Midterm Blogpost - Matt Kolzow

 Matt Kolzow: Hello everyone and thanks for meeting with me on this sunny day, now that it's stopped raining and we can finally meet in person, I'd like to ask you guys a question that's been on my mind. Do you think philosophy can help people learn to respect truth, facts, reality, and one another, and to reject falsehood, superstition, selfishness, polarization, partisanship, and mutual hostility based on differences of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, belief, etc.? If so, how? If not, why not?

Kurt Anderson: In our fantasyland, we thrive on the make believe and crossing what's real with what's fake. Superstitions in fact are a large part of what made America how it is. “Dedicated to blurring the lines between the fictional and the real, people in the living history world became focused on what they called the authenticity of their simulations” (FL 224). People don’t want to see the real truth, as much as they’d rather have their world of their truth start to become authentic to them. They don’t want superstitions or fake things to just be fake, and America has grown to try and help make these almost impossible ideas more plausible. LARPing in fact is one example of how people have incorporated fantasy into their real life. “It de-emphasizes all the kid stuff, the combat and magic, and goes for more realism, with players aspiring to experience bleed, as they call it---to let their characters colonize their minds, to dream in character, to lose track of where real and fake begin and end” (FL 246). To bring this all back to the main argument, my answer would be no, we simply aren’t built on that.

Matt Kolzow: Especially as we are referred to the land of the free right? I believe that has been misconstrued as meaning you can believe anything you want to the point of where your entire view of the world and truth can be based on yourself. We are less encouraged to challenge our truths and instead are offered ways to delve even deeper into our own fantasies.

Nigel Warburton: Kurt I think you’ve nailed it when it comes to how America has been thinking. It comes from an idea philosopher Jeremy Bentham came up with. It was the idea of utilitarianism and while he didn’t come up with it originally he was the one he began to think about how we could implement it into society. The problem is that in America, a large portion of people only seek pleasure and happiness. They avoid the pain of being wrong and not being selfish if they don't get pleasure from it. I will reiterate that not everyone in America is like this though. “ Yet many people. Though they might enjoy experimenting with such a machine from time to time, would refuse to plug in for life because there are other things they value more highly than a series of blissful mental states” (LH 125). This machine of pleasures isn’t real but we have familiar hints of it in tv, celebrities, and video games. As long as there is some way for people to experience happiness in their own ideas, I don’t think large scale change can occur in people's minds.

Matt Kolzow: Another great point! I can understand how you came to that conclusion, really if people have some way to receive happiness, why should they acknowledge what's around them? While I certainly can agree that not everyone is like that, if we have so many people not wanting to leave their bubble of happiness we can’t really make a change. If they’re content, who are we to take away their happiness right?

Julian Baggini: If I may, I’d like to build off what you’ve said Matt with my response. Philosophy can’t make changes in America if we can’t be in harmony with one another. Westerners here have a problem of seeing harmony as something bad. “If Westerners are more likely to mistake harmony with uniformity, it is perhaps because , as Li points out, ideas of an underlying fixed cosmic order or a transcendent, static foundation have been dominant in western thinking” (WT 225). In fact it was philosopher Heraclitus that said “Harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and lyre” (WT 225). It was during my time in China I saw their idea of harmony being to please one another, rather than please oneself. An orchestra for example needs many instruments playing notes in order to make one complete ensemble, no one instrument can be more important than the other. Harmony relies on all sides giving something up, there can be no imbalance of power or wants. I don’t expect it to be easily created though, everyone in America is really at fault. Harmony as I’ve said requires tension so it can be hard to maintain without it “snapping”. I don’t believe it to be impossible, but it will take quite a bit of work till America can become one ensemble with each other.

Matt Kolzow: Wow, I completely agree with you Baggini. I can’t really say anything you haven’t already said so I will just close this conversation with my thoughts. While it is a bit sad to think America might not be able to overcome itself and use philosophy to become something better, I personally believe it’s possible. As long as we don’t become content with all the things that are giving us happiness like Warburton has said, in time as long as we put our efforts in to see it change, I believe we can have some shifts in culture to help us reach that point.