Why contain multitudes?
- re the multitudes thing, you could let yourself contradict yourself by giving full-throated endorsements of positions or vibes, secure in the knowledge that you, or even current civilisation, wouldn’t be able to reach the final truth anyway, so who cares? The alternative is not expressing one such vibe flowing through you, or express them in sequence, so it loks like changing your mind. There’s some distinction about good in an epistemic utilitarian sense, and good as in virtuous/rule following thing here.
Why might intellectual specialisation seem fine but aesthetic specialisation or moral specialisation (in terms of your aesthetic competences, not just time spent) seems impoverished?
There might actually be a very general point here about responding to reasons in a balanced way - think of fitting responses in the domain of one virtue vs all virtues.
Confucius holds the same position re a gentleman is not a tool/pot
This has something to do with non-normative domains of expertise, vs. the weirdness of “in Canada we’ve had ministers of “red tape reduction” and “middle class prosperity”
- maybe also linked to normative concepts as limit concepts? Conceptual engineering and moral concepts
Questions about the permissibility of different kinds of specialisation can be framed by looking at Smith’s, and then maybe Marx’s account of alienation. So apply Smith’s diagnosis of the harms to the different kinds of specialisation, see how they hold up. The seems to relate to the basic point.
Stuff about bracketing also applies to i only build the rockets the luftwaffe decides where they fall Honesty and Poker Self-forks and games