows for subject/object discrimination, and I suspect has done so for much
> longer than 400 years. I am in fact very suspicious of claims that
> 'primitive' tribes had no concept of individuality, or in this case could
> not discriminate between subject and object. My experience in such cultures
> leads me to think the opposite, that individualism was highly developed in
> some senses, but with areas we would find deficient. Every infant learns the
> difference between subjects and objects when it bites its thumb instead of
> its bedding, or mother, or something else. Whether the culture supports this
> discrimination in ways we in the West today find axiomatic is another
> question.
Barfield is not saying that earlier cultures had no idea of
individuality, that they did not distinguish between self and other.
Rather, he is saying that the divide between subject and object (as we
now express it) was different. Here's a quote. In it he uses his own
word-coinings, so as to avoid confusions like my "understand" above:
Figuration: the process by which the objects of our perception are
formed. We don't see photons or hear air vibrations, we don't even see
colors or hear sounds. We see trees and hear birds. Furthermore, we tend
to forget that this is the doing of our own organism whenever we aren't
thinking about perception explicitly.
Alpha-thinking: thinking about the products of figuration, that is,
about things.
Beta-thinking: thinking about perception and thinking (which is not
different in kind from alpha-thinking, just different subject matter).
Now here's a summary from the end of Chapter IV:
"Anthropology began by assuming as a matter of course that primitive
peoples perceive the same phenomena as we do and on that assumption
investigated their beliefs about these phenomena. Now however some
anthropologists [he quotes from Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl] have begun to
point out that the difference between the primitive outlook and ours
begins at an early stage. It is not only a different alpha-thinking but
a different figuration, with which we have to do, and therefore the
phenomena are treated as collective representations produced by that
different figuration. It is further maintained by some of them that the
most striking difference between primitive figuration and ours is, that
the primitive involves 'participation'; that is, an awareness which we
no longer have, of an extra-sensory link between the percipient and the
representation [hence totemism, etc.]. This involves, not only that we
think differently, but that the phenomena (collective representations)
themselves are different. The first three chapters were devoted to
reminding the reader that we do, in fact, still participate in the
phenomena, though for the most part we do so unconsciously. *We* can
only remind ourselves of that participation by beta-thinking and we
forget it again as soon as we leave off. This is the fundamental
difference, not only between their thinking and ours, but also between
their phenomena and ours. It remains to consider how ours, which are
genetically the later, have come to pass."
The main thing about "their" phenomena that is not in ours, is an
awareness of psychic being "on the other side" of the phenomena. That
is, it is somewhat like what we do when we understand a sentence: we
perceive meaning in it. The "primitives" perceived meaning in the
natural world, though what that is we can no longer imagine. All this
does not address the difference in cognition, though, but that's as far
as I want to go for now.
>
> I have greatly enjoyed your recent debate, and hope my comments might add to
> it.
>
They do,
- Scott
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