From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Tue Oct 11 2005 - 18:13:59 BST
Ian, Mike, Bo, Mark et al,
Ian said:
The fourth level is already intellectual ...
GOF Aristotelian Rationality is just one SPV (mainly) in that level.
"Rationality" is a wider set of SPV's (mainly) in that level.
The Intellectual level is therefore more than either Aristotelian
Rationality or SOMism or Rationality ... it's something pretty close
to the MoQ itself - the ultimate intellectual pattern in this scheme.
(We cannot escape the recursion - we are using intellect to define
intellect - it's not a problem.)
Scott:
Not only is the recursion not a problem, it is the solution. Because
intellect can reflect on and modify itself, it is incorrect to see it as the
fourth *static* level. Although it does make sense to speak of a fourth
level of SPOV as being the symbolic patterns of value that intellect has
produced, nevertheless intellect itself as the producer of those patterns is
DQ, not SQ.
To Bo I have argued that though it is meaningless to say that the fourth
level is SOM (which is a metaphysics based on an absolute S/O[1] divide, and
so just one symbolic pattern), it is not meaningless to say it came into
existence through the S/O[2] divide. The S/O[2] divide is the ability to
reflect, including reflecting on itself, which is what creates a self. Hence
intellect creates an opposite and transcends the opposition in the same
move, which leads into the characterization of intellect as contradictory
identity. But if one doesn't want to go there, I still offer my suggestion
for a definition of intellect as the creation, manipulation, and reflection
on symbolic patterns of value. Please note that I see this as a working
suggestion, not a final one, and welcome discussion on it or on
alternatives.
A side note: One thing is that we should distinguish between Aristotle's
idea of intellect, on the one hand, and Aristotelian rationality on the
other. The latter is, indeed, limited, and it took Hegel, for example, to
see that with the tools of the Organon one doesn't advance knowledge but, at
best, explicates existing knowledge. But Aristotle himself, being still
somewhat in the stage of original participation (ref. Barfield), had not
been infected with the SOM notion that intellect was strictly human. Instead
he, and most everyone until the rise of nominalism and SOM, understood
intellect as being a sharing (participation) across the knower and the
known, which is to say that our knowledge of the external world consists of
our participating in the intellectual forms inherent in the external world.
Now this needs backing up, but Barfield has already done that work. Several
people here have read Barfield, but somehow this insight of his hasn't woven
its way into how one should deal with intellect, and I place the blame for
that on people still sticking to a SOM belief about intellect.
- Scott
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