So I just started reading ←Maps of the Mind , and it’s sizing up to be a good book, don’t get me wrong. Definitely worth the money, and I’m by no means going to put it down anytime soon. I stand to get quite a bit out of it, and it’s probably going to answer a lot of problems I’ve been having coming up with a usable personality model for my purposes.
But I’m sick of this misguided liberal arts relativism with its mistrust of anything remotely Western, especially science & rationalism. This over-emphasis on indeterminacy and intuition / feeling to make up for a percieved imbalance.
And this love affair with Freud & Eastern philosophies. Freud’s a fucking nut. His time has passed, just like Warhol. They’re both important historical figures, and they each made seminal impacts in their fields, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything in our power to forget them.
Eastern philosophy is nice and all, but it’s not the solution to this imagined problem. It is, of course, touted as a paragon of balance - the answer to the imbalance of Western Imperialistic Scientific Rationalism. But it doesn’t work to only focus on the Yang to the West’s Yin; all that does is switch the imbalance in the other direction. And just seeding Western Yin with Eastern Yang doesn’t work either, because the two systems are not entirely complementary.
And finally, being impartial doesn’t mean you can’t make judgments. All systems of thought aren’t equal. Some are better than others. And that’s fine. It may be an objective viewpoint, rather than a subjective one, but it’s true. Harmony means not an equal, 50/50 balance of objectivity & subjectivity, but knowing which the situation calls for.
sigh… I’ll probably come back to this & clean it up later