Any chance you could e-mail it as an attachment, as it
is a mess in this Yahoo mail reader? Looks good, but
doesn't look good IYKWIM
;)
André
--- Gary Jaron <gershomdreamer@yahoo.com> wrote: >
Here is a revision of my previously posted essay.
>
> My Holarchy and the integration of
> Robert Pirsig and Ken Wilber
>
> By Gary M. Jaron
> May 5, 2002[i]
>
> I must confess my own holarchy/map/diagram of
> metaphysical reality began out
> of rejection. I looked upon a map/diagram and was
> displeased, it was ugly.
> Socrates taught me about the Good, the True and the
> Beautiful. Robert
> Pirsig[ii] taught me that this holy trinity was one
> and it was Quality. Of
> course! Things of powerful and fundamental truth
> were not only good, but
> they were beautiful--they were simple, elegant
> statements of clarity. Truth
> and Beauty were united. Classical attributes of
> beautiful things were
> simple, elegant, and balanced. Lets us look at the
> map of reality that
> precedes Pirsig's revelatory new metaphysics.
>
>
> Reality
> Subjective(Mental)
> Objective(Physical)
> Classic (intellectual)
> Romantic (Emotional)
>
> Here is a balanced and sturdy configuration. On the
> top is a unity out of
> which branches off two levels of balanced items. It
> is no wonder that such
> an edifice has stood the test of time. A building
> such as this has a solid
> foundation. It is like a two story building with a
> peaked roof. Solidity,
> strength, simplicity, are all adjectives one can
> used to describe the
> diagram on purely esthetic observations. It thus
> should have some sort of
> truth to it, since it has such overwhelming beauty.
> But, there is something
> wrong with the picture when you examine it through
> the eye of intellect, as
> thousands of years of philosophic and scientific
> writings have conveyed.
> Now, lets look at the 'New' metaphysics of Robert
> Pirsig, he the champion of
> Quality, he the unifier of all that is Good, True
> and Beautiful.
>
>
> Quality(Reality)
> Romantic Quality
> Classic Quality
> (Preintellectual
> Reality)
> (Intellectual Reality)
>
> Subjective Reality Objective Reality
>
> (Mind) (Matter)
>
> My first reaction to this map/diagram was purely
> esthetic. And I was
> shocked. It was ugly. It was unbalanced. If it
> was a building it would
> surely topple over! This edifice could not stand on
> its own! I was
> completely baffled. How could someone who wrote
> with such elegance about
> truth, which surely Pirsig does, create such an
> picture that so clearly
> lacks elegance? Without even analyzing the words
> and ideas conveyed by the
> diagram I felt that there was something wrong with
> this picture of reality.
>
> But, most shocking of all, upon my current
> re-reading of Pirsig's book,
> probably my 6th or 7th read of it, I had my own
> revelation! The diagram
> Pirsig presented was not an accurate picture of his
> own words! It was as if
> the diagram was laid out by the Narrator and not by
> Phaedrus the philosopher
> who had the revelation concerning Quality. Return
> with me to chapter 20 of
> Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Go to
> what is page 247 in the
> Quill edition, the paragraph begins thusly:
>
> 'He'd been speculating about the relationship of
> Quality to mind and matter
> and had identified Quality as the parent of mind and
> matter, that event
> which gives birth to mind and matter. This
> Copernican inversion of the
> relationship of Quality to the objective world could
> sound mysterious if not
> carefully explained, but he didn't mean to be
> mysterious. He simply meant
> that at the cutting edge of time, before an object
> can be distinguished,
> there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness,
> which he called awareness
> of Quality. You can't be aware that you've seen a
> tree until after you've
> seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and
> instant of awareness
> there must be a time lag..The past exists only in
> our memories, the future
> only in our plans. The present is our only reality.
> The tree that you are
> aware of intellectually, because of that small time
> lag, is always in the
> past and therefore is always unreal. Any
> intellectually conceived object is
> always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is
> always the moment of
> vision before the intellectualization takes place.
> There is no other
> reality. This preintellectual reality is what
> Phaedrus felt he had properly
> defined as Quality. Since all intellectual
> identifiable things must emerge
> from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the
> parent, the source of all
> subjects and objects.
>
> Powerful words. But let us carefully consider them.
> The scene that Pirsig
> is describing consists of a person observing a tree.
> So, first off there
> exists matter! A human being stands on planet Earth
> and a tree grows out of
> the soil of planet Earth. Examine the word
> 'preintellectual'. Watch where
> it takes us. Pre-intellectual means something
> before there is an
> intellectual understanding. The intellect is a
> faculty of a human mind!
> Pre-intellectual is before the things the mind
> creates, which is words.
> Before intellect there is a non-verbal occurrence.
> We now have a body which
> has sense data, non-verbal, and this body process
> the sense data with its
> intellect--its mind. Out of this processing we have
> understanding. Pirsig
> labels Preintellectual with Romantic Quality and
> intellectual with Classical
> Quality. The actual diagram Pirsig is describing
> looks more like this:
>
>
> Objective Reality
>
> (Quality)
>
>
> Matter
>
> (Planet Earth)
>
> (trees and people)
>
>
> a human mind
>
>
> -------(Sub
> jective Reality)-------
>
>
> preintellectual awareness
>
> (Romantic Quality)
>
>
> intellectual distinguishing
>
> identifiable things
>
> (Classic Quality)
>
> Now this visual edifice is solid and stable. But
> this is not the diagram
> that Pirsig gave in his book! But it is the diagram
> as described by the
> paragraph from his book that I just cited! Quality
> exists before words,
> before intellect. We are made of matter and
> perceive things made of matter
> (trees). We silently, non-verbally are aware of,
> experience objects made of
>
=== message truncated ===
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