From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 21:15:06 BST
>dmb says to Sam:
>The first three are social level values? You mean ethics, values and
>morals?
>The idea that these are not invited to the intellectual party is exactly
>Pirsig's criticism of SOM and he says instead that they exist at every
>level
>of reality. Everything. Even the chair and even the bum of the philosopher
>who sits upon it.
The moral value patterns that we call intellectual are not the same patterns
of the other levels, though of course they are all moral patterns of value
and as such try to make themselves stronger. Ethics I would say is an
intellectual concept that dosn't exist at levels one through three, and is
not equivelent at all to morality, or even the "morals" that we associate
with society. Using ethics there with morals and values indicates that you
are thinking of social moral codes only, which are not the same as the
Morality that exists at every level. They are all made of that Morality
though - the social moral patterns (not ethical codes, but moral patterns)
are morality just like the intellectual and inorganic patterns are morality,
and have the same reality to them.
So I think Pirsig says that intellectual patterns have a reliance on lower
patterns, but not that lower patterns "exist at every level" and are invited
to the intellectual party. Patterns exist at their level only. The lower
levels may be the caterers and valets at the intellectual party, but that's
it, they are otherwise ignored.
Johnny
>From: David Buchanan <DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org>
>Reply-To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>To: "'moq_discuss@moq.org'" <moq_discuss@moq.org>
>Subject: RE: MD The Eudaimonic MoQ
>Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2003 12:26:30 -0600
>
>Sam and all:
>
>dmb was asleep at the wheel:
>: By the way, my use of the phrase "mere abstraction" is not intended to
>: insult the power of abstraction but to dispell the notion that
>intellectual
>: values, properly understood, are much more than high cognitive function,
>: that ethics, values, morals, aesthetics and all kinds of warm, fuzzy,
>human
>: things are included there too. Its a denial of Sam's Spockish vision of
>the
>: 4th level.
>
>Sam saved him from driving off a cliff:
>I'm not sure I follow the sense of what you are saying here - the last
>sentence seems to contradict
>the first. (A typo 'affirm' rather than 'dispell'?).
>
>dmb says:
>Thanks. That's right. I'm saying that Pirsig's 4th level is not Spockish. I
>should have said "assert" where I said "dispell".
>
>Sam continued:
>But if you *are* saying that the fourth level includes "ethics, values,
>morals, aesthetics and all
>kinds of warm, fuzzy, human things" - ie all the things I think of as
>'eudaimonic' - then our
>disagreements are much less than I thought.
>
>dmb says:
>That's right. We only disagree about the nature of Pirsig's 4th level. You
>want to de-Spockify it and I'm saying that this is misguided because Pirsig
>has already done that. Its one of his main points in both ZMM and LILA.
>From
>the road side motorcycle repair shops of middle America and Ponciare's
>coffeehouse to the conference of physicists at Copenhagen, Pirsig casts
>even
>cold steele, advanced mathematics and the hard sciences as playgrounds for
>artists. And then there's the MOQ itself, which insists already that
>"amoral
>scientific materialism" be replaced. The human qualities that Wilber
>describes as features of the higher levels, I think, is quite consistent
>with what Pirsig is saying too. (I posted 8 stages yesterday.) There you'll
>notice that the Spockish kind of intellect is #5, the very first stage
>after
>the social level has been transcended. The sterotype is not completely
>without foundation, but it only applies to "freshmen" intellectuals and,
>more to the point, does not reflect the MOQ's 4th level accurately. It more
>precisely describes SOM, Pirsig's great white whale.
>
>Sam continued:
>Which would be nice. We can then spend time arguing over whether
>'intellect'
>is the best word to
>describe all those things, as opposed to 'eudaimonic' or something else. I
>can't get away from the
>suspicion that you *don't* think that though. Particularly as I'm not sure
>that the first three of
>those things listed actually are fourth level - they seem like the third
>level to me.
>
>
>
>MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
>Mail Archives:
>Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
>Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
>MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
>
>To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
>http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
>
_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jun 02 2003 - 21:18:39 BST