From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Wed Feb 12 2003 - 13:54:36 GMT
Hi Scott, Matt, All:
SCOTT:
> Because Quality and DQ are undefined, the MOQ really can't be used
>in the
> way you fear (as a combined reality/justice vision). What it is is a "set
> of ideas" on how things, in the most general sense of the term, hang
> together (etc.), just as Rorty's materialism/nominalism is another (and
> different) set of such ideas, and so Rorty is also a metaphysician. (And
> denying the value of appearance/reality distinctions is also a metaphysical
> position, but that's another post.)
Excellent observation. The claim that Rorty doesn't do metaphysics is
bogus. Basic premises are metaphysical because they set the
foundation for a thought and belief framework--"a set of intellectual
glasses to interpret experience with." (8) Everyone, even those who
never gave philosophy a second thought, are metaphysicians. Are
things around you real or an illusion? Do they exist independent of an
observer or are they created by an observer? Does the world evolve or
does it does it recycle. Are you a free and independent individual or
dispensable cipher in a giant social machine? Are truth, goodness and
beauty transcendental realities or dependent on historical happenstance
and cultural conditioning? Does God exist and play a role in the world
or is He an invention designed to ease the harsh realities of life and the
inevitability of death? Does the universe exhibit a basic split between
mind and matter or is mind simply a byproduct of firing nerve synapses
in the brain? Is man's nature largely innate and unchangeable or
culturally determined and perfectible? Your belief system depends on
your answer to such basic questions.
The great thing about the MoQ is that it gives us a new pair of
intellectual glasses and resultant thought/belief framework. Things
around us are seen as patterns of morality, left behind by the force of
Dynamic Quality. To most people, this initial premise sounds "weird if
not actually crazy." But, "the idea that values create objects gets less
and less weird as you get used to it." (8)
To see the world as a moral order created by DQ is closer to the
premise of God than the premise of order emerging from accidental or
"contingent" jostlings of blind, purposeless energies.
Platt
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