[Inquiry] Re: And Passing Away -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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APA.  Discussion Note 2

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GR = Gary Richmond
JA = Jon Awbrey

If I haven't lost track of some email
somewhere, the next exchange was this:

JA: Thanks for the listen and thoughtful reply.
    A few more weekend musings scattered below.

GR: I'm writing away from my desk and remote so I won't say
    much as I never know how the formatting will come out under
    these conditions.  So just a few comments between your lines.

JA: The collaborations that I've known have all depended on
    the people working together being able to tell each other
    exactly what they think about each of the issues that faced
    the work.  It is true that I can count the number of genuine
    successes at that on the phalanges that God gave me at birth,
    but you presume too much to think you know a blessed thing
    about the number of trials from which that number arises.

GR: I would agree that the success of collaboration depends
    "on the people working together being able to tell each
    other exactly what they think about each of the issues
    that faced the work".  I have perhaps been fortunate in
    my life to early on have been a musician collaborating
    with others, for example, in classical and jazz ensembles,
    musical theater, etc.

JA: Speaking of musical collaborations, we just got back from a concert of
    Celtic music with Bonnie Rideout, a local lass gone good, and Scottish
    harpist William Jackson -- totally blown away by their musicality and
    general charm.

GR: So given the "success" of those simple collaborations, I suppose I began
    to find collaboration natural & potentially "a way of life".  On the other
    hand, maturity has brought me a great deal of disappointment in larger scale
    collaborations so that I may not have had (m)any more of those than you have.
    If I seemed presumptuous in this matter, I did not mean to be and do apologize
    for that.

JA: Now, that aside, there is indeed a connection between
    the sort of environment in which genuine collaboration
    can survive and that in which true inquiry can thrive,
    And all I'm saying here is the rather obvious fact that,
    as facilitative as new modes of communication might be,
    they are not the critical factor in reaching that aim.
    and the biggest obstacles are the blocks and caltrops
    in the social machineries that human beings have for
    many long ages now been building out of each other.

GR: Who would suggest that these "new modes of communication" are "the critical factor"
    in collaboration?  Some of the meta-theory of collaboration (for example, that of
    Aldo de Moor's GRASS project) are meant to help facilitate the HCI process, that
    is all.  But successful collaborations DO at least occasionally happen involving
    this "machinery" and I see no reason why there shouldn't be more and more of
    these (of course everything depends upon a high level of intelligence,
    creativity, sensitivity and especially good will of the participants --
    and that's a LOT to ask for).

JA: Sure, I see no reason why there shouldn't more powerful tools, and have
    especially focused on logical graph based learning tools for, well I lose
    count of the years.  So reasons, no, but causes there be why things grind
    on so slowly that general logical power has yet to catch up to where Peirce
    was by 1870, much less 1910, and a lot more of that than I used to think 5 yrs
    ago has to do with the fact that many ostensible promoters of Peirce are still
    promoting a bowdlerized rendering of the most distinctive insights in his work.
    Strangely enough, and I would not have guessed this possible just 5 years ago,
    many modern interpreters of Peirce are still bending his work down the same
    old dead ends that the analytic philosophers tried out of the chute, and
    that even some of them eventually wised up enough to abandon, to name
    but one, Russell's isomorphism theory of reference, an iconic theory
    of meaning by any other name.  Whether they do this through a lack
    of familiarity with the sadder-but-sometimes-slightly-wiser tales
    of those dead end debacles, or from having absorbed these theses
    through a kind of unconscious osmosis from the stale airs of
    the average U.S. analytic-dominated philosophy department,
    I have not yet been able to determine.

JA: No blame attaches if the realities of that are too hard to face.

GR: No blame.

JA: I'm familiar with the probabilities of what happens after saying
    what I actually think.  It's why poets, which I'm not by the way,
    along with all those pity-pattering esthetes on the playground of
    musementorship, which I am on a good day, long ago learned to
    give folks the easy out of pretending they never got it in
    the first place.

GR: A couple of points here: 1) I would hope and expect that you will,
    nonetheless, continue to say what you you actually think and I expect
    to do the same; 2) question: can someone once seen as a poet -- and
    you have posted at least a few pieces of your poetry -- deny that
    he is one? Well, I guess so.  Let me say that I continue to not
    only enjoy your use of poetic language, etc. when you are in
    a whimsical mood, but have been profoundly moved by your
    poesis when you were expressing something more profound;
    3) sometimes I have thought "I got it" in your regard,
    but it didn't seem to matter to you that I had --
    that can be discouraging on THIS end.

JA: When I say "poet", I mean it in the Germane sense that includes folks
    like Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, Shaw, Eliot, Wolfe, and so on.
    There is nothing of the effete esthete here, of course, but those
    who speak truths that are scarcely dreamt of in most philosophies
    and psychologies.  There is the chance that the most free-willing,
    manic musement, or playful punning will lead up to the verge of
    this domain, where there be oracles, as many have found, and so
    there's a real link, however weak.  Either way, truth that hard
    is so direly admired and dearly feared by Plato's Republicans
    that it must be banished forthwith.  And even your average
    Ogden Nash rambler like me learns to invite the complement
    of dismissal, hoping to avert the formalites of violence
    that would otherwise uninvitedly almost inevitably ensue.

JA: So they pass through this casino of a world where the highest token
    of respect they can pay another has overwhelming odds of being taken
    for an insult.  Still they keep betting on that card so high and wild ...

GR: So, if we're going to be misinterpreted in any even, let us,
    as I earlier suggested, continue to speak our minds and as we
    try harder to respect those worthy of our respect and, of course,
    continue to respect our own struggles, perhaps to just carry on as
    best we can.  I still am very hopeful myself, although I've had some
    bad days in the past few years and a few of them on the Peirce list.

JA: Sounds like a plan ...

Jon Awbrey

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