From: Paul Turner (pauljturner@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Mon Jun 30 2003 - 11:06:54 BST
Hi David
> dmb says:
> I wish I had lots more time for this. It seems to me
> that that it takes some
> outside reading and some unconventional notions to
> really get a handle on
> this stuff. People who know Barfield or Maslow tend
> to grasp it right away.
I think Pirsig is best understood by reading Pirsig.
However, I have studied Barfield's 'Saving the
Appearances' and it is a compelling thesis. I don't
recall him talking about nested spheres including and
transcending each other. He does have a lot to say on
the history of human thought which has no quarrel with
the MOQ. Everything he talks about in terms of thought
is at home in Pirsig's intellectual level. Barfield's
'representation' has much in common with Pirsig's use
of 'symbol'.
Each set of 'representations' is maintained and passed
on to each generation by a particular tribe or society
and are referred to by Barfield as 'collective
representations'.
Also, Barfield's discussion of original participation
describes thinking which does not invoke the
subject-object divide. In what he terms 'active
participation' the individual feels HE IS the totem,
there is no distinction of self in his thought. He
also describes how rites and ceremony brings about a
collective mental state amongst a tribe.
I think that ritual is the key between the 3rd and 4th
levels, and that ritual came first from human nature
(biological quality), prior to thinking of any kind.
We think because of the rituals, we didn't create the
rituals with thought.
> I can testify. As a Campbell fan, I was happy to
> take Pirsig's advice and
> read the MASKS OF GOD. There are lots of ways to
> explore the distinction
> between the mythos and the logos, the social and
> intellectual levels. Take
> yer pick.
Here you have assumed that the mythos and logos equate
to social and intellectual. Pirsig never says this. He
does say that the mythos-over-logos argument agrees
with the intellectual-out-of-social assertion made by
the MOQ but I think that can be easily understood
without making the assumption you have made as I have
explained in recent posts.
He also talks about 'leaving the mythos' being the
definition of insanity. If the social level is the
mythos then the intellectual level is the emergence of
insanity. I maintain that the western mythos prior to
Greek philosophy is just a lower stage in the
evolution of the intellectual level just as e.g. apes
are a lower stage in the evolution of humans at the
biological level, and just as e.g. rituals are a lower
stage in the evolution of church.
The MOQ intellectual level is broad enough to hold all
'species' of intellectual patterns of value -
mythical, logical, oriental, occidental and so on. The
mind is evolving. Understanding is evolving in diverse
and Dynamic ways, why take one strand and deny the
rest?
The 'species' of intellectual patterns of value we
call 'subject-object' is just that, a species.
'Static-Dynamic' is another species of intellectual
quality.
> With that in mind, I have no trouble at all with the
> idea that the senior
> levels both include and transcend the junior ones.
> Its no problem for the
> levels to be BOTH nested and discrete. Think of the
> way inorganic atoms and
> such are included in but distinctly different than
> organic tissue. You can't
> have intellect without social level thinking any
> more than you have have
> bones without atoms. Nested and discrete. No
> problem.
There is no need need to give 'social thinking' its
own level, I don't see what it adds to the quality of
the explanation offered by the MOQ. The inorganic
level describes everything from quarks to the observed
universe of matter. The biological level describes
everything from a virus to a human being. The social
level describes everything from a primitive ritual to
the United Nations.
The intellectual level describes everything from the
first thought to this argument about what the
intellect is.
> Paul, its not that "one can write myths without a
> mind", its that one can
> write a myth without the intellect.
In the MOQ, the intellect is the mind.
I can see from
> your posts that you have
> a radically different sense of the mythos/logos
> distinction
Radically different to whose sense?
> But briefly, I'd simply assert that
> for tens of thousands
> of years humans have lived in organized societies,
> told stories, held
> beliefs and all kinds of things that we'd consider
> "intellectual" in some
> vague sense of the word.
The vagueness comes in when we divide thinking up
based on some Greek books.
But I think these cognitive
> skills, these obvious
> signs of intelligence are not what Pirsig is talking
> about in describing the
> intellectual level.
I do, he never uses the term 'social thinking'.
I mean, this is though to talk
> about. We should even be
> more careful, i suppose, in tossing out words like
> "think" "mind" and
> "intellect" without saying exactly what we mean. It
> seems the whole debate
> is about making a distinction bewteen two
> "QUALITATIVELY" and distinctly
> different KINDS of thinking, two seperate forms
> mind.
I have no quarrel with talking about different kinds
of thinking, my quarrel is that if you start assigning
them to different evolutionary levels you undermine
the clarity of the MOQ. Should we create new levels
for oriental society and western society, or for
aborigine and English immigrant societies in
Australia, they are qualitatively different aren't
they?
cheers
Paul
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