mrb@fudgewriter said: ...I don't feel quite so odd-man-out. So, does anyone know if such work's been done? This area - the passions - seems to me the other shoe needed to get things rolling. Maybe I'll have to do it?
dmb says: The passions? I think it's already in there. I tired to show that in the opening of my little Oxford talk.... In Zen and the Art, Robert Pirsig says: "In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by re-assimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part." As William James puts it: "Their persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question, that it is a pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the pale. Still seeing a that in things which Logic does not expel, the most I can do is to aspire to the expulsion. At present I do not even aspire. Aspiration is a feeling. What can kindle feeling but the example of feeling? And if the Hegelians will refuse to set an example, what can they expect the rest of us to do? To speak more seriously, the one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and anticipatory of truth as anything else we have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly be denied. But what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common gro und; and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical, help us, and the truest of which will at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best divining power?" So I think he can see that they are both calling for a reintegration of reason and feeling. This immediately puts them on the same page. And they remain on the same page, even as they get more specific. Ron replies: I'm really looking forward to reading your work Dave. I believe it is in "Philebus" it is asked of what of the passions would rationality keep after already conceding that reason is but one of the greatest of passions, the love of wisdom. "to forge an association between reason and those pleasures forever involved in foolishness and vice would be totally unresonable for anyone who aims at the best and most stable mixture or blend. This is true particularly if he wants to discover in this mixture what the good is in man and the universe and to gain some vision of the nature of the good itself." I am working on a reply to your comments on the problem with sophists. thnx -R Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
