From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Fri Sep 02 2005 - 14:23:32 BST
> [Arlo]
> Marx. Marx. Marx. Platt, please. "Intellectual patterns" are not
> "individuals". They compromise the symbolic-representae that emerges out of
> a socio-cultural system. When Pirsig says intellectual patterns are morally
> superior to social patterns he is saying "reasoning" is more moral than
> "social codes".
Show me a social pattern that is capable of "reasoning." Only individuals like
you and I can think and reason -- as this and every other individual post on
this site proves every day. The collective, social pattern called the MD doesn't
create intellectual patterns, only its individual members do, just as the
individual named Robert Pirsig created the MOQ.
> "This fictitious "man" has many synonyms: "mankind," "people," "the
> public," and even such pronouns as "I," "he," and "they." Our language is
> so organized around them and they are so convenient to use it is impossible
> to get rid of them. There is really no need to. Like "substance" they can
> be used as long as it is remembered that they're terms for collections of
> patterns and not some independent primary reality of their own."
Individuals are collections of patterns. I agree. That says nothing about
the source of intellectual patterns, of new ideas.
> LILA: " The mind-matter paradoxes seem to exist because the connecting
> links between these two levels of value patterns have been disregarded. Two
> terms are missing: biology and society. Mental patterns do not originate
> out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates
> out of biology which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as
> anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by social
> patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as
> biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns."
>
> Mental patterns originate out of society. "I" is a mental pattern, part of
> the set of mental patterns that compromise the collection of patterns we
> call "man".
The patterns of language are social in nature. But the manipulation of
those patterns that produces new ideas is strictly individual. "Whenever
you kill a human being you are killing a source of thought too. A human
being is a collection of ideas, and these ideas take moral precedence over
a society. Ideas are patterns of value. They are at a higher level of
evolution than social patterns of value." (Lila, 13)
> More LILA: " The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of
> freeing itself from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended
> to invent a myth of independence from the social level for its own benefit.
> Science and reason, this myth goes, come only from the objective world,
> never from the social world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the
> mind with no social mediation whatsoever."
I don't claim that individuals aren't influenced by social patterns. But, society
doesn't evolve without an individual taking the lead. That's what the story of the
"Randian" brujo illustrated. As Pirsig wrote, "A tribe can change its values only
person by person and someone has to be first." (Lila, 9)
Person by person equals individual by individual and someone, an individual
"has to be first" -- the necessary condition of societal evolution.
> Not Marx. Pirsig.
Right. Not the collective, the individual--celebrated by Pirsig in the
very title of "Lila" and all the other colorful individual characters in
his book, from Dusenberry to the "good dog."
Platt
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