[MD] Intellectual Level

[david buchanan]

Arlo said to Marsha and Platt:
The MOQ originated out of a shared cultural milieu, involving the specific historical-social patterns that made the dialogue possible.  .., it would not have been possible without it. As always, you are falsely seeing "individuals" are "social activity" as oppositional forces. Instead, when one sees Pirsig as an "individual acting within a social context" one sees that Pirsig appraisal that intellectual pattern emerge from social pattern not biology is a better one than you are offering in response.


About William James's essay "Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment", Robert Richardson said:

"It was a defense of the idea that great persons influence the course of history; its argument had a neat Darwinian twist. 'The relation of the visible environment to the great man,' said James, 'is in the main exactly what it is to the 'variation' in the Darwinian philosophy. It chiefly adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, in short selects him.' Potentially great individuals arise at uncertain intervals in the natural course of events, But only those who are selected by their social environment come to have an effect on society. Both the individual and the 'social environment with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts' were needed for social change. This piece was aimed explicitly at Spencer,.." (page 210)


"Our scientific description of nature is always culturally derived.  Nature tells us only what our culture predisposes us to hear.  The selection of which inorganic patterns to observe and which to ignore is made on the basis of social patterns of value, or when it is not, on the basis of biological patterns of value."  

"Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was a historically shattering declaration of independence of the intellectual level of evolution from the social level of evolution, but would he have said it if he had been a seventeenth century Chinese philosopher?  If he had been, would anyone in seventeenth century China have listened to him and called him a brilliant thinker and recorded his name in history?  If Descartes had said, "The seventeenth century French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I am," he would have been correct."