[MD] What Bo Doesn't Get

[Krimel]

[Mary]
Would it be correct to summarize your view of the levels this way?

Inorganic
Biological
Intellectual
Social

After reading a week's worth of posts at one go, that is what I get.

Your thoughts?

[Krimel]
My thoughts on this matter alone are enough to make me a heretic in some
eyes. I think Pirsig was just messing around with his new analytical tools.
After showing the importance of his new term (Quality, SQ and DQ) he was
taking them out for a spin to see where they would take him.

I think the level system is just arbitrary. One could carve the world up in
any number of ways. We could say there are only two levels, big and small or
white and not white. It is taxonomy not metaphysics. It is a way of carving
the continuous dynamic flow of experience into discrete units. Even in this
I think it fails. 

The inorganic and biological levels are not even discrete. Organic chemistry
is special case of plain old chemistry and even though it forms the
foundation of biology it is not in Pirsig's biological level. 

Social behavior is a well established evolutionary survival strategy common
to many biological species. It is a pattern for insuring biological
survival. By limiting it to human, Pirsig undermines and dismisses critical
aspects of social patterns. For example, the failure to acknowledge that
human social patterns do not deviate significantly for the patterns of
social interaction in most other primate species. 

Claiming that intellectual patterns only begin in humans 2500 years ago is
so silly I despair that anyone would find it worthy of comment. 

That said, I don't have a problem with the Pirsig's ordering of the levels.
After all it is a system lifted from the pages of nearly any college catalog
so it does have its uses.