From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Jan 26 2003 - 22:12:41 GMT
This is from the end of chapter 29 of Lila. Whad'ya Think?
James had tried to make his pragmatism popular by getting it elected on the
coattails of practicality. He was always eager to use such expressions as
"cash-value" and "results" and "profits" in order to make pragmatism
intelligible to "the man in the street", but this got James into hot water.
Pragmatism was attacked by critics as an attempt to prostiture truth to the
values of the marketplace. James was furious with this misunderstanding and
he fought hard to correct the misinterpretation, but he never really
overcame the attack.
What Phaedrus saw was that the MOQ avoided this attack by making it clear
that the good to which truth is subordinate is intellectual and DQ, not
practicality. The misunderstanding of James occurred because there was no
clear intellectual framework for distinguishing social quality from
intellectual and Dynamic Quality, and in his Victorian lifetime they were
monstroously confused. But the MOQ states that practicality is a SOCIAL
pattern of good. It is immoral for truth to be subordinated to social values
since that is a lower form of evolution devouring a higher one.
The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous,
according to the MOQ. There are different kinds of satisfaction and some of
them are moral nightmres. The Holocaust produced a satisfaction among Nazis.
That was quality for them. They considered it to be practical. But it was a
quality dictated by low level static social and biological patterns whose
overall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth and DQ. James would
probably have been horrified to find that Nazis could use his pragmatism
just as freely as anyone else, but Phaedrus didn't see anything that would
prevent it. But he thought that the MOQ's classification of static patterns
of good prevents this kind of debasement.
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