[MD] Julian Baggini: This is what the clash of civilisations is really about

[John Carl]

Dan,


On Sun, Sep 13, 2015 at 2:26 PM, Dan Glover <daneglover at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dan:
> I'd say Trump appeals to a certain demographic in the United States,
> namely old, white, angry males. Luckily, those fanatics are in the
> minority.
>

Jc:  They're not a minority in Texas or Montana.  I guess it depends
on where you live.

> > Dan:
> >
> >> County clerks withholding marriage licenses because of their religious
> >> convictions? Really? The christian fundamentalists are no different
> >> than radical islam.
> >
> > Jc:  Exactly.  Unfortunately, intellectuals don't have any effective
> > means of dealing with either.  Intellectuals are too smart to get
> > their hands dirty by talking about religious things, so religious
> > things are allowed to grow and fester in the dark, uncriticized.
> > That's a mistake  I believe and  Bagginni's article  confirms my
> > belief.
>
> Dan:
> I'd say the court dealt with it... wouldn't you?
>

Jc:  No, I wouldn't.  She's rallied the kind of support that can get
demagogues elected.  The people trying to get marriage licenses said
they hoped she'd be fined instead of jailed.  They didn't to see her
turned into some kind of martyr.  well, it happened.


>
> >
> > Dan:
> >
> >>They all demand obedience to THEIR notion of god
> >> and anyone who dares to differ is damned to hell for all eternity. So
> >> yeah... if you really want to start a religious discussion, start with
> >> that.
> >
> >
> > Jc:  Religion is the means of absolutizing social patterns.  It's an
> > effective means of keeping them stable and growing them.  what would
> > arabs be without Islam?  Africans don't have a unifying religion and
> > so their social patterns cannot compete against modernity - Islam is
> > taking over Africa.  Now when we speak normally of our western
> > advanced society, we mainly refer to Science, but science was never
> > intended as a means of social conformity.  Science is founded upon
> > criticism and analytic thinking.  People who think you can have a
> > society based upon scientific values are, as we all know, SOMists and
> > wrong.  Yet that is the kind of thinking that has been growing in
> > authority over the last century.  It devolves into a kind of pragmatic
> > self-ism, which is why I think the discussion of Personalism is an
> > important one to have.
>
> Dan:
> I am not at all familiar with Personalism.
>

Jc:  Then that's another reason.   I'm still learning about it myself,
but what it seems to me so far, is a way of dealing with the
individual, without getting trapped in SOM.



>
> >
> >>
> >>> Jc:  I guess it depends upon what you mean by truth.  A novel is an
> >>> expression of a person's story. Perhaps what you mean by truth is
> >>> "factual".
> >>
> >> Dan:
> >> No, not really. Again, by definition, a novel is a fictitious story.
> >> We all need to recognize definitions to the terms we use, otherwise
> >> all we're doing is sowing confusion.
> >>
> >
> > Jc:  Some terms need to be negotiated.  For instance, we understand
> > that the word "reality" has definitional problems in the language we
> > use.  Thus "fictitious" falls under the same category, since  fiction
> > means "unreal".
>
> Dan:
> I wouldn't say unreal. Rather, I would say fiction does not conform to
> our agreement with experience. A novel is every bit as real as a
> non-fiction book.



Jc:  What if you make something up, a novel, that conforms to my
experience?  It's certainly possible, no?  It doesn't happen all the
time, but I bet many authors get many letters telling them "your novel
spoke to my experience exactly".
And I would say it's this quality, that makes a novel feel true.

>
> > Jc:  if something is true for me, but not for you, then the truth is
> > that some things are true for some people, but not for others.  if
> > this statement is true, then logically speaking, it's not true.
>
> Dan:
> Remember the squirrel anecdote in Lila?
>
> "It seems as though the squirrel is using the term "around" in a way
> that is relative to itself but the man is using it in a way that is
> relative to an absolute point in space outside of the squirrel and
> himself. But if we drop the squirrel's relative point of view and we
> take the absolute fixed point of view, what are we letting ourselves
> in for? From a fixed point in space every human being on this planet
> goes around every other human being to the east or west of him once a
> day. The whole East River does a half-cartwheel over the Hudson each
> morning and another one under it each evening. Is this what we want to
> mean by "around"? If so, how useful is it? And if the squirrel's
> relative point of view is false, how useless is it?
>
> "What emerges is that the word "around," which seems like one of the
> most clear and absolute and fixed terms in the universe suddenly turns
> out to be relative and subjective. What is "around" depends on who you
> are and what you're thinking about at the time you use it. The more
> you tug at it the more things start to unravel. One such philosophic
> tugger was Albert Einstein, who concluded that all time and space are
> relative to the observer."
>
> Dan comments:
> According to this, your logic fails.


Jc:  Well, I don't quite see how.  But I admit my logic ain't what it
used to be.  My little brother has even started beating me at chess.
I must be slipping.

>
> >JC:
> >  What we mean by truth is what works out to be true for all of us.
> > sometimes that takes time to work out so truth is a process.  It
> > doesn't work solely on appeal, because appeal is so various.  But it
> > doesn't work without appeal,  because nothing does.  Caring is as
> > fundamental as Quality.
>
> Dan:
> This all seems to stem from your belief that a novel is true. On the
> other hand, I have dictionary definitions backing up my assertion that
> a novel is fictitious. That definition has nothing to do with being
> true for one person or for everyone. And if we refuse to define terms
> in ways that comport to the dictionary, then we allow a sort of
> anything goes into the discussion.
>

Jc:  Well... I don't think you can really use a dictionary to settle
philosophical arguments.  I used to be able to explain why logically,
but I'm not sure how well that would work here.  I just know, that if
it were that easy, there'd be no such thing as philosophical argument
and since there plainly is philosophical disagreement, the dictionary
must not be the final authority.

You can't say that all novels are not true.  For instance,  Kerouac's
On The Road, was a true and factual recounting of his adventures with
his friends.  But it had to be classified as a Novel, because it
wouldn't have been published as a "true story" so the names were
changed to protect the guilty.   A thinly-veiled guise that STILL
landed Neal Cassady in jail, (can't get more real than that)  but
according to the "dictionary".  On The Road, is a novel.   But in
fact, is reveals many social and intellectual truths.

Anyway, when you get right down to it, everything IS just fiction.
It's either good fiction or bad fiction, but truth can't be
encapsulated so ....



> Dan:
> I don't know about your copy of ZMM, but mine states clearly on the
> cover that it is a novel. Where you might find the book in a bookstore
> has no bearing on that fact.
>

Jc:  Oh yeah?  Where do you think you buy dictionaries, hm???  ;)

My  point was, there are endless ways of classifying works of art but
those classifications don't tell us more about the art than the work
itself.  If you want to know if something is true, read it.  Don't
trust classifications bequeathed by academics OR store clerks.


> > Jc:  The present is a convenient fiction.  It certainly doesn't exist
> > in actual experience!  Nothing is less concrete than immediate
> > experience.  "whoosh!"  there it goes.  There it went, leaving only
> > the scant memory of its passing, .0023 microseconds ago.  Where is it?
>
> Dan:
> The present is experience. Everything else is but a memory.
>

Jc:  The only experience I ever knew,  was/is nothing but memory.
Even the present, is a memory of what just happened a micro-second
ago.   You can talk about "pre-conceptual" but why would you?




>
> >JC:
> > Where was it, is more like it.  And where will it be tomorrow, or in
> > the next minute.  When I do anything, from eating to breathing to
> > cooking or exercising, I am doing in the hope of an expected or
> > desired outcome.  All my immediate experience is then, is expectation
> > and memory.
>
> Dan:
> If you go through life with those preconceived notions, you are
> effectively removing all the magic... all the surprises... all the
> newness of the day. And sure, most people do just that. Which I find
> rather disheartening. But to each their own, as we say.
>

Jc:  I disagree.  It's not in your belief about memory and immediacy,
its in your attachment to (expectation of)  your beliefs.  And there's
certainly nothing wrong with a pre-conceived belief.  Your thoughts
wouldn't last a minute without them.  I think the magic comes in
allowing the room for error.

But I could be wrong about that.

>
> >> Dan:
> >> In the MOQ, experience is synonymous with Dynamic Quality.
> >
> > Jc:  Hmmm... I guess I'm going to challenge you on that one.
> > Experience is of static patterns.  Perhaps it could be said that
> > experience is the static fallout of DQ.    I believe Pirsig said
> > "immediate experience"  in which he was following along with James in
> > dialogue.  But experience as a whole is roughly equivalent to
> > "reality" but without the Cartesian baggage.
>
> Dan:
>
> Robert Pirsig:
> In a subject-object metaphysics, this experience is between a
> preexisting object and subject, but in the MOQ, there is no
> pre-existing subject or object. Experience and Dynamic Quality become
> synonymous. Change is probably the first concept emerging from this
> Dynamic experience. Time is a primitive intellectual index of this
> change. Substance was postulated by Aristotle as that which does not
> change. Scientific “matter” is derived from the concept of substance.
> Subjects and objects are intellectual terms referring to matter and
> nonmatter. So in the MOQ experience comes first, everything else comes
> later. This is pure empiricism, as opposed to scientific empiricism,
> which, with its pre-existing subjects and objects, is not really so
> pure. I hope this explains what is said above, “In the MOQ time is
> dependent on experience independently of matter. Matter is a deduction
> from experience.”
>
> DG:
>
> Yes, this does help, thank you. What bothers me slightly—I am sure I
> am not seeing it in the proper light yet—is how experience can be
> synonymous with Dynamic Quality? Isn’t experience that which we
> define?
>
> RMP:
>
> Dynamic Quality is defined constantly by everyone. Consciousness can
> be described as a process of defining Dynamic Quality. But once the
> definitions emerge, they are static patterns and no longer apply to
> Dynamic Quality. So one can say correctly that Dynamic Quality is both
> infinitely definable and undefinable because definition never exhausts
> it.
>
> Dan comments:
> So basically, I was saying the same thing you are now. And sure, we
> could qualify the term experience with direct if we so choose. On the
> other hand, if we begin to get a grasp upon the MOQ, that becomes
> redundant.
>

Jc:  Again, I disagree.  In fact, I see the distinction as entirely
useful. Equal really, to the distinction between SQ and DQ, don't you
see?   That's not an absolute distinction, but it certainly is a
useful one.



jc prev:

>>  RMP is right, somebody who unifies
> > Spinoza, James and  Aristotle is a fascinating thinker.  And has a lot
> > in common with Royce, also long-neglected.   It starts to make one
> > wonder, what social force is it that fears and keeps in check the
> > philosophers that would free people from their SOM-induced prisons.
>
> Dan:
> So you can see better now how the intellectual level can oppose the
> social level?
>


No. I can only see how the intellectual level opposes SOME social
level patterns but the only way to do this is by encouraging others.
Intellect doesn't oppose society,   Intellect opposes low-quality
social patterns.

John