Mr. Thomas, Bodvar and Y'all:
Some of the issues in this message could just as well be posted in the
"failure of the Enlightenment" thread and/or in a new thread called
something like "the historic emergence of, transition toward and dominance
by the intellectual level". Sorry if it seems a little messy, but all these
things are very inter-related and complex.
DMB had said:
> Let's start with the first word many of us
> learn as children; "no". Even this is an abstraction. A pre-verbal infant
> could just scream and cry to express displeasure, but the ability to say
> "no" is distinctly different. Its a symbol. Its a phonetic representation
3WD answered:
That is unless that child's "no" is in response to your "distinction
between social level thinking and intellectual level thinking." In which
case the the following quotes from Lila apply to her thinking .....
DMB says:
Hmmm. It seems you are trying WAY too hard to disagree. Since a child can
begin to utter the word "no" even before her first birthday, it seems quite
impossible that she could have anything to say about metaphysics. More
likely, it would be about mashed peas or poopy diapers. C'mon 3WD, you can't
honestly believe a toddler would be quoting Pirsig. (Although my 2 year old
has been able to read his own name for while. :-) Please forgive my Dad
pride.)
About Galileo and his critic 3WD said:
This is a common misinterpretation that shows up here time and time
again. We have overwhelming evidence of very high level of intellectual
"thinking" across a broad range of societies far far earlier than
Galileo's, or Buddha's, or Jesus's time. What had not evolved nor rose
to dominance was not "intellectual thinking" but an intellectual moral
order:
DMB answers:
Overwhelming evidence? I doubt it, but if you'd care to submit some of that
evidence, I'm all eyes. It seems like a very difficult task simply because
the historic records go back only so far. When we try to look back at the
thoughts of people BEFORE Socrates and Buddha, things get very murky.
Writing itself only goes back a few thousand years, and most of that is
merely accounting.
DMB goes further:
I'd suggest that you'll find plenty of evidence of mythic thinking in
pre-historic artifacts, such as the pyramid and stonehenge, which are
religious, ritualistic buildings. Obviously, these extraordinary structures
demonstrate amazing skill and intelligence, but still can't rightly be
called intellectual. I get the impression that too many people here assume
that any thought is intellectual, but this is a mistake. I think Bo is quite
right in asserting that such an assumption puts us right back into the SOM
soup, reintroduces the mind/body problem and creates a number of other
problems. Pirsig and Wilber both insist that there are realities BETWEEN
biology and intellect. This is were social level thinking fits. This is
where Wilber's archaic, magic and mythic thinking fits. Both of them are
presenting ideas that defy common sense notions because they are both
defying SOM and this is designed to be an improvement upon common sense
notions. See?
DMB moves to the related topic:
Surely there is a difference between the emergence of, establishment of,
transition toward and dominance of the intellectual level. This makes alot
of sense in an evolutionary scheme. The 4th level grows much like anything
else. By analogy, it was most likely concieved in prehistoric times and that
event will forever remain undocumented. Its' birth must have occured in the
5th century BC at the time of Socrates and Buddha. We could say it left its'
childhood in the Enlightenment period, and became to dominate society after
WWI, when Europes remaining monarchies lost out to democracies. This out
line is not contradicted by the Pirsig quotes from 3WD.
Pirsig:
"Or, within historical time, the day Socrates died to establish the
independence of intellectual patterns from their social orgins." p270
Pirsig:
"Phaedrus though is he had to pick one day when the shift from social
dominance of intellect to intellectual dominance of society took place,
he would pick November 11,1918, Armistice Day, the end of World War I."
pg 270.... "The new culture that has emerged is the first in history to
believe that patterns of society must be subordinate to patterns of
intellect." pg. 304
DMB moves to the other related topic:
This is the issue that could ought to be posted in the Enlightenment thread;
the dissociation of morals and science in the wake of the "Death of God".
The failure was a matter of throwing the baby out with the bath water. In an
effort to make science distinct from the Church, to make rationality
distinct from mythic thinking, the defect emerged, flatland emerged, amoral
scientific objectivity emerged. 3WD provided the right quote...
Pirsig:
"The defect is that subject-object science has no provisions for
morals.... From the perspective of a subject-object science, the world
is a completely purposeless, valueless place" pg 277-8
About this defect 3WD said:
So maybe those "common sense","salt of the earth", "down to earth",
"couldn't be nicer", guys rather the being ignorant, as you suggest, are
merely trying to maintain, or reintroduce a smiggen of values or morals
in a world that seems "completely purposeless". I think it was James (or
maybe Dewey) who said that in search of the truth, the Good, we must be
ever vigilant for "the cries of the wounded."
DMB says:
Yea. As I said very early on in the "Failure" thread, both the pre-modern
reactionary movements and the post-modern movements are a response to this
defect in modernism. They're both wounded by the sense of purposelessness
created by this same defect. Both are interested in reasserting a sense of
meaning and puropse. BUT, oh what a difference there is between them. The
reactionary movements would have us go back, would have us reject modernity.
The postmoderns, which includes hundreds of great thinkers from Kant to
Wilber and Pirsig, would rather we repair the defect. The task is to
re-integrate morals and science, to weave values into rationality. By
analogy, the pre-moderns and the post-moderns both see that the car doesn't
work very well. The pre-moderns would have us un-invent the car and return
to riding hoarses, while the post-moderns want to design a better car. See?
Big difference. All the difference in the world. And if the most moral path
is one that honors the ongoing process of dynamic evolution, the postmoderns
are clearly more moral. I hear the cries of the wounded. I am one of them,
but there's no going back. Going backward is not only stupid, its immoral.
See?
Hope it was worth your time,
DMB
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:19 BST