John said:
In my Q'm" system, the only patterns that can be disharmonius with reality or
nature are intellectual patterns.
Arlo replied:
So inorganic, biological and social patterns are never able to be disharmonious
with nature?
dmb says:
There is that bit about being an enemy of nature rather than a part of it so I
think John has a point. On the other hand it's pretty clear that social level
values impose a certain discipline upon the demands of our biological instincts
and appetites toward sex and aggression. This sets up a situation where we have
to fight against our own nature or at least redirect its energy into socially
acceptable channels. This sort of leads to the intellectual forms of alienation
from ourselves, particularly the way SOM tells us that there is no way to
bridge the gap between objective reality and our subjective understanding of
it.
Maybe it would be useful to think about this in terms of our evolutionary
development. As I see it, our distant primate ancestors lived and evolved over
hundreds of thousands of years and really our biological evolution goes all the
way back to the begging of life. The creatures that we would someday become
were able to function successfully without the benefit of social or
intellectual patterns, without the benefit of anything like self-consciousness
or deliberation. In a sense, we all have a billion years of experience at
operating in the world. These highly developed instincts are a kind of world
wisdom built right into the body. Even in the case of language, it's easy to
imagine how it evolved without any deliberate effort on the part of language
users and how it might have grown out of gestures and bird-song type
vocalizations. Then, once self-consciousness and deliberate, rational thought
comes along, we believe this is the way we operate in the world. We see this
attit
ude especially in the social level doctrine of original sin and in
intellectual level Freudian doctrine that we are primarily driven by the dark
instincts toward sex and aggression. These bookends both tell us that our
instincts are not to be trusted, deserve to be suppressed and despised. But
this is also a way of dismissing a billion years of progress, a billion years
of success and a billion years worth of intelligence. All that still operates
and yet it is either ignored or demonized. This is almost literally a case of
being cut off from yourself, alienated from yourself, not in harmony with
yourself.
That's how I like to frame the Pirsigian-Jamesian desire to reintegrate the
affective domain into our forms of rationality. Maybe that period of alienation
was a necessary stepping stone and so it's not just a dumb mistake. But I think
they're saying it would be a mistake to continue with that split in ourselves
and that the time has arrived to be whole again.
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