File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0311, message 121


From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gis.net>
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 13:11:00 -0500


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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