Greetings, Bo --
Glad to see you back in the fray. Although we had some brief discussions concerning the significance of subjectivity a year ago, you took a hiatus from this forum before I had an opportunity to fully explore your concept that the intellectual level is SOM. I recently visited the MOQ archives to re-read your SOL essay. As you probably know, I have a problem with the "levels" ontology, and the assignment of "intellect", "intelligence", "subject", and "mind" to different levels of Quality (value) makes no sense to me. If you can make allowances for this departure from "standard MoQ procedure", I'd like to pose this line of thinking on you and get your reaction, Since ontology is the study of relational being, it deals with physical existence which, in my view, is always a subject/object (SOM) relationship. Therefore, for me, conscious sensibility (awareness) is the subjective "existent", and the intellect or mind is the cognizant faculty of the proprietary subject. That leaves the "objects" of awareness and the "value" they hold for us unaccounted for, except as they are defined by the laws of cause-and-effect and biological evolution. However we choose to describe objective phenomena, the relational world is pluralistic, and its primary characteristic is Difference. Thus, all knowledge, intelligence, logic, and conceptualization is differentiated awareness, and the proprietary self (which is the locus of awareness) is also differentiated from every other self. In your essay, you include a diagram showing both a "romantic" and a "classic" split of Quality, purportedly based on Pirsig's metaphysical construction, and you criticize the author for positing "intellect" as a separate kind of Quality. Here's what you wrote: > P. toyed with a Quality-based metaphysics to replace the > S/O-based one, something that resulted in a romantic/classic split > and as we see from this diagram "Classic Quality", subtitled > "intellectual", is the S/O aggregate. (ZMM page 243). > > The Romantic/Classic split was left for the Dynamic/Static one in LILA, > but "intellectual quality" remains as a static level and ought to be the > VALUE of the S/O divide, but Pirsig had found a new way of disposing > of the S/O, namely the said "standard procedure" that says that the two > lower levels are "objective" and the two upper are "subjective". What struck me when I first saw it in your post was the phrase: "the Value of the S/O divide." I don't see value as particularly intellectual, nor is intellect necessarily a value (in the Pirsigian sense), However, I do believe that all value is relational, and the S/O divide is the foundation of relations. So why not say that VALUE itself is the subject-object relationship? Such an onology makes a lot of sense to me. First of all, Value represents the copula between subject and object; it binds them together, dynamically reversing the duality. Secondly, if the subject is pre-intellectually aware of its object as the "value of otherness", and intellectually objectivizes the value into the appearance of finite objects, we have a workable ontology for the creation of a physical universe. Finally, and probably most important to the MoQers, Pirsig can still call value Quality and define it as "the primary empirical reality" because, metaphysically speaking, Value is the essence of SO existence. Notice that I have managed to express agreement in large part with your SOL argument, and some agreement with Pirsig's ideology, without referring to levels and patterns. Would you oblige me, in turn, with your assessment of this ontology, hopefully without "leveling" your response? Thanks, Bo. --Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
