[MD] Another parallel

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
Also, objectivity is the defect in the intellectual level, not the level itself.

Bo replied:
What the intellectual level is beside objectivity (subjectivity the siamese twin) I would like to know. The 4th level is SOM and I would like some more substance than DMB's constant harping on: "it's wrong because Pirsig says so".

dmb says:
Well, it's also wrong because it doesn't make any sense. If the 4th level is SOM, then William James, John Dewey, John Stuhr, Sandra Rosenthal, Hegel, Heidegger and a whole host of other philosophers must have been using something other than intellectual patterns when they criticized SOM as a philosophical problem. On what basis can one offer a critique of SOM, if not an intellectual basis? In order to maintain your weird theory you have to deny intellect to the Western critics of SOM as well as most Eastern intellectuals. Frankly, I think that is more than a little bit ridiculous. On top of that, you have deleted and failed to even address "one of the best reasons to reject" your equation. That equation would mean that the central aim of the MOQ is impossible. If the intellect is identified with SOM, then there is no chance of ever correcting the idea that science and rationality are value-free and there is no chance of creating a new, spiritual rationality. There would be no way to assert human rights as anything but sentimentality. I'm saying that your equation is illogical in the extreme and even if it were a sound idea the consequences would still be a disaster for the MOQ. 
Look, Bo. One of the biggest problems with SOM and scientific objectivity is that it allows only one construction of things, that which corresponds with objective reality. But the MOQ says that it's possible for more than one construction of things. The MOQ says intellectual descriptions are like paintings in an art gallery. It says that SOM and the MOQ are like two different kinds of maps, one of which will be better than the other depending on one's purposes. It says intellect should control society, but then asks if SOM is the right set of intellectual patterns to do that job. As we all know, the answer in "no". SOM has no provision for morals and the MOQ paints a different picture in which intellectual patterns ARE moral patterns. In the MOQ, intellect is not amoral, objective or value-free and yet there is still coherence, logical consistency, agreement with experience, as well as elegance and simplicity. It has tremendous explanatory power, solves philosophical problem, and it begins with an alternative set of metaphysical assumptions. That, my friend, means it is intellectual without being SOM. Thus they cannot be identical. 

dmb quoted from chapter 24:
... According to the MOQ these 'human rights' have not just a sentimental basis, but a rational, metaphysical basis. They are essential to the evolution of a higher level of life from a lower level of life. They are for real.

Bo replied:
Agree, but first all the intellectual patterns listed in chapter 24 are based on OBJECTIVITY - on REASON - versus social values that intellect deem subjective, but seen from the social level is morals itself. No, objectivity is no "defect" but intellect's very core. How long will it take for you to see the obvious?

dmb says:
Sorry, Bo, but "obvious" is about the last thing one could say about your assertion. As I see it, your equation is obviously wrong, conspicuoulsy wrong. Reason and objectivity are not the same thing and it would be a huge mistake to think that the MOQ is attacking reason or the intellect itself rather than SOM and objectivity. If the MOQ is opposed to SOM and SOM is identical to intellect, then the MOQ would be fundamentally anti-intellectual. (Which is probably why Platt is warming up to the idea.) I think it's "obvious" that the MOQ's goal is to improve the intellect, to correct science, and that means using reason, rationality, logic, the skilled manipulation of abstractions and all the other things a person would normally associate with intellectual activities like philosophy. Those aren't the flaws in the intellect. Those are the tools we use to fix the flaws, to diagnose problems and to create solutions. SOM's objectivity is a more specific target than is intellect. This is another reason why it makes no sense to equate SOM with intellect. Here's a section from ZAMM where Pirsig gets to "the root of the whole thing". Throughout both books, the goal is a "modification of the existing rational methods themselves" and "This idea of Quality took issue with ... objectivity and disinterestedness", as he says in chapter 28 of ZAMM. "Reason was no longer to be value free", as he says in chapter 29 of ZAMM. Interestingly, he says exactly the same thing in chapter 29 of LILA as well. There's "another parallel" worth considering. 

If the University of Chicago was interested in the esthetics of what he was saying rather than the rational content, they were failing their fundamental purpose as a University.
This was it. He really believed. It wasn't just another interesting idea to be tested by existing rational methods. It was a modification of the existing rational methods themselves. Normally when you have a new idea to present in an academic environment you're supposed to be objective and disinterested in it. But this idea of Quality took issue with that very supposition...of objectivity and disinterestedness. These were mannerisms appropriate only to dualistic reason. Dualistic excellence is achieved by objectivity, but creative excellence is not.

Phædrus went a different path from the idea of individual, personal Quality decisions. I think it was a wrong one, but perhaps if I were in his circumstances I would go his way too. He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw it as even broader than that...a new spiritual rationality...in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to be "value free." Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do what is "reasonable" even when it isn't any good. That was the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then.





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