All thread participants and interested MOQers: Arlo said to Ron: ...And "intellect" has historically pretended it was independent of social-cultural patterns. It attempts to isolate "man" and present the image that his vision is clear, that in fact society obscures that vision. It presents the illusion that there is a "pure" subject-object value relationship that is the goal of intellect, one which sees through the haze of distortion created by social patterns.
dmb says: Right. I guess it goes all the way back to the point where "man" is defined as the rational animal. He's above nature by virtue of his capacity to reason. This is reflected in the tendency to asceticism and all the moral codes that dictate the suppression of our appetites and instincts. Fasting, sexual abstinence, vows of silence and such. As Nietzsche points out this life-denying, world-hating neurosis is found in all areas of the culture. "Christianity is Platonism for the people", he says. And the Modern philosophers created the ego, the subjective self where the "soul" had once been and, he says, and is equally based on religious superstitions. I'm glad Arlo used the word "historically" because its important to notice that the distinction between the social and intellectual levels is an abstraction that characterizes concrete historical events and the political struggles that continue even now. As is the case with all abstractions, like "democracy" and "justice" for example, any concrete example we point to will be a lot fuzzier than the abstraction itself. These same abstractions can be seen in the MOQ's conception of the practical self. You know, the subjective self, the cartesian ego goes out the window with SOM and we are instead conceived as a collection of patterns from all levels. Its not that there is a subjective self that has these patterns. Here again, the levels aren't marked out with bold white lines. They are abstractions drawn from the messier and larger world of experience. They refer to the various impulses and conflicting tendencies that we are. If the social and intellectual levels are engaged in an historical and political conflict upon the world stage, then you can bet your ass that its also going on in your self. We are that history. We are that evolution. The processes by which we evolved remain and continue to exert their demands so that we all have an array of tensions within. And the lines between the levels are drawn to help us sort that out. Who was it that said history is biography? I guess a big part of the point here is to say that we ought not expect too much percision from this categories. This about how hard it is to say exactly what "democracy" and "justice" and "rights" are and think about how hard it is to find anything like a pure example in concrete reality. Does the difficulty in those cases lead you to conclude that such notions are unreal or unimportant? The famously ambigous I-know-it-when-I-see-it attitude is entirely appropriate when it comes to abstract concepts, don't you think? Thanks, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Climb to the top of the charts! Play Star Shuffle: the word scramble challenge with star power. http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_oct 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/
