[MD] Distinguishing Levels

[ian glendinning]

Matt, Mike, Arlo, etc ...

I think Matt is correct about the confusion over representationism. We
can't avoid "representations" when having our intellectual level
debates about any of the levels, but that's just our model for
communicating, not our world model or even our model of the
intellectual level.
A constant source of confusion - part of my "catch-22".

More importantly ... JS Mill ...

[Mike said]
... 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 replied]
Interesting that you bring up Mill, because I think that was a decisive
turning point in intellectual history, too ....

Ian says ... I just recently came to a very similar conclusion about
Mill having been "on the money" (and blogged about it) so I agree with
you both. Like Matt, I don't see such hard dividing lines between
these levels - just a thick socio-cultural-intellectual evolutionary
melting pot of memes - the processes of analysing it are intellectual
top to bottom, but a lot of what goes on is social - even at the top -
"intellectual climbers".

Ian

On 6/1/06, Matt Kundert <pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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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