[MD] Reason, Tradition, Absolute Truth

[Matt Kundert]

Mike,

Mike said:
This is the argument for ditching the absolute distinction between tradition 
and a 'value-free' brand of reason. We need to "admit that our values are as 
inculcated as anybody else" - at least, some of the important ones are. We 
do have this value that people shouldn't have all their values inculcated 
for them, in other words, that people should be able to decide (some of) 
their values for themselves. As you explain, this liberal value is, 
paradoxically, an inculcated value. We indoctrinate people into not always 
being indoctrinated. This leads me to suggest that there is something 
different about the social patterns (i.e. the inculcated values) of 
liberalism, when compared with most social patterns.

Matt:
This is where things get sticky.  Saying there's something different about 
liberalism "when compared with most social patterns" suggests to me that 
there's something different _in kind_ from other social patterns.  I think 
we should just stick to saying that, yes, they're different--of course 
they're different, how else would we differentiate them?

I think the way out of the liberal paradox is to just say that liberalism, 
like every other tradition, inculcates a set of core values, but liberal 
culture is the culture that applies Mill's utilitarian point about what 
people are premitted to do for happiness to what governments are permitted 
to do to instill values. Liberalism is a set of values, but it is the set of 
values that says that you can have your own conception of the good above and 
beyond the minimal one's set by liberalism. It says that you can believe 
non-believers are going to hell as long as you get along with them at work. 
Any conception of the good "above and beyond" liberalism that can make that 
concession is one that can fit in liberal society.

If a conception of the good demands that you kill or otherwise make life 
horrible to a section of society, then it does not fit in liberal culture 
and must be eradicated.  That's how we can tell liberal culture is better.  
It's nicer (until provoked).

So I would shy away from saying "people should be able to decide (some of) 
their values for themselves" because it sounds like a kind of decisionism, 
which is a brand of what Alasdair MacIntyre calls "emotivism"--the faulty, 
incoherent view of morality Enlightenment philosophy breeds.  Our "self" or 
ego is not an empty monad that points outward at beliefs and chooses among 
them.  The only way to make a choice is to have a background of beliefs in 
place.  And this is what Pirsig teaches us, too.  Our "self" is not an empty 
container that we fill up with values, our self is made up of these patterns 
of value.  We don't _have_ beliefs or values, we _are_ our beliefs or 
values.

What this means is that, yeah, liberalism is the kind of tradition that 
instills a set of values in young children, and one of those is that there 
is a whole slew of value options that are exactly that--optional.  When 
you're an adult, you can be religious or not.  I hesitate to use "decision" 
to mark the kinds of choices we make _only_ because of the entrenched 
backgrounding of Enlightenment philosophy's emotivism.  In philosophy, we 
still need to demarcate ourselves from it.  In philosophy, it still breeds 
the idea that we can just wake up one day and decide, willy-nilly, to be 
religious or not.  Those kinds of choices don't look like decisions to me.

Mike said:
A society that believes that the world around them is filled with all kinds 
of intelligence and spirit will not feel consciousness to be a purely 
subjective thing that is somehow crammed inside the brain-boxes of humans 
and the higher primates.

Matt:
Yeah, the invention of the "mind" as an "inner space" where our 
consciousness resides is a new thing.  Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of 
Nature works towards trying to trace the history of the various marks of the 
mental we have and use in philosophy and finds that the "mind" as we now 
know it was essentially created by Descartes, it is a recent, modern 
invention.  For instance, he talks about why there was no mind/body problem 
in Greece.

Matt

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