[Bo] Platt isn't bending in any angle, he's just digging up the passages where intellect's true role is revealed and this proves to be far from the usual "intelligence" fallacy.
[Arlo] Au contraire, Bo, Platt's motis operandi is to denigrate "intellect" at every turn. Reading his posts makes you wonder why Pirsig would even put such a faulty level (if it is JUST S/O) atop his MORAL hierarchy (adopting Platt's nonsenical caps). I understand it is nice to have a sympatico voice among the forum, but I think you and Platt have far different motives for offering "intellect" as just "SOM". For him, it provides the necessary excuse to bash the academy, bash evil perfessers, and rage against any "intellectual program" as if these are the greatest enemy we face. On top of this, what you loosely call "digging up passages", I'd say is taking passages completely out of context, AND ignoring other passages that refute this idea. Honestly, I have never seen the use of a person's words used to argue with the person more than I see Platt using Pirsig to refute Pirsig. While some philosophers have altered their views over time, and lend themselves to a debate about which "version" is correct, Pirsig is quite categorical in denying that the "intellectual level" is "just SOM". That you take his own passages out of context and use them to refute him, is just weird. [Bo] You will also remember that Academy was Phaedrus antagonist in ZAMM. [Arlo] No one has ever said the Academy is above criticism, certainly not me. But there is an ocean of difference between criticizing the Academy for being rigid, and condemning the Academy in whole. I'll also remind you that it was right-wing politicians that wanted to expel Pirsig from teaching before he ever got to Chicago, an irony that is Platt remains ideologically blinded to. [Bo] The term "mathematics" is surely an intellectual - academical - branch, but the point is that people could do all kind of calculations long before the intellectual level [Arlo] People did all kinds of calculations before the intellectual level assumed dominance. In the same way I think early social groups existed that were still dominated by biological patterns, I don't think its a "poof!" moment where suddenly an "intellectual level exists!" I think the growth of the intellectual level, and the eventual dominance of it over society, follows the evolution of man's contemplation of her/his mediating symbols as patterns on their own accord, and began manipulating/considering these symbols into greater and greater abstractions. Math is a fine example of this, where "2" went from iconic picto-glyph "count" marks to represent concrete iterations of, say, "cattle" to an abstract "number" manipulated independently of any cattle (or anything else) which paved the way for algebra, geometry and calculus. And this fits precisely with what Pirsig says about the intellectual level being the skilled manipulation of symbols with no corresponding reality. 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/
