Gary:
Thanks for the tip, but I'm already quite familiar with Wilber and admire
him greatly. In fact, he lives nearby, or at least he used to, and I was
lucky enought to meet him at a concert. (Jimmy Dale Gilmore, the Zen-country
musican) I'm not certain, but I may even be the one who introduced his work
to this group.
As to the newspaper example you provide, I think its un-necessarily
complicated and would rather address the issue in a different way. Let's
just skip the first two levels becasue that much is pretty obvious. Instead,
let's just move to the newspaper example as I included in the list of
examples. There I'd bascially said that reading a newspaper is a social
level activity and by contrast doing an analysis of the media is an
intellectual activity. Here's why....
In reading the paper you learn what happened, you learn what has been
reported. For the most part the stories will be about crime, politics,
business, sports and that sort of thing. Its all social level stuff that
you're learning about. Yea, there are sometimes book reviews and such, but
even there what you're reading rarely rises to the 4th level.
Media analysis, by contrast, doesn't just report what happened. It examines
what kinds of things were reported and more importantly what kinds of things
were NOT reported. It looks at issues of bias, imbalance, the market forces
and cultural pressures that cause bias and imbalance. It asks questions
about trends in reporting and the various perceptions of readers ABOUT the
news they're getting.
All of the contrasting example work essentially the same way. Thinking is
social, but thinking ABOUT thinking is intellectual. Reading is social, but
reading ABOUT reading is intellectual. Understanding is social, but to
grapple with the nature of knowledge is intellecutal. See? They're both
mental activities, they're both subjective experiences in the sense that it
happens internally. But also they both can be exterior, objective and out in
public view. Clearly, both newspapers and books of media analysis are
objects that anyone can see and purchase. Which brings me to a criticism of
what you've written...
I don't think your hypothesis is confusing, as in too complicated for me to
understand. Instead, I think its confused. As I understand it, its does not
work and is even contaminated by logical contradictions. For example, you
were quite happy to agree with the idea that everything is BOTH an
individual entity AND part of a larger collective system. But at the same
time you assert that the social level is collective and the intellectual
level is individualistic. That is a logical contradiction. See?
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