From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jul 27 2005 - 19:20:35 BST
Hey Erin,
Erin said:
See in the Rorty quote I thought the reweaving and encapsulating made sense
but the erasing/dropping a belief didn't. The problem I have with your
examples like above because never knowing about a belief wouldn't be an
example of erasing a belief. Like I said before the only way erasing a
belief makes sense if you could erase it from memory. In your example it
was never in memory in the first place so there is nothing to erase.
Matt:
The idea that we "erase it from memory" is exactly what Rorty's going for,
like when I said "use it or lose it." We can't usually actively "erase" a
belief, as if you could actively forget how to ride a bicycle. But there is
a sense in which we can, which is in tune with Nietzsche's idea of active
forgetting. For instance, say you are in the midst of an unrequited love.
You decide that this is no good, so you enter a process of forgetting. You
distract yourself from thinking about the person. You do other things, fill
that void. At some point, all you remember is _having been_ in love with
the person. And then further, you can't even remember what it was like.
(If you've seen Swingers with Jan Favreau and Vince Vaughn, there are some
great lines about this in the movie.)
This is also why "rebounds" can be so disasterous.
The other thing to remember (which you may already have in mind) is that all
the types of things that can happen to a belief that Rorty listed (and there
could be many more nuanced ways of description) are kinds of reweaving.
Well, probably. The kind of forgetfulness I'm thinking of is, for the most
part, a reweaving. You reweave the blanket without the old belief. But
sometimes I imagine what people call having a "hole in your heart" is the
idea that something's been torn out without any reweaving. Healing is the
reweaving bit.
The "web" metaphor can be used either for an individual's beliefs or for an
entire culture's. It's the flip-flop between the two that produces the idea
of a "collective consciousness." And this is why I don't get too excited
either way about that whole debate. They're just two different
descriptions, flip sides of a coin. If you want to emphasize what
individual people do, like the idea of genius, you talk about an
individual's web. If you want to emphasize how culture's change, like the
rise and fall of geoocentrism, you talk about the culture's web. Neither
side can do without the other, and if they tried, one doesn't have to work
that hard to make them look silly: which is what both extreme sides do to
each other. They are both quite convincing in making the other side look
silly, but only at the expense of looking silly themselves.
Matt
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