From: Paul Turner (paul@turnerbc.co.uk)
Date: Mon Jul 19 2004 - 15:27:33 BST
Hi Platt
Platt said:
Perhaps our debate is a reflection of this "fight," with you championing
the social patterns in the name of the public good and I holding out for
the freedom of the individual to succeed or fail on his own...
Paul:
Intellectual freedom is simply the freedom to hold and voice ideas. At
that level, an intellectual pattern succeeds or fails in terms of its
clarity and precision as a description, explanation or prediction of
experience.
Also, I think the personal or individual success (or failure) that you
"hold out for" also occurs at other levels, so cannot be a defining part
of the intellectual level. In my experience, the most dominant measure
of personal success is wealth - a social level phenomena.
Platt said:
....using such intellectual powers as he is able to muster to make
decisions for himself and enjoy or suffer the consequences, whatever
they may be.
Paul:
But the problem occurs when it is others who suffer the consequences...
Anyway, in my understanding of the MOQ, subordinating intellectual
patterns to a primarily social level goal of individual success is
immoral. Pirsig contemplates this in LILA:
"He was really at the top of the world now, he supposed...at the
opposite end of some kind of incredible social spectrum from where he
had been twenty years ago, bouncing through South Chicago in that
hard-sprung police truck on the way to the insane asylum.
Was it any better now?
He honestly didn't know. He remembered two things about that crazy ride:
the first was that cop who grinned at him all the way, meaning, "We're
going to fix you good, boy" - as if the cop really enjoyed it. The
second was the crazy understanding that he was in two worlds at the same
time, and in one world [Paul: social] he was at the rock bottom of the
whole human heap and in the other world [Paul: intellectual] he was at
the absolute top. How could you make any sense out of that? What could
you do? The cop didn't matter, but what about this last?
Now here it was all upside down again. Now he was at some kind of top of
that first world, but where was he in the second? At the bottom? He
couldn't say. He had the feeling that if he sold the film rights big
things were going to happen in the first world, but he was going to take
a long slide to somewhere in the second." [LILA Ch.20]
(Of course, this doesn't mean that material success will never follow
high quality intellectual patterns, Robert Pirsig actually being a good
example of where this has happened.)
I think your equation of "the individual" with the intellectual level
completely changes the MOQ's ontological framework, and consequently its
moral framework. What I'm unclear about, based on recent posts, is
whether you make the equation because you believe it provides a better
explanation of experience or because it supports your political beliefs.
Cheers
Paul
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