From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Sun Sep 04 2005 - 15:13:54 BST
Hi Arlo,
Thanks for your in depth explanation of how you see individuals as mere
tools of a higher "organism" called the intellectual level. I appreciate
your patience. But, IMO your explanation can be summed up by saying
"Individuals are influenced by culture" To that I have no disagreement.
Pirsig put it this way:
"The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to
interpret experience with, and the concept of the primacy of subjects and
objects is built right into these glasses. If someone sees things through
a somewhat different set of (passes or, God help him, takes his glasses
off, the natural tendency of those who still have their glasses on is to
regard his statements as somewhat weird, if not actually crazy.
But he isn't. The idea that values create objects gets less and less weird
as you get used to it." (Lila, 8)
Later in your explanation you wrote:
> Now, certainly, any particular individual contributes back to the
> collective pool of knowledge, what Pirsig called the mythos ("The mythos is
> a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the
> collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of
> it.").
Hooray. You acknowledge the existence of and the essential role of a
"particular individual" that I have been talking about all along. The
"collective pool of knowledge" you speak of arose from a myriad of
individual contributions over time. The source of each and every idea in
the collective pool was (and is) an individual human being, just as the
source of water in a pool is individual molecules of H2O.
> You also keep mentioning how Pirsig, the individual, invented the MOQ.
> Didn't Kant have a part in that? And Descartes? And Poincare? And Chris?
> And the secretary who asked him "Are you teaching Quality?" And his wife
> who supported his efforts? And Sidis? And on and on and on.
Again and to repeat. Pirsig, like all of is, is influenced by those around
him, past and present. But, name me anyone who ever had the idea that
"values create objects" before Pirsig. Maybe its roots go way back to some
individual thinkers in the dim past as Pirsig suggests. But no one before
him put it all together in Western philosophy.
Pirsig knew his idea would be considered flaky: "If someone sees things
through a somewhat different set of glasses,or, God help him, takes his
glasses off, the natural tendency of those who still have their glasses on
is to regard his statements as somewhat weird, if not actually crazy."
Here he speaks of someone (an individual) who dares challenge the
"collective knowledge pool." Like the brujo (whose significance I notice
you continue to ignore), Pirsig is an individual contrarian, a dissenter,
a degenerate, a certified nutcase -- take your pick. He's "out of the
mainstream" of academic philosophy, with one lonely and heroic exception
in England, thanks to Anthony. If we search for the source of everything
we know we ill find it in the contributions of such "particular
individuals," from Aristotle to Galileo to Einstein to Pirsig. Societal
evolution proceeds "only person by person, and someone has to be first,"
another unequivocal statement you've ignored.
> The MOQ is not monologic. It is dialogic. It exists only because of the
> combination of the "voices of the past" and the experiences of Pirsig in a
> social-culture. It continues to exist because it has been made part of the
> collective Intellectual dialogue, of which Pirsig and everyone else are a
> part of (well, except Rush Limbaugh).
Keep in mind that a "dialogue" necessitates the existence of at least two
individuals, like you and Michael Moore..
> You want to value the individual who held the hammer in the building of the
> city. I say s/he too played a value role. But the social level is more than
> any one biological individual, and the intellectual level is more than any
> one social individual. As Pirsig says, it is a higher organism with "its
> own patterns and goals that are as independent of society as society is
> independent of biology."
Yes. And the major patterns of the intellectual level that society hates
with a passion is the idea of an individual with individual rights whose
source is not society but a higher power, and whose thoughts are his own
to freely express without social interference or punishment. That's why I
think the intellectual level ought to renamed the "individual level" -- to
put the emphasis on individual independence from social forces, from the
clutches of Giant.
> We may hold the social hammer, but what else?
We hold the hammer of ideas which can destroy a society. And rightfully
so.
Platt
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