[MD] Letter to Bodvar Skutvik From Robert M Pirsig, September 15, 2000

[Ron Kulp]

Ron:

I have reproduced Bodivars only known rational appeal to how SOL
functions

in a hope to resolve the misunderstanding and difference of SOL and MoQ.

My own statements and quotes from Robert Pirsig are inserted.

 

THE SOL.

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I read ZMM not long after its publication in 1974 and was struck by the
Herculean task it seemed to undertake: Doing away of the Subject/Object
enigma which has been the bane of Western philosophy since modern times
began. This is not the place to give examples of this enigma (also known
as "mind/matter") or tell about attempts at solutions, but as we know
young Pirsig had conceived of the Quality idea and was asked if it was
objective or subjective and ended up with the conclusion that it was
neither: It was a deeper reality, one that had created the SOM (as he
now called it) ZMM page 231. 

"And finally: Phaedrus following a path that to his knowledge had never
been taken in the history of Western thought, went straight between the
horns of the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma and said that Quality is
neither a part of mind, nor is it part of matter. It is a THIRD entity
which is independent of the two.

And on page 234:

The very existence of subjects and objects themselves is deduced from
the Quality (event). The quality (event) is the cause of the subjects
and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of
Quality.

Page 241

He'd been speculating about the relationship of Quality to mind and
matter and had identified Quality as the parent of mind and matter. This
Copernican inversion of the relationship ...etc. 

I dwell so long on this initial insight because of its significance for
the MOQ . P. toyed with a Quality-based metaphysics to replace the
S/O-based one, something that resulted in a romantic/classic split and
as we see from this diagram "Classic Quality", subtitled "intellectual",
is the S/O aggregate. (ZMM page 243). 

 

The Romantic/Classic split was left for the Dynamic/Static one in LILA ,
but "intellectual quality" remains as a static level and ought to be the
VALUE of the S/O divide, but Pirsig had found a new way of disposing of
the S/O, namely the said "standard procedure" that says that the two
lower levels are "objective" and the two upper are "subjective" 

(Lila's Child annotation # 4)

My earlier view when I was concentrating on the confusion of
subject/object thinking, was to get rid of them entirely to help clarify
things. Later I began to see it's not necessary to get rid of them
because the MOQ can encase them neatly within its structure. The upper
two levels being subjective and the lower two objective.

I agree with the necessity of retaining "S/O thinking" and also that the
MOQ can encase it, but not with his method of doing so. It has caused
much confusion dubious statements, for instance (Lila's Child". Page
529)

In the MOQ, all organisms are objective. They exist in the material
world. All societies are subjective. They exist in the mental world.
Again, the distinction is very sharp. For example, the president of the
United States is a social pattern. No objective scientific instrument
can distinguish a President of the US from anyone else.. 

Inorganic instruments only detect inorganic value. But more serious;
what has subjective/objective and mental/material to do with quality
patterns? In LILA Pirsig (correctly) shows that inorganic value does not
correspond to substance, thus intellectual value doesn't correspond to
mind. No level corresponds to any of SOM's categories. This makes a
SOM-like split open up between biology and society .... at best, more
likely between Intellect and the rest and nothing is gained. It's SOM in
a quality garb.

Ron:

This is Bodivars first misunderstanding of Pirsigs attempt to explain
MoQ levels from an SOM perspective.

Notice how he immediately compares and contrasts this attempt with the
MoQ interpretation conflating the two.

He does not notice how Pirsig is displaying how the two intellectual
patterns interpret the same data.

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In spite of this Pirsig repeatedly - inadvertently - returns to his
initial correct insight and presents intellect as the S/O divide alone.
He says that he saw no need to define intellect, everybody know what it
means and my dictionary says: "The power of the mind to reason
contrasted with feeling and instincts". "Mind" can be omitted without
losing any meaning and because reason is objectivity itself and feeling
is subjectivity itself .. intellect is the S/O distinction. What screws
it all up is the notion of a mind doing the intellectualization, while
it's intellect that does the mind/matter-ization. 

Ron:

Bodivar is unaware he is using a culturally SOM defined definition of
the term "intellect".
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And there is much more that points to the SOL. In LILA Pirsig calls
intellectual value by many names, in this quote on page 306: 

Knowledge has grown away from this historic purpose and has become an
end in itself, just as society has grown away from its original purpose.

It is "knowledge" and there is no other kind than objective knowledge,
and because objective requires subjective (like light requires darkness)
... intellect is the VALUE of the S/O distinction!

Ron:

Notice the jump to a SOM conclusion. He assumes knowledge is
objectivism.
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The most telling thing however is that the way the SOM is described in
ZMM corresponds to the intellectual level as described in LILA ,
something that causes a perfect harmony between the two books that
previously have been worlds apart. This passage in LILA page 261:

Perhaps in Homer's time, when evolution had not yet transcended the
social level into the intellectual ...etc.

...underlines my point. Homer's time is a bit uncertain, but the
development described in ZMM culminating with Socrates & Co started
around that time. During this period intellect -as SOM - made it out of
its social home. This fits perfectly. Look to this in ZMM page 367:

What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there
was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and
substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came
later.

This is clearly what LILA calls "transcending the social level into the
intellectual".

Ron:

I'd like to know where this is stated in Lila. Pirsig in his letter to
Paul Turner stated:

"Another subtler confusion exists between the word, "intellect," that
can mean thought about anything and the word, "intellectual," where
abstract thought itself is of primary importance. Thus, though it may be
assumed that the Egyptians who preceded the Greeks had intellect, it can
be doubted that theirs was an intellectual culture. 

I take this to mean that the intellectual level existed but the culture
was not an intellectually oriented culture.
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--------------------------------- 

After I had harped on the SOL for a long time Anthony McWatt (now
hopefully Doctor Philos. with the MOQ his field) produced this Pirsig
comment that seemingly contradicts the SOL 

To prevent confusion the MOQ treats "mind" as the exact equivalent of
"static intellectual patterns" and avoids use of the term when possible
(Jan. 1998)

Again I must repeat that after the mind/matter dichotomy has been
declared a fall-out of Quality its "mind" can't be MOQ's intellect. It's
poison to introduce either single-handed inside the MOQ and the later
development showed that this had started to bother Pirsig too, after
some more debate Paul Turner wrote to Pirsig to have his opinion and
received a letter in September 2003.

The question you raise about the intellectual level has troubled me too.
When I answered Dan Glover in Lila's Child, I remember being a little
annoyed that anyone should ask what the intellectual level is -as though
he were asking me what I mean by the word, "the." Any definition you
give is more likely to complicate understanding than simplify it. But
since then I have seen the question grow because the answer I have given
is inadequate. 

I take this as a step in the right direction - although not quite SOL -
because Pirsig goes on:

Intellectuality occurs when these customs as well as biological and
inorganic patterns are designated with a sign that stands for them and
these signs are manipulated independently of the patterns they stand
for. "Intellect" can then be defined very loosely as the level of
independently manipulable signs. Grammar, logic and mathematics can be
described as the rules of this sign manipulation.

This however makes intellect into language and if so the MOQ is solidly
back in the SOM. No, if using these terms: Intellect is the VALUE of the
signs/what they signify distinction. 

Just when the evolution of the intellectual level from the social level
took place in history can only be speculated on. I certainly wasn't
there when it happened. Julian Jaynes', "The Origin of Consciousness in
the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," has impressed me, but other
speculation seems valid. Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, could be the
pivotal point. Maybe Solomon. Maybe the early Greek philosophers.

The "Bicameral" idea is interesting, but intellect's emergence as a
value that transformed the Greek - and by and by the Western culture -
is convincingly described in ZMM. I'm afraid that the language
definition only complicates things. Admittedly, language most likely was
the social pattern that DQ used for lifting existence to the
intellectual level, but in the same sense that carbon remains inorganic
(while being the biological building block) language itself remains a
social pattern. It is WHAT language conveys that counts, and the Greek
philosophers used it to promote the value of the subject/object divide.

Ron:

The language definition only complicates things because Bo does not
understand the implications that

Aristotle's grammar has on the conceptualization of abstract and
concrete "entities" of noun usage.

He does not realize that HOW a language is structured determines HOW
ideas are conceptualized as "entities". That Axioms dictate method.
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If one extends the term intellectual to include primitive cultures just
because they are thinking about things, why stop there? How about
chimpanzees? Don't they think? How about earthworms? Don't they make
conscious decisions? How about bacteria responding to light and
darkness? How about chemicals responding to light and darkness? Our
intellectual level is broadening to a point where it is losing all its
meaning. 

Now, this is my Pirsig! Exactly what I have tried to say all the time. 

Ron:

This occurs when the human definition is reduced to meaninglessness
without taking into consideration that the levels are defined by the
species being observed that the intellectual level is defined by the
social level which is it's parent.
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You have to cut it off somewhere, and it seems to me the greatest
meaning can be given to the intellectual level if it is confined to the
skilled manipulation of abstract symbols that have no corresponding
particular experience and which behave according to rules of their own. 

But here he goes again. Abstract/concrete is another SOM off-spring and
abstract symbols with no corresponding experience is SOM's chimera of
its two halves having an independent existence. Pirsig's argument in ZMM
was that the SOM developed via Plato's "ideas/ shadows" and Aristotle's
"form/substance" and even if we today see no subject/object content in
these early dichotomies, they were precursors to the later mind/matter.
Thus a symbol may have no "concrete" opposite, but it always represents
something - an "idea" even. 

Ron:

Bo again does not see that the abstract/concrete distinction actually
creates SOM. What Bo fails to see is that symbols are concepts.

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The argument that the MOQ is not an intellectual formulation but some
kind of other level is not clear to me. There is nothing in the MOQ that
I know of that leads to this conclusion. 

This one is for me, but I can only say that an intellectual level
"containing ideas" - SOM one idea and the MOQ another - is incompatible
with the SOL. Earlier in this letter Pirsig says that intellect can't
see itself. That's just right! A higher ground is needed to see the
outline of something and that is what the MOQ provides! It sees
intellect for what it really is - a mere static level of its own system.


Having criticized Pirsig for not having followed the light of his first
insight in ZMM I again point to the "standard procedure" as the culprit.
It's a Trojan Horse that lets the SOM spread itself across the static
levels. Pirsig himself is of course immune to any infiltration, but a
newcomer to the MOQ will be led astray by it. 

Pirsig:

"As you know there is something about quality that makes it impossible
for many to understand what you are talking about. A lot of it is
persistence of the materialistic, objective, historic tradition that
hopefully will be overcome in time. But also we are seeing a kind of
quality blindness that musicians call a "tin ear" of singers who keep
sharping and flattening notes without knowing they are doing it. Many
people just do not "see" quality at the same time they are obviously
seeing it, in the same way that tin- eared people do not "hear" harmony
at the same time they are obviously hearing it. I think this was what
you were trying to tell Hellier at the end of the Great Shoot-Out when
you told him to learn more about reality. It seems that all he could see
was quality as a concept, something with about the same scientific
reality as hippogriffs and Jesus in Heaven and other empirically
unverifiable entities. He just did not directly see what you were
talking about."

---------------

Finally one example of how the MOQ could be the "Copernican Revolution"
that ZMM speaks about. The British magazine "Philosophy Now" had its
October/ November issue dedicated to the "consciousness" problem, which
we immediately recognize as the subject looking out on the world. In the
magazine the physics behind consciousness and the psychics resulting
from it is pondered, but at the end one has a feeling of futility;
no-one can unravel this Gordian Knot. 

If we assume the SOL interpretation that SOM is a sub-set of Quality -
the intellectual sub-set - none of its halves has an independent
existence. There's no mind alone and no body alone (I can't list all its
off-shoots) this is SOM's chimera and the much sought for interaction
between mind and body will never be found because there is none. Yet,
illusory, it's a most valuable illusion that has given us modernity. The
thing is that it has no metaphysical reality, no static level has. The
only thing real is the DQ/SQ union. 

Thus consciousness, mind, awareness as separate phenomena goes poof!
This will not be readily accepted, an example of a similar paradigm
shift - and its inertia - is ancient physics. It created a lot of
enigmas - paradoxes called - and the brightest minds of the age pondered
why nature would be so enigmatic. It was not until modern physics that
the solution was found, but this did not solve things from the old
premises rather dissolved them, but it took centuries to take hold. This
is exactly what the MOQ does with SOM's enigmas, but the science will go
on about its "angels on pin-points" for a long time to come. 

What the MOQ could have done .. more correctly, but because its creator
lost heart on one crucial point the MOQ is impotent and explains
nothing. The theory in LILA about how the mind/matter interaction works
- where the intellectual level is "mind" and the inorganic level is
"matter" - makes no sense. Nothing wrong with my opponents at the
discussion, like the ancient physicists they are the brightest, but from
the wrong premises it doesn't help. Pirsig's words in the Paul letter
about his opinion being no "Papal Bull" is notoriously neglected,
everything issuing from that end is received as just that. Geniuses do
mistakes, Einstein regretted his "universal constant" that was supposed
to explain the static universe that later proved to be expanding. I wish
that Pirsig would reconsider his own blunder.

Ron:

Likewise Bodivar should consider his own misunderstanding.
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