Mary said to dmb: Anybody can attack SOM, and books have definitely been written; but, what are those books and what are those attacks? They are all expressed in terms of SOM. To attack SOM is for the subject (the attacker) to attack the object (SOM) which is perfectly valid as long as you realize that your still in SOM. To write Lila is for the subject (Pirsig) to create an object (a book) about the subject of SOM. Do you see what I mean here? I'll let Bo speak for himself, but I think this is what he has meant all along. I know it's what I mean when I say that the Intellectual Level is totally steeped in SOM and cannot transcend it. I am incapable of thinking of anything - of forming any thought about anything - that is not me (the subject) thinking about something (the object).
dmb says: Well, that only reminds me of another reason to reject the idea that SOM = intellect. One of the reasons such a metaphysical dualism could take hold in the West is the grammatical structure of Indo-European languages. That's why it will seem so easy to express everything in terms of subject and objects, especially plain statements like "Bob wrote a book" or "I saw a bird". In our language, sentences don't function properly without that structure. But that's just the structure of language, not of the universe. I'm also reminded of Husserl's phenomenology. They saw he was the last of the great Cartesians, which means SOMers. His aim was to discover the essential structures of consciousness through a careful examination from within consciousness, from a first-person point of view. He came up with a notion of "intentionality", which doesn't really have anything to do with our intensions in the sense of planned goals. He meant to say that consciousness always has a content, that the subject always has something in mind. In other words, there is never a subjective experience without an object of thought. Apparently, people got very excited about this and it was considered to be a remarkable insight. But I had been reading William James and Robert Pirsig and so I just scratched my head and thought, "well, of course not BECAUSE there is no subject, no thinker that is over and above the thinking itself". In other words, consciousness seems to always have a content because the content IS the consciousness. He was amazed to find that whenever there was one there was also the other, but actually they are not two different things. It's not that they always go together but rather it's a mistaken metaphysical assumption that makes him think there is a consciousness that HAS contents. Mary said: That's why it's impossible to discuss DQ; why Pirsig said (somewhere in Lila) that it was impossible to define Dynamic Quality because to formulate a metaphysics was a corruption of the metaphysics you are forming. I'll find the quote if needed. I think somebody posted it recently, in fact. I think it's what he means when he says the Intellectual Level is "thinking itself". Basically, I think the only way to transcend SOM is to enter some higher plain which I have never personally been to. dmb says: I know the quote. It's one of many that have to be dismissed to make Bo's theory work, which is yet another reason I can't go along with it. (So many reasons, so little time.) That quote is one of my favorites. But it's not clear how much SOM has to do with its meaning. As I understand it, the reason DQ can't be defined is just that definitions are static. To define is to set limits, to draw lines such that the defined thing can be distinguished from everything that it is NOT, the way "dry" means "not wet" for example. Now, without understanding the context of this quote, wherein Pirsig says that philosophical mystics throughout history "share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided". Since definitions are exactly that, verbal divisions or distinctions, and metaphysical systems are basically big sets of distinctions and definitions, the MOQ is a definition of the undefinable, which is a logical absurdity. I mean, this absurdity is not inherent to ANY metaphysical system but rather a direct result of this mystical stance. I mean, if you're metaphysical assumptions tell you that reality is fundamentally material or physical, then we don't run into this problem with definitions. I'd even go so far as to say that they is no way to properly understand that quote without first understanding what he's saying about philosophical mysticism. So it seems to me that Bo is not yet in a position to agree or disagree with the quote just because he doesn't know what it means, what the claim actually entails. This is not to say that you have to become a mystic or be a Buddha to get what he's saying, but the quote doesn't make much sense without understanding first what these mystics are saying. The intellectual dismantling of SOM that we see in James and Dewey get at this without using the word "mystic" but it amounts to the same thing. James's notion of "pure experience" is that cutting edge of experience prior to the conceptualizations we derive from it. Dewey talks about this in terms of "Had" experiences and distinguishes "Had" from "known". This fits with Pirsig's description of DQ as the cutting edge of experience. This pre-conceptual or pre-verbal cutting edge of reality is what you experience before intellect chops it into words and concepts. They are both phases of experience, functions within experience and the one follows so immediately upon the other that we usually don't even notice it. Thanks, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469226/direct/01/ 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/
