Re: The new, improved Sophie's Choice...

John O. writes:
<< [. . .] I have no problem at all being the one "marginalized." >>

Sure enough. Though this enlightened indifference does not, apparently,
prevent one from hurling assertions of such things as my "peculiar needs"
like so many rotten tomatoes. And of course this is the self-referential
problem that forever nags all manner of assertions too unqualifiedly against
truth or objectivity -- unless you would speak with similar rhetoric about,
say, one's preference of ice cream flavor, it seems that you are putting
more faith than you suggest in the non-subjectiveness of SOME judgments of
better and worse, since you don't seem to indicate a belief that my position
in this conversation relates to yours as cholocate does to vanilla. Perhaps
yours conforms better to truth?

You keep returning to the point that these decisions need not be made, that
these questions need not be asked, and that all attempts to answer them
fail. Of course they need not be made, of course they need not be asked,
and of course we find ourselves struggling and perpetually falling short of
answers. But I am inclined to think them worth asking anyway, that the
struggle with some questions are more important than any hypothesized
answers. You assert repeatedly that such things cannot be quanitfied, as if
anyone would deny the assertion or assert the importance of quantifying them
(so many qualities, physical as well as abstract, do not admit of precise or
even accurate quantification, though none deny their existence or import).
I come to wonder if you're just too damned uncomfortable with questions that
you cannot quickly and confidently answer away -- questions that are or
appear to be unanswerable must be useless, their very foundations mere
phantoms.

I must try again to make it very clear that one need not harbor any
disrespect nor be lacking any fondness for the "heterogeneity of
historical and aesthetic experience" in order to say what I am saying.

I am merely doubting -- correctly or not, maintaining my uncertainty where
you seem so eager to dismiss as phantoms every question where uncertainty,
especially permanent uncertainty, might reside -- whether I ought to accept
as an axiom that all goodness is purely subjective, merely a matter of
preferring a flavor of ice cream. Perhaps it is, though you must
acknowledge that it remains for us only an axiom.

I can say that Lucretius, for instance, argued in favor of a position very
much like yours, but did it more eloquently, more thoroughly, more
thoughtfully, more compellingly, and without such persistent "vagaries and
slogans and difficulties" (and he did it in VERSE) -- and I can wonder
whether that says something important and fundamental about Lucretius, and
if his survival for close to two millennia reflects this. Or maybe your
messages here and Lucretius' great poem are merely vanilla and chocolate,
and I can only speak of the two with reference to my particular tongue.

The question is "worth" asking, it seems to me, even if we can never arrive
at a final answer.

-Robbie
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Received on Mon Dec 15 15:38:43 2003