The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selection, or the notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the means of production does not explain everything, not even everything human, but it still explains something and our attention shifts to isolating just what that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also given rise. But it no longer has the grandiose, all-promising scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had. It becomes, if it was, in truth, a seminal idea in the first place, a permanent and enduring part of our intellectual armory. They try to apply it and extend it where it applies and where it is capable of extension and they desist where it does not apply or cannot be extended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-universe view of it but less driven thinkers settle down after a while to the problems the idea has really generated. We try it in every connection, for every purpose, experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generalizations and derivatives."Īfter we have become familiar with the new idea, however, after it has become part of our general stock of theoretical concepts, our expectations are brought more into balance with its actual uses, and its excessive popularity is ended.
The sudden vogue of such a grande ideé, crowding out almost everything else for a while, is due, she says, "to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploiting it. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame of some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can be built.
They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues. In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer remarks that certain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous force. Section I: The conceptual confusion of the understanding of culture and the introduction of Geertz' definition of culture. Clifford Geertz: Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture
0 kommentar(er)
