Beginning to dissert

I think I'm finally getting into it, starting to think Big Thoughts about the nature of knowing and the limits of knowledge. Or that could be just the caffeine and chocolate speaking.

A few key quotes from a controversial book I've been reading:

Philosopher Rene Descartes transformed the competition between reason and faith by providing a new and neutral context in which the world could be understood. Out of his thinking came the modern understanding of mind and matter and the subjective and objective spheres. We have remained mired in this context because it seems to reflect commonsense experiences to us. But in terms of gathering valid knowledge about the world, this bifurcation has been detrimental. In plain language, the objective statement has been considered to be neutral, and the subjective has been considered to be unreliable. This way of viewing the source of our knowledge is crazy. We do not have objective facts when we choose to experiment or investigate something, our choice of phenomena is highly subjective. But no matter how sublime our thoughts, they are usually worthless without some objective thing to which they must refer: Everything we experience as an object invokes a subjective response from us.

Sythesizers – those who try to paint the larger picture – do not do well in academia, and for that reason, most of the truly creative work is being done outside the ivy-covered walls. Other scenarios can be brought forward that view the data in entirely different ways than I have suggested. It is in the nature of real scholarship to propose new ways of interpreting data instead of simply defending outworn theses. In that sense, and because so much is being published for the general reader, sooner or later some serious consideration will have to be given to these ideas. The other religions, then, have much to contribute to our understanding of the universe and ourselves, but they must be taken as seriously as we take the Western traditions.

Vine DeLoria Jr knew something about synthesizing and boundary-crossing, as an academic, a theologian, a lawyer, and a Native American. He died my first year of grad school, but my friend Clint, who works in the Cherokee Nation on traditional ecological knowledge, turned me on to his writing.

That said, this Synthesizer is head to Chicago to participate in a panel on Religion and Ecology, where I'll be 'taking seriously' the lived Tibetan Buddhist tradition of the Himalayas. I appreciate my adviser's insistence on taking the lived experience of real people seriously, and I feel lucky to have found sympathetic colleagues!

I should also give a shout out to my Mom, who's birthday is today, the original influence for taking the lived experience of religion seriously. Thanks, Mom!