Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
From: cbo@cs.toronto.edu (Calvin Bruce Ostrum)
Subject: Re: Sincerity is Bullshit
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Date: 28 Jul 92 02:58:47 GMT

In article <1992Jul26.135156.14191@husc3.harvard.edu>
    zeleny@husc9.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:

| principled loyalty to oneself is absolutely
| incompatible with loyalty to truth,

This has been asserted repeatedly, but I still don't see why it must be
true.  It must be true, of course, if there is in some instance a
definite and serious conflict between these two loyalties, such that
a decision on such a conflict is forced, and irrevocably casts one into
only one of the two loyalties forever (This conflict would have to be
instrinsicially deeper and more irresolvable than the intra-ideal 
conflicts that no doubt would already exist, such as those discussed 
in Nagel's "The Fragmentation of Value").

| I take Frankfurt as making the
| same point in the two final paragraphs of his article that I quoted earlier.

I don't.  I am unable to see where in his article Frankfurt says that
straight sincerity is incompatible with correctness.  Of course, 
reactive sincerity is, since it is defined to be.  Frankfurt clearly
suggests that the problem with reactive sincerity is that it supposes
being true to the self is easier or more possible than being true to
the facts, and that the preposterous nature of this belief is what makes
reactive sincerity the bullshit it is. One might argue that since he
says our natures are "notoriously less stable and less inherent than
the natures of other things" that he himself would opt only for the
ideal of correctness.  But this still does not imply that he thinks no
ideal of straight sincerity can be constructed within or alongside 
an ideal of correctness.

| >and at other times claiming that it's impossible.  He opts for edifying
| >philosophy, which, as far as I can tell, amounts to sitting around
| >and shooting the breeze (although no doubt in a creative and innovative
| >way) by participating in an "eternal conversation of mankind". 
| >
| >In other words, bullshitting.  Or at least it sounds like bullshitting 
| >to me.  Although it rejects the ideal of correctness, it also appears
| >to reject the ideal of sincerity: Rorty's eliminativist philosophy of 
| >mind rules out the notion of any kind of self to be true to.  But the
| >self that is left over to engage in the continuing conversation 
| >seems to be big enough to warrant a charge of reactive sincerity.

| You are missing the fact that Rorty's conception of "solidarity" as the
| cornerstone of his "edifying" discourse stands as proxy for sincerity as
| construed by Polonius, insofar as it merely substitutes the ideal of
| loyalty to unspecified goals of an arbitrarily delineated social group for
| that of loyalty to the self.

On the contrary, I intended to imply with the above remarks that 
edifying discourse, and the "solidarity" through which it is pursued,
do take the place of the idea of sincerity, although it is true that
I did not explicitly state this.  (One reason I am reluctant to do
so is that there do seem to be some differences.  Notably, I get the
feeling that bullshit somehow or other plays a much more upfront role 
for Rorty that it does the typical advocate of the ideal of reactive 
sincerity).

If it is agreed, then, that solidarity is appropriately related to 
sincerity, my original point can be made with it also.  Solidarity 
can be divided into two sorts: reactive and straight.  Rorty 
acknowledges as much in "Solidarity and Objectivity", where he admits 
that there is a group of people (he calls them "realists") that attempt 
to ground solidarity in objectivity ("objectivity" here is Rorty's 
"correctness").  Of course, Rorty dismisses this as "not working",
but I am not at all convinced that this dismissal is forced upon us.
A solidarity grounded in objectivity would be a version of straight
solidarity.

Lest I be accused of (or congratulated for) bullshitting here myself,
I should point out that I personally find all these "correctness-
systematic-objectivity/sincerity-edifying-solidarity" dichotomies rather
abstract and vertigo-inducing, and would welcome a systematic 
treatment of them of a series of more concrete examples.

We can only hope that this request doesn't lead Mikhail Zeleny to
subject us to even more of his notorious doctrine that the essence of
sexuality (this is the "correctness") implies that sex between any two
mutually consenting adults (this is the "sincerity") is immoral.  Who
said an apparent dedication to the ideal of correctness can't itself
produce loads of bullshit?

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Calvin Ostrum                                            cbo@cs.toronto.edu  
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  I tell you, Hobbes, it's great to have a friend who appreciates
  an earnest discussion of ideas.    -- Calvin, 1992/07/14
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