From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 08 2003 - 22:14:43 BST
Platt,
Jezzus, Platt. Did you even read my post? I'm going to say you did, but chose to villify me out of the kindness of your heart.
Platt said:
I have no use for any philosophy that has no use for beauty.
Matt:
Wait, what? I never said I have no use for beauty. The referees would like to see that play again:
Matt said:
if you had asked, "What is the utility of beautiful things?" the answer is simple: they satisfy me. What do they satisfy? My desire to see beautiful things.
Matt:
Hmm, tough call. Platt says I have no use for beauty. I say I like beautiful things. Is there a difference?
Actually, yes, but I think that Platt is trying to villify me by ignoring the difference between the two and saying, "Imagine a world without beauty, without art." The Mona Lisa is a work of art, something I would say is beautiful. Platt seems to think I see no difference between the Mona Lisa and shit on a shingle.
What I said that got Platt needlessly upset, and sent him attacking scarecrows that barely look like me, was, "I don't think beauty has any use in and of itself." Platt cut out the last part "in and of itself" because 1) it makes great rhetorical sense to reduce my position to an absurd stance of hating art and 2) he's an essentialist. As an essentialist, Platt will attack any position that does not adhere to a universalized, ahistorical sense of a term, a sense of the term that includes the "in and of itself" addendum. To attack the pragmatist, the slick and slightly underhanded essentialist will then try to argue that if you don't have a universal term, then you have no term at all. Thus, Platt's attacks on me for not being able to use the term "truth" and now "beauty".
Platt's colors show when he says, "As for 'everything is relative,' the statement is self contradictory. I have no use for any philosophy that has no use for the rules of rational discourse." This is "in and of itself", the cat he's really after. Now, Platt's not completely out of bounds when he translates "relational" into "relative". The two are synonyms after all. However, unlike the straw creature Platt wants to attack, the creature that says we cannot make any value claims because "its all relative", the panrelationalism that pragmatists advocate says nothing about making value statements. It simply says that we cannot make sense of something except as it relates to something else. No term sits in a vacuum. All words are defined by other words.
Platt's first attack on this position will be to note that Pirsig says that valuing comes before words. Though I'm committed to what Sellarsians call "psychological nominalism" and Foucaultians call "social constructionism", i.e. that without society/words there is no thought, this is not the angle with which I disagree with Platt at the moment. You can be a panrelationalist without making the linguistic turn. What the panrelationalist wants to argue is what Jason Lee's character in Vanilla Sky intimates: without the sour, the sweet ain't as sweet. The panrelationalist takes this one step further: without the sour, there is no sweet.
The funny thing I find about all this is that I agree with Platt's aestheticizing of the MoQ. I think calling the feel for Dynamic Quality an aesthetic response is exactly the type of analogy pragmatists want to make. I'm not sure how Platt feels about my description of DQ as honorific title, but the key to my interpretation of DQ is that sometimes when we are making a value judgement, there are no apparent reasons, there is only the feel that it is better/more coherent/more useful/more beautiful. It is only after the fact, after some of the outcomes of that initial judgement have taken place, that we can generate reasons for why the initial judgement was the good one. It is what Dewey meant by the means/end continuum, that muddy mess where ends and means change each other as each push forward.
Matt
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