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MichaelDreibelbisFirstPaper 3 - 31 Mar 2009 - Main.IanSullivan
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Trying Not to Die a Little | | | Finality
If what we do defines us, right down to our morality, then it turns out life is not about minding p's and q's. Rather, we need to actively surround ourselves with sources of inspiration.
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- I don't think you need to change this at all; I think you've nailed it straight on the first hit. So far as your purpose is to explain why I am doing what I am doing, I believe your explanation is accurate. So far as your purpose is to account for your own state of becoming, I think you do it honestly and with commendable self-reflection. In my opinion, you make two basic errors attributable to the stage of the journey you are presently on. First, you think that there should be some distinction between inspiration and manipulation. The line which separates them, etymologically, is the line between being breathed on and being touched, which is indeed a very basic distinction for human beings at the boundary between biology and intrapsychic psychology on our "stack." But while every human ape knows the difference between being breathed on and being touched, the line between inspiration and manipulation philosophically is that mysteriously unsolid line between "free will" and social influence. Coercion and advice, inspiration and manipulation, counsel and bluster, suasion, persuasion, abrasion and all the other forms of social influence are in essence the same, as their operational employments, swindling and selling, are. We do indeed have the desire for moral judgments, which makes perfect sense, as it does to say that everything one can do with a hatchet isn't morally equivalent to everything else. But our judgments are based, as you say in the end, on intention rather than structure; hence Holmes' observation that even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.
- Second, you use "paternalist" as springboard for a complaint about unequal power in the classroom: it is my concept of your best interest which controls. But a guide is not a father. My concept of your best interest is an agreed concept: you have sought my aid in going safely on a journey to a designated destination over ground that I have traveled many times and that you have not. I make the intervening decisions in your interest as an agent, not by right of geniture or any other superiority than that of greater experience. The complication arises because I am also required to evaluate your skill in making the journey, which implies judgment, which reintroduces the concept of paternal authority.
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