From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Tue Sep 09 2003 - 17:08:25 BST
Matt,
> 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.
I think you take my criticisms of Rorty's philosophy much too
personally. More to the point, you might want to report what Rorty
thinks of the usefulness of beauty.
> 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".
I don't attack you. I simply have no use for Rorty's truisms, like,
people need people to define a word.
> 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.
You also might want to report on what Rorty thinks of the usefulness of
logic.
> 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.
More truisms: "All words are defined by other words." "Without sour,
there is no sweet." Oops. Sorry. In Rorty's philosophy there are no
truisms because truth depends on whatever some intersubjective
community says it is, e.g., if everyone says the emperor's clothes are
gorgeous as he stands there buck naked, then the emperor's clothes are
gorgeous.
> 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.
The question is: What role does beauty, the aesthetic response, play in
Rorty's practical, socially-patterned world?
To repeat. Arguing against your beliefs is not a personal attack.
Platt
"As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no
use." --William James
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