Love-Hounds-request@GAFFA.MIT.EDU (06/24/89)
Really-From: Pete Hartman <bradley!bucc2!pwh@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu> >" . . .their own moral decisions." Ah, Relativism rears its ugly head >again in America. Morals and ethics are not a matter of individual >opinion. There are ABSOLUTE standards of Right and Wrong, which individuals >can discover and know. In this case, it is "It is wrong to steal." Somehow >today (in our state of ethical decay), that has been perverted to, "It is >all right to steal as long as you don't hurt the victim that much (and >especially if you don't get caught), otherwise it is bad." Are there Absolute Rights and Wrongs? Or is it just that some people feel that there must be absolute rights and wrongs, else all is chaos, and they feel all alone in the great big universe.... I'd opt for the latter. Just look at all the good things Absolute Rights and Wrongs have brought us: Absolute Solutions (as in the Final Solution), Absolute Dictatorships of various sorts, Absolutely Correct Religions (Jim Jones was told by GOD to have all those people kill themselves, and the Ayatollah was only acting as God's Messenger, pronouncing His death sentence on Salman Rudshie...) I don't often see absolutes doing anything but providing excuses for people in control to pronounce sentence on those they can't control. [ comments about zappa and specific complications of "relativism" deleted ] >Read _The_Closing_Of_The_American_Mind_ by Allan Bloom. It shows how >Relativism (and, as a result, nihilism) have taken over Western thought. >The theme is that eveyone accepts as fact that "everyone should come up >with their own value system and decide for themselves what is right and >wrong." It is, in fact, the only idea that most Westerners accept as an >absolute right--and that is why their mind is closed, since they cannot >even accept some other system of thought (why bother--it is known absolutely >that everyone has the right to decide their own value system). > >-andy What other systems of thought are we talking about? *I* think that "everyone should come up with their own value system...", based on the information they can get from the world around them (like the value systems shown them by church and family) rather than blindly accepting that what everyone else says is "RIGHT". To do otherwise is to reject your freedom to choose your own life. I don't think this makes me close minded, except perhaps insofar as I tend to resent people who have made the "RIGHT" decisions and feel it is their obligation to force those decisions onto myself. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ...uiucdcs\ Pete Hartman ......noao >!bradley!bucc2!pwh ......cepu/ INTERNET: bradley!bucc2!pwh@a.cs.uiuc.edu ARPA: cepu!bradley!bucc2!pwh@seas.ucla.edu IF ALL ELSE FAILS: bradley!bucc2!pwh@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu (ps maybe we could take this to email so as not to disturb the musiKal discussions? My mailer doesn't understand %'s and \@'s in the same address)
dbk@mimsy.UUCP (Dan Kozak) (06/26/89)
>Really-From: Pete Hartman <bradley!bucc2!pwh@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu> >>Read _The_Closing_Of_The_American_Mind_ by Allan Bloom. It shows how >>Relativism (and, as a result, nihilism) have taken over Western thought. >>The theme is that eveyone accepts as fact that "everyone should come up >>with their own value system and decide for themselves what is right and >>wrong." It is, in fact, the only idea that most Westerners accept as an >>absolute right--and that is why their mind is closed, since they cannot >>even accept some other system of thought (why bother--it is known absolutely >>that everyone has the right to decide their own value system). >>-andy >What other systems of thought are we talking about? *I* think that "everyone >should come up with their own value system...", based on the information >they can get from the world around them (like the value systems shown them >by church and family) rather than blindly accepting that what everyone else >says is "RIGHT". To do otherwise is to reject your freedom to choose your >own life. I don't think this makes me close minded, except perhaps insofar >as I tend to resent people who have made the "RIGHT" decisions and feel it >is their obligation to force those decisions onto myself. Bloom's argument is an interesting one (though perhaps in this forum [rec.music.gaffa] it should be noted that his opinions on rock music are laughable - showing that he has not the faintest clue what rock was/is about). However, he acts as if nihilism can be cured by some concious action. For an interesting discussion of why it can not, see Hubert Dreyfus' "Knowledge and Human Values: A Genealogy of Nihilism" (sorry, I don't have a source for this, I've got it in manuscript). Dreyfus defines nihilism as a "[loss of] a sense of the meaning and seriousness" of one's life. After discussing it's manifestation as the quest for energy, "zing," etc. he goes on to say: "I want to argue that what is at issue is not merely a sickness in American society just beginning to show in questionaires, but a condition of Western man that has been gradually revealing itself since Socrates subtly launched nihilism about 300 B.C." and getting more to the point we're discussing here: "When I say that our current condition can be characterized as nihilism I do not mean that we have forgotten or betrayed our values. Thinking that we once had values but that we do not have values now, and that we should regain our values or get new ones, is just another symptom of the trouble." Dreyfus argues that our very recognition that there are values to be chosen is at the root of the problem. ". . . we arrive at the notion that we must CHOOSE our values. . . . We have to decide which ones we want to adopt. Once we get the idea that there are a plurality of values and that we choose which ones will have a claim on us, we are ripe for the modern idea, first found in Nietzsche, that we POSIT our values -- that is, that valuing is something we do and value is the result of what we do. Once we see that set of values or mind sets or world pictures are simply posited they lose all authority for us and, far from giving meaning to our lives, they show us that our lives have no intrinsic meaning." ". . . once our concerns have become mind-sets, they have lost their meaning and authority, and whether we pick one of them or make up a collage out of the "best" elements of each of them, we cannot get back any meaning. The most one might get is something interesting, but there is a big difference between something interesting and something important. This is what I meant when I said at the start that talking about "human values" is part of the problem. As long as we think in terms of explicit value-objects rather that implicit shared concerns, we cannot find anything that has authority for us and elicits our commitment." What I'm really getting at here is that someone who is a total Relativist and someone with explicit "absolute" values are the same in terms of nihilism. Thus Bloom has put the cart before the horse, it is nihilism that has lead to Relativism, not the other way around. The crux of the matter is that the "absolute" values have been objectified and therefore could be explicitly rejected or changed later, i.e. they are no longer "absolute" by virtue of the fact that they are recognized as being seperate elements of thought that one "posits," and are no longer part of an implicit background (what Heidegger calls "being in the world"). (don't you dare take this e-mail - this is the best discussion on Usenet right now!) -- #dan Clever: dbk@mimsy.umd.edu | "For I was rolled in water, Not-so-clever: uunet!mimsy!dbk | I was rolled out past the pier" - MoB
Love-Hounds-request@GAFFA.MIT.EDU (06/30/89)
Really-From: bloch%mandrill@ucsd.edu (Steve Bloch) Dan Kozak <dbk@mimsy.umd.edu> quotes Hubert Dreyfus: >". . . once our concerns have become mind-sets, they have lost their >meaning and authority, and whether we pick one of them or make up a >collage out of the "best" elements of each of them, we cannot get back >any meaning. The most one might get is something interesting, but >there is a big difference between something interesting and something >important. An interesting idea, but I'm not convinced it's impossible to believe in something one has chosen. I know a lot of Witches, for example, who have what they would call deep religious feelings, yet relativism is perhaps the closest thing Witchcraft has to a commonly accepted religious tenet (to the extent that whenever you get more than twenty or so Witches together in one place they get worried that somebody will tell them what to do; this is why, although Witchcraft has far fewer adherents than, say, Christianity, it has at least as many visibly different sects.) We're talking several steps beyond Unitarianism here. I can't speak from personal experience, not being a practicing Witch myself. >they are no longer "absolute" by virtue of the fact that >they are recognized as being seperate elements of thought that one >"posits," and are no longer part of an implicit background (what >Heidegger calls "being in the world"). A few years ago I wrote a paper for a Philosophy class attacking Patrick Devlin's statements in favor of legislating morality. I dimly remember that his idea was close to this, adding on that since the State has a vested interest in its citizens having absolute beliefs, and dissent leads to relativism, it therefore has a right to legislate whatever is common moral practice into universal practice. Of course, it didn't sound nearly this Fascist when he said it. >(don't you dare take this e-mail - this is the best discussion on >Usenet right now!) Wouldn't dream of it. But perhaps a different group; both your message on relativism and |>oug's on intellectual vs. physical property seem to have shut people up in a way that wouldn't happen in sci.philosophy.*. "A crystalline set of dominoes / Except not really crystalline; And sort of domino-like, / But not really." -- Jane Siberry Steve Bloch