[MD] continental and analytic philosophy

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[gav]
philosophy - the love of wisdom - is at its best when creating new concepts
which open up new ways of thinking - new directions, new interconnections.

[Arlo]
Yeah, you know I think you could make the argument that what has happened to
philosophy is what has happened to rotisserie building and motorcycle
maintenance. There is a hang-up on the endless specificity and technicalities
and a lack of overall "care" or "oneness" or "grooving" that would return "art"
to the practice. 

Again, I just make the point that this is hardly unique to the academic
discipline of philosophy, and I think ZMM underscores very strongly that the
entirety of Western Culture (which includes the building of rotisseries) has
been effected by this schism. 

This is not to say either that specificity has no place whatsoever. Only that
the evident disconnect owes a great deal to the very fragmented nuances which
become the sole pursuit of said activity. 

As you seem to suggest (correct me if I am wrong), what gets lost is an overall
"ecological" perspective. We can engineer genes, but we don't understand what
it is to be human in the first place. Pirsig's comment from ZMM is a profound
one.

"Phædrus remembered a line from Thoreau: "You never gain something but that
you lose something." And now he began to see for the first time the
unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule
the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of
scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous
manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had
exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of
what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it." (ZMM)

This is precisely the "ecological" perspective so beaten out of modern
discourse, in nearly all disciplines. We can still see so much how the pursuit
of this "power" (be it social or economic capital) informs so much of the
West's activity.

[gav]
so we return to the ethics of permaculture i think. by caring for the planet
(ethic 1)and people (ethic 2), and by providing the fair share (ethic 3) that
is necessary for the process of individuation...

[Arlo]
I think you're spot on.