Part 1: Existence and Consciousness
Floor 1: Basement: Prologue
The following essay is a modified, updated, and extended version of my 1979 Honours Thesis in Psychology at The University of Waterloo. I am proud to say that my professor, sponsor, and marker back in 1979 was Dr. Donald Meichenbaum who has since become a Canadian Leader in Clinical Psycholgy specializing in 'Cognitive-Behavior Modification' interventions.
A lot of theoretical changes, modifications, and extensions have taken place in my thinking and in my writing since I was a young and idealistic 24 years old in 1979 (not to mention the underlying life changes that have contributed greatly to these theoretical changes).
In 1979, I had just barely been exposed to the concept of 'dialectic thinking' which is now the central focus of my thinking and writing. The focus up to 1979 in my thinking and my writing was a two-fold combination of 'Post-Enlightenment Rational-Empiricism (Cognitive Therapy, General Semantics...)' and 'Humanistic-Existentialism (Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers...').
Through the 1980s, I became much more exposed and familiar with the concepts and applications of Gestalt Therapy, Adlerian Psychology, Psychoanalysis (Classic, Object Relations, and Self Psychology), Jungian Psychology, Transactional Analysis...and the underlying 'double-edged' philosophical influence of Hegel and Nietzsche behind all of these 'dialectic' and 'humanistic-existential' schools of psychology.
When I finished my Honours Thesis in 1979, I knew that I had a lot more research and theoretical work to do to get into the 'deeper realm of the unconscious influences' (which I now call 'transference-archetype templates, complexes, and neuroses'), on here-and-now thinking, but even now, in 2010, the basic 'rational-empirical' foundation laid down in this essay contributes much to what is now 'Hegel's Hotel: The Multi-Dialectic (Bi-Polar) Humanistic-Existentialist'.
-- dgb, Nov. 30th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
.......................................................
Floor 2: Main Lobby: Introduction
The value judgments we make determine our actions, and upon their validity rests our mental health and happiness. -- Erich Fromm, 1947.
The issue of values and value judgments (or evaluations) represents a critical problem in regard to man's life.
On the one hand, man if free to evaluate and to respond to the situations he is confronted with in his day to day life as he or she pleases (usually within the context of what he or she has learned up to that point in the course of his or her life). But on the other hand, man is not free from the very real consequences that these evaluations, choices, and actions will have (or won't have) on his natural and/or social environment, and the consequences that will in turn come back to him or her via these consequences on his/her environment.
The following two 'cosmic truisms' are very applicable to anyone's evolving life.
What goes around comes around.
For every action there is a reaction.
A person's evaluations (which are built on top of his or her epistemological sensory perceptions and interpretations) can be said to be 'effective' or 'functional' to the extent that they are 'life-serving' -- that is, they work towards promoting a person's health and/or happiness.
Conversely, a person's evaluations can be said to be 'ineffective' or 'dysfunctional' to the extent that they are 'life-negating' -- that is, they work towards 'sabotaging' the person's health and/or happiness.
Now, being more of a 'skeptical, cynical realist and post-modern deconstructionist' in 2010, as opposed to the 'young, naive idealist' that I was in 1979, I look back at the last two paragraphs and I see clearly that these statements are not quite as 'rosy' and 'clear' as they were to me when I initially wrote them in 1979, under the dual influence of Nathaniel Branden and Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand was in the midst of building her 'Objective' epistemological and ethical system which she appropriately came to name -- 'Objectivism'.
By 1979, Rand had already completed two of her 'fictional-philosophical' masterpieces, 'The Fountainhead' (1943), and 'Atlas Shrugged'(1957), in which she laid down her Capitalistic Ideals that she would later blend into her more general philosophy of Objectivism.
But even back between 1974 and 1979, I was getting the beginning of my 'dialectic exposure' even though I hadn't tagged it with that particular label yet. For as well as receiving my father's Capitalistic influence -- who introduced me to the philosophy of Ayn Rand through 'The Fountainhead', and later the philosophy of Adam Smith -- still, at the same time I was reading Erich Fromm's 'Escape From Freedom' (1941), and 'Man For Himself' (1947), and 'The Sane Society' (1955) that introduced me to Fromm's 'Post-Marxian-Post-Freudian-Humanistic-Existential Philosophy'.
The potential and reality for at least partly 'opposite thinking' in epistemological, ethical, econonomic, and/or political philosophy between two very well known and well respected living philosophers at the time sparked the beginning of what would eventually, for me, become the beginning of 'dialectically integrative thinking and philosophy-psychology-ecomomics-politics...' in the 1980s.
The question for me at the time was starting to become: 'How do you understand and account for the seemingly opposite thinking in two polar opposite -- and yet both logically intelligent, rational-empirical, humanistic-existential -- philosophers'; and beyond this, 'How do you potentially integrate the results of their polar-opposite thinking?'...
These two types of dialectic questions would come to dominate my own 'Subjective-Objective', 'Humanistic-Existential', 'Capitalistic-Socialistic', 'Liberal-Conservative, 'Freudian-Adlerian-Jungian-Gestalt' brand of 'Post-Hegelian Multi-Dialectic Philosophy-Psychology-Economics-Politics...'
But a lot of years -- and a lot of ideas -- would have to pass between 1979 and what I am writing now in 2010.
In 1979, I was just getting the ball rolling...
In 1979, I was just starting the preliminary architecture of 'Hegel's Hotel'...
In 1979, I was just a young guy in the woods of Western History, Culture, and Evolution, starting to stretch out his/my own cognitive faculties based on my very limited life experiences and what I was reading and hearing taught to me...
A thousand essays later and Hegel's Hotel is still not completely built, probably never will be, but it is getting closer to what I continue to envision...as the architecture and construction -- metaphorically speaking -- continues to be filled in, and continues to reach higher and higher into the sky...
How do you integrate Rand's 'Objectivism' with Nietzsche's brand of epistemological and ethical 'Subjectivism' or 'Individual Relativism'?
A banker, a poverty political activist, a playboy, and an artist all walk into the same cocktail party and none of them are likely to 'see' the same things...
We are all individually -- and 'narcissistically' -- biased (based on our own constantly evolving ideas, opinions, beliefs, values, feelings, impulses and restraints).
However, 'Subjectivism' or 'Individual Relativism' -- Nietzsche style -- can only take us so far. If I cross a busy street and don't see a car turning the corner and aiming right at me, with the driver not seeing me, I could be in tomorrow's obituary column...or if I, and/or my tragedy, am/is considered by a newspaper writer and/or editor to be important enough, I might even get a first or second page article...
But I won't be around to find out where I ended up in the newspaper, or if I arrived there at all, because the difference between life and death can often be only a matter of a second or two of timing...
And if my subjective, individualistic, narcissistic timing is off by even a second or two when a car is racing towards me, the driver not seeing me, or unable to apply the brakes in time, or an ex-girlfriend 'confusing' the gas with brakes...then my 'Subjective, Relativistic Philosophy' has been steamrolled under the more 'Objective Cosmic Forces of Life and Death' and/or someone else's 'Subjective, Relativisitic Epistemology and/or Ethical -- mistake, or act of Epistemological and/or Ethical judgment (or lack thereof).
In our day to day world, life and death involves a constant 'dialectic collision' between 'subjective-narcissistic' and 'more objective' (and/or other 'subjective-narcissistic') forces.
Kant's 'noumenal'(objective) and 'phenomenal'(subjective) world are constantly colliding even if man will never know perfectly just exactly what it is that is in his 'noumenal/objective' world. He still has to strive for a 'good enough' epistemological and ethical 'fit'.
Fritz Perls, the (co-)founder of Gestalt Therapy, fittingly called this the 'fitting game'.
Alfred Korzybski, one of the best (and philosophically least known) epistemologists in the history of Western Philosophy, created his school of 'General Semantics' as a 'cognitive toolbox' for people to better learn how to play life's various '(epistemological and ethical) (subjective-objective) fitting games'.
This essay here is a continuation and an extension of Korzybski's (and later S.I. Hayakawa's) General Semantic, language, and epistemology work, as well as the 'Cognitive Theory and Therapy' ('epistemological fitting game work') of writers such as Beck, Kelly, Ellis, and Meichenbaum, as well as the political-economic philosophies ('economic-political fitting game work') of Branden, Rand and Fromm, and the 'ethical fitting game work' of other Humanistic-Existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Binswanger, Heidegger, Sartre, and Rollo May...
The two main principles that are slowly starting to be built here are:
1. The principle of 'post-Enlightenment-rational-empirical-egalitarian-humanistic-existentialism';
2. The principle of 'bi-polarity', 'dialectic interaction and negotiation between bi-polar extremes', and 'ideally evolving/resulting homeostatic-dialectic balance between bi-polar extremes in epistemology, ethics, politics, economics, and/or whatever other human endeavor we wish to partake in...
I hope that I have sufficiently 'grabbed your attention' to continue to motivate you to follow through with me on this 1979 to 2010 description of the 'original architecture and still evolving structure' of -- Hegel's Hotel.
-- dgb, Nov. 30th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism...
