From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sat Feb 28 2004 - 14:21:10 GMT
Matt,
Matt P said:
You say that you think the gains of our current situation , outwiegh the losses. May I ask one question? What world do you live in? ...
Matt K:
Here's the thing: I think you are pretty much correct with your diagnostic of the current social situation, that people are forced to work too much, that people aren't given the opportunities to expand laterally. But I think this is besides the point I am making. My point is that we Westerners have probably made the last _conceptual_ revolution we will ever have to make. _Nothing_ you point out, as far as I can see, cannot be fixed by our current political framework of welfare democracy. (Besides, even if we reflect simply on our current social situation, I still think we have made great progressive strides in the last 100 years. Things have gotten better. We've just also become much more aware of how much further we have to go.)
The question is, what is your proposal for something better? What will allow us to retain most of all of the benefits of Western democracy and correct its failures? If a proposal does come about, my bet is that it doesn't come about in philosophy.
Matt P said:
Handmaiden....Master? Lets not get into Nietszche here. "It" is not about being Master or Handmaiden, or being better or worse. Its about being the BEST. Good. Excellence. Quality. striving for something, instead of being happy with what you have to be happy with.
Also, you say that it is a better hand-maiden to politics. Then, based on this, you are assuming that politics is different, and above philosophy in the heirarchy of things. This is dead wrong IMO.
Matt K:
There's no "be happy with the status quo" going on here. There's simply a reading of history and taking lessons from it. (And it _is_ about being better or worse, because if "BEST" means anything other than "better," than you're pulling a Hegel and reifying Quality, making it some sort of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.)
Making politics have priority over philosophy does assume that politics and philosophy are different, but not really in kind. Sure, we can say that politics is practical philosophy and that's the angle from which we can pull political implications from, say, Hans-Georg Gadamer. But that's still not the point. The point is that there is a difference from what we do on the Senate floor from what we do in Phil 101 classes. If you are saying that we should make the Senate floor look more like Phil 101 classes, then I think that's a big mistake.
The priority of politics over philosophy is something that we neo-Millians think is a consequence of the First Amendment. Nothing has any necessary, ahistorical priority over anything else, but we have learned from history to make the practical agreement that, in the Capital building, making our social environment more free and equal has priority over our religious differences. We are not sure how we are supposed to live up to Mills' ideals by any other arrangement and we are not sure why we shouldn't be striving for Mills' ideals. The idea that philosophy should have precedence over politics is the old Platonic idea of the priority of reflection and contemplation over action and praxis. This is the idea that something like the Republic needs to occur before we can have real politics. But while philosophers have been enacting the Republic with no conclusion, real politics have marched on without them, making real strides all by itself. Have philosophers helped in this
march? Definitely. But when philosophers who think that philosophy has priority over politics help in the political arena, it is never as they intend because these philosophers are in the business of _ending_ politics. They are in the business of reflecting and contemplating and finding the _correct_ solution to all of our problems. That's the Platonic ideal. To the extent in which, over 2500 years, philosophers have gradually accepted that they don't want to end politics, but help it, the idea that philosophy is a handmaiden has gradually taken hold.
Matt
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