Greetings, Mary --
We haven't corresponded before, but I've read your posts and am impressed with some of the insights you bring to this forum. FYI I'm not a "levelist", and the Quality hierarchy is not my cup of tea. You might call me a "fundamentalist", if this label can be applied to metaphysics.
If you will indulge me, I'd like to focus on what you've been saying about epistemology -- specifically, the way you view the subject in an objective world.
On 4/4 you said:
Here's the deal. Everything I can think of, every single thought I am capable of having, is completely MIRED in Subject-Object Logic. I have never had a single thought in which I was not a discrete entity in the thought relationship. If I am thinking about any kind of mathematics, symbolic logic, or a computer program, everything about those thoughts is discrete. X+2=5. Solve for X. I am doing the solving for the quantity X which is outside of myself. For that matter, so is the 2 and the 5 and the equals sign. I am not at "one" with that mathematical equation. It represents discrete entities from "my" perspective, where I am also a discrete entity.
You stress a fundamental concept that is alien to the MoQ and, in my opinion, is lost on the Pirsigians; namely, the "discreteness" of existence. What you have called "Subject-Object Logic" (perhaps in deference to Bodvar) I call "differentiation". It applies not only to subjects and objects but to the contrariety of time and space, being and nothingness, beginning and ending, good and evil, morality and immorality, and just about every existential process we experience.
I challenge you to think of any "thing" or "situation" where this is not true. I can conceptualize all sorts of things. I can even imagine what it would be like to achieve Eastern Nirvana - but who is doing the conceptualizing? Who just achieved Nirvana? Me. I am totally mired in my static patterns. I have hands and feet and my feet differ from the floor - they are not at one with the floor. I am discrete, and discretion is the better part of valor (sorry, couldn't resist). We are all totally mired in Subject-Object Logic for every minute of every day everywhere.
This is a fundamental principle that gets lost in the "patterns" approach to epistemology which, in fact, is designed to eliminate subjects and objects. As a consequence, the MoQ places no value in the integrity of the 'self'. Instead, Selfness and Otherness are simply "interacting patterns" of Quality, while the cognitive aspects of subjectivity -- awareness, experience, feelings, intellect, conceptualization, etc. -- are relegated to some undefined cosmic stratum, leading to endless debate as to where they fit in the Quality hierarchy.
Every metaphysics the West is founded upon, everything we think we believe, everything we do is based on this fundamental principle of DISCRETENESS. I am different from you. I am "in" the world, a part of the world, but I am not the world. This we believe in the West and all other Western metaphysics takes this as a given. It is not questioned. It is not examined. The enormity of Zen and then Lila was when this one small voice, Robert M. Pirsig, sat at a typewriter and wrote down the idea that the Universe as we know it is not composed of subjects and objects - discrete things - but is composed of value and Quality. Wow! If that puts Eastern Metaphysics outside the bounds of the Intellectual Level, then so be it. So what? I say that rather than "demoting" Eastern Buddhism or whatever to a "lower" level, what this implies is that the MoQ is on the SAME level as any Eastern Metaphysics that says essentially the same thing, and that BOTH are ABOVE the Intellectual Level. Is there something wrong with that? Is it a heresy in this group to admit that maybe Pirsig isn't the only one that's ever had this idea?
You're absolutely right, Mary, and I suspect your assertion will be vindicated here in short order. However, my problem is with the concept of Quality (Value) in the absence of the subjective self. If RMP has launched anything "new" is the annals of philosophy, it must lie in this concept.
The thing that makes the whole construct of the MoQ WORK is the idea that sets of patterns only achieve the status of a Level when they cease to support the level they are in and go off to meet ends of their own. Brilliant! So how does that tell us what the Intellectual Level is? Is it thinking itself? The act of having thoughts. Thoughts are used to enhance and support the Biological and Social AND Intellectual Levels. Doesn't seem to meet the criteria unless you can say that thinking itself is now going off to meet ends of its own. Maybe it is, but hasn't it always? If the levels evolved one from the other in the order presented, then you'd be hard pressed to argue that "thinking itself" is the Intellectual Level. We've been doing it all along. Maybe it has more to do with a way of thinking. ... Society is built on discreteness. The idea that we are unique individuals who come together to achieve common goals that may or may not support biological survival. To argue that this differs in the East is a fallacy. They too are descended from the same organisms in the mud as we and do not have different brain wiring than theirs. The teachings of Buddha did not arise from the Biological Level, but were a reaction - an extremely insightful reaction - to the fundamental belief in discreteness that exists in all people everywhere. If everyone in the East innately "gets" the idea that we are all one, all "Quality", then why did the Buddha have to suffer so much to convince people? Why doesn't everybody over there agree? Why don't we?
Excellent reasoning, Mary. I wonder what explanations it will elicit from the Pirsig acolytes.
Thanks for your contributions, Mary, and welcome aboard! Ham 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/md/archives.html
