From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Jul 16 2005 - 16:05:11 BST
Ham,
On the mistaken identity: Yeah, but it could have just as easily have been
me. Its not that surprising that the switch accidently occured because I
jumped in on Paul's side right around the same time. It seems to me that
everything I said applies equally to Paul. I don't think Paul knew what
_you_ were talking about when you said "collective consciousness," primarily
because it didn't seem to be any way like Pirsig uses it. If I had been in
Paul's shoes, I probably would've replied the same way:
First
-----------
Ham: Are you implying that the time continuum is a notion derived from a
collective consciousness?
Paul: No, although I don't know what you could mean by "collective
consciousness."
Second
-----------
Ham: Do YOU know what a "collective consciousness" means?
Paul: No.
I mean, I don't know, he said he didn't know what you meant the first time.
He said it, my guess is, because he perceived that it was some silly thing
that Pirsig has no use for and you were trying to fit him in that
dialectical hold (and the same thing for Platt, he sees any word that can be
connected to "group of people" definitions by his thesaurus as commies). So
he has to wait for you to define the hold. So you did:
Ham: "Collective consciousness", by the way, is a postmodern twist on Carl
Jung's theory of consciousness which distinguished the "collective
unconscious" from the subconscious realm of mental activity common to all
human beings. This concept became a key element in Freud's development of
psychoanalysis....
And all the rest (it isn't that important; though I have to say, I thought
Jung was Freud's student and that Jung was bouncing off of Freud's
development of the "unconscious," not the other way around). The reason I
can predict with some degree of probability Paul's response is Paul's
response at that time:
Paul: In the MOQ, mind, insofar as the term is employed at all, is loosely
defined as intellectual patterns. But, as Matt recently said to Bo, it is
not that mind *has* intellectual patterns or functions, but that mind *is*
intellectual patterns. So it is not so much that you or I *have* beliefs,
but rather that, along with physical and social patterns, you and I *are*
beliefs.
Paul is trying to get around whatever it is you're trying to pin on him. He
does it with the same thing I would have. That we _are_ intellectual
patterns, as opposed to having them, is just a slightly different twist of
the "collective consciousness" of ZMM. The latter's the predecessor to the
former. If Jung meant by "Collective Consciousness" some big mind in the
sky that moved us all around, or at the least, that all of our minds were
connected with and exterted influence on the Big Mind, thus making the Big
Mind exert the collective influence of all the individual minds (all
democratic like) back on the individuals, then no, Pirsig says no such
thing. The "collective consciousness" is just our intellectual patterns.
Matt
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