Kant and Living Waters
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:date: 2005-04-26T18:10:00
:category: research
:tags: dissertation, BostonMiracle

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:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant
.. _Critics:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason
.. _Wittgenstein:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein
.. _`Carey (1989)`:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-04-445062-1