[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[Mary]

Hello DMB & Bo & Marsha,

We seem to have become embroiled in a very subtle argument.  I'll respond
in-line as plainly as I can and then wait for your objections so we can
proceed. :)

On Behalf Of david buchanan
> Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 12:16 PM
> Mary said to dmb:
> I can't find anywhere in Bo's comments where he equates the Social
> Level with Dynamic Quality itself.
> 
> 
> dmb says:
> 
> Huh? That's a confused version of what I said. Bo mistake is not
> EQUATING the social level with DQ. His mistake is CONFUSING the social
> level with Arete. Bo takes Arete to mean the social level but Pirsig
> equates it with DQ.
> 
> 


[Mary Replies] I'll withhold comment until you expand on this below.

> 
> Mary saod:
> 
> ... Now I figure you are zeroing in on Bo's use of the word "arête" in
> this phrase, " Socrates represents SOM's independence from the Arete
> past", and I say you really don't want to go there. ... But if your
> argument is that Bo is saying that arête = Dynamic Quality = The Social
> Level, then what am I to do with you, DMB? :)  Do you really think Bo
> is saying that Socrates escaped from Dynamic Quality?  This would be a
> straw man indeed.
> 
> 
> dmb says:
> 
> 
> I'm saying that Bo mistakenly equates arete with the social level. I
> think Bo doesn't understand what is meant by DQ, which is pretty much
> the whole point of Pirsig's work. See, I'm not disputing the idea that
> the intellectual level was being born out of the social level but I'm
> insisting that there is something else also going on. Pirsig traces our
> hollow forms of rationality back to the moment when Plato took the
> Arete (DQ) from the Sophists and turned it into a static form, an
> intellectual static form. This is not a case of putting the
> intellectual over the social but rather of putting the static over the
> dynamic. Take a look at the last few pages of chapter 29 in ZAMM and
> you'll see what I mean. The emphasis is Pirsig's in the original...
> 
[Mary Replies] 
I find it difficult to believe that before Plato people existed in an
amorphous state of Dynamic Quality without static latches beyond the
Biological. If arête was the common way by which people interfaced with the
Universe, then where are the static latches for that?  At what level does
arête reside?  If it is pure Dynamic Quality, that contradicts Pirsig's
definition of Dynamic Quality.  Before Plato, you seem to be arguing that
people lived in a state of "pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality".
Hmmm.
 
> 
> "QUALITY! VIRTUE! DHARMA! THAT is what the Sophists were teaching! NOT
> ethical relativism. NOT pristine 'virtue.' But ARETE. Excellence.
> Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind
> and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those
> first teachers of the Western world were teaching QUALITY, and the
> medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric. He has been doing it right
> all along."
> 
> "But why? Phaedrus wondered. Why destroy ARETE? And no sooner had he
> asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato HADN'T tried to
> destroy arete. He had ENCAPSULATED it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out
> of it; had CONVERTED it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made
> arete the Good, the highest of forms, the highest Idea of all. It was
> subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone
> before. That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the
> classroom had seemed so close to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was TAKEN
> from the rhetoricians. Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous
> cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists.
> The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and
> unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an idea at all.
> The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever
> changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed rigid way."
> 
[Mary Replies] 
As we see in the quote above, that is not what Pirsig is saying at all.  He
is instead building the case that before SOM, we were more attuned to
Dynamic Quality.  We did not try to put it in a box and label it as an
immutable Object.  This quote seems to strongly support the idea that the
Intellectual Level is SOM.
  
> dmb says:
> 
> You see? The Sophists were teaching Quality, as in "reality itself,
> ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way."
> I think it's obvious that he's talking about Arete as dynamic quality
> and he's explaining how it was converted by Plato into static quality,
> into a fixed and rigid thing.
> 
[Mary Replies] 
Yes.  This is the birth of SOM as the Intellectual Level.  The first
Intellectual static latch right here.  When you take DQ and codify it, that
is by definition an act of SOM.

> 
> Mary said:
> As I recall, Pirsig's point about arête was not that arete = DQ
> unequivocally as used by everyone in ancient Greece, but that it was a
> word with multiple layers of meaning with a very interesting past which
> may have evolved from the much older word rta which does seem to mean
> something similar in concept to DQ. - and, that the only reason all
> this fuss about this word is significant at all, is because Pirsig was
> looking for a precedent in history for the concept of Dynamic Quality.
> 
> 
> dmb says:
> 
> Who said anything was unequivocal for everyone? I'm just saying that
> Pirisg identifies his own notion of Quality (DQ) with the Arete taught
> by the Sophists of ancient Greece. The textual evidence (above) is very
> clear about this point, don't you think?
> 
[Mary Replies] Yes I do.

> Again, the assertion that the intellectual level grew out of the social
> level is NOT in dispute. But there is something else going on too. The
> dynamic is being converted into the static. It's the price paid for
> intellect. Pirsig is saying we want intellect, but not at that price.
> The problem is that Bo (and you too, apparently) is misconstruing this
> other, more important aspect. Bo construes the Sophists as teaching
> static social quality instead of Dynamic Quality. That misses the
> central point of the book. It undermines the central point of the book
> and misconstrues the book's philosophical and dramatic climax. For my
> fifth example....
> 
> 
[Mary Replies] When you say, " The dynamic is being converted into the
static. It's the price paid for intellect. Pirsig is saying we want
intellect, but not at that price", what you are saying is that codifying -
Objectifying - Dynamic Quality is where Intellect starts.  I completely
agree.

This is why I equate the Intellectual Level with Subject-Object Metaphysics.
To say "the dynamic is being converted into the static" is exactly the
definition of the way all static patterns of value are formed at any level.
This does not subvert the message of the book.  This is in complete accord
with the message of the book.

> Bo said:
> 
> Socrates represents SOM's independence from the Arete past, here he is
> said to represents the intellectual level's independence of its social
> origin  (all levels have their origin in the former level).
> 
> 
> dmb says:
> 
> In this sentence, Bo is equating SOM with intellect and equating Arete
> with the social level. I think each of those equations are incorrect
> and together these two notions create one helluva conceptual mess.
> 
[Mary Replies] 
If one accepts your definition of arête, which I am uneasy with, then yes, I
can certainly see where you disagree with Bo on his use of "arête" in his
sentence; however, if he were to say, "Socrates represents SOM's
independence from the illogical belief-based past" - or - he were to say,
"Socrates represents a new paradigm where the world is viewed as
understandable in terms of absolutes (subjects and objects)" then I would
agree with Bo entirely.

> 
> Again, here is Bo misconstruing arete as social static quality:
> "About Aretê being the social level in a MOQ retrospect is so obvious
> that you have to be hell-bent on NOT admitting it. It was the Homer's
> time in Greece  "...when the social level weren't yet transcended" as
> it says in LILA.
> 
> Here's what Pirsig actually says about arete:
> "QUALITY! VIRTUE! DHARMA! THAT is what the Sophists were teaching!
> ...Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching QUALITY, ...
> Plato HADN'T tried to destroy arete. He had ENCAPSULATED it; made a
> permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had CONVERTED it to a rigid, immobile
> Immortal Truth. ...The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and
> eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an
> idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself,
> ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed rigid way."
> 
> I don't see how it could make sense to describe static social quality
> as "reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of
> fixed rigid way".
> 
> Bo said:
> ... but it's plain silly to believe that DQ was more prominent at some
> particular time in history. And its just as plain that the Aretê
> represents social values, the duty, honour, valor, contempt for death
> that Hector displays is the same as the islamists suicide "pilots"
> showed. This is the "paradise lost" longing.
> 
> dmb says:
> Bo says it's plain silly, but I think that is exactly what Pirsig is
> saying. "And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable
> magnitude of what man, when he gained the power to understand and rule
> the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires
> of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into
> enormous manifestation of his own dreams of power and wealth - but for
> this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of what it is to be a
> part of the world and not an enemy of it."  "And the bones of the
> Sophists long ago turned to dust ...buried so deep and with such
> ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman
> centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and
> see with horror what had been done."
> 
[Mary Replies] 
I agree with Bo.  It's "plain silly" to believe that DQ was more prominent
at some particular time in history.  

DQ is all around us.  It is everywhere and nowhere.  It cannot be
quantified.  It did not exist in greater abundance at any one time than at
another.  What does exist in varying quantities over time is Static Quality.
Socrates may well have been the one to make the first Intellectual Level
static latch.  His latch was that The Good can be quantified, observed,
Objectified.  This is the first example of SOM.  Making up stories to
explain the unexplainable was no longer necessary, according to Socrates et
al, we could seek to find out the Truth in a logical, experimental way.
This was a sea change.  This in no way diminishes DQ - it just provides a
new and unique way to respond to it.
> 
> dmb had said to Bo:
> 
> ...You repeatedly take this [pre-intellectual] as a reference to social
> static patterns. Because they evolved prior to intellect, you figure,
> social patterns are "pre-intellectual". What it actually refers to is
> the cutting edge of experience, the front edge of each moment, the
> eternal present. In other words, the pre-intellectual reality is
> Dynamic Quality, not social static quality.
> 
> 
[Mary Replies] I view this paragraph as a mass of confusion.  You are once
again equating the human intellect (the human capacity for thinking) with
the Intellectual Level.  The two are not the same.
> 
> Bo responded by simply repeating the mistake again:
> 
> 
> .., in the MOQ context "intellect" is the last or highest level, thus
> what precedes intellect must necessarily have been the social, but mark
> you, all level have once been the "cutting edge" and the formation of a
> new level was in all cases as dynamic as dynamic comes. No problems
> there.
> 
[Mary Replies] But now I see why, for Bo uses the term "intellect" loosely
too.
> 
> dmb says:
> 
> No problem there? There is a very, very big problem. Can you imagine
> static social quality getting you off that hot stove? Can you imagine
> that the front end of that moving freight train is Victorian virtue? Do
> you suppose Northrop's term (the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum)
> is a reference to honor and duty? Do you think James's "immediate flux
> of life" or "pure experience" is a reference to courage and loyalty?
> No, of course not. If you read "preintellectual" to mean static social
> quality, the most important ideas and examples no longer make any sense
> at all. 

[Mary Replies] 
Yes they do.  Pre-intellectual refers to prior to the advent of the
Intellectual Level.  That is not the same as stupid.  We were just as smart
prior to the Intellectual Level as after its emergence.  The difference is
in how we use our intellect.

Before Socrates, there was no concept of an absolute Good that can be
dissected.  We were at the mercy of gods and forces beyond our control and
understanding.  There was a profound fatalism underlying everything.  We had
no hope of understanding why things happened as they did.  All we could do
before the Intellectual Level appeared was hope and pray and make up
nonsensical stories to satisfy our craving to bring order and logic to the
world.


This goes for ZAMM as well as Lila. I think anyone's
> understanding of what what Pirsig means by "pre-intellectual" is going
> to be improved when you compare it to the way this idea is expressed by
> other thinkers. Northrop and James are the most obvious choices because
> Pirsig was heavily influenced by the former and identifies his MOQ with
> the latter. Dewey talks about this too, in terms of experience that is
> HAD and experience as it is KNOWN, or simply as primary and secondary
> experience.I can assure you that none of these guys, including Pirsig,
> are talking about the difference between social and intellectual
> levels. They're talking about dynamic and static, about pre-
> intellectual and intellectual, undivided and divided, undifferentiated
> and differentiated, preconceptual and conceptual, immediate and
> reflective. This is about the DQ/sq distinction, not the
> social/intellectual distinction.
> 
[Mary Replies] Sure.

> But hey, I've explained this more than a few times already but it just
> doesn't register. Bo sticks to his ridiculous nonsense no matter what
> anyone says.
> 
[Mary Replies] 
Then take a deep breath, DMB.  Marsha sees it right when she asks, "What was
the Buddha doing sitting under that tree?"  He was using SOM to try to think
through a solution to the problems of the world.  It's what we all do.
There is nothing special or beyond SOM going on in the East that makes it
necessary to expand the Intellectual Level beyond SOM so that it can be made
to encompass it.  

> His english is way better than my norwegian but still, I can't help but
> wonder if Bo is losing something in translation. How a native english
> speaker can follow him in this wacky thinking, however, is hard for me
> to fathom.
>