From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Jun 01 2003 - 19:26:30 BST
Sam and all:
dmb was asleep at the wheel:
: By the way, my use of the phrase "mere abstraction" is not intended to
: insult the power of abstraction but to dispell the notion that
intellectual
: values, properly understood, are much more than high cognitive function,
: that ethics, values, morals, aesthetics and all kinds of warm, fuzzy,
human
: things are included there too. Its a denial of Sam's Spockish vision of
the
: 4th level.
Sam saved him from driving off a cliff:
I'm not sure I follow the sense of what you are saying here - the last
sentence seems to contradict
the first. (A typo 'affirm' rather than 'dispell'?).
dmb says:
Thanks. That's right. I'm saying that Pirsig's 4th level is not Spockish. I
should have said "assert" where I said "dispell".
Sam continued:
But if you *are* saying that the fourth level includes "ethics, values,
morals, aesthetics and all
kinds of warm, fuzzy, human things" - ie all the things I think of as
'eudaimonic' - then our
disagreements are much less than I thought.
dmb says:
That's right. We only disagree about the nature of Pirsig's 4th level. You
want to de-Spockify it and I'm saying that this is misguided because Pirsig
has already done that. Its one of his main points in both ZMM and LILA. From
the road side motorcycle repair shops of middle America and Ponciare's
coffeehouse to the conference of physicists at Copenhagen, Pirsig casts even
cold steele, advanced mathematics and the hard sciences as playgrounds for
artists. And then there's the MOQ itself, which insists already that "amoral
scientific materialism" be replaced. The human qualities that Wilber
describes as features of the higher levels, I think, is quite consistent
with what Pirsig is saying too. (I posted 8 stages yesterday.) There you'll
notice that the Spockish kind of intellect is #5, the very first stage after
the social level has been transcended. The sterotype is not completely
without foundation, but it only applies to "freshmen" intellectuals and,
more to the point, does not reflect the MOQ's 4th level accurately. It more
precisely describes SOM, Pirsig's great white whale.
Sam continued:
Which would be nice. We can then spend time arguing over whether 'intellect'
is the best word to
describe all those things, as opposed to 'eudaimonic' or something else. I
can't get away from the
suspicion that you *don't* think that though. Particularly as I'm not sure
that the first three of
those things listed actually are fourth level - they seem like the third
level to me.
dmb says:
The first three are social level values? You mean ethics, values and morals?
The idea that these are not invited to the intellectual party is exactly
Pirsig's criticism of SOM and he says instead that they exist at every level
of reality. Everything. Even the chair and even the bum of the philosopher
who sits upon it.
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 : Sun Jun 01 2003 - 19:25:58 BST