I still wonder about this question – Who is a ’scholar’? someone with a PhD or PostDoc? Someone with a long list of publications? a well-read person? a card-carrying academic? who is it?
while i still don’t know the answer to this question, i am thinking of some of the scholars whom i admire. some of them are not academics. some of them are fiction writers, musicians, cinematographers. but in some way or the other, each of them carry a certain scholarship within themselves, which they acquired over a long period of strenuous labor filled with passion and madness, coupled with the giant-sized loneliness which comes along as a freebie. Well, some of the immediate random names which comes to my mind include – Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, Carl Rogers, Maslow, Frankl, Piaget, May, Kohlberg, Gilligan, Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Arthur Koestler, Nikos Kazantzakis, Ron Fricke, Whitehead, Habermas, Foucault, Giddens, Hofstadter, V.S.Ramachandran, Mintzberg, Richard Daft, Karl Weick, Wanda Orlikowski, Rob Kling, Claudio Ciborra, Paul Dourish et al.
However, most of these names are in the mainstream – either academic mainstream or the countercul. mainstream or the mainstream mainstream or mainstream somewhere.
But, there is one scholar (some refuse to consider him as one), who detached himself from the main currents and worked silently for almost three and a half decades to produce some of the profound meta-theories, which integrated many of the seemingly disparate and disjointed world-views. He is still an unknown name, both in the mainstream as well as in the academia.
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Some Flashback. U.S in Late 60’s (Strangely, the US media refers to the 60’s as the period between 1963 to 1973). Bitter aftertastes of the Vietnam war. Increasing influence of the Beat Gen. – especially after the series of books released during the late 50’s. Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, William Burroughs ‘Naked Lunch’ and Kerouc’s ‘On the Road’. Hippie wave on the high. Doors, Jimi Hendrix et al. Some packed their bags, and went to Morroco, to catch the famous ‘Marrakesh Express’. Some went to Arambol and Anjuna in Goa. Some drifted around. Loafers on the road. Dreaming of hitchhiking their way to Nirvana.
But, slowly, there was dissatisfaction again. People became restless. People started coming back. The dusk of the hippie era, which peaked after the infamous “Woodstock West Altamont Free Concert” incident – a spectator named Meridith Hunter was killed by a member of Hell’s Angel. Followed by some more violent incidents among the hippie community. Lost hope with notions like ‘expanding consciousness’ etc.
the end of 60’s was indeed a tough period for America. A war which went on and on, assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. successive crumbling of every belief system. a real difficult phase, it was. on the other hand, 60s was time where tremendous scientific and technological leaps happenned. First sucessful heart transplant. first minicomputer. BASIC. ARPANET. Apollo 11. and so on.
Encompassing all these vast historic context dawned the 70s. There was this young boy in his 20s who dropped out of his pre-med program at Duke University. Then, he joined University of Nebraska for his PhD in BioChemistry. He discontinued again, with a Masters, for he got tired of digging out frog’s eyes and examining them. The countercul-camp didn’t excite him either, which was the other alternate cul-de-sac at that time.
Rather, he joined a nearby restaurant and took an evening job as a dishwasher and worked there for the next 10 years. It saved him from 2 traps a) No committee meetings, No publish or Perish, No P’n'T pressures and thereby, no burden of carrying forward the ‘eminent-scholar-in-the-making’ identity b) No pressure to score, and no pressure be part of the in-gang, and its psychedelic dope’n'Bukowski reading sessions and thereby, no burden of carrying forward the ‘Kerouc-in-the-making’ identity. He is the average joe. He made 300$ per month and spent 200$ on books. During his day, he read and read and read. And this, he did not in the usual “yippie-look-im-havingfun-taking-a-year-break-coolsabbatical” way, but he did this with an unimaginable seriousness for the next 10 years. And all he did in those 10 years was to read, to write and to dishwash. As a result, he managed to publish 10 books in these 10 years. His major epistemological position is that – “No human mind is smart enough to be 100% wrong”. When we put this the other way, it becomes, “Everybody is right”. Well, in parts. He started out with Meta-theories on Psychology. Then, moved on to other major fields like sociology, anthropology etc. and brought forth an integrative framework bridging eastern and western thought, connecting different worldviews and epistemology. Integrating not only Piaget and Chomsky but also Freud and Buddha. Not only Comte with Parsons but also Foucault with Nagarjuna. All of these, he did it in style, in a very simple and friendly way, with no mumbo-jumbo, and at the same time moving beyond the shallow, cocktailish stuff which is expected of a work of this nature. In short, it neither conformed with the academic jargon. Nor with the romantic ecoprimitivist lingo. And thereby, failed to find a place in either of these. And unfortunately, with the influence of postmodernism and constructivism during the recent past, meta-theories were frowned at. and so, making him and his theories even more distant.
And thus, he remained a recluse during most of his productive days. Salon.com calls him “…may be the most important living philosopher you’ve never heard of” . He is… Oh, well. Go figure!
