[MD] Individual v Collective

[ian glendinning]

Mark,

This was the bit which I paraphrased as you making the point about
"intellectual meaning"
[QUOTE]
The Social aesthetic is a relationship between your values and the  current
social conventions (values). This is social meaning.
The Intellectual aesthetic is a relationship between your values and the
current intellectual conventions. This is intellectual meaning.
Value come first - meaning is an intellectual pattern of ambiguous nature ...
[UNQUOTE]

Elsewhere in the recent response you accused me of getting hung up on
the intellectual habit of needing "definitions". Touche. That is in
fact a large part of the point I was making to you ... being hung up
on a precise definition of social vs intellectual .... and warning
against it :-) An unnecessary split, etc.

Anyway in that final piece ... I thing we get to the crux ... it's the
order it happens ie social before intellectual ... value before
meaning.

Will you let me agree with you on that ?
I'm sure any disagreement can only be in definitions of words ;-)

I think all I was suggesting, in these terms, was that whilst one may
come before the other in a primary experience sense ... "we
westerners" jump into the intellectual level so fast ... present
company excepted ... that the gap is marginal and they are quite
tangled up in everyday socio-cultural-intellectual patterns.
(And of course the value in e-mails is very hard to get at without a
little intellectual interpretation unless we're going to quote poetry
at each other. Did I mention Cornflowers ... ?)

You are saying the social "interaction" aesthetic is more primary than
the intellectual "interpretation" aesthetic ... Yes ?
I wouldn't argue with you on that.
Ian