My sense of ethics leads me to a different approach to knowledge than that which is typically Western, which is why I am such a good teacher of non-Westerners. (The same attribute probably makes me poor at communicating with those who have developed a very strong Western line to their thinking.) I am averse to telling people what they ought to think or what attitudes they ought to have in interpretation. When I write anything, I desire that people should draw their own interpretations rather than looking to me for “the right one”. (Part of me even believes that producing a thesis statement defeats the purpose of writing, which should be to carry the reader along with you to the point that they draw their own conclusions in a way that is meaningful in relation to both affects and logic.) If they try to alight upon “the right” answer — usually an interpretation based on input from a received authority — this inevitably produces a wrong or offensive-sounding interpretation. Readers shouldn’t be fighting the writer to understand or oppose their world view. They should develop ways to go with the flow so that they fill the shape that is the writer’s mind.
I could teach people to write good essays, but I don’t feel that a conventionally good essay is all that good — at least to the point of being something I would like to teach. Rather, writing a good computer programme serves this logic of essay writing better than writing essays in English. I’m either for or against positivism — but not much for this mid-way land which requires a being for and against discrete propositions. The Eastern way is more for an epistemological holism that doesn’t separate emotion from logic, but relies upon phenomenology.
STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism
No comments:
Post a Comment