janw@inmet.UUCP (01/18/88)
[firth@sei.cmu.edu.UUCP ] >/* ---------- "Re: prickles and goo" ---------- */ >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... I welcome this reminder of Berlin's interesting essay, but I be- lieve the distinction there is quite different from that in the (no less welcome) Watts quote. It was the "hedgehog" side of Tol- stoy that was "gooey" - or syncretist. However, Dante was the ar- chetype of hedgehogs, according to Berlin, Dante - the arch- categorist, a definitely "prickly" thinker. Shakespear was the archetype *fox* (again, according to Berlin) - but he does not fit easily into the prickly-gooey dichotomy. The "one big thing" of Dante was a dogmatic, strongly categor- ized, rigidly subdivided picture of the moral universe. The "one big thing" of Tolstoy was a syncretistic belief that all people and faiths are, at bottom, the same, and all knowledge superfluous. Tolstoy could fit in *.newage, Dante would've consigned it to In- ferno. On the other hand, Shakespear's (and Tostoy's in his *fox* aspect) taste for the richness of individual, unsystematized, disorderly things of the world - overlapping but not reducible to each other - is neither gooey nor prickly. Laughter and tears get mixed in Shakespeare, bad guys like Shylock suddenly grab our sympathy; life is sometimes called a dream, or a theater play; but that doesn't make him gooey. The "fox" knows *many* things, knows them to be *different* - therefore is not gooey; but also knows *too many* to fit neatly into categories - therefore isn't prickly. Jan Wasilewsky