Bodvar [Chris and Platt quoted] --
[Chris]:
No, not all emotions are of the biological level, though they all
need the biological level, and of course the levels are
overlapping and interrelated.
But I do think that greed could be seen as a biological pattern,
the basic drive for survival is greatly benefited by it.
"Greed" is an ambiguous term. One may eat greedily if hungry but
this is biology's SENSATION.
[Platt]:
What emotions do you think are NOT of the biological level?
Pirsig wrote: "The MOQ sees emotions as a biological response
to quality and not the same thing as quality. There are many cases,
particularly in economic activity where values occur without any
emotion." (LS, Note 141)
[Bo]:
IMO emotion is the social "expression" (Sensation the biological
and Reason the intellectual). Animals wouldn't survive if they had
emotions. When an antelope has escaped a lion it continues to graze
as if nothing has happened. If it had been afraid in the emotional
sense it would never have dared venture out in the open again and
quickly succumbed.
But as Chris says, emotions "need the biological level". There is the
experiment of people being injected with adrenalin. Those told in
beforehand felt the restlessness, but took no further notice, while
those who didn't know, reacted emotionally, they felt danger
threatening (flee or fight). This because humans are social beings
and interprets the biological sensations emotionally. A silly example:
A stab of pain: Am I ill, will I die?
We are also "intellectuals" so for those told about the expected
reaction reason overuled emotions.
This is where I think the levels/patterns concept obfuscates understanding.
To call humans "social beings" and their reasoning patterns "the
intellectual level" ignores the psyche of man which is responsible for his
awareness and the emotions (biological level?) he feels. Conscious
awareness is no more "biological" than it is "social". It is the
subjective contingency of being-aware. Yes, Chris, we need hormones,
neurons, and a biological organism to experience emotion. These are the
"beingness" components of being-aware. But "greed" is not "Biology's
sensation"; it's OURs! And Bo, ALL creatures need emotions like fear to
survive. What do you suppose would happen to animals under attack if their
flight instinct was not aroused by fear?
The concept you are all missing -- and it's because of Pirsig's levels
metaphor -- is that value, emotion, esthetic quality, or morality left
unrealized is an epistemological absurdity. There is no such thing as
"unrealized value". Pirsig himself said that "if a thing has no value it
doesn't exist." But this means that value must be realized, which is what
proprietary awareness does. Everything else -- thoughts, feelings, objects,
and events -- follows from the primary sense of value.
I define awareness as value-sensibility. Pirsig uses the term
"pre-intellectual experience", which is confusing for those of us who equate
experience with the intellectualized world (i.e., experiential existence).
Bo's "stab of pain" like Pirsig's "sitting on a hot stove" describes what
may be called an "experience" but doesn't tell us much about values. Value
is what is sensed or felt in our relation to otherness. It is defined as
"pain", "pleasure", "fear", or "disgust" only as we relate it emotionally to
our being-aware. Experiencing the phenomenal world of "things and events"
requires intellection, which is a further differentiation of Value. How we
behave socially - whether greedy, arrogant, deceitful, cruel, or
passionate - expresses our valuistic construct of reality (i.e., our
being-aware-of-
otherness.)
Isn't this a clearer, simpler explanation of human existence than the
levels/patterns analogy?
Regards,
Ham
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