Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 12:56:58 +0000
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war


Hi Tobin,

I don't think James's statement need be construed as anthropcentric; if 
reason is 'a trust that the universe of being is responsive to human 
values' this could be because, as you remind us, everything human is an 
emergent part of being.  Sophism certainly is anthropocentric and I'm 
glad to learn you're not endorsing that. (You seemed to be endorsing 
Carrol's claim that the Sophists virtually invented hope. For me the 
opposite is the case: Sophism is a market-oriented philosophy of a kind 
we're only too familiar with today in the form of homo economicus etc).

> My
>objection was to the claim that reason, of itself, *defines* humans.

This is not what I took James to be saying. This is what he said:

>> >Reason after all is the highest and defining human faculty

He doesn't say that reason alone defines humans, and 'faculty' suggests 
that he is limiting the claim to mentalistic capabilities, where the 
main 'rival' is doubtless imagination. 'Practice' is not a 'faculty' in 
this sense, it's the exercise of a range of human powers, including of 
course reason. So a 'primacy of practice' thesis of some kind is not 
incompatible with what James said, and I expect that, as a Marxist, he 
does in fact subsribe to one (though doubtless not to pragmatism).

I agree entirely re the importance of imagination and creativity (James 
himself spoke of 'the infinitude we are capable of imagining' just 
before his 'reason' statement). Ironically, while this has always been 
stressed by Bhaskar, it's a leading theme of the later philosophy, from 
which I understand you take your distance. I'd be interested in your 
view of imagination. Is it an irreducible power which can create 'ex 
nihilo' so to speak, or is the great imaginative work comprised solely 
of pre-existing materials, including cognitive etc materials, so that we 
only ever have creation 'de novo' (which I take to mean 'anew')? Note 
that in DPF 49 Bhaskar 'feels like saying' that emergence as such is a 
quantum leap of 'the materialized imagination--or even, with Hegel, 
reason'.

Mervyn

PS. I hope I haven't given the impression that reason and imagination, 
while distinct, aren't closely bound up with each other in practice.

Tobin Nellhaus <nellhaus-AT-gis.net> writes
>Dear Myrmidon,
>
>A Sopite?  Nay, sir: a Soapite, sworn to scrub snobbishness from our
>sentience.  'Tis sooth I say: the assertion that h. sapiens sapiens strides
>at the center of existence certainly slides toward an empiricist analysis.
>And such simian-centrism sabotages our struggles to save the bio-sphere,
>from which suspends our survival.  Silly?  Sadly, not in the slightest
>sense.  And so, submerged in the sea of my satire, a secret serious side
>stands solid.
>
>But my sibilant speaking strategy -- which has succeeded for several
>sentences -- must, alas, now cease.  You scribed:
>
>> Do I detect alarm bells from the age of mockery?
>
>Yup.
>
>> James's claim is not rendered inaccurate by the fact that other animals
>> reason any more than the fact that chimps use tools disproves that
>> tool-making of a certain kind is distinctive of humans (chimps don't
>> engage in the second order reflexive monitoring that is necessary to use
>> tools to make tools, etc, and to make history.) Which is not to deny
>> continuity, but surely there is discontinuity too. (It's true, though,
>> apes do kinda *look* like George Bush and dogs like Tony Blair).
>
>Actually, I have no problem with the view that there's something distinctive
>in the way that humans reason -- I said so in my post, in which I
>specifically pointed out reflexive characteristics of human thought.  One
>might say, it's an example of the old-style dialectical idea that at a
>certain point, an increase in quantity becomes a change in quality.  My
>objection was to the claim that reason, of itself, *defines* humans.  *That*
>is not a scientifically supportable assertion (wow, those S'es just keep
>resurfacing!).  Much more distinctively human is our creativity (which was
>the point of my encomium to the ice cream cone -- definitely not the
>"benefits" of the market).  Even that is not solely human, unless you look
>at what we *do* with that creativity.  Frankly, I find cooking much more
>impressive than reasoning as such.  The kind of imaginative acts involved in
>inventing bread are mind-boggling.  Grinding grain, adding water and yeast
>and maybe eggs and baking powder (!?) and other stuff, kneading the
>resulting goo, building ovens and baking the stuff, under the peculiar
>insight that the result would be utterly wonderful -- what the hell?  How
>did people come up with all that?  It's more the result of experimental
>practice than reasoning.  The human ability to form abstractions is quite
>remarkable, but even laying aside the fact that making reason our defining
>feature has a long association with male domination, materialism recognizes
>that knowledge and reasoning emerge from practical engagements with the
>world.  I'm talking the "primacy of practice" thesis here.  One need hardly
>move from one's seat to realize that reasoning easily (in fact, usually)
>goes wrong, but there's a remarkable level of success at getting dinner on
>the table, even by people who can't tell a syllogism from a synecdoche --
>and for the most part, getting dinner is more fundamental (not just from a
>commonsense perspective, but from a marxist one as well).
>
>Best, Toolbox
>
>---
>Tobin Nellhaus
>nellhaus-AT-mail.com
>"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce
>
>
>
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