Mati, Ant and y'all:
Mati said:
Here is a problem. You are sitting in a doctoral committee meeting to review
your research proposal. You want to use MOQ as possible basis for a
research methodology to understand and pose a way to better approach your
research problem. ...Now after an hour of brain grinding questions they drop
this one. "Well can you define intellect in such a way that clearly
delineates social from intellect values and give us a clear indication or
example as to how you are propose to delineate the interview data you
collect as social or intellect based values?" That was the problem and
still is.
dmb says:
Thanks to you and Ant for helping me think these things through. It's likely
that I'll find myself in a situation like the one you're described here.
Better start thinking about it now, eh? As I see it, the problem of how to
draw a clear line between the social and intellectual levels is complicated
by one of the central findings in MOQ's diagnosis of the 20th century. I
mean, it seems that Pirsig's examples from that recent history are meant to
show that the the century's conflicts were driven by the conflicts between
the top two levels and, ironically or paradoxically, that the problems
derive from the fact that this distinction is not recognized. In order to
assert this distinction, then, a Ph.D. candidate would have to cut across
the grain of 100 years of intellectual history. He or she would have to say,
in effect, that many respected thinkers were confused on this point.
Margaret Meade is used as an example of one of the intellectuals who sided
with biology against social values, but we've been reading Freud lately and
the same sort of attitude can be seen there. I suppose everybody knows that
Freud's ideas are still very much with us, not least of all among
intellectuals.
Again, this problem is complicated by the fact that the leading thinkers of
our time can't help us. In fact, in making this distinction we'd have to
ignore or even defy many of them. I forget how the line goes exactly, but
Pirsig says that 20th thinkers, instead of looking at the social level moral
codes with gratitude for all they has accomplished in the evolutionary
struggle to control biology, saw these traditions as oppressive, arbitrary,
and thoroughly worthy of destruction. They attacked social level morality
for all kinds of reasons, some of them were good reasons. The rigidly
moralistic Victorian culture Pirsig describes in Lila so well is pretty much
the world Freud lived in and reacted against.
You see what I'm getting at? We can't very well look to these scholars for
support in making the distinction because drawing that line is squarely
aimed at correcting THEIR failure. I'm guessing that we can use that same
line to flatter them insofar as intellect is defined as the capacity to
criticize these inherited forms. You know, we could start way back in
Ancient Greece and still make that work pretty well, when thinkers dared to
question the existence of the gods and public opinion in general.
It occurs to me now that Ken Wilber faced a similar problem in creating his
big picture. He's been able to find support among the thinkers of the West
by using each as a piece of the puzzle. Maybe its just because Freud is
fresh in my mind, but it seems he could be used to support the
biological-social distinction of the MOQ and it wouldn't be too much of a
trick to show that psychoanalytic theory can be distinquished from the
social forms it examines.
Gotta run. Thanks for the thoughts. Keep them coming.
dmb
Mark:
The intellectual level has always seemed so very simple to me.
May i explain please?
Imagine a time in the course of value evolution when there is no
intellectual level?
Mati:
I have a thousand times.
Mark:
Evolution is dominated by social patterns, and these patterns are those of
imitated behaviour and the celebrity. The celebrity is the best human -
those with arte.
The arte humans are the ones who get to choose what language is transmitted
from one generation to the next. For them, the Good is Arte, and language
reflects this.
Duality already exists at this time: Duality between those who are arte,
and those who are not. A better term may be, 'differentiation;' those with
arte are differentiated from those of no or little arte.
At some unspecified time, geometric patterns are described for the first
time in language.
Geometric patterns are perfect examples of the Truth.
If you want to build a Good wall, that wall will be the best if True to
Geometry.
This challenges arte, because Truth is so regardless of how little arte
anyone has.
What good is it to have all that social arte when an ugly, weak little
bastard can build a wall in accordance with geometry which protects
everyone
-
even those without social arte - from the enemy?
Once the concept of truth is worshiped in its own right language isn't
dominated by social arte privilages anymore, and so the intellectual level
begins to break free from the social level: Abstract symbolic
manipulation.
Structures of all kinds from music to poetry now have a new dimmension -
new differentiations which begin to replace the old social differentiations
of the Good.
Mati: Very interesting stuff of which I really enjoyed. Are you saying that
ones capacity to utilize truth is the basis for intellect? If so then how
would you answer the doctoral committee question? Take care. Mati
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