From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Oct 04 2004 - 17:11:32 BST
Mel,
(I think I am responding to this out of order. Apologies if this confuses
anything.)
> > [Scott prev:] The issue is whether Intellect is there in inorganic and
> > biological levels. I don't understand "Intellect is evolutionary a
> process"
> > with respect to this question. Also, I would think that to call Quality
an
> > attribute is non-MOQ. What is it an attribute of?
>
> mel:
> Think of quality as an attribute of being
> As I understand MoQ, there is no intellect
> in the physical or biological, but rather
> the physical and biological are in the
> intellect or maybe more correctly they
> are foundations for intellect.
[Scott:] I don't think that Pirsig would approve of saying that Quality is
an attribute of being. I think he would say that being is a product of
Quality. The rest of what you say is, I believe, MOQ's position (but not
mine).
> > [Scott prev:] There is no value unless there is an awareness of better
and
> > worse. Such an awareness requires comparisons. It need not show itself
in
> > S/O form, but that's about the only way we know to think about it. There
> is
> > no such awareness in a purely mechanical universe, for example, so we
> > reject that there is a purely mechanical universe. So if value is
> > omnipresent, then there is omnipresent an appreciation of value. In our
> > experience, that appreciation shows in the various ways that we say that
> > things are meaningful. All those ways involve the relation of a thing or
> > event to a pattern. This is what Peirce calls a sign-event, the 3-way
> > interaction of thing/event, pattern, and relating. This, it seems to me,
> is
> > a more productive way to address Quality than the MOQ's.
>
> mel:
> There is a lot of assumption in this bit
> of real estate. The long response I deleted
> may be best replaced with a question.
>
> What do you see as the relation between
> Quality and Value?
> (sorry if I missed it earlier...)
[Scott:] Like Pirsig, I use the terms interchangeably, subject to
syntactical requirements.
> > [Scott prev] I am trying to treat Intellect as neither subjective nor
> objective,
> > but as ontologically prior to both. What past flavored formalism are you
> > referring to?
>
> mel:
> Your treatment of Intellect is outside of
> MoQ as Pirsig related it, at least as I read
> his work and I may be wrong...
[Scott:] You are correct, my treatment of intellect is outside of MOQ. I
have tried to be clear about that.
> What I should ask is, why you are considering
> Intellect a pre-existing condition or attribute?
> This is intriguing.
[Scott:] Because I consider intellect to be irreducible, that is, it is not
something that can be developed from a universe that did not contain it.
Instead, I agree with those pre-SOM philosophies that regarded human
intellect as a degraded and limited form of divine intellect, which latter
is what drives the evolutionary process. (There are, to be sure, huge
adjustments that need to be made to the pre-SOM philosophies, not least of
which is to include evolution, but also to avoid an overly-theistic
picture.)
This does not conflict with the MOQ view that there is a fourth level of
SQ, though it certainly describes it differently.
> > [Scott prev:] Correct. I am disagreeing with Pirsig's sense of
Intellect.
>
> mel:
> Is it specifically how he uses the term?
Yes.
> If so, is there another term for what he describes?
[Scott:] I don't think so. Other philosophers have distinguished
'intellect' from 'reason', but not consistently (that is, one philosopher
will elevate 'intellect', while another will elevate 'reason'.) Since we
tend to use them interchangeably, one would need to put considerable effort
into making the terminology clear. That can be done in an essay, but is
difficult if not impossible in a discussion forum. Hence I resort to
Intellect vs. intellect, or divine vs. human intellect.
> Otherwise, is it fatal to what you view as his
> formulation of MoQ or
> the notion of MoQ vis other schools of thought?
[Scott:] My view is that his restriction of the word 'intellect' results in
an inadequate metaphysics. It has no vocabulary for investigating what is
most interesting about intellect, and therefore, about the cosmos.
> > > mel:
> > > Apprehension in Being is not the same as the
> > > discussion of an experience in the past. To rely on the
> > > portion of intellect trapped in the past, in language, is
> > > to remain at a remove from Apprehension in Being...
> >
> > [Scott prev:] Not if language (or Language) is the Ground of Being.
Nature is
> > (speaking metaphorically) God's speech. Our speech is a response.
>
> mel:
> Language is not the ground of being.
> Mature is certainly a grand process of effect and
> speech is one of our responses, but being
> precedes speech.
Sez you :-) (I assume you meant "Nature"). I don't have the energy right
now to fully back up my claim that language precedes being, but it would
involve pointing out that 'being' is in polar relation to 'becoming', as
well as to 'non-being', that this polarity is "what makes the world go
'round", and is to be found in the fundamental workings of language and
intellect. One might hypothesize a One of which language and intellect are
the first emanation, but I think it is better to see the One and
language/intellect as itself in a polar relation.
> > > mel prev:
> > > Mysticism is not a needed ingredient and adds nothing.
> >
> > [Scott prev:] It is data that a metaphysics must be adequate to.
>
> mel:
> I understand that systems are always
> meta-systemic in their degrees of
> freedom or analytical dimension, but
> I am not sure if this is where you are pointing.
> Could you expand?
[Scott:] Mystics have said many remarkable things down through the ages. A
metaphysics needs to evaluate what they have said. A materialist
metaphysics will claim that all that they have said can be chalked up to
delusion and/or fraud. A non-materialist metaphysics, such as the MOQ or
what I am putting forth, has the more difficult task of attempting to
separate the wheat from the chaff in what they have said.
> mel:
> Anything not fully surrounded by language,
> not fully static, largely escapes the grasp of
> Aristotelian logic. Predicate calculus fails at
> the edge of specific definition or at a post-
> binary condition.
[Scott:] True. That is why I have been exploring what Nishida Kitaro calls
the logic of contradictory identity, which I believe is the same as what
Coleridge calls polarity. It takes seriously such formulations as "the self
exists by negating itself".
> > [Scott prev:]> But as soon as one has form one has
> > > > value and intellect. To put it in mythical terms, all reality is
> created
> > > by
> > > > God's conceptualizing. Hence the error of the "go-beyond-intellect"
> > school
> > > > is to treat intellect as just being about reflecting on what exists.
> It
> > is
> > > > also the source of what exists.
> > >
> > > mel prev:
> > > This is an interesting weaving of post hoc ergo propter hoc and
> > > an equivocation of intellect into something preceding intellect
> >
> > [Scott] On the equivocation, only if one defines intellect the way SOM
and
> > the MOQ do. I don't see how the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy
applies,
> > since I am not talking about causation.
>
> mel:
> As I read your statement you place intellect
> as the source of existence, being, and yet
> the term "intellect" as a process in mind
> is post social/biological/physical for the
> MoQ, as for Buddhism and other meta" "
[Scott:] This is simply resolved by considering human intellect as the
occasion of Intellect incarnating itself -- in an impure and limited form,
to be sure.
>
> Maybe it is more emergent or eruptive than
> causal, but to place intellect on both ends
> has the flavor of p.h.e.p.h.
[Scott:] I think you misunderstand p.h.e.p.h. It is the fallacy of "Since A
comes after B, then A is caused by B". I think what you are complaining
about is called circular reasoning, but see above for that.
> mel:
> I agree that spurning the intellect is a mistake, but
> so is driving purely into intellect. Coherence seemed
> to offer an "anchor" or a vector...
>
> It seems worth exploring.
[Scott:] What is Coherence without intellect? Indeed, are they, if not the
same, mutually dependent?
> > [Scott prev:] I propose that one learn to see limits as what intellect
creates,
> > that reality is created by setting limits.
>
> mel:
> Relying on intellect to see the limits of intellect
> is not going to work from a system viewpoint
> because there is no access to the additional
> degree of freedom or analytical dimansion.
> The context must be meta-intellectual, as it were.
> Hence the bippity-boppity-boo of Zen.
When you say "relying on intellect to see the limits of intellect", you are
continuing a SOM view of intellect. That view is that intellect is all
about understanding systems. The non-SOM view that I am espousing is that,
while we do apply intellect to understand systems, in its greater role --
in humans as well as divinely -- it creates systems, which is to say, it
creates realities. Hence it is not limited by any one system. When we
engage in understanding a system, we are (if we understand truly)
revisiting the acts of intellect that created it in the first place.
> mel:
> It would seem critique rather than criticism is a
> better approach. (In the traditional sense...)
>
> The critique adds an expansive rigor in
> the form of extension and complement.
>
> Criticism acts to break and to be properly
> used, if you want to engage as a philosophy
> in the formal sense, it must follow the rigor of
> expansion otherwise it is a waste of time.
>
> Pirsig himself has conveyed that he has
> only just started.
>
> So, the stages of a formal philosophical
> development:
> 1)Original Position
> 2)Sympathetic Hearing
> 3)Expansion / Synthesis
> 4)Critique
> 5)Comparison
> 6)Criticism
> 7)Debate
>
> (I may be missing a step or two,
> this is from memory and 20-odd
> years past...)
>
> ...place us at about 2 at this point.
> Don't jump to 6 unless you like shooting
> fish in a barrel... ;-)
> ------------
> Sorry if it sounds bombastic and pedantic
> 'twas not meant to drool Ivory tower dust
> on this thread...
[Scott:] Well, I started out in this forum (about three years ago)
critiquing and not criticizing. I found (in part from reflecting on the
reactions I got to my critiquing) that the MOQ cannot expand to incorporate
what I view as inadequacies, without revisiting and altering its
fundamentals. Put bluntly, the MOQ is still captured by SOM (see above on
its view of intellect. Another indication is Pirsig's espousal of
empiricism, basically a SOM-inspired methodology). Until this is rooted
out, there is no scope for expansion. Hence the criticism.
- Scott
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Oct 04 2004 - 17:44:58 BST