[MD] Oneness, Dualism & Intellect

[David M]

Hi DMB

Yet Freud said:

"We may insist as much as we like that the human intellect is weak
in comparison with human instincts, and be right in doing so. But
nevertheless there is something peculiar about this weakness. The
voice of the intellect is a soft one, but is does not rest until it has
gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it
succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic
about the future of mankind."

Would a man dedicating his life to to intellectual work think anything else?

David M

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2007 6:13 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Oneness, Dualism & Intellect


> Mati, Ant and y'all:
>
> Mati said:
> Here is a problem. You are sitting in a doctoral committee meeting to 
> review
> your research proposal.  You want to use MOQ as possible basis for a
> research methodology to understand and pose a way to better approach your
> research problem. ...Now after an hour of brain grinding questions they 
> drop
> this one.  "Well can you define intellect in such a way that clearly
> delineates social from intellect values and give us a clear indication or
> example as to how you are propose to delineate the interview data you
> collect as social or intellect based values?"  That was the problem and
> still is.
>
> dmb says:
> Thanks to you and Ant for helping me think these things through. It's 
> likely
> that I'll find myself in a situation like the one you're described here.
> Better start thinking about it now, eh? As I see it, the problem of how to
> draw a clear line between the social and intellectual levels is 
> complicated
> by one of the central findings in MOQ's diagnosis of the 20th century. I
> mean, it seems that Pirsig's examples from that recent history are meant 
> to
> show that the the century's conflicts were driven by the conflicts between
> the top two levels and, ironically or paradoxically, that the problems
> derive from the fact that this distinction is not recognized. In order to
> assert this distinction, then, a Ph.D. candidate would have to cut across
> the grain of 100 years of intellectual history. He or she would have to 
> say,
> in effect, that many respected thinkers were confused on this point.
> Margaret Meade is used as an example of one of the intellectuals who sided
> with biology against social values, but we've been reading Freud lately 
> and
> the same sort of attitude can be seen there. I suppose everybody knows 
> that
> Freud's ideas are still very much with us, not least of all among
> intellectuals.
>
> Again, this problem is complicated by the fact that the leading thinkers 
> of
> our time can't help us. In fact, in making this distinction we'd have to
> ignore or even defy many of them. I forget how the line goes exactly, but
> Pirsig says that 20th thinkers, instead of looking at the social level 
> moral
> codes with gratitude for all they has accomplished in the evolutionary
> struggle to control biology, saw these traditions as oppressive, 
> arbitrary,
> and thoroughly worthy of destruction. They attacked social level morality
> for all kinds of reasons, some of them were good reasons. The rigidly
> moralistic Victorian culture Pirsig describes in Lila so well is pretty 
> much
> the world Freud lived in and reacted against.
>
> You see what I'm getting at? We can't very well look to these scholars for
> support in making the distinction because drawing that line is squarely
> aimed at correcting THEIR failure. I'm guessing that we can use that same
> line to flatter them insofar as intellect is defined as the capacity to
> criticize these inherited forms. You know, we could start way back in
> Ancient Greece and still make that work pretty well, when thinkers dared 
> to
> question the existence of the gods and public opinion in general.
>
> It occurs to me now that Ken Wilber faced a similar problem in creating 
> his
> big picture. He's been able to find support among the thinkers of the West
> by using each as a piece of the puzzle. Maybe its just because Freud is
> fresh in my mind, but it seems he could be used to support the
> biological-social distinction of the MOQ and it wouldn't be too much of a
> trick to show that psychoanalytic theory can be distinquished from the
> social forms it examines.
>
> Gotta run. Thanks for the thoughts. Keep them coming.
>
> dmb
>
>
>>
>>Mark:
>>The intellectual level has always seemed so very simple to me.
>>May i explain please?
>>Imagine a time in the course of value evolution when there is no
>>intellectual level?
>>Mati:
>>I have a thousand times.
>>
>>Mark:
>>Evolution is dominated by social patterns, and these patterns are those of
>>imitated behaviour and the celebrity. The celebrity is the best human -
>>those with arte.
>>
>>The arte humans are the ones who get to choose what language is 
>>transmitted
>>
>>from one generation to the next. For them, the Good is Arte, and language
>>reflects this.
>>
>>Duality already exists at this time: Duality between those who are arte,
>>and those who are not. A better term may be, 'differentiation;' those with
>>arte are differentiated from those of no or little arte.
>>
>>At some unspecified time, geometric patterns are described for the first
>>time in language.
>>Geometric patterns are perfect examples of the Truth.
>>If you want to build a Good wall, that wall will be the best if True to
>>Geometry.
>>This challenges arte, because Truth is so regardless of how little arte
>>anyone has.
>>
>>What good is it to have all that social arte when an ugly, weak little
>>bastard can build a wall in accordance with geometry which protects
>>everyone
>>-
>>even those without social arte - from the enemy?
>>
>>Once the concept of truth is worshiped in its own right language isn't
>>dominated by social arte privilages anymore, and so the intellectual level
>>begins to break free from the social level: Abstract symbolic
>>manipulation.
>>Structures of all kinds from music to poetry now have a new dimmension -
>>new differentiations which begin to replace the old social 
>>differentiations
>>of the Good.
>>
>>Mati: Very interesting stuff of which I really enjoyed. Are you saying 
>>that
>>ones capacity to utilize truth is the basis for intellect? If so then how
>>would you answer the doctoral committee question?  Take care. Mati
>>
>>
>>
>>
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