From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Dec 11 2003 - 22:11:26 GMT
Steve,
Steve said:
I think that your public/private is an interesting analytical cut but I don't think it can square with the MOQ levels. I thought of this section of Lila...
...
To me this suggests that the way Pirsig defines the first four levels, any fifth level would be embedded in a system that can't escape the lower four levels. In other words, there is no possibility for the sort of privacy that defines your (Sam's) idea for a fifth level. Just as Descartes' intellectual patterns rely on his 17th century French social patterns, Eudaimonic patterns (if any) must rely on intellectual patterns (as social patterns can't exist without biological ones and so on). The only aloneness that is consistent with Pirsig's MOQ is what Buddhists might call Emptiness. Not a new set of static patterns but the complete absence of static patterns.
Matt:
First, in my explication of eudaimonia, I'm not as concerned with it squaring with Pirsig because its an explication of my own vision, not Pirsig's. That being said, though, I'm not so sure that what you quoted from Lila and your interpretation of it is critical of eudaimonia. I absolutely think that the fifth level is embedded in the other four. Part of my last few posts have been on how each level steps on the shoulders of the last. So I'm not sure where you see the problem with privacy being an extension. When I call the eudaimonic level the private level and the intellectual level the public level, the extension I'm thinking of is the type argued for by the early social contract thinkers, like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. They argued that the type of freedom we want occurs _after_ we've entered into a social agreement with other people. They said that this may look like an inhibition on our freedom, having to agree with others on rules and restrictions, but the fr
eedom gained on the other side is well worth it.
Steve said:
The sort of aloneness required would be mystical, but then it isn't *patterned* experience so it can't be a fifth *static* level.
Matt:
Oh, I don't know. I must say though, I enjoy fuzzing up all the hard and fast distinctions, between levels, between static and Dynamic. Think of it this way: the higher and higher you go in the levels, the less static each level is right? Well, if we have a fifth level, its going to look even less static, which means it'll be harder and harder to tell from Dynamic Quality. And I'm not so sure we should have it any other way, being as there's no certain way of differentiating Dynamic Quality from degeneracy.
Matt
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