JONATHAN REBUFFS BODVAR ON SOTAQI AND
EXPANDS ON THE HIGHER-LEVEL MEDIATION IDEA
Hi Bodvar and Squad,
(NB. Alex, Maggie and Magnus also mentioned or quoted)
I just went through losing a large reply to a power interruption. I'll
try and reconstitute it from the
error-prone Biological backup system I resort to in such circumstances
Bodvar Skutvik <skutvik@online.no> wrote on
Thursday, November 12, 1998 7:39 PM:
>Jonathan B. Marder wrote on Mon, 9 Nov 1998 :-
>...Pirsig discussed the divorce of Ethics from Reason in ZAMM, and
> traced it back to Aristotle.
> A major point of the MoQ is to reverse this split. To call it "too
> general" is to say that ethics is peripheral. Please Bodvar, don't do
> that!
Bodvar:-
>Jonathan and group.
>I do have problems with what you mean by the above "warning". The
>Quality idea is that existence is a moral evolution and that each
>moral plateau has its own good/bad scale, but your ethics sounds like
>a detailed prescription of what is good in a society at all times
>and under all conditions, an impossible task using the MOQ.
Let me spell out my "warning":-
1. The Intellectual level has moral precedence over Social, Biological
and Inorganic (that's according to Pirsig's Lila).
2. The Intellect consists of SO thought patterns (Bodvar's SOTAQI)
Put 1 and 2 together, and you have SO thought as the basis of morality.
This is difficult to reconcile with Bodvar's comment of 5th November:-
>Intellect is the "enemy" that attacks us! Not just pompous academics,
>but the intellectual part of existence - of ourselves!.
My reply to that still stands:-
>Right on Bodvar! The intellect which ignores gut instinct can lead one
>on a very long path away from morality.
Bodvar continued:-
<<<
It [JM's ethics] merely states that Social value is for the individual
to live for
the good of all. This value is terribly general and was established
long before modern man, the myriad of moral codes that later sprang
from it is impossible to keep track of. Hamurabi's, the Mosaic law,
the Koran, the Norse "ting"s, the.....An unending succession
of law collections, of old full of stoning, burning and other good
social countermeasurements, but more and more influenced by
Intellect's ethics of individual worth.
>>>
If Bodvar would read my recent posts, he would notice the emphasis on
basic human decency and gut instinct.
There have been many religious and legal attempts to capture, distil
and codify this ethic, but these intellectual or pseudointellectual
systems often fail:-
JM>The intellect which ignores gut instinct can lead one
JM>on a very long path away from morality.
Bodvar:-
>The development described in ZMM was 'the divorce of ethics from
>reason' all right, but remember that Pirsig had not conceived
>the MOQ when writing ZMM.
!!!!!!!!!
I expect to read message of great subtlety, but to be struck by an
asshole statement like that!
[that was supposed to be based on what Pirsig said about Aristotle, in
ZAMM, but I don't have the book handy right now].
MoQ is rooted in ZAMM, in concept if not in name. ZAMM gave us the taste
of Quality. Lila tries to give us the recipe.
Another thing Bo, I find it irritating to see "ZMM" without the "A" for
Art.
Bodvar:-
>Intellect took leave of its social bounds
>which up to then had been the ruling ethics. As you will know do I
>claim that this development also can be seen as the birth of SO
>thinking which came to be the the new morals that everything
>was judged from. That is what I call SO-ethics or morality.
Yeaass!
JM>The intellect which ignores gut instinct can lead one
JM>on a very long path away from morality.
>And yes, the MOQ is a reversal of this. Perhaps "reversal" isn't
>accurate? There is no going back, only a spiral movement to a higher
>perspective.
You never gain something without losing something.
>And it is this view that give us the ability to see the
>big picture, but to use it as a guide how to be a good member
>of this or that particular community is not its mission. It only says
>that society is the base for Intellect, and (stretching our tether to
>the limit) Intellect may give rise to a new moral/ethics level
>...another Bo pet as you know :-).
[more on this higher level later]
[snip]
>Over to the Inorganic vs Organic theme.
Bodvar:-
<<<<In your reply to Diana it
only sounded as if you said that Pirsig was wrong: there's no
conflict between the two lower levels, and if that fails the whole
logic of the MOQ topples.
>>>>>
I believe that if we let Lila be the last word, the MoQ will indeed
topple, especially if we take every word literally.
The way Pirsig describes the levels, there CANNOT BE a conflict because
they are different types of patterns. This is what I believe Magnus
meant
when he wrote on 2nd August:-
>I think the levels are totally orthogonal to each other, in other
>words,
>you can for example never express biological patterns in terms of
>inorganic, nor the other way around.
I don't thing that "orthogonal" is the right word here, but I do want to
expand on my suggestion that conflicts at one level are mediated at a
higher level. When a rapist is jailed, society allows biological and
physical tools (police, handcuffs, sticks and guns, jail cell) to
restrain him. You can't tie up a rapist with a law. You can't hit him
over the head with a custom. Society restrains the biological rapist
PHYSICALLY. That's what social patterns *are* - mediations between
lower level patterns. Similarly, intellect consists of patterns which
mediate between social patterns (e.g. communism vs. capitalism,
liberalism vs. conservatism).
This begs the question, "what mediates between intellectual patterns?".
On 13th November Alex Finlay wrote:-
>(4) Along the same vein could MoQ be a higher tier (Quality Realizing
>that it exists?) because it seems to be a completely different level
>than intellectual
I am also reminded of my "levels of sentience" post from 17th June in
which I wrote:-
<<<<This sentience business has caused a lot of trouble, so I want to
put forward some thoughts about the different levels involved:-
1. Sensitivity - e.g. ability of a molecule to absorb light of a
particular colour.
2. Responsiveness - e.g. the way an organism by light or smell
3. Consciousness - Confers ability to act in ANTICIPATION of sense. e.g.
running away from a skunk or a snake.
4. Consciousness of consciousness - awareness of present and past
consciousness or anticipatory acts.
5. C of C of C - the realm of philosophers. Anyone who understands 4 has
it.
6. Higher levels (if anyone can make it to here ... COs I can't)
>>>>
Maggie later equated levels 1-4 with the four MoQ levels which leaves
philosophy at 5.
There is a logic (is it SOM?) that says that MoQ itself should be at a
higher level than the 4 levels it contains.
The problem of this is that it leads to endless recursion.
Back to Bodvar:-
<<<<I am a little bewildered. I thought that the MOQ basic assertions
were understood and accepted after all your time at the discussion.
Now suddenly to declare the most elementary things as "wrong" is
disappointing .....and exhausting. Perhaps you don't like the
conflict allusion, but it will make a mess of the MOQ to blunt those
concepts.
No bad feelings dear Jonathan, I just had to say this.
Bodvar
>>>>
Sorry to say this Bodvar, but the (mutual) frustration *is* a bad
feeling. Yet, beneath all this, I believe we share a taste for Quality
(that's a good feeling;-)
It is significant that you bring up the CONFLICT allusion. This
dialectical framework makes it inevitable. That's what SOM creates -
opposites and CONFLICT. Marxism is an extreme example of the dialectic
at work. As humans, we have instinctive ability to transcend these
conflicts and achieve harmony. Pirsig didn't discover this, but he
championed it, giving it the name QUALITY.
So my dear friend Bodvar, let's not pretend that there aren't some bad
feelings, but lets try and transcend them with better ones. With the
greatest respect to you and all the Lila Squad,
Jonathan
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