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RIP: Robert Anton Wilson
In response to Jeff Vail's brief obit,
I wrote:
RAW was a huge influence on me during some serious formative years - mid-teens through early twenties. I owe him for introducing me to a wide array of provocative ideas and sources for further investigation; from Hassan i Sabbah to Korzybyski to Wilhelm Reich.
His ol' boy lack of sympathy for feminism rubbed me the wrong way from the start, but I took it with a lump of salt. I eventually did tire of his (ultimately quite trend-setting) focus on trying to re-read process at the human-scale according to the patterns of action at the sub-atomic scale (i.e. Quantum Psychology). Functional organization is scale-dependent,yes? An quark is not an organism is not a social system. Would that he had encountered Maturana and Varela - they accomplish a similar destruction of the ontology/epistemology split without the methodological problems.
But then again, I never would have waded through M&V's _Tree of Knowledge_ as a teenager, and I might well have rejected it's challenges altogether if I hadn't been prepared by RAW's guerilla ontology.
So thank you, Robert Anton Wilson, but don't rest in peace. May your legacy rest as uneasily and undigestibly in the maw of Western culture as your embodied presence has.
I wrote:
RAW was a huge influence on me during some serious formative years - mid-teens through early twenties. I owe him for introducing me to a wide array of provocative ideas and sources for further investigation; from Hassan i Sabbah to Korzybyski to Wilhelm Reich.
His ol' boy lack of sympathy for feminism rubbed me the wrong way from the start, but I took it with a lump of salt. I eventually did tire of his (ultimately quite trend-setting) focus on trying to re-read process at the human-scale according to the patterns of action at the sub-atomic scale (i.e. Quantum Psychology). Functional organization is scale-dependent,yes? An quark is not an organism is not a social system. Would that he had encountered Maturana and Varela - they accomplish a similar destruction of the ontology/epistemology split without the methodological problems.
But then again, I never would have waded through M&V's _Tree of Knowledge_ as a teenager, and I might well have rejected it's challenges altogether if I hadn't been prepared by RAW's guerilla ontology.
So thank you, Robert Anton Wilson, but don't rest in peace. May your legacy rest as uneasily and undigestibly in the maw of Western culture as your embodied presence has.
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