Mati asked: 1. How does your definition or understanding of intellectual level/value differentiate the social level from the intellectual level as well as social values from intellectual values? Please provide examples of both intellectual and social values and share how your definitions of each level are able to clearly discern the levels.
Arlo answered: I'll preface my answer by saying that looking at this distinction as "collective-individual" or "conformity-freedom" is wrong. IMO, the social level is defined by collaborated human activity mediated by a shared symbolic system. Intellectual patterns emerge from human collective activity when the symbols that mediate the social level are treated as objects of inquiry in-and-of themselves. dmb says: Right. At the very end of chapter 30 Pirsig explains that, "stone age people were probably bound by ritual all day long. There's a ritual for washing, for putting up a house, for hunting, for eating and so on - so much that the division between 'ritual' and 'knowledge' becomes indistinct. ..These rituals may be the connecting link between the social and intellectual levels of evolution. One can imagine primitive song-rituals and dance-rituals associated with certain cosmology stories, myths, which generated the first primitive religions... Their sequence in history suggests that principles emerge from ritual, not the other way around." I think that this contrast between rituals and principles helps to explain what Arlo is saying here. We could say rituals, myths and religions use symbols while principles are established through the capacity to examine those symbols as well as the 'knowledge' they represent. The ritualistic, primary type of culture developed and evolved for f ifty thousand or a hundred thousand years. (Interestingly, I think, humanity almost went extinct about 75,000 years ago because of a devastating volcano and there was a population bottleneck. They estimate that there were only about 10,000 survivors on the entire planet and so all persons alive today are related to them.) In the beginning, when there was a ritual for building a house, this 'knowledge' was passed in the actual building of houses, huts, teepees or whatever and one can imagine that the portion that today we would think of as "engineering" was indistinct from the portion of the task that made the site sacred, the way its placement among the other dwelling reflected the social hierarchy, etc.. When things get so highly evolved that a culture can produce giant pyramids, as we see in Egypt and Central America, etc., the construction process is still almost entirely steeped in ritual and the building itself is essentially a religious object, a political object, a mo numental expression of that society's values. If you've ever seen the film "Apocalypto" or the more recent "10,000 B.C.", it is pretty easy to imagine how the primitive, tribal cultures were conquered and enslaved by a new thing called civilization, which is to say the switch from hunter-gatherer societies to an agricultural society and the emergence of surplus and cities. This period has been imagined by all kinds of philosophers. We see it in Hobbes, where the savage trades a nasty, brutish and short existence for a more civilized arrangement. We see it in Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic, a similar scenario in Marx, a much more optimistic version in Rousseau, who hated the cities. All these are ways to imagine how society got to be what it is and they ask us to imagine some kind of ideal social arrangement. But Plato's Republic must be one of the oldest surviving examples of a utopian vision. Not only does this require a high level of abstraction, a higher cognitive functio n, it is also used to call traditional values into question. He wants a philosopher kind to rule his ideal city rather than a warrior kind who is sanction by the gods, etc. Compare that vision to the story we hear in Genesis about how Cain, the hunter, is jealous because God love his brother Able, who is a farmer. In effect, this is a story that offers in intellectual justification for choosing the nomadic hunting life over the civilized life. It simply asserts that God loves farmers better and that hunters are to be cursed by God. Ironically, the Hebrews probably picked up the notion when they were slaves in Babylon. This story doesn't have to make sense, it simply has to lend legitimacy and divine authority to a particular economic system, a particular set of cultural values. In that light, its almost funny to see how early 20th century anthropologists turned their gaze toward the native American tribes and how the intellectuals generally began to criticize civilization in all sorts of way. Right up to this day, a large part of the game is to expose hidden ideologies and to scrutinize all the power structures in society. In some sense, there is a continuity between Plato's Republic and today's post-Colonial literary theory and third wave feminism. There is a bird's eye view of how things are and how they could be better, more reasonable, more principled, more just than tradition alone would have it. I mean, society itself has become an object of inquiry with several disciplines devoted to that task; History, political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, socio-biology, archeology, linguistics, social psychology, mythology and other fields are all aimed at this task. My point? The definitions and differences are derived from the history and development of human values, human culture. Pirsig points to ancient Greece as the birthplace of intellect, as the time when this new capacity was such that ritual became distinquishable from princi ple. And he points to the end of World War I as the time when intellectual values has achieved enough clout to take charge for the first time. I like to think of it in terms of the intellect being in its infancy in Ancient Greece, still very much dependent on its parent. Socrates was killed for impiety, after all. The dawn of the twentieth century is more like the intellectual level as a very young adult, a little too rebellious for her own good and ungrateful too. Mati asked: 2. Given there is a evolutionary process to each of the levels, what is a possible historical point which represents the likelihood for the birth of the Intellectual level, and what is the basis for this period/event(s) chosen and how intellectual level changed or remained the same over time. Arlo answered: I don't think its possible to point to one time and say "at this moment humans began considering their symbols as objects of inquiry". It certainly began long before the trend placed such activity as a dominant behavior. I'd say that it likely began only after the social language reached a sufficient complexity to sustain such reflective meta-cognition. dmb says: One could probably find a way to draw a line or pick a point by way of language and its increasing complexity, the emergence of abstract concepts and such but I think that another way to justify Ancient Greece as the birthplace is by way of simple logistics. I mean, there had always been trade and cultural exchange even before civilization emerged but by the time Alexander went out to conquer the world, the transportation systems were already developed well enough that a single person could be exposed to several radically different cultures, with different gods and rituals and even study them. Many of the pre-Socratic philosophers studied in Egypt, for example. This level of exchange allowed some of the more educated people to make comparisons. I mean, the short answer is that culture shock gave rise to the intellect. The existence of rival civilizations allowed the imagination to wonder what else might be possible. Utopian visions happen only when it can be asked when it is no longer believed that society's rules are carved in stone or set down by God. Then people start asking questions like, "how then should we live?" and "what is justice and the good?". Instead of asking whether the gods will be pleased or angered, then you can start asking if it makes any sense or not. They could do a kind of cross-cultural analysis by that point. The library at Alexandria provides a concrete picture of this new syncretism. That was practically a tower of meta-cognition, with a light on top that shined farther than any before it. Sure he was a brute and an ego-maniac but Alexander had a utopian vision too, of sorts. Mati asked: 3. It seems clear that both social and intellectual levels use language, but in different ways. Please describe how each level utilizes language to sustain its level? dmb says: Again, I'm with Arlo, who said, "the intellectual level is reflexive on this language, that is it is activity that considers the symbols of language as object of inquiry in-and-of themselves." We can see this in the history of philosophy, spanning from the first basic syllogisms to the linguistic turn. Formal logic and symbolic logic pretty much turns language into algebra. To take a different approach, however, I'd point out that the level of skill and abstraction employed by a language user doesn't necessarily indicate the level of values being attacked, defended or sustained. There is a strong correlation between cognitive development and moral development but it is not impossible for one to get way ahead of the other, as in nazi scientists and illiterate saints. Mati asked: 4. Given that intellectual values dominate it's parent level, the social level, yet must sustain and maintain a relative harmony with the social level. Given your definition or understanding of intellectual levels how do intellectual values do that? dmb says: Here I would dig up the Pirsig quote about how the social level is the middle term that stands between biology and intellect. Pirsig points out that it is proper for society to regulate the animal appetites for food, sex, violence, sloth etc. but it is not proper for society to regulate things like thought or art. The social level controls biology for its own purposes while the intellectual level controls society for its own purposes. Relative harmony is achieved when these distinctions are used so "there is no encroachment either way", as Pirsig puts it. Its up to intellectuals to re-examine all those old social level morals and values to see where they function to keep biological forces under control and where they exceed their proper authority to encroach on the intellect. You know, there was Margaret Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa" and the free love movement of the 60's. For Pirsig, these represent a destructive misunderstanding and underestimation of social quality. I me an, there is a huge data set that intellectuals had to overlook in order to believe sexual promiscuity was just fine and dandy. In our culture at least, jealousy destroys all relationships. And without stable relationships, society won't work. Its not rocket science, you know. Some things, like the laws against rape and murder, are so obviously advantageous that we only need to spend a few seconds wondering whether or not to keep them. In that sense, a certain amount of "oppression" is entirely warranted. We have lots of experience with these things and so the data set is a helluva lot bigger than your house, even if you're Bill Gates and you have a really, really big house. _________________________________________________________________ Use video conversation to talk face-to-face with Windows Live Messenger. http://www.windowslive.com/messenger/connect_your_way.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Refresh_messenger_video_072008 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/
