LS Re: On thrones and chairs


Diana McPartlin (diana@asiantravel.com)
Wed, 24 Sep 1997 04:19:18 +0100


Bodvar Skutvik wrote:

> I once said that seen from within, any level fills every nook of the
> universe. Life regards everything as leading up to its creation, sustaining
> or threatening it. So does Society. Everything dead (inorganic) or
> alive(organic) are positive or negative social values. Values from below
> are everything from minor nuisances to outright evil while the value of
> the Intellect is transparent or invisible. Dirt (Inorganic value) at wrong
> places diminishes my social status as a clean person. Burping at the table
> - or worse sounds - (organic value) may destroy it completely. Life's more
> powerful values, sex for instance must be directed into acceptable
> channels, the "evil" greed or lust given some acceptable social form.
>
> The same goes for the Intellect. Seen from its high ideas/rationality perch
> every bit of the universe is high or low intellectual value. We do our
> discussion from Intellect's premises, and my error was to try to decide how
> Society looks upon this and that ...in an Intellectual way. Its impossible;
> THE METAPHYSICS OF ... cannot be employed at other value levels other than
> the
> Intellect..only QUALITY can. Human beings - when focussed on the social -
> or lower - level are not Intellectual. When we start rationalizing why we
> like that and hate that we're back on the Intellectual level. This why it
> is so horribly important to get the distinction between the MOQ Intellect
> and the SOM "Mind" sorted out.
>
> Focus can only be in one level at a time, the transit is like the Gestalt
> Psychology two-profiles-or-one-vase perception: One moment you see one
> reality, the next another. I am sitting at the keyboard totally submerged
> in the Intellectual, but a headache or a feeling of hunger and in a flash I
> am a biological organism. I may even go all the way to the Inorganic when I
> die (excuse the social unacceptable morbidity). Reading LS mail is
> Intellect, but then I see a sarcastic remark and suddenly my (hurt) social
> self is in focus (Even the Internet and Lila Squad is a small pocket
> society with its rules and status).

This is a straightforward, all-encompassing way of interpreting values
so I'm inclined to go along with it.

One thing that's bothering me though is that Pirsig doesn't make it
clear that this is the interpretation he intends in Lila or in SODV. (Or
does he?)

In Lila, Pirsig gives dozens of examples of values. And every time he
phrases it as "this thing *is* social value, that thing *is*
inorganic..." It's hardly surprising that his readers then think that
discussing the values of various phenomena is a valid endeavour. We are
only doing what he did.

In SODV he says (p14) that social patterns are " the patterns of culture
that the anthropologist and sociologist study". Biological patterns are
"senses of touch, sight, hearing and taste."

If I understand what you (Bodvar) have said above correctly, patterns of
culture are also intellectual patterns, albeit low quality intellectual
patterns. The sense of touch is a high quality biological pattern and a
low quality intellectual pattern and a low quality social pattern
depending on the level that you are currently focussed on.

Is this what you mean?

Diana

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