From: Steve Peterson (speterson@fast.net)
Date: Sun Oct 27 2002 - 15:22:27 GMT
> In last Thursday's post Sam said:
> I would back up my point by a brief consideration of how the fourth level
> was born. Pirsig refers to 'government by consent'; would people here accept
> that democracy is a social level pattern that has been shaped in order to
> allow the fourth level to flourish more freely? Yet democracy is all about
> aggregating the choice of individuals, not the intellectual consensus. It is
> notoriously the case that aggregating the intellect diminishes its Quality,
> and yet democracy is still a high quality innovation.
>
> DMB says:
> This is a good example of the confusion that ensues when the third and
> fourth levels are re-defined as collective and individual. Democracy is not
> a social level value, it is an intellectual value that guides society. The
> fact that this principle operates on large groups of people does not make it
> a social value. Otherwise we could view the scientific and academic
> communites as social level things, which they are clearly not. Rights are
> extended to all citizens equally and are protected collectivel by the cops
> and the courts, and they are designed to protect the intellectual values of
> individuals and groups. As you can see, ndividuality and collectivity are
> decidedly NOT helpful in sorting out or defining the levels.
Steve:
Is democracy a social or intellectual value?
"mu."
Though our animal, vegetable, or mineral scientific taxonomy attempts to do
this, Pirsig points out that such categorizations always result in Platypi
because the universe refuses a subject-object duality. It's fundamental
nature is not a collection of subjects and objects.
Pirsig names Quality as this fundamental nature and begins a new
classification system. He writes about static patterns of value, but not
patterns of values. Values aren't the fundamental stuff of existence, Value
is. Even values themselves are patterns of Value.
Previous posts suggested to me that moq is not at all about categorizing
things. What's great about moq is that it better fits our experiences of
reality in considering thoughts and ideas, the laws of science, and morality
as real. These are all "things" in our new way of understanding what a
"thing" is. But if "thing" is now to mean "pattern of value," then democracy
is just as real and is as much a "thing" as a rock is.
It makes no more sense to try to categorize "democracy" as social or
intellectual value as it does to do so with a person. All "values" are
still things in a way and can't be categorized into the four levels of
morality.
The four levels of Value (not values) are not types of things but ways of
valuing. This thing called democracy has both social and intellectual value.
Democracy can be valued in either way.
I'm still trying to understand the moq, and I could be way off base. Please
let me know.
Steve
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