[Andre]
I apologize for having been abrupt and terse Marsha when you asked
for full quotes plus explanation. A summary you will find in
Anthony's PhD. More stuff, as said, in LILA and the LC.
[Arlo]
In the years I've been here, this impasse has been insurmountable.
What I find interesting is that no other "level" is so assaulted, so
denigrated, so demonized, as the "awful" intellectual level. By
casting it as "just SOM", it is forever condemned as an "obstacle" in
an otherwise clean trajectory to harmony. Rather than expanding
rationality, as was Pirsig's goal, we have his highest moral (static)
level reduced to a incurable disease in the silent, harmonic
landscape of "inorganic-biological-social" bliss.
What has been interesting over the years is to witness the psychology
behind this. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, Bo's SOLAQI
seems to be an attempt to place "Western Culture" as the morally
dominant worldview, and reduces all non-Western worldviews to
"social". That is, "we" (Western cultures) are
"intellect", non-Western cultures are "just social", and so our
superiority can be claimed. Platt, on the ironic other hand, demands
intellect be reduced to SOM as a way of causally dismissing
"intellect" as broken or inferior, it becomes just another
"Boogeyman" in an otherwise tiring and cliche-ridden
anti-intellectual crusade. Marsha, although this will likely draw her
ire, has probably the best intentionality at dismissing "intellect"
to promote a more artistic, "merry prankster" approach to life. What
I think she misses is that it was the malady of a subject-object
primacy within intellect that the MOQ was attempting to cure, it is
an expansive philosophy, not a condemnational one. It is a uniting of
classical/romantic approaches, not a dismissal of one and a
championing of the other. The Buddha rests just as comfortably in
semiotics as in gardening.
But then my own psychology says intellect is worth saving, there is a
great value in it, and I think Pirsig's placement of it as the
highest moral order shows he feels similarly. The MOQ is not a "burn
down the universities" philosophy, it is a "reclaim the universities"
philosophy. It does not condemn "science", it saves it. It does not
dismiss rationality, but it expands its power. As DMB pointed out,
the goal of the MOQ is beautiful science and intelligent art. The SOL
view offers us neither.
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
