Originally posted by P. G. Tipps
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By "what" do you not mean "that"?... -
It's based on an idea, which is a lot easier to put across, based as it is on simplistic premises, than socialism, that human nature is suspect and we're all basically greedy, whatever the utopists tell us, and therefore in need of external controls, our own being inadequate. Apart from religion, capitalism is the best way of achieving this inner control because it is based on the idea of self-interest being best allowed to operate in circumstances in which its exercise to excess will be severely subject to diminishing returns, while at the same time the source of those returns, whether diminishing or expanding, is at any point in time impossible to locate and judge upon. It is the "hidden hand" of market mechanisms explained by Adam Smith. And everybody knows that things happening without the power to prevent them is the ultimate default of existence, and indeed, a test of what it is to be a "complete" human being. The ability to respond responsibly and authoritatively without recourse to lengthy theoretical exegesis - for which BBC news programmes allow no discussion time - provides the ideal in terms of role modelling. It is a sort of reversed you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours lifestyle principle that conflates practicality and commonsense, and is therefore easy to put across, like the myth of motherhood and apple pie.Originally posted by Richard Barrett View Post
Recalling how much of the popular pre-rock'n'roll American culture of my childhood coloured my formative thinking on these matters, I suddenly realised this while watching the 1950s Western "Shane", about a man who comes unannounced and unexplained into a fearful community of rural homesteaders under constant threat from a gang of land-grabbers who own the local provisions store, and before riding off into the distance sorts them out in the only way American culture seems to know how, having introduced the one boy-child in the cast to how to draw a gun and shoot faster. The fact that, like in many of such movies of that time, it is the woman who stands for something other than the sufferings of violence and warfare, albeit meekly, and that those particular values she espouses have now, courtesy the gun lobby, gone by the wayside, indicates the basic unsustainability of the philosophy, which, as with capitalism, personifies the survival of the fittest. But it's still difficult to counter without the help of a counter-theory, since the argument that human nature's supposed untrustability is ultimately counterable by pointing out that what cannot be trusted is itself subject to the same charge of untrustworthyness can be challenged by the religious notion that God's grace saves us from the conundra of not having all the answers to life's imponderables. The fact that our supposed untrustability puts any unverifiable notion such as God in question, cannot occur to religious apologists, shielded as they are by this idea of grace and forgiveness emanating from a source which, as with all origins, precludes questioning; and in endowing this entity or whatever with ultimate arbitration over moral questions and the power to ensure everlasting happiness, by virtue of a certain circularity that makes ideal bedfellows of religion and conservatism so that they are able to have their cake and eat it.Comment
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But what would you call the search for the establishment of a philosophical basis for socialism if not broadly the same thing insofar as it goes; in so saying, I'm not seeking to suggest that either is in any sense better or more acceptable or understandable than the other but merely to point out that one's own political beliefs, such as they may be, might encourage such a view about holders of the opposite ones, surely?Originally posted by Richard Barrett View PostComment
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... which doesn't need people rooting around to find a philosophical basis for it because its philosophical basis is quite explicit in all of its founding documents, in the idea of equality and social justice, while there isn't and couldn't be a Capitalist Manifesto because if it told the truth it would say exactly the same things as the Communist one.Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View PostComment
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And
"Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world" strikes me as eminently deserving of the description "deep and meaningless." Doesn anyone here know what it is supposed to mean?Comment
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It isn't even a simile, let alone a metaphor.Originally posted by Richard Barrett View PostComment
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I wonder....sounds a bit like cod Kant or Schopenhauer - are we talking phenomenon and noumenon here?Originally posted by Richard Barrett View PostComment
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Metaphysical, certainly. Whatever that means.Comment
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Well, despite having given it some thought, I for one am uncertain as to what it means.Originally posted by Richard Barrett View Post
To begin with, I would question
a) where "the borders of the natural world" are,
b) who imposed them when, how and why (or how might they otherwsie have materialised) and
c) with what they border.
Next, I would ask what is meant by music "addressing us", on the grounds that, as it doesn't and indeed cannot just do that on its own without the intervention of its composers/improvisers/performers, it is those very composers/improvisers/performers who are "addressing us" with it.
All that I can deduce that Prof. Scruton is seeking to put across here is that he perceives something in music - at least in what he takes to be the best of it - that is somehow possessed some kind of "other-worldly" characteristics that identify it as being above and beyond the mundanities of day-to-day human life which, insofar as that might go, might seem not entirely unreasponable, but that does not obscure the fact that even the C# minor Quartet "addresses us" - via its performers - from the creative mind and imagination of Beethoven who, as best I recall, was inhabiting "the natural world" when he composed it.
"Deep" Prof. Scruton's statement might be; "meaningless" it might not be, but its intended meaning nevertheless does not seem to convey itself to me.Comment
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Evidently not.Originally posted by Barbirollians View Post
And no Sir Richard Barrett or Sir David Matthews either, perhaps demonstrating (for what it may or may not be worth) that, if they have nothing else in common, they do at least appear to have that.Comment
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They probably asked him, and he probably refused.
He will have been too embarrassed to tell us about it.Comment
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Or even, dammit, a truncheon?Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post
It isn't meant to be ... it's simply a statement of profound wisdom, S_A .Comment
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[FONT=Comic Sans MS][I][B]Numquam Satis![/B][/I][/FONT]Comment
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