The Challenge: Disinterested Critique

Great Debates
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The Challenge: Disinterested Critique

Says Goethe; “the little that is done seems nothing when we look forward and see how much we have yet to do”.

The challenge to criticism is disinterestedness! Why we can and should choose the path to DI (disinterestedness) is the discussion this OP will attempt to initiate.

Criticism can show DI by keeping aloof from the practical view of things; by the free play of the mind on all subjects upon which it touches. “Its business is,…simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas…and to leave alone all questions which will never fail to have due prominence given to them”.

The world is full of partisan and emotional criticism, right and left. It is filled with various sound bites and bumper stickers advocating nostrums that are promoted with bluff, bluster, and bravado. We, who are of the DI critical thinking mind, will remain disinterested to such malarkey and try to take the path less traveled. To take the path of disseminating truth as we can perceive it so as to lay a foundation for new ideas with new approaches to old problems.

The DI critique approach must recognize that its approach is long range resulting in significantly large rewards if successful. This approach creates and nourishes fresh new foundations for the structure of new ideas. This approach lays down a foundation of intellectual grounding that provides for a solid structure but, of course, it will be a painful activity because emotional rage seems to be the order of the day and that rage will express its anti-intellectualism by focusing attacks on those who seek to make a different way.

I think that such an approach must somehow foster an appreciation of the purely intellectual sphere that focuses attention on that which is excellent in human capacity.

Quotes and ideas from “Essays in Criticism” by Matthew Arnold 1822-1888

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It sounds like a re-hash of ‘fecund interests’ by J S Mill or J Bentham

  • can’t remember which, it is such obvious stuff

You might be interested into looking into some Economic theory, Pareto’s optimum and optimum optimorum.

Mostly Economists are terrified of value judgements, so with a few exceptions, they try to build models that are not too obviously falacious. That might appeal to you.

You also have an odd idea of what ‘disinterested’ means, it just means that one gets no perceivable reward - better substitue ‘impartial’.

Some people are curious, others incurious

  • I quite like knowing how a computer works
  • others could not care less, but are happy using them

That stuff of yours above was stuffed with value judgements, a right little polemic.

IIRC Arnold was headmaster at Rugby, as in Tom Brown’s Schooldays

  • the best thing that came out of that was ‘Flashman’ by George McDonald Fraser

I don’t blame you for your approach, it sounds like you come from a technical background, so that didactic jargon feels familiar to you.

However, it just don’t work, the people you have been quoting were born with their thumbs up their posteriors - they just want to look ‘intellectual’, not get ideas across

While I don’t much rate Christianity, I am sure that without JC’s parables, the whole thing would have died out long before the silly sod got himself topped.

As it happens, I have the ‘liberal’ education that you are yearning for, of the six of us, one was a jargon-meister - and he was … well let’s say his degree results had to be manipulated.

Ideas are interesting, to some people, especially if they are expressed in simple terms.

Ever heard of precis ?

  • it is harder than streaming out bullsh*t

Actually I reckon it is kinder to keep people in blissful ignorance, rather than forcing them to look at reality.

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FRDE

Shall I assume from your reply that you will not be signing up for a job as a DI Critique?

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If the reader is interested in what an essay of disinterested knowledge might look like he has already read an example. I have been posting disinterested knowledge for 30 months and this one is an ecample of that activity.