[MD] Another parallel

[david buchanan]

Gav said:
 i don't think it is about killing the intellect; it is about killing intellectual 'noise': the unconscious activity of the mind that is really an extrusion of the social level. once this noise abates the intellect is empowered.

dmb says:


Yea, something like that. One of the central features of the MOQ's critique of intellect extends from Plato and Aristotle in ZAMM all the way to James's ideas at the end of Lila. I mean, this critique practically constitutes a continuous narrative thread extending through both books and yet it's really pretty simple. Somewhere back in ancient Greece the good and the true became separated and the true became king. Eventually, by the time we get to objective, value-free, scientific truth, the true had became so removed from the good that the good was considered to be not quite real. So then Pirsig and James come along and say just the opposite, they say, "truth is a species of the good". More specifically, truth is a static intellectual good and in the MOQ's moral hierarchy only DQ itself is considered higher and more moral. The MOQ not only rejects the idea of value-free objective truth, it says that intellectual static patterns are the most highly evolved of all patterns and are composed of nothing but values.
Now, it's true that you'll find mystics and meditators whose goal is to quite the mind in various ways to rediscover what James and Zen Buddhism would call "pure experience" and these kinds of activities really aren't appropriate in a science lab or at University. But the MOQ is also adding the idea of DQ to our intellectual understanding of the world. The MOQ says that DQ explains why people like Poincare can pick one hypothesis from an infinite number of them, that DQ is "the cutting edge of scientific progress itself", the driving force behind the contrarians, and even the static form of morality that should be guiding our society (intellectual values like freedom of speech) is designed to keep things open to Dynamic improvement.
That's why I keep saying that anti-intellectualism is not only incorrect, it's immoral. I suppose that could come across as self-righteous posturing or mere insult but I sincerely that this is pretty much the whole point of the MOQ. Pirsig tells us that Phaedrus' aim was to create a new spiritual form of rationality in which in would be irrational to exclude values and this moral hierarchy is just that. In that sense, to be anti-intellectual is to miss the whole point of bashing SOM and of replacing it with the MOQ. To be anti-intellectual in this context, is to identify intellect with it's defect and gloss over Pirsig's repair job almost entirely. 
But, Gav, you already know this. I'm talking to Bodvar and the anti-intellectual types who more or less identify intellect with it's defect, who can't seem to accept that Pirsig solves an intellectual problem with an intellectual solution, and who somehow got the idea that metaphysics is something other than an intellectual description. 


  
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