[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[skutvik at online.no]

DMB and Group.

On 15 Nov. DMB  wrote:

> Bo said:
> ...But this also proves my SOL (Intellect=S/O) There can't arrive an
> "intellectual" pattern that overthrows the S/O while remaining an
> intellectual pattern. The MOQ started as one but "took off on a
> purpose of its own".
 
> dmb says:
> Why not? Why do you imagine that non-SOM intellectual patterns are
> impossible? I have been reading anti-SOM or non-SOM intellectual
> descriptions from a variety of philosophers for a couple of months now
> and so this assertion strikes me as quite absurd and quite obviously
> false. 

I should have expected this, to be praised by me is the kiss of 
death. ;-)  You clearly regard the mere ability to speak or think as 
MOQ's 4th. value. And if you were able to listen in on a Stone 
Age meeting - whose agenda guaranteed was non-SOM - you 
would deem it an intellectual exchange. 

The "philosophy" term itself, invented by the Greeks who 
introduced the SOM, is intellect's hallmark. It means love of 
wisdom, but after Socrates & Co. wisdom and truth became 
synonymous. Thus philosophy is the search for what is 
OBJECTIVELY true and wise in contrast to silly SUBJECTIVE 
nonsense.   

> Radical Empiricism is a direct attack on SOM. In what sense is radical
> empiricism NOT intellectual? How does this prime example fail to prove
> the falsity of your assertion? 

William James certainly doubted S/O as existence's fundament, 
but he did NOT identify a SOM. He also hinted to a pre-S/O 
stage the said "aesthetic continuum" which - in James opinion - 
was the TRUE reality with the S/O some secondary taking place 
at the subjective human plane. Thus he was, and remained, a 
SOM-ist. Pirsig also began as one (SOM or Intellect is MOQ's 
parent) but he went a stage further and sketched the first 
alternative to SOM - the Romantic/Classic metaphysics - where 
Classic is sub-titled "intellect" = SOM or mind/matter. And this 
metaphysics weren't  S/O, not even in the Jamesian form of the 
"continuum" as the objective reality. At least Phaedrus did not 
claim Quality as "objective" - an intellectual pattern - he relegates 
SOM the role of a sub-set of his new metaphysics. Regrettably 
LILA did not follow up (making the 4th. level=S/O) but created 
one that we have been chasing for more than ten years without 
finding out.

Bo