Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
> Ray E. Harrell wrote:
> >
> > Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
> >
> > > Ray E. Harrell wrote:
> [snip]
> > I'm reminded of a friend doing research on fish behaviorat the New York
> > Museum of Natural History. He is a
> > psychologist and quit the team because he said that he
> > had no way of knowing what the intent of the behavior
> > was that he had been given to document. How the team
> > believed they knew but had no way of truly knowing.
>
> Psychologists in general miss the *one subject they could validly
> study*: Each of them doing a case study on whatever he or she
> happened to be doing at the moment. That could simply be
> breathing (or belching), or it could be being-in-the-
> middle-of-a-multi-million-dollar-grant-funded-project-to-study-some-
> aspect-of-[whoever's: e.g., welfare recipients, school children,
> clerical workers, etc.]-behavior. *Not*: Studying the
> welfare recipients, school children, clerical workers, *per se*,
> but studying the activities in which the psychologist is
> here-and-now engaged in, in the lived experience of "studying....".
But the historians have not, thank God. That great scholarLawrence W. Levine
wrote a whole book answer to Allan
Bloom's inept but popular polemic "The Closing of the
American Mind". The future will record Levine's superior
documentation but the present is closed to his facts. The
University of Chicago has this great reputation for punctilious
scholarship, but what Levine documents is a riot of opinion
and anecdote with very little genuine scholarship.
I wonder Brad, has anyone ever done a study on all of
this Chicago scholarship as a "second city sibling envy"
expression? Or maybe it fits more the anger of the good
child who did not leave home. Leo Strauss gravitated to
its environment and Bloom said:
>"When I was fifteen years old I saw the University
> of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed
> that I had discovered my life.... The longing for
> I knew not what suddenly found a response in
> the world outside."
> In my opinion, this may be the greatest *intellectual* (as
> opposed to *material*!) tragedy of
> the 20th Century. Edmund Husserl clearly set forth the
> problem and the path to its solution, ca. 1935, in his
> _The Crisis of European Sciences..._ (Northwestern Univ. Press,
> 1970), and there are numerous others who have made more
> or less the same point, more or less well (Susanne
> Langer, Gregory Bateson, C. Wright Mills, the
> best "industrial sociologists" such as Philip
> Kraft..., Robert Lynd...).
I like Bateson and some Langer but have never been muchdrawn to Husserl.
> (snip)
>
> Alas likely also little what *both* makes them feel good *and* does good
> for others ("win-win" behavior)! I am not a "fan" of
> *sacrifice*! (snip)
Well Brad, in my work "sacrifice" means to make sacred
and only that which is truly sacred would keep us in this
wonderful creative profession and economist damaged
business.
REH
