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Mar. 4th, 2008
a sort of beginning: joculum, new series
Mar. 4th, 2008 04:12 pmA Sort of Beginning
When one’s earliest graduate school mentor and one’s most efficacious spiritual counselor at a distance say the same thing, decades apart, one tends to take notice.
Both asserted that ascribing general ideas to their originators tends to make people react to their feelings about the originators rather than to the ideas themselves.
Both asserted that while it is possible and desirable to memorize data, we acquire most knowledge by piecing together independent perceptions.
This is totally opposed to what Pascal called the esprit de géométrie. And from geometry onward, it is certainly not the way to approach topics in which large quantities of quantifiable information have to be learned, arrayed, and applied.
But most of human knowledge is not rocket science, a joke I shall most likely be making more than once in the posts that follow.
It is quite another kind of science. But a science nonetheless (so it is not quite Pascal’s esprit de finesse), and not one in which one is free to tell any old story that comes into one’s head.
When one’s earliest graduate school mentor and one’s most efficacious spiritual counselor at a distance say the same thing, decades apart, one tends to take notice.
Both asserted that ascribing general ideas to their originators tends to make people react to their feelings about the originators rather than to the ideas themselves.
Both asserted that while it is possible and desirable to memorize data, we acquire most knowledge by piecing together independent perceptions.
This is totally opposed to what Pascal called the esprit de géométrie. And from geometry onward, it is certainly not the way to approach topics in which large quantities of quantifiable information have to be learned, arrayed, and applied.
But most of human knowledge is not rocket science, a joke I shall most likely be making more than once in the posts that follow.
It is quite another kind of science. But a science nonetheless (so it is not quite Pascal’s esprit de finesse), and not one in which one is free to tell any old story that comes into one’s head.