Hi Ham
> What is the collectivist view? > That I have arms, legs, eyes, language, culture > and so do you. David, I think you know that's not what is meant by the collectivist view. As I explained to Arlo on 4/3, I find that the post-modern, elitist, nihilistic concept of reality invariably hangs on a collectivist view of mankind. This is reflected in Pirsig's philosophy, where 'mankind' is relegated to biological and social levels and the individual is defined as a "pattern" of quality. Thus, for many here, man is a mythical entity--an artifact of cultural evolution with 'intellect' left hanging at some yet unresolved extracorporeal level. It's no secret that I deplore this deliberate exclusion of proprietary awareness from the Quality thesis. I cannot imagine any philosophy that dismisses subjective consciousness as meaningful or enlightening to society. For me the individual is central to existence. It is the individual's values that define the experienced world, that determine the course of history, and that ultimately relate human beingness to its primary source. I view the universe as an anthropocentric system, with man as its choicemaker. In an age where objective reality is everything and technology drives "progress", people hunger for answers to the meaning of life and its ultimate purpose. No longer does man rely on the spiritual beliefs of his ancestors to support his existence. Religion and spirituality have been preempted by more "enlightened" concepts. It's little comfort to be told by a philosopher that the world is evolving toward "betterness" through a competition of levels, even less that the cognizant self is only an "abstraction" of the inanimate universe. Unless man has a central role in existential reality, he may as well be a biological offshoot of the primates, programmed by nature to 'tread in his petty pace' 'til death consumes him. Until we realize that cognizant awareness is central to existential reality, and that there would be no universe in its absence, we are doomed to fulfilling Nietzsche's prophecy of a world without meaning, a life without soul. The MoQ's substitution of a Quality hierarchy for subject/object reality is not the solution we need. Regards, Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
