[Mary] Would it be correct to summarize your view of the levels this way? Inorganic Biological Intellectual Social
After reading a week's worth of posts at one go, that is what I get. Your thoughts? [Krimel] My thoughts on this matter alone are enough to make me a heretic in some eyes. I think Pirsig was just messing around with his new analytical tools. After showing the importance of his new term (Quality, SQ and DQ) he was taking them out for a spin to see where they would take him. I think the level system is just arbitrary. One could carve the world up in any number of ways. We could say there are only two levels, big and small or white and not white. It is taxonomy not metaphysics. It is a way of carving the continuous dynamic flow of experience into discrete units. Even in this I think it fails. The inorganic and biological levels are not even discrete. Organic chemistry is special case of plain old chemistry and even though it forms the foundation of biology it is not in Pirsig's biological level. Social behavior is a well established evolutionary survival strategy common to many biological species. It is a pattern for insuring biological survival. By limiting it to human, Pirsig undermines and dismisses critical aspects of social patterns. For example, the failure to acknowledge that human social patterns do not deviate significantly for the patterns of social interaction in most other primate species. Claiming that intellectual patterns only begin in humans 2500 years ago is so silly I despair that anyone would find it worthy of comment. That said, I don't have a problem with the Pirsig's ordering of the levels. After all it is a system lifted from the pages of nearly any college catalog so it does have its uses. 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/
