[MD] What's missing

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Khaled]
The above description of the "great man" sounds like the Leo Strauss 
school of thought.

[Arlo]
Of course it does. Sadly, this continues to influence the way some 
engage the world.

[Khaled]
Rule without stewardship or compassion. So the question is where does 
the revolutionary individual come from to counter such a 
dictatorship. Is he the individual, or the collective desires of the 
oppressed masses.

[Arlo]
First, I don't discount "individuals", I just don't artificially 
separate them from the collective social-cultural (and historical) 
patterns through which they act. To your question, I say that the 
collective through which individuals come to engage the world offers 
constraints and affordances. Aristotle would not have been able to 
say what he said had he not been in that particular social dialogue 
at the particular time. Pirsig points to this when he says, "If 
Descartes had said, "The seventeenth century French culture exists, 
therefore I think, therefore I am," he would have been correct." (LILA)

What advances the social and intellectual level is the level of 
possibility reached by the accumulative response of all its 
individuals acting within that culture. In the afterward to ZMM, 
Pirsig mentions this through the analogy of the Kulturbaerer. "There 
are books of high quality that are a part of the culture, but that is 
not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it 
anywhere. ... Culture-bearing books challenge cultural value 
assumptions and often do so at a time when the culture is changing in 
favor of their challenge." (ZMM). The same is true of those seen as 
the Great Men in the "Hero Versus the Stupid Masses" view of history. 
We have a tendency (because of celebrity and power) to hero-ify the 
"man", the same way we hero-ify the book, but these do not lead the 
poor huddled masses through history.

As Case recently said, "Every individual contributes and draws from 
the collective accumulation of knowledge", and through this interplay 
of individual-collective does intellectual progress proceed. I would 
only add that this contributing and drawing is not an isolated "man 
interacting with knowledge", but a dialogic-historical-social process 
involving by definition "others".

As such the "revolutionary individual" comes from a culture ready to 
head such a revolution. S/he is "an individual", to be sure, but 
represents the collective, social value patterns built through social activity.