[MD] Catching up to Pirsig

[Ham Priday]

Hi Platt --


> I wrote a comment to the NY Times about the column entitled
> "The End of Philosophy" by David Brooks that I told you about.
> Out of 446 comments received the editors chose 11 to highlight,
> one of which was mine: ...

Congratulations on "getting published" in the Times, and thanks for 
providing this reference.  I'm dismissing Mr. Brooks' politics for the 
moment, because this op-ed piece is lucid, relevant, and well worth reading 
on its own merits.  I don't know why he titled it 'The End of Philosophy', 
since his message is that philosophy has actually expanded into moral and 
esthetic study.  But I was particularly interested in his (or author 
Gazzaniga's) take on human values as individual "preferences".

"As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a 
recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, 'Our 
brain is computing value at every fraction of a second   Everything that we 
look at, we form an implicit preference.  Some of those make it into our 
awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but ... what 
our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of 
value in our environment.' ...

"In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions 
that preceded it.  Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia 
memorably wrote, 'The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of 
morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a 
high priest.' ...

"The third nice thing is that it explains the haphazard way most of us lead 
our lives without destroying dignity and choice.  Moral intuitions have 
primacy, Haidt argues, but they are not dictators.  There are times, often 
the most important moments in our lives, when in fact we do use reason to 
override moral intuitions, and often those reasons - along with new 
intuitions - come from our friends."

In some ways this psycho-emotional rationale for value and morality lends 
more support to Essentialism than to Pirsig's philosophy.  In fact, I've 
decided to run it on next week's Values Page.  (It won't be the first time a 
source cited by Platt Holden has appeared on my website ;-).

Thanks again for keeping us posted on reviews of philosophical interest.

Best regards,
Ham