Hi Squaders,
Bo's been asking for some kind of definition of the intellect and the
intellectual level of the MOQ. I suspect we all have basically the same
idea and we each experience it all the time, but it's such a broad
"thing" that it can be frustrating to talk about it. But I've found some
interesting bits of info on the topic.
LOGOS is defined in my Oxford Companion to Philosophy as "a Greek word
primarily signifying, in the context of a philosophical discussion, the
rational, intelligible principle, structure, or order which pervades
something, or the source of that order." You can see it as a root word
in many English compounds such as biology, epistemology, cosmology,
etc.. Its interesting to note that the Greeks used a verb form of the
word, LEGEIN, which meant simply to "tell", "say" or "count". So you
can see that the noun, logos, is the order or source of order itself,
while the verb, legein, is the act of discovering and describing that
order. I realize this definition smells a lot like Aristotleian
rationality, he used logos to make a distinction between thought and
emotion, but you know what I mean. Yes it stinks of SOM, but the idea
here is interesting. We could say the logos is the intelligible
structure of the cosmos or any "thing" in it, while the mythos is the
structure of cultural meaning and is "intelligible" to us on a different
level of consciousness. It seems to me that the act of saying and
counting can take any number of approches. I think our dreaded SOM is
just one way to "tell" of the logos.
The Oxford Companion says to check out "neo-Platonism" in reference to a
related notion, the idea of a generative intelligence, which the Greeks
called LOGOS SPERMATIKOS. So I did.
Neo-Platonism began shortly after Plato himself and still lives today.
The battle between Aristotle and Plato has been going on the time and we
can see it in Pirsig's books too. I think its the "eternal
Buddha-seeker" returning again and again, as I said in the last post.
And I also think neo-Platonism provides the material for an intellectual
alternative to SOM and can serve the function of Bo's "transformation
proceedure". It gives us a metaphysical framework that is already
markedly different than SOM.
One of the earliest and most important neo-Platonists was Plotinus , who
lived from 204 to 270 A.D. The companion says,...
"In the Enneads, (which was translated into Latin in 1492) he affirms
the same themes common to the general Platonic tradition, namely (1) the
non-materiality of the highest form of reality, (DQ?) (2) beliefe that
there must be a higher level of reality than visible and sensible
things, (3) preference for intellectual intuition over empirical forms
of knowing, (4) belief in some form of immortality, and (5) belief that
the universe is essentially good."
"He attempts to answer the primary question of Greek metaphysics; "How
does the one become many?" by positing an Ultimate Being, the One, as
supernatural, incorporeal, self-caused, absolutely free and absolutely
good. Since it is absolutely good it necessarily extends its goodness
and power into all lower beings. Without any loss of any of its own
essence, it projects itself into lower stages of itself to form lower
and weaker beings... Thus the one becomes many by the necessary
extension of the One into lower, progressively weaker multiple phases of
itself as the principles and life-forms of all natural things. The many,
in turn, always seek to return to the one, for all natural thins seek to
return to some higher unity as their source." He even seperates the
"progressively weaker multiple phases" into something like Pirsig's
levels, distinguishing between mind (Nous), soul (Psyche) and the
organism itself (Bios).
I'll leave it up to you to see how closely neo-Platonism resembles the
MOQ, but I should point out that this alternative view has influenced
many famous thinkers; Saints Augustine and Aquinas, the mystic Meister
Eckhart, the German idealists, Bergson, Blake, Shelly, Keats, Emerson
and the New England Transcendentalists, and in my opinion, it has
greatly influenced Pirsig too.
DMB
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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