From: Elizaphanian (elizaphanian@tiscali.co.uk)
Date: Sun Feb 23 2003 - 12:03:24 GMT
Hi Wim, David,
This thread is broadening out, but that's OK. I don't think it requires
renaming just yet, because I'm hopeful that we will get back to ritual.
DMB described his conception of the distinction between the third and the
fourth level:
>>
The best way to get at it, I guess, is to make it concrete and personal.
Remember the Campbell quote? The social level person is a fully functioning
and responsible member of their community. While the modern person is expect
to be that AND become a critical thinker and a creative agent as well. This
is something like a shift from social to intellectual values. Its a shift
that happens to many of us in college when, perhaps, we start to become
truly rational creatures. This is when, just as in ancient Greece, we begin
to question the religious, patriotic and familial sentiments that were
instilled in us in youth. (Wilber points out how unfortunate it is that so
few in our culture ever progress beyond rationality.) Hopefully, the
expansion of consciousness and awareness leads to more than just a brief
period of rebellion, spiked purple hair and membership in a punk rock band.
Hopefully, it will lead to a life of the mind, a love affair with books and
ideas and an ever expanding level of awareness. The willingness and ability
to critically examine the traditions and institutions of one's own culture
need not necessarily lead to radical politics or militant atheism, but
wouldn't be afraid of them either. An intellectual is not the same as a
contrarian or a revolutionary, but they drink at the same pub, so to speak.
>>
Wim wrote:
>>
It's a pity that Pirsig in chapter 12 only compared his
hardware-software-novel analogy only with 'trying to explain social moral
patterns in terms of inorganic chemistry patterns' and not with the
relation -over two 'machine level interfaces'- between intellectual patterns
of value and biological patterns of value. He didn't even mention what is
the 'machine level interface' between biological and social patterns of
value. So we have to choose for ourselves. My choice (for the interface
between social and intellectual patterns of values) is both rituals and
symbolic language (e.g. the letters that are forming this text).
>>
I would quibble with this, but in a context of broad agreement. The quibble
relates to the substance behind being "a critical thinker and a creative
agent". I think those things are the result of emotional maturity and
insight, not 'intellect' as defined by Pirsig or convention. I think the
openness to DQ, characteristic of the fourth level, is dependent on a
particular mode of personal character, not on the manipulation of symbols. I
see language as fundamentally social level.
With regard to ritual, I think I am coming to the view that it is not a
particularly fruitful line of enquiry into the MoQ. For most ritual seems to
be built around the preservation of the social order (historic DQ
innovations, static latched), whereas religious rituals are - according to
Pirsig - designed to make socially pattern dominated people aware of DQ. Our
understanding of how to place ritual in the MoQ seems therefore to be
dependent on how we view ritual in general - and that was what I was trying
to get away from. Ho hum.
Sam
"A good objection helps one forward, a shallow objection, even if it is
valid, is wearisome." Wittgenstein
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