[MD] What is SOM?

[david buchanan]

Bo asked how:
...democracy and trial by jury emanated from "manipulation of symbols" but that was in vain, maybe you DMB can inform us? ...I don't know what "your" intellect is, but if it is the "symbol manipulation" one, how can social value see this as a threat, and intellect in return look upon social value as evil, and - moreover - spawn the intellectual patterns that Pirsig refers to [democracy, trial by jury, freedom of speech, freedom of the press]  all of which are based on the "objective over subjective" template.

dmb says:
Huh? I don't understand the question or what the problem is. The intellectual values named here are aimed at protecting the intellect from social level interference. Principles such as free speech and equal protection under the law are designed to protect intellectual activity or "symbol manipulation". These principles were derived using that same capacity. So what's the problem?

Social level values don't see symbols or their manipulation per se as a threat but rather SOME the products, the beliefs and positions arrived at by that means. In the case of Pirsig's diagnosis, the "threat" comes more specifically from the dominant metaphysical assumptions of the intellectual level, namely SOM. 

And I'd also object to the idea that these intellectual principles are based on the "objective over subjective" template. There's nothing inherently social about subjectivity. Just like "objectivity", it is an intellectual distinction, a particular idea about the nature of truth. Are you thinking that subjectivity belongs to the third level and objectivity belongs to the intellectual level? If so, that would explain why I can't follow your theories.

My view is that SOM is a philosophical creature. Its been around long enough that it has become common sense and in that sense it has been absorbed as the standard world view among educated Westerners, but in terms of the philosophical positions that follow from it there is a whole range of positions from total subjectivity as in the idealists and total objectivity as in the scientific materialists. But there are also a wide range of philosophers who attack SOM as such and assert that truth or reality is neither subjective nor objective. As you know by now, James and Dewey were doing this 100 years ago. You'll find different versions of this attack among the so-called postmodern thinkers too. I've been pleasantly surprised to find that Pirsig has a lot of company in the academic world on this point. After being exposed to a bit of this, I think I can see how some are closer to the MOQ than are others. I mention this range of MOQish, anti-SOM philosophies because your take doesn't seem to fit into it anywhere and I think it should. I mean, why is it I can see Pirsig in Nietzsche, James, Dewey, Mead, Heidegger and so many others, but not in what you're saying? I mean, the MOQ's rejection of SOM is consistent with the concerns expressed by a whole bunch of other philosophers and they can all be read as members of a school or a style of thinkers. Despite the differences, there's a sympatico that can be discerned. I suspect that some of your positions would dissolve if you were exposed to this school. It was something I thought I already understood. Its not that I had to reverse myself in any way, but it was a pretty radical change in terms of my level of appreciation of the problem. I suspect it would be something like that for you too. I can't stress the importance of radical empiricism enough on this point. It is not only an alternative to SOM, it is what makes the pragmatism work and it is extremely congenial to Quality, the mystical reality so central to the MOQ. 

“Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too ‘scientific’. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand page menu and no food” (LILA 63).

 “Mystics will tell you that once you’ve opened the door to metaphysics you can say good-bye to any genuine understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.
     The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called ‘Quality’ in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn’t have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions” (LILA 64).


For whatever that's worth.

dmb
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