[MD] Intellect vs. Intellectualism

[John Carl]

Taking up thee task at hand, (and it's been a long-running battle)

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 3:34 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>wrote:

"You should be able to see that intellect and the flaw are two different
things. Your task is to discover where one concept ends and the other
begins."


I agree.  I call the flaw, "intellectualism".  Intellect is a good thing.
Without intellect, we'd be screwed. However, putting intellect as the sole
value of evolution or the highest value is the stance that over-emphasizes
the head at the expense of the heart.  Intellectualism is the name of that
particular problem.  That is where one concept ends and the other begins.
Therein is the reason Bo's SOL is an issue and Platt, Marsha and others
cannot rest easy with the MoQ as it is formulated.  Because the MoQ states
that the highest and most moral level of evolution is intellect.  This is
wrong and immoral because it puts thinking alone in front of feeling whereas
this task of ours should be to integrate heart and head; to demonstrate
science that is not ugly, and art that makes sense.

The common definition of intellect:

"the power or faculty of the mind by which one knows or understands, as
distinguished from that by which one feels and that by which one wills; the
understanding; the faculty of thinking and acquiring knowledge."

I've posted supporting evidence (Schlain) for the leading edge of human
evolution being the aesthetic sense.  Pirsig himself posits rationality as
an art and support for the idea that the artistic sense is the highest
(closest to DQ) human mentation so it should be plainly obvious that
unfeeling rationality is not the highest of all.  And yet, because we use a
hierarchical model for evolution with intellect at the top, we get stuck in
these conundrums, over and over.  Making intellect your highest value forces
you logically into an intellectualism.  In this regard, the MoQ is inferior
even to the Academy, which at least has a liberal arts arena and lets the
two fight it out on somewhat equal terms.   The MoQ, which should have been
a synthesizer, instead has inadvertently come down on the side of
intellectualism with it's labeling.  And until that problem gets cleared up,
I don't think we're going to get anywhere.