Submission for rec-music-gaffa

[Dan Kozak <dbk@mimsy.umd.edu>]

Path: mimsy!dbk
From: dbk@mimsy.UUCP (Dan Kozak)
Newsgroups: rec.music.gaffa
Subject: Re: Absolute Right my CREDENZA
Date: 25 Jun 89 17:21:38 GMT
References: <614667177@bucc2.UUCP>
Reply-To: dbk@mimsy.umd.edu.UUCP (Dan Kozak)
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742
Lines: 87

>Really-From: Pete Hartman <bradley!bucc2!pwh@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu>

>>Read _The_Closing_Of_The_American_Mind_ by Allan Bloom.  It shows how
>>Relativism (and, as a result, nihilism) have taken over Western thought.
>>The theme is that eveyone accepts as fact that "everyone should come up
>>with their own value system and decide for themselves what is right and
>>wrong."  It is, in fact, the only idea that most Westerners accept as an
>>absolute right--and that is why their mind is closed, since they cannot
>>even accept some other system of thought (why bother--it is known absolutely
>>that everyone has the right to decide their own value system).

>>-andy

>What other systems of thought are we talking about?  *I* think that "everyone
>should come up with their own value system...", based on the information
>they can get from the world around them (like the value systems shown them
>by church and family) rather than blindly accepting that what everyone else
>says is "RIGHT".  To do otherwise is to reject your freedom to choose your
>own life.  I don't think this makes me close minded, except perhaps insofar
>as I tend to resent people who have made the "RIGHT" decisions and feel it
>is their obligation to force those decisions onto myself.

Bloom's argument is an interesting one (though perhaps in this forum
[rec.music.gaffa] it should be noted that his opinions on rock music
are laughable - showing that he has not the faintest clue what rock
was/is about).  However, he acts as if nihilism can be cured by some
concious action.  For an interesting discussion of why it can not, see
Hubert Dreyfus' "Knowledge and Human Values: A Genealogy of Nihilism"
(sorry, I don't have a source for this, I've got it in manuscript).
Dreyfus defines nihilism as a "[loss of] a sense of the meaning and
seriousness" of one's life.  After discussing it's manifestation as
the quest for energy, "zing," etc. he goes on to say:

"I want to argue that what is at issue is not merely a sickness in
American society just beginning to show in questionaires, but a
condition of Western man that has been gradually revealing itself
since Socrates subtly launched nihilism about 300 B.C."

and getting more to the point we're discussing here:

"When I say that our current condition can be characterized as nihilism
I do not mean that we have forgotten or betrayed our values.  Thinking
that we once had values but that we do not have values now, and that
we should regain our values or get new ones, is just another symptom of
the trouble."

Dreyfus argues that our very recognition that there are values to be
chosen is at the root of the problem.

". . . we arrive at the notion that we must CHOOSE our values. . . .
We have to decide which ones we want to adopt.  Once we get the idea
that there are a plurality of values and that we choose which ones
will have a claim on us, we are ripe for the modern idea, first found
in Nietzsche, that we POSIT our values -- that is, that valuing is
something we do and value is the result of what we do.  Once we see
that set of values or mind sets or world pictures are simply posited
they lose all authority for us and, far from giving meaning to our
lives, they show us that our lives have no intrinsic meaning."

". . . once our concerns have become mind-sets, they have lost their
meaning and authority, and whether we pick one of them or make up a
collage out of the "best" elements of each of them, we cannot get back
any meaning.  The most one might get is something interesting, but
there is a big difference between something interesting and something
important.  This is what I meant when I said at the start that talking
about "human values" is part of the problem.  As long as we think in
terms of explicit value-objects rather that implicit shared concerns,
we cannot find anything that has authority for us and elicits our
commitment."

What I'm really getting at here is that someone who is a total
Relativist and someone with explicit "absolute" values are the same in
terms of nihilism.  Thus Bloom has put the cart before the horse, it
is nihilism that has lead to Relativism, not the other way around.
The crux of the matter is that the "absolute" values have been
objectified and therefore could be explicitly rejected or changed
later, i.e. they are no longer "absolute" by virtue of the fact that
they are recognized as being seperate elements of thought that one
"posits," and are no longer part of an implicit background (what
Heidegger calls "being in the world").

(don't you dare take this e-mail - this is the best discussion on
Usenet right now!)
-- 
#dan

Clever:         dbk@mimsy.umd.edu | "For I was rolled in water,
Not-so-clever:  uunet!mimsy!dbk   |  I was rolled out past the pier" - MoB