[MD] Intellect vs. Intellectualism

[david buchanan]

John said:
... 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.  ...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.


dmb says:
I disagee but your framing is helpful. In a nutshell, I'd say that the MOQ already does synthesize thought and feeling and the only problem is that some people wrongly interpret the MOQ as if it didn't. This is what the expansion of rationality is all about. This is what the rejection of SOM, amoral science, and attitudes of objectivity is all about. 
As luck would have it, I was just reading a paper somebody mentioned here. It's about the British pragmatist Schiller. It would be safe to think of him as James's body guard. He defends James's pragmatism on this very point. "Until James", he says, "logicians had always talked as if beliefs grew up automatically in a soil of pure indifference".

"Some of his best [followers] like Charles Augustus Strong and Dickinson S. Miller misunderstood him; while the contrary herd of critics shouted, all with one voice, that James had granted to everyone an unlimited right to believe whatever he pleased, and to call truth anything that made him feel good.... Dogmatic philosophers seem to believe with the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland that truth can be created by representation, so these [misconceptions] are still largely current. But . . . James had made it clear from the first that he distrusted believing the psychological facts which generated a belief and the logical consequences which established it. In the establishment of any belief the Will to believe is only the first step. It means only the willingness to consider it . . . . Until James this first and [easiest] step in the growth of beliefs had been completely overlooked. In fact logicians had always talked as if beliefs grew up automatically in a soil of pure indifference, and without aid and the intervention of a mind; they had never gone into the question of how in the sciences subjects of investigation are selected, or why a scientist interested himself in one more than another. Pure Reason was supposed to need no will, scientific method was supposed to need no purpose. . . .  In short the right meaning of the doctrine of the Will to believe was simply empiricism, the molding by experience of all our beliefs. It was however a new, and as James pointed out, a more radical empiricism, tied to no dogmas and free from the unwarranted assumption that the mind must be represented as purely passive in its dealings with experience, as merely receptive of impressions, without any will or aim of its own."