"Ray E. Harrell" wrote:
>
I am not altogether clear exactly where Ray's
response to my posting engages with what I
wrote, and/or the limitations of what I wrote.
If Ray is disturbed by my denigration of
unreflected life in all its forms (what I
intentionally provocatively call: "ethnic formations"),
I can only say that I hope I made it clear that
my critique is not aimed at "primitive peoples" but
at everything which is *primitive* (i.e., not
radically grounded in self-accountable
reflective reconstruction of all that which
merely is given) -- wherever it
occurs. In support of my position,
I will simply quote from the NYT article Ray himself
reposted:
> But indigenous knowledge can be faulty.
> "Traditional people sometimes get
> things right, and sometimes get them
> wrong," said Alan Fiske, a
> psychological anthropologist at the
> University of California at Los Angeles.
> "Some things people do are bad for them."
> Other anthropologists have
> challenged the notion that all indigenous
> groups have somehow developed a
> blissful oneness with their world.
Neither will it do to reply to this that: "Everyone makes
mistakes." Galilean natural science, Hegelian dialectic
and Husserlian phenomenological reflection are all
self-grounding projects for [albeit iteratively and
asymptotically] overcoming error in every aspect
of life. That the 17th Century Chinese recognized in
Galilean natural science "something new, because true for
everyone who took the effort to learn it", and not just
true for those childreared to believe it (--Joseph Needham),
seems to me to lead to one of two possibilities: (1) The
Chinese understood that *their own limited form of life* was
superseded by the Universality of
Science, or (2) That the Chinese are
just like "The West" and so their admiration for
Science just proves they aren't "real peoples" any more
than the Jesuits who brought Galilean science
to them
Finally, there is Margaret Mead's _New Lives for Old_,
and a recent report in the NYT of one traditional culture
in Africa, where the elders have undertaken a
thoroughgoing inventory of their traditional culture,
to see what parts of it are still viable and which
are not worth preserving (e.g., ritual genital
mutilation of children). I see these developments as
somewhat similar to our recently having
taught some apes to speak (ASL, etc.): The
innate faculties presumably always were
there, but somehow they did not express themselves
until Western Modernity provided the
catalyst (and let me repeat: I do not consider
"Western Culture" in its higher forms to be
Western but rather to be *Universal* -- *Western*
culture is symbolized by such semiotic specimens as
Superbowls, "commercial paper", and "Keep
America beautiful, get a haircut!" --> Yes,
Prof. Latour, "We
have never yet really been modern." But I say
it's time to get on with it!
>
>
> "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." wrote:
>
> > (snip)
> > .) Robert Musil's vision of a world in which "mystical experience"
> > would be rescued from the muddled hocus-pocus of fuzzy feelings
[snip]
> And then there is the following article about the rest of
> we ethnics whose practicality is buried so deep that the
> rest of the world considers it superstition and screws it up in
> the argument about the future without understanding the
> past.
We have noted that this article was not
straightforwardly supportive in a blanket
way, of traditional practices.
[snip]
> To bad Freud didn't
> really have the guts to get it beyond his own Viennese
> prejudice. Narcissism and Idolatry are sisters except
> he was too embarrassed by his tradition and desire to
> be accepted in a racist society, to say so.
It is my understanding that Freud did indeed have
such an unanalyzed complex as Ray here specifies.
If Freud had been rich, he would have spent his life chopping
up worms: Prof. Sigmund Freud, Invertebrate Biologist.
> Don't
> throw away the old until you understand it and have
> something better to put in its place.
This is just prudence (which, admittedly, the contemporary
"civilized" world has no surfeit of). *However*! Even
while we keep the old, we can keep it at arm's length:
"reduced" to semiotic raw material -- however
valuable it may be! -- thru phenomenological,
hermeneutical, sociology-of-knowledge and other
rigorous reflective methods. It is a very
different thing to say: "There have been persons who believed
that 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori', and studying
their sentiment may help us to cultivate our own feelings",
than to say: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!"
But, please, do not take my word for it: Substitute
*your own* "idols of *your* tribe" for mine! --Unless
your tribe has no idols, in which case I shall presume
that their childrearing meets all the criteria of
Frederick Leboyer, Alice Miller, Lloyd deMause and
the rest of the persons who have exposed the
part of our own society most deeply sunk in
darkness (in classical Greece: the "oikos" as opposed
to the "polis"). A society without idols will rear its
children to honor their elders in the modality of
subjecting everything their elders say and do to
ever renewed and ever further deepened critique. Such
a society's every child will respect his elders
like museum conservators respect masterpieces of
art -- so long as they hold up to every possible test
of their value. Honor thy father and mother (and thy
G-d, too) by measuring them against only the highest
standards we can conceive of -- and this provisionally,
pending discovery of even higher standards (which
possibly our childrearing hid from us -- or at least
mine did from me...).
Prove *all* things; hold fast [only] that which is good.
[snip]
> He might have considered the studies in anthropologist Jack Weatherford's book
>
> Indian Givers and physicist F. David Peat's exploration of the connection
> between
> Indigeneous Science and Quantum Mechanics in his ground breaking book
> Lighting the Seventh Fire.
I admit I have not read these texts.
> I suspect Husserl fed at a table where the
> cooks were anonymous.
This is an interesting conjecture. I have found
little biographical material on Husserl. But if
Husserl failed to fully live up to the potential
of his philosophy, let us do better, now
that he has shown us the way.
But I will say this (shifting ground slightly:) It
is a great tragedy that our society did not provide
a limousine for Louis Kahn [the architect] --> for
then he might not have died of a heart attack in the
men's toilet of Pennsylvania Station rushing
to make a travel connection. Perhaps there *are*
cases where surplus value extracted from the
mass of the people returns to the people at a
high rate of interest (but these probably are
not the statistically prevalent cases, e.g.,
the Leona Helmsleys and [what was the name of
that man who just resigned as boss of Russia?]
of this world). Certainly, to modify the famous
altruistic words of JFK, we might say:
From those to whom much has been given,
Much should be expected.
> They did however understand the Phenomenology
> of Fire for many thousands of years.
I would be interested in hearing details.
Pragmatics and/or *phenomenology* and/or?
> My Cherokee Father loved Husserl but
> I was too turned on by the Existentialists
> at the time to enjoy him with him.
> My loss.
I would have been interested to speak with him.
The closest I personally have ever come to a
universal thinker is probably John Wild, one
of the people who brought existentialism and
phenomenology ot America, and whose philosophical
position emphasized: "openness to otherness".
>
> Ray Evans Harrell
>
"Yours in discourse [which, at least implicitly,
is universal -- but how do we make that
latent potential proactively manifest?]...."
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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