My previous post mentioned the late Frank Meyer, to whom I owe my first encounter with one of my favorite poems. This one is about how I got to know him and his family. It is one of my favorite stories and, since I do not plan to ever write an autobiography, I might as well tell it here.
This is such a delightful anecdote - I'm glad you wrote it up!!
There is so much in this which pleases me. (including those parents' choice to take a "better to ask forgiveness than permission" approach towards homeschooling in a time when it was maybe-not-considered-legit.)
This was a fun read. I enjoyed Stratego in 7th grade. Decades later I learned the game was invented in China & it used a Chinese hierarchy of animals with Tigers as the #1 piece. I also played Avalon Hill wargames when I was in my teens, though I later switched to Strategy & Tactics games. My father, a former Navel officer, enjoyed the game “Midway”. Best wishes, Professor.
I don't think I'm a moral realist. That is, I don't think that good or bad, right or wrong, is an intrinsic property of any object, action, or agent, knowable as an absolute (even within the limits of finite human knowledge). But I am not a moral subjectivist, either; I don't think these are purely matters of taste, as Hume, for example, asserted in his epigram that "reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions"---neither of the tastes of the individual, nor of the tastes of the species, as Jonathan seems to propose in his tracing morality to instinctive desires for fairness, avoidance of harm, purity, and so on.
I think that William Blake had it right when he said (in the Proverbs of Hell, I believe) that "One law for the lion and ox is oppression." That is, I think that value is relative to the living organism---but objectively relative, not subjectively so. The idea that relativism = subjectivism is one of the great fallacies of twentieth century social science. In physics, weight is relative to the gravitational field of the body one is resting against (as opposed to rest mass, which is not relative), but it is not subjective; we can build a device to measure it. Value is relative to the needs of the organism that values (in terms of survival, reproduction, and/or support for kin). Maybe you would consider that a form of "moral realism," but I think of that term as expressing something more Platonic.
Have you even encountered C. S. Lewis's "Evolutionary Hymn" (beginning "Lead us, evolution, lead us/Up the future's endless stair")? It's a marvelous parody, funny throughout. But at the same time, whenever I read it, and admire its clever satire, I am left reflecting that nearly everything it says in jest is something that in fact I believe in earnest.
You may be interested, if you hadn’t the chance to read it, in Joseph Epstein’s essay on Isaiah Berlin in his collection of essays, THE IDEAL OF CULTURE.
Lepanto! The highest occasion that the times have seen (or at least Cervantes times). Not much to celebrate about the Spanish Hegemony in Europe. But that was our finest hour.
More autobiography please
This is such a delightful anecdote - I'm glad you wrote it up!!
There is so much in this which pleases me. (including those parents' choice to take a "better to ask forgiveness than permission" approach towards homeschooling in a time when it was maybe-not-considered-legit.)
This was a fun read. I enjoyed Stratego in 7th grade. Decades later I learned the game was invented in China & it used a Chinese hierarchy of animals with Tigers as the #1 piece. I also played Avalon Hill wargames when I was in my teens, though I later switched to Strategy & Tactics games. My father, a former Navel officer, enjoyed the game “Midway”. Best wishes, Professor.
I don't think I'm a moral realist. That is, I don't think that good or bad, right or wrong, is an intrinsic property of any object, action, or agent, knowable as an absolute (even within the limits of finite human knowledge). But I am not a moral subjectivist, either; I don't think these are purely matters of taste, as Hume, for example, asserted in his epigram that "reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions"---neither of the tastes of the individual, nor of the tastes of the species, as Jonathan seems to propose in his tracing morality to instinctive desires for fairness, avoidance of harm, purity, and so on.
I think that William Blake had it right when he said (in the Proverbs of Hell, I believe) that "One law for the lion and ox is oppression." That is, I think that value is relative to the living organism---but objectively relative, not subjectively so. The idea that relativism = subjectivism is one of the great fallacies of twentieth century social science. In physics, weight is relative to the gravitational field of the body one is resting against (as opposed to rest mass, which is not relative), but it is not subjective; we can build a device to measure it. Value is relative to the needs of the organism that values (in terms of survival, reproduction, and/or support for kin). Maybe you would consider that a form of "moral realism," but I think of that term as expressing something more Platonic.
Have you even encountered C. S. Lewis's "Evolutionary Hymn" (beginning "Lead us, evolution, lead us/Up the future's endless stair")? It's a marvelous parody, funny throughout. But at the same time, whenever I read it, and admire its clever satire, I am left reflecting that nearly everything it says in jest is something that in fact I believe in earnest.
Lovely stuff, thank you
You may be interested, if you hadn’t the chance to read it, in Joseph Epstein’s essay on Isaiah Berlin in his collection of essays, THE IDEAL OF CULTURE.
You provide tremendous value with your posts. Please keep them coming. And, as Arnold says, more autobiography would be delightful. Thank you.
Lepanto! The highest occasion that the times have seen (or at least Cervantes times). Not much to celebrate about the Spanish Hegemony in Europe. But that was our finest hour.