Platt, John, and All --
On 28 Aug 2009 at 7:50, John Carl wrote:
Platt,
Isn't a "collective" simply a quantity of individuals? How can a single
individual intellectual person be valued above a collection of intellects?
There you have it, folks!
John has just invoked a major misconception of the postmodern age: 'The
Greater Good'. Not only does this ideology lead to moral confusion and the
death of individualism, but I wouId go so far as to pronounce it the "evil
of our culture".
This is going to get me into hot water with many of you Pirsig acolytes, yet
it needs to be said. The individual human being is the most precious entity
on earth. If we can't put a price on the individual life, by what calculus
can we measure the value of "a collection of lives"? The notion that the
collective society has more value than the individual is a regression to the
pantheist view that "the whole is equal to the sum of its parts," and that
the single part is virtually worthless. It misses the whole point of
individual existence, philosophically, epistemologically,
socio-economically, and intellectually.
The universe is anthropocentric -- not in the sense of "mankind" but AS the
sensibility of the Self. Any other theory of existence is fraught with
problems, not the least of which is the loss of meaning. As Platt correctly
said:
There's no such thing as a collection of intellects or a collective
intellect.
Your intellect like your life is yours and yours alone. (See quote from
Pirsig's SODV about individual values.) If you wish to persist in
believing a collection of intellects exists, then you must also see that
history is full of examples were a majority of intellects has been wrong.
In the middle of the last century, Ayn Rand wrote prophetically:
"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage
where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens
may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of
human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
And in The Fountainhead ...
"From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the
wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single
attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.
"But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as
a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An
agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise of or an average
drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The
primary act - the process of reason - must be performed by each man alone.
We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective
stomach. No man use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use
his brain to think for another. All the functions of the body and spirit
are private. They cannot be shared or transferred."
Until we realize the truth of this epistemology, we will be frantically
trying to fit the pieces of our experiential world, including its esthetic
and moralistic attributes, into a unified whole which does not exist. This
"whole" that we struggle to construct as a collectivist paradigm is our
secular culture's substitute for the Creator or Primary Source. It will
never work, because ultimate reality is not a collection of patterns,
levels, parts, or ideas. It is One in Essence.
Thanks for your time and tolerance.
Best wishes,
Ham
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