From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Fri Jan 30 2004 - 22:23:15 GMT
Steve,
Steve said:
Perhaps "unpatterned awareness" would make a good substitute for "pre-intellectual awareness," otherwise it would seem that all patterns are intellectual by equating dynamic/static with pre-intellectual/intellectual. What do you think?
Matt:
I think this is a good interpretational question to ask. Interpreting Pirsig's evolving philosophy, the shift in terminology between ZMM and Lila and beyond are the kinds of things that are fuzzy and good to discuss.
I think you are moreorless right, Steve, that DQ as a whole should be thought of as "unpatterned awareness," but I have a couple of caveats.
Caveat 1) While DQ as a whole should be thought of as unpatterned awareness, there is still a particular kind of unpatterned awareness, a particular kind of DQ, that pre-intellectual awareness refers to, that being the kind of awareness humans, as conglomerates of four levels of static patterns, can have that other conglomerates (three or less level conglomerates) cannot have. This, of course, means that not all DQ is made equal, which is what I think we should say when we cut a difference between the DQ striven for with sex and with ideas.
Caveat 2) I think Pirsig does want to say in one sense that "all patterns are intellectual." I'm thinking of his LC note 97 in which he says, "It is important for an understanding of the MOQ to see that although 'common sense' dictates that inorganic nature came first, actually 'common sense' which is A SET OF IDEAS, has to come first. This 'common sense' is arrived at through a web of SOCIALLY APPROVED EVALUATIONS of various alternatives. The key term here is 'evaluation', i.e. quality decisions. The fundamental reality is not the common sense or the objects and laws approved of by common sense but the approval itself and the quality that leads to it." I think Pirsig is here saying that all of our knowledge is intellectual patterns. That being so, the MoQ and its talk of "patterns" is an intellectual pattern. This makes, in one sense, all patterns intellectual. However, in another sense, all patterns aren't intellectual as Pirsig notes when he goes on to talk about the
fundamental reality in the last line.
Matt
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