Bo and anyone else who cares, I know you see yourself as Pirsig's Apostle Paul but I don't think you fully appreciate the aptness of the analogy. Paul likely suffered from frontal lobe seizures and was a bit of a psychotic. He also advanced ideas that had nothing to do with what the historic Jesus actually said or did and was in direct conflict with those who actually knew and understood what the historic Jesus said and did.
Your notion that SOM IS a "level" just doesn't fly. SOM is one particular set of "intellectual glasses". The intellectual level, whatever that might be, involves wearing a set of intellectual glasses not which particular pair one might choose. In addition Pirsig's portrayal of SOM involves particular problems with objectivity that are more easily resolved in other ways. In my opinion objectivity does not refer to TiTs which as Kant rightly advises us can not be experienced or known directly. Rather objectivity refers to our shared understanding of things. It is only possible for each of us to know things through our own individual experiences. To the extent that we can communicate with one another about our shared experiences we can construct a picture of an "objective" external world. This is Bohr's notion that physics does not teach about what "is" but only what we can "say" about what is. Among the many reasons why I regard the "levels" as secondary is that they are not even remotely "discrete" as Pirsig claims. While the confusion is most obvious at the intellectual level, it exists even at the inorganic level which is not "discrete" from the biological level at least not in the way Pirsig frames it. All life on earth is based on carbon chemistry. In fact carbon chemistry is its own branch of chemistry. It is called organic chemistry. But Pirsig places it on the inorganic level. One of the problems some of our intellectually challenged brethren here on the MoQ have with evolutionary theory is how life begins. However and whenever the division between the living and the nonliving began it certainly involved organic chemistry and when we look at life itself on a molecular level we see no clear distinction between what is alive and what is inert. The "distinction" between the biological and social levels is equally arbitrary and certainly not discrete. Social organization or the mutual interdependence of individual members of a species is an evolutionary strategy employed by many species in nature. From coral to ants and bees up through primates many organisms owe their survival to mutual support, division of labor and cooperative behavior. Pirsig chose to specifically exclude all of this and include only humans at the social level. In so doing he misses out on the evolutionary function of social structures and on the origins of human social interaction that are so obviously rooted in primate social behavior. E.O. Wilson in developing his sociobiology in the late 70's pointed out that human social behavior is deeply grounded in biology. Among the evidence he presented for this was the striking similarities among all human societies. He claims for example that ants show a much greater variation in social structures than humans and few would deny that ant social behavior is entirely biological. Beyond all this is the absurdity of thinking that a set of "levels" so blatantly focused on human beings can have "metaphysical" significance. As I understand it, metaphysics is the search for a set of principles that would apply to any form of "reality" not just ours. Having said all this I should point out that the "levels" are often useful. They are especially useful precisely where Pirsig got them from, the college catalog. The various areas of academia are often lumped taxonomically in this way. But on the whole I would say this particular set of "intellectual glasses" has taken way too much attention away from Pirsig's much more important insights regarding the interactions of DQ and SQ. Krimel 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/
