[MD] Forget about Empiricism, no thanks.

[skutvik at online.no]

In your message barrage on 21 Oct:

you also said :

> My intellectual history has alot of non-SOM content in it.
> Take a look at Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self

I would like to see examples of "non-SOM INTELLECTUAL content"

Bo earlier:
> > Yes, the S/O - or intellectual value - returned from its Medieval
> > hibernating with the Renaissance and slowly worked itself upwards in
> > the social-value dominated Europe. Magna Charta, Habeas Corpus, and
> > the Bruno, Kepler and Galileo affairs were mileposts, but I would
> > say that the French revolution and the following Enlightenment
> > really accelerated its progress. But according to Pirsig it was not
> > until the end of WW1 that intellect took command in the European
> > theatre.

> DM: Yet there have always been those trying to challenge Enlightment
> blind spots, Blake,the great Romantics, Jung and there is a social
> class struggle in this Enlightenment movement too that is far from
> intellectual.

You have some strange notions of what "intellectual" and "social" 
means in a MOQ context. When king and nobility were toppled by the 
French revolution and the burgoise came to power, it was an upheaval 
of the French society, but NOT social in the sense of (in the social 
level's hey-day) when one despot overturned another. The French, the 
American, the Russian revolutions were all about the intellectual level 
taking over from the social level, displacing the latter's view that the 
human condition is god-given with its own view that OBJECTIVELY 
seen all men are equal. 

The Romantics among with many other did not liked the new 
"objectivity". Fascism and the Nazism were the social order's last 
stand in Europe, but intellect has taken over completely in the Western 
world. Nowadays the intellect vs society conflict has moved to a stage 
called "western values vs islam". The islamists struggle desperately to 
keep their world pure from this destructive un-godly force, but the 
outcome is given. Intellect will prevail.

Finally regarding resistance against intellect. Pirsig himself began as a 
protestant and for him the pre SOM - Aretê - era looked ideal and he 
identified it with Quality. Now, in the MOQ no level or era has been 
dynamic or ideal - to the contrary the static evolution is one of 
betterment - thus the coming of SOM was no "out of Eden" but 
intellect's emergence out the social level. However the two books 
ZAMM and LILA has brought much trouble, Pirsig seems unwilling to 
see the obvious, and the new MOQ "elders" - Anthony, (once) Paul 
Turner and now DMB - avoid this issue like the plague. 

Enough

Bo