[MD] Distinguishing Levels

[Matt Kundert]

Mike,

Matt said:
Arlo is reminding us that everything under a description is an intellectual 
pattern (assuming for the moment that language is the currency of the 
intellectual level).

Mike said:
Hmm. I'm not going to pretend that I know whether or not I agree with this 
:)

Matt:
Sure.  The point of that stipulation is just to move us to the "nugget" I 
pulled from you, which you agreed with. Given that, we can still haggle over 
the levels, which we'll now do.

Matt said:
I don't think there's anything much discrete between them which is why I've 
advocated the collapse of the social/intellectual distinction.  I'm not sure 
that distinction is doing much.

Mike said:
It's certainly caused a lot of problems so far. But I'm convinced that 
there's something in it. Reading Mill's 'On Liberty', I get the very eerie 
feeling that he was establishing new social patterns of value (free speech, 
freedom of self-regarding action...) for the purpose of unleashing intellect 
(and individuality?) from the tethers of societal domination.

Matt:
Interesting that you bring up Mill, because I think that was a decisive 
turning point in intellectual history, too.  The trouble I have with the 
social/intellectual distinction you'd still like to field (one that 
"unleashes intellect") is that it sets up the old Enlightenment dichotomy 
between Tradition and Reason.  On the philosophical score, that dichotomy 
fails for the same reasons SOM fails.  That dichotomy is what led to purer 
and purer versions of SOM till we finally get to scientific realism in this 
century.  The cold light of Reason shall lead us to the Truth.  That type of 
thing is what Pirsig was railing against in ZMM, that we should "do what is 
'reasonable' even when it isn't any good." (ZMM, 368)  The further 
implications of Pirsig's demolition is the provisional truth thing (which is 
getting a lot play recently).  There is no single, absolute Truth.  There 
are simply better and better truths.

I think the tearing down of SOM requires us to tear down the 
Reason/Tradition dichotomy, and after we tear that one down I don't think 
there's much left of the social/intellectual distinction.  It isn't clear to 
me that Pirsig places language in the social sphere, but people who 
increasingly balked at the notion that it wouldn't.  And so they should, but 
if language was created at the social level, what does that leave for the 
intellect to do?  I think Pirsig has some idea of "philosophical inquiry" in 
mind, a kind of social authority independent inquiry, like science.  Except 
that science fails that requirement, as does everything else (which I think 
Pirsig even sometimes admits).

The trouble with social/intellectual distinction is that it has to be 
obvious.  Rocks and cells? Obvious difference.  Plants and mammals?  Obvious 
difference.  Tigers and humans?  Obvious difference (this one with 
language).  Odysseus and Socrates?  Not so obvious.  Pirsig places the 
origin of the intellectual level in Greece, essentially with Socrates, but 
I'm not sure if this isn't just another case of philospohers valuing very 
highly the activity of philosophy.  I think something important happened in 
Ancient Greece, but I don't think it was the creation of philosophy, I think 
it was the creation of democracy.

This leads me back to Mill and the current hubbub over Platt's "individual 
level".  I think Platt's redescription of the "intellectual" into 
"individual" has a fair amount going for it (though I think it has very 
little to do with economics).  I think something important happened in 
Greece, but what started didn't get finished until Mill and the 
Enlightenment.  But again, I think philosophers endow their own profession 
with too much importance.  When they think of the Enlightenment, they start 
talking about the freeing of Reason from Superstition and Tradition.  They 
do this because Newton and the Democratic Revolutions of America and France 
occured during the 18th century.  People take Kant's philosophy as 
paradigmatic, as displaying philosophically and generally what Newton and 
America were simply instances of the success of: the freeing of Reason from 
Tradition.  Richard Rorty once suggested that if the American and French 
Revolutions had waited around a hundred years, so that they occured in the 
19th centuries, intellectual history would look far different because we 
wouldn't hold up Newton and Kant anymore, we would hold up Darwin and Hegel. 
  And if that had happened, we wouldn't be talking about the difference 
between Reason and Tradition, which is something Kant did and Hegel began to 
destory.

If we used Hegelian historicism, rather than Kantian antihistoricism, in our 
formulations of what happened with the Democratic Revolutions, I think when 
we talk about Mill we wouldn't say he helped unfetter the intellect from 
social domination.  We _would_ say that Mill was attempting to lay down some 
new social values, but we'd be talking more about privacy than intellect.  
I've been creating various names for some time for the vacant fourth level 
(after I clear a distinctive "intellectual level" out of the way), but I 
have no clear preference.  I've called it Privacy, the Public/Private 
distinction, Individual (following Platt), Eudaimonia (following Sam), 
Democracy, Politics, I've probably called it Modern Liberty (following 
Benjamin Constant) and Negative Liberty (following Isaiah Berlin).  All of 
them point to generally the same thing: that what we do with our aloneness 
is none of anybody else's business (as long as it isn't infringing on 
anybody else's aloneness).

Matt

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