LS SOM and the intellect

From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Sep 04 1999 - 23:41:30 BST


Bodvar and Squad:

Seen in the light of the MOQ, what is it that's described in the last
part of ZAMM? Is it the emergence of SOM, the coming of age of the
intellect or...?

I've been re-reading part four. There is quite a cast of characters. And
of course the whole issue is complicated becasue the levels of static
patterns had not yet been "invented". I mean, even as P talks about how
Quality got lost back there in ancient Greece, he never really describes
it in the MOQ's static/Dynamic terms. Although we can see its
preliminary form and Lila doesn't contradict it so much as refine and
elaborate on the original idea. I think we are forced to speculate to
some extent.

BODVAR ASKED: "....don't you agree that the Truth vs Good struggle of
ZAMM sounds like a more massive shift than one idea...that he sees it as
intellect vs social conformity?"

Yes, I agree. In MOQ terms I'd say the intellect emerged with Socrates'
death. And it is more than a massive shift than one idea. I think it
represents the emergence of ideas themselves. It represents the begining
of the kind of consciousness that's capable of holding ideas,
intellectual concepts, or what ever you choose to call it. I haven't
seen the reference lately, but it seems I can recall an apt analogy...
where the prehistoric "mind" is like a warehouse full of information,
the intellect is a list of items in that warehouse. And there is
something lost in the abstraction, but the cross-referencing ability
makes it so efficient that its worth the loss. It was something like
that?

AND BO SAYS "...let's dwell a little longer on the Intellectual level...
it has been difficult to define Intellect ever since this discussion
started."

By extending the analogy, I think Pirsig was saying that we do want the
ability to catalogue what's in the warehouse. I think you are quite
right in asserting that "there is a mind at the social level". It seems
that is precisely what is in the warehouse. "We are suspended in
language", as Bohr put it.
To be outside the mythos is to be insane, as Pirsig puts it. All the
intellect can do is deal with its parent, the mythos, the culture, the
language from which it emerged. So, in a sense, the intellect can't be
seperated from society, the logos can't be divorced from the mythos. Why
bother with an accounting system if there's nothing of value in the
warehouse?

But there is another analogy in ZAMM. P says the mythos is a shrub and
the logos is a tree, and the difference is only one of size, not of
kind. Here is making a case that our intellectual pictures of reality
are just another set of "myths". We see this notion in the repeated
references to "the ghost of rationality" and "the Church of reason",
where he compares modern scientific thinking with medieval superstitions
and essentially puts them at the same level. The shrub grows up to be a
tree, but they are really the same "thing".

But in Lila he is a little more careful about the distinctions between
the social and intellectual levels, between the mythos and the logos.
As you know, he even says the intellect level is more moral and should
be in charge. I think the difference between ZAMM and Lila is centered
around this issue. Seeing that the mythos is its own level of reality
and is different than intellect, in my opinion, is one of the major
breakthroughs. The MOQ's four levels of static quality replaces the
shrub/tree analogy from ZAMM, and we see discrete differences instead of
seamless growth. This has the effect of making Socrates' battle even
more important than before, because it represents the beginning of a
whole new level of reality. Its not just an older plant, but something
distinct and different.

In some sense, both is true. They're the same, but there're different.

It must have been very hard to tell the difference at the dawn of the
intellect. It must have been like the first generation of post-Victorian
intellectuals. They had been raised and educated in a way that protected
them from the dangers of their own making. The social degeneracy of
amoral objectivity would mostly effect later generations. It must have
been like that for the first generation of Greek intellectuals. In
chapter 29 Pirsig writes about the cosmologists...

"Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal
Principle, the One, Truth, God, is seperate from appearance and from
opinion, and the importance of this seperation and its effect upon
subsequent history cannot be overstated. It's here that the classic
mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said,
"THE GOOD AND THE TRUE ARE NOT NECESSARILY THE SAME," and goes its
separate way. ..Socrates carried their ideas into full fruition."

The cosmologist had disagreements about the nature of the Immortal
principle. It was called water, air, fire, change, number and mind by
the various voices. It was the Sophists who came up with a way to
resolve the cosmologists' debate by saying that all truths and all
principles were relative and that "Man is the measure of all things."
Socrates, through Plato, defended the cosmologist and the Immortal
Principles against the Sophists. He saw them as the enemies of Truth and
the defenders of mere opinion.

I imagine the Sophists as the final flowering of the mythos, as the
height of social level values. Pirsig points out that the pre-Socratic
"thinkers" were at the end of 10 or 15 thousand years of settled social
life. We can imagine the mythos was relatively unchanged for hundreds of
generations, giving it a chance to be perfected, or very finely tuned.
This is where we find the Sophists. Pirsig describes a man of
excellence, in this pre-Socratic sense, as one who can do everything
well. He's mastered the mythos. He'll fight to defend the lands, hunt
down his dinner, butcher it, cook it, and recite poetry and move all to
tears after the meal. And it seems more than just a matter of being "a
well-rounded guy". All these activities are united by excellence. And so
its easy to see that the Sophist were teaching excellence (Quality)
through rhetoric, not so much rhetoric itself. In the same sense,
Quality can be taught through archery or motorcycle repair. They taught
the wisdom of the highly evolved mythos. But I like to think that level
was ripe and pregnant and Socrates was right to defend the Truth against
their Good, sort of.... Quality itself is outside the mythos.

Like I said, there is quite a cast of characters in part four. It says
Phaedrus is a Platonist and thinks Aristotle is an evil asshole, but the
narrator Aristotleian. No wonder we get confused. No wonder he went
insane. Insanity is outside the mythos too. The difference between Plato
and Aristotle gets to the heart of the difference. This is where we can
see the difference between the "encapsulation" and "dessication" of
Quality. To put it loosely, Plato wanted to capture Quality, but
Aristotle killed it.

As Pirsig writes, "Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears
again and again each generation, moving onward and upward toward the
"one". Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the
"many". "

And it is Aristotle who won. He shaped the intellectual level shortly
after it arrived. But the buddha-seeker appears over and over and
re-news its battle with the dried-up lifeless version of reality we've
inherited. Our history is one of revolutions and recurring Rommantic
movements because we can't really ever get away from Quality. So we
alternate between rigid authoritarianism and anarchical chaos. And the
entire West is caught up in this war, simply because we share a common
history with Grease. (There are tons of Greek root-words in English, as
you know.) These mistakes have become part of the structure and grammer
of our language. But you're noone in Chicago if you haven't rubbed
someone out, so its about time Aristotle got his. Bang!

DMB

MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org



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