From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Nov 09 2003 - 19:22:34 GMT
Patrick, Platt and all:
Pirsig:
"They have their genesis in society the same way that society has its
genesis in biology. WIthout biology there is no society. Without society
there is no intellect since there would be no one to talk to anyone else and
thus no language to speak and thus nothing to contain the ideas."
DMB added:
In the same way that biology preceeds society, language preceeds intellect.
He makes the same point in several different ways. Maybe you rememeber where
he corrects Descartes. He re-phrases the famous quote as, "French culture
exists, therefore I think, therefore I am". (Or something like that)
Patrick replied:
I disagree with 'biology preceeds society, language preceeds intellect'. If
I were an advocate of the devil, I'd argue that even the first statement is
untrue: hasn't life evolved in a symbiosis? Even a single simple cell
couldn't survive with other cells around: so cells and a 'society'
consisting of chemical and other interactions between these cells were
created at the same
time. But that's just stretching words like 'society'. More fundamental is
my
disagreement with the 'language preceeds society'.
dmb says:
You're stretching the meaning of the word "society" unto meaninglessness. A
group of cells is simply not what Pirsig refers to when using the word
"social". Pirsig has specifically addressed this kind of mistake and insists
that a group of cells is biological, not social. Bo recently caught Platt
making the same mistake with intellect, where he pushes it back tens of
thousands of years. The same priciple applies there too.
Pirsig:
I think the same happens to the term, "intellectual," when one
extends it much before the Ancient Greeks.* If one extends
the term intellectual to include primitive cultures just because
they are thinking about things, why stop there? How about
chimpanzees? Don't they think? How about earthworms?
Don't they make conscious decisions? How about bacteria
responding to light and darkness? How about chemicals
responding to light and darkness? Our intellectual level is
broadening to a point where it is losing all its meaning.
Thanks, dmb
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