Dan/inside and out

[Guest guest]

At 05:19 PM 11/25/99 -0500, Dan Berkow, PhD wrote:

>Dan: Your benevolent clarity knows no bounds, Gregji. This "simple" little

> "pointing" of yours demolishes much illusion. How often have I attempted to

> make sense of "outside" events from an "inside" perspective, when I could

> have, instead, looked to how real is the distinction between inside/outside.

> How often have I read the words, without reading the space between the

words.

> How often have I spoken without noticing the silence as I spoke.

> Inside and outside - these are in all words, all concepts, all perceptions.

> They are mutually referenced ways of providing location and relationship.

> There is no ultimate defining boundary between inside and outside, it

> shifts depending on the point of view.

 

Hey Dan,

 

Isn't it amazing when stuff just goes POP!! - POOF!! - GONE!! For me, the

inside/outside distinction popped once and for all back in 1982 when I was

in a George Berkeley seminar in grad school. Berkeley's the guy who said

that there's no such thing as physical substance, that it's all ideas, that

the tree falling in the forest makes no sound if there's no one to hear it

(so goes the old academic saw). Quite an un-intuitive theory!! But the

ironic thing is, that to get an "A" in the class, your final paper (30 - 50

pages in length) had to be *pro*-Berkeley. That wasn't really impartial of

the professor (one of the world's great Berkeley scholars), but it did make

us study hard, to extract any shred of sensibility out of his writings.

After reading several of his works, I must say that several distinctions

popped and dropped: physical/mental, inside/outside, entity/attribute. I

never saw things the same way again. One un-philosophical girlfriend

thought Berkeley's ideas were absolutely nutsoid and that I was living in

la-la-land. She thought it was miraculous that I never got hit by a city

bus while crossing the street!!

 

With love,

 

--Greg