[MD] Empirical and Historical

[Platt Holden]

Hey Bo,

I can see now that Pirsig's attack on S/O intellect in ZAMM got watered
down in his subsequent writings.  There's nothing I can find in ZAMM
about intellect being a manipulation of symbols or any such
abstract description. Not at all. In ZAMM, intellect is S/O, period, 
including
all its paradoxes, self-contradictions, infinite regresses, and 
uncertainties.
It was against this giant of accepted but flawed intellectualism that Pirsig
found an Achilles heel. Small wonder, then, that when the Intellectual Level
appeared in the MOQ, again described as defective, you presumed it to be
the same derelict creature Pirsig exposed in ZAMM. The relief that exposure
brought to you was, now that I think about it, the same relief I felt. And, 
I
too presumed the Intellectual Level in the MOQ was the S/O intellect
of  ZAMM. There was no reason not to. But then others started questioning
the level and I got swept up in the tide. Silly me.

Now I agree with you that any other interpretation of the Intellectual Level
effectively kills the great body of Pirsig's work and deprives him of his
revolutionary discovery. For if the MOQ is simply another in a long line of
static intellectual patterns, what good is it? As Marsha said, a static 
intellectual
pattern is like a score for a symphony. You can experience either one, but
there is a difference!

Best,
Platt


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <skutvik at online.no>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 4:27 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Empirical and Historical


> Platt and All.
>
> 15 July:
>
> I think I'll tell a story, you may have heard it many times, but it 
> conveys
> my point better than all this tedious philosophy.
>
> In it's time I was oppressed by SOM. Not that the I knew any SOM, it
> was the mind/matter abyss, ourselves as isolated minds fundamentally
> alienated from other minds and - most of all - from reality, only
> approaching "it" by way of theories, that however close only were
> subjective descriptions of an enigmatic something. I knew the
> impossibility of this dualism, but it did not alleviate my oppression, it
> merely looked like an added sadistic game that existence played with
> us. Like a child playing with an ant not capable of understanding that
> the huge shape above it was its tormentor. I wandered through
> libraries and browsed through books in a search for some answer, but
> no one seemed to care.I mean a lot of thinkers addressed the M/M
> paradoxes and problems - the empiricists for instance -  but only like
> myself  in a more abstract way, pointing to the strange "thing in itself"
> world that we subjectively added qualities to. The more modern
> philosophers that DMB promotes I hadn't heard of, but they would not
> have helped, as said there's no lack of "criticisms" of the mind/matter
> schism, but no one has identified it as a metaphysics - as a SOM -
> entering history at a particular time. Not until Robert Pirsig. I came
> across "Zen and the Art .." in 1978 and it turned my tables. Phaedrus
> seemed even more oppressed than myself, but more capable of
> challenging it,  as said I believed it was the way existence was
> "prefabricated". I need not repeat my first reading but even writing
> about it some thirty years later it moves me. Well, as we know, he had
> his Quality epiphany and by and by he made the in-out turn of the
> reality "sock": The subject/object divide was no abyss but a Quality fall-
> out. Most revealing for me was the section on how SOM emerged with
> the old Greeks, it had not existed as SOM itself wants us to believe
> "always, just for the Greeks to discover". Then, even more exciting,
> the sketch of a new metaphysics, and now NOT in the classic sense of
> just another theory about an enigmatic reality, but in the sense of
> CLASSIC being degraded to a part of the new world order. It was this
> that meant revolution for me. In ZAMM (translated to moqish) DQ only
> had SOM as its static component, but it was also called INTELLECT!!
> When LILA arrived the SQ range had increased to four levels and that
> was fine with me, but SOM no longer was the intellectual level, and
> that destroyed its value. Intellect had again become the dreaded
> "mind" where ideas -  theories - are produced about the enigmatic
> Quality Reality. The MOQ itself just another mind-intellectual idea-
> theory Phaedrus giant step for humankind had been reversed.
>
> Hope this conveys my frustration.
>
> Bodvar
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