Tag: metaphor

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Can the Empire survive? I doubt it!

Excellent site. Puts the whole business in perspective.

The American Empire Project:

Americans have long believed that the very notion of empire is an offense against our democratic heritage, yet in recent months, these two words — American empire — have been on everyone’s lips. At this moment of unprecedented economic and military strength, the leaders of the United States have embraced imperial ambitions openly. How did we get to this point? And what lies down the road?

Recent good article:

Is America Hooked on War? – CBS News

This is a good article too, though I wonder if addition is the right metaphor? It implies that if you went into recovery youd have a new rich life. The imperialism is more like food and water for capitalism than a drug. No imperialism, no USA as we know it. And it will come sooner than we think.

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One

McLuhan (Wikipedia) said the computer was the extension of the brain, in the same way the wheel was an extension of the legs. Prosthesis. Kevin Kelly (podcast) has taken this a step further. The web, the cloud, the one connected machine, is an extension of the self. Well done. Everything is out there in that cloud.

But self? What is self?

Via negativia, it is not the thoughts, not the sensations, not even the breath as air interfaces with the body, it is not the body. Psychodrama postulates the personality as the sum of our roles and more than the sum of the parts, and each role is part of a system of networked roles. I’m tempted to say the self is our networked roles, and that they are extended into the net. Useful as that idea might be it is not the self.

And does self have a small or a capital S? to place the notion in a Jungian frame, self or Self? Another word for “me” or an archetype?

Is it the self that dreams?

The self is what’s left when we drop the ego?

It is not so much a mystery, but a difficult thing to talk about. Psyche, soul, self, spirit all these things are usually appended to a tradition of language, they are hard to talk about without metaphor, as there is no “thing”. Soul, in the Archetypal psychology tradition is somewhat different from soul the Christian tradition. Ken Wilber tried to typologise it all, usefully?

For all that, Kevin Kelly’s contribution adds something wonderful to the sphere of discourse. And via negativia, something similar happens in cyberspace as in the age old discourse about Self. Is the Net the hardware? It is not the hardware. Is it the software then? Certainly not one particular bit of software, and not really all of it either. The net involves people, it is between people, perhaps it is people mediated by the net. It is a conversation, one conversation.

One. There may be a few small clouds but to be really part of anything is to be connected to the net, to the one big cloud. One net. Hold that idea and reflect on the collective unconscious. Also hold the idea that all life is expression of one unfolding DNA fest. And then note the religious idea we are all one.

Once again I am at a familiar place, psyche & cyberspace resonate, psyberspace.

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Eric Voegelin & Participatory Consciousness

quoted in

The Philosopher and the Storyteller
By Charles R. Embry

The symbols do not refer to structures in the external world but to the existential movement in the metaxy from which they mysteriously emerge as the exegesis of the movement in intelligibly expressive language. Their meaning can be said to he understood only if they have evoked in the listener or reader the corresponding movement of participatory consciousness. Their meaning, thus, is not simply a matter of semantic understanding; one should rather speak of their meaning as optimally fulfilled when the movement they evoke in the recipient consciousness is intense and articulate enough to form the existence of its Human bearer and to draw him, in his or her turn, into the loving quest of truth.

google books

Amazon

I found it fascinating that through the words participatory consciousness the dialogue and archetypal psychology – with its notion of metaxy come together.

Careful reading of the passage points to the responsibility of the sender. Sending might involve beauty. In imago we are asked to listen to some ugly sends! Fair enough, but what if they were works of art?

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Entanglement

I continue to hold an hypothesis that the behaviour of particles is a microcosm of human relationships. Not just as a metaphor, but that something of the “tele” involved is the same in both levels.

Listening to this podcast from Nights on RNZ confirms and extends this hypothesis. But hypothesis aside – it is ASTOUNDING stuff!

Synchronistically I just had this one arrive from the BBC IOT, have not listened yet.

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Plato’s Metaxy

I have several earlier posts about this but the link where I quote this particular essay has gone dead. Searching on a snippet I found the whole (?) item on a Japanese website. I don’t know the author or original source. The old dead link might be a clue:

http://info.bethany.wvnet.edu/wsimmons/Metaxy.html

I now have a Metaxy tag, which should bring up all relevant posts, though search works too.

tianya.cn

The whole item follows:

Continue reading “Plato’s Metaxy”

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Reason: You’d Have to Be Crazy: Mental illness is the new normal

Reason: You’d Have to Be Crazy: Mental illness is the new normal:

In the sketch Steve Martin plays Theodoric of York, a medieval barber with a patient whose condition has not improved despite a bloodletting, a sheep’s-urine-and-staghorn poultice, and a night buried in the marsh up to her neck. ‘Medicine is not an exact science,’ Theodoric tells the girl’s mother, ‘but we are learning all the time. Why, just fifty years ago, they thought a disease like your daughter’s was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach.

That funny bit makes its point well. As does this more serious bit:

Judging from the way psychiatrists respond to Szasz’s critique, most of them believe schizophrenia and perhaps a few other conditions described in the DSM are diseases of the brain in the same sense as Alzheimer’s or multiple sclerosis, albeit with etiologies that are not yet clear. But when it comes to habits and traits such as smoking, gambling, gluttony, shyness, impulsiveness, inattentiveness, dishonesty, and nastiness—not to mention diagnoses that have fallen out of psychiatric fashion, such as homosexuality and multiple personality disorder even psychiatrists recognize the arbitrariness of their taxonomy.

In my eyes psychotherapy is a way of talking about the psyche that is nothing to do with health or illness, it is a way of reclaiming a holistic account of the self that was provided by religion and superstition and in the past. The language of medicine distorts the holistic endeavour.

Later Saturday, 6 February, 2010

Metaxy.

How does the “way of talking” relate to science? I think it is something of value, even if it is full of “dormative hypothesis”.

My defense of the dormative hypothesis (ie that it is not so bad if seen in the right way) is that it is a poem, and that poems are a way of compressing and making order. Making order is a form of science.

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