From: Steve Peterson (speterson@fast.net)
Date: Sun Oct 06 2002 - 21:11:27 BST
> PACO:
> I think freedom/liberty is essential within the MOQ.
Steve: Thanks for responding, Paco. Lot's of food for thought. I want to
return to some of the other things you wrote in a later posting, but first
it would help me a lot to understand freedom in terms of moq levels. I
think I remember Pirsig talking about an idea of evolutionary progress as
increasing freedom. (Does anyone remember where so I can look it up?)
Tell me if you think I have it right. Maybe someone can rewrite this thing
for me. I think the progression would go something like this:
I. (I'm probably missing a first stage where inorganic matter is more free
than I dunno what.)
II. Animals are more free than rocks from the inorganic bonds of natural
forces in that they can move under their own power though they are obviously
not really free of forces like gravity. Animals are still in bondage to
Natural Law just as much as rocks are. But an animal can jump up in a sort
of temporary defiance of gravity and is in this way more free than a rock.
The one who throws the rock must be more free than the flying rock.
Morality at the organic level has survival as its highest value.
Survival might considered merely maintaining organic-ness since any organic
entity will eventually revert to an inorganic state. Reproduction is
important as a way of ensuring continued survival and maintaining this
higher level of evolution.
Organic life attains this freedom of movement at the cost of new
biological restraints. Animals need food, water, shelter, and the
like--things that rocks don't need at all. To respond to these needs
societies developed as a third stage of evolution.
III. Societies enable humans to free themselves from biological
constraints to a degree by making food, water, and shelter more accessible
and by finding cures for diseases, but the development of society has
resulted in a new way to be in bondage. People can be bound by one another
and by society as a whole. A society's morality will restrain some
biologically moral behavior in favor of a sort of "greater good" of
fulfilling other biological needs. But a society's morality will also
include morals designed to preserve the society itself in its current state
since by its own existence it is presumed to work. Societies evolve to
serve themselves. From a society's perspective, human beings exist to serve
society. Morals at the societal level become the survival instinct of
society which wants to preserve itself as a still higher level of evolution
over individual biological beings.
Since humans are biological entities before they are societal entities,
they may be forced to destroy a society that is not providing biological
benefits that outweigh the biologically moral behavior that is prevented by
society. The result of such an attack will likely be a new society that
provides a better balance between biological needs and the society's
tendency to serve itself.
IV. Societies can also be attacked "from above" as a fourth level of
evolution is represented by intellect. A morality that values individual
humans over society that exists to break the societal constraints on
freedom. To be honest, I don't really understand what is meant by this
intellectual level. I understand that intellectual morality would include
rights, but I don't know what else its morality includes and I don't know
what Pirsig means by intellect.
To summarize how I think these levels work...
Complete freedom is the ultimate good, my ultimate goal, and my most natural
desire. I become free of an inorganic immobile state of being through my
biological aspect of existence. I become free of the bonds imposed by my
biological needs through the social aspect of my existence. I become free
of the bonds imposed by society through the intellectual aspect of my
existence.
Q: Does intellect serve itself the way biology and society do? Does the
fourth level of evolution grant freedom only to provide a new way to be
bound as the other levels do? Or is perhaps the highest level one of pure
Freedom?
I am never made completely free of the bonds of the previous levels through
the next levels while new restrictions on freedom are always introduced.
In a paradoxical way, with the addition of each new level, there is less
freedom. Freedom actually gets harder and harder to attain through this
evolutionary "progress." In a way, rocks have complete biological, social,
and intellectual freedom. They have all the food, shelter, and rights they
need. They just donšt have inorganic freedom.
The rock might get squished into a different kind or rock or eroded out of
existence, but a rock is completely free to express it's rock-ness so long
as it exists, while a tree that is not grounded in good soil cannot fully
express its tree-ness. How much harder still is it for a human to fully
express herself?
It seems to make sense to rank these levels in terms of capacity for freedom
for self-expression rather than the amount of restriction on freedom. With
each level, quality of existence is increased as measured by an increased
capacity for freedom that may or may not be attained by individual rocks,
plants, dogs, and people.
Once again, I would appreciate it if someone could help me better understand
this progression of levels. I hope some of you can help me think this
through. If I can get this cleared up, I would like to continue the
discussion into how the idea of freedom could apply to practical morality.
Steve
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