There are a number of ideas that I would like to quickly summarize within the confines of this essay, at least one of which is brand new for me, others which have been with me for varying lengths of time -- 10, 20, 30, even 40 years.
Let's start with the brand new idea. I heard an NBA player on tv the other day talking about an 'arc' in a player's evolutionary development.
I said to myself, 'Now there is an idea that I like -- and well worthy of bringing into the creative mix of Hegel's Hotel.'
Being 55 years old, and partly in the midst of a 'post-mid-life crisis', also having battled the flu for going on 3 weeks now, one gets some personal insight into the idea of 'organismic efficiency and inefficiency'.
Facebook provides a rare insight in terms of 'the juxtaposition of different generations' all on the same social network, and often 'chatting' side by side in the same venue, fully illustrating some of the different 'subjective frames of interest' that go hand in hand with the different generations, the different age groups.
It's like the book 'Passages' for anyone who might remember and/or read that book when it first came out. Extrapolating from this book, we can distinguish between 'unique, individual mindsets', 'cultural mindsets', 'political mindsets', 'religious mindsets', 'economic mindsets -- and 'generaltional mindsets'.
Referring to the latter, I look at the lates 'profile picture' of my son and his new girlfriend, or a day or so previously, my son and his cousin, and they look like 'models off the cover of a magazine'. (For this oldtimer, I think of The Rolling Stones song, 'Little Queenie', written by Chuck Berry...
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Chuck Berry)
I got the lumps in my throat
When I saw her coming down the aisle
I gets the wiggles in my knees
When she looked at me and sweetly smiled
There she is again standing over by the record machine
Oooh, she's looking like a model on the cover of a magazine
Why she's too cute to be a minute over seventeen
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Juxtaposed beside these pictures are the generally much less flattering pictures (I will speak for myself primarily here because some of my friends look much better than I do, and after it is all said and done, it is the underlying relationship that still stands the test of time some 10, 20, 30, or even 40 years later and beyond that is a much better barometer of the relationship than the 'shock of the aging process' that we see in both ourselves and our friends who we may have known as far back as when we were kids in high school, or when we worked together at a time when the testosterone and estrogen was 'filling the air'... (and had pictures to rival the ones that we now see in our kids 20 or 30 years later).
You look back at some of the 'peak moments' in your life -- let's use the barometer of 'phsyical energy, skills, and achievement' here for the moment -- in my own case, back to a time when I ran-walked one of the early 'Miles for Millions' marathons that at the time was more than 30 miles (not kilometres), in about 6 hours, or 'led off a baseball game by hitting an 80 mile an hour fast ball for a homerun at a park that I still go by now and again at Islingtion and Bloor in the west end of Toronto... Or when I caught a softball in a company pick up game, racing straight back and catching it over my head like the 'famous Willie Mays World Series catch' (well, maybe I didn't travel quite that far back but I had a cup of beer in my other hand!)...
We all can do the same if we want to travel down memory lane...
But anyways, you may start to get the idea of what is meant by 'the arc of life (and death)' -- the idea that we start life in a more or less 'chaotic state', a bundle full of largely unorganized energy except relative to those 'needs' that are 'most pertinent' and 'figural' to a newborn baby who is trying to stay alive...
In tennis, I heard the other day, that a professional tennis player generally peaks around 24 years old -- this is generally the top of his or her 'tennis arc' -- and by 29 this arc is generally on a 'downward movement towards more energy inefficiency'' as younger, more 'energy efficient' players generally start to take their place at the 'top of the tennis arc'. Rafael Nadel is 24 years old right now and ranked the number 1 tennis player in the world; he took over 'the top of the arc' from the previous number 1 tennis player, Roger Federer, who is now ranked number 2 in the world, and who dominated the tennis scene in his younger 20s. He is 29 years old right now.
Now, there will always be those excpetions of people who somehow manage to defy the 'normal age barrriers' but usually they have to do it through 'extra hard work', or in some cases, partly with 'money'.
You take what I just said about the 'arc of life' -- and in some cases we may even be able to talk about 'two or more arcs of life' -- and now you go back to some of Freud's earliest influences from 'physics', laws that he learned about 'Thermogenics' -- primarily, 1. 'The Conservation of Energy'; and 2. 'Entropy' -- and you can see how these two laws affected/influenced his work throughout his life, even after he had long left the study of physics.
The idea that I have been discussing above pertaining to 'the arc of life' is associated with the law of entropy -- the idea 'that we come from the earth when we are born and we return to the earth when we die'. ('Dust unto dust...')
I don't profess to be any particular religious follower, other than for comparisons and contrasts in ideas, but in this case, science and religion at least partly meet...
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Dust Thou Art, and Unto Dust Shalt Thou Return
Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Genesis 3:17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
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Entropy...From Wikipedia...
Entropy is a thermodynamic property that is a measure of the energy not available for useful work in a thermodynamic process, such as in energy conversion devices, engines, or machines. Such devices can only be driven by convertible energy, and have a theoretical maximum efficiency when converting energy to work. During this work entropy accumulates in the system, but has to be removed by dissipation in the form of waste heat.
The concept of entropy is defined by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of a closed system always increases. Thus, entropy is also measure of the tendency of a process, such as a chemical reaction, to be entropically favored, or to proceed in a particular direction. It determines that thermal energy always flows spontaneously from regions of higher temperature to regions of lower temperature, in the form of heat. These processes reduce the state of order of the initial systems, and therefore entropy is an expression of disorder or randomness. This model is the basis of the microscopic interpretation of entropy in statistical mechanics describing the probability of the constituents of a thermodynamic system to be occupying accessible quantum mechanical states, a model directly related to the information entropy.
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dgb...
Unless you have studied physics seriously, I don't expect you to understand all of this -- I certainly don't -- but it gives you the gist of what 'entropy' is all about: the idea of energy being lost in an energy-producing system over time due to increasing inefficiency in the system -- and thus, an increase in the 'waste of incoming raw potential energy' that is less and less efficiently turned into 'work or kinetic energy'', due to such things as 'aging', 'oxidation', the breakdown of organ systems and their processes, decreases in cell production, changes in cell structure, and 'the arc of life'...
Ain't life peachy....If you are my age, or closing in on it, look what you have to look forward to....if you are my parents age, then you know by personal experience how much worse it can get...but I don't think I need to worry about getting to their age...I'm still skeptical that I will make 60.
So let us turn our attention away from 'physical energy' and into the realm of 'mental energy' -- like Freud did in his early professional years.
Fortunately, in the realm of 'mental energy', I think we all have the potential for a much longer 'arc of life'. The memory cells may be fewer and further between -- less efficient than they used to be in my best 'dispatching years' -- but still, in terms of mental energy, I stil feel like I am 'at the top of my game, the top of my arc', especially when you add the accumulation of valuable knowledge and experience that you potentially gain with every new day of life. As long as you can still do something with it...
What does 'Gap' mean in 'Gap-DGB' Psychology and Personality Theory?
It is a very important part of the equation here and can be associated to 'Nietzsche's Abyss' -- the abyss that separates 'being' from 'becoming'.
'Gap' also refers to the gap that separates 'potential energy' from 'kinetic energy'.
How efficient is my 'energy conversion'?
How efficient is your energy conversion?
I have a thought in my head. Consider my thought to be 'potential energy'.
As soon as my thought -- in the case of this essay -- has been comitted to paper in an organized and coherent fashion, then a 'bridge' has been built, and travelled over, between potential energy and kinetic energy, between being and becoming.
I have traversed over top of Nietzsche's Abyss.
If my essay falls through,
Or in any other life goal,
There isn't a successful conversion of potential energy into kinetic energy.
Then we can say,
That there was a 'fall into Nietzsche's Abyss',
Although you can fall into Nietzsche's Abyss by acting 'non-prudently' as well,
But in general,
The rise of the 'Superman' or 'Superwoman',
Requires a 'successful transference of potential energy to meaningful kinetic energy -- and successful love and/or work.'
Now what does the 'DGB' stand for...
Aside from the initials of my name,
'DGB', as you can see at the bottom of most of my essays,
Stands for 'Dialectic-Gap-Bridging'...
In other words, it stands for traversing over top of Nietzsche's Abyss...
From converting potential energy to kinetic energy,
From converting being to becoming...
It stands for a measure of 'energy conversion efficiency'...
And defeating entropy...
-- Another Nietzschean Abyss...
-- Has, for the moment,
-- Been Successfully,
-- Traversed...
