Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2003 09:10:56 -0500
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>


Hi Mervyn,

To say that love triumphs over evil sounds to me much more like an expression of hope than a statement of accomplished fact.  That is my hope, but I don't believe that love has already triumphed, or that it will do inevitably.  To say that it will necessarily triumph sounds so much like a "force of history" argument, something like the belief that a global communist society is inevitable.

Perhaps my reading of the historical record is different from yours, but it seems to me that one of the major contributors to fellow-feeling, or love, within a collectivity, is their common need to protect themselves from external enemies.  It is a commonplace that a major task of the political representatives of a collectivity is to organize it for protection against other, similarly organized, collectivities -- "tribes," "city-states," "nation-states," "alliances," "empires."  I take very seriously Randolph Bourne's aphorism, "War is the health of the state."

Best regards,

Dick   

-----Original Message-----
From: Mervyn Hartwig [mailto:mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 1:18 PM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.


Hi Dick,

But it hasn't, i.e. notwithstanding inter-(and intra-)specific aggression, species have proliferated and flourished. If aggression dominated both inter- and intra- the whole show would come to a halt (as of course it might yet owing to contingent aggression within a contingently powerful species, i.e. ours; it would remain the case that there could be no process of biological evolution if love did not triumph over evil, Eros over Thanatos).

Mervyn




 "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu> writes
>Hi Mervyn,
>
>You wrote:
>
>"One can argue that, given that biological evolution proceeds, it must 
>be the case that co-operation, care etc prevails over 
>self-preservation, aggression etc within species."
>
>But isn't it possible that conflict among (between)different 
>communities may prevail over co-operation among (between)them, even as 
>this conflict requires high degrees of co-operation within each of 
>these communities?
>
>I don't write this out of any basic disagreement with the other 
>arguments for the either the existence or the fundamental goodness of 
>something (not yet fully specified, perhaps) that we can point to with 
>the heuristic concept, "human nature."
>
>Regards,
>



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