From: Wim Nusselder (wim.nusselder@antenna.nl)
Date: Thu Apr 10 2003 - 21:13:57 BST
[Part 2A of www.elizaphanian.v-2-1.net/Eudaimonic-moq.htm]
BREAKING AWAY FROM THE SOCIAL LEVEL
Clearly the way to understand a fourth level, existing above the social
level, is through describing the values which override social values. Thus,
whatever the fourth level is, it must be something which emerges from the
social level, but which cannot be captured through a description of the
social level. More precisely, given that we are describing human activity,
it must describe the way in which a particular human being rejects social
values, in favour of a higher value. Put at its most simple, the fourth
level occurs when a particular human being is able to say "My society says
that this is good, but is my society right to say so?" - in other words,
there is a questioning of social values. We are fortunate that there are
some historical accounts of this process, and this history is one of the
main strengths of my proposed revision.
The capacity to break out from social conditioning, ie to question social
values, depends upon the ability to distinguish oneself as an individual
apart from the various social roles that are played. In After Virtue,
Alasdair MacIntyre discusses Homeric virtue (the arete that Pirsig also
discusses in ZMM) and he argues that "morality and social structure are in
fact one and the same in heroic society. There is only one set of social
bonds. Morality as something distinct does not yet exist. Evaluative
questions are questions of social fact. It is for this reason that Homer
speaks always of knowledge of what to do and how to judge." It is only when
there is some sense of self as something apart from those social roles (eg
husband or wife, child or parent, noble or slave) that there is the
possibility of judgement about what is right - in MoQ terms, that openness
to DQ depends upon a degree of detachment from the social role.
Just as the cell is the unit at the biological level, and the social roles
represent the unit at the social level (eg father, husband, son, farmer,
politician, scientist), the unit of the fourth level is not a disembodied
rational intellect, but an autonomous - ie socially detached - individual.
And that autonomy is not dependent primarily upon reason, but upon emotional
maturity. MacIntyre describes the transition (from human being as social
unit, to human being as individual) as being the change from the story of
the tribe or nation, to being the story of the individual. What is crucially
at issue is a transition from being a vehicle or unit of that social order -
and therefore whose decisions are wholly determined by that order - to being
an autonomous unit of decision making, "For freedom of choice of values
would, from the standpoint of a tradition ultimately rooted in heroic
socieies, appear more like the freedom of ghosts - of those whose human
substance approached vanishing point - than that of men". Sometime around
Homer and Isaiah, but best exemplified in the culture of fifth century
Athens (where Socrates appears at the tail end), human beings gained the
capacity to operate as individuals, and not as social units. Whenever a
human being is in a decision making situation pre-5th century, then their
decisions are geared around an application of biological and social level
elements, eg instinct (run away from lions and tigers) or (eg)retribution
(maintain status of clan or tribe). For various reasons, largely contact
with other civilisations and greater affluence, human beings in Classical
Greece became able to consider themselves separately from their social role;
moreover, they began to dscriminate and judge between the claims of
alternative societies. The key is that whereas before your identity was
exhaustively defined by your social role, and your place in the story of
that society, and your decisions were determined by the values of that
society, now your identity is able to maintain its own narrative structure,
your place is determined by the quality of your own actions, and your
decisions are determined by your own values.
The pre-eminent forum for this discrimination was the theatre, which
pre-dates the philosophical innovations. A quotation from Martha Nussbaum
(The Fragility of Goodness):
"It is not accidental that it was in fifth-century Athens that this
dialectical debate-filled sort of theater got its hold. These aspects of
tragedy [their capacity to communicate ethical teaching, ie arete] are
thoroughly continuous with the nature of Athenian political discourse, where
public debate is everywhere, and each citizen is encouraged to be either a
participant or at least an actively critical judge... Plato's debt to tragic
theatre is not a debt to some arbitrary aesthetic invention - it is at the
same time a debt to the social institutions of his culture. In the same way,
his repudiations of tragedy and of Athenian democracy are closely linked".
[to be continued]
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 : Thu Apr 10 2003 - 21:18:21 BST