XPost: alt.philosophy.taoism, alt.buddha.short.fat.guy, alt.philosophy.zen
From: invalid@invalid.invalid
brian mitchell wrote:
> Tang Huyen wrote:
>
>> On 11/2/2016 9:18 AM, Lee Dillion wrote:
>>
>>> Tang Huyen:
>>
>>>> The French have a saying: With increasing specialisation,
>>>> the experts will know everything about nothing.
>>
>>> This is a common problem across all areas of knowledge, it
>>> seems. I see students with a lot of general common sense
>>> about problem solving struggle to gain specialized knowledge
>>> while retaining overall connections. They can become so
>>> focused in their areas of expertise that they try to stuff all
>>> issues into their narrow area they have mastered rather than
>>> step back and see other connections and solutions.
>>>
>>> I fear I was much smarter years ago when I knew far less.
>>
>> Chomsky has harped much on the stupidity that universities
>> force down the throats of their students, though I don't
>> remember the exact wording. I think that I am lucky that I
>> did not get ground to bits by a post-graduate programme,
>> in which professors would have pushed me the way that
>> hamburger paste is made. I worked and studied on the side
>> on my own, as an hobby, without any professor breathing
>> down my neck and telling me what to think. I could and can
>> choose how to think from my own side, without external
>> help, and also without external interference, which in my
>> case would have been enormous since my thinking is quite
>> unorthodox, to put it mildly.
>>
>> And as I said many times before, to me there seems to be a
>> glass ceiling of abstraction against which the white scholars
>> in the humanities singly and collectively bump up and fall
>> down, even if they can discourse on methods of unity and
>> systematicity, paradigms, forms, structures, syntagmas, etc.
>> which they fail to apply insofar as they apparently take them
>> as content rather than form, though form is said to form and
>> inform the content since Plato and Aristotle. Strangely,
>> logicians and the logically minded philosophers who work
>> on the philosophy of philosophy are quite good at
>> discoursing on their expertise in content, but are unable to
>> take it as form to explain philosophy, which is what they
>> should do. They are mired in a morass of content and can
>> scarcely stand back to abstract the form from it. They
>> constantly teach criticality, higher critique, etc., but only in
>> content and scarcely jump in to apply them in the concrete,
>> namely whatever content of their various disciples is. The
>> non-white scholars in the humanities are not any better, and
>> possibly worse, be they at Nobel powerhouses like Tokyo
>> and Kyoto.
>>
>> As you say: "They can become so focused in their areas of
>> expertise that they try to stuff all issues into their narrow
>> area they have mastered rather than step back and see
>> other connections and solutions." I take your "they" to cover
>> all scholars in the humanities, including the luminaries like
>> Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger.
>>
>> Pretty grandiose, eh? But as the former contributor (now
>> dead?) Theravad used to say, one should reach beyond
>> one's grasp, which is what I am trying to do. Quixotic, but
>> why not? At most, I fail.
>
> A useful practice that most academics follow is to provide examples
> and/or citations to bolster the propositions they put forward. It
> seems to me that in the realm of abstract concepts the distinction
> between form and content is so fine as to be mostly invisible. Can you
> give an example of a "white scholar" floundering about in content
> while ignoring the form they were better to be focusing on? Just a
> short extract would be enough to give a sense of your meaning here.
>
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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