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

John Carl ridgecoyote at gmail.com
Mon Sep 21 16:31:19 PDT 2015


Dan,

On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 5:45 PM, Dan Glover <daneglover at gmail.com> wrote:

> John,
>


> Dan:
> So old angry white dudes outnumber everyone else in Texas and Montana?
> That's a pretty bold statement. Care to back it up with statistics?
>
>
Jc:  No, just it's just my personal experience.    And Trump appeals to a
broader demographic than old angry white dudes, or he wouldn't be as
popular as he is.  And even if he shrivels up and blows away, the fans he
is making will still be here and the ideas that he has coalesced will
remain.  Upper level patterns are not dependent upon "material" for
propogation and continuence, eh?  Or at least not the same material.


> Dan:
> I'm not so much arguing that novels are true or not but that we need
> some sort of commonality in order to make sense of the world and
> dictionaries and encyclopedias help in that regard.
>
>
Jc:  Well I think it is a good discussion to have.  There are certainly
nuances in the term's "factual" and "truth" that need to be fleshed out.  I
do have my own thinking on those terms that is probably different from what
you're used to.


> >JC:
> > 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.
>
> Dan:
> Any good novel reveals social and intellectual truths. It's been a
> while since I read On The Road but if I remember that book is a sort
> of stream of consciousness effort by Kerouac. Whatever truth it
> contains was filtered through the author's cultural lens. As far as
> Cassady landing in jail, what did On The Road have to do with that?
>
>
JC:  Ok, first off, of COURSE all truths are filtered through the author's
cultural lens.  Even so called "non-fiction"  that's my point.  In ways,
fiction can be a better tool to tell the truth, than an autobiography could
possibly accomplish.  Truth is not a matter of Facts.  Facts are simple and
empirically direct, truth is of an abstract nature from the get-go.

As to what On the Road had to do with Cassady serving time in prison...
well, he enjoyed a certain notoriety in the Bay Area scene, while Jack was
off in New York and all the cops had to do was read the book and they knew
who to look for as an influence in the newly burgeoning drug scene.    You
can take Kerouac's word for it, he writes about it in *his* Big Sur.  Also
wrote about flaking out on meeting Henry Miller, who really gave his work
and early critical boost, but Jack disappointed people, all the time.
Alcoholism will do that, I guess.




> >JC:
> > 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:
> Nope. Gotta disagree again. There are certain unavoidable truths. If
> everything was simply a fiction, we'd have no anchors holding us in
> place.
>
>
Jc:  Do you get what Pirsig's "painting in a gallery" metaphor means?  You
can't escape the brute fact that any ontology is at it's basis,
fictional.    Fiction is another term for story or metaphor.  We build all
our meaning (every last bit) out of these stories we make up. The only
thing an anchor does is weigh you down and keep you from going anywhere.
There are countless anchors in the world, I'd rather sail away on the good
ship MoQ.  :)



> Dan:
> So we are back to a sort of anything goes?
>
>

Jc:  No... not "anything".  It has to be good.  It has to make sense and
connect up with the rest of the lines in your painting.



>
> > 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?
>
> Dan:
> Key word: knew. Static patterns are all we know.
>
>
Jc:  Yeah, and there's no such thing as pure staticity so it's tricky
seeing where the lines go in that part of the picture.  But I keep coming
back to an early and fundamental statement about Quality, whereas it cannot
be defined, you KNOW what it is.  So there must be some knowing, beyond the
static.  Some knowing, of what is not in the past.

Thanks Dan,

John



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