Xref: utzoo sci.philosophy.tech:530 talk.religion.newage:1467 Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!epiwrl!epimass!jbuck From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,talk.religion.newage Subject: prickles and goo Message-ID: <1832@epimass.EPI.COM> Date: 11 Jan 88 07:28:16 GMT Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA Lines: 41 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." 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,}!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 Bach