Krimel, I hope you enjoyed *Pirates*. -----Keith, Tue 2007-05-29 00:55----- Pirsig likewise identifies everything as originating from primordial Quality. Is Quality then not relevant to the Metaphysics of Quality? Is Spirit not relevant to the Phenomenology of Spirit? Shall we criticize Pirsig for nominating Quality as the One in his monism?
-----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ I do not regard Quality as referring to anything especially "primordial" and I certainly do not equate it with Spirit. But that's just me. ----- I'm not necessarily saying that Quality=Spirit, I'm just saying that they play similar roles in Pirsig's and Wilber's respective philosophies. You claimed that Spirit was not especially relevant to Wilber's system and then criticized him for working out a "system that reveals Spirit" when he's already postulated it as the ground of being. I responded that Quality plays the same role in the MOQ. Pirsig postulates it as reality itself (forget the word "primordial" if you don't like it, but Pirsig uses it in Chapter 30 of *Lila*: "...if Quality were the primordial source of all our understanding ..."), and then proceeds to reason about quality, value, the Good, betterness. If that's on OK metaphysical chess move for Pirsig, then I don't see how Wilber should be criticized for substituting "Spirit" in the same spot. -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ I understand the distinction between stages and states. A state is a current of previously experienced instance of consciousness. A stage is an ongoing condition of awareness. But what Wilber is doing in essence is trying to quantify those stages saying some are higher or lower. But what criterion would you use to say that the Pope is at a higher or lower stage of spirituality than the Dali Lama or that the Dali Lama is at a higher or lower stage than Ken Wilber? ------ >From your previous posts, it seemed like you were consistently confusing the two, since you keep insisting that Wilber thinks that conscious states of dreaming are somehow higher than waking, which I believe to be a wholly inaccurate characterization. With respect to your question on higher levels of spirituality: mu. Wilber does invoke an ordering of developmental stages, but those have to do with various human faculties, not strictly with "spirituality". For those correlated developmental phases Wilber invokes, he would point to the specific criteria that the theorists he builds his work on use to identify their respective stages of human development. For cognitive development, that would primarily be Piaget, for worldview/values, Beck, etc. It's an interesting question to me what constitutes an appropriate set of general criteria for identifying evolutionary advancement. Wilber identifies: "transcending & including", "greater depth & less span", "differentiation & integration", "increasing relative autonomy", "increasing telos", among others (*SES*, Chapter 2). In *The Phenomenon of Science*, Valentin Turchin identifies the "metasystem transition" as the core concept of his control-system-oriented philosophy. Pirsig points to various relationships between the levels that characterize similar hierarchic relationships: control with dependence, independent rules & descriptions, greater degrees of freedom, etc. I think all of these distinctions are very useful in determining what constitutes an evolutionary *advance* vs. what just constitutes change, which could be relatively worse than what came before. -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ As for the spirit as god... Frankly I would have more respect for Wilber if we actually said something like that. ------ Well, he pretty much does make that identification. It's just not God in the traditional, mythic-religious sense of some transcendent, omniscient, being up there in heaven. It's God as ground of being--an all-pervading Good. -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ Wilber thinks that all truth should be honored to be included in his integral system. I am not convinced that this is much of an honor. ----- Ha! Funny one. -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ I don't see Wilber wanting to do what dualists do. He is all about the non-dual. The problem I have is that as antireductionist as he claims to be; for Wilber it all reduces to Spirit. ----- See David Buchanan's excellent response in this same thread regarding Wilber's anti-reductionist program. Like Pirsig, Wilber's a certainly a dualist when it comes to manifest reality (it's Static/Dynamic vs. interior/exterior), but both are transcendental monists (Quality vs. Spirit). Just because the Tao is one doesn't mean that Yin (or Yang) "reduces" to the Tao. -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ For Wilber Spirit may equal consciousness but I do not see Quality = Reality in the same way. Pirsig, at least to me, is hazy on this. I think Pirsig is talking almost exclusively about each individual's experience of reality and not external things-in-themselves. He is claiming that experience results in the perception of subjects and objects but just exactly what constitutes and experience and who can have them is a bit vague. ------ Agreed on Pirsig's vagueness with respect to experience. I'd be interested in exploring that further. It's a big woolly phenomenological brainbuster. -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ My point was that Wilber co-opts the whole body of Piagetian research into his system ignoring the fact that Piaget's system point in a completely different direction than Wilber's own. ----- I don't see how Piaget's system contradicts Wilber's. As David Buchanan points out, Piaget's system stops at rationality, and that's where Wilber tacks on some new levels. I don't know how much evidence there is for those additional levels, but it doesn't seem to be contraindicated in Piaget's work, just not observed by him. -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ But Pirsig's system actually does aid our understanding of particle physics. In the field as in any other we ultimate come down to studying things that change and things that remain constant; matter and energy. In other words Pirsig is consistent with particle physics and does not run off chasing after imaginary Spirits. ----- I don't think the ideas of "change" and "staying the same" needed any help from Pirsig. While Static & Dynamic are useful cross-level unifying concepts, they don't add anything to quantum mechanics or particle physics that wasn't there already. I don't see Pirsig pumping out any Feynman path integrals or engaging in solving problems in matrix mechanics. With regard to "imaginary Spirits": again, strawman. See my previous post with respect to his use of the term "spiritual". -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ I don't even think he has made a good case that there is a fallacy. ----- I'll let David's elaboration of Wilber's pre/trans fallacy stand in here. -----Keith, Tue 2007-05-29 00:55----- Similarly, Pirsig, in his own version of the pre-/trans- fallacy, rails against hippies who worship biological Quality because it's not Social Quality, when they should be seeking Intellectual Quality instead. -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ I avoid discussing this. I don't think Pirsig is as on target here as he is elsewhere. ----- I've had misgivings about Pirsig's analysis of the hippies, too, but I think Pirsig's view is reinforced and clarified by Wilber's pre/trans fallacy and his use of the developmental levels of Spiral Dynamics to explain the movement in *Boomeritis*. -----Keith, Tue 2007-05-29 00:55----- No, no, no--look again: Wilber does not claim sleep is a higher state of consciousness than waking. If he were claiming that then I would agree with you and not give Wilber any credence. However, Wilber's saying something different: *States* of consciousness are not higher than one another. In his system, they are just different ways of experiencing. That's why they are shown horizontally. Developmental *stages* are arranged vertically. *States* and *stages* are two very different things in Wilber's system. -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ Look at your color coded consciousness chart. Wilber identifies those states with gross, subtle and non-dual consciousness. ----- I am looking at the chart. Yes, he does associate gross consciousness with waking, subtle consciousness with dreaming, causal consciousness with dreamless sleep, and non-dual consciousness with union. However, those *states* he identifies are arranged horizontally to show that one is not higher than the other. They are different ways of experiencing the world that one can apparently attain through meditation or other consciousness-altering means. Only the *stages* of development, which represent evolutionary advancement in the structure of consciousness, are arranged vertically, to show that higher one is the outgrowth of a lower one. I think these stages of development provide a very useful framework when we start talking about conflicts of society vs. intellect and the value wars of red states and blue states, fundamentalists and pluralists, etc. -----Keith, Tue 2007-05-29 00:55----- Zen minus the mythos, yes, but not minus the mysticism. The MOQ is fundamentally mystic philosophy since it refuses to define its central term. -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ The Tao te Ching does recommend quieting the mind. There are mystical Taoists but I do not find that to be the primary focus of Taoism. ----- I didn't argue that Taoism was primarily focused on mysticism. I just saying, countering your prior claim that the MOQ was "Zen minus the mysticism" by saying that the MOQ may be Zen minus the mythology, but it's not Zen minus the mysticism, since the MOQ embraces mysticism in its refusal to define the central term of its monism. -----Keith, Tue 2007-05-29 00:55----- Pirsig makes some great distinctions, yes. I think, though, that the distinctions Wilber makes in co-opting developmental systems like Spiral Dynamics only enhances the clarity of the ethico-evolutionary levels Pirsig offers. Breaking these broad levels down with finer-grained divisions such as those offered by Wilber or by Turchin can only help sort out the "matter-of-fact evolutionary relationship" between factors under examination to better reason out our moral judgments. -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ Spiral dynamics is the color coding right? That is hinky at best. Like Piaget there is nothing to suggest the Greave's who work is the foundation of Spiral Dynamics would want to be associated with Wilber at all. One of his students seems to be on board but the other originator of the idea seems to be moving as far away as he can get. ----- Yes, Spiral Dynamics is Don Beck's take on Clare Graves' developmental system. Graves is dead and Beck and Wilber have parted ways on interpretations, but I don't see that as an indictment of either Graves', Beck's, or Wilber's work. David and I find simply find many of the distinctions that Wilber has synthesized is his work very useful aids to thinking about Pirsig's system and about the world. Both Pirsig & Wilber present metaphysical monisms incorporating evolutionary insights. I think there's much to be learned from comparing & contrasting them. -----Krimel, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 17:29------ Keith, look sorry I have written this in haste. I have a day job and tonight I am supposed to go see Pirates. So I wanted to get out an answer but I may have rushed it. This was a long one... ----- Yeah, my day job gets in the way of my philosophic frivolity, too. So does sleep! Yawn, Keith 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/
