Hey Bo,
I can see now that Pirsig's attack on S/O intellect in ZAMM got watered
down in his subsequent writings. There's nothing I can find in ZAMM
about intellect being a manipulation of symbols or any such
abstract description. Not at all. In ZAMM, intellect is S/O, period,
including
all its paradoxes, self-contradictions, infinite regresses, and
uncertainties.
It was against this giant of accepted but flawed intellectualism that Pirsig
found an Achilles heel. Small wonder, then, that when the Intellectual Level
appeared in the MOQ, again described as defective, you presumed it to be
the same derelict creature Pirsig exposed in ZAMM. The relief that exposure
brought to you was, now that I think about it, the same relief I felt. And,
I
too presumed the Intellectual Level in the MOQ was the S/O intellect
of ZAMM. There was no reason not to. But then others started questioning
the level and I got swept up in the tide. Silly me.
Now I agree with you that any other interpretation of the Intellectual Level
effectively kills the great body of Pirsig's work and deprives him of his
revolutionary discovery. For if the MOQ is simply another in a long line of
static intellectual patterns, what good is it? As Marsha said, a static
intellectual
pattern is like a score for a symphony. You can experience either one, but
there is a difference!
Best,
Platt
----- Original Message -----
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 4:27 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Empirical and Historical
Platt and All.
15 July:
I think I'll tell a story, you may have heard it many times, but it
conveys
my point better than all this tedious philosophy.
In it's time I was oppressed by SOM. Not that the I knew any SOM, it
was the mind/matter abyss, ourselves as isolated minds fundamentally
alienated from other minds and - most of all - from reality, only
approaching "it" by way of theories, that however close only were
subjective descriptions of an enigmatic something. I knew the
impossibility of this dualism, but it did not alleviate my oppression, it
merely looked like an added sadistic game that existence played with
us. Like a child playing with an ant not capable of understanding that
the huge shape above it was its tormentor. I wandered through
libraries and browsed through books in a search for some answer, but
no one seemed to care.I mean a lot of thinkers addressed the M/M
paradoxes and problems - the empiricists for instance - but only like
myself in a more abstract way, pointing to the strange "thing in itself"
world that we subjectively added qualities to. The more modern
philosophers that DMB promotes I hadn't heard of, but they would not
have helped, as said there's no lack of "criticisms" of the mind/matter
schism, but no one has identified it as a metaphysics - as a SOM -
entering history at a particular time. Not until Robert Pirsig. I came
across "Zen and the Art .." in 1978 and it turned my tables. Phaedrus
seemed even more oppressed than myself, but more capable of
challenging it, as said I believed it was the way existence was
"prefabricated". I need not repeat my first reading but even writing
about it some thirty years later it moves me. Well, as we know, he had
his Quality epiphany and by and by he made the in-out turn of the
reality "sock": The subject/object divide was no abyss but a Quality fall-
out. Most revealing for me was the section on how SOM emerged with
the old Greeks, it had not existed as SOM itself wants us to believe
"always, just for the Greeks to discover". Then, even more exciting,
the sketch of a new metaphysics, and now NOT in the classic sense of
just another theory about an enigmatic reality, but in the sense of
CLASSIC being degraded to a part of the new world order. It was this
that meant revolution for me. In ZAMM (translated to moqish) DQ only
had SOM as its static component, but it was also called INTELLECT!!
When LILA arrived the SQ range had increased to four levels and that
was fine with me, but SOM no longer was the intellectual level, and
that destroyed its value. Intellect had again become the dreaded
"mind" where ideas - theories - are produced about the enigmatic
Quality Reality. The MOQ itself just another mind-intellectual idea-
theory Phaedrus giant step for humankind had been reversed.
Hope this conveys my frustration.
Bodvar
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