I am back, after a twenty-eight hour voyage on everything from a tiny bush plane to a Boeing 737 -- exhausted, totally discomfited by jet lag, but full of stories to tell. It will take me a while to catch up. In the Johannesburg airport, I passed the time by deleting 375 unwanted emails. Now, I must reply to the important twenty-five, reflect on the comments on my Piketty posts, compose an appropriate report of my safari, and prepare to start teaching the Gorgias in the Osher LifeLong Learning Institute at Duke the day after tomorrow. Now I must figure out how to incorporate into my blog the pictures and videos I took with my remarkable IPhone.
Tomorrow I shall offer a meditation on the safari experience, connecting it to some observations about the ineluctably ideological nature of social reality. [What did you expect, a travelogue?]
And, do you think when we impose those structures that some are better and some worse?
ReplyDeleteJust to expand a bit: I read your "Musings" prior to adding that remark. And, of course you are right that nature documentaries engage in such organizing and framing (as do movies not about wild nature). And, I have no doubt that it's an important insight to suggest that our actual human interactions would have that emptiness/amorphousness without certain categories we bring to our experience of other human beings. Nevertheless, in the case of animals, there is a real structure that's not ideology, and we call it biological science. Why should there be no such similar thing whose subject is us?
ReplyDeleteMy last sentence probably should be re-written as: Why can't there be...OR Why shouldn't there be... (Sorry, but I'm on my way to teaching a class, and I can't spend a lot of time re-writing just now.) So, the fuller version would be: Why shouldn't there be a science of human beings or human society on a par with biology? (On a par----meaning not merely ideology) Or do you think that biology is ideology too?
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