Template Thinking: The ever narrowing border of human reason

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'Enlightnement is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere Aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!' - that is the motto of the enlightenment. - Immanuel Kant in 'What is the enlightenment'  Kant, who Rudolf  Steiner described as 'the guardian of the threshold', is not one among the philosophers of ancient thought, and reducing him to the same is a grievous error. While we might analyse a number of philosophers up to Descartes, and perhaps even Leibniz as corollaries for ancient wisdom, for a Nyaya-type or a Madhyamika-type philosopher, Kant, and all of Kant, and not just the COPR, are in my reading of modern times the last stand against the darkness of human thought.  But we have forgotten Ka...
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Starting Out: Philosohical Sociology

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...to be a log of extractable, scalable ideas drawn from classical and otherwise Sociology texts that I read as I attempt to write out a part of my most recent ethnographic work. 

A short stint of teaching Sociology at University has motivated me to try and return to 101 texts and extract not just their core ideas but also experiment with subsidary ideas. 

I will also attempt to draw from my environs and experiment with the reach and extent of these theories in the everyday. Teaching has helped me see even more clearly that immediate applicability at a variety of scales is crucial as much as interpretation is.

However what I miss the most about Sociology today is the lack of interpretation and speculation. Even well delimited experimental speculation is missing. Thus while I will attempt to be specific and direct with my use of these texts, I want to encourage interpretation.

The limits of this discipline I realize having taught a while are not just that we can give accurate political-economic diagnoses of current realities that sound good, but that we can speculate on the wildest things very seriously. Without this, the hau of the discipline stops returning to its originally designated source. 

Apart from being an incredible critical tool when applied to political science, economics and psychology, Sociology also has its own realm, of magic, ritual and religion which cannot be marked simply as mumbo-jumbo. There is something of child-like wonder still to the discipline, a quasi-scientific wonder at strange objects like boomerangs and cigarette silver foil, a sense of the incipiently experimental, that I want to retain here. 

This does not mean however that I'm abandoning the practical. In fact what is most fascinating about Sociology is not just its ability to create general-universal theories (Primitive Classification, The Savage Mind etc) but also its ability to create specific-universal theories (Grief and Rage, Real and Medicinal Cannibalism). I am primarily interested in the Sociology of the wonderous in terms of these two modes which I find go beyond the sheerly empirical, which really doesn't exist in Sociology: every ethnography is an intervention in the theory of ethnography.

I will also look to query my recent interest in the more quantitative parts of the discipline. So far my training has been close to entirely ethnographic.  

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