[MD] The social - intellectual transition.

[skutvik at online.no]

Craig the enigmatic

2 Mar:

John originally: 
> > By what mechanism does a social level create intellectual patterns?

Craig  
> Pirsig gives the example of how from social rituals, intellectual
> meaning arises. Also Wittgenstein's builder example in "PI". Craig 

The MOQ tenet about the higher level out of the lower and hence 
intellect from society  we agree on, but WHAT social pattern provided 
DQ's its stepping stones to intellect? Language has been suggested  
(Magnus) but that has been around since the Neanderthals and no 
immediate transition took place and moreover there is whole cultures 
this days - the Muslim - who speaks and thinks as well as any without 
making it to the 4th. level 

Now for your (Pirsigean) "social ritual" idea. I guess it's this part from 
LILA you think of.

    Rta. That's what was missing from her life. Ritual. Arriving at 
    work Monday morning is rta. Getting paid Friday evening is rta. 
    Walking into the grocery store and taking food off the shelf to 
    feed one's children is rta. Paying for it with the money received 
    on Friday is more rta. The entire mechanism of society is rta 
    from beginning to end. That's what Lila really needed. He could 
    only guess how far back this ritual-cosmos relationship went, 
    maybe fifty or one hundred thousand years. Cave men are 
    usually depicted as hairy, stupid creatures who don't do much, 
    but anthropological studies of contemporary primitive tribes 
    suggest that stone-age people were probably bound by ritual 
    all day long. There's a ritual for washing, for putting up a 
    house, for hunting, for eating and so on - so much so that the 
    division between 'ritual' and 'knowledge' becomes indistinct. In 
    cultures without books ritual seems to be a public library for 
    teaching the young and preserving common values and 
    information. 

All about rituals being "public libraries" is true and valid, but the 
knowledge of how to build a house or hunting ...etc.  isn't "knowledge" 
in the "objective" (truth) sense. 

    These rituals may be the connecting link between the social 
    and intellectual levels of evolution. One can imagine primitive 
    song-rituals and dance-rituals associated with certain 
    cosmology stories, myths, which generated the first primitive 
    religions. From these the first intellectual truths could have 
    been derived. 

This is also valid. "Primitive religions" are the multi-god mythologies 
out of which the Western and Oriental cultures made it to the 
intellectual level while the "non-primitive religions" i.e.  the Semitic, 
monotheism kind make for the most rigid social patterns there are, 
totally impervious to all intellectual efforts.. 

     If ritual always comes first and intellectual principles always 
    come later, then ritual cannot always be a decadent corruption 
    of intellect. Their sequence in history suggests that principles 
    emerge from ritual, not the other way around. That is, we don't 
    perform religious rituals because we believe in God. We 
    believe in God because we perform religious rituals. If so, 
    that's an important principle in itself.    

But this is a bit awkward as if "social rituals" slowly developed into 
"intellectual principles", but as shown the Semitic religions are nothing 
BUT rituals and rather made it a principle NOT to yield to intellect. No 
it was not rituals which was DQ's stepping stones to intellect, but 
what?   

Bodvar