[MD] Food for Thought

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Dan]
When we discuss shaking hands it is an intellectual pattern and it is a social
pattern too.

[Arlo]
Okay, I can accept this.

[Dan]
In regards to a "Don't Walk" sign, to the extent a person just follows the sign
automatically without thinking about it, the sign would seem to be a social
pattern. When we begin defining the sign and discussing its significance the
sign is an intellectual pattern and a social pattern too.

[Arlo]
Okay, this seems to be intellect as "signs about signs". I can accept this too.

Your other examples make sense to me, so rather than nodding I'm going to skip
ahead to something I am still having trouble with. Some tangental comments on
Egypt is at the end.

Let me restate where my confusion arises.

[Arlo previously]
Pirsig is laying BOTH the advent of S/O metaphysics AND the intellectual level
at the feet of the Greeks. Now tell me how they are not the same, considering
their origins are identical. Reason, logic, decontextualized and deculturized
thought appear to be BOTH the source of SOM AND the intellectual level.

[Dan]
The way I understand things, subject object metaphysics is an intellectual
pattern of value but the level of the intellect in the MOQ is not subject
object metaphysics. SOM is an idea. It is not ideas themselves.

[Arlo]
Yes. This is the direction I understand Pirsig meant to go. But the trouble I
have is that the qualifications for "signs about signs" seems to revolve around
the same problematic elements he describes about SOM, namely
"decontextualization" and "deculturation" (my words). 

>From Lila. "The logical order of things which the philosophers study is derived
from the "mythos." The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric which the
culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible. Most of this old
religious talk is nonsense, of course, but nonsense or not, it is the parent of
our modern scientific talk. This "mythos over logos" thesis agreed with the
Metaphysics of Quality's assertion that intellectual static patterns of quality
are built up out of social static patterns of quality."

"The logical order of things"... the logos is what Pirsig establishes as the
intellectual level. Okay, I am fine with that. Placing the emerging
intellectual level firmly at the feet of the Greeks, Pirsig writes, "to the
time when this mythos-to-logos transition was taking place". Okay, social level
is the mythos, intellectual level is the logos. I'm still fine with this.

In ZMM, Pirsig describes the logos. "The term logos, the root word of "logic,"
refers to the sum total of our rational understanding of the world." So "logos"
is "logic" which is the "intellectual level".

Let me stay with ZMM for one second. Pirsig writes, "Thus, in cultures whose
ancestry includes ancient Greece, one invariably finds a strong subject-object
differentiation because the grammar of the old Greek mythos presumed a sharp
natural division of subjects and predicates. In cultures such as the Chinese,
where subject-predicate relationships are not rigidly defined by grammar, one
finds a corresponding absence of rigid subject-object philosophy."

Okay, as the logos emerged in Ancient China it lacked the S/O differentiation.
THEIR logos, or intellectual level, does not contain this S/O problem. With
regard to the logos, our intellectual level, Pirsig says in LILA, "The doctrine
of scientific disconnection from social morals goes all the way back to the
ancient Greek belief that thought is independent of society, that it stands
alone, born without parents. Ancient Greeks such as Socrates and Pythagoras
paved the way for the fundamental principle behind science: that truth stands
independently of social opinion."

Okay, to this point I see him suggesting that the logos, as it emerges from the
mythos, is bound by the characterizations of that mythos, in Greek culture it
was a sharp S/O distinction that resulted in the logos adopting this fallacy of
"independence" (or what I call "decontexualization" and "deculturation"). And
it has been THIS logos that has been driving Western Culture ever since.

Earlier in LILA. "The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of
freeing itself from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to
invent a myth of independence from the social level for its own benefit.
Science and reason, this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never
from the social world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with
no social mediation whatsoever."

Okay, so SOM could be said to be the "myth of independence", denying that "our
scientific description of nature is always culturally derived."

If you made it this far, and if you think this is a fair assessment, I'm okay
with this.

Rereading these quotes, I think much of my confusion would be eradicated by
restating "the intellectual level" as "our intellectual level". That is,
recognizing that there ARE intellectual levels originating from other cultures
that do not suffer from this defect.

I guess, though, my problem is this. The very things that make science "science"
are the very things that Pirsig calls SOM. If we drop these things, this myth
of independence (decontextualization and deculturation), what is left that
distinguishes science as "science"?

In anthropology, the "science" Pirsig challenges in LILA, the dismissing of
"independence" leads to a more involved, interactive, immediate experience. And
I get that. It resonates in many ways with this ZMM acknowledgment. " And now
he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when
he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths,
had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the
phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and
wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal
magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an
enemy of it."

Well.. you know what. I think I am starting to understand a bit. "Manipulating
signs about signs" does not have to be decontextual or decultural, while
labeling intellect as "science" (as we use it) appeared to indicate to me. Hmm.
I have a little bit to digest here.

Ah, as for Egypt. I don't think the Pyramids were tombs, I think they were
significant for astronomical purposes. There alignment, for just one example,
with particular bodies in the sky seems to show a purpose greater than just
burial, even if it is a very egotistical burial. Also consider this, the most
complex and well constructed Pyramids are earlier ones. As time goes by,
Pyramid construction gets cruder and cruder and then just stops. This would be
akin to Henry Ford building a Ferrari, and then as time goes by we start
buidling Taurus and then Edsels and then Model T's and then we just stop making
cars and go back to horse-drawn carriages. Just something to think about.

Thanks Dan, even though this particular post was just outloud musings, your
posts have really helped me (I think) understand a few things.