From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Tue Mar 18 2003 - 04:20:34 GMT
Wim,
Some clarification to the following:
> Scott first distinguishes between 'thinking about thinking' and 'thinking
> about (anything)'. Using Barfield as support, he equates the last with the
> intellectual level AND with 'Subject-Object Thinking'. Before that, there
> were 'ideas ... felt as coming from the gods, not [as] something
internal',
> i.e. (in my rewording:) 'thinking' was projected outside the subject.
> Barfield dates this change around 500 BC.
>(skip)
> Scott's vision contradicts Pirsig's clarification from 'Lila's Child'.
> Countering Bodvar's identification of SOM and intellectual level, he
wrote:
> 'I don't think the subject-object level is identical with intellect.
> Intellect is simply thinking, and one can think without involving the
> subject-object relationship. Computer language is not primarily structured
> into subjects and objects. Algebra has no subjects and objects.'
I've said several times that mathematics is interesting because it is not
subject-object oriented. I got this idea from Barfield, by the way, in his
book "What Coleridge Thought" (1971).
> I suggested in earlier postings, that early man (homo sapiens, between
> 50.000 - 100.000 years ago and around 500 BC) may have only thought in
terms
> of subject-subject relationships. Gods inspiring or even embodying ideas,
> were other subjects to them. Everything they experienced was felt to be
> animate, something to relate with from inside to inside, rather than to
> perceive from the outside. They used symbols (e.g. paintings of the
animals
> they hunted or figurines of fertile women), probably in rituals which
> conveyed meaning to them and not only latched 'human associations'
(Platt's
> catch phrase for the social level of 20 Feb 2003 10:07:15 -0500).
> I suppose that Barfield (whom I didn't read myself) didn't write in the
> context of the MoQ (and may even not know about it).
Barfield's book "Saving the Appearances" came out in 1958.
> So whatever he writes
> can hardly be used as supporting an interpretation of what Pirsig wrote
> about how to distinguish the social and the intellectual level. From what
> Scott wrote about Barfield's ideas, I gather that Barfield's distinctions
> between different types of thinking can best be aligned with Pirsig's
ideas
> by understanding them as (very interesting and important) subdivisions of
> the intellectual level.
My position is that Barfield has a much more thorough analysis of the
difference between what Pirsig calls the social and intellectual levels than
Pirsig does, and that without this analysis one cannot fully understand it.
Hence the debates on this forum on what the intellectual level is. As I
said, Barfield nailed this, while Pirsig is less definitive.
I should add that I am not saying that there was no thinking until about 500
BC. Rather, what happened then was starting to regard thinking as "my"
thinking, and hence the birth of the subject and of the object.
So, yes, there was always an intellectual level ("In the beginning was the
Word"), but it only began to center itself in the individual human being
around 500 BC.
- Scott
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