Everything is Quality. SOM is Quality, and it didn't destroy anything.
They thing it allegedly destroyed was never there, because if it was there
it wouldn't be it!
Yes, Andre - Hi! Here is my thoughs on your post - or really on the sophists
and everythign in general
[Andre]
Hi Chris and Ron and All
Just thought I'd jump in because this is interesting and intriguing.
Just a thought: according to Pirsig, and loads of historians, the Sophists
did teach arete which Pirsig equals with Quality.
It sounds Chris,(and correct me if I misinterpret your meaning) that,
because this arete was valued by the social level it is to be seen as
something less valued?? Is this what you mean?
This teaching (and understanding/experience of Quality at that time) took
place (more or less over a period of time before a 'proper' intellectual
level had emerged from the social level) in a way , I would want to call
it,
uncontaminated-by-intellect.It was not defined because there were no
subjects and objects, no mind or matter. It was pure Quality, unmediated,
un-dissected by intellect.
[Chris]
I don't agree really. First of I don't think the teaching was free from
intellectual values, and by intellectual values I mean valuing Truth. Only,
by this time, Truth wasn't defined, encapsulated, as it would later be by
many philosophers and made into a paradigm by Aristotle above all others.
Thus the exploration of things/the world/man7language etc that may have been
partly motivated by unrealized intellectual level would have been dominated
by social level values. To clarify: the ventures into expanding human
knowledge was governed mainly by what was socially Good, since intellectual
Good had not yet been properly defined, as it would later be in the word
"Truth" and the way this would come to be looked at in the tradition that
later developed.
[Andre]
This whole notion of 'truth' was undefined and I hope to think at that
time
at least on equal par with Good.
I think that is why Pirsig compared it to the Tao. It was 'intellect' as
Bodvar suggests that fucked it all up...later. And then it needed to be
retrieved intellectualy, which is an impossibility...it is direct
experience, from the pre-intellectual 'era'. That's why we must kill all
intellectual patterns to get a glimps of it.
[Chris]
Even though I don't agree with Bodvar on the point of SOM being synonymous
with the intellectual level, I do share his view that looking at SOM (and
for that matter all philosophy and subsequent science that developed in the
western world) as something that usurped and suppressed a Quality
Understanding - is wrong. We mustn't nurture some unrealistic view that
before SOM people saw things undivided and pure - the Quest for
Understanding is apparently present as far back as we have historical
testimony, but what we CAN see (at least a MOQist) is that this quest was
heavily - if not totally - dominated by social level values. Only when Truth
can stand by itself, as a Value in it self - is the intellectual level
realized.
We may also examine the eastern schools of Buddhist and Taoist philosophy
and see that in a way they are also motivated by the intellectual level -
though not using SOM thinking the same way we do. I believe the reason
people turn to any philosophy (that may or may not be SOM and may or may not
be turned into a religion) is because they are motivated by the Need For
Understanding - The core of the intellectual level.
We may say that the above mentioned schools brings the practitioner closer
to a Quality understanding than SOM-schools of thought, but that would be
wrong to say really. Perhaps we could say that these schools brings one
closer to DQ, but since we cannot know anything about DQ and since - just
like with the Tao -there can be no "understanding" in the manner we mean it
really isn't meaningful to say this. It is different schools of thought,
motivated by the same value, and the only difference is that within the one
tradition we believe that Truth can be expressed and found, in the other we
say that this is not so "be silent".
Everything is Quality. SOM is Quality, and it didn't destroy anything. They
thing it allegedly destroyed was never there, because if it was there it
wouldn't be it!
(by the way Andre, I read your "Instant karma" post - I liked it, and I will
write a reply soon I think - so much to do, so little time!)
Friendly
Chris
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