Radhe: Thanks so much for your comment. Good to know about the Lipps connection—I’d like to look into that. I would be a bit skeptical about the chances of actually practicing the pure empathy you speak of, really getting into another’s shoes. But there is the hope of glimpses, which remind us how much farther we have to go to understand the other. I admire how Levinas takes the transcendence of God as a way to speak of the transcendence of others. Your distinction between empathy and sympathy warns of an important danger—the thought, no matter who is in power and who is not, that empathy need only be a one-sided affair.

Look forward to hearing more from you.

I (perhaps obviously) tend to think of ideas from a historicist perspective rather than as eternal ideas.

Which is not to say I see no point in reading older stuff. I hope soon I’ll be able to show you the stuff I’ve been writing about medieval and ancient proofs for the existence of God.

Unfortunately present parsing methods mostly ignore contemporary philosophers. Vintage is the only filtering mechanism I know that picks up innovation w/o excessive time investment. I wish I could say more on Rorty but am not capable at this moment. What is your take?

Yet of course I cannot ignore what you say because interesting points are everywhere in it. And because conversation is the whole point of throwing my unfinished business onto the internet anyway. Probably someday I will regret it when this stuff gets me in trouble (I might have already offended some Muslims with it). Throughout, this discussion has been quite invigorating, forcing me to think hard about what I know and what I don’t.

I hope that we can appreciate that both of us are still at the lumber yard for at least parts of our houses. You sound like you’re saying you are too.

I forget if we’ve talked about it, but how productive have you found Rorty’s pragmatism as a contemporary expression?

I’m sorry you find my remarks hurtful. I don’t mean to be so. I think of intellectual frameworks as something like the memory palaces and theatres of Ricci and Bruno we once discussed. Consequently I have a difficult time taking offense when persons critique mine and perhaps don’t realize how offensive I can be to others.

As for my houses on display, I’m also not particularly impressed with any that I have put forward. If you don’t have any to show yourself at the moment, perhaps you can tell me what aspects of what you have seen of mine that are insufficient or unappealing. I seem to be in a constant stage of building and rebuilding and always appreciate suggestions.

As for the argument from tradition, I wasn’t sure if you were making it or not. Most people default to the beliefs passed onto them by their parents and modify forwards (or even backwards) as they see fit. I don’t see anything wrong with this.

In my discussion of values, I don’t see all such as necessarily grounded in ‘first principles,’ as nice as this would be. To give an example of what I mean: if we, two citizens of Greenfield, believe that our town should be less polluted, this constitutes a shared value. Once we have a shared value, we can move forward and debate how to implement this. I may believe that it is best to fund programs in schools that encourage recycling, etc. You may believe a better option is to organize citizen patrols to pick up litter.

I’m sorry if what I suggest sounds astonishing but I mean exactly this with respect to pragmatism. Philosophical schools pick up large quantities of extra verbiage supposedly but often not even related to their founding principles. My project at the moment is simply to restate the founding principles of both James and Dewey within their historical context. Frankly, I’m not entirely capable and must do more serious study before I can.

Here is a quote from CTaylor:

As to the unfortunate fact that [William] James is neglected by contemporary academic philosophers, with a few honorable exceptions, this may just show that, alas, wide sympathy and powers of phenomenological description are not qualities for which the discipline has much place at present. But in spite of this, it seems to me that James… has trouble getting beyond a certain individualism.

As I understand James he claims that observable ethical behavior should be the prime factor in evaluating the benefit of religious experience. The problem, for me, is both the definition of the ‘ethical,’ and expanding this beyond individual persons. Which is why I present these snippets of my theories of cultural evolution.

I can’t really help not having a finished intellectual framework to present. But I have tried throughout this to illustrate the tendencies in my thinking over the years, which have some consistency, and I think, tiny bits and pieces of originality, such as is possible. I summarize it the best I can in the About page—an urge for experimentation with ideas and a view of that experimentation as a process partly beyond my own total, systematic control. I have tried to practice a discipline that is the intellectual equivalent of Gandhian Satyagraha—a conviction that the truth will best unravel itself when we deny that we are possessed of it. You, as I have said, are seeing my position as one of pure negativity, which it is not, just as critics have described Gandhi’s program as “passive,” which it was decidedly not.

Anyway, the more I attempt to defend myself, the less I seem to satisfy you, and indeed, the less appealing I find your expectations of me and your conception of the intellectual life. It may be more productive (“for the sake of man”?) to change the subject somewhat so we don’t have to keep reiterating hurtful remarks about what we are “not interested” about in one another.

For instance, I’d be eager to know more about your thinking on pragmatism—your sense of its failures and promise. Some links to your writing on the subject would be most welcome.

And, from an intellectual standpoint, I’m curious how and whether the tradition of American pragmatism (from which I also consider myself to hail) can be rehabilitated, despite the failure in many respects of its aims and techniques — or at least the failure to coherently restate what they mean for the century after James (and to some extent also Dewey, although I consider myself less in his intellectual lineage).

Also, I have a cause of sorts — to encourage American would be intellectuals to step back from present political agitation and consider more broadly the principles the nation was founded on and how and whether they can be restated for the coming century. Without such dialogue, which I firmly believe in, the only recourse is violence. Although I expect this in some measure, I work as best I can to minimize its occurrence.

Of course I am not interested in your intellectual framework — as you admit, it does not exist. Not a threat, but statement of fact. Nonetheless, I remain interested in dialogue, not for its own sake, but for the sake of man. Is this not, according to Jesus, why God also provided us the Sabbath?

Do we work in a tradition? Of course, but what is this tradition? We select out of it what we believe necessary for our purposes, but what is the hermeneutic we use to decide what these are and what is useful for them? That our parents believed the same thing is, for me, insufficient.