Lies or Insights?
I’ve been reading close to one book a week for the past year, and have nearly achieved Buddha-hood. I’ll be reviewing them all here eventually, now that I have a trusty C-Pen.
But today I am for the first time thinking of ditching a book on my self-assigned list. I just started reading “Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience” by Yi-Fu Tuan. He is apparently a brilliant thinker and is highly recommended. And it started out well enough. But by page 10, I ran into this insight:
“It is a common tendency to regard feeling and thought as opposed, the one registering subjective states, the other reporting on objective reality. In fact, they lie near the two ends of an experiential continuum, and both are ways of knowing.”
He’s correct that popular wisdom holds thought and feeling to be in opposition. His response if very insightful. It’s the “and both are ways of knowing” that I have a serious problem with. The correct sentence would end “and both are ways of knowing or (deliberately) not knowing”. Thus the whole ending could be left off entirely — leaving it there and one-sided as he does makes it seem as if all thought and feeling is a road to knowledge. This is an error of the gravest magnitude. Thought and feeling are far more often employed in concealing knowledge from oneself than in “knowing”.
Now, here is my problem. Prior to this tainted insight, he eruditely proclaimed one or two uncommon insights per page — the rest of the book will no doubt be the same. Normally this would be a bonanza, but now I can’t trust him. It’s very likely that he will have some great insights, but if these are scattered among half-baked insights with dangerously jagged holes, I’ll have to be on guard to avoid getting seduced by something specious. And so far, none of his insights have been fully baked.
Of course, every book of this sort is going to have things that you disagree strongly with, so disagreement alone shouldn’t be reason to jettison a book. And I am not actually that worried that I would be duped by any half-baked ideas. But it will take considerable effort to wade through this book with a critical mind and catalogue all of the places where the guardrails are missing or weak.
~
Tossed it. The book is filled with indefensible nuggets. For example, he explains that the word “experience” comes from the root of the word “perilous”, so experience implies overcoming adversity. This is intellectual humbuggery. Perhaps people once used the word that way, but not today, so it’s irrelevant. He builds a whole palace of argument on that one point. It’s the truck of charlatans to use numerology and linguistic tricks to redefine words in the listener’s mind.
July 24th, 2007 at 9:23 am
The difference ‘twixt “event level” and “object level” abstractions is clear when one remembers what an old Polish aristocrat said “whatever you say it is, it isn’t” - a version of the map/territory confusion.
If you were to reduce the amount of time spent bothering your pretty little head with spewed nonsense and undertake writing some of your own, it would help towards universal connectedness due in part to your experience as an evangelist.
It is weird that I hesitate putting your gift monitor into the land fill because it was from you but I now have a living room filled with proof of the abundance that belies the notion of scarcity that even to this day rules most of our premises. How bizarre!
Love.
July 24th, 2007 at 9:40 am
I agree; I am proud of the fact that this is one of the first “highly recommended” philisophical books I’ve felt confident tossing. Tossing old monitors is a good way to affirm you’ve got something better, too.
As for the writing, I’ve written hundreds of pages in the last 6 months, but the bulk is not ready to be shared with anyone (not even my family) and might never be. I read anything I can which may serve to refute or challenge what I’m writing (as long as it’s not inane sophistry) and refine it that way. Being a firm believer in “just connect” and “transparency/truth”, it is odd to find myself hesitating to publish certain things. I promise that if I don’t, at least I’ll publish very clear and honest reasoning why I think it is right to put some things in one bucket and other things in another bucket. (In fact, there is a third bucket I imagine — certain insights which can be shared and refined with friends who have some level of understanding but shouldn’t be shared out with just anyone).
July 24th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Wow. I don’t have any experience with Yi-Fu Tuan or his writings. I don’t really have any experience with this blog; perhaps commenting on posts in total ignorance of the ideological seed from which your opinions sprout is laying solid groundwork on which to stand whilst I accidentally offend. Who knows & sorry if need be. Preamble over. Here are my meat and potatoes: “… and both are ways of knowing” is dissimilar to “… and both are ways of knowing truth”, which I feel is a more accurate statement to base an argument such as yours on. I know a lot of things, many of which I’m sure, are objectively incorrect, ill defined, fantasies. I feel there is some merit in considering thought and feeling as two tools in the same tool box; tools that can be used to build a representation of reality, or whatever else you might fancy. Keeping in mind that “knowing” does not imply “knowing truth”, I’d like to bring attention to the final sentence of the post. Cheers.
July 24th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
“I feel there is some merit in considering thought and feeling as two tools in the same tool box; tools that can be used to build a representation of reality, or whatever else you might fancy.”
Absolutely! That is an uncommonly profound insight, which should give the author some credibility. But with great credibility comes great responsibility. And the issue with the way he framed this insight is context — in context he’s talking about objective reality, “space and place”, and making an implicit value judgment that “knowing” is “good”. Without clarifying the sentence (as you did), I have to give the benefit of a doubt and assume that he meant either a) both reality and fantasy with no value judgment, or b) truth, with the value judgment.
My real problem is that I found myself continually having to assume that he didn’t mean exactly what he wrote. And he seemed to be simply trying to dazzle the reader with clever arguments and disconnected anecdotes rather than presenting an airtight philosophy. I have the same complaint about Seth Godin’s new book, but am less upset about Godin’s book simply because it doesn’t give the impression of being profound — and is thus less likely to mislead people.
July 25th, 2007 at 3:52 am
While the context clues that you mention didn’t seem to be apparent in the original excerpt, they do completely invalidate my opinion. I suppose originally I was going for a sort of “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water”… but seeing as it appears you are better read than I, I’m sure your baby throwing is well deserved. Out of curiosity, are the works of Yi-Fu Tuan in question a translation?
July 26th, 2007 at 6:57 am
Nothing invalid about your opinion, and I have no complaint with people who read his book and find it useful. It’s just not for me.
Throwing out baby with bathwater is a real danger and one shouldn’t do so hastily. That’s why I blogged about it; since it’s rather exceptional for me. And I don’t know if anyone is “well read” enough to go around trashing authors indiscriminately — I am far from the stage where could eschew being self-critical. In this case though I don’t feel compelled to bend over backward to evade calling a spade a spade.
The book was authored in English, which is the version I read. He’s a professor in the U.S. Conversely, I read Zhong Yong in English translation (originally authored in Chinese 2,000 years ago) and found it quite profound.