Hi Marsha,
You mentioned that the only opinion you cared about with regard to Bo's
SOL interpretation is RMP's. In fact, as Bo well knows, Pirsig did
"rule" on the issue and not at all favorably to Bo's interpretation.
The following is from Lila's Child:
Bodvar:
Gentlemen! I must hasten to say that “rationality” wasn’t meant to
replace static patterns
of intellect as the official name in the MOQ. The reason for
introducing the term stems
from a thread in the early days of TLS when the evasiveness of this
value dimension
dawned upon us. At first it was pinned down as thinking, mental
activity, consciousness,
“mind” for short, but this really screws things up. The MOQ rejects
mind/matter as the
fundamental division of reality so defining intellect as mind means
lapsing back to the
SOM.
I long stuck to “Symbolic Language” (and still think it’s a good
definition), but someone
caught the idea that intellect can be seen as rational thinking. Long
before the Lila Squad
days, it had puzzled me greatly that Subject/Object metaphysics maybe
viewed as the
intellectual level of MOQ! I even raised the question in a letter to
Pirsig, but he did not
respond. [88]
Pirsig responded with this annotation:
88. I don’t remember not responding, so it must have been an
oversight. I don’t think the subject-object level is identical with
intellect. Intellect is simply thinking, and one can think without
involving the subject-object relationship. Computer language is not
primarily structured into subjects and objects. Algebra has no subjects
and objects.
Case closed? Of course Bo is welcome to come up with his own
philosophy, but a subject/object level is clearly not what Pirsig means
by the intellectual level in his MOQ. What do you think?
Best,
Steve
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