different modes of description, yes, however

by hassanisabbah

Posted to WritersAndGenres on 2003-10-28 16:11:00

Parent message is 536106
I agree that the free-will/determinism debate is an old philo-psych. chestnut and sort of boring to most hipsters, but it is relevant to our perceptions of justice, ethics, and aesthetics. When people read fiction their own ideas of religion, values, justice etc. (whether logical or not) influence their judgments and understanding, right? What say Sartre or B. Russell brought to their reading of texts, either lit or non-lit, is quite a bit different and more penetrating than what Suzie Q. sorority gal does in Eng. 101….

So boring phil./psych. questions such as free will, the “soul” or mind, whether there are “objective” ethics, are often held or assumed but usually not debated either internally or in what criticism I see..though marxist and psychological crit. does touch upon this sometimes

Are you taking a post-modernist approach and seeing science and logic as just other “narratives” of reality? I disagree with this sort of irrational, uh, crap. The periodic table is not a poem….


“and in any case natural science and biology operate under different standards from ethics/aesthetics and have different modes of description and different vocabularies.”

obviously. and while we might find many scientists and science education to be dull, oppressive and square, daddy-o, that does not mean that the theories and facts are untrue or that its methods are unsound…I adhere to CP Snow’s ideas that the two cultures (of humanities and science) should crossbreed: I am sick of artiste-poet types who know nothing at all about modern science and simply reject it because..why? …it’s too difficult or doesn’t go over at the sock hop or at SlutBucks?

rationalists would say that the ethics and aesthetics are forms of human behavior, they are activities that human-primates do for some reason–usually pleasure or understanding or perhaps to establish power or sexuality….I think ethics is dependent on biology..in fact it is description of both how certain animals (humans) act, and how they ought to act–though that is the difficult part…so heroes as humans are also driven and conditioned by animalic instincts..as seen in some naturalistic fiction