[MD] Emerson and Pirsig

[Matt Kundert]

DMB said:
What does it mean to void the essence of an instinct?

Matt:
I was simply trying to articulate the difficulty of telling whether 
you've really broken a pattern (or in Emerson's language, rejected 
the "courtly muses") or not.  I was using "essence" in a nontechnical 
sense, in the sense in which DQ is the core to which static patterns 
must be shucked to reach it.

What I wrote was largely just paralleling the vocabularies of 
Emerson on self-reliance and Pirsig on "following DQ."

DMB said:
How is self-reliance grounded in "the doctrine of one mind"?
What is the doctrine of one mind?

Matt:
I think the sense of "grounding" Emerson was aiming at was 
something like a conversational cut-off: not quite like Cartesian 
foundationalism, but more like the assurance one has in one's 
premises.

Self-reliance is grounded in the doctrine in I think something like this 
fashion: if everyone just follows their instincts (rather than customs 
or traditions), how will this not just devolve into anarchy or chaos?  
Well, says the doctrine, each individual mind is cut out from the 
same Big Mind, so instinctual action will felicitously dovetail.  (This, 
again, gives rise to Santayana's charge of optimism, but I think 
Emerson, in the end, is a subtler theorist than his recourse to this 
doctrine suggests.)

The doctrine has roots in the Greeks sense of Logos and Nous, but 
too, think of what Jung meant by the "collective unconscious."  It's 
all roughly of the same stripe, I think.  For Emerson, there was a 
background unity to which all of our variety could point.

Does one need a "doctrine of one mind"?  Not really, I don't think.  
What strikes me in reading Emerson alongside Pirsig is the 
resonance between Emerson's descriptions of the experience of 
oneness and Pirsig's of DQ.  A similar theoretical web could capture 
the thrust of both.

Matt