Arlo said to Marsha and Platt:
The MOQ originated out of a shared cultural milieu, involving the specific
historical-social patterns that made the dialogue possible. .., it would not
have been possible without it. As always, you are falsely seeing "individuals"
are "social activity" as oppositional forces. Instead, when one sees Pirsig as
an "individual acting within a social context" one sees that Pirsig appraisal
that intellectual pattern emerge from social pattern not biology is a better
one than you are offering in response.
About William James's essay "Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment",
Robert Richardson said:
"It was a defense of the idea that great persons influence the course of
history; its argument had a neat Darwinian twist. 'The relation of the visible
environment to the great man,' said James, 'is in the main exactly what it is
to the 'variation' in the Darwinian philosophy. It chiefly adopts or rejects,
preserves or destroys, in short selects him.' Potentially great individuals
arise at uncertain intervals in the natural course of events, But only those
who are selected by their social environment come to have an effect on society.
Both the individual and the 'social environment with its power of adopting or
rejecting both him and his gifts' were needed for social change. This piece was
aimed explicitly at Spencer,.." (page 210)
"Our scientific description of nature is always culturally derived. Nature
tells us only what our culture predisposes us to hear. The selection of which
inorganic patterns to observe and which to ignore is made on the basis of
social patterns of value, or when it is not, on the basis of biological
patterns of value."
"Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was a historically shattering declaration
of independence of the intellectual level of evolution from the social level of
evolution, but would he have said it if he had been a seventeenth century
Chinese philosopher? If he had been, would anyone in seventeenth century China
have listened to him and called him a brilliant thinker and recorded his name
in history? If Descartes had said, "The seventeenth century French culture
exists, therefore I think, therefore I am," he would have been correct."
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