Venkat, I can't help but feel that you are muddling different axes of distinction in this essay.
To use as a vocabulary an abstraction you mention in the footnotes, MBTI, ostensibly you are arguing for a tradeoff (and implicit antipathy) between N and S (intuition vs sensation) But you also seem to be referring to I vs E (the inner experience vs the outer experience of life) and also the T vs F ( theories vs spiritual experiences).
But the real villain ("Soviet Harvard") isn't characterized by ANY of these really, it's their lack of VIVIDNESS, the quality that is the real hero of your piece!
VIVID abstractions and VIVID experiences both contribute to a healthy, thriving reality (of whatever flavour), while the dead, rote, regurgitated abstractions (and experiences!) supported by the IYI are merely attempts to cling to the status afforded by a moribund system.
I'd recommend that all people with something VIVID to contribute should be allies in these days, and if and when vividness has returned to the world, we can return to making the lesser distinctions of which form of vividness is superior.
Weird(ing)ly enough I have been most attracted to some experience-supremacists' writing precisely because they seem like the most vivid abstractions around lately. Maybe I haven't been reading enough experience-supremacists to experience the full war or abstraction-less "touch grass" only kinds of writing—or maybe I am reading the perfect amount.
Venkat, I can't help but feel that you are muddling different axes of distinction in this essay.
To use as a vocabulary an abstraction you mention in the footnotes, MBTI, ostensibly you are arguing for a tradeoff (and implicit antipathy) between N and S (intuition vs sensation) But you also seem to be referring to I vs E (the inner experience vs the outer experience of life) and also the T vs F ( theories vs spiritual experiences).
But the real villain ("Soviet Harvard") isn't characterized by ANY of these really, it's their lack of VIVIDNESS, the quality that is the real hero of your piece!
VIVID abstractions and VIVID experiences both contribute to a healthy, thriving reality (of whatever flavour), while the dead, rote, regurgitated abstractions (and experiences!) supported by the IYI are merely attempts to cling to the status afforded by a moribund system.
I'd recommend that all people with something VIVID to contribute should be allies in these days, and if and when vividness has returned to the world, we can return to making the lesser distinctions of which form of vividness is superior.
Weird(ing)ly enough I have been most attracted to some experience-supremacists' writing precisely because they seem like the most vivid abstractions around lately. Maybe I haven't been reading enough experience-supremacists to experience the full war or abstraction-less "touch grass" only kinds of writing—or maybe I am reading the perfect amount.