LS Re: Senses


Hugo Fjelsted Alroe (alroe@vip.cybercity.dk)
Wed, 1 Oct 1997 04:06:07 +0100


On your discussion of definition and the role of intellect (this also
relates to the mail 'The four levels' from James).

We humans are in the midst of a struggle - we ARE the struggle; becoming
self-conscious is sometimes painfull and always filled with tension. Doing
philosophy involves stepping outside, by way of the self-conscious
intellect, and looking at oneself, others and the rest of the world from
without. This is of course the essence of more than 2000 years of western
philosophy, and my point is that this we cannot avoid. Pirsigs dilemma is
that of lost innocence, the ramification inherent in eating the fruit of
knowledge, and fostering a new kind of being, - within ourselves.

In this inherited dilemma of philosophy humans have wavered between the two
pure paths, the way of the mystics - moving back into the pre-intellectual
being, and the way of pure reason - moving on to an all-intellectual being.
Doug has given some examples of Pirsig doing this, and pointed to the same
dilemma here on Lila Squad.
The first path may be open to some humans, but it involves loosing the
distinctive feature of our species, reason, and I am afraid reversing all
together (for now) the crossing of the border to the level of intellect
implies the fatal end of humans. (This reminds me of a somewhat unpleasant
story of a patient regressing due to a brain tumor, who became a valued
member and buddha-like ideal of a Hara Krishna group.)
The latter path is not open to us humans, despite the hopes and desires of
pure reason which has spawned and grown in philosophy and in the western
culture in general (eg. our morbid fascination with robots). We are
biological and social beings first and foremost, and no transcendence into
the world of reason can remove this our basic being. One characteristic of
reflective consciousness in particular leads into the illusion of pure
reason, and this is the selectiveness of reflection; the blinders of focus
is the strength and weakness of reason.

Niels Bohr often referred to a scene in a book by the danish 19th century
philosopher Poul Moeller (Møller på dansk) where a student reflects on his
own present doings, and then reflects on his own reflections of his doings,
and so on - getting dizzy by the neverending hierarchy of this intellectual
exercise. Pirsig did something like this in a grand scale, I belive,
reflecting upon the reflections involved in rational philosophy. This is of
course an entirely rational endeavour, but the curious and extremely
important concequence is a de-ranking of rationality in human society. By
stepping outside a second time and reflecting on human rationality, the
inherent limits and blind areas of rationality becomes evident, -
rationality exposes itself. Our rationality does not in general mislead us
by what it tells us, but by way of what it does not tell us, by way of what
gets hidden in the shadow of the tower of reason.

By way of reason we may argue that we should give feeling (or 'doing' - I
have no settled idea of this yet) more room in human life on earth, simply
because there is no path of pure reason open to us. We should not fool
ourself by overrating the power of Reason, and acknowleding this we must
work on our alternative means of reaching decisions, such as ethics. We are
biological and social beings first and foremost and, all through the
rational inquiry performed by Pirsig and ourselves, we need to bear this in
mind.

The above is an attempt to put these arguments in a general way. I believe
more formal arguments are needed to actually reshape our image of
rationality, - there are powerfull mechanism of Rationality at work in our
society, especially in the conglomerate of economics, technology and
science. I am trying to get somewhere on this, in the philosophy of science,
taking the notion of 'objectivity' up for a new analysis.
I am not sure if I have made this clear, but I see nothing wrong with the
notions of subject and object as tools of reason in analysing the world. We
may entertain a host of different analytical tools and find them more or
less usefull (though probing tools at this fundamental level is not at all
easy).
What has gone wrong is that these analytical tools have been transformed
into ontological substances, we have mistaken them for some things that can
be taken as 'building stones' of the world. It seems like we entered this
mistaken course somewhere after Aristotle under influence of monotheistic
religions. And by taking this idea to the extreme Descartes arrived at his
dualistic philosophy of mind and matter, a philosophy which rested firmly on
an religious belief. Later the amputated monistic branches of this
mind-matter dualism, materialism and idealism, has been highly influential
in western culture.
This just reiterates Pirsig, but there is plenty of work to be done in
exploring the role of rationality in society from a monistic philosophy like
metaphysics of Quality.

Hugo

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