From: Sam Norton (elizaphanian@kohath.wanadoo.co.uk)
Date: Tue May 03 2005 - 09:12:16 BST
Hi Mark,
You said to Matt:
> msh says:
> The difference, I think, is in the universal accessibility of the
> objects of their thought. The concept of liberty, personal freedom,
> is immediately accessible to everyone. No one needs to be told that
> freedom is better than being buried alive. That the concept of God
> is not immediately accessible to everyone is obvious in that not
> everyone believes in God. Pirsig's Quality, like Mill's Liberty, is
> immediately accessible to everyone. This, I suggest, is why belief
> in God is idolatrous and belief in Quality or Freedom or Liberty or
> Equality is not.
I think this is a very revealing exchange. Two things. In saying "No one
needs to be told that freedom is better than being buried alive" you are
comparing an idea to a biological state, not one idea to another. That seems
to beg the question. But more importantly there are indeed societies where
the concept of personal freedom is incomprehensible. I quote from Alasdair
MacIntyre's 'After Virtue' - he's a philosopher/theologian I greatly admire.
"There is thus the sharpest of contrasts between the emotivist self of
modernity and the self of the heroic age. The self of the heroic age lacks
precisely that characteristic which we have already seen that some modern
moral philosophers take to be an essential characteristic of human
self-hood; the capacity to detach oneself from any particular standpoint or
point of view, to step backwards, as it were, and view and judge that
standpoint or point of view from the outside. In heroic society there is no
'outside' except that of the stranger. A man who tried to withdraw himself
from his given position in heroic society would be engaged in the enterprise
of trying to make himself disappear. Identity in heroic society involves
particularity and accountability.... what we have to learn from heroic
societies is twofold; first that all morality is always to some degree tied
to the socially local and particular and that the aspirations of the
morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an
illusion; and secondly that there is no way to possess the virtues except as
part of a tradition in which we inherit them and our understanding of them
from a series of predecessors in which series heroic societies hold first
place. If this is so, the contrast between freedom of choice of values of
which modernity prides itself and the absence of such choice in heroic
cultures would from the standpoint of a tradition ultimately rooted in
heroic societies appear more like the freedom of ghosts - of those whose
human substance approached vanishing point - than of men." (AV pp 126-127)
What really strikes me as odd is that, for someone so lucidly critical of
modern ideologies in the political and economic spheres, you seem remarkably
at home with the very same ideology in the philosophical sphere - which is
ironic, in that it is precisely the ideology which you are here defending
which provides the main justification for the practices which you so
cogently condemn elsewhere.
Regards
Sam
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue May 03 2005 - 09:15:54 BST