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+category:
+    - research
+title: Kant and Living Waters
+date: 2005-04-26T18:10:00
+---
+
+While reading this morning next chapter of Carey (1989), I again hit
+some of my familiar spirits. I was thinking yesterday about the symbolic
+interactionism (the first chapter of Carey is actually a thorough
+explanation of the background of ideas feeding into the symbolic
+interactionism and similar constructivist sociological tradition), and
+it came to me that I should write into my dissertation proposal about
+the relation between the symbolic interactionism and the tradition of
+those who (following `Kant`_, among others) considered “the real world”
+impossible (or hard) to understand directly. Actually, I am really not
+that interested in Kant’s philosophy itself (it is tempting to write “in
+itself” :-)) — I have never read any of his `Critics`_ — I use him more
+as a symbol of a whole line of thinking, which includes also
+`Wittgenstein`_ and the whole bunch of postmodern thinkers.
+
+That is obviously just a small (and not that important) note, that could
+be added to the proposal in a minute. However, much more important is
+that I was actually thinking about this whole relation between “Kant”
+and the symbolic interactionism (and I was certainly not the first one,
+who thought about that — I wonder, what has been written on this theme
+in the “Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism” (2003)). I was actually
+saying to myself, that these things I found about SI remind me of
+discussions with my brother about Kant. And yet, I have not thought that
+I could actually use it for my dissertation, because what I really tried
+to do was to create a work which would resemble other scientific works I
+have read. However, the path to truly interesting stuff and to finding
+out something new goes exactly in the other direction — to use my own
+resources and thoughts as much as possible. The dissertation (especially
+with qualitative methods) should be as personal as possible — I don’t
+mean personal in terms of sharing my personal issues, but I have to go
+deeper in finding out what I actually think, what really matters to me,
+etc.
+
+Actually, somewhere here may lie a root of my father’s dissatisfaction
+with sociology. Citing (again, there are more cites here than my own
+thoughts :-), oh well) my advisor Len Buckle, “real sociological truths
+are either common sense or nonsense”. Except that it sometimes requires
+a lot of uncommon thinking to discover common sense. And unless we go to
+the personal depths and appreciation of the artistic dimension of
+science, we don’t find anything that really matters.
+
+Citing (indirectly) Markus Hoffmann, whenever we are insecure in our
+world, it is a reliable sign that we should go deeper in our healing.
+Whenever I feel bored and drained by the routine work, I should go
+deeper as well.
+
+.. _Kant:
+    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant
+.. _Critics:
+    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason
+.. _Wittgenstein:
+    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein