[MD] Emerson and Pirsig

[david buchanan]

Matt said:

I was simply trying to articulate the difficulty of telling whether you've really broken a pattern or not. .. What I wrote was largely just paralleling the vocabularies of Emerson on self-reliance and Pirsig on "following DQ." ...Self-reliance is grounded in the doctrine in I think something like this fashion: if everyone just follows their instincts, 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.  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.

dmb says:
I think that's a good answer. Thanks.
>From the little I recall, Emerson's term for the larger mind was the "All". This has a different flavor than the Hegelian Absolute. You know, the "All" would be more like a pluralistic totality rather than a single, unified, rationally intelligible Mind.
I very distinctly remember being impressed by Emerson. Maybe even a bit astonished. He's more like a prophet than a philosopher. But I still tend to see him as William James's godfather and have lots to learn. Also, in emails, Pirsig gave me the impression that American Transcendentalism is an natural extension of the Protestant movement in the sense that even more emphasis is put upon the individual to grapple with truth and meaning even more independently of traditional forms. I also got the impression that Transcendentalism begins and ends with Emerson. 



Matt said:

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.


dmb says:
I like the quote from Self-Reliance that says "man should not be subdued by his instruments". It reminds me of ZAMM's classroom scenes, the ones in Bozeman where he tells his students that the rules of english composition are just tools to help them achieve Quality. "Instrument" is just a fancy name for "tool".