dmb,
Mahayana Buddhism rejects that things have an essence. I have written that
the concept of Emptiness is the lack of independent existence, inherent
existence, or the essence of things. Emptiness IS being empty of essence.
Nagarjuna argues that phenomena are 'fabricated by virtue of acquiring their
identity as particulars through conceptual imputation.' This is
anti-essentialism, is it not? This would be the same as the MOQ saying
that it's all analogy. And RMP stating in the Copleston paper, 'The MOQ is
not opposed to materialism as long is it is understood that materialism is a
set of ideas." Right?
Marsha
----- Original Message -----
From: "david buchanan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, August 10, 2008 6:22 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] What is SOM?
Ron, Bo, Ian, Ham, Platt, Gav and all MOQers:
Gav wrote:
...where are we when we are in SOM?...we are in the world of western
industrial alienation. we are divorced from the ground that gives meaning
to our ideas, or to be more accurate SOM obfuscates or devalues this
ground of being.
Bo replied:
Yes, but the MOQ has no "Western industrial alienation" level so the
question still stands. Pirsig says that the MOQ does not abolish the S/O
distinction so it must have a place inside the MOQ, and - as in my well
known opinion - it's the intellectual level, everything points to such an
interpretation.
dmb says:
Thanks to some recent help from Ron, it seems pretty clear to me now that
there are at least two different things going on here and they are
conflated and confused in various ways. I'm talking about SOM and
essentialism. These are not identical. SOM is a kind of essentialism, but
there are other kinds, although the former is usually a subset of the
latter. I say "usually" because the MOQ retains SOM in a non-essentialist
way. As is often said, subjects and objects lose their metaphysical status
within the MOQ and are instead understood to be concepts derived from
experience and handed to us by the cultural eye glasses as we acquire
language. SOM is usually essentialist in the sense that it takes subjects
and objects as the ontological ground of experience. Scientific
materialism is essentialist in the sense that it takes objective reality
as ontologically real, as what actually exists. As Ron said of essences,
"think of it as objecthood. As isolated entities in a vacuum". If
logic has been "predicated on truth in being" since Aristotle, as he and
Paul explain, then truth has been what corresponds to objects and these
entities are thought to be what actually is, what actually exists. But
this is approximately the opposite of what Plato says and he's the
original essentialist. Aristotle's metaphysics of substance rejects and
reversed Plato's theory of forms and yet they're both essentialists. I'd
like to suggest that a similar thing happens here. The MOQ rejects SOM and
essentialism. The latter is so important that it might be better to say
the MOQ rejects som AS essentialism, AS an ontological ground. It can
reject this essentialist element even while it accepts "subjects" and
"objects" as useful concepts. That's how it has a place in the MOQ, Bo.
Its gonna get confusing if I don't speak about you guys in the third
person...
I think Gav makes a good point but it doesn't quite address the question
about "where we are when we are in SOM". I think scientific objectivity
has produced an affliction we call alienation and the objectification of
nature in particular is a freaking disaster but I suspect Bo's question
goes in different direction. Alienation is a consequence of SOM but Bo is
interested in the nature of the levels themselves, thus he rejects Gav's
answer because there is no "alienation level". Instead of trying to answer
Bo's question, I'd make a case the question only makes sense if the MOQ is
a rival form of essentialism. This is probably the source of many such
questions and the basis of the theory that SOM and intellect are the same
thing. In other words, Bo takes the levels of the MOQ as an ontology, as
what actually exists, rather than an intellectual description that
categorizes experience. I mean, the MOQ says that experience IS reality,
that reality is phenomenal and not ontologica
l. This same idea came up in the TITs thread when I was talking to Krimel,
where I'd said there are no things-in-themselves in the MOQ. Anyway, if
the MOQ's levels are taken as an essentialist claim, as an ontological
claim, then it would raise the question of how SOM can exist within it. It
would seem like a claim that one universe can fit inside another, like
reality can have two different shapes at the same time. If SOM and the MOQ
are seen as two ways of conceptualizing experience, of cutting up the
phenomenal reality with that analytic knife, then there is no such
problem. The phenomenal reality can be carved up any number of ways or it
can simply remain uncarved. The essentialist interpretation would explain
why Bo says, "Pirsig may have been cowed into recanting because LILA's
intellect is a bit ambiguous and has led to a decade of discussion". But I
don't think Pirsig recanted in LILA so much as he clarified things, the
knife analogy being one of many explanations. I
think the discussion has gone on so long because of the various
confusions introduced by MOQers.
So basically, I think there are lots of problems when we try to reject SOM
without also rejecting essentialism. Bo has not called himself an
essentialist and it is partly just a hunch. But it does have a basis in
what the man says. Here is one of the most recent examples of Bodvian
essentialism...
Bo said to gav:
There emerges a level-like relationship between intellect and the
metaphysics that has reduced it from reality itself (SOM) to a mere static
level. That's why SOM is "evil" to the MOQ .... while in the competitive
phase that is, after the MOQ has achieved dominance intellect is the
highest and best static value. It has (in your words) "taken mankind to
the zenith of technological expansion", the "nadir of nihilism" was due to
its former metaphysics role.
dmb says:
Its true that the MOQ reduces SOM to a set of static patterns, to a set of
ideas ABOUT reality, the MOQ also says the same thing about itself. The
MOQ is also a set of intellectual patterns. See, if the MOQ's levels are
taken as an ontology then it has to replace SOM entirely. We have to get
rid of it because it does not correspond to the actual nature of reality,
which is a pluralism composed of DQ and the 4 levels rather than a dualism
composed of subjects and objects. But this would be the mistake of trading
one essentialism for another essentialism. On this view, the static levels
are something like things-in-themselves, the new ontological ground that
replaces the old ontological ground. But as in the art gallery analogy,
the MOQ says there is no ontological ground to which our intellectual
descriptions must correspond. As Matt Kundert might put it, the phenomenal
reality doesn't have any joints such that we have to carve it up this way
or that to be "right". These intel
lectual descriptions, metaphysical systems and the various worldviews can
exist side by side. There are reasons to think some are better than
others, but this does not depend on their proximity to how things "really"
are. This is true of the MOQ as well. There are reasons to think it is
better than SOM, but not because its truer in any absolute sense. In other
words, it rejects essentialism even with respect to itself. When we take
the MOQ otherwise, it produces a lot of fake problems as to the "real"
nature of the levels.
Bo said:
...when we rationalize we are at the intellectual level because reasoning
is distinguishing the objective from the subjective, i.e: SOM!
dmb says:
That's a very odd definition of reasoning. Isn't it obviously true that
the intellect can make all kinds of distinctions? Isn't it obviously true
that intellect can distinguish between SOM and the MOQ? The metaphysics of
substance and the metaphysics of quality are rival intellectual
descriptions, not rival realities.
Platt said:
We think we're in SOM whenever we think. But we're actually in MOQ all the
time.
Ian said:
Blimey, I agree with Platt again ... "We think we're in SOM whenever we
think. But we're actually in MOQ all the time." That's a neat way to put
the problem we have arguing to anything like conclusions, because our
thought and talk is (mostly) hidebound by our SOMist heritage. Even those
of us that just "know" we are MoQists, can help tripping up over the
SOMism in our arguments, thought or expressed. (Is this the "Ker-Ching",
in the Ron / DMB thread ?)
dmb says:
The Ker Ching moment came in seeing what essentialism means and how SOM
relates to essentialism, as described above. I don't agree with the
assertion that Ian and Platt agree upon here. They seem to equate SOM with
intellect just like Bo, if not for the same reasons that Bo does. I
suspect it is a distorted version of a pretty good idea, a paralyzing
interpretation of some decent anti-essentialists notions. In order to
conclude that we're "hidebound" otherwise doomed to think in terms of SOM,
one would have to also conclude that Pirsig's deconstruction of SOM is
"hidebound" by SOMist heritage. Not to mention James and Dewey and the
tetra lemma. The fact that this assertion continues to be made in the face
of such obvious and relevant counter-examples is extremely frustrating.
Pirsig's non-SOM thinking and this thinking is supposedly familiar to us
all. In this context, frankly, the assertion is pure nonsense. Asserting
it is not only obviously wrong, its destructive. If SOM i
s the problem and SOM is equal to intellect, then intellect is the
problem. Yikes! That's the paralysis I speak of and it has done as much
damage as anything else in terms of preventing a fruitful discussion. I
suspect this is the basis for Ian's general disrespect for definitions and
the basis of Platt's anti-intellectualism. Even if there were no other
reasons to deny that intellect and SOM were identical, no obvious counter
examples, these consequences would be enough reason to reject it.
In the MOQ, it is DQ, the primary empirical reality, the undifferentiated
phenomenal reality, that can not be defined. It is ahead of definition. It
is reality in the sense that it is experience and we "know" it in that
non-cognitive, as yet undefined sense of knowing. But metaphysics and and
intellectual descriptions are nothing without good definitions. To reject
essentialism and SOM is to reject a certain definition of reality but that
is not at all the same as rejecting definitions per se. The MOQ is full of
them. This would make a little more sense in the context of a discussion
about mystical experience, but conventional concepts are perfectly
appropriate in the everyday conventional world. And they're absolutely
crucial wherever one wishes to discuss metaphysics.
I think the assertion might be a bad interpretation of the idea we cannot
escape from the mythos, that we can only think in terms of the concepts
and thought categories handed down to us through language and culture. On
this view, I suppose, all of that is SOM-based. But Pirsig points out that
the MOQ is derived from that same mythos and insists that it couldn't be
otherwise. It is derived from some deeply hidden, submerged roots of that
culture but it comes from the same mythos all the same. This is another
reason to deny that we're fated to think in terms of SOM, that SOM is a
subset of the terms in which we can think.
Finally, to equate intellect with SOM denies the possibility of reading
and understanding the post you just read and, hopefully, understood.
Thanks.
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