From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Feb 16 2003 - 19:58:33 GMT
Matt, Sam and all:
Matt said:
However, I still don't think retaining the title "metaphysics"
as what we are doing when figuring out how our assumptions all hang
together in the widest sense and calling these assumptions "metaphysical"
is better than not. I think "philosophy" is a better moniker for what we
are doing and "final vocabulary" a better moniker for what we are fiddling
with. I think this because, when looking at the history of philosophy,
most of the people who thought themselves to be actively doing metaphysics
thought of themselves as looking for an absolute ground zero. The attacks
on metaphysics have been attacks on this attempt to find a foundation. I
simply find it exceedingly more convienient to call it an attack on
metaphysics than an attack on something else.
DMB says:
OK. Let's look at the MOQ and ask ourselves about this problem, this quest
for a foundation, for absolute ground zero. Is there really such a thing in
the MOQ? Is Pirsig like the traditional metaphysicians in this respect?
I really don't think so, but I think the reason it may look that way has to
do with something you mentioned before; the perennial philosophy. (pp) As I
see it, Pirsig uses the pp not as some absolutist foundation, but insists
such things MUST be incorporated into any fully integral philosophy. His
incorporation of the pp is consistent with and part of the MOQ's insistence
that the social level is the source of all our intellectual descriptions,
that philosophical thought is only possible because of the culture, the
rituals and the language we've inherited as social beings. He insist that
the language and values of a culture is what provide the conceputal
categories with which we do philosophy and that these vary in time and
place. The MOQ also insists that our prespectives are bound up in the
language and the culture in which we are formed and in doing so Pirsig
addresses many of the concerns of the post moderns. But let me explain this
notion by a discussion of the pp. I hope you'll read this carefully. I hope
you'll read it twice. I hope you'll respond by adressing the features of the
MOQ itself and really address what Pirsig is saying specifically. For a
working idea of what the pp is, I'll turn to Ken Wilber who opens his
INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY like this. Emphasis is the author's....
"A truly integral psychology would embrace the enduring insights of
premodern, modern and postmodern sources. To begin with the premodern or
traditional sources, the easiest way to their wisdom is through what has
been called the perennial philosophy, or the common core of the world's
great spiritual traditions. The core of the perennial philosophy is the view
that reality is composed of various LEVELS OF EXISTENCE - levels of being
and knowing - ranging from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit. Each
senior dimension transcends but includes its juniors, so that this is a
conception of wholes within wholes within wholes indefinitely, reaching from
dirt to divinity."
DMB says:
Its interesting that, of all the features of the perennial philosophy,
Wilber should mention the levels of being and emphasize it with big block
letters. Its interesting that Pirsig paints reality as a progressive series
of levels too. Its a sure sign that he's using the pp and that the
theological or mythic notion of the great chain of being one of the aspects
of the mythos that can make the transition to the intellectual level pretty
much intact. But my point here is not really about that. Notice instead
Wilber's descripton of the way these levels relate to one another. The
senior or higher levels transcend BUT INCLUDE the junior dimensions. This
idea leads us to conclude that our modern 4th level scientific and
philosophical talk INCLUDES the junior social level within itself. Pirsig
says this same thing in lots of different ways.
As Pirsig says, much of social level talk is just a bunch of low grade
yelping about god, but like it or not, it is the parent of all our modern
scientific talk. The intellectual level includes but transcends all that low
grade yelping. That was, you may recall, Descartes mistake. He failed to
aknowledge his culture's role in his ability to think. Or perhaps you
remember where Pirsig asks, "how independent is the intellect from society?"
and then answers, "not all all". He says we shouldn't follow social values
blindly, but that we have to go back and re-ask what it was trying to do,
what it actually did well and preserve that. It is the mythos over logos
idea. As Sam and Wim and I and others have been discussing, its the idea
that ritual is the connecting link and the source of all our 4th level
musings.
I should add that this reclaimation of the mythos is part of a single effort
to fix what ails SOM. SOM solidifies, even absolutizes, the mistake begun
back in ancient Greece; the belief that intellect is independent from
society, born without parents. Pirsig's incorporation of the pp is part of
the fix, part of the effort to re-integrate them into a coherent whole. And
it seems very obvious, when you think about it, that we ought to do so. I
mean, talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater! How did anyone
ever think we could dispense with hundreds of thousands of years of social
evolution and replace it with mere reason? Its absurd. We are far more
complex than such sterile philosophy would admit. Its no accident that I
turn to psychology and mythology, to Wilber and Campbell, in order to get at
the nature of this connecting link either. These fields reveal that the
mythos in buried within our unconscious minds, that it is still very much
with us, shapes our perceptions, motivations and desires. Its become
impossible to ignore. We can't do without the mythos any more than we can do
without our bodies.
"In ancient times every social occasion was ritually structured and the
sense of depth was rendered through the maintenance of a religious tone.
Today, on the other hand, the religious tone is reserved for exceptional,
very special, "sacred" occasions. And yet even in the patterns of our
secular life, ritual survives. It can be recognized, for example, not only
in the decorum of courts and regulations of military life, but also in the
manners of people sitting down to table together. All life is structure."
Campbell
"...anthropological studies of contemporary primitive tribes suggest that
stone age people were probably bound by ritual all day long. There's a
ritual for washing, for putting up a house, for hunting, for eating and so
on - so much so that the division between 'ritual' and 'knowledge' becomes
indistinct. In cultures without books ritual seems to be a public library
for teaching the young and preserving common values and information. These
rituals may be the connecting link between the social and intellectual
levels of evolution." Pirsig
Here's a good idea about this "connectting link from Campbell...
"The first requirement of any society is that its adult membership should
realize and represent the fact that it is they who constitute its life and
being. And the first function of the rites of puberty, accordingly, must be
to establish in the individual a system of sentiments that will be
appropriate to the society in which he is to live, and on which that society
itself must depend for its existence. In the modern Western world, moreover,
there is an additional complication; for we ask of the adult something still
more than that he should accept without personal ciriticism and judgment the
habits and inherited customs of his local social group. We ask and we are
expecting, rather, that he should develop what Sigmund Freud has called his
'reality function'; that faculty of the independently observant, freely
thinking individual who can evalutate without preconception the
possibilities of his enviroment and of himself within it, criticizing and
creating, not simply reproducing inherited patterns of thought and action,
but becoming himself an innovating center, an active, creative center of the
life process. Our ideal for a society, in other words, is not that it should
be a perfectly static organization, founded in the age of the ancestors and
to remain unchanging through all time. It is rather of a process moving
toward a fulfillment of as yet unrealized possibilities; and in this living
process each is to be an initiating yet cooperating center." Campbell
DMB wraps it up:
As it must be with a topic so large, much has been left unsaid. I think its
important to see that this connecting link is what is missing from SOM
thinking. Its important to see why Pirsig think we MUST make that
connection, and how this connection also helps us see the DISTINCTION
between the social and intellectual levels. But my point is simply that
Pirsig is incorporating the perennial philosophy for good reasons, and that
those reasons are quite apart form any attempt to find the absolute ground
zero foundation.
Thanks for your time,
DMB
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