Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1999 23:57:29 +0100 From: Judy <jaw-AT-earthlink.net> Subject: Re: the reality check is in the mail >Hugh, the word "ruse" also suggests deception to my ear. I suspect that >people like it because somehow it legitimates deception -- as if we >needed to legitimate it in our culture. Lois, when you say you suspect people like the word ruse because it "somehow" legitimates deception, which people are these? Lyotard? Me? Do you think I've said this word affected me positively in reading Lyotard because I want to legitmate deception? you said >The problem with deceptive ruses is not that they are unethical, it is >that to work they require trust and if you tell me you use ruses, or if >I discover that you do, then I won't trust you. What if you did not discover that someone uses ruses, yet they did and continue to? Then, would you say there is no problem with the ruses? If you want my trust, >the best way to get it is to be trustworthy and to show that when I test >it with evident and testable sincerity. > >Now, would you want to call that a ruse? Or a tack? I would definitely call that a ruse, and a tack. A ruseful tack. Do you think it was a ruse? If so, would you not trust yourself? I'm not seeing the connection between trust and ruses, though I can understand how it might seem obvious. It did to me at first, until I thought about it. ...If I can't count on what someone says, eventually I stop counting on them. But just because someone tricks me or manipulates me, does not necessarily result in my losing trust in them. Sometimes people have kind of maneuvered me into doing something that turned out to be the right thing for me; they knew it and I didn't, and then I found out they were right. The ruse was a good instrument for learning something I would not have otherwise learned. How about those Buddhist koans, or paradoxical therapeutic interventions? I would not stop trusting someone who used a ruse to accomplish a purpose I favor. I think too that I would not trust someone who pursued a purpose I believe is wrong, even if they did so straightforwardly, for example, someone who straightforwardly enslaves others or uses unbridled coercian to self-aggrandize. Someone might approach me with a gun and straightforwardly say "Give me your money please." I will give the money, and I will never trust that person even though they have never used pretense with me and they made clear exactly where I stood with them. I'm not at all sure what the total absence of any ruse would be in a person. What you might mean by "be trustworthy," and how you might "test" that (would this test be like a ruse?) is not clear to me at all. If you were testing my trustworthiness and I didn't know it, wouldn't you be tricking me? If you warned me ahead of time that you were testing me, then I could trick you into thinking I was what you call trustworthy. Finding out that someone is testing me would tend to undermine my trust in them. One of my favorite ruse users is Wittgenstein in the Investigations. The way he plays a kind of game with his questions and his circuitous approaches to them, and the way he sets up his interlocutor and then exposes the interlocutor in all his positivist muddle. I completely trust Wittgenstein all the way, I suppose because what he is doing seems righteous to me. I find his ruseful style especially helpful--it's part of the teaching, in all its rigged paralogy. What do you think? Judy
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