From: Allenbarrows9966@aol.com
Date: Fri Jun 03 2005 - 21:55:23 BST
bo: Som is the intellect every bit of it.
I have been reading Anthony McWatts book trying to find something about this
but there is nothing which helps. I began to think why it was left out of
Anthony McWatts book and it soon became clear that intellect is patterns of
value of which one is som only. So saying som actually is the intellect is
making a big mistake it seems to me. Here is what i reckon i mean:
However, a fundamental difference between Whitehead and Pirsig is that the
latter presumes (as observed in the hot stove account in Section 2.3.) that
the Quality
event occurs before subjects and objects are aware of each other: ‘The
Quality event
is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed
to be
the cause of the Quality!’ (Pirsig, 1995a, p.12) As noted in the previous
chapter,
that does not entail, as an idealist metaphysics would have it, that
intellectual patterns
create experience but rather experience creates intellect. In the MOQ,
experience is
categorised by intellect (as noted above, primarily into the four static
levels and a
referring term for Dynamic Quality). On the other hand, Whitehead (1933,
p.171)
still presupposes ‘that the subject-object relation is the fundamental
structural pattern
of experience’ and divides reality between eight categories of existence
(Whitehead,
1929, p.29) of which ‘prehension’ is only one category.
Anthony says here that experience creates intellect and that experience is
categorised by the intellect. This sounds like a chicken and egg problem until
you realise that category is another word for value and then it makes sense.
Intellect is patterns of value of which only one is som and there are others
all patterns of value.
According to Northrop (1947, pp.44-45), the
recognition of Dynamic Quality (i.e. ‘nothingness’) arises from the Buddhist
‘dialectic of negation’ which can be considered as the East Asian
equivalent of
Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’ though a more severe (i.e. even the ‘I’ isn’
t accepted as
certain) conceptual development from the immediately apprehended continuum
of
experience.
The Orientals of the Far East, who brand all knowledge as illusory except
that given as pure fact, or, to use their words, by intuition, arrived long
ago at
the… pure empiricist’s thesis that nothing but what we immediately apprehend
is genuine knowledge. Their dialectic of negation forced them, therefore, to
negate, i.e., reject, the common-sense man’s belief in the reality of a
persisting
determinate substantial self underlying the empirically given sensuous
qualities.
This happens in the realistic Hinayanistic School of Buddhism and corresponds
exactly to the conclusion of David Hume following the latter’s acceptance of
Bacon’s pure empiricism in the Modern West.
168
In other words, Hinayani (or ‘Theravada’)150 Buddhists realised that the
self
(corresponding to Descartes’ ‘I’) is an abstraction from Dynamic Quality
and, as
such, a conditioned entity.151 The significance of Pirsig’s employing the
phenomenological orientated Buddhist ontology rather than Descartes’
ontology is
that it allows the conceptualisation of reality beyond the mind-matter
format. As
such, mental substances and material substances can be perceived as
ontologically
identical i.e. as intellectual quality patterns and inorganic quality
patterns
respectively.
This ontological construction not only circumvents SOM’s mind-matter problem
but is supported by the scientific evidence (of cosmological evolution)
which,
indicates that mind (eventually) evolved from matter (despite appearing so
radically
different). Possibly, the mind-matter problem is partially reinforced by the
notion
that mind and matter are both types of ‘substance’. As noted in Chapter 2,
the notion
of substance as defined by Pirsig152 is redundant in the MOQ and replaced
with the
notion of ‘quality patterns’.
When i think about the begining of som it becomes clear that it is
biological and social. It is the leader who demands look at me so me is a social
pattern of value not an intellectual one. The Theravada looked at this and denied
the social importance and the greeks looked at this and said the social good
is an idea. That is not the same as as concluding that philosophers made som.
Only some philosophers made som but it did not have to be that way as the
Theravada prove. Now we are paying for the mistake and bo is adding to it by
saying som is intellect because if you follow it through anything that is not
som is not intellect. That means the Theravada are not intellects but something
else which is a irrisponsable thing to say for another culture and is
dangerous.
Thank you
Allen
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