“I have decided to preach intellectual modesty for the rest of my days. There
is a tradition, an enormously strong tradition of intellectual immodesty and
irresponsibility. Around the year 1930 I told a joke. I said that many students
don't go to university assuming that it is a great empire of knowledge, in the
hope to gain some understanding; but that they go to university to learn how to
speak in an impressive and incomprehensible way. This is the tradition of
intellectualism. At the time I thought it was a joke. But having become a
university professor myself, I have perceived with horror that it is a reality.
That's the way things are, unfortunately. In universities there is a tradition
that legitimizes this attitude, it is the tradition of hegelianism. Especially
in Germany, Hegel is extraordinarily admired. People really believe that Hegel
was a great philosopher because he used big words. And it is exactly this
incredible immodesty that destroys so much in and between intellectuals. I
would like to spend my last years fighting against this. I want to start a new
fashion. I have always fought against fashions, and I have never followed any
fashion, and I have never tried to start one. But I would love to start a new
fashion of intellectual modesty, of permanent thought of everything we don't
know.“ -- Karl Popper
"Hegel had talked like this, with his Absolute Mind. Absolute Mind was
independent too, both of objectivity and subjectivity. However, Hegel said the
Absolute Mind was the source of everything, but then it excluded romantic
experience from the 'everything' it was the source of. Hegel's Absolute was
completely classical, completely rational and completely orderly. Quality was
not like that." (ZAMM 252)
This is consistent with the comments he made 17 years later, where DQ "is not a
social code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday
experience." (Lila, 366)
Pre-intellectual experience is the key to Pirsig's root expansion of
rationality.
But a post-intellectual society is the road to totalitarianism and the
devolution of human culture.
I don't think Ian is post-intellectual so much as anti-intellectual.
Politically and socially speaking, there's not much difference.
[Ian]
> You've had
> Post-structuralism.
> You've had
> Post-Modernism
> Thus side of the pond, we've even recently had
> Post-Christian
> What about
> Post-Intellectualism?
[Arlo]
> This has been done, no? Donald Wood wrote "Post-Intellectualism and the
> Decline of Democracy: The Failure of Reason and Responsibility in the
> Twentieth Century" in 1996.
>
> From Amazon's site: Our society's institutional infrastructures—our
> democratic political system, economic structures, legal practices, and
> educational establishment—were all created as intellectual outgrowths of the
> Enlightenment. All our cultural institutions are based on the intellectual
> idea that an enlightened citizenry could govern its affairs with reason and
> responsibility. In the late 20th century, however, we are witnessing the
> disintegration of much of our cultural heritage. Wood argues that this is due
> to our evolution into a ^Upost-intellectual society^R—a society characterized
> by a loss of critical thinking, the substitution of information for
> knowledge, mediated reality, increasing illiteracy, loss of privacy,
> specialization, psychological isolation, hyper-urbanization, moral anarchy,
> and political debilitation. These post-intellectual realities are all
> triggered by three underlying determinants: the failure of linear growth and
> expansion to sustain our economic system; the runaway information overload;
> and technological determinism. Wood presents a new and innovative social
> theory, challenging readers to analyze all our post-intellectual cultural
> malaise in terms of these three fundamental determinants.
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