Tuesday, January 20, 2009

POISON...of subjectivism...

This reading was incredibly difficult for me to read for some reason. It took me at least 2 times before I understood some things while others I had to reread many more times.
On the first page a paragraph that stuck with me was..."Until modern times no thinker of the first rank ever doubted that our judgments of value were rational judgments or what they discovered was objective. It was taken for granted that in temptation passion was opposed, not to some sentiment, but to reason. Thus Plato thought...The modern view is very different. It does not believe that value judgments are really judgments at all. They are sentiments, or complexes, or attitudes, produced in a community by the pressure of its environment and its traditions, and differing from one community to another. To say that a thing is good is merely to express our feelings about it; and our feeling it is the feeling we have been socially conditioned to have."
So basically it is rational thought versus personal preference. If that makes sense. You think rationally thinking in and out of the box instead of just staying inside the box. People have become self centered in their thinking. Then from the self centered thoughts comes ideology. People think of things as important or right then end up forcing others to believe or think in the same way. This kind of collective thought reminds me of the borg from star trek...yes I like star trek...anyway they share one mind, have no feelings, and if you are not part of the collective you must either become one of them or be destroyed. Talk about pushing your own values onto someone else. Something else in the reading that was very borg-like was the second paragraph on page 3. "
All idea of "new" or "scientific" or "modern" moralities must therefore be dismissed as mere confusion of thought. We have only two alternatives. Either the maxims of traditional morality must be accepted as axioms of practical reason which neither admit nor require argument to support them and not to "see" which is to have lost human status; or else there are no values at all, what we mistook for values being "projections" of irrational emotions. It is perfectly futile, after having dismissed traditional morality with the question, 'Why should we obey it?' then to attempt the reintroduction of value at some later stage in our philosophy. Any value we reintroduce can be countered in just the same way. Every argument used to support it will be an attempt to derive from premises in the indicative mood a conclusion in the imperative. And this is impossible." So resistance really is futile. No matter what there is some sort of conformity going on. There are many sociological implications that can be added to this. Things about norms and morals and laws, but all of this is useless if it doesn't have some ground or reasoning behind it. Still very confusing stuff...maybe I'll understand more when I'm older. ^_^;

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