Hi Bo,
[Platt]
> > True enough, but would you not agree that someone (an individual) had to
> > be first in putting truth above opinion and starting objectivity on the
> > road to becoming the dominant way of thinking?
> Bo:
> Of course it was human beings who did so, but in a moqish sense the
> social level is a human domain and it was the 3rd. LEVEL that
> spawned the 4th. not the biological "man".
Agree with idea that the 3rd level preceded the 4th. but it was a human
being (not beings) who first split subject from object. Others followed, as
Pirsig says, "person by person" so that SOM eventually became the dominant
intellectual pattern in the West and the intellectual level rose to
prominence.
{Bo]
> As said to Ron the
> individual has existed from times immemorial without transcending the
> social reality. Some leverage outside it was needed and in my opinion
> the emergence of the SOM fits.
Agree, but the "leverage" you speak of was the mind of an individual who first
split his experience and attached symbols to subjects and objects. It took
eons before his newly invented symbols where adopted by others until
finally they reached a tipping point to become the intellectual level at a
time and place I believe you've identified as ancient Greece. SOM didn't
magically emerge by itself.
> Platt ctd:
> > The story of the brujo that Pirsig spends a lot of time on is an
> > emblematic case of the individual vs. society -- plus in a later
> > chapter he describes the role of individual contrarians who alone are
> > responsible for changing static social patterns of conformity.
>
> Bo:
> I see your point, but I don't think the Brujo example is about the
> intellectual- vs.social level struggle, rather an intra-society shift.In
> LILA he says that the said story was crucial in his arriving at the
> Dynamic/Static split, he had tried many ways, but finding them "dead ends".
Since the brujo was tortured for his ideas and behavior by the social
priests I see his example as an individual vs. society struggle.
It was the brujo's intellect after all that caused the societal shift and
his elevation from an outcast to leader.
> LILA:
> Just as the biological immune system will destroy a life- saving
> skin graft with the same vigor with which it fights pneumonia,
> so will a cultural immune system fight off a beneficial new kind
> of understanding like that of the brujo in Zuñi with the same
> kind of vigor it uses to destroy crime.
>
> Here I must object. The way the "cultural immune system" is described
> (at other places) it'sintellect's "immune system", but the Zuni tribe was
> definitely not "intellectual". What he speaks of here is the SOCIAL immune
> system and what the Brujo brought about was SOCIAL change. OK this you may
> agree with.
>
> LILA ctd:
> It can't distinguish between them. Phædrus recognized that
> there's nothing immoral in a culture not being ready to accept
> something Dynamic. Static latching is necessary to sustain the
> gains the culture has made in the past. The solution is not to
> condemn the culture as stupid but to look for those factors that
> will make the new information acceptable: the keys. He
> thought of this Metaphysics of Quality as a key.
>
> He goes on calling the Zunis (part of a) culture, but here it's clearly
> understood in the SOCIAL sense. If the intra-level change are dynamic - if
> not THAT is reserved for the inter-level shift? OK I know that Pirsig sees
> the biological evolution as a dynamic/static interaction so ....well let's
> suspend that question.
OK. I got lost about half way through the answer to a question I'm equally
unsure of.
> Platt ctd:
> > What's puzzling is how the word "individual" seems to raise hackles
> > when the MOQ itself was created in the fertile brain of an individual
> > named Robert Pirsig, not some amorphous, fictional "collective mind."
[Bo]
> Yes, Pirsig clearly was a 4th.level Brujo but his intellectual shift was far
> more radical than Brujo's social one and here the true intellectual immune
> system kicked in, he was declared insane and hospitalized (the system works
> from within, he felt mentally ill, that's the trick).
Agree.
[Platt]
> > Pirsig himself is a contrarian of the first order whose ideas go
> > completely against the grain of current cultural consensus. In fact,
> > the main character in his novel "Lila" is a "loner" like him.
> > Celebrating the individual is a major theme of his work.
[Bo]
> Still a "culture" can be social-value-dominated (as was the Zuñi
> Indians) but it can also be intellect-value-dominated as was the USA of
> young Pirsig's days. So his premises were intellect (SOM as I see it) and it
> was intellect's immune system that felled him, not the social one.
Agree. But I also agree with Pirsig that a battle for domination is
currently in progress between intellectual and social patterns, and that
intellect has made a royal mess of things because it "has no provision for
morals," relying instead on old religious morals. The battle is political
as Pirsig describes in Chap. 22 of Lila, citing the "hurricane of social
forces" let loose in the 20th century -- National Socialism, Communism and
the New Deal.
[Bo]
> You know I see his MOQ so incompatible with intellect's S/O pattern
> that it spells a level-like shift, but this is outside the scope of this
> thread so enough.
Yes, I agree with you that the MOQ is a level-like shift. I would even go
so far as to suggest it's a new level whose main thrust is aesthetic. But,
that's for another day.
Regards,
Platt
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/
