ROGER, MARY, BO, GLOVE AND SQUAD:
I read the four Wednesday posts and, after thinking about it, would like
to offer some thoughts.
Glove and Bo have mostly been confusing me. Who is using a capitol 'Q'
in front of words? Cut it out! Use standard English! Talk like a person,
will ya? :-)
But I think you two were really on to something when your debate over
the two top levels focused on social patterns in animals and
proto-humans. It seems like there is a point when our ancestors became
human and that must be about when the intellectual patterns began to
emerge from social patterns. Before proto-humans became self conscious
there was not yet an intellectual level on earth. (As far as we know.)
Before early man became self-conscious, the social level must have been
the highest level.
Who said snails have intellect? That's laughable.
Bees and ants have social patterns, but mostly we think of the social
lives of wolves or chimps. They're highly evolved, intelligent mammals
who've been finely tuned in the last few million years, just like us. We
can relate to their societies. We must have lived in societies just like
them in our ancient past and vestages still remain.
Am I correct to believe all the SQUAD members see the MOQ as
evolutionary on all levels simultaneously? I certainly see it that way
and view the MOQ as much better than traditional Darwinism. The Moq has
the advantage of unifying biological evolution with inorganic matter and
the intellectual level, which has no substance at all. Natural selection
ignores value, is too mechanistic and explains too little.
Having said all that about evolution, now I'd ask you to think about the
garden of Eden. Don't worry this is NOT going to be about original sin.
I'm not going to ask you to repent. I'm not going to ask you to believe
the crap they teach in Churchianity. But think of the story of Adam and
Eve.
They lived in paradise and everything was provided by God. Then they ate
of the tree of knowledge (the tree that forbidden, yet stood in the
middle of the garden) and suddenly they knew they were naked and felt
ashamed. They were cast out of the garden and had to work from that day
forward.
Adam and Eve are metaphors for the first humans. Let me tell the same
story another way.
They lived by instinct and had evolved to survive in their enviroment.
Then the intellect was born and they saw themselves as individuals for
the first time. Adam and Eve were now alienated from their enviroment.
They worried about death and had to plan for the food to fill their
bellies and the furs that would keep them warm.
Adam and Eve represent the emergence of intellectual patterns out of the
three lower levels. As the story goes, they paid a heavy price for it.
This is also a good analogy of the birth of subject object thinking.
They were cast out of the garden, seperated from nature, a unity was
broken. "I am in the wilderness and the garden is far away." We have
subjects (I) and objects (the garden) in every sentence. It's in the
very structure of our language and thoughts.
Pirsig traces the subject/object split back to ancient greece, but its
much older than that and is seemingly part of the price we pay to have
self-consciousness. We are alienated from the ground of being ( the
three lower levels that gave rise to humanity) by the very nature of
self-consciousness.
Attempts to heal this rift is traditionally the domain of religion. The
tree of knowledge is in the center of the world, a central event of the
world takes place there. The events cause the rift, the seperation from
god. The cross that the Christ died upon is transformed into that
central tree. The central event of the world that occurs there heals the
original rift. Unity is restored. I will save the whole mythology
lecture for another time, but thought you'd be curious about how the
story ends.
One more thought to tease - I think that subject object thinking
dominates Western civilization because of the forces of value, but its'
time is limited and its' task is almost complete. The intellectual level
may soon be radically transformed. There may even be a new level about
to emerge from the intellectual level. Anyone care to speculate?
DAVID B.
P.S. I don't know where the other mystics went, but I'm absolutely
convinced the MOQ is mysticism. The very heart and soul of the central
issues are involved in this dispute. I'll bet you each a dollar I can
produce evidence that the author himself and at least one professional
academic philosopher believes the MOQ is mystical. I believe that to
think otherwise makes it nearly impossible to discuss Pirsig's work in
any meaningful way and only demonstates a misunderstanding of myticism
or the MOQ or both. I know that's a harsh statement, but I'm very
worried about the quality of our debate.
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