Hi Platt, (Marsha, All,) I don't have your post with me, but I try to address what I remember about it.
Marsha quoted the whole paragraph which is important because the last sentence is key: "What had happened since the end of World War I was that the intellectual level had entered the picture and had taken over everything. It was this intellectual level that was screwing everything up. The question of whether promiscuity is moral had been resolved from prehistoric times to the end of the Victorian era, but suddenly everything was upended by this new intellectual supremacy that said sexual promiscuity is neither moral nor immoral, it is just amoral human behavior." What Pirsig is describing is not intellect itself but rather the SOM view of intellect. Specifically it is the intellectual pattern that says that intellectual patterns are amoral that is screwing everything up. It is Rigel's rather than Pirsig's view of intellect. This becomes even more clear as we continue: "That may have been why Rigel was so angry back in Kingston. He thought Lila was immoral because she'd broken up a family and destroyed a man's position in the social community-a biological pattern of quality, sex, had destroyed a social pattern of quality, a family and a job. What made Rigel mad was that into this scene come intellectuals like Phædrus who say it's unintelligent to repress biological drives. You must decide these matters on the basis of reason, not on the basis of social codes. But if Rigel identified Phædrus with this intellect-vs.-society code and the social upheavals it has produced, he certainly picked on the wrong person. The Metaphysics of Quality uproots the intellectual source of this confusion, the doctrine that says, "Science is not concerned with values. Science is concerned only with facts." In a subject-object metaphysics this platitude is unassailable, but the Metaphysics of Quality asks: which values is science unconcerned with? Gravitation is an inorganic pattern of values. Is science unconcerned? Truth is an intellectual pattern of values. Is science unconcerned?" Clearly Pirsig is indeed talking about patterns of values when he wants to get specific, and he specifically mentions them here. He is saying that what we need is for the intellectual pattern that says that truth is a species of good to win out over the intellectual pattern that says that intellect is amoral. This is ZAMM's pursuit of the Ghost of Reason or the root of the problem or the dark side of SOM. Certainly many of our common intellectual patterns such as the one I just described are based on SOM assumptions, but that does not mean that ALL intellectual patterns are based on SOM assumptions or that SOM is what intellect is (the S/O aggregate or whatever Bo says). That would simply be a category error. Intellect describes a sort of pattern of value recognized as the manupulation of abstract symbols that stand for patterns of experience. The intellectual level is the collection of all such patterns. Regards, Steve 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/
