> Ray Evans Harrell wrote:
[snip]
> It was in the work of Edward T. Hall and Clifford Geertz that the
> Europeans were nailed on the issue of what Geertz called "Local
> Knowledge." When he wanted to do a study of the culture, i.e.
> scientific "ethnicity", of the scientists at the Institute for
> Advanced Studies they refused contending that their regalia and
> scientific myths were real and not unreal like all of the other
> cultures of the world.
As Bruno Latour said, "we have not yet really been modern". I
completely agree that the way of life of "scientists" needs to
be studied, including most importantly integrating self-reflection
on their praxis into their praxis.
> Really Brad, which style of music would you
> pick as being without ethnicity?
Nobody can be "without ethnicity". True enough. Everyone gets
childreared in some particular way, and lives among particular
peers.
However, I think there is a big difference between being
childreared to respect one's elders in the form
of obeying them more-or-less implicitly, and being
childreared in the form of respecting one's elders in the
form of rigorously scrutinizing everything they do and say,
and selectively appropriating what [at least for the moment,
pending further inquire...] passes the test because the
thing most worthy of respect about them would be that
they would recognize the limitations of what they know
and try to overcome those limitations in every way possible.
Some children are in some measure raised this way -- two
"ethnic backgrounds" where I would look for examples would
be among unitarians and among assimilated educated jews,
but certainly this is not exclusive -- perhaps Bahai
are this way?
The deeper "logical" issue is whether reflection is different
from first-order, naive, prereflective... experience. (A similar
question is whether human communication is different logically
different from other acoustic phenomena, i.e., whether there
is such a thing as *logic* at all, or whether , as the
police explained to K in Kafkas's _The Trial_: You don't
need to accept everything as true, only as necessary. $%^&*
[Perhaps "first order, naive expoerience" is a straw man?
Perhaps everyone in the world knows Kant and Husserl
"in their bones" but is hiding it from me just
because I am such a distasteful person to them that they want to
play a trick on me and make me into an avatar of the
man in Kafka's parable of the law?]
I like the analogy with "cardinality" in mathematics.
Adding more items to an infinite set of items [giving
ethnicity the benefit of the doubt that it is not
simply "closed" in a way we can enumerate completely...] --
adding more items to an infinite set cannot make
the set bigger. The only way to make something bigger
than the set of all possible items is to reflect upon the
operation of set inclusion and construct *sets of sets*.
*Sets of sets* are bigger than all first-order sets.
This is just an analogy, but I would propose that the
"ethnicity" which constructs itself as a reflective
appropriation of all first-order ethnicities is
different than any of the latter in somewhat the
same way as higher infinities are different from
"more of the same without end". Again, this is a
metaphor....
Obviously email is not a place to resolve these issues.
(Maybe you'd liketo argue with my dissertation, where
I took a lot of time to work over my sentences and try to
express myself to the best of my ability
( http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/dissert.html )
--
As for Husserl being a "romantic", I do not find him such.
The kind of continual change I have in mind, and which I
think Husserl was interested in has nothing to do with
empirical changes -- "variety is the spice of life", etc. The "novelty"
is in ever anew reflectively reappropriating one's previous
reflective appropriation of [whatever]. "All things are
new and all unchanged." You can never think the same thought
twice if you think about how each time you think it
you have objectified the context in which you were thinking it
the previous time. But you know all this....
[Of course there is always the danger that one thinks
one is reflecting when one is really just doing rote behavior --
sort of like how if a radar operator can fail to see when
a blip appears on the screen even though he thinks he is
looking for blips to appear on the screen....]
--
Let's try it a different way: There is a difference which
even the most block-headed politician or preacher or teacher
or parent or whatever can smell even if not understand,
between:
(1) Believing it is sweet and fitting to die for the homeland,
and
(2) Examining the propositional content that
somebody might believe that
it is sweet and fitting to die for the homeland.
That's the difference I am getting at, and before you say
"Oh! That's just relativism...." or whatever, the constructive
aspect of this kind of deconstruction is to reflect on the
conditions for the possibility of reflection at all, and to
choose to do what will [seems most likely to...] nurture them.
So I do believe in something: the process of dialogical discourse
as the foundation of a whole social lifeworld (a world
in which scientists study their process of doing science
in their activity of doing their science, etc. -- including
thinking about what it means for a person to be a lab-tech,
not just about what it means for a particle to be an
electron...).
There is no reason anyone needs to make this choice, but it
seems to me that it is difficult not to make it if one
chooses to think about it. This was Socrates' "trap" for
the citizens of Athens, wasn't it???
--
I didn't think that Edward Hall was an advocate of
naive immersion in one's culture of origin -- at least
that not how I read the first half of _The Silent Language_,
which is all I have read of his writings (I really liked it).
I don't remember enough about Geertz to comment on him.
But I think the first half of _The Silent Language_ says
the same as I am trying to say, so if you understand it better
than me, that would not be surprising, since
I have not been able to devote the prime time of my life
to study. (On the other hand, from what I have read
of Hall's work, he is one of the few who has had this
privilege and not wasted it.)
Blah! Blah! Blah! Words, words, words.... What can I
say but that I find that questioning which is the
piety of thinking (--Heidegger) more fun than
watching Seinfeld or the Superbowl. However:
--
Today I saw a man in a dressy suit with suspenders. And I
had the thought: If somebody said they would give me a
Patek Philippe 3939H watch to wear if I'd wear such a formal
business suit along with it all day, and they'd pay for the
suit and the cleaning of it -- all I'd have to do is wear it
(no more jeans!), I'd take them up on the offer. If they
extorted me having to get a haircut, too, I'd probably still
go along with the hard bargain they were driving. So, Ray,
you see, I am superficial and lots of other bad things.
\brad mccormick
> Which language? It is a
> fraudulent argument.
So you say. Not something to argue in an email.
> Ethnicities are just colors in the whole (not
> races but colors as in a painting). Your comment about continual
> change in Husserl is a good example. It was a conceit of the late
> romantic. Schoenberg did it and what he got was not an evolution of
> difference but a mind numbing sameness since change is based in
> prediction and continual change is predictably no change at all.
I don't know about Schoenberg.
>
> Ray Evans Harrell
> New York City
>
>
--
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)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
