From: Marc Brookhuis (brookhuis1@zonnet.nl)
Date: Tue Sep 02 2003 - 08:19:55 BST
From a lurker, just a very late response, and a side remark, based on my
admiration of Adams.
Funny to me, at least, is that in my experience there are just a few
books which I keep reading and re-reading. For a long time it used to be
Pirsig's books but lately I'm totally absorbed by D. Adams guide to ...
well almost everything. What amazes me is that I'm so impressed by his
books, because I didn't think it would be possible anymore (last time
was due to Pirsig)
So, the fact that Adams turns up on this forum seems logical in some
way.
Marc
-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: owner-moq_discuss@venus.co.uk
[mailto:owner-moq_discuss@venus.co.uk] Namens MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT
Verzonden: donderdag 17 juli 2003 23:06
Aan: moq_discuss@moq.org
Onderwerp: Re: MD Douglas Adams - now you're talking
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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