[MD] Distinguishing Levels

[Matt Kundert]

Arlo, Gene, Ian,

Arlo said:
The problem with the logos-mythos distinction is exactly what Matt 
describes. The two appear so interwoven that true distinction is impossible, 
especially when one considers that everything "is just an analogy". Both the 
mythos and the logos, as social and intellectual activity, depend on 
language (or "linguaculture") as its primary static agent.
...
But this tying of Reason to Tradition, where one could even argue that 
Reason BECOMES Tradition as Tradition BECOMES Reason, makes it difficult 
(for me) to place Reason as an entirely separate, and superior, level.

Matt:
Yeah, Sam and I have been having these similar problems with the 
distinction.  The biggest problem I have is that both social and 
intellectual levels are using language (people aren't always willing to go 
that far, but recently it has become for more common).  And since language 
is the currency of both levels, both (supposedly different) activities 
exhibit the same general rules.  They may have different purposes, but every 
attempt to set apart the intellectual as being distinctly different from the 
social has failed.  It ain't Kant's Reason, it ain't Carnap's Science, it 
certainly isn't Plato's Truth.

Gene, I think, points out fairly that the intellectual level may still be 
struggling to existence.  And this strikes me as parallel (for good 
historical reasons) to the idea that metaphysics, while as yet unsuccessful 
in cutting past appearances to reality, may someday yet still do it.  Who 
knows, maybe it will.  With metaphysics, we can't even imagine what it would 
be like to know if we were successful.  We just have no idea what the 
criteria would look like.  With the intellectual, Pirsig has pointed out to 
us that a higher level will be radically different from the lower (so as to 
fit in that word "discrete") and that those "things" existing at the lower 
levels will be ignorant of the higher levels.  We can understand what this 
means for atoms being ignorant of the cells they make up, cells ignorant of 
the mammals they make up, and human bodies being ignorant of the societies 
they make up (this one's a little harder to imagine, but I'm thinking of a 
difference between our physical bodies and the language that our bodies 
employ).  But I'm not sure what the difference is supposed to be between two 
different types of linguistic performance where some people in the world are 
ignorant of it and we (who are supposedly intellectual) aren't.

But the more important one is the word "discrete".  I think it suggests 
pretty stongly that, in language is the currency of the social level, that 
whatever level pops up later it will use language, but for something that 
isn't defined as being language.  I don't think a distinction between, say 
language used to accrue authority and language aimed at truth works.  I 
think that was the Enlightenment philosophical attempt.  It has to be 
something completely different.

Arlo said:
I don't have an firm idea on how this can be resolved. But I do know that I 
disagree that the intellectual level should be considered as the 
"individual" level. The "individual" and the "collective", as I've said a 
few times recently, are as interwoven as "intellect" and "social". It is 
only in Western SOM that the "individual" is seen as removed, detached, 
impartial or somehow a lone wolf battling the forces of collectivization. To 
me, pairing the individual and the social as somehow opposed (even if the 
opposition is not a Holy War, as Platt makes it), simply succombs to SOMist 
thought. In my thinking, I place BOTH the "individual" and the "collective" 
as inseparable, dialogic constructs of the social level.

I've thought a few times that a conflation of the social-intellectual and a 
recasting Pirsig's "Code of Art" as the fourth level would be more 
appropriate. But this has its own problematic considerations.

Matt:
What's funny, Arlo, is that Platt thinks the same thing about Pirsig's "Code 
of Art".  I've seen Platt as attempting a more thoroughly aestheticized 
version of Pirsig's philosophy, which I have a lot of sympathy with.  To me, 
that's exactly what "individual" denotes, not the invidious distinction 
between "collective" and "individual" which you rightly excoriate.  To me, 
Platt conflates his aestheticization with economics (which is the same thing 
Rand does), and it all doesn't pan out very well.  I'm certainly willing to 
cede "individual."  However, what I'd like to get at is something very 
individualistic.  Like I've said, I want to emphasize privacy.  I think Mill 
represents the creation of a new form of life that values something called 
"self-creation" which is new to culture.  Mill gave us the conceptual 
revolution for politics to help us protect the practice of the 
Romantics--geniuses of private self-creation.

The one up shot to this is that I think one can imagine this as being a 
radical discrete break.  The one topical example is the clash of cultures 
that exists between the Middle Eastern and Western cultures.  The West 
desperately wants to convince the Middle East to adopt certain of our 
practices and cultural values, but the Middle East simply doesn't recognize 
them as better.  There can be no argument from Western values that doesn't 
beg the question over certain Middle Eastern ones.  They don't recognize the 
form of life we have as being better.  They are ignorant of it.  Those that 
do adopt Western values are those that have experienced them, not those that 
have been convinced by argument.  It is a kind of cultural imperialism, but 
I'm not sure what other way a culture spreads other than killing off lesser 
ones.

Matt

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