From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Tue Jul 08 2003 - 08:36:40 BST
Hi All.
Paul Turner wrote to me privately and delivered this critique of the SOLAQI
idea - or the SOL-interpretation of the intellectual level - and allowed me to
post it on the MD along with my comments.
> You think that the "Quality idea" in the MOQ is better
> than intellect, beyond intellect, a fifth MOQ level of
> evolution with a view of reality emerging for the
> first time in history. You think that the resistance
> to your idea is just the resistance of the intellect.
> Am I right?
You are right!
> (I actually think that your SOLAQI idea is YOUR
> intellect's resistance to the MOQ, you are trying to
> save thinking from the inferior status it is given by
> the MOQ in terms of its relationship to Dynamic
> Quality. "SOM can't understand ultimate reality but
> the way I think can!")
OK.
> To support this view, you must first destroy the
> system which Pirsig has set up in the MOQ, because, in
> the MOQ, intellect is simply thinking.
Destroy? I accept all the MOQ postulates, it can't be destructive to question
one static level. However I know why the SOL idea is opposed, will add that
at the end.
> I think your logic goes something like this: I can
> think about the "Quality idea" and the MOQ, so, as it
> is beyond intellect, the intellectual level cannot be
> synonymous with thinking.
A very keen observation even if my rejection of the "thinking" intellect stems
more from its diminishing the social level ..which is unique fro the MOQ.
Matter, life and mind has some reality in SOM but society. No!
> So you have to restrict the intellectual level to a
> KIND of thinking. Fortunately, Pirsig spent a lot of
> time describing a particularly western kind of
> thinking in ZMM which he didn't like and which the MOQ
> is better than; he traces it to the ancient Greeks and
> calls it Subject-Object Metaphysics. There’s your
> target.
Right. The Greek part of ZMM describes the emergence of SOM.
> Pirsig describes how, for the first time in history,
> people discussed what they believed was imperishable
> in the affairs of men, what was independent of them.
> Man, Plato argued, is not the measure of all things.
> There is a fixed reality which we can understand with
> the power of thought and the dialectic method. This
> method is so good it convinces everyone that it is
> uncovering a pre-existing fixed reality. As a form of
> thinking, it is distinct and well known enough to
> those in the west for Pirsig to single it out and for
> you to do the same.
Right.
> So, if you make this kind of thinking synonymous with
> the intellectual level then that frees the non-SOM
> based MOQ from the fourth level and it can become a
> fifth level of thinking. Success!
OK.
> But what about thinking that happened before SOM? Well
> that must be social level thinking!
Yes, but maybe your critique has forced me to re-formulate myself.
INTELLECT is "thinking" in the sense of it becoming "subjective thinking
versus objective reality" Thus "social thinking" is as Jonathan says an
oxymoron.
> So we have three kinds of thinking, at least. We now
> have pre-SOM, SOM and post-SOM, the 3rd, 4th and 5th
> levels of your metaphysics. We have now left Pirsig’s
> MOQ behind.
From the above clarification this is irrelevant.
> Well, let’s continue this reformation shall we? The
> social level is not really about thinking, it goes
> back way further than that, so there will have to be
> some new levels of society, say Stone Age, then
> ancient, then contemporary for our own. Three levels
> of society should do it. There’s a bit of thinking
> mixed in there, but what the hell.
Look to DMB and Sam on language as thinking based on Wittgenstein. It is
the thinking-interpretation of intellect that creates a schism within the social
level. Language was the ultimate social (communication) pattern, the one
that DQ used to lift existence to the next platform. But at the social level it
was social through and through. At the intellectual level it became a
subjective realm separate from an objective one.
End of part 1.
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