Category: Philosophy

Posted on

History of the Relational Paradigm

It occurred to me that before Imago therapists came up with the idea of the relationship paradigm there were earlier attempts at the formulation.

I’ve mentioned Moreno and ‘tele’, Martin Buber and I-Thou today it occurred to me that Jung also had a concept for something similar: participation mystique. [Turns out I’ve written on this earlier in this post.]

Sure enough, I’m not the first to notice this.

Bridge to Unity – By MD Wilford W. Spradlin, Susan Renee Amazon

The connection between I-Thou and participation mystique is mentioned at least twice in this novel. I’ve also found thesis and other comments I’ll add in later posts.

Page 60:

Screen Shot 2012 10 12 at 2 29 41 PM

Page 96:

Screen Shot 2012 10 12 at 1 53 39 PM

Posted on

The Heidegger-Buber Controversy: The Status of the I-Thou

The Heidegger-Buber Controversy: The Status of the I-Thou (Contributions in Philosophy) [Hardcover]
Haim Gordon (Author)

Amazon

This book is $96 in kindle!

I’m curious.

Perhaps in line with my hypothesis that Moreno has a solution to the problem posed by I-Thou for knowing and research.

I’ve got the kindle sample.

From the blurb:

The I-Thou controversy between these two thinkers is a significant but often overlooked issue in philosophy and theology. In one of the first books to truly address the subject, Haim Gordon explores the arguments of both Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber regarding the The I-Thou relationship and its significance for human existence. Gordon’s work illuminates Heidegger’s complex and enlightening ontology–one that describes the everyday life of the human in such a way that there is no place for the I-Thou relationship. Buber, on the other hand, argues for the significance of the I-Thou relationship within human existence, and highlights the ways in which Heidegger’s philosophy fails to grasp this important point. After examining the fundamental ontology of Heidegger, set beside the ontological insights of Buber concerning this relationship, Gordon concludes that each of these important twentieth-century philosophers was guilty of ignoring the contributions made by the other to the study of ontology and being.

By exploring the complicated dynamic between Heidegger and Buber, Gordon presents the reader with valuable insights and a deeper understanding of human existence and relationships. The implications of both this controversy and its resolution are far reaching for many other philosophical disciplines, including social and political philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics.

Posted on

Klaus Krippendorff

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Krippendorff Wikipedia

Screen Shot 2012 10 07 at 2 11 28 PM

Amazon On Communicating: Otherness, Meaning, and Information [Paperback] Klaus Krippendorff (Author), Fernando Bermejo (Editor)

I’ve got the Kindle sample – looks interesting — the material available on Google books – pdf on the kindle – still can’t find the bit where he talks about the I-thou implications on research.

I did see that somewhere?

Yes, but the pages I saw are not available on the MacBook Pro – the iPad seemed to show them.

I might well buy the book. [ Later – Thursday, 11 October, 2012 – bought the Kindle version.]

A clip from the Google book on the Mac is followed by two I got on the iPad.

Dialogue

Photo

Photo

Posted on

Coevolution, invention, creation of the psyche – the relational paradigm

There is a flow in the evolution process.

Grass had to exist before grazing animals could evolve, they in turn had to precede carnivores.

These examples perhaps are best expressed in the principle of the “next adjacent possible”.

A brief digression: I recently ran across a novel way to think about this question. In evolutionary theory, there’s a concept called the “adjacent possible,” coined by scientist Stuart Kauffman.

From this blog.

The “adjacent possible” refers to the change that’s available to you — i.e. adjacent, next door – versus the change that’s not.

Screen Shot 2012 10 07 at 1 24 29 PM

From Stuart A. Kauffman — Reinventing The Sacred Amazon

The process is holistically connected to the mutual adaptations in each species. Grasses develop ways to survive grazing. Herbivores evolve capacity to run, and carnivores develop sharper teeth and claws.

This idea is sometimes captured with the phrase co-evolution (Wikipedia):

In biology, coevolution is “the change of a biological object triggered by the change of a related object.”[1] Coevolution can occur at many biological levels: it can be as microscopic as correlated mutations between amino acids in a protein, or as macroscopic as covarying traits between different species in an environment. Each party in a coevolutionary relationship exerts selective pressures on the other, thereby affecting each other’s evolution.

Earlier post exaptation, a related concept.

I’m imagining this whole process as envisage the world of the psyche. The changing nature of how we relate to our being. Everything from collective rituals, art, monks meditating in a cave, group therapy, psychoanalysis, conjoint family week and couple therapy.

The investigations above, summed up as:

  • Adjacent possible
  • Coevolution
  • Exaptation

Imagine how these apply to the coevolution/invention/creation of the psyche.

(Why I say evolution/invention/creation is evident from this post about psyche this post about the nature of the psyche, about how it is not a thing, yet not nothing either, is relevant.)

Freud was before Jung. The idea of an unconscious and a method of working with it that was possible in the world was available to Freud as a medical clinician.

Moreno was in part a reaction to Freud. Group therapy and conjoint therapy was possible.

Moreno and Buber had found or invented an idea about the nature of the person being in the relationship.

Hendrix is pioneering the ice that being is relationship.

The relational paradigm is the now a niche that has opened, a shift in the culture and new ways of attending the the psyche are possible.

Moreno’s idea that this could well transform science is also on the cards as an I-Thou relationship with things is also possible according to Buber.

Posted on

Colin Wilson online — Intentionality

Philosophy « Colin Wilson online:

One concept I recall from my Colin Wilson reading phase was Intentionality. This was one of the ideas I have stuck with as being useful. I associate it (rightly or wrongly) with Aldous Huxley and the “Doors of Perception”. We are capable of seeing far more than we do. We evolved to see everything and then evolved to select to see only what we need to survive. We can transcend our survival mode of perception with “intentionality”. I think that sums it up.

“Wilson has a sporting analogy for philosophy: ‘You could say on the billiard table of philosophy there are only two pockets – the positive and the negative. In philosophy, all kinds of people who belong to the negative side like David Hume, don’t really believe that the human will serves any purpose whatever. In other words it seems to me that in philosophy you’ve got people who believe that to a large extent, will really matters, and that we human beings have a certain control over our lives, and people who belong to the other side. And basically Derrida is one of these.’ He describes intentionality with another sporting analogy here: ‘Intentionality should not be seen as a synonym for ‘directionality’, an essentially static attribute, but as a dynamic description, involving consciousness and its freedom to act. It is better described by analogy with a baseball pitcher than with a signpost. Paul Ricoeur was the first to state this with clarity. I will suggest that Husserl saw intentionality as a creative act, capable of altering consciousness, and potentially as a kind of mystical discipline.’ That is to say, consciousness is active (perception is intentional). You can see this in Fitche’s statement ‘to be free is nothing; to become free is heavenly.’ This is completely opposed to the passive ‘signpost philosophy’ (semiotics) of Barthes and the ‘language speaks us’ of Derrida.

All of Wilson’s work is concerned with Husserl’s techniques [and Nietzsche’s optimism]. Not just his philosophy books though: the true crime paperbacks, the luridly covered supernatural volumes, the pulp fiction and even the books on booze or music are all in the positive pocket. In The New Existentialism he explains why – ‘Phenomenology is not a philosophy; it is a philosophical method, a tool. It is like an adjustable spanner that can be used for dismantling a refrigerator or a car, or used for hammering in nails, or even for knocking somebody out.’ (p.920).
In the seven volumes of his excellent ‘Outsider cycle’ (1956-1966), Wilson demonstrates the phenomenological method. ‘Husserl has shown that man’s prejudices go a great deal deeper than his intellect or his emotions. Consciousness itself is ‘prejudiced’ – that is to say, intentional.’ (ibid. p 54). So, in order to really experience phenomena, we have to grasp it, like a hand picking up an object. This selectivity is so deeply entrenched in our perceptions that we fail to see it operating and think that things just ‘happen’. But it is not so: perception is intentional, rather like an arrow fired by an archer. The illustration below shows this selectivity in action, as we can choose to see either the faces or the vase, rather like flipping a coin.

8cffed348cd1c3159cdbe16186324919

Posted on

Colin Wilson

Just got a bit carried away looking at Colin Wilson links on the web.
 
In about 1963 I read The Outsider and this changed my life – I was introduced in one fell swoop to a swag of existentialist philosophers and began reading in earnest.  Wilson became a sort of mentor as I’d look to what he said to get my bearings.  Then I began to loos interest… he was too developed in the intellect and not enough in rl.  He had ideas I thought were too mystical, not that I had any time for logical positivist I studied in depth at university or empirical approaches to psychology.  But he crossed a line in my opinion where he accepted too much magical bullshit.
 
But those were opinions I made of him in my 20s!  What do I make of him now, and of my own critiques back then?
 
Recalling him with a lot of gratefulness and delightful memories I just downloaded a swag of samples from Amazon.  Wow.
 
 
 
 

Ref=sib dp kd

Ref=sib dp kd

Ref=sib dp kd

Ref=sib dp kd

Ref=sib dp kd

Ref=sib dp kd

Posted on

The Silver Chord – Graphic Novel

I’m in the middle (still) of reading Kevin Kelly’s Book “What Technology Wants”. Enjoying it and finding it stimulating.

http://silver-cord.net/

I’m reading the CBZ file in Comic zeal on the iPad. Nice. I’m about 50 pages into the 250.

Finding the free graphic novel, is interesting as it sort of ties in with his other themes. It is si-fi and the links back to the science are fascinating. I learned about Roger Penrose who I’d never heard of. There is a big debate obviously about consciousness, but from the wikipedia article I tend to go with Penrose. Thee is something weird about consciousness. I have an instinctive disdain for the value of neuroscience for psychotherapy – not for neuroscience but for the value people see in it for psychotherapy. However quantum science could change everything once we get the hang of it.

Its well done, a big collaborative production – with an interesting Kick-starter project for volume two.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose

Penrose has written books on the connection between fundamental physics and human (or animal) consciousness. In The Emperor’s New Mind (1989), he argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. Penrose proposes the characteristics this new physics may have and specifies the requirements for a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics (what he calls correct quantum gravity). Penrose uses a variant of Turing’s halting theorem to demonstrate that a system can be deterministic without being algorithmic. (E.g., imagine a system with only two states, ON and OFF. The system’s state is ON if a given Turing machine halts, and OFF if the Turing machine does not halt, then the system’s state is completely determined by the Turing machine, however there is no algorithmic way to determine whether the Turing machine stops.)

Pages22

Posted on

I am nature

I am nature triptych

Posted a few on my other blog in the last week or two… on a theme – nature and how thinks relate to their past origins.

I am as it were in a slow almost imperceptible meditation on the word “inevitable”. The art of finding a way through the maze of the possible. Certain turns forfeit possibilities but open others. Beed reading E O Wilson on all this. Pigs can’t fly.

~~~

Later Sunday, 28 January, 2018

This 4 years before http://kk.org/books/the-inevitable/

Posted on

Critical theory – mashup

Just exploring a few rethinks I don’t understand…

Mimetics

http://www.mimetics.com/theory.html

“By answering the question concerning technology with a sensuous mimetic account of presubjective embodied agency, Benjamin opens a path that can help technocultural critics dispel their residual (and, as I have argued, largely unthematized) commitment to representationalism.

Pre-subjective

From the Wikipedia page on Tonino Griffero

Whereas Heidegger’s moods always presuppose a subjective response, we see atmospheres (in this provocative, anti-subjective sense) not as internal feelings of an individual or metaphors but as pre-subjective feelings, as spatially extended emotions.

I can’t yet make sense of that.

Mimetics seems to relate to Dawkins memes – see Wikipedia but the idea I’m pursuing here is more related to…

Mimesis

Wikipedia.

In ancient Greece, mimesis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art, in particular, with correspondence to the physical world understood as a model for beauty, truth and the good. Plato contrasted mimesis, or imitation, with diegesis, or narrative. After Plato, the meaning of mimesis eventually shifted toward a specifically literary function in ancient Greek society, and its use has changed and been re-interpreted many times since then.

This is interesting too…

The Frankfurt school critical theorist T.W. Adorno made use of mimesis as a central philosophical term, interpreting it as a way in which works of art embodied a form of reason that was non-repressive and non-violent.[2]

Benjamin was of that school, was he not? Makes me think the opening quote really should read Mimesis.

This exploration stems from reading an interview in Mousse magazine 34 with Amy Balkin

atp: Are you also interested in the pre-subjective and in rendering it transparent?

ab: Yes, I’m influenced by how Philip K. Dick’s characters build models or prefigurative spaces. These can be nostalgic, like Dick’s “babylands” of the super-rich, who build and curate satellite demesnes to mimic a specific lost place and time of their childhood (e.g. Washington, D.C. in 1935), or the miniaturized “layouts” of off-world settlers forcibly evicted to colonize Mars, where a proxy experience of a day out in pre-climate change San Francisco is accessed through drug-enhanced “translation,” but experientially structured by the interior decor of a miniature home layout.

“A model provides a vision to inhabit, whether for a desired political future or a nostalgic past, or some combination of these—a form of continuity. So the pre-subjective could be about the possible experience of a future loss of the familiar via climate change—familiar birds and plants,
landscapes or food, or the familiar in terms of ideas of shared spaces or notions of experiential commonality, whether as a park or some formulation for an equitably shared space. So perhaps the question for me would be about a commons as a way forward versus nostalgia for a kind of shared land and resource use that was historically situation-specific.

This makes more sense, but I’m still not really a member of this discourse domain.

Was that story by Philip K Dick the basis for True Lies? No, I think the reference is to Now wait for last year but is could have been, seems like they pinched a few ideas. And they did use a Philip K Dick story for the other Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall. Perhaps the novel and the short story have a similar theme.

__________________________________________________

The following serendipitously found its way here…

Part of recent explorations in In this moment… my art blog

13 Tobey Crystallizations obraz do artykułu

Proudly powered by WordPress