File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0311, message 145


Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 12:36:36 -0500
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>


Hi Tobin,

I like the ice cream cone almost as much as your critique of human exceptionalism.

Dick

-----Original Message-----
From: Tobin Nellhaus [mailto:nellhaus-AT-gis.net] 
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 9:58 PM
To: Bhaskar list
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war


James Daly wrote:

> > Reason after all is the highest and defining human faculty. It is a 
> > trust that the universe of being is responsive to human values, and 
> > that human goodness is not ultimately wasted, as it was for the 
> > Sophists,

To which Carrol replied:

> This both defames the Sophists and trivializes human struggle. The 
> Sophists virtually invented hope that makes sense, that is the hope 
> that through human struggle in a universe indifferent to humans we can 
> build something halfway decent for a while.

I'd also like to point out that the claim "Reason after all is the highest and defining human faculty" is inaccurate.  Research over the past ten years or so has shown that various higher mammals (certainly chimpanzees and some other simians, also if I remember right even dogs and cats) do in fact reason, even if not to the degree of sophistication, self-awareness, self-delusion, arrogance, and incredible stupidity that humans do.  Many mammals also experience emotion.  All told, we're pretty continuous with the rest of the animal world, actually (and as a radio network in the US likes to mention, an ear of corn has more genomes than people do).  For my money, one of the most distinctive things humans do is pun, and it's arguable that our crowning acheivement is the ice cream cone.  (Hey, that's not as silly as it sounds.  Mathematically, it's a work of beauty; the combination of milk, salt, ice, fruit, nuts, chocolate, wafers etc is an astonishing feat of agricultural and chemical creativity, and refrigeration is no small technological accomplishment either; its evanescence encourages one to progress toward the spiritual goal of attention to the Now; as a union of Italian gelato and [I think] Syrian wafers that was invented during [I think] a Chicago World's Fair about a century ago, it demonstrates the possibility of a joyful intercultural fusion; and how can anyone think of war or even be angry when laying seige upon an ice cream cone?  A true example of a dialectical absenting that absents a constraining or destructive absence.)

Hungrily, T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-mail.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce




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