Between One and One Another

Оглавление

Michael Jackson. Between One and One Another

Отрывок из книги

BETWEEN ONE AND

ONE ANOTHER

.....

In the sketches and portraits that comprise this book, I claim no definitive understanding of the thinkers whose lives have engaged my interest. But while they are tentative and tangential, these essays touch on the question of how we might balance modes of thinking, speaking, writing, and living that have, since the Enlightenment, been seen as antithetical. When a trainee social worker or psychotherapist is told not to get too emotionally involved with his or her client, when an ethnographer is counseled not to lose sight of his or her academic objectives by going native, when an analytical philosophy has recourse to symbolic logic when working out what can be reasonably stated or defended rather than adducing examples from the world of which he or she is a part, and when a scientist speaks of subjective experience as a regrettable disturbance that must be neutralized in order for objective observations to be made, we are carrying the burden of culturally and historically determined distinctions that cannot be sustained in reality and that overlook the different contexts in which these modes of being and thinking find a useful place.

We come here to the limits of social science. To understand in depth and detail what transpires within our relations to others, we draw upon the work of social scientists, psychologists, and ethologists to be sure, but it is to the work of artists, novelists, biographers, and nonspecialists that we must also turn for techniques that help us do greatest justice to lived experience. In venturing beyond the borders of orthodox science, we may be accused of departing from empirical truth and being unprofessional, or, worse, of pure invention. But there may be a middle ground, where anecdote enriches rather than invalidates our work.

.....