From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Mon Mar 08 2004 - 01:35:01 GMT
David MOREY asked:
So how seriously do we need to take the value
of the intellectual level. How are we going to get more
people on this level and off of the dominance of the social
level. I think that mal-functioning aspects of the social level,
such as inequality and the failure to reduce working hours,
is making progress currently impossible.
dmb says:
How seriously should we take it? Pirsig says the social/intellectual
conflict is the theme song of the 20th century. He says its an earthquake, a
hurricane, a period of evolutionary transformation. I take it pretty darn
seriously. As I understand it, the main problem with effecting a smooth and
successful transition to an intellectual culture is not just resistance from
the social level. The problem is with intellect itself. (SOM) In its
historical struggle to free itself from society, intellect has gone past the
independence it sought and become disconnected, disassociated and divorced
from its parent level. Scientific materialism has gutted the world and left
it devoid of spirit, morals and the like. The social level is responding to
SOM in an especially violent and hostile manner because this flaw declares
so much of the social level to less than real. There is bound to be conflict
in any transitional period, but SOM's attack on the social level has given
rise to fundamentalism, fascism and other forms of the reactionary right.
Ken Wilber:
"When only objective its with simple location are really real, then the
mind itself is a tabula that is totally rasa, utterly blank until filled
with PICTURES or representations of the only reality there was: objective
and sensory nature. There is no real SPIRIT, there is no real MIND, there
is only empirical nature. No superconsciousness, no self-conscious, only
subconscious processes scurrying endlessly, meaninglessly, in a vast system
of interwoven its." A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYTHING pages 264-5.
Ken Wilber:
"Only objective its with simple location were really real. The entire
interior
dimensions were completely gutted, and the ghost in the machine began its
sad and lonely modern moan, a haunting cry made all the more plaintive in
that it had not even the power to attract attention."
Pirsig says essentially the same thing:
"the metaphysics of substance...regards both society and intellect
(subjects) as possessions of biology (objects). It says society AND
intellect don't have substance and therefore can't be real. It says biology
is where reality stops. Society and intellect are ephemeral POSSESSIONS of
reality." (Lila page 265.)
Pirsig:
"A scientific, intellectual culture had become a culture of million of
isolated people living and dying in little cells of psychic solitary
confinement, unable to talk to one another, really, and unable to judge one
another because scientifically speaking it is impossible to do so." (Lila
page 283)
dmb says:
It seems that Pirsig and Wilber both agree about the problem. And the way to
solve that problem is to repair the flawed intellect. If our culture is
going to be dominated and guided by intellectual values, then SOM must first
be replaced. The independence of the intellect doesn't require that relegate
all spiritual and moral matters to the social level. The birth of intellect
does not mean we MUST divorce science from spirituality or morality from
philosophy. This is only a symptom of the metaphysics of substance, not
intellect itself. And its not accident that Pirsig and Wilber agree that the
solution lies in a philosophical mysticism, because it successfully
dissolves the SOM problem.
Ken Wilber:
"I always found it fascinating that both William James and Bertrand Russell
agreed on this crucial issue, the nonduality of subject and object in the
primacy of immediate awareness. Now we have to be very careful with these
terms (radical empirisism) because "empiricism" doesn't mean just sensory
experience, it means experience itself, in any domain. It means immediate
prehension, immediate experience, immediate awareness. And William James set
out to demonstrate that this pure nondual immediateness is the "basic stuff"
of reality, so to speak, and that both subject and object, mind and body,
inside and outside, are derivative or secondary. They come later, they come
after, the primacy of immediateness, which is the ultimate reality, as it
were. Of course, virtually all of the mystical or contemplative sages had
been saying this for a few millennia, but James to his eternal credit
brought it crashing into the mainstream ... and convinced Russell of its
truth in the process. Russell had a rather tin understanding of the fact
that the great comtemplative philosopher-sages - from Plotinus to Augustine
to Eckhart (Pirsig's favorite mystic) to Schelling to Schopenhauer to
Emerson - had already solved or dissovled this subject/object duality."
Pirsig:
"Some of the most honored philsophers in history have been mystics:
Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a
common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language;
that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality
is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of
dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues
that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were
normally resistant to it,.." LILA (ch 5)
Thanks for your time,
DMB
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to George Washington, January 4, 1786:
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but
laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human
mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries
are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the
change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with
the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which
fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen
of their barbarous ancestors."
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