[MD] [Bulk] Re: Intellectual Level

[david buchanan]

Andre said to Marsha:
Dmb doesn't understand the question because your question reflects your misconception about the MOQ and especially about the fourth level. Firstly: the MOQ is an INTELLECTUAL pattern of value. It is an idea.  It suggests that the best way to understand the world we live in is in terms of values.(DQ/sq)


Marsha replied:
Dmb, btw, offered all his quotes from ZMM which makes no reference of the MoQ, including the evolutionary, hierarchical structure, the four levels or even static patterns of value, when the subject of my definition was specifically intellectual static patterns of value. 



dmb says:

I was trying to be polite about Marsha's question. She asked how feelings, passions and other modes of consciousness are included back into rationality. Since this explanation is the central point of Pirsig's books, I was stunned by the question. Can Marsha really be lost and confused to THAT extent? I wondered against all hope if she might be asking the question sincerely. Does she really NOT understanding that Pirsig's books are the answer to that question? So, I thought, maybe I should just dish up some of the relevant passages so she can see how my alternative definition of intellect was really just a summary of the MOQ's answer to her question, which is THEE question.


Btw, yes I did include a quote from Lila, the one that not only explains how Quality is central to the scientific process but also where such intellectual level activity sits in relation to the other levels of static quality. Those passages included this one, which is from the end of Lila's 29th chapter:



"In the past empiricists have tried to keep science free from values. Values have been considered a pollution of the rational scientific process. But the Metaphysics of Quality makes it clear that the pollution is from threats to science by static lower levels of evolution: static biological values such as the biological fear that threatened Jenner's smallpox experiment; static social values such as the religious censorship that threatened Galileo with the rack.  The Metaphysics of Quality says that science's empirical rejection of biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also morally correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher evolutionary order than the old biological and social patterns. But the Metaphysics of Quality also says that Dynamic Quality - the value-force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one - is another matter altogether.  Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than static scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method.  Dynamic value is an integral part of science.  It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself." (LILA, p. 365-6)



Even when the explanation is dished up on a silver platter along with a whole series of quotes that run through both books, she still doesn't see an explanation. If that doesn't count as an explanation, then I really don't know what would. If that doesn't answer her question, I can't imagine what would. As I see it, the answer is pretty clear. There's nothing wrong with the explanation. It's simply that Marsha cannot comprehend it or will not accept it. 


It seems to me that a reasonable people would have had something to say about all those quotes. If answers we're sincerely being sought, she would have engaged with the answer, she would have grappled with at least some of the textual evidence presented. But it seems she never really got past the first sentence, which was apparently way too polite. Instead of expressing uncertainty about your question, I should have been just as frank and direct as I usually am. I should have started out by saying, "I don't understand how can you even ask that question, not unless you've never read Pirsig's books".