In noting the comment on The Great Dead.

I get the feeling that Charlie Huenemann says all things in seriousness, but with a smile, a wink, and a tweak.

I don’t see the conservative/liberal divide so much in morality as much as just people who pay attention and people who don’t. Then the even larger divide, those who devote themselves to it like Norman Borlaug and the rest of us.

There is a difference of the assessment of morality between liberal and conservative sides of life. In crude terms,

Liberal: Give broad forgiveness (or even no judgment) on personal failings. See the important issues as justice and equity among people. It is the community’s responsibility to ensure justice and equity.

Conservative: Give great importance to personal responsibility in behavior and integrity. See the important issues as freedom to be good or choose evil and suffer the consequences. Society’s great problem is the lack to training to teach the individual to live a good and valuable life.

These communities (liberal and conservative) have now decided the other side’s point of view is evil. Discussion is filled with polemics rather than consideration. I suspect, Gerson is ‘truly concerned about morality’, just with a different set of glasses. Perhaps there is a middle ground that accounts for both views of morality.

I am with you on your ‘liberal’ outlook and with your struggle in understanding conservative points-of-view. I hope we can reach across the gap without too many polemics. I am too quick to make polemic attacks … even on this blog (see my damnation of VP Cheney above.)

Side note from earlier– I tried to read Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” as well as Nausea and I just couldn’t stomach them. It wasn’t really the difficulty (like Kant), it was more just the style. If it were for a class I probably would have pushed myself through it. Simone de Beauvoir on the other hand was almost exactly communicating to me. So if you say she’s the genius, that’s good news. On the other hand if there is something specific in Sartre that I should pay attention to (i.e. hasn’t been covered by Nietzsche or Kierkegaard (or even someone like Jaspers) in a better way though maybe less verbose) I would love to hear what it is.

My use of “you” should be considered rhetorical rather than personal. I don’t know Kliener well enough to speak to the ‘real’ Kleiner and i’m not sure I would use “you” in that way even if I knew him a lot better.

I certainly don’t think that philosophy is the only worthwhile pursuit. As Vince suggested in a past post, I rather suspect that the best life will exemplify the golden mean across activities (one should do the right amount of philosophy, the right amount of science, the right amount of leisure, the right amount of political inquiry, . … …). The best life will certainly be one that is engaged with the world (I am no Platonist in that regard).

And I don’t think the ancients are the only ones we should read (after all, my dissertation was on Heidegger and Derrida). I have always worked very hard to be a “generalist” – to not pigeon hole myself into one field of philosophy so much that I lose sight of the bigger picture, the bigger questions, and the relevance of the task of philosophy to living a good life.

So why do I protest so much about the ancients? I think they should be read and that their views (metaphysical, ethical, aesthetical, etc.) are still quite relevant to ongoing inquiry into (a) the status and possibility of knowledge, including scientific knowledge and (b) basic “meaning”-type questions, like ‘how ought I live?’ and ‘what kind of life will be fulfilling?’

I value morality and art (the creative aspect of human existence) and I’m not depending on metaphysics to ground these values (though I guess these are themselves arguably metaphysical claims). I depend on art to provide meaning to life and respect other people enough (intrinsically) to attempt to treat them well. I’m fairly suspicious of people who need ‘grounding’ for ethics. They scare me.

I’m in agreement to an extent about the ancients, that we are in no better a place than they are to judge the ultimate truth of things. I don’t think introspection by itself provides much data to work with though while philosophical method and a thorough understanding of history adds a lot but along with that there’s experience, science, languages and a whole active living world to pay attention to. With this broad sense of what it would take to get to ultimate truth I think humility is the only approach to take towards knowledge. Maybe a person can think hard enough to get to ultimate truth but I’m pretty sure I can’t think that hard.

So if the philosophical project is discovery and not creation (and I hope it is) you might allow for a broader range of variables to impact your view of the world. Socrates’ world was limited enough that he had a decent knowledge of most disciplines. If he was living in our age I would hope his approach would be similar but maybe his (probably Platonic) claims would be more modest.

Sorry for the rant. The whole “modern science only has legitimacy insofar as we base it on ancient metaphysics” really gets to me. I’ve heard this in some form or another for years and years and it just seems like crap to me. The statement by itself is almost enough to make someone quit studying philosophy especially if they understand what truly gives legitimacy to science (the track record of the scientific method and more importantly the USE of what science has provided… don’t make me write a list).

oh… one more thing. Lucky for me my job isn’t to sell philosophy. I can take what I want from it. My job (in this context), if I can do it, is to get philosophers to engage the world.

Of course I agree that philosophy can have all sorts of practical value and tons of personal value. And those of us in the philosophy department try to sell it that way to encourage students to try it. But should we “sell” philosophy exclusively in this way? Will we sacrifice the idea that philosophy is worthwhile “for its own sake” at the altar of popularity and “relevance”? Won’t that mean selling off a bit of philosophy’s soul (again, I am using Socrates as my model for philosophy)?