[MD] Spinning our Wheels, metaphorically speaking

[John Carl]

Steve with a side of Ham for Lunch!

Deee- lishious!

"The ethical maxims which are scattered through these pages (WIll to
Believe)  voluntarily share much of the vagueness of our age of tentative
ethical effort.  But they certainly are not the maxims of an impressionist,
or a romanticist, or of a partisan of merely worldly efficiency.


They win their way through all such attitudes to something beyond--to a
resolute interpretation of human life as an opportunity to cooperate with
the superhuman and the divine.  And they do this, in the author's opinion,
not by destroying, but by fulfilling the purposes and methods of the
sciences of experience themselves.


Is not every scientific theory a conceptual reinterpretation of our
fragmentary perceptions?


 An active reconstruction, to be tried in the service of a larger life?


Is not our trust in a scientific theory itself an act of faith?


Moreover, these ethical maxims are here governed, in James's exposition, by
the repeated recognition of certain essentially (yeah Ham, you see where I
begin to think  of you...)  absolute truths, truths that, despite his
natural horror of absolutism, he here expounds with a finished dialectic
skill that he himself, especially in his later polemic periord, never seemed
to prize at its full value.


The need of active faith in the unseen and the superhuman he founds upon
these simple and yet absolutely true principles, principles of the true
dialectics of life:


First, every great decision of practical life requires faith, and has
irrevocable consequences, consequences that belong to the whole great world,
and that therefore have endless possible importance.


Secondly, since action and belief are thus inseperably bound together, our
right to believe depends upon our right, as active beings, to make
decisions."


John:


Ok, this is fundamental to existence, fundamental to life -- choice.  Choice
defines intelligence and being, those which possess choice (or in MoQ term,
susceptibility to DQ), exist.


But back to you man.


Royce:


Thirdly, our duty to decide life's greater issures is determined by the
absolute truth that, in critical cases, the will to be doubtful and not to
decide is itself a decision, and is hence no escape from a responsible moral
position.


John:


Which is?


Royce:


The world needs our deeds.  We need to interpret the world in order to act.



We have a *right* to interpret the universe so as to enable us to act:  at
once decisively, courageously, and with the sense of the inestimable
preciousness and responsibility of the power to act.


John:


Well, I like that, Josiah.  There are those in modern society who believe
that WJ gave support only to the idea that one interpretation of existence -
pure experience - was sufficient guide to action, but that idea seems kinda
weird when you explain it from your viewpoint.  Thank goodness you were a
close friend and confidante of Prof. James for all those years and developed
such a clear understanding of his deepest thoughts!  Otherwise we'd be
dependent upon the opinions of absolute academic pricks who "murder to
dissect"


Royce:


Many of you have enjoyed James's delightfully skillful polemic against
Hegel, and against the external forms, phrases, and appearances of the later
constructive idealists, but I assure you that I myself learned a great part
of my absolute idealism from the earlier expressions that James gave to the
thoughts contained in "The Will to Believe".  As one of his latest works,
"The Pluralistic Universe" still further showed, he himself was in spirit an
ethical idealist to the core.  Nor was he nearly so far in spirit even from
Hegel as he supposed, guiltless as he was of Hegel's categories.  Let a
careful reading of "The Pluralistic Universe" make this fact manifest.


John:


Thanks Josiah.  As usual you help me a lot.

>
> Steve:
> I agree. While there are some interesting similarities between Pirsig
> and James, at some point DMB will have to put his secularism up
> against James's "The Will to Believe" and see what wins. I'd be
> interested to hear his thoughts on the article as a secularist and a
> Jamesian.
>
>
Steve, I'd be glad to hear his actual thoughts on just about anything, but
I'm afraid a parrot has a limited vocabulary, constrained as he is to merely
what he observes.

 John