[MD] Philosophy and Philosophology

[John Carl]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com>wrote:
>
>
> Matt:
> Yeah, I suppose.  I dislike greatly metaphors of purity (I talk
> about "purity" in the last three paragraphs of Part I of
> "Philosophosofpolsopy"), but you're pointing at the problem
> of getting money for having ideas.  The notion of a
> "think-tank," left or right, falls into this category.



John]

So do you have a problem with "pure" as  descriptive term for "experience"?
 Just curious.  Its an issue I'm looking at more closely, thanks to mr b.
He posted a most helpful, to me anyway, link which should inform my
curiousity more.  Here's the first sentence:

    The notion of "pure experience" is one of the most intriguing and
simultaneously perplexing features of William James's writings. There seems
to be little consensus in the secondary literature as to how to understand
this notion, and precisely what function it serves within the overall
structure of James's thought. Yet James himself regards this idea as the
cornerstone of his radical empiricism.

Now I read a sentence like that, and I'm immediately reassured.  Something
that has been perplexing to me is witnessed by a professional as being
perplexing.  So yes, I'm not forgetting that professional opinion is
necessary and valuable to me.


>
> However, I don't think a "profession is constantly evolving
> towards degeneracy."  I think our culture has done quite
> well--so far--in generating safeguards against that kind of
> thing.


Perhaps then, there is the constant pull toward degeneracy which must be
opposed in tension of opposite oversight of intellectual control - the
culture evolves these responses to the tensions pulling it toward degeneracy
and we have a dynamic balance.

Yeah, I can see that.






> It's not like that kind of thing doesn't happen, but as
> _a system_, we can't forget what effect the image of
> Socrates has, dying for his unpopular, free beliefs.  The
> image itself is welded into the cultural immune system, if
> you will, which breeds in regular joes, like you and me, the
> simple, if only slight, suspicion of people getting paid to
> generate ideas.



My issue wasn't so much the pay as the social prestige - the innate will to
dominate the pack which is a social force - using intellect to "win".  Or as
gav said and I liked so much, sub-conscious intellectual extrusion of social
patterns.

But you make a wholly different point I'd like to get into more, some other
time perhaps, the image of the heroic in the culture and how these images
can be manipulated by the social extrusions for their own ends.  AIDS in the
cultural immunes system.


And if you weren't aware of it, tenure is an endangered
> species these days.  _THAT_, more than anything, will spell
> the doom of culture (the planet being a separate problem).



Yeah, I heard all about it, this guy I work with, Bob, was just talking
about that the other day as we were bucking up a tree.  He looks over at me
and goes, "Hey John, didya hear that tenure is an endangered species?"

Bob actually didn't say that.  I don't think Bob would know what tenure is,
nor would he consider the lack of it anything dangerous.   But then he's an
avid Michael Savage Fan so I guess any more to say about Bob's opinion would
be silly.

  It might not seem pernicious, and most of the
> people who think it's a good idea are not thinking anything
> so destructive, but we are talking about a _system_, one
> that's been functioning quite well, thank you very much,



Well there's been more than a little criticism of that system on this forum
and those two books Pirsig wrote...




> and the effect on the system would be to make it at the
> mercy of the standards-writers, which means we could see
> an Orwellian situation occur, where the present just keeps
> writing itself into power: a situation _not_ likely in the
> present set-up.



If you truly think that present power has not been writing itself into power
throughout the past, well I just don't know what to say.  It sounds to me
mainly like you have a dog in this fight and see a changing of the guard
coming that threatens "your" side.  Is that the case?  Just cuz we criticise
SOM is no reason to turn our backs on objectivity, Matt.



>
>
> This is a tangled, complicated issue, and the first step has
> to be to separate primary from secondary (University)
> schooling, and demand that each seek their own specific
> answers.  And secondly, that even when the Right isn't
> overtly threatening the University with attacks on tenure,
> with the insane, Chicago-school economic policy they keep
> thrusting down our throats, they destroy working economies
> (because that is, even if unintended as when we take
> Greenspan's surprise sincerely, what it's designed to do,
> funnel dispersed money into fewer and fewer hands) and
> thus create underfunded universities--which means
> universities, because they're seeing their money dry up,
> have to hire _adjuncts_, which are basically analogous to
> non-union jobs, something like scabs.  Or perhaps not like
> scabs, but like part-time Wal-Mart employees, who are
> _specifically_ kept at part-time so Wal-Mart doesn't have to
> cough up benefits.  It's not the adjuncts' fault, they gotta'
> make a living like anyone else.  It's a system gone down the
> tubes.  And guess what--adjuncts can be fired whenever, for
> whatever.  They are non-tenure-track positions, contractors
> who are hired back only if the employer feels like it.



Whew!  Definitely a dog in the fight.  And it sounds like a complicated
fight.  There's always room in the woods for another tree cutter if things
don't work out.



> So what's more dangerous to intellectual quality: the lures of
> being President of the American Philosophical Association, or
> being asked to give the Paul Carus lectures--or a sea of fresh,
> massively in debt PhDs just waiting for the chance to get a
> job, any job, when you--an adjunct--are fired for teaching
> Pirsig or Royce instead of someone more entrenched, like
> Searle or Russell?
>
>
The sad truth is, when the Titanic hits the iceberg, the worthy drown with
the rats.  And nothing affects intellectual quality itself.  What is
affected is the quality of intellect that a society possesses.  And that has
more to do with what is on TV than what is in the classroom.  Unfortunately.

John



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