From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 23 2003 - 00:01:15 BST
Ray,
Ray said:
So then back to the original question: would our feelings about the whole MoQ change if Pirsig appeared to be an ugly, child-molesting, cigar smoking bold woman? No, I still don't think it should.
Matt:
Yes, absolutely. Sorry, I forgot to go back and answer the original question.
Ray said:
I should first and foremost make the distinction between the human being and their thoughts, morals, actions, past, etc., and then proceed to conclude (if necessary) that our treatment of the MoQ should not be blindly influenced by this "other Pirsig's" history, but it should not be blindly disregarded when considering his theories, either. Any thoughts?
Matt:
I'm not sure exactly what you mean. I'm not sure what the "it" of "it should not be blindly..." refers to. If you mean we should not either directly associate a bad man with his good theories or make a sharp, discrete distinction between a bad man and his good theories, then yes, I agree. The idea is to excavate and see if there is any association, because sometimes there won't be (but sometimes there might).
Ray said:
Also for the sake of curiosity, I would like to go back to your comments on the abstract quality of philosophy. What if we were to discuss another pursuit, say physics? Had Albert Einstein been sitting on death-row when he came up with his theory of relativity, would our dislike for the criminal change the reception of the theory? Or art? Had Bach been a theif or a swindler, would his music still be taught throughout literally every Western music school in the world?
Matt:
I think what topic we are talking about has a direct relation on whether we trust the person who has accumulated a lot of bad static patterns. Philosophy is extremely abstract, but physics, as far as anybody has been able to tell, has barely any relation to the moral interactions between people at all (besides the extremely abstract sense of valuism). So, Einstein? Wouldn't matter a wit, much less so than Lester the Moral Philosopher, in fact. The closer you get to matters of social interaction, the more it matters how the person interacts socially. I mean, what does it matter to the notes on the page that Bach stole stuff? Nothing at all seemingly (though in past times, people did think it mattered). But does it matter what the former executives at Enron think and write about politics? You bet it does. They have something very definable to gain by getting people to side with them politically (assuming their political positions are bent for personal gain). But how
would the St. Matthew's Passion aid Bach in stealing horses? As far as I can tell, not at all.
So, I do think the topic of conversation to be very important. The more abstract and further away from social interaction, the less influence we should think a person's behavior has on the topic, and vice versa. The "vice versa" is interesting because I also think that physics doesn't change the way people behave. Okay, that's not interesting ;-) The interesting bit is when you go from physics, which is both abstract and remote from social interaction, to moral philosophy, which is abstract, but not remote from social interaction. I think moral philosophy can provide good summaries of our moral intuitions and precepts, but I think it is a poor way to try and get people to change their moral intuitions. I think things that are more concrete, like ethnographies and descriptions of ghettos, are much more important.
Matt
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 : Tue Sep 23 2003 - 00:02:11 BST