Hettinger (hettingr@iglou.com)
Sun, 30 Nov 1997 18:16:42 +0100
Martin, you might want to try a different slant on "social". We've
kicked
it around a bit.
Martin Striz wrote:
<snip>
> Now about your example of social values. I don't understand what
> advantage
> that situation gave to the prey and predator. What possibilities and
> freedoms do they enjoy? What's so much better about it? Perhaps its
> this:
> Organisms living on their own have to spend every waking moment of their
> lives just trying to stay alive. The introduction of social values, by
> way
> of societies, gives living organisms greater freedom because they don't
> have
> to spend all their time 'just' trying to stay alive.
The value of the social level to the biological is the better ability to
stay alive. It is attained by anti-biological behavior--suppression of
the
need to fight every other organism for turf. It is maintained through
imitation and habit. No thought or consciousness is involved.
The function of the social level is hard to observe. It basically
doesn't
exist in our language or intellectual patterns. Its effects are
everywhere,
so pervasive that it is invisible.
To work in Pirsig's context, "social" has to have a different meaning
than
it has in almost any other source. It refers to the powerful tendency
of
humans to do exactly as other humans do. It is, as Doug,I think, put
it--the "how to do it" that formed animal societies and human societies
during most of pre-history. (The difference between animal and human,
even
during prehistory, was the (small, by our standards) effect of DQ that
eventually became the intellectual.) After the intellectual level came
into being, the "content" or "substance" of human social patterns
changed
(was mediated by intellectual patterns), but the way it functions--the
blind
imitation, the high quality perceived in conformity and recognition of
sameness, the value of belonging to group--are still very much with us.
matter plants animals human
/ \ / \ / \ / \ chaos? inorganic
biological social intellectual
> When people formed
> civilizations they had enough spare time to start asking
> religious/philosophical questions. This would make sense because then
> the
> freedom that intellectual values give us is the same pursuit of personal
> interests and individuality, but without the constraints of social
> bonds.
What Pirsig gives us is the concept that the freedom of the intellectual
level can only be attained inasmuch as it respects the structure of its
parent level, the social. The freedom from society that our particular
"new" society values, is a dangerous impossibility since it tends, in
its
ignorance, to destroy its own substance.
Martin, I think I see where you're coming from, but 'absolute potential
freedom' as a description of DQ implies to me randomness or chaos.
Total
freedom would be back to square one--pre-social, pre-biological,
pre-inorganic--with none of the advances in awareness that DQ has built.
(Thanks, Platt, for the "awareness" part. This is what I was missing.)
I do see, however, the gradual reconstruction of all the lower levels by
migration toward DQ as a progression that could eventually dissolve the
in-between levels as new, more direct, links are formed... much as
artificial intelligence (AI) is a pretty direct mediation of
intellectual
patterns on inorganic.
Push back. This is fun.
Maggie.
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