Bo, Bo said: If you see the said Greek event as the intellectual level's emergence you are "my man" and why not join me in making it clear that - in a MOQ context - SOM=the 4th. level. After that is settled we may discuss what's wrong with THAT view. Nothing is according to me, but let that wait.
Matt: Let me reiterate: I do think something important happened in Greece around the time of Socrates, but it is only by a stretch that I would think "intellect" would be an appropriate title for it. Again: it was Greek democracy, not Greek philosophy (or Greek science, which at the time was called philosophy, or Greek math, which at the time was done by philosophers). I've discussed with you before my problems with your suggestion, but probably the shortest summation of why I've never sought to pick up your revision of Pirsig's philosophy is this: I think you make the same mistake on a systematic scale what some others make on a rhetorical scale--you conflate SOM with thinking. In Pirsig's language, you conflate the Subject/Object dualism with the analytic knife. As far as I can tell, in Pirsig--and this is the better part of wisdom--there is a difference between SOM and our ability to distinguish, to make distinctions, etc. At the very root of the Quality thesis, waiting there implicitly, lies our ability to distinguish between X and Y, using the analytic knife, because if we didn't first have that power, then we wouldn't be able to value one more than the other. In fact, Pirsig's very important point is that the analytic knife, our distinguishing ability, is the same thing as our process of valuing, that each movement of the analytic knife is a function of our evaluative relationship with the two that fall out of the cloven one. Rorty once defended Derrida from his interpreters on this very same point by pointing out that there is a difference between Derrida's logocentrism and binary oppositions generally. Distinctions aren't bad _inherently_. A distinction is only as bad as the use to which it is put. One of the things philosophers have been doing since Plato, to borrow the way Putnam once put the point, is turning ad hoc distinctions into universal dualisms. They did so because they thought eternity was better than ephemerality. They did so because they thought eternity was a live option. But it isn't, and neither is the analytic knife or binary oppositions inherently bad. It is thinking so that makes me suspicious of people because it reminds me of another philosophical quest, the Route Back to Eden. This quest takes it that Man is a Fallen Being and that one of its traits of fallenness is that it must distinguish, cleaving into two, four, eight, sixteen, and on, instead of being able to coalesce with the One. A variation: if it weren't for language/concepts, we'd be able to get at what the essence of the object was. That is why, Bo, I do not get on board with thinking that SOM is the intellectual level. It either makes your enemy 1) all-pervasive (thus making you an irrevocably fallen being) or 2) domesticated (thus taking the enemy away). In the first case, it is an ironically SOMic venture to conflate SOM with thinking and in the second case, you just force yourself to look for another name for what Plato did that was bad that we need to get rid of. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft Office Outlook – together at last. Get it now. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102225181033.aspx?pid=CL100626971033 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/
