From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Dec 07 2003 - 19:34:00 GMT
Steve,
Yeah, I probably sounded wishy-washy on a fifth level 'cuz I didn't talk about it. I did talk about it before, though, in a post called "A Brief Proposal for a 5th level" back in the beginning of August. I made a grab for Sam's proposal for a rehabiliatated 4th level and tacked it on top of the other four Pirsigian levels, though not before redefining them. Here's what I ended up with:
Inorganic level - non-replicating persistence
Biological level - replicating persistence
Social level - non-linguistic semiotic behavior
Intellectual level - linguistic semiotic behavior
Eudaimonic level - autonomous behavior
The gist is that rocks persist, but do not replicate, cells persist by replicating, tigers develop herd behavior, humans develop language, and rich North Atlantic democracies allow for private self-creation. I'm not quite all hip to the way Pirsig defines his levels, but if I remember correctly he wants lions to be on the biological level. I'm not sure where he puts the creation of language.
You put forth a new way in which to argue against the creation of a fifth level, and that's "self-containment". You argue that we can't have anything higher than an intellectual level because the intellectual level defines things, and if we define a new level, that means its contained in a lower level.
First off, I never understood what Pirsig was talking about there and never understood Squonk's repeated charges of "a lower level (or idea) containing a higher level (or idea)." The reason is that as I understand Pirsig's historical alignment of the levels, that they originate and stand up on the shoulders of the levels below them, each higher level uses the level below it to "define" itself. Cells use physical chemicals to achieve replication, herds use biological bodies to achieve social behavior, language uses social institutions to achieve ideas, and privacy uses beliefs and desires to achieve self-creation. I love Sam's idea of eudaimonia, or human flourishing, because it gives breath to the idea that individual self-creation is a whole new world of opportunity for humanity. The tie between this fifth level and the fourth-level-as-definition is simple: self-creation is the same thing as self-_definition_. The creation of language allowed humans to define things.
I suggest that it was a significant turn of events when we started to define ourselves, which was the seed crystal for the jump to letting every person define who they are for themselves. The seed crystal were the early attempts to define humanity, define humans writ large. We treated ourselves like a thing in the tradition of Platonic metaphysics: we hypostatized ourselves. Rorty deplores this kind of authoritarianism, some ivory tower punk defining how every person is. The jump was the creation of privacy, the idea that we have time to ourselves and that every person has the right to define themselves, create who they are.
That's why for me, I downplay any ontologizing of the levels, and play up their historical character. The adding or subtracting of levels is a matter of looking at the past and sorting out the events in a way that makes sense of the present and gives hope to the future. In my hands, Pirsig's Levels of Quality turn into my Narrative of Quality, a Hegelian march through history into the unknown future. From an ontological standpoint (the standpoint I take Pirsig to be in and the one I eschew), we'd never know if a higher level existed because of Pirsig's idea of discreteness. But from an historical standpoint (the standpoint Pirsig tacitly endorses, but I take on fully), to say that we can never know if we have created fifth level is to say that we can never know the future until we get there.
Neopragmatists like Rorty dissolve the old metaphysical distinctions and replace many of them with a distinction between the past and future. This is what it means to replace hope for knowledge (if you remember Andy and DMB talking about it). Instead of seeing the intellectual level, the level that defines things, as the tacit end point (tacit because of Dynamic Quality), we see hope for new levels, new Dynamic directions. I understand that Pirsig wants this too, my main point is that in excavating his philosophy I would say that he still seems to want _knowledge_, if it is construed as Platonic metaphysics, if definition is seen as the last stop for the march of levels. If we replace hope for knowledge, openness reappears, and the problems of self-containment and self-referencing (engendered by talk of discreteness) are dissolved.
Matt
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 Dec 07 2003 - 19:34:48 GMT