Steve Kurtz wrote:
>
> Sorry, Ray. Your response is all evaluations (value judgements) of
> good/bad/, ugly/beautiful, worthy/unworthy, valuable/worthless. The
> standards you use in evaluation may be vastly different than the
> billion+ in China, the billion+ in the Indian subcontinent, the hundreds
> of millions in Africa, S.America, and obviously the hundreds of millions
> in N.America.
>
> Culture does matter, but each culture is responsible for its own
> creations. Each can & does change over time. There are NO known
> external, objective, universal absolutes ( please refute if you can)
> other than death and the tendency of life forms to seek to thrive,
> replicate, and expand niches.
Perhaps it is not so simple. I like Joseph Needham's
description, in Vol. 3 of "Science and Civilization in China",
of the reception of the Jesuit missionaries
by the Chinese in the 17th Century:
1.The Jesuits' intention was to convert the Chinese to
The True Faith: Christianity, and they offered Galilean natural
science as an example of the fringe benefits of adopting
Jesus Christ as one's Savior.
2.The Chinese, on the other hand, saw through the Christianity
as just another ethnic belief system like the many they
already tolerated in their kingdom. But they recognized
Galilean natural science as something genuinely new,
because it was valid for anybody who made the effort to
understand it, not just for people who happened to have
been childreared to believe it (like, e.g., Yin and Yang...).
This leads to Husserl's distinction between "life lived in
finitude" -- all straightforwardly lived traditional forms
of life --, and the form of life devoted to infinite tasks,
of which Galilean natural science was the first and not
fully mature form. One of Husserl's presentations
of this was his "Vienna Lecture" (May 1935):
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.html
As Habermas points out in his "transcendental pragmatics of
communication", no person has to participate in conversation
(dialog, peer communication aimed at freely reaching
mutual agreement, as opposed to manipulative forms
of communication like giving and obeying orders, etc.).
But insofar as one does choose to participate in
conversation, *then* one must at least implicitly accept
certain logical (transcendental) preconditions.
Science is not necessary. Science's elaboration in
phenomenological reflection is not necessary. Nothing
is necessary (not even oxygen). But various things inspire
persons, from air to breathe, to the endeavor self-accountably
to reconstruct whatever form of life one happens to have
been childreared into....
If there is nothing appealing in the project of
human self-accountability, or in the project of
dialogical conversation, then one can "live" in
ways which appear to reflection as "false
consciousness". There may be nothing "wrong" with
false consciousness, and nothing right about
critically defensible self-understanding. Heidegger
came up with a phrase to describe this (albeit he
did not consistently think it thru, in my
opinion): "Es Gibt." What is just is. The cancer
tumor is. The death from the tumor due to lack of
health insurance or denial is. The cure of the
cancer thru surgery is. What is just is. {Puke....)
If one does not agree with this, then one makes
value judgments. The only way not to make value judgments,
in the end, is to not exist, for every least perception
is at least implicitly a judgment that the perceiving
was worth doing.
But Husserl has something else to say (which I quote
at http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/HusserlQuote.html ).
Insofar as we do not enjoy the secure daily life
which is the requisite foundation for cultural
endeavor (remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs!), then
we may need to put aside our cultural values and
devote ourselves to the work of reestablishing those
conditions. Even if the effort to reestablish a
secure daily life succeeds, at best we will then have
to try to recover what we had to set aside, and this
effort may not succeed. What is once lost in the
life of the mind ("Spirit" in a Hegelian as op[posed to
a religious form!) may not be recoverable.
The best are not always the strongest.
After a thermonuclear holocaust, grasses
and cockroaches will thrive, but
orchids, kestrels, maine coon cats [fill in your
own favorite life forms...], not to mention
artists and philosophers, will not.
This may not matter.
Let me repeat a story I like about things not mattering.
I have a friend who bought a Mercedes Benz automobile (he is
not wealthy). My friend tried to make it easy for
people to not hurt his car, by doing such things as
parking in deserted corners of parking lots.
One day my friend's car was parked next to
another person's car. The other person opened his car's
door and dinked it into the side of my friend's Mercedes.
When my friend pointed this out to the person,
the person replied: "It's only a door." My friend
punched the person in the jaw, and then said to the
person: "It's only a jaw."
For the spirit alone lives; all else dies.
(Jean de Coras, 1561)
Nothing matters. Nothing makes any difference.
It's pointless to ask: "Right?", isn't it?
\brad mccormick
>
> Meanwhile, we still agree on some things aesthetic.( I call it taste)
> It's just that I don't care that much about historical standards or the
> taste of others. Many great artists (all genres) were laughing stocks
> during their lifetimes. So much for objective standards; they were
> creating new works that were appreciated IN FUTURE! Rear view mirrors
> don't help much in those cases.
>
> Steve
>
> --
> http://magma.ca/~gpco/
> http://www.scientists4pr.org/
> Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a
> finite world is either a madman or an economist.--Kenneth Boulding
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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