[MD] to claim people had no "intellect"

[david buchanan]

Ian said to David T.:
...The MOQ states that the intellectual level "consists of the collection and skilled manipulation of abstract, language-derived symbols that can either have no corresponding particular experience or can, and which behave according to rules of their own."  When you have a culture without a written language, this is a hard standard to achieve.  Don't get defensive about a perceived slight which feels like culture relativism.  I have no doubt that the genius(es) who built Stonehenge qualify, as would geniuses from the Native American population who had no way to record their thoughts.  In fact, if you read my previous post [and ZAMM, and Lila], you'll have a hard time prosecuting Pirsig (and Sidis) for valuing Native American thinking as anything other than world-class. The Greeks may have invented the jury trial and elections, but Pirsig and Sidis credit Indians with a healthy percentage of the political concept of democracy. I like the definition of the fourth level and believe it makes a worthy border.  The Bible makes a good test case.  ...

dmb says:

I think that's right. As Pirsig puts it, it's not that intellectual patterns are truer in any absolute sense, whatever that means, it's just that intellectual patterns are more dynamic, more flexible and, to the extent that they're empirically based, they're self-correcting. Apparently, David has the idea that intellectual means "smart" and social means "dumb". But I think it's more like the social level evolved over tens or hundreds of thousands of years and this growth was less deliberate and more organic than intellect. Language developed and grew increasingly sophisticated but for the most part this was an unexamined tool. It was used, not scrutinized. But with an increasing power of abstraction you get a situation where the unexamined cultural forms start to come under examination. The power structure of the society, their gods, the nature of justice and truth and lots of other things that had evolved more or less naturally at the social level was no longer taken for granted, no longer unquestioned or unexamined. 
So, as I see it, the battle between the Sophists and Plato was NOT a contest between social and intellectual values and it was NOT a contest between subjectivists and objectivists. It was a battle over the shape of the intellect, with the Sophists being on the side of flux and flow and dynamism while Plato was pushing for fixed, eternal forms. In Plato's hands it was like we were supposed to be subservient to our own abstractions whereas the Sophists said that man is the measure of all things. And I think that is a statement about the limits of human knowledge and an acknowledgment of the limits of our perspective, not a statement claiming any special privilege of that perspective.

Getting back to that first point, that the social level is not necessarily less true but only less able to change, I've seen this with respect to mysticism. There are intellectual and philosophical explanations that more or less match what the myths say in their own metaphorical way. This is one of the things I find so compelling about philosophical mysticism and the perennial philosophy. The same basic idea shows up in a wide range of cultures, East and West, ancient and modern, and can be expressed socially or intellectually. It seems to persist regardless of the particular static forms it takes and so it seems true on both levels.  



 		 	   		  
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