… coming home to roost?
1
For years I have been boring people, myself included, with how all knowledge needs re-examining to take in current and contemporary thought and insights. This is nothing new of course. R G Collingwood put forward the idea that history needs to be re-written every generation to take in new and recent discovers and knowledge. That was way back in the 1940s.
So, when I was working on my new book, GIFTS OF RINGS AND GOLD, I used whatever resources were immediately to hand, restricted to energy and expense. I had trained as an historian; my course was more analytical than straight arts based. I had tried constantly to keep up to date.
But I worked on my own, with no faculty behind me, and very little access to academic material.
What I found was that by using older methods of analysing texts the results and conclusions were not much different from the new writing. The new writing methods were obviously fuller, broader, deeper because they had the resources that I did not have. Yet within all this and their wrangling with equalities and perspectives the conclusions were similar.
My conclusions from this?
In these instances my trumpeted demands for new evaluations have maybe not produced much that is new. Have the energy demands for the new aesthetics overtaken what is then left available for further insights?
2
Another item in my rant-repository was how argument, discussion, if it was to be relevant, or more relevant, to our needs, must have a multiple base.
That is, no more yes, no; no more subject-predicate-conclusion…. One way to help towards greater incorporation I thought may be symbolic logic’s use of formulations to work with larger bases of argument.
Was all this another effect from having immersed myself in chiasmi, and dual/binary-based structures?
I did not know what was beyond yes and no (remember ‘Po, Beyond Yes and No’ by Edward de Bono, 1990? http://www.edwdebono.com/debono/po.htm ), but felt that these dualities were unworkable. In fact that they had long been so, and only led to conflict, opposition and trouble.
The need was for everyone, by implication, to recognise we were all essential, and all part of the world. For genders not to be polarities, but points on the wavelength of being.
Funny how you get to thinking in universal terms. I’d been trying to banish the universal, and applaud our particulars.
So, was I damning myself to computer thought? As my friend Karen so rightly pointed out, no one could possibly think or reason to any effect by using wider bases.
3
And I was thinking: If society is to be workable it has to have input from everybody.
And so we now now have crowd-sourcing. Online courses have discussion boards that are taken credibly by the tutors.
And yet, I have to admit, the results of these of these have not resulted in much of interest or innovation.
They read as though social media has reduced responses to dated and glib cliches.
4
How can the current aversion to religion have any meaning without its sibling, religion-as-rule?
Would an atheist world would be a featureless, medium-shallow terrain of uninteresting sludge?
How can the current body-centred reasoning have the reach and dynamic of more abstract multi-dimensional thought?
Am I getting bogged down in immediate matters, not the big picture: ‘the surface look that soil took, when the seeds of blooms were germinating…’ – that is, new-world systems of knowledge and thought?
Those old binaries again:
Only allowed question –
Is it This?
Or This?
Disallowed answer –
Well, it has elements of both and yet many other unconsidered factors. The result is a web, a vast network, that we call here, now, us……
What’s in Santa’s sack? A new-world egg?
michael9murray 