[lit-ideas] Re: The meaning of life

>> What I hoped, by providing the [JH] quote, was to show that transcendental arguments need not necessarily be, as Eric claimed, a "sly power grab, the looming, the looking down upon, the lording it over." Instead, they are very much grounded in and dependent on human life.
Not necessarily a sly power grab, for sure, but we can't say for certain. 


Let me play postmodern Maimon's role in another scene.
ENTER KING HABERMAS WITH ATTENDANTS: These ethical questions in a stricter sense, concerning a life that is worthwhile or is preferable, can find an answer only in context-dependent discourses of self-understanding. 

ATTENDANT: Let us be grave, a fool approaches!
ENTER MAIMON (RUBBING THE BACK OF HIS NECK WITH BOTH HANDS): Sure, sure. But how much context is enough? How much understanding? Any claim about the motives of people who "answer their substantial questions themselves" involves discounting their possible adventitious or false motives ... which presupposes any infinite capacity for discernment. Reason is self justifying? If you think so. We have no answer then, only the questioning itself.
KING HABERMAS: These answers will be more differentiated and more appropriate depending upon how rich the identity-building traditions are that support self-assurance.
MAIMON: As for more words, whose greatness answers words, let this paperback copy of Steven Pinker report what speech forbears. 

[Quotes from _The Stuff of Thought_, page 159]
"This is not to say that Kant himself is a reliable guide to our current understanding of the nature of thought and its relation to the world. ...Many philosophers today believe that Kant's rejection of the possibility of knowing the world in itself is obscure, and most physicists dispute his blurring of the mind's experience of time and space with our scientific understanding of time and space." 

KING HABERMAS: What! Am I talking to myself?

MAIMON: It's a context-dependent discourse.


Always with the caricatures,
Eric
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