Mike wrote:
"to be sure . . . but that foundation is, as
current events demonstrate yet again,
perilous and shaky . . . i suppose my
speculation came from a utopian dream
of a human community founded not
on celebration and ritual but on
rationality and ethics . . ."
That the foundations of our culture are perilous and shaky - isn't that a fact
of life we just have to accept? Not in the sense that we should become
fatalistic about it, but rather that we must constantly struggle to
consolidate what we believe to worthy and significant in our lives.
Andrew asked Frank:
> >>Hmm, are celebration and ritual diametrically opposed to rationality and
> ethics?
>
> not DIAMETRCIALLY opposed in any necessary sense, but
> the behavior that emerges from the one is often [usually?]
> radically different from the behavior that comes from the
> other . . .
The way I see it, there is not the one without the other. Rationality is a
fairly late trait in human constitution, and it does not simply wipe away all
the rest, which in respect to it is dubbed irrational. We might see a
polarization, but that polarization is an extricable part of what we are. And
in no way is one the good and the other the bad, or one to be lauded and the
other to be despised. What made the Nazi horrors so monumental was not the
amont of evil as such - there has been plenty of evil throughout the history -
but the way rational means were put into the service of evil irrational
purposes. One of the most unpleasantly impressive notions to emerge in
Lanzmann's film Shoah (and in some way s also in Resnais' Night and Fog) is
the way everything was carefully designed so as to maximize efficiency.
Reason may be used to sort out our notion of ethics or moral codes, but the
sense of ethics in itself is not something rational. At least to me it seems
to spring from something more primordial. Isn't reasoning why we should not
hurt each other or refuse to treat each others as other subjects a rather weak
form of ethics? Thinking about it as a categorical imperative, something we
just have accept to be ethical beings is as rational as one can get about it.
We can and must rationalize about what this means in practice. But isn't the
ethical impulse itself is inexplicable? (Cognitive science might someday
explain the mechanism of the ethical but that will be an explanation of a
wholly different order.)
We are wise to at least try to be rational about strong forces such as love,
because this might be the only we can act ethically in the storms of our
emotions. But we do gross violence to ourselves if in the name of rationality
we simply try to quench that most unrational of emotions. It woudl not be
rational at all.
Henry
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