What ever is of ultimate importance

By -
is useless.

I forget where I picked up this idea from, but its proof is very easy.

Something is useful if it is useful for purpose X. For instance, sleep is useful to maintain our health. But this means that maintaining our health is what is truly important here, while sleep derives its importance from that goal.

Therefore, it follows that whatever is of ultimate importance cannot be useful, because that would mean it derived its importance from something else for which it was used, which would mean it is not of ultimate importance after all.

Comments

  1. Unknown10:02 AM

    Gene.... that is absolutely incredible. I don't know what to say: I'm a little astounded. Was this in Experience and It's Modes...? I don't recall it!

    Wow. Just... wow. Unbelievable. I'm a little speechless here. I recall a definition of religion as "the thing of ultimate importance", and I'm thinking of some folks definition of God as the "thing of ultimate importance".

    Again, my mind is racing. Unreal! Just... wow.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown10:07 AM

    Gene, I think that this is actually from Aristotle, if I recall correctly! He traces a sort of "hierarchy" of things by asking us why we do certain actions. Eventually, we reach a thing that we want just for itself.

    Thank you for jogging my memory! I think I see now where Oakeshott and Gasset were saying! =)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah10:27 AM

      Ortega y Gasset cites Aristotle in the passage I quoted.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more