Here's another (more Head-Shoppy, maybe) excerpted passage... it's also in a slightly different form in the audio archive:
quote:I have sometimes thought that all philosophical disputes could be reduced to an argument between the partisans of "prickles" and the partisans of "goo." The prickly people are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between things. They prefer particles to waves, and discontinuity to continuity. The gooey people are tender-minded romanticists who love wide generalizations and grand syntheses. They stress the underlying unities, and are inclined to pantheism and mysticism. Waves suit them much better than particles as the ultimate constituents of matter, and discontinuities jar their teeth like a compressed air drill. Prickly philosophers consider the gooey ones rather disgusting - undisciplined, vague dreamers who slide over hard facts like an intellectual slime which threatens to engulf the whole universe in an "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" (courtesy of Professor F.S.C. Northrup). But gooey philosophers think of their prickly colleagues as animated skeletons that rattle and click without any vital juices, as dry and dessicated mechanisms bereft of all finer feelings. Either party would be hopelessly lost without the other, because there would be nothing to argue about....
As things now stand in the world of academic philosophy, the prickly people have had the upper hand in both England and the United States for some years. With their penchant for linguistic analysis, mathematical logic, and scientific empiricism, they have aligned philsophy with the mystique of science... and, as William Earle said, would come to work in white coats if they thought they could get away with it.... their sweeping victory over the gooey people has almost abolished philosophy as a discipline....
Historically, this is probably the extreme point of that swing of the intellectual pendulum which brought into fashion the Fully Automatic Universe, of the age of analysis and specialization when we lost our vision of the universe in the overwhelming complexity of its details.*
*Academic philosophy missed its golden opportunity in 1921, when Ludwig Wittgenstein first published his Tractatus... which ended with the following passage: "The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy; and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs and propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other - he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy - but it wuld be the only strictly correct method. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finall recognizes them as senseless, wehn he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." This was the critical moment for all academic philosophers to maintain total silence and to advance the discipline to the level of pure contemplation along the lines of the meditation practices of Zen Buddhists. But even Wittgenstein had to go on talking and writing, for how else can a philosopher show that he is working and not just goofing off?
I like this because it's a paradoxical critique, a gooey thinker inventing prickly categories to critique prickly thinkers by pointing out their gooey-ness. Sort of. In a way, Watts sets himself up as both and neither at the same time, which is very nice.
It also (in the footnote, at least) points toward silence in a way that I think deconstruction points towards meaninglessness, or more precisely, the ineffability of meaning. Deconstruction seems sort of gooey, then. So does contemporary gender theory. If not gooey, then corrosively anti-prickle. |
