jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) (01/11/88)
An interesting passage from Alan Watts:
"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 division 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 Prof. F.S.C. Northrop). But gooey philosophers think
of their prickly colleagues as animated skeletons that rattle and
click without any flesh or 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, no one would know what his position was, and the whole
course of philosophy would come to an end."
<end quote>
Fortunately, this was written before the concepts of left and right
brain specialization were popularized, so Watts chose much more
colorful terms than he might have if he wrote this today.
As a prickly person by nature who is becoming gooier as he gets
older, I thought I'd cross-post this to the group created exclusively
for prickly philosophy (post goo to talk.philosophy.misc :-) and to
the gooiest group on the net, to see if I can get a good chemical
reaction going.
Comments? Is there something to learn from the other side?
--
- Joe Buck {uunet,ucbvax,sun,<smart-site>}!epimass.epi.com!jbuck
Old Internet mailers: jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net
Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them. -- Richard Bachfirth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth) (01/12/88)
In article <1832@epimass.EPI.COM> jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes: >An interesting passage from Alan Watts: > >"I have sometimes thought that all philosophical disputes could be >reduced to an argument between the partisans of 'prickles' and the >partisans of 'goo'... Joe, you might find this book useful Isiah Berlin: The Fox and the Hedgehog "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing" It is ostensibly an essay on Tolstoy's view of history, but most of its insights address exactly this division between categorists and syncretists, whom Berlin refers to as Foxes and Hedgehogs May your prickles never grow less...
romkey@kaos.UUCP (John Romkey) (01/12/88)
In article <1832@epimass.EPI.COM> jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes: >An interesting passage from Alan Watts: (passage deleted) This dichotomy between the prickly and gooey philosophers is something that Robert Pirsig talks a lot about in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", a book that I expect is pretty well known at least in the newage newsgroup... -- - john romkey ...harvard!spdcc!kaos!romkey romkey@kaos.uucp romkey@xx.lcs.mit.edu