Bodvar Skutvik (skutvik@online.no)
Mon, 16 Mar 1998 19:48:22 +0100
Fri, 13 Mar 1998 17:31:38 -0500
Maggie Hettinger (>) wrote that Platt Holden (>>) wrote:
> > From the beginning of the LS, Bo has maintained that the Intellectual level
> > is SOM (rationality, language, science). It's gradually seeped into my mind
> > that Bo is right about this. SOM is the current mental framework and means
> > of communication in which we operate from day to day, enabling us to "make
> > a living" and enjoy "the good life."
To say that I appreciated Platt's support would be an understatement
:-). He has had the same puzzlements and doubts as myself, but then
takes off in a flight of thought that lands him smack on. I was a bit
doubtful at one point where he wrote:
> > After all, the MoQ is an SOM document based on SOM reasoning.
but soon I saw what Platt meant. Any outgrowth from a static level
starts at the parent level's terms (how can it be otherwise?). Pirsig
hammers on this in the intellect/society relationship. Intellect is
no free-floating view from nowhere (as Hugo says). In its infancy it
was very much a social prop: language upheld the common myth, ideas
were all about the tribal survival. Only much later as intellect had
helped human societies rise to civilizational proportions (Greece)
did it take over: REALITY became intellectual, i.e.: subject/object
metaphysics.
Maggie's comments:
> One "record" of the memory (a perceptive acknowledgement of this
> event) is found in Genesis, in the description of Original sin, when
> the serpent tempted Eve to tempt Adam to "eat of the tree of the
> knowledge of good and evil."
> (Julian Jaynes deals with this concept of the emergence of this
> human ability in his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the
> Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" that we've mentioned here before.
> If you haven't read it, you'd probably like to.)
> The "punishment" is that people are no longer able to simply exist
> naturally in a natural world, comfortable in their unthinking
> action, doing as their parents did, never making conscious choices,
> never knowing that the choices could be made. (Being driven out of
> the Garden of Eden.) The "punishment" in making intellectual
> choices is having to live with the results of choices. The
> "punishment" is having a desire to control even more than we can
> control, and being disappointed in being unable to control (to
> "have") all that we desire..
The "fall myth" is still with us and will always be. In his "Up from
Eden" Ken Wilber brings a view which is very like Pirsig's, except for
one crucial point: Awareness is seen as the traditional objective
light dawning after darkness, but that is NOT MoQ. Intellect is no
"God's eye view"! It was merely awareness (of the value) of
individual self as different from other (or subject/object
consciousness!). No small feat though, a new moral dimension!.
I know Julian Jaynes work (from Colin Wilson's preoccupation with the
split-brain theory) and after reading LILA for the first time I wrote
to Pirsig to ask if the emergence of Intellect (of MOQ) could be seen
in such a context, and he replied:
(quote)...I haven't read Julian Jaynes' book but what I heard of it
seems to match the Metaphysics of Quality exactly."..(unquote)
Like Platt I admit that it difficult to visualise a time when the
concept of self was weak or lacking, but Jayne entertains this idea
and Maggie will know that his claim is that preconscious experience
was no Cartesian I-think-therefore-I-am, but "voices from the gods".
About this Pisig said in the same letter:
(quote)...I don't know if they were more in touch with Dynamic
Quality, but certainly they were less in touch with the modern
intellectual pattern that declare those voices to be illegal. It is
the easiest thing in the world to call a thought a "voice". I think
this is what the ancients did and this is in fact done in the last
chapter of Lila. But Phaedrus is aware that the doll's voice is not
vibrating any air molecules around his ears, and this distinction I
think it's best not to blur, if only to keep the psychiatrists away."
(unquote)
The "bicameral" bit is the brain's two halves communicating by a giant
nerve bundle which, which when severed (as in surgery to cure
epilepsy), causes a person to become two: one intellectual and one
artist! The first one dominating "awareness", but the second
marking its existence through bodily reactions.
I agree Maggie. No (manifested) new moral level is needed to see
SOM as Intellect, but i would like to keep Platt's idea on "red
alert". It is still dynamic forces trying to evade the laws of
Intellect (as SOM!). Platt once wrote about art having always been
around; cave paintings no less artistic than the modern
expressions. The dynamism that made them paint such
masterpieces (whatever the purpose) was no more stoneage than
computerage.
Finally, look to this passage in the same letter from Pirsig
(quote) ...."The emergence of the intellectual level is most closely
associated in my mind with the ancient Greek philosophers and
particularly Socrates who continually pitted truth-seeking against
social conformity. This seems why they killed him"...(unquote)
Isn't this also the emergence of subject/object metaphysics?
Bo
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