[MD] Intellectual Discussion and Dialectic - Finding agreement, Quality and beauty in the world.

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
This is not even debatable. To have your own brand of logic is to reject logic. Like language and math; logic is a public property.



djh replies:
But we all *do* have our own brand of logic…  We have all been raised differently - with different values and have had different life experience so we will find that what is and is not logical will differ between us.  I mentioned previously the following Lila quote.. "'You're sort of another culture,' he said. 'A culture of one. A culture is an evolved static pattern of quality capable of Dynamic change. That's what you are. That's the best definition of you that's ever been invented." ...In other words - by calling Lila a culture of one - he is speaking of the *uniqueness* of Lila and her *particular* values which she has acquired over her life and form the 'debris of her *own* memory'.. 


dmb says:
No, I'm fairly certain that you are misreading the idea here. To be a culture of one, as he's explaining it here, is to be a microcosm of the larger culture, a particular way of exemplifying the culture, a partial and particular inflection of the total image. To have your own private culture is to be insane.

Pirsig says, "we" advanced organisms respond to our environment. "We" invent earth and heavens, philosophy,  civilization and science. "We" call these analogues reality and "we" mesmerize "our" children. "We ..create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it."


"The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is."  --ZAMM, Ch. 28

"There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is "insane." To go outside the mythos is to become insane."  ---ZAMM, Ch. 28


To say that you or Marsha have your own logic is to say that you are insane, that you have un-geared yourself from the common lot of humanity and suffer in lonely solipsistic misery.  ...Hey, maybe you're right after all.