Ron, Krimel,
I have to apologize beforehand for my comments because they are mainly
regurgitated from old posts of mine. The MD is cyclical that way, and I don't
have any new thoughts about this sector of Pirsig's writing.
I take the main thing you are struggling with Ron is the slippery nature of the
words in play, all the different ways one could take the meaning of
"intellect," "pre-intellect," "symbol manipulation," etc., etc. I think Ian's
mantra around here is, echoing the 1992 American Presidential campaign, "It's
the communicative process stupid!", and it's the perfect point here--there is
no correct definition of these things, the only thing we are in charge of is
trying to find the most pleasing pattern for these terms. They all relate
quite closely to each other, so our process must be the one of finding nice
variations of the terms that avoid/solve some problems while giving us some
room to do what we want. E.g., to say that the world was there before us, but
that animals have intelligence, and also that SOM is a cultural pattern, but
also deeply felt, and that without language there is no knowledge, though there
are a lot of things we do that isn't linguistic. The list could go
on and on.
My point in pointing out the obvious (that we are slip-sliding around with our
key terms) is to say that philosophy is mainly about balancing the intuitions
we have about how the world is, choosing which ones to loosen up, which ones to
hold onto, which ones to exterminate. The reason I should start so far back
behind the actual conversation before actually entering it (no less than that's
how I usually proceed) is because I both want to offend and remain inoffensive
to everybody currently in it: everything everybody's so far said about
intellect, intelligence, symbol manipulation, before the word there was
nothing, etc., is right (after a fashion), though taken together contradictory.
Everybody is bringing forward a different intuition about how the world works
to add to the stew, but what happens when it isn't framed properly is that it
just looks like a mess. Ron is asking for order, and the conversation is just
getting more and more muddy. Granted, that's the general
intention of many here at the MD, but then I might be in the minority in
thinking that clear thinking, though not always in point, is not by itself
complicit in SOM (which is sometimes the feeling I get from some people).
Moving to the actual conversation: What is the "intellectual level" in Pirsig?
There are two ways to go at it: 1) What does Pirsig think? (An interpretive
question with a more or less definite answer.) 2) How _should_ we define it?
(Where what Pirsig thinks, while remaining important, becomes sometimes besides
the point.)
To my eyes, the conversation has been mainly ignoring the interpretive
question. If it doesn't, it has to first acknowledge that Pirsig restricts
intellectual activity, defined as "symbol manipulation," to humans and then
play this restriction out across the levels: since Pirsig doesn't talk a lot
about intelligence or language, what does his restriction mean for these
related terms?
For my part, I don't like Pirsig's definitions of the levels (let alone
level-talk generally), so I usually use different ones (moving to 2). The
reason I don't like Pirsig's definitions of levels is because 1) it is really
easy to muddy the water by pointing out that ants have social behavior (Pirsig
explicitly relegates ants to only biological patterns, and by extension most
other animals), 2) that many advances in science these days are on the analogy
that inorganic/biological stuff interact informationally (which is why it isn't
terribly difficult to think that ants use something like "symbols"), but most
importantly 3) it isn't clear where Pirsig places "language" in his scheme, but
a) it can't be restricted to the intellectual level because of how Pirsig
places its growth in Ancient Greece (right around the time of Socrates
coincidentally) and b) placing it across the social and intellectual levels
runs into the problem figuring out what's so special about math, the ru
les of logic, the rules of grammar, or whatever exemplar one might come up
with (the excitement Pirsig derives from the levels for evolutionary story
about the march of Dynamic Quality seems to lose some steam if it consists of,
"First there were rocks, which eventually produced a protoplasm that amazingly
learned to replicate itself. Then, against all odds, some of this replicating
protoplasm got together, split up its duties, and created an entity that
communicated with other similar entities solely by its behavior. And then, one
day, a subsection of these entities--LEARNED TO COUNT!!!")
My preferred way:
inorganic -- non-replicating entities (rocks)
biological -- replicating entities (cells)
social -- communicative replicating entities (animals)
linguistic -- linguistically communicative replicating entities (humans)
democratic -- political linguistically communicative replicating entities
(Americans, Europeans, etc.)
Clearly I favor a fifth level. My levels are the way they are because I think
they neatly divide things in a way that follow Pirsig's rules a) discrete and
b) the lower level doesn't recognize the higher level. 1) there is an obvious
difference between rocks and cells, and cells obviously recognize a rock,
whereas a rock doesn't recognize anything, 2) animals, as opposed to plants, do
function in a way that they recognize plants, whereas not vice versa--a plant
will move towards the sun, but an animal will differentiate the world in all
sorts of more complicated ways, 3) an animal does not recognize language as
language (until it is taught language, as in the case of gorillas), 4) it is
common to see a person raised in a non-democratic culture to not understand
what it means to take part in the democratic way of life (though one might
argue that many Americans don't know either).
My revision has one main goal: I think Pirsig, like many philosophers, looked
to Greece and saw their own thing happening, rather than the important thing
happening. Disciplinary chauvinism happens all the time, but the important
thing in Greece wasn't Socrates, but Solon and Pericles--it was democracy, not
philosophy. It was the burgeoning of a democratic culture for the first time.
My main beef with Pirsig's social/intellectual split is that it is typical of a
philosopher--social conventions on one side, life of the mind on the other. It
is elitist in the wrong way.
All this talk about pre-intellectual experience: think about it: according to
Pirsig, could pre-intellectual be pre-linguistic? No, because humans had
language before Greece. Could pre-intellectual be pre-reflective? No, because
it would seem to be clear that we could reflect before Socrates came along, too.
I think the only way to get a handle on pre-intellectual is to constrict it to
pre-linguistic, but that does some raw things to Pirsig's notion of the
intellectual.
Matt
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