From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Sep 24 2004 - 22:17:29 BST
Joe,
[Joe said:] I would like to try to apply the use of intellect to the essay on moq.org written by Matt Kundert. IMO Matt questions Pirsig’s motivations in making a distinction between Philosophy and Philosophology. If I understand you correctly you could say that the social level has an intellectual part which produces philosophology which Matt shows to be quite creative. The intellectual part of the intellectual level creates philosophy which is creative in a different way.
{Scott:] I don't think this works, since philosophology is an intellectual activity, that is, it is a fourth-level human examining the history of philosophy, and thinking about it. (Though I do agree with Matt that it can be creative.) The real question to be answered is how the Axial Age came about (the time around 500 BC when the Greeks, Indians, and others started philosophizing). The best discussion of this I know of can be found in Owen Barfield's "Saving the Appearances". What he points out, though, is that the philosophy changes as consciousness changes. Hence what is needed (and he supplies) is a history of consciousness, rather than a history of ideas, which latter is what philosophology studies. (He also addresses the development of SOM about 400 years ago).
[Joe said:] Applying that insight more rigorously, evolution proceeds from the intellectual part of the inorganic level to the organic. From the intellectual organic to the social, and from the intellectual social to the intellectual, and from the intellectual intellectual to bliss or created higher-awareness. Awareness is present in all levels and is modified mystically which is why I prefer mysticphysics to metaphysics.
{Scott:] Yes. On the last step (from the intellectual intellectual), some writers have used two different words to refer to our normal intellect on the one hand and higher-awareness intellect on the other. Franklin Merrell-Wolff calls the former relative consciousness and the latter absolute consciousness, Nicholas of Cusa uses 'ratio' and 'intellectus' respectively, and Coleridge uses 'understanding' and 'reason' respectively. I tend to use intellect and Intellect. In all cases, the latter is that which is Intellect at all levels, driving the evolutionary process. I think I would prefer something like "creative thinking" to both mysticphysics and metaphysics, since in this scheme, the physical (in its original sense from the Greek physis, i.e., the natural, what MOQ calls inorganic and biological) is just another form of Intellectual manifestation.
[Joe said:] The urge to logic is a moral consideration, the true is moral and the false is immoral. I wonder how Mt.Everest views the hydrogen bomb?
[Scott:] I'm not sure you expected an answer, but let me toss in my two cents. I don't think Mt. Everest as we know it feels anything, for two reasons. One is that a mountain, or a rock, is not an organism, the way an individual molecule might be. That is, if you cut a rock in half, you get two smaller rocks, but if you cut a molecule up, you will have two different molecules. The other reason is that all we know of a mountain is its physical appearance. There are intellectual/spiritual/moral depths behind it that need to be considered to ask about feeling, and without "higher-awareness", as you call it, we just don't know. It would be like trying to guess what someone feels if all we have is what they have written, but we don't know the language they wrote in.
[Joe said:] Everything is composed of three forces. Evolution embodies the three forces. And now I am into the soup.
{Scott:] What three are you referring to? Coleridge used the phrase "Two forces of one Power", where the two forces are "free expansion" and "constricting form", which of course sounds a lot like DQ and SQ. His Power he usually called Reason, or Logos.
- Scott
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