Re-read for Great Books<\/a>; I remember my dad reading it in the ’70s, and I first picked it up myself in college (maybe another re-read in my 20s or so? not sure). I do think it’s not aged particularly well, but I wasn’t vastly disappointed the way most of the others were. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The contrast between the narrator and his friend John, who doesn’t want to deal with technology, is still fascinating to me (see long quote below). As a hands-on person myself, I resonate so hard with the narrator. But he’s such a jerk to his poor son Chris, who is only ELEVEN! Other book group people were agitated about him taking Chris on the trip because of physical safety – that didn’t bother me, but the lack of emotional safety\/support did. And the lack of understanding of a child, expecting him to act like an adult. “He’s angry and I expect we’re going to have one of his little scenes.” The contempt! Ugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I did enjoy the reveal of Phaedrus (the narrator’s former self), concluding with “Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the estrangement in self-stoking cycles until some sort of climax is reached. In Phaedrus\u2019 case there was a court-ordered police arrest and permanent removal from society.” It becomes like a detective story. I don’t always agree with Phaedrus, but his observations on science and teaching are fascinating. But I really trip over “Quality” as his primary value – pace<\/em> Humpty Dumpty, I can’t make it mean what he wants it to mean. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. \u201cWhat\u2019s new?\u201d is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question \u201cWhat is best?,\u201d a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n But what struck me for the first time was the agreement of these manuals with the spectator attitude I had seen in the shop. These were spectator manuals. It was built into the format of them. Implicit in every line is the idea that \u201cHere is the machine, isolated in time and in space from everything else in the universe. It has no relationship to you, you have no relationship to it, other than to turn certain switches, maintain voltage levels, check for error conditions\u2026\u201d and so on. That\u2019s it. The mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were really taking no different attitude from the manual\u2019s toward the machine, or from the attitude I had when I brought it in there. We were all spectators. And it occurred to me there is<\/em> no manual that deals with the real<\/em> business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n John is horrified at the idea of fixing his motor with a shim from a beer can – this is one of my favorite sections in the whole book:<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve<\/em> to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred-dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer<\/em> can! … I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn\u2019t oxidize in wet weather\u2014or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, any true<\/em> German mechanic, with a half-century of mechanical finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular solution to this particular technical problem was perfect<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a while I thought what I should<\/em> have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it. …<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant<\/em>. He was seeing what the shim was<\/em>. That\u2019s how I arrived at that distinction. And when you see what the shim is, in this case, it\u2019s depressing. Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I should talk now about Phaedrus\u2019 knife. It\u2019ll help understand some of the things we talked about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us\u2014these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road\u2014aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it the more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two are alike. Some are similar in one way, some are similar in another way, and we can form the sand into separate piles on the basis of this similarity and dissimilarity. Shades of color in different piles\u2014sizes in different piles\u2014grain shapes in different piles\u2014subtypes of grain shapes in different piles\u2014grades of opacity in different piles\u2014and so on, and on, and on. You\u2019d think the process of subdivision and classification would come to an end somewhere, but it doesn\u2019t. It just goes on and on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or<\/em> contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken. That is what Phaedrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To understand what he was trying to do it\u2019s necessary to see that part<\/em> of the landscape, inseparable<\/em> from it, which must<\/em> be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all. To reject that part of the Buddha that attends to the analysis of motorcycles is to miss the Buddha entirely.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n [Phaedrus pursued] a ghost which calls itself rationality but whose appearance is that of incoherence and meaninglessness, which causes the most normal of everyday acts to seem slightly mad because of their irrelevance to anything else. This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. That is why mechanics sometimes seem so taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests. They don\u2019t like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on mental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical motorcycle at all. They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind. They are looking at underlying form.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I don’t think the conclusion here is entirely correct, but it’s interesting:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The more you look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth from a multitude you are increasing the multitude<\/em>. What this means logically is that as you try to move toward unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away<\/em> from it! It is your application of scientific method that is causing it to change!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you\u2019re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn\u2019t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It\u2019s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here\u2019s where things grow.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Mu<\/em> as “no thing,” neither yes nor no:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The dualistic mind tends to think of mu<\/em> occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu<\/em> is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesn\u2019t cheat, and nature\u2019s answers are never irrelevant. It\u2019s a great mistake, a kind of dishonesty, to sweep nature\u2019s mu<\/em> answers under the carpet. Recognition and valuation of these answers would do a lot to bring logical theory closer to experimental practice. Every laboratory scientist knows that very often his experimental results provide mu<\/em> answers to the yes-no questions the experiments were designed for. In these cases he considers the experiment poorly designed, chides himself for stupidity and at best considers the \u201cwasted\u201d experiment which has provided the mu<\/em> answer to be a kind of wheel-spinning which might help prevent mistakes in the design of future yes-no experiments.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n With nuts and bolts you\u2019re in the range of large mechanical forces and you should understand that within these ranges metals are elastic. When you take up a nut there\u2019s a point called \u201cfinger-tight\u201d where there\u2019s contact but no takeup of elasticity. Then there\u2019s \u201csnug,\u201d in which the easy surface elasticity is taken up. Then there\u2019s a range called \u201ctight,\u201d in which all the elasticity is taken up. The force required to reach these three points is different for each size of nut and bolt, and different for lubricated bolts and for locknuts. The forces are different for steel and cast iron and brass and aluminum and plastics and ceramics. But a person with mechanic\u2019s feel knows when something\u2019s tight and stops. A person without it goes right on past and strips the threads or breaks the assembly.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Re-read for Great Books; I remember my dad reading it in the ’70s, and I first picked it up myself in college (maybe another re-read in my 20s or so? not sure). I do think it’s not aged particularly well, but I wasn’t vastly disappointed the way most of the others were. The contrast between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-great-books-group","category-quote-dump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2540"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4852,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540\/revisions\/4852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}In this book I learned about:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
Short quotes<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
Longer quotes<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n