PLatt, Arlo, Chris
12 March:
Chris had said:
> > > Yes. Arlos reasoning is quite logical I'd say. But I wondered over
> > > the sense of "Individuality" as such. Because I lean towards the
> > > interpretation that the split between seeing the self and the
> > > world as one and the self and the world as separate is the
> > > emergence of the intellectual level -
Chris and I basically agree on the Intellect=the S/O distinction,
just a few remarks here. The self/not self is very basic, an
organism can't exist without an immune system. At the social
level this is brought to a new refinement, the "human organism"
has got a name, ancestry, property, and all things we know as
personhood. I always find this passage from ZAMM about life
before the intellectual level as most apt
But before the Greek philosophers arrived on the scene,
for a period of at least five times all our recorded history
since the Greek philosophers, there existed civilizations in
an advanced state of development. They had villages and
cities, vehicles, houses, marketplaces, bounded fields,
agricultural implements and domestic animals, and led a
life quite as rich and varied as that in most rural areas of
the world today.
However this 3rd. level person had a strong sense of belonging
and of duty to his/her social group. The worst penalty of that age
wasn't death but being an outcast ("varg i veum" [wolf in the
woods] as the old Nordic saying went). The way ZAMM describes
the Homeric heros' motives says it all:
`What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism,''
Kitto comments, ``is not a sense of duty as we understand
it...duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself.
He strives after that which we translate `virtue' but is in
Greek areté, `excellence' -- we shall have much to say
about areté. It runs through Greek life.''
Admittedly Pirsig says ".. not a sense of duty as we understand it"
(meaning modern intellect) still it demonstrates the unity between
the common cause and the individual. The duty is totally
internalized- towards himself. Besides this pre-SOM - Aretê - age
becomes the social level in a MOQ back-light.
Platt:
> I agree with your interpretation of the emergence of the intellectual
> level -- when humans began to see the self (the individual) and the
> world as separate. For that and many other reasons I think it's
> entirely proper to refer to the intellectual level as the individual
> level.
I guess you say - and I agree - that "the world" came to be along
with the individual as separated from it. The said social value
existence had no "world" in the sense of an inert, indifferent
material realm nor of themselves as isolated subjects. Yet,
"individual level" kind of indicates that there weren't individuals
before that, a kind of ant-hill existence but that is not true. Maybe
you mean the "human rights and - worth" individual and its
freedoms to speak and write ...etc (the intellectual patterns) and
that is just it.
Chris again:
> No matter
> > how much anyone manipulated symbols or how many languages they
> > spoke. But when did this emerge? I don't believe that it was only in
> > Greece, and perhaps it was way earlier,
"This" is ".. seeing the self and the world as separate". As said
the social level was/is not concerned with neither self nor world,
theirs was an existence governed by gods/forces/spirits whose
will could be swayed by rituals, a remnant we see in church
rituals today. But the break with this era very much came with the
Greeks (as described in ZAMM) as the search for a reality
(principles) beyond the mythological one. Only slowly did this
manifest in the known isolated subject looking out on an objective
world. However, it may have happened in India (in the
Upanishads period) or in civilization extinct, that's not the point,
the point is that the 4th. level is the S/O distinction (in its
countless forms)
In my opinion
Bo
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