[MD] philosophy and education

[david buchanan]

Gav said:
...and of course it is not just education that suffers this treatment. but as dave said: got to go to the roots - no use holding on to something which is terminally ill. ...and this is where i perhaps deviate from pirsig and dave (oh my god!), at least a little. i do think that change will occur at the academic level, but it will be slow. people like ant and dave are pioneers here. but this isn't the root; these are the topmost branches.


dmb says:

I don't think the system or rather the rationality behind it is terminally ill and there's reason to hope, even in the academic world. I mean, it's worth pressing the idea again that the MOQ is not opposed to rationality or intellect per se. It has a genetic defect in it, as Pirsig puts it, and that's why he goes all the way back to the ancients to locate the source of the problem but the idea is to repair the defect in those old forms of thought. 
>From ZAMM, near the end of chapter 14:
"Well, it isn't just art and technology. It's a kind of a noncoalescence between reason and feeling. What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that. People haven't paid much attention to this before because the big concern has been with food, clothing and shelter for everyone and technology has provided these."But now where these are assured, the ugliness is being noticed more and more and people are asking if we must always suffer spiritually and esthetically in order to satisfy material needs. Lately it's become almost a national crisis...antipollution drives, antitechnological communes and styles of life, and all that."Both DeWeese and Gennie have understood all this for so long there's no need for comment, so I add, "What's emerging from the pattern of my own life is the belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can't be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who're solving it are solving it at a personal level by abandoning `square' rationality altogether and going by feelings alone. Like John and Sylvia here. And millions of others like them. And that seems like a wrong direction too. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the solution to the problem isn't that you abandon rationality but that you expand the nature of rationality so that it's capable of coming up with a solution."

dmb continues:

In fact, if the task is to expand rationality, I don't see why one couldn't introduce that expanded rationality into the academic world. It's hard to imagine a better place to introduce such a thing. I tried to present it at the skateboard park and at some birthday parties but somehow that seemed inappropriate.  One kid at the party pointed out that philosophers do blind, ugly things (Kant's aesthetics was his example) and then he popped my balloon. The kid at the skateboard park flicked a lit cigarette at me. Said I was in his way. Said he was trying to get some exercise and that I should take up the peripatetic method of contemplation. When I tried to explain the urgency of the need for an expanded rationality, he grabbed his crotch and said, "expand this, pal". That squirrel definitely got around me. 


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