Two conversation-stopping quotes for tonight's dinner party (I think I might be good at this). Have fun.
"The assertion that a proposed change is impossible because of the fixed constitution of human nature diverts attention away from the question of whether or not a change is desirable and from the other question of how it shall be brought about. It throws the question into the arena of blind emotion and brute force. In the end, it encourages those who think that great changes can be produced offhand and by the sheer use of violence."
- John Dewey, "Does Human Nature Change?", 1938.
"[I]ntelligence... is trained power in judgment in choosing and forming means and ends in all the situations that life presents. The alternatives to formation of the fundamental attitudes and habits of life experience and of values and ends that give life whatever ordered articulation it possesses through the use of science are convention, prejudice, custom, and desire to believe that which it is agreeable to believe, either because of its harmony with personal wishes or its conformity with the expectations and requirements of the particular group of which one is a member."
- John Dewey, "The Determination of Ultimate Values or Aims through Antecedent or A Priori Speculation or through Pragmatic or Empirical Inquiry," 1938.
11 comments:
I don't.... Never mind.
Let me guess. You have family, don't do dinner parties? Just speculation. Hard to bring this up with the wife and kids.
But me, I'm a DC guy, and the dinner party is the pinnacle of cultural life. What we do at DC dinner parties is talk about politics in the most banal ways possible - as in this pundit said this, this other one said that. If culture is the topic, it's the trendy movies. After Sideways, everyone was bringing pinot noirs and no one touched merlot. The movie said so.
I'm an academic who's the youngest in my department by twenty years or so with most of them. So it's not the kind of crowd you go out and grab a beer with. The non-dinner party crowd is dispersed at the mopment. So all I can do is the dinner party, quote Dewey on human nature, scream at the hostess something about ideological incoherence after several glasses of their pinot noir, then bolt. Fortunately, they call me, quaintly, a curmudgeon. At least to my face.
But I imagine it just comes out as jdkekjht.
I was just playing along with your premise that those were stumpers, although I suppose if I weren't playing I'd have been stumped genuinely. I think it's lack of context, which has the effect of lack of oxygen or atmosphere, from which conversation cannot feed. Or maybe you just had to be there. Dewey? Didn't he invent the decibel system? Loud guy to have at the dinner table, I suppose. Um, it's been quite awhile, now that you mention it, since I've been to a genuine dinner party. It's true I've got my reproductive issues more or less worked out, which makes schmoozing in the flesh a little less of the utmost. Plus I have DSL. Maybe what you're getting at is what our nation's intellectuals call our nation's anti-intellectualism. That can be tough on a philosopher. Probably it's only the fact that you're an "applied" philosopher that gets you invited back to these parties. My prescription: Sign up for ESPN, rent two seasons of "Lost" on DVD and you'll be in good shape for the next one. Or learn poker. Poker staves off the need for real conversation.
Thanks for playing!
And we're playing it well by changing the subject.
Oh, I don't really fret it. There's a double life: the life of the dinner-party intellectuals, and the life of folks who read and think about supposedly useless stuff like philosophy. I can do both, I think, and I don't mind doing both. But there is a kind of anti-intellectualism of the nation's intellectuals. I buy it to a certain extent myself (in a Jamesian sense), and I'm not sure philosophy has much to say in the end to matters of practical importance except in a long-run kind of way (in a Rortyan sense). But to dismiss it outright is to block the route of inquiry (in a Peircean sense).
And oh, I've got tv.
I appreciate the fact that a whole lot more serious thinking gets done at Beltway dinner parties than gets done when my neighbors and I get together.
We're a prosaic bunch. We talk about which trees should be cut down so that they don't fall on the power lines during the next big storm. (I've got a huge wild cherry tree that is gonna topple any fuckin' minute, which gives me conversational ammo ad infinitum, or at least until the bastid falls on my truck. Parking next to that tree is my middle-aged version of thrill-seeking, replacing the rampant hallucinogen usage of my salad years.)
Oh, there was a time when I was a dazzling urban sophisticate. We'd bring the most fantastic new wine (with hints of toast and chocolate), and talk about the Big Issues, and afterwards, we'd go to a smart bar and mock the Proles. And for all of our public posing and ennui, we really did give a shit about the human condition, especially our own.
Now, as to your conversation-stoppers, I think they're pretty swell, especially the second one.
But if you can reel off this sentence:
"The alternatives to formation of the fundamental attitudes and habits of life experience and of values and ends that give life whatever ordered articulation it possesses through the use of science are convention, prejudice, custom, and desire to believe that which it is agreeable to believe, either because of its harmony with personal wishes or its conformity with the expectations and requirements of the particular group of which one is a member."
...without notes or PowerPoint, then, Sirrah, my hat is permanently off to you. That's no mere conversation-stopper; that's a converational carpet-bomb. You probably can't trot that one out more than once or twice a decade, allowing the hazmat team sufficient time to render Georgetown once again fit for human habitation and conversation.
I mean, didn't Dewey have an editor, or a peer review committee or anything?
Lovely comment. I envy your conversations about old cherry trees falling and thrill-parking. My background is mixed. I deal with lots of so-called urban sophisticates who actually disdain the proles while using the language nice, tolerant liberals. I grew up abroad, lived all over the planet, mostly in urban areas, but spent a fair amount of time also in back-assward Texas. Always an outsider - that's all.
Dewey had two moments of nice, non-Teutonic prose: Art as Experience and Human Nature and Conduct. Next week we'll do Kant as conversation-stopper. Or maybe something more useful. Montaigne is good for that.
Back-assward Texas? I spent 3 years in Ama-fuckin-rillo. I'll see your back-assward and raise you a full cranio-rectal insertion.
I was in Bry-fuckin-an. It ain't the vast sandbox Amarillo is - we had the Brazos Valley and the muddy Brazos itself -- but it was named after an anti-evolutionist. Actually, I was fond of it in some ways. The Mexican sisters who ran the best Mexican restaurant ever out of the porch on their house in a latino neighborhood. Blind Lemon Jefferson from up the road in Hearne and Lightnin' Hopkins from down the road in Navasota, and nuts like the Butthole Surfers coming through town and playing in small dives. I miss that. I don't miss the "kickers" who ran me out of bars with knives in hand, the Texas drive-friendly smile that conceals a backstabbing knife, fireants, and the rightwing right or wrong politics. Don't worry, I've had my cranium rectified and versified. Happily, we both lived through it.
From deep in the bowels of Texas:
Hey, Helmut: how about a "Friday Conversation Stopper" every Friday?
Barba - I thought about that. A new series to go with the fruit thing! We'll be the smartest, most confusing, dinner-party conversation stoppers out there!
Or maybe just fqkkrs.
Crickets....
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