Hey Ron,
Matt said:
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.
Ron said:
Precisely my point I think the problem being experienced with the terms Centers
around the difference of what SOM WAS when it started (an intellectual form
based Logic and reason) and how it conceptualized the world and what SOM Is NOW
which is cultural as well as intellectual. This in itself muddies The waters, I
think this is a pivotal point in understanding in order to fully grasp the
difference of just what SOM WAS and IS now to better understand what MoQ is and
it's relevance.
Matt:
My problem is that I don't think SOM was anything but a set of metaphors (which
is what I think everything linguistic is), and I balk at the distinction
between cultural and intellectual. The notion that logic and reason suddenly
appeared on the playing field of humanity around the time of Greece, or around
any time for that matter, is a myth, created in the West to make the West look
cooler. Cultures do it all the time to make their innovations look like the
culmination of humanity.
The way I think we need to frame this issue is to first fully naturalize the
parts as part of our eviction of SOM. Doing this, I think, requires us to
think of reason as just what every other animal does when it decides what to
do. It is just that our reasoning process is much more complicated. Reason
didn't suddenly appear in Greece, though they thought it did. What appeared
were certain new beneficial cultural products, like democracy, philosophy,
math, de-anthropomorphized religion, etc.
Like all beneficial cultural products, some of them lose their benefits when
compared to new cultural products that come on the market. The reification of
reason (in its opposition to tradition, which Plato began and got a new lease
on life during the Enlightenment) was beneficial for a time, but a bunch of
intellectuals, including I think Pirsig, are thinking there are new cultural
products on the market to replace it.
SOM was a step towards naturalizing our culture by de-anthopomorphizing our
explanations of reality. I think Plato saw with great foresight that there was
something silly going on with Zeus, Hera and the rest. What SOM became was
just another supernatural double. What the MoQ needs to be is a fully
naturalized replacement of SOM. I think it can be this.
That's why I don't go for the distinction between intelligence and
intellect as what divides Pirsig's levels. Intelligence is obviously
the biologically linked thing that we share with the animals, but I
think that's all there is. "Intellect" is a reification of a set of
cultural innovations that humans were able to create in part through
their creation of language. Language was just a tool we created to
help us survive. So were all the other innovations that language made
possible. Some of these innovations took on a life of their own, but
how do we tell an evolutionary story about the creation of "intellect"
if it isn't a set of cultural innovations? We haven't been able to do
it for "mind" or "representations" yet, and that's partly why
philosophers of a pragmatist stripe have been working so hard to retire
them.
Matt
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