Donald T Palmgren (lonewolf@utkux.utcc.utk.edu)
Thu, 5 Mar 1998 17:25:36 +0100
On Tue, 3 Mar 1998, clark wrote:
> Donny,
> I have been reading your posts with pleasure even though I don't
> understand a word of them.
He-ha. :)
Well, Ken, I know the LS has a mixed exposure to Phil. (on the
flip side my knowledge of quantum M starts w/ *Tao of Physics* and stops
w/ Tim Alen's *I'm Not Really Here* [which was a great explanation of lila
(the concept not the book)]) so I try to write so you don't need any phil.
background to understand, and I think I've done that, if I do say so
myself. But the problem is of course (inherent in the e-mail medium) that
one must right very condensed w/o much room for explication, elaboration
or repatition, and when you take something like Kant, which is this big
logical machine -- well its like explaining modern automotive mechanics
over e-mail.
Unfortunatly most philosophers don't write as well as Pirsig;
they might have some great ideas, but it takes some effort to get at them.
The question is, is the pay-off worth the price? For me (probly for
everyone) w/ some philosophers it is and some it isn't. Just don't give up
too quick. If you tried one writer and didn't like him/her, maybe try
someone else, someone w/ a different approch, position and background. Who
knows, you may get hooked.
One of the better "intro" level books is Robet C. Soloman's (Why
do pilosopher's always sign w/ their middle initial? Novelist don't do
that.) *History of Wester Philosophy, vol 7, Continental Philosophy since
1750: Thr Rise and Fall of the Self* (pause for breth). He starts out w/
"What Rousseau discovered in the woods" and moves *breefly* through German
Idealism, Phenominology, Existintialism, and winds up in Postmodernism --
focasing w/ each on their answer to "What is the Self?"
And of course there is the Web. Nietszche has 10,000 sites.
> You caught my attention with Nietszche's philosophy of the Will to Power.
> It sounds very similar to the epiphany I had the other night about the
> basis of Pirsig's philosophy being grounded in the force for greater
> information content that we observe everywhere around us in the universe
> including our minds (is that a curse word?).
Something else that might intrest you is "Process Philosophy." I
don't know much about it (maybe Anthony might?), but the bottome line is
that what really exists is not a thing but a process, the universe is
flux, a movement (presumably towards something). I believe Alfred North
Whitehead is the big guy in this camp (this -ism). I've never read
Whitehead so I can't tell you how his writting style is. (I can tell you
that this thinking comes right out of Hegel -- the universe is the process
of making/knowing itself -- it knows itself *by* making itself and visa
versa.) I can't tell you yet if this is what you have in mind (Ah! "mind"
again! Oh-no! S-O thinking!), but it may be worth checking out.
> Lila is a fine book but to my mind smacks a wee bit of having to
> get something ready for publication. ZMM was the book that he poured his
> heart into. Ken Clark
Feeling that P is more original in his form rather than his
content, I too like ZMM better.
Now: Hegel for the Masses!
Well, H is probably the most difficult thinker of all. The
*Phenominology of Spirit* (PoS) is certainly the most difficult book in
phil. -- not for a lack of writting skill on H's part, but just because
his thinking is both wildly unusual and full of subtilties. As far as his
writting goes: The PoS was written on the eve of the battle of Jena, 1806,
w/ Napolean's troops at the door. He must have wrote the book as fast as
his pen could move, and yet years later he declined the opertunity to
revise it. Time constrant was not its difficulty. But for one thing, when
he wrote it he assumed (and had to assume) that the reader had already
read it. (Boggled yet?)
Rather than trying to give his philosophy in a nutshell (an
impossibility that might send Ken and the other non-philosophicaly
educated members running or the hills or snarling at ME rather than their
old philosophy books) I'll just sort of tell you what his approch was
about (a difficult enough task).
1. The first thing you have to get about H's thought is that
it is historical. You can't approch H by asking "Where does he stand?"
"What's his position on-- ?" He doesn't have a possition on anything! He
has a movement from question to question. "Position" is a spacial
metaphore, and the way H looks at phil. is temporal.
2. A frequent problem w/ H is that we come to him w/ the
prejudice that there's some logical gimik which if you can wrap your mind
around then you've "got" Hegel. We come in thinking that there's some
philosophical method like a big machine that you poor in data and out pops
The Spirit!
Thus, H is often confused w/ Spinoza. Spinoza constructed a
geomatry of phil. -- a system of definitions and axiums leading to
propositions that demonstrate (ultimatly) that reality is a unity he says
is God/the universe/EVERYTHING! Spinoza turns around logical necessity
(All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefor Soctates is mortal.). But
Hegel employes a different kind of necessity -- historic necessity. Like,
"Because of the condition of the old regime the revolution had to take
place." Or perhaps it's like Bad Bad Leroy Brown who goes around picking
bar fights and beatting the crap out of guys for fun or sport. Sooner or
later he *is* going to find someone tougher than himself and get his head
kicked in.
3. Hegel begins w/ a simple idea: Our ancestors wern't
stupid! They were just as bright as we are, and therefor their
intellectual endevors deserve to be incorperated into ours. Now I'm an art
teacher, and for me the art analogy here is vey helpful. Uneducated people
will rutinely assume that the reason the primatives, the Egyptions, the
Mideval artists didn't draw naturalisticly w/ perspective and
*chiarosquro* shadding techniques... is because they weren't as talented
or bright or as cultured as we are. Of course *precious* little reflection
shows that they didn't make art that way because that's not what art was
-- just as Aristotle didn't scientificly test and prove his ideas, not
because he was an idiot, but because if he had no one would have listened
to him -- not because they were idiots, but because that's not what
counted as a proof to them. I had a highschool chemestry teacher who
taught (I'm serious) us how dumb Aristotle was for comming up w/ this
silly cosmology, and how people were unelightened/uneducated(dumb) enough
to buy it because Aristotle was this great rhetoritition. -sigh-
Philosophy has no regular form.
Not only that, but are there, as almost everyone assumes, timeless
philosophical questions like, "What really exists?" "What is the self?"
"What is beauty?" "What is the moral life?" "Is there a God?" It dosn't
take a tremendous knowledge of the history of philosophy to know that that
hand is full of duces and threes. "Philosophy" started as a serch for a
systimizing of nature so that it could be brought under control and thus
escape superstition. Then it became a question of how to save the polis
which (in the "Golden Age" of Athens) was in pretty bad shape (That is
what the sophist, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were all about!). Then, w/
the stoics and the epicurions, etc. it becomes a pursuit of peace of mind
in a hostile world gone to hell. Mideval mythology is all about: Why God
exists, and modern phil. (at least the Anglo-American achedimic variaty)
is all about: Why science is true and what else must be true about the
world for it to be so ("science apologetics").
Philosophy has no content.
This intrest me (being an art scholer) because the art comparisen
is again so strong. An enterprise w/ no form or content -- then what the
blazes is it? In the case of Phil. it seems to boil down to just a kind of
intellectual restlessness. So here's the problem: How (and why) do you get
a fast and loose thing like "intellectual restlessness" into an achedemic
program -- the Church of Reason? That's what my "Can Logic be
Institutionalized? Dunderbeck's Saussage Machine" adresses (now if I could
just finnish the bloody thing).
TTFN
Donny
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