[lit-ideas] Re: Socratic Congress
- From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:44:50 -0230
Quoting Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Robert: I don't want to discuss 'ticking bomb' examples.
> Really. Not now. I'd hope that Eric has some response to the
> first paragraph of mine he quotes, although it was aimed
> nowhere near him.
>
>
> The "piano interlude" was a response of sorts to the "moral
> theory of everything" absolutism you were opposing. It was
> posted in agreement with your position. Aristocratic Kantian
> Steinways are reputedly the best pianos, but Hoi Polloi
> Yamahas also have their distinct virtues.
>
> A similar (contra-absolutist) question is how simple natural
> laws "explain" the complexity of the natural world (except
> at the macro- and micro-levels). Natural "laws" explain a
> very restricted aspect of the natural world. For example, a
> theoretical avalanche can be modeled in math construed from
> those simple laws, but a real-life avalanche is more than
> the mathematical unfolding of the simple laws.
>
> For me, morality seems grounded in empathy, and empathy
> seems to be grounded in one's imagination, one's ability to
> imagine oneself as another. The imagination is one's moral
> compass.
WO: I understand empathy to be not the capacity for imagining oneself as another
but rather as the capacity to project one's self into the circumstances of
another and understanding what things look and feel like from that
perspective-unto-the-world. I doubt it's possible to imagine oneself as being
an other, as Eric puts it.
Interestingly, Hannah Arendt, following Immanuel Kant, refuses to identify this
capacity for imagination with what we normally understand the capacity to be:
empathy.
If you can't distinguish capacity A from capacity B, are you able to produce the
performances of either one?
Walter O
MUN
Yeah, that's the ticket. All the system-building of
> moralists strikes me as an attempt of the analytic mind to
> gain control of (or power over) the imaginative mind. Which
> is like trying to control a river ... the river ultimately
> prevails.
>
> Eric
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