[Buddha-l] The arrow: its removal and examination

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Richard Hayes schreef:
> On Sunday 24 June 2007 13:07, Katherine Masis wrote:
>
>   
>> I for one don’t know what business, if any, is the
>> proper Buddhist one, but if no Buddhist had ever had
>> the inclination to lead the examined life, no Buddhist
>> cosmology, no Buddhist epistemology and no Buddhist
>> psychology would ever have developed.
>>     
>
> It is not that false dichotomy, or any other kind of anti-intellectualism, 
> that I was endorsing. Rather, I was echoing the kind of sentiment (probably 
> hopelessly outmoded nowadays) that Husserl expressed when he said that 
> philosophy never existed outside Europe. What he seems to have meant by 
> philosophy in that infamous claim is closer to what we might call "pure" 
> science, that is, an inquiry done purely for the sake of knowledge, with no 
> regard whatsoever to anything practical. I don't think Buddhists qua 
> Buddhists ever engaged in anything like "pure" science, because they were 
> always interested in theory only as a handmaiden to the practical task of 
> reducing unnecessary forms of suffering, especially those that arise from the 
> way we think (or fail to think).
>   
Richard, I think you mix up poor old Edmund with his teutonic villagepriest pupil Martin Heidegger. Martin came at a certain stage of his life under the spell of Hegel, who insisted nothing existed apart from history. So if philosophy is a historical phenomenon, like the birth of the Buddha, then philosophy must be part of European history and therefore mainly a German affair. There's a rather sad text by Martin called 'Conversation with a Japanese' wherein he forbids a Japanese professor to use the word 'esthetics' because Japanese people have no part of the Greek heritage so they cannot know the true meaning of the word. 
Edmund was a secret meditator, because his phenomenological reductions turned into a kind of vipassana, excluding all historical and other prapañca. He wrote not about pure philosophy let alone pure science but about pure phenomenology.
I agree of course that it's rather stupid to restrain yourself to merely pulling out your own arrow, while in the meantime you can make a plan with your fellow arrowvictims to reduce the chance to run into new arrows and invent new churgical tricks to get arrows out more efficiently. Moreover, while pulling out arrows you still have to eat, don't you. 
So yes, these anti intellectuals are merely sociopaths.  

Erik


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