From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 17 2003 - 22:05:30 BST
Rick, Sam, Ian,
Ian said:
So what is the connection between our favourite Holistic Detective, Nietzsche and Pirsig / Phaedrus ?
Matt:
At their best, they are all pragmatists.
On the antiessentialism of "post-moderns," I wrote:
"One of the first protests that is usually incurred by the call of postmodernism is something like 'moral nihilism.' The point of this objection is that, with the eschewment of metanarratives, we have no context from which to construct judgments. Another way to put this objection is to say that, if there is nothing intrinsically good about anything, how are we to say that there is any good? This has been the effect of looking at the world in an increasingly mechanistic fashion. Whereas before, Plato asked if there was anything intrinsically good about justice and Aristotle claimed that all things had an inner telos, after Newton and Darwin we are having a harder and harder time thinking these things. But this objection is met simply by the fact that, even though we may get rid of metanarratives and intrinsic values, we do not need to get rid of narratives and relational values. The call for antiessentialism is the desire for us to think of things as numbers. Following Rorty,
meditating on the number 42 will not reveal an essence. The only thing it could reveal is its relations to other numbers. To describe 42 is to say things like: 20 plus 22, 84 divided by 2, 21 times 2, greater than 40 but less than 42.6, etc."
The footnote to this last line reads:
"You could also relate it to things other than numbers such as saying, 'the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.' This relates it to Douglas Adams, and I take Adams’ answer to what the ultimate essence is as a reductio ad absurdum for the question of essences (including what the Ultimate Question actually is: 'What do you get if you multiply six by nine?'). I also take this to be the point of his description of the Universe, the Babel fish proof for the non-existence of God, and the fact that there are five books in the Hitchhiker trilogy. In fact, read the Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide from start to finish, from the introduction ('A Guide to the Guide,' a very funny piece on how the various writings all contradict each other) to Mostly Harmless, and you basically get the most entertaining way I’ve ever read to suggest that we should stop looking for essences i.e. to stop doing metaphysics. The world truly lost its funniest pragmatist when Adams died prematur
ely at the age of 49 in 2001."
Matt
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