From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Sep 05 2004 - 20:41:53 BST
Bill Hicks said, "The responsibility of the intellectual is to expose lies".
Howdy MOQers:
Thanks for Hicks quote, Ant. I whole-heartedly agree with it and think that
Pirsig would too. This view gets at what I've been trying to say with
respect to news analysis, criticisms of Bush's foreign policies, and other
problems in everyday reality. We're not talking about mysticism or the
ultimate truth, but in terms of static reality, the intellect is an
indispensible moral force and a vast improvement over the alternatives,
despite its flaws. I'd like to try to make a case for that. To that end, I'd
like to share some relevant passages from Ken Wilber's "SEX, ECOLOGY,
SPIRITUALITY: The Spirit of Evolution". It may help you, dear reader, to
know that, in Pirsigian terms, Wilber is talking about the emergence of
intellectual level perspectives and their advantages over the views based in
the social level of values. I've used CAPITOL letters where Wilber uses
italics....
"Cognitive psychologists and anthropologists tend to use RATIONALITY to mean
'formal operational cognition', which simply means the capacity not just to
think, but to think about thinking and thus 'operate upon' thinking. Since
you can operate upon or REFLECT UPON your own thought processes, you are to
some degree free of them; you can to some degree TRANSCEND them; you can
take PERSPECTIVES different from your own; you can entertain HYPOTHETICAL
possibilities; and you can become highly INTROSPECTIVE. As we will see in
the next chapter, all of these come into existence with the emergence of
formal operational cognition, or 'rationality'."
"And finally, because we can reflect on our own thought processes, and thus
to some degree remove ourselves from them, we become capable of imagining
all sorts of other POSSILILITIES; we become DREAMERS in the true sense of
the word. Other perspectives, other beliefs, other horizons open before the
mind's eye, and the soul can take flight in the worlds of the not-yet-seen.
Rationality is the great doorway to the invisible, through which, and then
beyond which, lie so many secrets not given to the senses or to conventions
(which is why all true mysticism is transrational and never anti-rational;
'right thought' always precedes 'right meditation'). Thus the idea that
rationality is somehow 'dry and abstract', or that it has 'no feelings', is
way off the mark. Rationality creates a deeper SPACE of possibilities
through which deeper and wider feelings can run, feelings not bound to one's
isolated desires or the narrow confines of offical conventional reality."
"And this is why rationality or reasonableness tends to be UNIVERSAL in
character, and is highly integrative. If my reasons are going to be valid, I
want to know that they make sense, or that they hold true, not just for me
or my tribe or my isolated culture (however important those might also be).
If science, for example, is going to be true, then we are not going to have
a Hindu chemistry that is different from a German chemistry that is
different from a Greek chemistry. There is simply chemistry, and its truth
is not forced or coerced or ideologically imposed, but is freely open to any
who wish to look into its reasons. This doesn't mean that we can't have
cultural differences that make each society unique and special; it means
that only rationality will allow these differences to exist side by side
seeing them as different perspectives in a more universal space, something
that cultural differences, left to their own conventional or sociocentric or
ethnocentric devies, could never do. It is only rationality, in other words,
that allows the beginning emergence of a truly global or planetary network,
which, freed from any particular society, can allow all societies their own
unique and special place."
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