🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan4.025624.7173@unmvax.cs.unm.edu> 
ctm@ardi.com (Clifford T. Matthews) writes:

MZ:
>	"...
>
>	I don't require jack shit, my excitable boy, with the sole
>	exception that men live up to their billing.
>
>	...
>
>	cordially,
>
>	..."

CTM:
>The irony is subtle once you realize that there is more than one meaning of
>"cordially."  When used at the closing of a letter, it usually means
>"warmly and genially affable."  However, "cordially" also encompasses
>"sincerely or deeply felt".  It appears that we have a word, "cordially,"
>used as a billing--describing the contents of the letter containing it--in a
>manner that clashes with the images that the word typically conjures.

I'll buy the deeply felt bit, but please try to avoid the s-word.

	The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper
	sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can
	have any reliable access to an objective reality and which
	therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly
	are.  These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in
	the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true
	and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the
	notion of objective inquiry.  One response to this loss of
	confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by
	dedication to the ideal of _correctness_ to a quite different
	sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an
	alternative ideal of _sincerity_.  Rather than seeking
	primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common
	world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest
	representations of himself.  Convinced that reality has no
	inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth
	about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own
	nature.  It is as though he decides that since it makes no
	sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try
	instead to be true to himself.

	But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are
	determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and
	incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of
	determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake.
	As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other
	things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing
	them.  Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly
	nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment
	that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a
	person to know.  Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly
	solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution.  Our natures
	are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less
	stable and less inherent than the natures of other things.
	And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

		Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit"

Great essay.  Changed my life.  Leave sincerity to bullshitters.

>	--Cliff[ord T. Matthews]
>	ctm@ardi.com


cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Les beaulx bastisseurs nouveaulx de pierres mortes ne sont escriptz
en mon livre de vie.  Je ne bastis que pierres vives: ce sont hommes."