[MD] Pirsig's idea of the individual

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Arlo had said]
This "useful convention" (the "self") is a stable part (and result) 
of collective activity.

[Platt]
I assume "collective" is also a "useful convention."

[Arlo]
Of course it is. At best, "collective" points to the concentric 
spheres of activity, beginning with the smallest microgenetic 
activity on up to large socio-cultural activity. It points to both 
symbolic and psychomotor activity.

[Platt]
It seems the Chinese "cultural system" with its emphasis on the value 
of "collective activities" made the country easily susceptible to the 
siren call of communism.

[Arlo]
Chinese cultural notions of "self" likely transcend and are rooted in 
the long historical Chinese traditions and culture. Of course, I 
expected you to pander to the great right-wing boogeyman, if not toss 
in a little patriotic masturbation. And all this is based on the Big 
War, where it is "Glorious Individual" versus "Evil Collectives". 
Because of this, you fail to grasp that the Chinese (and other 
cultural notions of self around the world) are rooted not in this 
ridiculous Holy War Dichotomy, not in the notions that "individual" 
and "collective" are polar, opposing forces, but in the recognition 
that they are interwoven and mutually emergent phenomenon. It is the 
"individual-embedded-in-community", rather than promoting an 
"individual-against-community" or "community-enslaving-individuals". 
In other words, recognizing "interdependence" rather than the myth of 
"independence".

But I found this today, while I haven't fully digested the entire 
article, the introduction sums up some of this nicely.

http://elies.rediris.es/Language_Design/LD2/morillas.pdf

"The self is a culturally-constituted category. It is generally 
viewed as a functional whole with a composite nature: mind, body, 
emotions, and personality. However, the unitary or compartmentalized 
functional composition of the self very much depends on the cultural 
psychology of a culture (Morris, 1994; Cohen, 1994), especially as 
regards the individualistic-collectivist distinction and its 
attendant analytic or holistic cognitive styles (Triandis, 1990). 
Again, the concept of self is contingent upon the ecological, 
cosmological, social and moral orders permeating the culture. ....

In like manner, important social and individual consequences follow 
from a culture's concept of self as regards an individual and his/her 
social life: the gendered relations (the concepts of masculinity and 
femininity), socialization of children, the conception of the body, 
the relationship with the natural world, the normative and moral 
order (do's and don't's, ought's and ought not's), etc. 
Phenomenologically speaking, the self is not a tangible entity, but 
rather an inferred abstraction from phenomenological experience. Nor 
is it a unitary concept, for it conjures up a composite, 
multi-faceted, many-layered phenomenon. Again, although universally- 
categorized, different cultures conceive it in different ways 
(Geertz, 1983; Shweder and Bourne, 1984).

Because of the intangible, composite, quasi-ineffable and 
relativistic nature of self, humans have developed culture-bound 
conceptual-linguistic categories representing its properties, 
attributes and traits in order to think and talk about it. Through 
talk people signal the pragmatic indexes of the 
culturally-constituted categories permeating a culture. Hence talking 
about the self (describing its attributes, ascribing properties and 
qualities to it, and evaluating it) is an index of both the 
subjective- and intersubjectively-constituted categories making up 
the mental and cultural models of a culture's members. ...

In our search for a cognitive-cultural framework of analysis for the 
concept of self, we should bear in mind a number of points. Firstly, 
although universally found in all languages and cultures, it is 
nevertheless a culture-bound, many-faceted category. Different 
cultures hold different conceptions about its nature, structure and 
functions, and have proposed ways of conceptualizing it, often at 
odds with one another. This means that we are dealing with a 
relativist conception of a cognitive-cultural category.

Secondly, as a non-natural kind category, its categorization is 
'constituted', in the sense of Searle, 1995. ... As a constituted 
sign, the categorization of selfhood may encode or reflect some 
general or even universal properties, but most saliently, it is 
likely to display the particular way in which a given people or 
culture conceives of it. There is no question that each culture 
possesses a distinctive concept of self, one that only partially 
overlaps with another culture's. The degree of overlap is likely to 
be the result of a host of historical, social, and psychological 
causes. By and large, cultures with a common axiological and 
historical tradition are likely to share most of their concept of self."

Thirdly, it is important to specify at which level of language 
experience our categorial analysis is to be framed. We may in 
principle distinguish between the following models of self: Reflexive 
models, which are for the most part encapsulated in the views passed 
down to us by the great religious and philosophical traditions since 
Antiquity; Expert models, which seek to provide us with a scientific 
or principled account of man's nature, as offered by the fields of 
psychology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy; Folk models, 
which convey the phenomenologically-based, tradition-bound, 
commonsense view that we find encapsulated in the way members of a 
given culture talk about persons."