Hi,
I'm back from the dead, and the first thing I'm about to do is to let a
LS discussion spill into the MD forum. Some people have no manners. (-:
Anyway, I finally finished my paper in linguistics, got my grade and am
now ready to battle David B. on some of his critics.
But answering just him leaves me somewhat unsatisfied.
Bo said to me that this month in the (ex-)LS seemed to be developping
into a "battle for the soul of the MOQ", and I somewhat agree with him.
Perhaps Diana is right and this month subject has gone to far in too
many directions.
I mean, who's talking about the Greeks, or the "coming of age of the
SOM", of late ?
Roger, with his "How long have you been beating your wife?" setup
brought up an interesting "fault line" in the LilaSquad, that I think we
should acknowledge it to see just how deep the rift is, and what is the
cause of it. I'm not going to count who's supposedly on my side and
who's not, since Glenn did it already, and anyway I don't think the
"fault line" is as unified as Glenn made it out to be.
But yet, I'm going to do a little bit of analytical surgery here (and
hope no one get killed in the process), to probe this strange division
among us who supposedly read the same book, and thought it "great".
How come we all think it is great but then don't agree on what it means
?
Some will say, "You misunderstood it". Mmm... I don't think that's very
deep, and anyway it's unprovable (listen to my SOM mind, here). I don't
think David "misunderstand" ZMM and Lila (even if he misunderstands me),
since I have a deep respect for his intelligence, and that I understand
most of his critics. In fact, I would agree with them if the position he
describes was mine.
Agreed, he recognizes his faults :
> I didn't mean to make a straw man out of you or paint you with too broad
> a brush. I'll admit that using the one quote as if it represented your
> total position isn't really fair. Sorry about that. In spite of the
> rambling length, my intention was merely to focus on one issue,
> solipsim. I don't want you to be angry with me,,,, just in case i need a
> free place to stay in Paris. :-)
[quote from : LS Time to Count and be Stranded ; 29/09/99]
Don't worry, any anger on my part is at best a rhetorical trick. ;)
But while David is right that the all-intellectual explanation is a "SOM
portrait in MOQ colors", the all-real levels HE describes is equally
SOM-like, and thus the MOQ miss its intended mark.
I'm going to explain what those two un-MOQ-like MOQ are and where they
lead us.
David Buchanan wrote:
> THE BONES
> I agree with Magnus. He has put his finger on one vital anti-MOQism,
> saying we shouldn't muddle up the levels or ignore the static /Dynamic
> split. (I'm sure no one WANTS to muddle or ignore anything.) But don't
> we all agree that the four levels and the static/Dynamic split are at
> the heart of Pirsig's work and that understanding them is essential? I
> don't mean to be harsh, but I have to say that Denis and Roger have
> mis-interpeted the basic structure of the MOQ by doubting the existence
> of the three lowest levels by putting evolution, revolution and Dynamic
> change into ordinary consciousness. I think this picture disrespects the
> ontological scheme (the levels) and the primary division between DQ and
> sQ.
>
First strawman of David here : "Denis and Roger have mis-interpeted the
basic structure of the MOQ by doubting the existence of the three lowest
levels by putting evolution, revolution and Dynamic change into ordinary
consciousness".
Where did I say that ?
To mean that I should have said :
"All patterns of value ARE intellectual patterns of value." (put the
word "just" somewhere in there if you want ot be SOM-like)
Thus, I would be putting *all* processes of evolution and Dynamic change
in the "mind".
But I said :
"All patterns of value are *also* intellectual patterns of value."
The paradoxical nature of this "also" has raised a lot of eyebrows on
both sides of the rift.
Bo said : "neither 'also' nor 'just'", thus putting words into my mouth
; that's a lousy rhetorical trick, buddy. Please don't do it again.
This *also* is important, and I'm ready to stick to it. If you take it
out, you've entered the Solipsist version of the MOQ, and I don't like
it any more than David or Bodvar do.
David says this too. I could nearly give this quote the tittle "The
Persistent Voice of SOM".
Listen :
> Putting all the levels into the
> intellect ignores those distinctions and makes the moral codes into a
> pointless exercise in sorting different kinds of thoughts. (IntPoV)
A *pointless* exercise, people ! Not an intellectual exercise, but a
pointless one. The little voice of SOM must have whispered those word in
your ear, my friend. The Intellectual level doesn't make *pointless*
exercises, which take place *just* in your mind. It's in your mind,
period.
Leave the prejudice out. Try, really try.
I mean, if you want to label me a solipsist, at least try not to fall
into the "it's all just in your mind, guy" trap.
If we say that the levels values are nothing but intellectual values, we
are wrong. The symbol (the word if you prefer) is the link between the
values.
When I say that patterns of value are also intellectual patterns of
value, I mean that the values we experience in the Quality Event can
always have a symbolic representation in the intellectual level.
Then, when we talk about our experiences (at all levels), the
words/symbols are used and discussed, and the link between meaning and
sign makes this talk pertinent (spare me the Jabberwocky here, please).
This is fundamental, because in turn language is a powerful static
latching for our experiences. This is how we become INTELLECTUALLY aware
of them. Many things come into your senses, but the only ones you really
pay attention to are those with a static intellectual pattern attached.
The others are dismissed as "irrelevent" (the green flash example).
If they aren't, congratulations ! you've just experienced DQ !
But here David, having the deep-grounded conceit of subjective
statements that all modern intellectual share, dismiss the symbolic link
as irrelevent and grounds the levels in EXISTENCE (i.e. he creates an
ontology).
Thus, David becomes a proponent of the second trend Roger's questions
have uncovered : the Materialistic version of the MOQ.
OK, I'm cutting David mis-representation of my view (his strawman) and
go for the bone.
> KNOTS
> I'd like to try to unravel a couple of threads that have, in my opinion,
> led you to a mistaken view. One thread leads from Aristiotle's
> "substance" to the modern concepts of matter and objectivity. The other
> has to do with language as it relates to the social and intellectual
> levels. Together they should make up a coherent description of how
> Pirsig treats the objects and subjects, how he handles the problems with
> SOM. That's the plan, but I may have bitten off more than I can chew.
[...]
> THE "SUBSTANCE" OF THE MATTER
> I believe you've mistaken the nature of Pirsig's problem with
> "substance". It certainly doesn't mean that there is no reality outside
> of DQ and our conceptualizations of it. It doesn't mean there is no
> inorganic reality. Yes, Pirsig objects to the notion that Aristotle's
> "substance" is the bedrock of reality. He objects to the notion that the
> "mind" arises out of complex "matter", but he doesn't deny the existence
> of "substance". In the MOQ its known as inorganic and organic static
> Quality. Intellectual static patterns are just as real, but are a
> seperate level of reality, a different level of static Quality.
> Confusing them collapses the MOQ like a house of cards.
>
That's it. The Materialistic MOQ. The levels exists, they are real and
the evolutionary foundation of the Intellectual one. To try to say the
intellectual level created them destroys the MOQ and renders it mute.
Denis : "BTW, why does it renders it mute ? "
David : "Simple, if the intellectual level created them, then they are
just in your mind and therefore not to be trusted. They are filthy
artistic stuff that isn't objective and... Oops..." ;)
OK, now I'm putting words into your mouth (just for fun... and revenge
;) but what's YOUR answer to that ? why is it mute ?
> LOCKED ALL BY MYSELF IN A TACKY LEASED CONDO
> As a result Science is no longer at home in society. We are no longer at
> home in the universe, nor at its center. We are locked inside a mind
> that can only imagine what is "outside" in the real world. Thus we get
> the terrible secret lonliness and all kinds of existentail dis-ease. SOM
> has created a monster by its willful ignorance of our social and
> cultural inheritance. Sure the Inquistition sucked, but they threw the
> baby out with the bath water, reducing the entire mythos to nothing more
> than ignorance and superstition. THIS IS THE PROBLEM WITH SOM. It's not
> the belief in the ontological reality of inorganic nature that matters,
> its the exclusion of everything else! Its the assumtion that only
> material reality can be considered objectively real. SOM has denegrated
> everything that can't be detected by scientific instruments and put it
> on a shelf labeled "subjective". This removes things like love, art,
> beauty, and religious experience from the world. Its a big problem, to
> say the least.
>
But the Materialistic MOQ puts them back on the shelves again, doesn't
it ?
We are there at the top level of evolution, able to make "rational
judgments" about religions, morality, love, art, beauty, and... wait,
wait, can we really do this ? Uh....
> THE CURE FOR BLINDNESS or REVERSE AMPUTATION OF THE LEGS WITHOUT A KNIFE
> That's exactly where the levels come in. Matter is radically re-imagined
> as inorganic and biologicial static patterns of Quality, and mind exists
> in the MOQ as the top two levels. And its not just a matter of
> re-organizing "things" into different categories. Pirsig's ontological
> scheme does a lot more than just replace "things" with "patterns". The
> levels of static Quality replace subjects and objects with a unified
> field of evolutionary progress. The MOQ's description of the conflicts
> between the levels, and the moral codes that go with it, certainly seems
> to defy the idea that they are "just cuts of the intellectual knife".
> And even though they are all made of static Quality, the levels are
> discrete and represent different values.
[The "pointless" quote follows this]
Your are right, the levels REPRESENT different values. Those levels of
value are discrete, and linked in an evolutionary scheme, and so on...
The problem here is that the Materialistic MOQ would *really* like to
forget that damned symbolic relation between what it says and what
exists.
Look, what I want you to understand is not that the levels are
inexistent, but that the notion of existence itself, and its
philosophical child ontology, are the hellspawn of SOM. As long as
someone says that a word, a defined word HAS EXISTENCE, as if this was
just some propriety you could stamp on just anything you want, you don't
understand the BEST MOQ : the Mystic MOQ.
HERE COMES DENIS WITH HIS BIG IDEA : A MYSTIC MOQ
The Mystic MOQ says that the only thing to which we can assign Existence
is QUALITY : nothing else. That is, Existence in the SOM sense. After
which, comes the existence (lower case) of the levels. They exist not
because you experience them (you experience Quality), but because you
use them to classify your experiences. That is why the MOQ can be called
a "Radical Empiricism". As soon as you talk, you are leaving pure
Quality and entering Intellect. Intellect is a high-Quality thing, the
highest of the levels, the best thing evolution has produced yet.
IOW, Quality has pure existence, the levels have intellectual existence
(they are good ideas).
As such, discussing them makes perfect sense because we are thus engaged
in a high-Quality endeavour. Defining them, analysing them, working them
in ever-more coherent structures of thought is a very high Quality thing
to do.
>From a mystic point of view that's degenerate, but that's because the
mystics operate at the highest level of all. They are outside the circle
of samsara, outside the cycle of life and evolution. They have left the
ring. Perhaps we should all try to do this, but I don't think so. If
everybody leaves the ring, the match ends. Read UG Krishnamurti ; I
think he's right : if we knew what moksha REALLY is, we wouldn't touch
it with a ten-foot pole. I'm not ready to. The match may be pain and
blood and tears, but it still has more attractiveness for me than this
death-like state of everlasting contemplation.
> **************** LANGUAGE ON (AT LEAST) TWO LEVELS****************
>
> MINE OVER MADDER
> Pirsig's solution is just another piece of evidence that the levels are
> real and not just in the intellect. The MOQ insists that the any search
> for knowledge, truth or meaning has to include SOCIAL LEVEL MEDIATION.
> That is to say, science has to recognize the mythos or it will be
> blinded to a wide range of human needs. Pirsig's saying our intellectual
> patterns can be repaired if we undo what science did back in those
> troubled times. When they rejected the authority of the church they
> rejected the mythos along with it. Pirsig is saying that social level
> static patterns are not only real, they're essential in the formation of
> all our intellectual patterns. Intellectual patterns don't spring
> directly out of DQ, they are connected to all the levels of static
> quality. Our intellectual patterns of Quality become distorted if they
> are not properly mediated through each level. That's the problem with
> SOM. Its insane. Its outside the mythos. So now the (amoral scientific)
> mothos is insane. This is where the issue of language comes into the
> picture. It exists at both levels, so it serves as a bridge and a good
> way to get at some distinctions between the levels. This approach also
> brings us back to the main topic, the emergence of the intellectual
> level and SOM.
>
For me, the mythos isn't society and logos intelligence. No, the mythos
is static intellect, what we believe in, and logos the working
intelligence. After a while, any logos becomes a mythos. David and
Bodvar's insistence on the reality of the levels (which I don't contest,
they have intellectual reality all right) are a mythification (no bad
connotations applied on my part) of Pirsig work. It is the Intellectual
static latching. As such, it is VERY valuable. They are overdoing it,
that's all.
The problem isn't a missing social level mediation, the social level has
nothing to say about Intellect except that it doesn't like it. No, the
problem is that SOM has absolutely no regards for the social level. It
despises it. It wants to turn it into its thing, its toy. The social
level has to be engineered to satisfy nothing but SOM intellectual
urges. Precision, technicity, effectiveness : those are the main words
of the SOM gone mad.
It goes like this :
The morals of the social level are irrelevent, static things of the
past, superstitions. A society has no other goals than the perpetuation
of itself, in ever-more efficient ways, which are provided by nothing
but SOM thoughts. Neil Postman has called this Scientism, and its result
a Technopoly. A Technopoly is the place where precision is a synonym for
Truth, where calculation is thought to be a adequate substitute for
judgement, where the value of a life is objectively defined by numbers
(wealth, IQ, you name it), where the aged are regarded as irrelevent,
where efficiency is the pre-eminent goal of humans relations, and where
technological ingenuity is thought as the pinacle of human achievement.
Does this remind you of something ?
What we have here isn't a rejection of the mythos, but its replacement
with a scientific one. A BAD scientific one. The death-force.
David obviously had a dim understanding of this : "Its outside the
mythos. So now the (amoral scientific) mythos is insane."
This logical contradiction, saying SOM is outside mythos, and then
saying it IS a mythos itself, isn't a contradiction but a "revealing
lapsus" (as the french say) of his "dim apprenhension of he knows not
what".
SOM is the contemporary mythos. And YES, it is insane. Not because it is
outside the mythos, but because its mythos disregard the fact it was
born of the precedent mythos. It has lost its roots.
And what is worse, it has lost all sense that its own moral code
(efficiency, objectivity, provable truth) is perhaps not adequate for
the social level, which must have its own set of morals.
The MOQ tells us that, at least.
I'm cutting your post here and I'll answer the rest of it tomorrow. Any
missing part of your initial post in this one or the next means I agreed
with you on it. So smile ! :)
In the meanwhile, be good.
Denis
PS : anyone wanting to criticize this is welcome, but before you start,
please read last month LS archive (Sept.). I'm not going to repeat what
I already said (ie. I won't answer you). Be dynamic, and offer new
critics, not old ones ! Sorry for the caveat, but this happens far too
often.
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