K has not replied to me yet, and she is the core of the gist of my remarks, but Paul (Paul Henry Rosenberg) has written some things that are worth clarifying. Actually I really appreciate the exchanges with Paul both on LBO and off. I think he and I are moving in parallel tracks that may converge a little down the line.
Paul writes Wed Oct 21/98:
> Doyle
> We do not think with feelings.
How can Doyle reconcile these two statements? I don't think it's possible....
But what of unconscious thought? It seems to me that Doyle is trying to completely separate thought and feeling here -- which is certainly a useful therapuetic or introspective process,
Doyle Paul is right I am separating feelings from thoughts. We do not "think" with the system of feelings in the body. Thinking is done in the neo-cortex, and the neo-cortex does not itself produce feelings. It helps to know this because we first must realize that thinking does require feelings since without feelings we would have no way to value plans in our self interest. Second, we can then understand that if feelings aren't thought then words which describe feelings are thought, but not feelings, and we become clear in what is what in thought.
Paul What's so unreasonable about planning to avoid feeling shame or guilt?
Doyle Moral systems are rules with strong emotions attached to them. Thou shalt not kill doesn't work if you don't care. The area of confusion is that we confuse moral statements such as shame based assertions with the properties of reasoning which does include feelings, but is always contingent and not fixed in the sense that we think of morality. The giveaway in morality is the attachment of strong feelings to a rule. Without the strong feelings the rule doesn't guide behavior. But we are then stuck in rigid dogmatic territory if we can't understand that strong feelings stop thinking and where a dialectical process no longer applies. Interestingly Nathan started in advising us that coercion is a tool to use in building working class consciousness.
Doyle If you look at Michael Yates comments after he cooled down from being angry about buying Gallo products, he notes that when talking to working class people, you don't want to get morally upset with some worker because he is selling guns from his car. You want to feel out the emotions in a community. Therefore Michael advocates avoiding going into the community with an intensely felt moral code. Michael no doubt had a moral code about guns that bothered him in relation to the worker who was selling the guns, but he was concerned with building the community, and the strong feelings would have stopped the process.
Paul I disagree with Doyle's statement:
> the reference to shame and guilt
> are not about feelings, but about taking moral stances in the world
> and using these stances to advance working class interests.
as creating a false dichotomy. Feelings in this case are the inwards manifestions of our moral AND intellectual (ideological) stances in the world.
Doyle There are numerous reasons why someone else might not share your feelings about something. When you then stand at a picket line and assume that someone else shares your assumption about shame and guilt, you assume that attaching strong feelings to a rule is the way human beings think. That is wrong. I will give some examples, suppose someone is a socio-path, meaning so disassociated from feelings they can't picture the suffering their actions would entail. That is a common outcome for some with attention deficit disorder to lose contact with moral systems. You can't assume that a strong feeling attached to a rule is the only way or best way to create society. What you wind up doing I think is something like Nathan advocates, using coercion to make picket lines work because morality fails in the final analysis. What then happens to democracy? Or equality? How do you use force to structure society. Chris Burford has an interesting statement in this regard:
The use of bourgeois laws is of course bourgeois. But Joseph Noonan seems to show a false radicalism in arguing that such provocative and offensive verbal attacks should not be made illegal. This seems to make a fetish out of bourgeois democratic rights. But the right to make physically inflammatory remarks about a minority means there is no right for that minority to be free of inflammatory taunts.
Doyle Chris goes against the idea of attaching strong feelings to something as a way of structuring behavior. He says why not outlaw something like hate speech against gays. So isn't he advocating that strong feelings attached to a rule, i.e. hating gays works against societies best interests. It certainly raises the issue of why strong feelings are a problem when the moral system opposing one results in murder of some group of people. Recognizing how moral systems work, and how the brain doesn't follow moral systems is very important in my opinion with respect to creating socialism. regards, Doyle -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/19981021/2ef6aabb/attachment.htm>