Everyone brings a perspective to the table, an angle, a point of view, a proposed direction of movement, a 'Will to Power'...We have seen this at least as far back as Plato's 'The Symposium'...
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From Wikipedia....
The Symposium (Ancient Greek: Συμπόσιον) is a philosophical text by Plato dated c. 385–380 BCE.[1] It concerns itself at one level with the genesis, purpose and nature of love.
Love is examined in a sequence of speeches by men attending a symposium, or drinking party. Each man must deliver an encomium, a speech in praise of Love (Eros). The party takes place at the house of the tragedian Agathon in Athens. Socrates in his speech asserts that the highest purpose of love is to become a philosopher or, literally, a lover of wisdom. The dialogue has been used as a source by social historians seeking to throw light on life in ancient Athens, in particular upon sexual behavior, and the symposium as an institution.
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dgb...
Sorry ladies, there were no women present at The Symposium...a statement of the male-dominated, patriarchal times that would spread over thousands of year of Western history, culture, philosophy and politics....It would be a long, long time before the first female philosopher would make made her presence known in Western culture, specifically between 1759 and 1797 with the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, arguably the first recognized 'feminist' in Western Philosophy. This is not to say that women didn't wield significant power behind the scenes relative to men's thoughts and actions...but none of these influences have been historically documented...at least from a philosophical perspective until Mary Wollstonecraft came along and said that 'Mind has no sex' and therefore rights are not determined by gender -- a shocking new idea even amongst so-called 'liberal, Enlightenment' philosophers...
In Plato's time, 'slaves' were taken for granted and they would be a part of Western civilization right up to the movement towards 'The American Civil War'...
'Democracy' is the collision -- and the purposeful egalitarian negotiation -- of a wide assortment of often strong, individual 'Wills to Power'...
Democracy has always been both the process and the outcome of an often very 'unstable', 'fleeting', and/or 'pseudo-for-public-appearance-only-symposium' among men...and more lately, women...which can be, and oftentimes is, at least partly compromised if not completely toxified and corrupted, by a 'strong undercurrent' of a domant sub-group of men and/or women who still very much 'want their own way'....and may even have their own pressing 'hidden agenda' that never, ever reaches the 'symposium table'...and/or makes its covert appearance after The Symposium...
Such is the difference between a 'democracy' and a 'pseudo-democracy' that puts on a front, a personna, or appearance of 'democracy' for the public masses, even though the real power, or a significant portion of it, is wielded in private rooms behind closed doors...
There will always be a collision in power between an 'individual's will to power' vs. a 'group's will to power', with a wide assortment of possible different 'group wills to power' depending on the size, the individual make-up, and the individual contributions of particular members within the group...
For example, there could be a general consensus and agreement of the majority of a group of politicians -- even amongst different political parties -- to create a new 'pubic tax', or to keep hidden the exact particulars of all individual politicians 'expense accounts'...but come election time....in a 'representative democracy'...if the democracy is working right, these same politicians could be voted out of office by the 'larger voting public'...for doing what they did when the public had no vote...
-- dgb, Nov. 10th, 2010
-- David Gordon Bain
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Some Important DGB Analytic-Therapeutic Technical Terms, Concepts, Distinctions...
You won't find most of these distinctions in most of the common psychotherapeutic literature...except in different, smaller pieces...
But they are important to what I see as the potential therapeutic dynamics of DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis...
1. An 'Existential Analysis'...
Pertaining to the here-and-now...as opposed to the 'there-and-then' of past childhood, teenage, and/or adult experience, desire, and/or trauma... Focusing in on such things as work, love, romance, sex, family, stability, rootedness, passion, self-idealism, growth and self-actualization, depth of insight into current problems, conflicts, and potential solutions, as well as direction and degree of action to solve these problems and conflicts in order to keep growing....
2. An 'Existential -- or Gestalt Existential -- Hotseat (or Psychodrama)'...
A 'therapeutic acting out' of current existential issues, conflicts, problems in a way that 'emotionally brings these issues' back in tighter and closer to the heart...so they can't be simply 'abstractified away' with words and/or intellect...'Psychodrama' utilizes other people in the therapeutic group to play out different roles in the individual participant's 'existential issues' whereas 'The Gestalt Hotseat and Empty Chair Technique' utilizes the individual participant's own 'projections' to play out as many 'invisible characters' as he or she needs to in order to bring some meaningful type of 'conflict resolution' to the therapeutic exercise....
3. A Freudian or (Modified Post-Freudian) 'Transference Analysis'...
A comparison -- and contrast -- of past 'there-and-then' (usually childhood) events, memories, perceptions, interpretations, judgments, feelings, impulses, and/or relationships with current, here-and-now ones...
4. A Freudian-Gestalt Transference Hot Seat (or Freudian-Satir Transference Psychodrama)...
Similar to an 'Existential Hot Seat' except with an emphasis on 'Childhood Transference Psycho-Dynamics' and how they weave themselves into our 'Here-And-Now'...
5. A Freudian-Adlerian 'Transference-Lifestyle Analysis and/or Hotseat'
A 'modified transference analysis and/or hotseat utilzing both Freudian and Adlerian concepts (e.g., 'lifestyle', 'conscious early memories', 'inferiority feelings', 'superiority striving' and/or 'superiority feelings, and 'compensation') and modified concepts like 'projective transferences', 'lifestyle transferences', 'introjective transferences', and 'compensatory transferences'...Originally, i used the term 'GAP (Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic') Hotseat and Therapy Work, now 'DGB' or 'GAP-DGB' Quantum Psychoanalytic...
The name is less important than the quality and the meaninfulness of the potential psychotherapeutic work...but I need some sort of distingishing name that separates my work here from everything else that is out there...
I feel comfortable with any of GAP or DGB or GAP-DGB Psychology or Quantum Psychoanalysis...
I work the 'GAPS' between other schools of psychology and psychotherapy as well as the 'gaps' -- or 'chasms' or 'abysses' -- between our 'self-images' and our 'self-ideals' because it is here that we generate our greatest sense of 'self-depression, self-rage, and self-crucification' or alternatively, 'self-celebration'...
It is here that we need to do our main work aimed at 'closing or bridging the gaps, the chasms, the Nietzschean abysses...between being and not being, between being and becoming, between the Archetype of Jesus Christ working as the 'Master of All Self-Healers' as opposed to tumbling into, or purposely choosing, 'Self-Crucification'...'Self-Victimization'...'Self-Martyrdom'...as in the 'Archetype Idealization and Pathology' of 'The Suicide Bomber'...who takes out as many people as he or she can take with him or her...in the movement towards meeting his or her perceived and fantasized 'Maker'...
It is this latter type of more 'mythological' work with 'archetypes' and 'symbols' that I call:
6. 'A Freudian-Jungian Archetype-Transference Analysis and/or Hot Seat...
Which simply, as stated above, utilizes a combination of 'mythological archetype symbols' and 'transference work'...
The difference then, in my vocabulary, between a Transference Analysis and an Archetype Analysis is the utilization of 'personal memories' vs. 'mythological symbols' towards the same end -- the self-celebration of the individual and the human personality towards a happier, healthier, more meaningful and self-sastisfying existence...
One of my main purposes in conducting this type of psychotherapeutic approach is to 're-own' the 'projections' of 'The God or Gods' that we look into the sky for...and help us realize that these same 'God-Archetype Figures' are also Within Us...meant to be utilized as 'Internal GuidePosts' of the Psyche, Self, and Soul' as long as the 'Jesus Christ Archetype' of our 'Central Mediating Ego' is acting as 'Self-Healer' and not as 'Self-Crucifier' and/or 'The Crucifier of Others'...
That is just about where 'DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis' stands today once we have also factored in 'The Family Dynamics Mandala' of Our Early Transference Memories, Encounters, Relationships...and 'Repetition Compulsion' ('Obsessive-Compulsive-Addictive-or-Avoidant') Complexes...
That, we will leave for another day...
Some final comments here...
1. 'Heaven' and 'Hell' are often right beside each other in the deepsest abyss or Underground of our Psyche, Self, and Soul...
2. Often we have to go through 'Hell' to get to 'Heaven'...
3. In DGB Quantum (Post-Jungian) Psychoanalysis, the 'Holy Trinity' of 'The Father', 'The Son', and 'The Holy Ghost' is The Holy Trinity of a) 'The Central Ego' (The Jesus Christ Archetype of 'Self-Healer'), b) The Genetic, Unactualized or Partly Actualized and Partly Unactualized, Individually Unique Template of The Self-Soul' (The Archetype of God), and 'The Shadow' (The Archetype of The Holy Ghost which often needs to be 'detoxified' of its potentially 'toxic' components before it is 'actualized' through The Central Ego...Failure to do so can sometimes breed the worst evils of mankind...)
4. The Ultimate Celebration of The Individual and/or The Dialectical, Engaging Man is 'The Internal Meeting of The Father, Son, and The Holy Ghost...or worded otherwise, 'The Central Ego, The Self-Soul, and The Shadow'...with 'Dionysus' providing the dance music, the alcohol, the sensuality, and the celebration of The God-Archetype-Self-Soul...(Nietzsche, 'The Birth of Tragedy')
5. 'God' in the Roman-Christian sense can also be viewed as the 'Ultimate Integration of All Greek and Roman Gods' and all things human (and projected externally into 'God' and/or 'Gods')...
6. The 're-ownership and worship of 'God' is the ownership of Archetypes, Mythological Symbols, and The Celebration of The Actualization and Fulfillment of The Self-Soul...
7. 'Heaven' in this particular approach can be viewed as the celebration of the actualization of our 'Self-Soul' which can be viewed as both a part of God, and also, God's Ultimate Unique Creative Gift to each of us that we need to creatively apply to our lives in order to properly live out our 'partly God-scripted, partly unscripted' destiny...
What this is, in effect, is an integration of religion and humanistic-existentialism. Humanistic-existentialism wants no part of a 'God' -- such as the Christian God taught in the organized religion that Nietzsche was protesting against -- that people believe teaches 'self-denial' and 'self-sacrifice', 'blind faith and authoritatianism' and 'submission' to this blind faith and authoritarianism to the extent of 'denying one's own reason and rationality, one's own rational-empiricism...and one's own pursuit of health and happiness'. 'Don't worry if your life is a living death -- you will be rewarded in the 'afterlife' -- in 'Heaven'. This is the type of mindset that created Nazi Germany...and 9/11. It is the type of mentality that creates religious wars. Some pathological authority-figure masquarades as being the 'bridge' between man and God -- and then puts 'pathological words into the mouth of God'.
In this approach that I am advocating here -- which does not dismiss the possibility of believing in a more 'humanistic-existential' God -- even if that God is a 'mythological creation of our own projective capabilities' -- still, who cares if the message remains: 'Treat your neighbour with the same freedom, respect, and tolerance that you would want and expect from him or her under the same circumstances'...And if our 'message from God', if this is where we wish to be believe where it comes from, remains essentially the same, and does not contradict, what, for example, is written in The American Declaration of Independence......
............................................................................................................
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
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And when we read in the Bible the story of God, Abraham, and Isaac....Abraham going up to the mountain with the full intention of killing his son, his very flesh and blood...someone has got to stop and think...how does this type of God connect with the one advocated in 'The American Declaration of Independence'? The God described in the Bible in this parable 'asks' Abraham to kill his son, and Abraham is willing to 'comply' without a second thought....And preachers everywhere say that this 'faith' in God is 'good'....and now you have a good idea how Nazi Germany and 9/11 came about...
Here is the Abraham and Isaac parable as described by Wikipedia...
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The Binding of Isaac, in Genesis 22:1-24 is a story from the Hebrew Bible in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on Mount Moriah.
The narration is referred to as the Akedah (עקדה) or Akedat Yitzchak (עקידת יצחק) in Hebrew and as the Dhabih (ذبح) in Arabic. The sacrifice itself is called an Olah in Hebrew — for the significance of sacrifices, especially in Biblical times, see korban.
According to the narration, Abraham sets out to obey God's command without questioning. After Isaac is bound to an altar, the angel of God stops Abraham at the last minute, at which point Abraham discovers a ram caught in some nearby bushes. Abraham then sacrifices the ram in Isaac's stead.
While it is often imagined that Isaac was a small child upon their arrival at the setting of the altar, some traditional sources claim he was an adult as Jews are considered adults at age 13. The Book of Genesis does not tell the age of Isaac at the time; the Talmudic sages teach that Isaac was thirty-seven, likely based on the next biblical story, which is of Sarah's death at 127 (she was ninety when Isaac was born). Bishop Ussher's chronology would place Isaac at about 20 years of age.
Genesis 22:14 states that it occurred at "the mount of the LORD": in 2 Chronicles 3:1; Psalm 24:3; Isaiah 2:3 & 30:29; and Zechariah 8:3, the Bible seems to identify the location of this event as the hill on which Solomon later built the Temple, now known as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
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It was this kind of 'blind religious authoritarianism' that brought about the 'anti-thesis' of the age of Science, and then The Enlightenment, of which the founding fathers and the authors of 'The American Declaration of Independence' were a compelling part of this 'age of Enlightenment'....As can be seen in the actual text of 'The Declaration', these founding fathers of America did not dismiss 'God', or 'our Creator', or 'The Creator of Nature', outright but 'attached' this God to an element and a message of 'rationality and sanity' -- of the combined humanistic-existential goals of 'Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness' -- not of 'killing and sacrficing your son on The Mount'...
In the end, civil man has to be the judge of what constitutes 'rational sanity' and rational sanity never never was, never is, built from 'blind faith and submission to authority'...
Nietzsche wasn't rebelling and preaching against a 'humanistic-existential' God -- no, he was rebelling and preaching against the type of 'introjected, authoritarian, sadistic God' that destroys people's lives and leaves them miserable both in their every waking moment because they can't do anything without feeling guilty and because they are not allowed to use their own minds to decide what is and isn't 'good' for them...
How do you justify or rationalize one of God's Ten Commandments -- 'Thou shalt not kill!' -- against the same God who apparently asked/told/demanded? Abraham to kill his own son! Do you call this God a 'hypocrite'?
Or a God who is willing to change His rules and demands at a moment's notice -- irrespective of justice, fairness, sanity, and human compassion?
Or do we say that at some point in history there were a series of preachers and/or Biblical writers who put contradictory words and ideas into God's mouth?
Anybody can put words into God's mouth if we choose to believe the credibility as a 'bridge to God' (utter nonsense!) of the preacher who is uttering them...whether these words be humanistic and compassionate or sadistic and pathological...It could be The Pope, it could be a minister or priest of the local Church, or it could be Bin Laden...
Of prime concern was the number of 'living dead' people who he saw around him -- people who were 'sacrificing their life on Earth' for a supposedly better 'Afterlife in Heaven'. Utter balderdash in Nietzsche's mind. And in my mind too.
It is to this end that Nietzsche wrote: 'God is dead! (through one of his characters in a fictional book) and it is to this end that I fully support his statement.
Let blind faith in a so-called authoritarian, sadistic God that could ask a man to destroy his own son -- be dead!
And let a much more 'humanistic-existential God', even a 'pantheistic, humanistic-existential God' -- modelled closely after the men who wrote the American Declaration of Independence (and/or Spinoza, Diderot, and/or Schelling)-- come alive!!!
And then we can say, 'God is alive, man is alive, and they are both dialectically (and democratically) supporting each other. God is in man, and man is in God! They are both Creative Extensions of each other!
If or when we we fulfill God's -- and/or our Creator's -- Creative Gifts to us, we experience an internal version of 'The Holy Trinity' in a three-way embrace. Our Creativity and Creative Passion comes out of 'The Shadow of our Unconscious' -- the archetype of 'The Holy Ghost'. God is proud of us and/or we are proud of ourselves because we feel ourselves expressing and fulfilling in our Earthly lives our Creator's Unique Creative Gifts to us. We feel our Soul and Spirit coming alive within us -- The Archetype Image of God, Our Mythological or Real Creator. And our Central Ego -- which has reached into our Spirit-Soul-Self and into our Creative Unconscious -- feels the 'self-healing' and/or the 'healing of others' Archetype Image of Jesus Christ, the Mythological or Real Son of God.
Does it really matter if God created man, and/or if man created God?
As long as we are creating ourselves in the Humanistic-Existential Spirit-Soul of our Unconscious, partly scripted, partly unscripted Potential Selves which contain the Unique Indivdual Creative Gifts of Nature-Our Creator-and/or Our Real or Mythological God.
There is no 'blank tabula rasa' in our Unique Potential Self. Sartre got this part all wrong. He says 'existence before essence'. I say 'essence before existence'. And I say, that ideally 'existence and essence should embrace each other through our actions during the course of our lives. That is how you get 'self-actualization' or 'self-fulfillment'. If essence and existence do not embrace each other during the course of our lives, then that is how we get 'self-alienation' and 'self-estrangement'...If there was 'no essence' to start our lives with, then there could be no such thing as 'self-alienation' or 'self-estrangement'. Jean Paul, you were supposed to be an existentialist. Shame on you! If there was no 'essence' in you, how could you choose whether you liked 'existentialism' or not? Whether you liked 'Communism' or not? And so on...
There has to be an Internal Essence in our Genetic Spirit-Soul-Potential Self that provides the 'map', 'the guide posts', and the 'route' that we ultimately -- and ideally -- choose to live our lives by. If we don't follow this 'internal map' that comes from deep inside our Spirit-Soul, then we pay the price for this 'existential negligence'. We suffer and feel the very real pain of an 'unfulfilled life'.
As Spinoza bravely proclaimed, 'God is in everything'. And that includes Our Self.
All we have to do is 'Find Him/Her' -- through our Spirit-Soul -- through our Creative Unconsicous and Shadow -- through our Central Ego.
Through 'The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost'...
Spinoza, Jung, and DGB style.
Our Potential, Unactualized Self is full of unique or rare, creative, genetic gifts that we got from someone or somewhere...genetically....before us...and/or even long before us.
Whether you want to call the Original Source of all these unique individual gifts -- ultimately 'Gifts from God', or not -- that is up to you...
I have given you my take on this matter. Unorthodox to be sure. But still very spiritual, and potentially spiritually-uplifting as well as both humanistic-existential and dialectical -- even 'trialectical'.
Religion and modern day personal growth psychology -- coming together into one.
Inside and out, The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- all embracing each other.
Have a creatively brilliant day!
-- dgb, Nov. 6th, 8th, 9th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectical Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
But they are important to what I see as the potential therapeutic dynamics of DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis...
1. An 'Existential Analysis'...
Pertaining to the here-and-now...as opposed to the 'there-and-then' of past childhood, teenage, and/or adult experience, desire, and/or trauma... Focusing in on such things as work, love, romance, sex, family, stability, rootedness, passion, self-idealism, growth and self-actualization, depth of insight into current problems, conflicts, and potential solutions, as well as direction and degree of action to solve these problems and conflicts in order to keep growing....
2. An 'Existential -- or Gestalt Existential -- Hotseat (or Psychodrama)'...
A 'therapeutic acting out' of current existential issues, conflicts, problems in a way that 'emotionally brings these issues' back in tighter and closer to the heart...so they can't be simply 'abstractified away' with words and/or intellect...'Psychodrama' utilizes other people in the therapeutic group to play out different roles in the individual participant's 'existential issues' whereas 'The Gestalt Hotseat and Empty Chair Technique' utilizes the individual participant's own 'projections' to play out as many 'invisible characters' as he or she needs to in order to bring some meaningful type of 'conflict resolution' to the therapeutic exercise....
3. A Freudian or (Modified Post-Freudian) 'Transference Analysis'...
A comparison -- and contrast -- of past 'there-and-then' (usually childhood) events, memories, perceptions, interpretations, judgments, feelings, impulses, and/or relationships with current, here-and-now ones...
4. A Freudian-Gestalt Transference Hot Seat (or Freudian-Satir Transference Psychodrama)...
Similar to an 'Existential Hot Seat' except with an emphasis on 'Childhood Transference Psycho-Dynamics' and how they weave themselves into our 'Here-And-Now'...
5. A Freudian-Adlerian 'Transference-Lifestyle Analysis and/or Hotseat'
A 'modified transference analysis and/or hotseat utilzing both Freudian and Adlerian concepts (e.g., 'lifestyle', 'conscious early memories', 'inferiority feelings', 'superiority striving' and/or 'superiority feelings, and 'compensation') and modified concepts like 'projective transferences', 'lifestyle transferences', 'introjective transferences', and 'compensatory transferences'...Originally, i used the term 'GAP (Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic') Hotseat and Therapy Work, now 'DGB' or 'GAP-DGB' Quantum Psychoanalytic...
The name is less important than the quality and the meaninfulness of the potential psychotherapeutic work...but I need some sort of distingishing name that separates my work here from everything else that is out there...
I feel comfortable with any of GAP or DGB or GAP-DGB Psychology or Quantum Psychoanalysis...
I work the 'GAPS' between other schools of psychology and psychotherapy as well as the 'gaps' -- or 'chasms' or 'abysses' -- between our 'self-images' and our 'self-ideals' because it is here that we generate our greatest sense of 'self-depression, self-rage, and self-crucification' or alternatively, 'self-celebration'...
It is here that we need to do our main work aimed at 'closing or bridging the gaps, the chasms, the Nietzschean abysses...between being and not being, between being and becoming, between the Archetype of Jesus Christ working as the 'Master of All Self-Healers' as opposed to tumbling into, or purposely choosing, 'Self-Crucification'...'Self-Victimization'...'Self-Martyrdom'...as in the 'Archetype Idealization and Pathology' of 'The Suicide Bomber'...who takes out as many people as he or she can take with him or her...in the movement towards meeting his or her perceived and fantasized 'Maker'...
It is this latter type of more 'mythological' work with 'archetypes' and 'symbols' that I call:
6. 'A Freudian-Jungian Archetype-Transference Analysis and/or Hot Seat...
Which simply, as stated above, utilizes a combination of 'mythological archetype symbols' and 'transference work'...
The difference then, in my vocabulary, between a Transference Analysis and an Archetype Analysis is the utilization of 'personal memories' vs. 'mythological symbols' towards the same end -- the self-celebration of the individual and the human personality towards a happier, healthier, more meaningful and self-sastisfying existence...
One of my main purposes in conducting this type of psychotherapeutic approach is to 're-own' the 'projections' of 'The God or Gods' that we look into the sky for...and help us realize that these same 'God-Archetype Figures' are also Within Us...meant to be utilized as 'Internal GuidePosts' of the Psyche, Self, and Soul' as long as the 'Jesus Christ Archetype' of our 'Central Mediating Ego' is acting as 'Self-Healer' and not as 'Self-Crucifier' and/or 'The Crucifier of Others'...
That is just about where 'DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis' stands today once we have also factored in 'The Family Dynamics Mandala' of Our Early Transference Memories, Encounters, Relationships...and 'Repetition Compulsion' ('Obsessive-Compulsive-Addictive-or-Avoidant') Complexes...
That, we will leave for another day...
Some final comments here...
1. 'Heaven' and 'Hell' are often right beside each other in the deepsest abyss or Underground of our Psyche, Self, and Soul...
2. Often we have to go through 'Hell' to get to 'Heaven'...
3. In DGB Quantum (Post-Jungian) Psychoanalysis, the 'Holy Trinity' of 'The Father', 'The Son', and 'The Holy Ghost' is The Holy Trinity of a) 'The Central Ego' (The Jesus Christ Archetype of 'Self-Healer'), b) The Genetic, Unactualized or Partly Actualized and Partly Unactualized, Individually Unique Template of The Self-Soul' (The Archetype of God), and 'The Shadow' (The Archetype of The Holy Ghost which often needs to be 'detoxified' of its potentially 'toxic' components before it is 'actualized' through The Central Ego...Failure to do so can sometimes breed the worst evils of mankind...)
4. The Ultimate Celebration of The Individual and/or The Dialectical, Engaging Man is 'The Internal Meeting of The Father, Son, and The Holy Ghost...or worded otherwise, 'The Central Ego, The Self-Soul, and The Shadow'...with 'Dionysus' providing the dance music, the alcohol, the sensuality, and the celebration of The God-Archetype-Self-Soul...(Nietzsche, 'The Birth of Tragedy')
5. 'God' in the Roman-Christian sense can also be viewed as the 'Ultimate Integration of All Greek and Roman Gods' and all things human (and projected externally into 'God' and/or 'Gods')...
6. The 're-ownership and worship of 'God' is the ownership of Archetypes, Mythological Symbols, and The Celebration of The Actualization and Fulfillment of The Self-Soul...
7. 'Heaven' in this particular approach can be viewed as the celebration of the actualization of our 'Self-Soul' which can be viewed as both a part of God, and also, God's Ultimate Unique Creative Gift to each of us that we need to creatively apply to our lives in order to properly live out our 'partly God-scripted, partly unscripted' destiny...
What this is, in effect, is an integration of religion and humanistic-existentialism. Humanistic-existentialism wants no part of a 'God' -- such as the Christian God taught in the organized religion that Nietzsche was protesting against -- that people believe teaches 'self-denial' and 'self-sacrifice', 'blind faith and authoritatianism' and 'submission' to this blind faith and authoritarianism to the extent of 'denying one's own reason and rationality, one's own rational-empiricism...and one's own pursuit of health and happiness'. 'Don't worry if your life is a living death -- you will be rewarded in the 'afterlife' -- in 'Heaven'. This is the type of mindset that created Nazi Germany...and 9/11. It is the type of mentality that creates religious wars. Some pathological authority-figure masquarades as being the 'bridge' between man and God -- and then puts 'pathological words into the mouth of God'.
In this approach that I am advocating here -- which does not dismiss the possibility of believing in a more 'humanistic-existential' God -- even if that God is a 'mythological creation of our own projective capabilities' -- still, who cares if the message remains: 'Treat your neighbour with the same freedom, respect, and tolerance that you would want and expect from him or her under the same circumstances'...And if our 'message from God', if this is where we wish to be believe where it comes from, remains essentially the same, and does not contradict, what, for example, is written in The American Declaration of Independence......
............................................................................................................
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
...............................................................................................................
And when we read in the Bible the story of God, Abraham, and Isaac....Abraham going up to the mountain with the full intention of killing his son, his very flesh and blood...someone has got to stop and think...how does this type of God connect with the one advocated in 'The American Declaration of Independence'? The God described in the Bible in this parable 'asks' Abraham to kill his son, and Abraham is willing to 'comply' without a second thought....And preachers everywhere say that this 'faith' in God is 'good'....and now you have a good idea how Nazi Germany and 9/11 came about...
Here is the Abraham and Isaac parable as described by Wikipedia...
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The Binding of Isaac, in Genesis 22:1-24 is a story from the Hebrew Bible in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on Mount Moriah.
The narration is referred to as the Akedah (עקדה) or Akedat Yitzchak (עקידת יצחק) in Hebrew and as the Dhabih (ذبح) in Arabic. The sacrifice itself is called an Olah in Hebrew — for the significance of sacrifices, especially in Biblical times, see korban.
According to the narration, Abraham sets out to obey God's command without questioning. After Isaac is bound to an altar, the angel of God stops Abraham at the last minute, at which point Abraham discovers a ram caught in some nearby bushes. Abraham then sacrifices the ram in Isaac's stead.
While it is often imagined that Isaac was a small child upon their arrival at the setting of the altar, some traditional sources claim he was an adult as Jews are considered adults at age 13. The Book of Genesis does not tell the age of Isaac at the time; the Talmudic sages teach that Isaac was thirty-seven, likely based on the next biblical story, which is of Sarah's death at 127 (she was ninety when Isaac was born). Bishop Ussher's chronology would place Isaac at about 20 years of age.
Genesis 22:14 states that it occurred at "the mount of the LORD": in 2 Chronicles 3:1; Psalm 24:3; Isaiah 2:3 & 30:29; and Zechariah 8:3, the Bible seems to identify the location of this event as the hill on which Solomon later built the Temple, now known as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
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It was this kind of 'blind religious authoritarianism' that brought about the 'anti-thesis' of the age of Science, and then The Enlightenment, of which the founding fathers and the authors of 'The American Declaration of Independence' were a compelling part of this 'age of Enlightenment'....As can be seen in the actual text of 'The Declaration', these founding fathers of America did not dismiss 'God', or 'our Creator', or 'The Creator of Nature', outright but 'attached' this God to an element and a message of 'rationality and sanity' -- of the combined humanistic-existential goals of 'Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness' -- not of 'killing and sacrficing your son on The Mount'...
In the end, civil man has to be the judge of what constitutes 'rational sanity' and rational sanity never never was, never is, built from 'blind faith and submission to authority'...
Nietzsche wasn't rebelling and preaching against a 'humanistic-existential' God -- no, he was rebelling and preaching against the type of 'introjected, authoritarian, sadistic God' that destroys people's lives and leaves them miserable both in their every waking moment because they can't do anything without feeling guilty and because they are not allowed to use their own minds to decide what is and isn't 'good' for them...
How do you justify or rationalize one of God's Ten Commandments -- 'Thou shalt not kill!' -- against the same God who apparently asked/told/demanded? Abraham to kill his own son! Do you call this God a 'hypocrite'?
Or a God who is willing to change His rules and demands at a moment's notice -- irrespective of justice, fairness, sanity, and human compassion?
Or do we say that at some point in history there were a series of preachers and/or Biblical writers who put contradictory words and ideas into God's mouth?
Anybody can put words into God's mouth if we choose to believe the credibility as a 'bridge to God' (utter nonsense!) of the preacher who is uttering them...whether these words be humanistic and compassionate or sadistic and pathological...It could be The Pope, it could be a minister or priest of the local Church, or it could be Bin Laden...
Of prime concern was the number of 'living dead' people who he saw around him -- people who were 'sacrificing their life on Earth' for a supposedly better 'Afterlife in Heaven'. Utter balderdash in Nietzsche's mind. And in my mind too.
It is to this end that Nietzsche wrote: 'God is dead! (through one of his characters in a fictional book) and it is to this end that I fully support his statement.
Let blind faith in a so-called authoritarian, sadistic God that could ask a man to destroy his own son -- be dead!
And let a much more 'humanistic-existential God', even a 'pantheistic, humanistic-existential God' -- modelled closely after the men who wrote the American Declaration of Independence (and/or Spinoza, Diderot, and/or Schelling)-- come alive!!!
And then we can say, 'God is alive, man is alive, and they are both dialectically (and democratically) supporting each other. God is in man, and man is in God! They are both Creative Extensions of each other!
If or when we we fulfill God's -- and/or our Creator's -- Creative Gifts to us, we experience an internal version of 'The Holy Trinity' in a three-way embrace. Our Creativity and Creative Passion comes out of 'The Shadow of our Unconscious' -- the archetype of 'The Holy Ghost'. God is proud of us and/or we are proud of ourselves because we feel ourselves expressing and fulfilling in our Earthly lives our Creator's Unique Creative Gifts to us. We feel our Soul and Spirit coming alive within us -- The Archetype Image of God, Our Mythological or Real Creator. And our Central Ego -- which has reached into our Spirit-Soul-Self and into our Creative Unconscious -- feels the 'self-healing' and/or the 'healing of others' Archetype Image of Jesus Christ, the Mythological or Real Son of God.
Does it really matter if God created man, and/or if man created God?
As long as we are creating ourselves in the Humanistic-Existential Spirit-Soul of our Unconscious, partly scripted, partly unscripted Potential Selves which contain the Unique Indivdual Creative Gifts of Nature-Our Creator-and/or Our Real or Mythological God.
There is no 'blank tabula rasa' in our Unique Potential Self. Sartre got this part all wrong. He says 'existence before essence'. I say 'essence before existence'. And I say, that ideally 'existence and essence should embrace each other through our actions during the course of our lives. That is how you get 'self-actualization' or 'self-fulfillment'. If essence and existence do not embrace each other during the course of our lives, then that is how we get 'self-alienation' and 'self-estrangement'...If there was 'no essence' to start our lives with, then there could be no such thing as 'self-alienation' or 'self-estrangement'. Jean Paul, you were supposed to be an existentialist. Shame on you! If there was no 'essence' in you, how could you choose whether you liked 'existentialism' or not? Whether you liked 'Communism' or not? And so on...
There has to be an Internal Essence in our Genetic Spirit-Soul-Potential Self that provides the 'map', 'the guide posts', and the 'route' that we ultimately -- and ideally -- choose to live our lives by. If we don't follow this 'internal map' that comes from deep inside our Spirit-Soul, then we pay the price for this 'existential negligence'. We suffer and feel the very real pain of an 'unfulfilled life'.
As Spinoza bravely proclaimed, 'God is in everything'. And that includes Our Self.
All we have to do is 'Find Him/Her' -- through our Spirit-Soul -- through our Creative Unconsicous and Shadow -- through our Central Ego.
Through 'The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost'...
Spinoza, Jung, and DGB style.
Our Potential, Unactualized Self is full of unique or rare, creative, genetic gifts that we got from someone or somewhere...genetically....before us...and/or even long before us.
Whether you want to call the Original Source of all these unique individual gifts -- ultimately 'Gifts from God', or not -- that is up to you...
I have given you my take on this matter. Unorthodox to be sure. But still very spiritual, and potentially spiritually-uplifting as well as both humanistic-existential and dialectical -- even 'trialectical'.
Religion and modern day personal growth psychology -- coming together into one.
Inside and out, The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- all embracing each other.
Have a creatively brilliant day!
-- dgb, Nov. 6th, 8th, 9th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectical Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
Greek Mythology, Roman Christianity, and 'Air', 'Earth', 'Fire', and 'Water' in The Body-Psyche-Soul of Man
The earliest Greek Philosophers -- were all looking for, reaching for, and theorizing on, in some fashion -- 'The Big, One Initial Cause' of Creation, The World, and Man...
Does it surprise anyone that we are still searching, still reaching, still theorizing...some 2600 years later...
Thales (the 'water' theorist), Anaxamander (the 'Apeiron' theorist), Anaxamenes (the 'air' theorist), Heraclitus (the 'fire' theorist)...all put in their respective theories with Anaxamander's theory being significantly different than the other three because he was the only theorist to argue that we had to go 'beyond the one cause, one substance idea' to look for 'God's Playpen' (my words, not his), i.e., the 'Ultimate Breeding Ground' for 'all opposite causes and substances' which Anaxamander called 'The Apeiron'....
The Apeiron can be viewed as being similar to our present usage of the term 'Universe' but it also has certain elements of the concept that are similar to our present usage of the term 'Chaos' and Jung's usage of the term 'Shadow' and Freud's usage of the term 'Id' and Perls' usage of the term 'Background'...
The Apeiron can be viewed as the 'Backdrop' and 'Primal Chaos' of life from which all substances and elements in life become slowly differentiated from each other -- and then 'spit out into the world to compete with each other and try to dominate each other'...in extended Nietzschean language, each opposite substance in life is blessed (and/or cursed) with its own particular 'Will to Power' or 'Will to Self-Empowerment and Self-Actualization' which it takes with it into the world to 'try to survive and indeed dominate', particularly over its 'opposite nemesis' (you can see Hegel's dialectic theory in its archaic infancy here)...
So 'opposite substances' land in the world together, compete and fight with each other, with one opposing substance coming out on top as the 'dominant or superior opposite substance' and the other opposing substance' coming out on bottom as the 'submissive or inferior opposite substance'...When this 'power struggle' is played out and fully articulated, 'the inferior substance' is then spit back into the Apeiron (Unarticulated Chaos, The Shadow, The Id, The Background...) in order to re-group, re-energize, 're-gain more of God's Power' if you will, and then it is 'spit' back into the world again to re-confront its 'Lifelong Opposing Nemesis' and to fight another battle...and win or lose again...
...........................................................................................
Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.
-- Anaxamander's Fragment
.....................................................................
So while Thales -- the oldest Greek and Western philosopher -- was preaching about 'water' as 'Life's Original Cause'...
And Anaxamenes -- about the third oldest Greek and Western philosopher -- was preaching about 'air' as 'Life's Original Cause'...
And Heraclitus -- about the fourth oldest Greek and Western philosopher -- was preaching about 'fire' as 'Life's Original Cause'...(although Heraclitus had some of Anaxamander's teachings within his 'dialectic' thought process and theory as well)...
Anaxamander -- the second oldest Greek and Western philosopher -- was aiming for a way to 'bring all these different opposites and so-called original causes into one over-riding (multi-dialectic) theory that integrated all these 'opposites' together in the same 'Original Birthplace' -- 'The Apeiron' ('Cosmic Chaos', The 'Cosmic Shadow', The 'Cosmic Id', The 'Cosmic Background'...) -- where they were each 'differentially articulated' and 'born' to the world as we know it, something like a 'Noah's Ark' type of situation...although 'The Noah's Ark' biblical story focused on the idea of 'one pair of opposite sexes' of each species of plant and animal being brought on board Noah's Ark in order that the world would have the capability of 'Generating New Birth and Creation' once 'The Ultimate Flood' subsided...
The Noah's Ark biblical story can also be associated with Heraclitus' most important philosophical work as Heraclitus emphasized the dialectic idea for the first Western time -- like the Chinese were doing about this same time over in The East with their opposing concepts of 'yin' (feminine energy) and 'yang' (masculine energy) -- that opposites were not only put on earth to 'struggle with each other' and 'try to overpower each other' but they were also brought into this world to 'be attracted to each other', 'want each other', 'long for each other', 'need each other', 'biologically and/or psychologically and/or philosophically and/or politically and/or artisitically create with each other' in order to continue 'God's Creation' of the world (my religious words, not Heraclitus') and to 'bring dialectic peace, harmony, unity, wholism, and balance' into the world as opposed to power-seeking, strife, conflict, and war...
This was the main difference between Anaxamander's 'Will to Power' Cosmic Theory as opposed to both Heraclitus' 'Dialectic Homeostatic Balance' Theory locally in Greece (after Anaxamander was dead) and Lao Tse's Eastern 'Yin' and 'Yang' Cosmic Theory that was providing the philosophical foundation for Daoism (Taoism) in China and eventually beyond China...to those who now practise it in all parts of the world...For a couple of very similar theories (Heraclitus and Lao Tse respective 'Cosmic Philosophical Theories') that are some 2500 years old (or perhaps much older in China), these two 'dialectic theories' that set the stage for Hegel's 'Ultimate Dialectic Theory' in 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' (1804)...they have both done very well, indeed... (Well, I am trying to make both theories even more 'Ultimate' today...and in the 21st Century...)
Between Anaxamander's precursor to Nietzsche's 'Will to Power' Cosmic Theory and Heraclitus' 'Will to Dialectically Integrate' Cosmic Theory, you essentially have the backdrop to more than 2500 years of Western and Eastern Philosophy coming to a head in Hegel's Dialectic Philosophy in Prussia/Germany (the essential border-point between Western and Eastern Philosophy and their respective similarities and differences but mainly differences as would become structurally pronounced in 'The Berlin Wall') with Karl Marx turning Hegel's Philosophy upside down but 'ringing bells' and fascinating the Eastern World for perhaps much of the worst part of both China's and Russia's respective political and civil history...through Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin...
Their intentions may or may not have been good (they were probably mainly bad) but/and the results were mainly disasterous...(because peace, integration, harmony, and democracy all disappeared -- or stayed -- in 'The Apeiron' of The Eastern World...which is not to say that the Western world was necessarily faring much better but 'The Enlightenment', 'Romanticism', and the birth of 'Humanistic-Existentialism' were positive evolutionary developments in Western philosophy before 'The French Reign of Terror' and Napoleon's 'Megalomania' took over and blew things out of control...likewise with certain facets of today's Western (and now Eastern) Narcissistic Capitalism...and Globalization and Free Trade with their respective good and bad features...good for third world countries...bad for America and Canada in that all the manufacturing jobs are getting 'outsourced' to Third World countries...and/or we are 'cheapening' the labour market in North America in order to try to compete with the rising Third World countries...and/or 'importing' Third World Labour Forces here...such as just north of the Mexican boundary...)
Back with Anaxamander, his philosophical mindset was such that he emphasized the 'competition, the will to power, and the destruction between opposites' as the essential 'Way of The World'...whereas Heraclitus (and Lao Tse) emphasized the more positive side of 'opposites desiring and needing each other for homeostatic dialectic balance' (my 21st century words, not his)....
Anaxamander might have been watching the respective Greek 'city-states' of Sparta and Athens continually trying to overpower and destroy each other...and the 'loser' eventually coming back to seek 'retribution' and 'justice' for its previous 'suppresion' 'oppression' and 'repression'...Sparta being the more 'authoritarian' city-state, and Athens being the birth place of Western 'democracy'...
Thousands of years later we can see these two respective cosmic theories of Anaxamander and Heracltius coming back into play, first in the philosophy of Hegel, and then Nietzsche in 'The Birth of Tragedy' and then in the work of Freud, Jung, and Perls, and their respective descriptions and understandings of the way man's mind works...also, later in the philosophical work of Foucault and Derrida...
And we thought that Plato and Aristotle were the 'primary' philosophers of Ancient Greece... Anaxamander and Heraclitus stand up in the ongoing evolution and integration of Western and Eastern philosophy just as importantly...if not more so, as we continue into the 21st Century....
What Freud, Jung and Perls all essentially did in their own respective way was to bring Anaxamander's essential idea of the Apeirion 'out of the heavens' and into the 'chaotic, Darker Shadow or Id or Background' -- of man's Psyche and Soul', complete with all of his most primitive, archaic, driving impulses, desires, characteristics, and shocking behavior patterns...that place in the human psyche where all evolving opposite tendencies exist side by side both in attraction and in conflict and turmoil...with a need for some form of Central Integrating Force (The Central Ego in my own DGB model) in The Personality to both detoxify and to harmoniously balance these attracting and repulsing opposite forces...'
In the partial language of Freud from 1920 on...(Beyond The Pleasure Principle)...and paraphrased and/or extrapolated on by me at this moment....The 'life and death (love and hate, creativity and destruction) impulses or instincts' in both the body and the personality are dialectically, paradoxically, and inseparably linked to each other throughout our lives through the ancient destructive and creative principles of Anaxamander, Heraclitus, and Lao Tse...all these similar and different competing, attracting, converging, diverging evolutionary energies...looking for their own separate place in the world, either in power and destruction and/or in harmonious integration...
With elements of Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Darwin, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche all adding to the Pre-Socratic foundational base, what we have here is essentially a 'collision' of both 'Individuated' and 'Integrative' Energies -- both trying very much to survive at the same time -- through a more or less 'Cosmic Will To Power and Differentiation' as well as a 'Cosmic Will to Embrace, Contact, Engage, and Unite'...as easily witnessed through the metaphorical 'ebb and flow of the tides', the divergence and convergence of individuals, races, countries...and the contact and withdrawal of every day living...
In DGB post-Jungian conceptuology and terminology, the 'Internal Archetype of God' is 'The Soul' and 'The Genetic, Partly Created, Partly Templated, Partly Undifferentiated, Unactualized Self-Apeiron of Man'.
Sitting right beside or behind the 'Light of The Soul' is 'The Dark of The Soul' -- like 'The Light and Dark Side of The Moon' as represented by 'The Estranged, Ex-Communicated Angel of God -- Satan' with all its/his potential for upsurging 'human pathology and evil'...
'Pathology and evil is born from the self-perception of being The Most Disavowed, Ex-Communicated, Rejected, Abandoned, Betrayed, Slighted, Discriminated... amongst Us...and feeling the perceived need for some form of 'Negative' (Destructive and/or Self-Destructive) Compensation, Power, and/or Retribution... And often this tendency is born from the 'Most Righteous' amongst us -- politically and/or religiously intolerant and inflexible, and incapable or unwilling to entertain 'the potential integrative good' of holding two or more opposite ideas in one's mind at the same time...
I view 'The Central Mediating Ego' in the personality as being the 'Archetype of Jesus Christ' -- capable of both healing the personality through the integration of conflicting opposites both inside and outside the personality; as well as potentially also being 'overpowered' by the competing factions inside and outside of the personality which can in effect 'overpower', 'destroy' and 'crucify' The Central Ego if it is/we are not strong enough to deal with -- and integrate -- the onslaught of these competing powers...
As far as Thales, Anaxamenes, and Heraclitus, they also have a different important place in the history and evolution of Western Philosophy...as exemplified by the following integrative Ancient Greek based 'Double Bi-Polarity' Model of The Personality...
1. 'Air' is an essential structural part of the makeup of our mind and body; psychologically/mythologically/symbolically speaking we look to the 'sky' for our most important 'self-ideals and virtues'; also, when we speak we may speak with 'hot' or 'cold', 'warm' or 'cool' words...if our words are coming from too high in the sky, then they are likely to lack the 'passion', 'heat', and 'directness' of fire, the 'depth' and 'wisdom' of water, and 'the common sense and groundedness' of 'the earth'...which is why an integration of all four of these competing qualities is essential to our body, our philosophy and psychology, and the words that we choose to use, and how we choose to use them...
2. Similarily, 'the earth' is also an essential part both of our structural makeup in the food, vitamins, and minerals we eat, and psychologically/mythologically/symbolically speaking, we all need the 'rootedness' of the 'earth beneath our feet'...for a sense of self-stability and groundedness...
3. 'Fire' is in our blood, structurally speaking, and psychologically/mythologically/symbolically 'fire' makes up our desire and passion for life...an essential 'yang' energy in our ongoing existence...
4. 'Water' is also an essential part of our bodily, structural makeup, and psychologically/mythologically/symbolically speaking, we need water as a 'cooling' ('yin') force in our ongoing existence...Water is also symbolic of 'depth of character'...'Still waters run deep'...
Thus, in a combined model of our most ancient Western philosophers -- 'internalized' and 'psychologized' -- we have come up with a 'double bi-polarity model' of the personality with The Central Ego needed to harmoniously integrate these opposing, bi-polar energies and forces towards a 'compromise-formation of homeostatic-dialectic-democratic balance'....
We have accomplished enough for today...
Or have we?
-- dgb, Nov. 6th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectical Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Evolutionary Progress...
Does it surprise anyone that we are still searching, still reaching, still theorizing...some 2600 years later...
Thales (the 'water' theorist), Anaxamander (the 'Apeiron' theorist), Anaxamenes (the 'air' theorist), Heraclitus (the 'fire' theorist)...all put in their respective theories with Anaxamander's theory being significantly different than the other three because he was the only theorist to argue that we had to go 'beyond the one cause, one substance idea' to look for 'God's Playpen' (my words, not his), i.e., the 'Ultimate Breeding Ground' for 'all opposite causes and substances' which Anaxamander called 'The Apeiron'....
The Apeiron can be viewed as being similar to our present usage of the term 'Universe' but it also has certain elements of the concept that are similar to our present usage of the term 'Chaos' and Jung's usage of the term 'Shadow' and Freud's usage of the term 'Id' and Perls' usage of the term 'Background'...
The Apeiron can be viewed as the 'Backdrop' and 'Primal Chaos' of life from which all substances and elements in life become slowly differentiated from each other -- and then 'spit out into the world to compete with each other and try to dominate each other'...in extended Nietzschean language, each opposite substance in life is blessed (and/or cursed) with its own particular 'Will to Power' or 'Will to Self-Empowerment and Self-Actualization' which it takes with it into the world to 'try to survive and indeed dominate', particularly over its 'opposite nemesis' (you can see Hegel's dialectic theory in its archaic infancy here)...
So 'opposite substances' land in the world together, compete and fight with each other, with one opposing substance coming out on top as the 'dominant or superior opposite substance' and the other opposing substance' coming out on bottom as the 'submissive or inferior opposite substance'...When this 'power struggle' is played out and fully articulated, 'the inferior substance' is then spit back into the Apeiron (Unarticulated Chaos, The Shadow, The Id, The Background...) in order to re-group, re-energize, 're-gain more of God's Power' if you will, and then it is 'spit' back into the world again to re-confront its 'Lifelong Opposing Nemesis' and to fight another battle...and win or lose again...
...........................................................................................
Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.
-- Anaxamander's Fragment
.....................................................................
So while Thales -- the oldest Greek and Western philosopher -- was preaching about 'water' as 'Life's Original Cause'...
And Anaxamenes -- about the third oldest Greek and Western philosopher -- was preaching about 'air' as 'Life's Original Cause'...
And Heraclitus -- about the fourth oldest Greek and Western philosopher -- was preaching about 'fire' as 'Life's Original Cause'...(although Heraclitus had some of Anaxamander's teachings within his 'dialectic' thought process and theory as well)...
Anaxamander -- the second oldest Greek and Western philosopher -- was aiming for a way to 'bring all these different opposites and so-called original causes into one over-riding (multi-dialectic) theory that integrated all these 'opposites' together in the same 'Original Birthplace' -- 'The Apeiron' ('Cosmic Chaos', The 'Cosmic Shadow', The 'Cosmic Id', The 'Cosmic Background'...) -- where they were each 'differentially articulated' and 'born' to the world as we know it, something like a 'Noah's Ark' type of situation...although 'The Noah's Ark' biblical story focused on the idea of 'one pair of opposite sexes' of each species of plant and animal being brought on board Noah's Ark in order that the world would have the capability of 'Generating New Birth and Creation' once 'The Ultimate Flood' subsided...
The Noah's Ark biblical story can also be associated with Heraclitus' most important philosophical work as Heraclitus emphasized the dialectic idea for the first Western time -- like the Chinese were doing about this same time over in The East with their opposing concepts of 'yin' (feminine energy) and 'yang' (masculine energy) -- that opposites were not only put on earth to 'struggle with each other' and 'try to overpower each other' but they were also brought into this world to 'be attracted to each other', 'want each other', 'long for each other', 'need each other', 'biologically and/or psychologically and/or philosophically and/or politically and/or artisitically create with each other' in order to continue 'God's Creation' of the world (my religious words, not Heraclitus') and to 'bring dialectic peace, harmony, unity, wholism, and balance' into the world as opposed to power-seeking, strife, conflict, and war...
This was the main difference between Anaxamander's 'Will to Power' Cosmic Theory as opposed to both Heraclitus' 'Dialectic Homeostatic Balance' Theory locally in Greece (after Anaxamander was dead) and Lao Tse's Eastern 'Yin' and 'Yang' Cosmic Theory that was providing the philosophical foundation for Daoism (Taoism) in China and eventually beyond China...to those who now practise it in all parts of the world...For a couple of very similar theories (Heraclitus and Lao Tse respective 'Cosmic Philosophical Theories') that are some 2500 years old (or perhaps much older in China), these two 'dialectic theories' that set the stage for Hegel's 'Ultimate Dialectic Theory' in 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' (1804)...they have both done very well, indeed... (Well, I am trying to make both theories even more 'Ultimate' today...and in the 21st Century...)
Between Anaxamander's precursor to Nietzsche's 'Will to Power' Cosmic Theory and Heraclitus' 'Will to Dialectically Integrate' Cosmic Theory, you essentially have the backdrop to more than 2500 years of Western and Eastern Philosophy coming to a head in Hegel's Dialectic Philosophy in Prussia/Germany (the essential border-point between Western and Eastern Philosophy and their respective similarities and differences but mainly differences as would become structurally pronounced in 'The Berlin Wall') with Karl Marx turning Hegel's Philosophy upside down but 'ringing bells' and fascinating the Eastern World for perhaps much of the worst part of both China's and Russia's respective political and civil history...through Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin...
Their intentions may or may not have been good (they were probably mainly bad) but/and the results were mainly disasterous...(because peace, integration, harmony, and democracy all disappeared -- or stayed -- in 'The Apeiron' of The Eastern World...which is not to say that the Western world was necessarily faring much better but 'The Enlightenment', 'Romanticism', and the birth of 'Humanistic-Existentialism' were positive evolutionary developments in Western philosophy before 'The French Reign of Terror' and Napoleon's 'Megalomania' took over and blew things out of control...likewise with certain facets of today's Western (and now Eastern) Narcissistic Capitalism...and Globalization and Free Trade with their respective good and bad features...good for third world countries...bad for America and Canada in that all the manufacturing jobs are getting 'outsourced' to Third World countries...and/or we are 'cheapening' the labour market in North America in order to try to compete with the rising Third World countries...and/or 'importing' Third World Labour Forces here...such as just north of the Mexican boundary...)
Back with Anaxamander, his philosophical mindset was such that he emphasized the 'competition, the will to power, and the destruction between opposites' as the essential 'Way of The World'...whereas Heraclitus (and Lao Tse) emphasized the more positive side of 'opposites desiring and needing each other for homeostatic dialectic balance' (my 21st century words, not his)....
Anaxamander might have been watching the respective Greek 'city-states' of Sparta and Athens continually trying to overpower and destroy each other...and the 'loser' eventually coming back to seek 'retribution' and 'justice' for its previous 'suppresion' 'oppression' and 'repression'...Sparta being the more 'authoritarian' city-state, and Athens being the birth place of Western 'democracy'...
Thousands of years later we can see these two respective cosmic theories of Anaxamander and Heracltius coming back into play, first in the philosophy of Hegel, and then Nietzsche in 'The Birth of Tragedy' and then in the work of Freud, Jung, and Perls, and their respective descriptions and understandings of the way man's mind works...also, later in the philosophical work of Foucault and Derrida...
And we thought that Plato and Aristotle were the 'primary' philosophers of Ancient Greece... Anaxamander and Heraclitus stand up in the ongoing evolution and integration of Western and Eastern philosophy just as importantly...if not more so, as we continue into the 21st Century....
What Freud, Jung and Perls all essentially did in their own respective way was to bring Anaxamander's essential idea of the Apeirion 'out of the heavens' and into the 'chaotic, Darker Shadow or Id or Background' -- of man's Psyche and Soul', complete with all of his most primitive, archaic, driving impulses, desires, characteristics, and shocking behavior patterns...that place in the human psyche where all evolving opposite tendencies exist side by side both in attraction and in conflict and turmoil...with a need for some form of Central Integrating Force (The Central Ego in my own DGB model) in The Personality to both detoxify and to harmoniously balance these attracting and repulsing opposite forces...'
In the partial language of Freud from 1920 on...(Beyond The Pleasure Principle)...and paraphrased and/or extrapolated on by me at this moment....The 'life and death (love and hate, creativity and destruction) impulses or instincts' in both the body and the personality are dialectically, paradoxically, and inseparably linked to each other throughout our lives through the ancient destructive and creative principles of Anaxamander, Heraclitus, and Lao Tse...all these similar and different competing, attracting, converging, diverging evolutionary energies...looking for their own separate place in the world, either in power and destruction and/or in harmonious integration...
With elements of Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Darwin, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche all adding to the Pre-Socratic foundational base, what we have here is essentially a 'collision' of both 'Individuated' and 'Integrative' Energies -- both trying very much to survive at the same time -- through a more or less 'Cosmic Will To Power and Differentiation' as well as a 'Cosmic Will to Embrace, Contact, Engage, and Unite'...as easily witnessed through the metaphorical 'ebb and flow of the tides', the divergence and convergence of individuals, races, countries...and the contact and withdrawal of every day living...
In DGB post-Jungian conceptuology and terminology, the 'Internal Archetype of God' is 'The Soul' and 'The Genetic, Partly Created, Partly Templated, Partly Undifferentiated, Unactualized Self-Apeiron of Man'.
Sitting right beside or behind the 'Light of The Soul' is 'The Dark of The Soul' -- like 'The Light and Dark Side of The Moon' as represented by 'The Estranged, Ex-Communicated Angel of God -- Satan' with all its/his potential for upsurging 'human pathology and evil'...
'Pathology and evil is born from the self-perception of being The Most Disavowed, Ex-Communicated, Rejected, Abandoned, Betrayed, Slighted, Discriminated... amongst Us...and feeling the perceived need for some form of 'Negative' (Destructive and/or Self-Destructive) Compensation, Power, and/or Retribution... And often this tendency is born from the 'Most Righteous' amongst us -- politically and/or religiously intolerant and inflexible, and incapable or unwilling to entertain 'the potential integrative good' of holding two or more opposite ideas in one's mind at the same time...
I view 'The Central Mediating Ego' in the personality as being the 'Archetype of Jesus Christ' -- capable of both healing the personality through the integration of conflicting opposites both inside and outside the personality; as well as potentially also being 'overpowered' by the competing factions inside and outside of the personality which can in effect 'overpower', 'destroy' and 'crucify' The Central Ego if it is/we are not strong enough to deal with -- and integrate -- the onslaught of these competing powers...
As far as Thales, Anaxamenes, and Heraclitus, they also have a different important place in the history and evolution of Western Philosophy...as exemplified by the following integrative Ancient Greek based 'Double Bi-Polarity' Model of The Personality...
1. 'Air' is an essential structural part of the makeup of our mind and body; psychologically/mythologically/symbolically speaking we look to the 'sky' for our most important 'self-ideals and virtues'; also, when we speak we may speak with 'hot' or 'cold', 'warm' or 'cool' words...if our words are coming from too high in the sky, then they are likely to lack the 'passion', 'heat', and 'directness' of fire, the 'depth' and 'wisdom' of water, and 'the common sense and groundedness' of 'the earth'...which is why an integration of all four of these competing qualities is essential to our body, our philosophy and psychology, and the words that we choose to use, and how we choose to use them...
2. Similarily, 'the earth' is also an essential part both of our structural makeup in the food, vitamins, and minerals we eat, and psychologically/mythologically/symbolically speaking, we all need the 'rootedness' of the 'earth beneath our feet'...for a sense of self-stability and groundedness...
3. 'Fire' is in our blood, structurally speaking, and psychologically/mythologically/symbolically 'fire' makes up our desire and passion for life...an essential 'yang' energy in our ongoing existence...
4. 'Water' is also an essential part of our bodily, structural makeup, and psychologically/mythologically/symbolically speaking, we need water as a 'cooling' ('yin') force in our ongoing existence...Water is also symbolic of 'depth of character'...'Still waters run deep'...
Thus, in a combined model of our most ancient Western philosophers -- 'internalized' and 'psychologized' -- we have come up with a 'double bi-polarity model' of the personality with The Central Ego needed to harmoniously integrate these opposing, bi-polar energies and forces towards a 'compromise-formation of homeostatic-dialectic-democratic balance'....
We have accomplished enough for today...
Or have we?
-- dgb, Nov. 6th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectical Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Evolutionary Progress...
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
On Convergence vs. Divergence, and The 'Socially (or Orally) Receptive' Personality vs. The 'Socially (or Anally) Rejecting-Schizoid' Personality
Under construction...Nov. 3rd, 2010.
1. Convergence and Divergence
Freud and Jung both went through periods of 'dark self-analysis'.
With Freud, it was mainly after his father died.
With Jung, it was when he was in theoretical conflict with Freud and was caught between 'hanging on to the Freudian approach' vs. 'developing his own unique approach.
I talked briefly about 'divergence and convergence', 'contact and withdrawal', 'separation and union' in my last essay.
This is the dialectical -- or 'multi-dialectic' -- cycle of life.
A distinction can be made between two types of 'energy': a)'integrative energy' vs. b) 'individuated energy'.
a) Integrative energy can be both good and bad. It is the energy of two or more uniquely differentiated parts, particles, bacteria, viruses, plants, animals, people, countries coming together to create something that is 'greater and stronger than the sum of the two individuated parts separate on their own...eg. Lennon and McCartney, Wayne and Shuster, Abbott and Costello, any successful business partnership or love relationship...
However, integrative energy can quickly or slowly 'DIE'...through the process of individual neglect and/or alienation if what was exciting and dynamic in the beginning of the 'dialectical relationship' starts to become mundane and routine over time...Dialectic engagement, contact, and excitement fades away -- or at least can, and often does, fade away -- and the dialectic partnership becomes a 'shell' of its original self, its original 'dynamic duo'...
Conflict, anger, resentment, and alienated impasses enter the picture -- and often a 'compensatory longing' for a new and different type of partnership...can stir new forms of longing, desire, and excitement...
The conflict can sometimes be seen as being between 'stability', 'loyalty', and 'rootedness' on the one hand; and 'mystery', 'newness', 'intrigue', and a heightened sense of 'desire', 'attraction', 'romance' and/or 'sexuality' on the other hand...at least if we are talking about an 'alienated or partly alienated marriage' (which doesn't even necessarily have to play a part in the new dialectic partnership)...The human personality is always looking for new and different ways of 'extending and actualizing the multitude of different parts of its own self and life mandala'...both inside and/or outside of a stable and/or unstable long-term partnership...
To state the obvious, there are many different types of people in the world with a myriad of different character-traits that can be 'attractive' to us, at least at first, until perhaps the same characteristic starts to become 'too much' for us later on, and thus begins to take on a 'negative judgment and feeling' as opposed to its earlier 'positive judgment and feeling'... Every pronounced characteristic we meet in a person is thus often flanked by both positive and negative elements attached to this characteristic...
The 'bold, assertive' person we meet and are attracted to at first can become 'too pushy and controlling' later on in our relationship...As Hegel stated, and I am paraphrasing, every theory, every characteristic, every person, carries the seeds to his or her or its own self-destruction...as well as self-celebration....depending on how it is used and where it goes and how it is judged...
Some people are more liberal-minded, creative, daring, risk-taking, adventurous, excitement-seeking...
While others are more conservative-minded, less creative, less daring, less risk-taking, less adventurous, less excitement-seeking, more concerned about such life factors as safety, stability, rootedness, routine, predictability, and the like...
Neither is better or worse than the other...both have both their positive and negative features to them...
Probably most of us seek a balance of both....Again the magic principle of 'dialectic, (democratic, egalitarian), homeostatic balance or equilibrium' enters the picture...
Another way of quickly differentiating people is on their 'degree of self-boundaries'...and 'degree of openess and/or closedness to others'....
A partly or mainly Freudian distinction can be made between a) 'the socially (or 'orally')-receptive' person who tends to be more outgoing, more socially receptive, more 'socially extraverted' as opposed to b) the person who tends to be more 'socially (or anally)-rejecting' 'socially (or anally)-schizoid'...closed in, less receptive to social interaction, 'intraverted', protective of his or her self-boundaries, and how close you get to him or her, a plate of 'body or character armour' metaphorically 'protecting his or her heart', protecting his or her sense of emotional vulnerability, or alternatively, more interested in the 'thoughts and ideas and issues going on inside his or her head' than in 'attempting to carry on any kind of meaningful conversation with anyone'...
Again, neither type is necessarily better or worse than the other in itself -- the ''orally/socially receptive' or 'anally/socially rejecting' person -- but both have their respective strengths and weaknesses attached to their 'dominant style of interaction' and their 'serial (obsessive-compulsive) behavior pattern' with 'flexibility according to the context of the situation' being an important factor in achieving a better balance between the two different modes of interacting with the world...
We move on...
-- dgb, Nov. 6th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain
1. Convergence and Divergence
Freud and Jung both went through periods of 'dark self-analysis'.
With Freud, it was mainly after his father died.
With Jung, it was when he was in theoretical conflict with Freud and was caught between 'hanging on to the Freudian approach' vs. 'developing his own unique approach.
I talked briefly about 'divergence and convergence', 'contact and withdrawal', 'separation and union' in my last essay.
This is the dialectical -- or 'multi-dialectic' -- cycle of life.
A distinction can be made between two types of 'energy': a)'integrative energy' vs. b) 'individuated energy'.
a) Integrative energy can be both good and bad. It is the energy of two or more uniquely differentiated parts, particles, bacteria, viruses, plants, animals, people, countries coming together to create something that is 'greater and stronger than the sum of the two individuated parts separate on their own...eg. Lennon and McCartney, Wayne and Shuster, Abbott and Costello, any successful business partnership or love relationship...
However, integrative energy can quickly or slowly 'DIE'...through the process of individual neglect and/or alienation if what was exciting and dynamic in the beginning of the 'dialectical relationship' starts to become mundane and routine over time...Dialectic engagement, contact, and excitement fades away -- or at least can, and often does, fade away -- and the dialectic partnership becomes a 'shell' of its original self, its original 'dynamic duo'...
Conflict, anger, resentment, and alienated impasses enter the picture -- and often a 'compensatory longing' for a new and different type of partnership...can stir new forms of longing, desire, and excitement...
The conflict can sometimes be seen as being between 'stability', 'loyalty', and 'rootedness' on the one hand; and 'mystery', 'newness', 'intrigue', and a heightened sense of 'desire', 'attraction', 'romance' and/or 'sexuality' on the other hand...at least if we are talking about an 'alienated or partly alienated marriage' (which doesn't even necessarily have to play a part in the new dialectic partnership)...The human personality is always looking for new and different ways of 'extending and actualizing the multitude of different parts of its own self and life mandala'...both inside and/or outside of a stable and/or unstable long-term partnership...
To state the obvious, there are many different types of people in the world with a myriad of different character-traits that can be 'attractive' to us, at least at first, until perhaps the same characteristic starts to become 'too much' for us later on, and thus begins to take on a 'negative judgment and feeling' as opposed to its earlier 'positive judgment and feeling'... Every pronounced characteristic we meet in a person is thus often flanked by both positive and negative elements attached to this characteristic...
The 'bold, assertive' person we meet and are attracted to at first can become 'too pushy and controlling' later on in our relationship...As Hegel stated, and I am paraphrasing, every theory, every characteristic, every person, carries the seeds to his or her or its own self-destruction...as well as self-celebration....depending on how it is used and where it goes and how it is judged...
Some people are more liberal-minded, creative, daring, risk-taking, adventurous, excitement-seeking...
While others are more conservative-minded, less creative, less daring, less risk-taking, less adventurous, less excitement-seeking, more concerned about such life factors as safety, stability, rootedness, routine, predictability, and the like...
Neither is better or worse than the other...both have both their positive and negative features to them...
Probably most of us seek a balance of both....Again the magic principle of 'dialectic, (democratic, egalitarian), homeostatic balance or equilibrium' enters the picture...
Another way of quickly differentiating people is on their 'degree of self-boundaries'...and 'degree of openess and/or closedness to others'....
A partly or mainly Freudian distinction can be made between a) 'the socially (or 'orally')-receptive' person who tends to be more outgoing, more socially receptive, more 'socially extraverted' as opposed to b) the person who tends to be more 'socially (or anally)-rejecting' 'socially (or anally)-schizoid'...closed in, less receptive to social interaction, 'intraverted', protective of his or her self-boundaries, and how close you get to him or her, a plate of 'body or character armour' metaphorically 'protecting his or her heart', protecting his or her sense of emotional vulnerability, or alternatively, more interested in the 'thoughts and ideas and issues going on inside his or her head' than in 'attempting to carry on any kind of meaningful conversation with anyone'...
Again, neither type is necessarily better or worse than the other in itself -- the ''orally/socially receptive' or 'anally/socially rejecting' person -- but both have their respective strengths and weaknesses attached to their 'dominant style of interaction' and their 'serial (obsessive-compulsive) behavior pattern' with 'flexibility according to the context of the situation' being an important factor in achieving a better balance between the two different modes of interacting with the world...
We move on...
-- dgb, Nov. 6th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Divergence and Convergence, Contact and Withdrawal, Separation and Union, Thesis and Anti-Thesis: God, Man, Creation, Anaxamander, Hegel, Nietzsche, The Christian Religion/Mythology, The 'Anti-Christ', and Dialectic Integration
What was the essential idea propelling Darwin's Theory of Evolution?
Was it the idea that we evolved (or 'mutated') genetically over millions of years and countless generations -- from apes? Or indeed, from animals in general?
Because if so, Anaxamander, the second oldest, recognized Greek and Western philosopher, a Pre-Socratic -- as stated in the last essay, and in a growing number of philosophical essays and biographical articles on Anaxamander life and ideas -- can be viewed as the first 'evolution theorist' as he asserted that man 'evolved' or 'mutated' from fishes...
Or was -- and is -- there a much more profound idea associated with 'evolution theory' that goes way beyond the theory of whether or not man 'mutated from an animal (or indeed, from all animals)' or not?
The particular aspect of evolution theory that I am reaching for, enters into the realm of the 'bi-polar', 'the dialectic', and 'dialectic engagement', 'dialectic energy', and even into 'Quantum Physics' and 'Quantum Energy Theory' that still needs to be more fully integrated with, or into, what might be called 'Quantum Psychic and Philosophical Energy Theory'?
Because here too, Anaxamander showed us in his own primitive, partly mythological way, some brilliant insights into 'the way the world and man works' that have 'continued to evolve' through the work of such famous philosophers and psychologists as Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Darwin, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Freud, Jung, and others...And this is without even touching upon the history and evolution of Eastern Mythology and Philosophy, Middle Eastern Mythology and Philosophy, North American Indian Mythology and Philosophy...
There is a pattern here... Philosophy and Psychology have their collective roots in Mythology...Mythological Symbols remain entrenched in the psychology of man, and in order to fully understand the depths and roots of both philosophy and psychology, we need to better understand -- 'mythology'.
I say this at 55 years old. I was unable to say this at 20 years old -- or 24 years old when I wrote my Honours Thesis in Psychology at the time -- because I was too much 'engulfed in, and swallowed up by, rational-empiricism, which was my Ruling and Idolized God' at the time...
And God said...You shall have no other gods before Me. (1st Commandment)
Ooops...David, you slipped...you were 'worshipping a different God' at the time -- not your 'introjected Protestant God' but rather your conflated, integrative 'God of The Enlightenment'...
What you were (I was) not yet 'dialectically capable of' yet -- because I had not been fully exposed to Fritz Perls, Carl Jung, and Hegel yet -- was the very 'dialectic idea' that the 'two Gods' were not necessarily 'mutually exclusive'...and could indeed, one day, meet each other...
Furthermore, my 'Enligtenment God' had not yet met my 'Romantic God' and furhtermore, neither my 'Enlightenment' or my 'Romantic' God had yet fully met and 'dialectically embraced' my 'Humanistic-Existential God'...
And furthermore, at 29, none of these 'Gods' had met my 'Mythological Gods' which my introduction to both Jungian Psychology and Greek Mythology would later (in my mid 30s and 40s) introduce me too...
I had 'disavowed' Carl Jung for a long time -- he was one of the last of the main psychologists to be fully embraced within the confines of Hegel's Hotel...
In 'disavowing' Carl Jung, I was also disavowing my 'Mythological Self'...and my 'Mythological Gods'...and the connection between 'introjection' and 'projection', 'Gods' and 'Archetypes'....'Gods' are externalized (projected) 'Archetypes'...and 'Archetypes' are internalized (introjected) 'Gods'...The two are dialectically connected and both give 'birth' and 'death' to each other...
At 29, and indeed, right up into at least my mid 30s, I disavowed my 'Mythological Self'...I believed myself incapable of 'thinking mythologically' (even though we all think mythologically at night when we dream...)
Between 29 and probably right up into my 50s, I believed that 'I would never be able to give a 'dream or fantasy or mythological interpretation' like Freud in 'The Interpretation of Dreams', or Jung, or Erich Fromm in 'The Forgotten Language'...
And yet here I am at 55 about to embark -- or to continue in more depth and detail -- a mythological interpretation of the Central Figures in The Christian Religion (modifications can be applied to any other religion) that arguably rival any mythological interpretation that Freud or Jung or Fromm ever presented...Of course, I am narcissistically biased...
Jung was the ultimate 'Master of The Mythological'...Freud was too 'rational-empirical' to fully embrace the Mythological, and as such, rebelled against Jung's activity in this area that went way beyond anything Freud did in this area...Freud delved into 'The Personal Unconscious', Jung went beyond the Personal Unconscious and into the realm of 'The Collective Unconscious'...and I dialectically embrace both -- and the interaction between them...
Incidently, speaking of 'The Coincidental -- or Not', 'The Uncanny', 'The Astrological', and 'The Para-Psychological', I was born on March 3rd, which was the day that Freud and Jung met for the first time on a Sunday morning in 1907 and talked for 15 hours straight!
Although others have been here before me, I consider it my 'unconscious/conscious duty and passion' to re-integrate Freud and Jung and their respective individual and collective ideas as I am doing right here and now (although with a more 'Jungian domination' today) in November 2010...
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The Freud Meets Jung conference held in November 2007 was organized jointly by The British Psycho-Analytical Society, The Society of Analytical Psychology, and The Journal of Analytical Psychology to celebrate the centenary of the first meeting between the two pioneers of psychoanalysis. Speakers and Chairs were from the three organizations with the addition of two historians of depth psychology, Ernst Falzeder and Sonu Shamdasani. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Analytical Psychology and the International Psychoanalytical Association. A tribute was paid to Dr. Joseph Henderson who died at age 104 the week before the conference.
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And now here we are in November, 2010...
With Hegel's Hotel embracing the whole history and evolution of Western Philosophy and Psychology but in particular here the respective and integrative psychologies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung...
Carl Jung used 'the mandala'...as his 'Ultimate Therapeutic Tool'...(Google... Carl Jung and The Mandala... to get a much better visual image of what 'the mandala' looks like in its 'circular structure' which is different than the usual 'rectangular structure' of the psyche that I usually visualize...Today we are switching to a 'circular image of The Mandala with a Christian image of The Cross inside the Mandala'...
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From Wikipedia....(Jung comments on his theoretical and therapeutic movement towards 'The Mandala' as his 'Ultimate Therapeutic Agent of Healing and Change'...)
Writes Jung,
I had to abandon the idea of the superordinate position of the ego. ... I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point -- namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the centre, to individuation.
... I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate. - C. G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
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Before I get back to 'The Mandala' and my particular convergence or integration of 'The Mandala' with 'The Christian Cross' and 'Christian Mythology' (and/or Religion, whichever you prefer -- I am not here to start new 'religious vs. anti-religious wars'...), let's move from Jung back to Anaxamander and then fast forward to Darwin...
Anaxamander gave us his own 'Greek-Style Myth of Creation' which, albeit primitive in some of its ideas and structures, was still so brilliantly profound that it has stayed with us in a host of different philosophical, psychological, political and religious renditions that retain the foundation of its original Anaxamanderian structure, dynamics, and interaction...
We must remember as psychologists and/or as students of psychology that man projects (or externalizes) into the outside world everything inside of himself that is important to him, unconscious, and evolving from the depths of his psyche as a part of his 'individuation' (Jung) or 'self-actualization' (Maslow) process...
But in order for these 'projections' to be understood and utilized properly by our 'Conscious Central Ego' we have to understand 'symbolic, mythological language', and in particular, our own symbolic, mythological language which then can be translated either by a therapist and/or by our Central Ego and 'translated into more rational-empirical language' that can be utilized in our day to day living, to faciliate our 'personal growth' and 'individuation' or our humanistic-existential, 'self-actualization' process...
Let me give you an example from my personal life. The other day I had a dream of an ex-girlfriend (why this ex-girlfriend and not another, I have no idea why) who came to me in a 'symbolic visualization of her having no legs'...(Perhaps I have 'conflated' this particular ex-girlfriend with my mother who has diabetic complications and who I worry about her circulation and her legs -- as I just now 'conflated' with my own personal health complications with my liver, and me too worrying about a loss of circulation -- and particularly the circulations in my legs...
The next day I received an email from a friend showing a video of a man who had no legs and no arms -- and yet he was still very mobile, very active, and very 'positive thinking' towards life... A 'coincidence' or 'the uncanny' and some element of the possibly 'para-psychic' or 'para-normal'...
The dream can also be interpreted on another level or dimension as well pertaining to the process of 'individuation' to use Jung's term or 'self-actualization' to use Maslow's term.
The human psyche -- like the human body -- is built according to the principle of 'homeostatic or dialectical balance' with the principle of 'compensation' (arrived at first by Alfed Adler, and then used a little differenly by Jung) being a part of the human mind-body's natural movement towards homeostatic and dialectic (and democratic) balance...
Jung talked about 'superior or dominant functions and/or character traits in the conscious personality or Ego or Personna (or what I would call the Central Ego)' and 'subsidiary, secondary, inferior functions and/or character traits being more likely to be lost, buried, hidden, suppressed, repressed in the subconscious/unconscious Shadow of the Personality...
Nietzsche (1844-1900) was 15 years old when Darwin wrote 'The Origin of The Species' in 1859.
Well, with me, the application of this principle is easy... My 'superior function' is my 'brain activity', my 'inferior function' is my 'leg activity'...and the dream came to me at least partly as a symbolic message and a form of 'unconsicous compensation' designed to tell me in crypted dream language not to 'ignore my inferior function' -- i.e., my 'leg activity'...(meaning I need to get more physical as opposed to psychological exercise...)
This is how our 'unconscious mind' complements and compensates for what is going on in our conscious mind and our mind-body, taken 'wholistically' as opposed to 'reductionistically'...like the 'therapeutic agent of the whole Mandala' as opposed to only seeing particular parts of our own personal life-Mandela...and ignoring other 'suppressed' or 'repressed' or 'inferior' (at least in terms of self-perception) parts...
You see, even Nietzsche, as he ranted and raved against Christianity and the 'suppression of The Self' or 'The Suppression of The Actualizing Self' which Nietzsche viewed as the 'Anti-Thesis' of the Activity of The Superman'...who thus can also be viewed as 'The Anti-Christ' -- because of the Superman/Anti-Christ's opposition to prevailing Christian religion at the time -- which advocated the 'Suppression of The Individual Self in The Here and Now and in The Face of God' as the necessary expense of living happily ever after in Heaven, God's Palace, after life...
Even as Nietzsche raved and ranted against these Christian 'Anti-Humanistic', Anti-Here and Now, anti-live for the moment, anti-live for health and happiness, principles...
Still, in the Shadow of his personality, Nietzsche embraced the best principles of Christianity and the Spirit/Archetype of Jesus Christ...
As he ran towards the horse being whipped by its cruel master...and stepped between the horse's master and the horse to take the full blows of the whip...who else can this remind us other than The Spirit and The Archetype of Jesus Christ...Nietzsche going down for the count to save the punishment of the horse...and apparently this being the last moment of Nietzsche's sanity as he spent the last 10 years of his life inside a mental institution/asylum...Perhaps -- or so I will throw this argument at you -- Nietzsche might have been attempting to atone for both his own sins and at the same time the sins of all mankind...Nietzche had spent 46 years looking into the face of his own monsters, deep within his own Nietzcschean self-abyss -- and yet over and over again, he had managed to somehow jump, or climb, or fly across this precipice -- from Being to Becoming -- without falling into The Abyss...
And in a Christian moment...Nietzsche fell...into his own existential abyss...never to really surface again except in psychotic moments...
Nietzsche had spent his whole life defeating The Abyss...
And then one day, in protecting a horse, The Abyss defeated Nietzsche...
Was this Nietzsche's 'repetition compulsion'?
Was this his 'Ultimate, Core Nuclear, Transference Complex'?
His fight with his own personal Abyss?
His fight with his own 'Internal Monsters'?
His fight against -- and eventual loss to -- Insanity?
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Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Nietzsche was 38 years old in 1882 when he wrote 'The Gay Science' and pronounced to the world for the first time -- 'God is dead!' -- via a character in his book, and this distinction between author and character is important, the character in the book being a 'madman' on top of that (although maybe this distinction isn't so important in the eventual scheme of things as the character in the book can be projectively interpreted as the 'evolving, soon to be insane, later Nietzsche')...
However, Nietzsche was certainly very sane when he wrote this 'philosophy with a hammer' and 'signature statement' of his 'anti-Christian, deconstrutive, post-modern, pro-humanistic-existential philosophy', and its eventual Copernican impact on the world...
Did Nietzsche murder God? (or was he attempting to murder the Christian ideology of sacrificing all humanistic-existential, health and happiness, and striving to be the best we possibly can be in our short here-and-now life on earth for the sake of a very idealized but highly suspicious 'afterlife' in 'Heaven' (at least from a rapidly evolving 'Enlightenment-rational-empirical' point of view that was just a little behind Nietzsche's own more 'romantic' and 'post-modern' vision of the purpose and meaning of man's valuable time, passion, and energy spent on earth...) In between, were the 'pantheists' and 'deists' like Schelling and Diderot who were trying to 'bridge the dialectic gap' between Christianity and Religion on the one hand , and Science, Rational-Empiricism, and Evolution Theory on the other hand...
Did Darwin murder God with his Evolution Theory?
Did Spinoza start to kill God with his Pre-Enlightenment brand of 'Pantheism'? Spinoza was a 'pantheist' -- a person who believes that 'God is in everything' -- which was looked at by orthodox Jews in Holland during his time as being a 'sneaky form of atheism'...For this, Spinoza was 'ex-communicated' from his Orthodox Judaism and the surrounding orthodox Jewish Community...It could have been worse as it could have been a 'death sentence'...paradoxically from the same 'religious victims' who had managed to escape the deadly nightmare of 'The Roman Church and The Spanish Inquisition'... and were now turning themselves into 'victimizers relative to religious intolerance.)...
Did Heraclitus murder God? (Heraclitus is recognized, among other things, as being the first Western/Greek pantheist)...
Did the first Greek/Western philosophers -- Thales and Anaxamander -- murder 'The Greek Mythological Gods'? Remember, Ancient, Pre-Socratic Greece was 'Pre-Christianity'...before Plato and Aristotle influenced the eventual creation and rise of Roman Christianity...
Did all heretics, the blasphemists, the atheists, the agnostics, the pantheists, and/or the deists amongst us -- past and present -- murder God? (Certainly, many were murdered in the name of 'God'...which is despicable...and still happening...)
The Common, Uniting Signature of The Modern-Day, 21st Century, Post-Hegelian, Humanistic-Existential Multi-Dialectic Theorist....is....
The willingness and ability to hold two or more opposing and competing ideas up together, side by side, and not necessarily feel 'love' towards the one idea and 'hate' towards the other...not to feel 'compelled' to have to choose 'one' or the 'other', 'either/or'...
But rather, to be able to embrace both competing ideas, or sets of ideas, and not to feel 'panic-stricken' by the close proximity of the one competing idea with its opposite, but rather to see the 'dialectical or multi-dialectical (or even pluralistic) truth value of both or all competing ideas converging on each other in the same space and time...
By doing this, we recognize and accept the ultimate 'Plulalistic, Multi-Dialectic, Multi-Cultural, Multi-Religious and Mythological, Multi-Political, Multi-Philosophical, Multi-Psychological Reductionistic and Wholistic Truth-Value of Life'...
Call this in partly Jungian terms if you wish...'The Pluralistic, Multi-Dialectic, Multi-Bi-Polar Truth Value and -- Mandala -- of Life -- and of The Wholistic, Evolving Self'
Now at this point, we start to enter a very, unorthodox, partly 'Copernican' -- DGB Multi-Dialectical-Humanistic-Existential-Mythological Pantheistic World'...
Paradoxically, I come from a very orthodox, Protestant background that, partly like Nietzsche (Nietzsche's dad was a Lutheran Pastor before he died when the little Nietzsche was only 5 years old) -- and many, many others -- before me, I both partly reject, and partly embrace and accept...at the same time...This should not be shocking or even surprising as it is a very, very, common recurring paradoxical human psychological and philosophical phenomenon to 'accept' something (an idea, a belief, a value, a thing, a person...) and to 'reject' him, her, and/or it at the same time...
Whether we like this phenomenon or not, 'Hegelianism' in the sense that I am about to define it -- i.e., as the idea of holding seemingly paradoxical, contradictory ideas in the personality at the same time -- is the ruling principle of the human psyche, not the exception...and only turns 'neurotic', 'psychotic', and/or 'pathological'...to the extent that we 'dissociate', 'disavow', 'alienate', 'bury', 'isolate', 'reject', 'betray'...'our hidden opposites'...in 'the deepest Shadow(s)' of our personality...It is a psychological truism of sorts that has been affirmed by Freud, Jung, and other 'psychologists of the deep' that 'what generally goes down in the personality -- as in 'hidden', 'ostracized', 'ex-communicated', 'buried', 'suppressed', 'repressed'... -- comes back up again, often in shocking energies and formats...
Traditionally, this has been called 'the return of the repressed'...and it might be a 'buried trauma and/or memory', a 'character-trait', an 'impulse'...a 'hidden counter, compensatory upward movement and energy in the personality'...
This can be either good or bad depending on the type of energy that is surfacing, how it is surfacing, in what context, and whether it is properly understood in the 'wholistic, multi-dialectic, dynamic context of the evolving personality' -- or not...
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Enough for today...I am burnt out...
We will come back to 'The Cross and Mandala' Model of The Personality tomorrow...
-- dgb, Nov. 2nd, 2010...
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectical Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Have been resurrected....
Was it the idea that we evolved (or 'mutated') genetically over millions of years and countless generations -- from apes? Or indeed, from animals in general?
Because if so, Anaxamander, the second oldest, recognized Greek and Western philosopher, a Pre-Socratic -- as stated in the last essay, and in a growing number of philosophical essays and biographical articles on Anaxamander life and ideas -- can be viewed as the first 'evolution theorist' as he asserted that man 'evolved' or 'mutated' from fishes...
Or was -- and is -- there a much more profound idea associated with 'evolution theory' that goes way beyond the theory of whether or not man 'mutated from an animal (or indeed, from all animals)' or not?
The particular aspect of evolution theory that I am reaching for, enters into the realm of the 'bi-polar', 'the dialectic', and 'dialectic engagement', 'dialectic energy', and even into 'Quantum Physics' and 'Quantum Energy Theory' that still needs to be more fully integrated with, or into, what might be called 'Quantum Psychic and Philosophical Energy Theory'?
Because here too, Anaxamander showed us in his own primitive, partly mythological way, some brilliant insights into 'the way the world and man works' that have 'continued to evolve' through the work of such famous philosophers and psychologists as Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Darwin, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Freud, Jung, and others...And this is without even touching upon the history and evolution of Eastern Mythology and Philosophy, Middle Eastern Mythology and Philosophy, North American Indian Mythology and Philosophy...
There is a pattern here... Philosophy and Psychology have their collective roots in Mythology...Mythological Symbols remain entrenched in the psychology of man, and in order to fully understand the depths and roots of both philosophy and psychology, we need to better understand -- 'mythology'.
I say this at 55 years old. I was unable to say this at 20 years old -- or 24 years old when I wrote my Honours Thesis in Psychology at the time -- because I was too much 'engulfed in, and swallowed up by, rational-empiricism, which was my Ruling and Idolized God' at the time...
And God said...You shall have no other gods before Me. (1st Commandment)
Ooops...David, you slipped...you were 'worshipping a different God' at the time -- not your 'introjected Protestant God' but rather your conflated, integrative 'God of The Enlightenment'...
What you were (I was) not yet 'dialectically capable of' yet -- because I had not been fully exposed to Fritz Perls, Carl Jung, and Hegel yet -- was the very 'dialectic idea' that the 'two Gods' were not necessarily 'mutually exclusive'...and could indeed, one day, meet each other...
Furthermore, my 'Enligtenment God' had not yet met my 'Romantic God' and furhtermore, neither my 'Enlightenment' or my 'Romantic' God had yet fully met and 'dialectically embraced' my 'Humanistic-Existential God'...
And furthermore, at 29, none of these 'Gods' had met my 'Mythological Gods' which my introduction to both Jungian Psychology and Greek Mythology would later (in my mid 30s and 40s) introduce me too...
I had 'disavowed' Carl Jung for a long time -- he was one of the last of the main psychologists to be fully embraced within the confines of Hegel's Hotel...
In 'disavowing' Carl Jung, I was also disavowing my 'Mythological Self'...and my 'Mythological Gods'...and the connection between 'introjection' and 'projection', 'Gods' and 'Archetypes'....'Gods' are externalized (projected) 'Archetypes'...and 'Archetypes' are internalized (introjected) 'Gods'...The two are dialectically connected and both give 'birth' and 'death' to each other...
At 29, and indeed, right up into at least my mid 30s, I disavowed my 'Mythological Self'...I believed myself incapable of 'thinking mythologically' (even though we all think mythologically at night when we dream...)
Between 29 and probably right up into my 50s, I believed that 'I would never be able to give a 'dream or fantasy or mythological interpretation' like Freud in 'The Interpretation of Dreams', or Jung, or Erich Fromm in 'The Forgotten Language'...
And yet here I am at 55 about to embark -- or to continue in more depth and detail -- a mythological interpretation of the Central Figures in The Christian Religion (modifications can be applied to any other religion) that arguably rival any mythological interpretation that Freud or Jung or Fromm ever presented...Of course, I am narcissistically biased...
Jung was the ultimate 'Master of The Mythological'...Freud was too 'rational-empirical' to fully embrace the Mythological, and as such, rebelled against Jung's activity in this area that went way beyond anything Freud did in this area...Freud delved into 'The Personal Unconscious', Jung went beyond the Personal Unconscious and into the realm of 'The Collective Unconscious'...and I dialectically embrace both -- and the interaction between them...
Incidently, speaking of 'The Coincidental -- or Not', 'The Uncanny', 'The Astrological', and 'The Para-Psychological', I was born on March 3rd, which was the day that Freud and Jung met for the first time on a Sunday morning in 1907 and talked for 15 hours straight!
Although others have been here before me, I consider it my 'unconscious/conscious duty and passion' to re-integrate Freud and Jung and their respective individual and collective ideas as I am doing right here and now (although with a more 'Jungian domination' today) in November 2010...
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The Freud Meets Jung conference held in November 2007 was organized jointly by The British Psycho-Analytical Society, The Society of Analytical Psychology, and The Journal of Analytical Psychology to celebrate the centenary of the first meeting between the two pioneers of psychoanalysis. Speakers and Chairs were from the three organizations with the addition of two historians of depth psychology, Ernst Falzeder and Sonu Shamdasani. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Analytical Psychology and the International Psychoanalytical Association. A tribute was paid to Dr. Joseph Henderson who died at age 104 the week before the conference.
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And now here we are in November, 2010...
With Hegel's Hotel embracing the whole history and evolution of Western Philosophy and Psychology but in particular here the respective and integrative psychologies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung...
Carl Jung used 'the mandala'...as his 'Ultimate Therapeutic Tool'...(Google... Carl Jung and The Mandala... to get a much better visual image of what 'the mandala' looks like in its 'circular structure' which is different than the usual 'rectangular structure' of the psyche that I usually visualize...Today we are switching to a 'circular image of The Mandala with a Christian image of The Cross inside the Mandala'...
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From Wikipedia....(Jung comments on his theoretical and therapeutic movement towards 'The Mandala' as his 'Ultimate Therapeutic Agent of Healing and Change'...)
Writes Jung,
I had to abandon the idea of the superordinate position of the ego. ... I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point -- namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the centre, to individuation.
... I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate. - C. G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
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Before I get back to 'The Mandala' and my particular convergence or integration of 'The Mandala' with 'The Christian Cross' and 'Christian Mythology' (and/or Religion, whichever you prefer -- I am not here to start new 'religious vs. anti-religious wars'...), let's move from Jung back to Anaxamander and then fast forward to Darwin...
Anaxamander gave us his own 'Greek-Style Myth of Creation' which, albeit primitive in some of its ideas and structures, was still so brilliantly profound that it has stayed with us in a host of different philosophical, psychological, political and religious renditions that retain the foundation of its original Anaxamanderian structure, dynamics, and interaction...
We must remember as psychologists and/or as students of psychology that man projects (or externalizes) into the outside world everything inside of himself that is important to him, unconscious, and evolving from the depths of his psyche as a part of his 'individuation' (Jung) or 'self-actualization' (Maslow) process...
But in order for these 'projections' to be understood and utilized properly by our 'Conscious Central Ego' we have to understand 'symbolic, mythological language', and in particular, our own symbolic, mythological language which then can be translated either by a therapist and/or by our Central Ego and 'translated into more rational-empirical language' that can be utilized in our day to day living, to faciliate our 'personal growth' and 'individuation' or our humanistic-existential, 'self-actualization' process...
Let me give you an example from my personal life. The other day I had a dream of an ex-girlfriend (why this ex-girlfriend and not another, I have no idea why) who came to me in a 'symbolic visualization of her having no legs'...(Perhaps I have 'conflated' this particular ex-girlfriend with my mother who has diabetic complications and who I worry about her circulation and her legs -- as I just now 'conflated' with my own personal health complications with my liver, and me too worrying about a loss of circulation -- and particularly the circulations in my legs...
The next day I received an email from a friend showing a video of a man who had no legs and no arms -- and yet he was still very mobile, very active, and very 'positive thinking' towards life... A 'coincidence' or 'the uncanny' and some element of the possibly 'para-psychic' or 'para-normal'...
The dream can also be interpreted on another level or dimension as well pertaining to the process of 'individuation' to use Jung's term or 'self-actualization' to use Maslow's term.
The human psyche -- like the human body -- is built according to the principle of 'homeostatic or dialectical balance' with the principle of 'compensation' (arrived at first by Alfed Adler, and then used a little differenly by Jung) being a part of the human mind-body's natural movement towards homeostatic and dialectic (and democratic) balance...
Jung talked about 'superior or dominant functions and/or character traits in the conscious personality or Ego or Personna (or what I would call the Central Ego)' and 'subsidiary, secondary, inferior functions and/or character traits being more likely to be lost, buried, hidden, suppressed, repressed in the subconscious/unconscious Shadow of the Personality...
Nietzsche (1844-1900) was 15 years old when Darwin wrote 'The Origin of The Species' in 1859.
Well, with me, the application of this principle is easy... My 'superior function' is my 'brain activity', my 'inferior function' is my 'leg activity'...and the dream came to me at least partly as a symbolic message and a form of 'unconsicous compensation' designed to tell me in crypted dream language not to 'ignore my inferior function' -- i.e., my 'leg activity'...(meaning I need to get more physical as opposed to psychological exercise...)
This is how our 'unconscious mind' complements and compensates for what is going on in our conscious mind and our mind-body, taken 'wholistically' as opposed to 'reductionistically'...like the 'therapeutic agent of the whole Mandala' as opposed to only seeing particular parts of our own personal life-Mandela...and ignoring other 'suppressed' or 'repressed' or 'inferior' (at least in terms of self-perception) parts...
You see, even Nietzsche, as he ranted and raved against Christianity and the 'suppression of The Self' or 'The Suppression of The Actualizing Self' which Nietzsche viewed as the 'Anti-Thesis' of the Activity of The Superman'...who thus can also be viewed as 'The Anti-Christ' -- because of the Superman/Anti-Christ's opposition to prevailing Christian religion at the time -- which advocated the 'Suppression of The Individual Self in The Here and Now and in The Face of God' as the necessary expense of living happily ever after in Heaven, God's Palace, after life...
Even as Nietzsche raved and ranted against these Christian 'Anti-Humanistic', Anti-Here and Now, anti-live for the moment, anti-live for health and happiness, principles...
Still, in the Shadow of his personality, Nietzsche embraced the best principles of Christianity and the Spirit/Archetype of Jesus Christ...
As he ran towards the horse being whipped by its cruel master...and stepped between the horse's master and the horse to take the full blows of the whip...who else can this remind us other than The Spirit and The Archetype of Jesus Christ...Nietzsche going down for the count to save the punishment of the horse...and apparently this being the last moment of Nietzsche's sanity as he spent the last 10 years of his life inside a mental institution/asylum...Perhaps -- or so I will throw this argument at you -- Nietzsche might have been attempting to atone for both his own sins and at the same time the sins of all mankind...Nietzche had spent 46 years looking into the face of his own monsters, deep within his own Nietzcschean self-abyss -- and yet over and over again, he had managed to somehow jump, or climb, or fly across this precipice -- from Being to Becoming -- without falling into The Abyss...
And in a Christian moment...Nietzsche fell...into his own existential abyss...never to really surface again except in psychotic moments...
Nietzsche had spent his whole life defeating The Abyss...
And then one day, in protecting a horse, The Abyss defeated Nietzsche...
Was this Nietzsche's 'repetition compulsion'?
Was this his 'Ultimate, Core Nuclear, Transference Complex'?
His fight with his own personal Abyss?
His fight with his own 'Internal Monsters'?
His fight against -- and eventual loss to -- Insanity?
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Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Nietzsche was 38 years old in 1882 when he wrote 'The Gay Science' and pronounced to the world for the first time -- 'God is dead!' -- via a character in his book, and this distinction between author and character is important, the character in the book being a 'madman' on top of that (although maybe this distinction isn't so important in the eventual scheme of things as the character in the book can be projectively interpreted as the 'evolving, soon to be insane, later Nietzsche')...
However, Nietzsche was certainly very sane when he wrote this 'philosophy with a hammer' and 'signature statement' of his 'anti-Christian, deconstrutive, post-modern, pro-humanistic-existential philosophy', and its eventual Copernican impact on the world...
Did Nietzsche murder God? (or was he attempting to murder the Christian ideology of sacrificing all humanistic-existential, health and happiness, and striving to be the best we possibly can be in our short here-and-now life on earth for the sake of a very idealized but highly suspicious 'afterlife' in 'Heaven' (at least from a rapidly evolving 'Enlightenment-rational-empirical' point of view that was just a little behind Nietzsche's own more 'romantic' and 'post-modern' vision of the purpose and meaning of man's valuable time, passion, and energy spent on earth...) In between, were the 'pantheists' and 'deists' like Schelling and Diderot who were trying to 'bridge the dialectic gap' between Christianity and Religion on the one hand , and Science, Rational-Empiricism, and Evolution Theory on the other hand...
Did Darwin murder God with his Evolution Theory?
Did Spinoza start to kill God with his Pre-Enlightenment brand of 'Pantheism'? Spinoza was a 'pantheist' -- a person who believes that 'God is in everything' -- which was looked at by orthodox Jews in Holland during his time as being a 'sneaky form of atheism'...For this, Spinoza was 'ex-communicated' from his Orthodox Judaism and the surrounding orthodox Jewish Community...It could have been worse as it could have been a 'death sentence'...paradoxically from the same 'religious victims' who had managed to escape the deadly nightmare of 'The Roman Church and The Spanish Inquisition'... and were now turning themselves into 'victimizers relative to religious intolerance.)...
Did Heraclitus murder God? (Heraclitus is recognized, among other things, as being the first Western/Greek pantheist)...
Did the first Greek/Western philosophers -- Thales and Anaxamander -- murder 'The Greek Mythological Gods'? Remember, Ancient, Pre-Socratic Greece was 'Pre-Christianity'...before Plato and Aristotle influenced the eventual creation and rise of Roman Christianity...
Did all heretics, the blasphemists, the atheists, the agnostics, the pantheists, and/or the deists amongst us -- past and present -- murder God? (Certainly, many were murdered in the name of 'God'...which is despicable...and still happening...)
The Common, Uniting Signature of The Modern-Day, 21st Century, Post-Hegelian, Humanistic-Existential Multi-Dialectic Theorist....is....
The willingness and ability to hold two or more opposing and competing ideas up together, side by side, and not necessarily feel 'love' towards the one idea and 'hate' towards the other...not to feel 'compelled' to have to choose 'one' or the 'other', 'either/or'...
But rather, to be able to embrace both competing ideas, or sets of ideas, and not to feel 'panic-stricken' by the close proximity of the one competing idea with its opposite, but rather to see the 'dialectical or multi-dialectical (or even pluralistic) truth value of both or all competing ideas converging on each other in the same space and time...
By doing this, we recognize and accept the ultimate 'Plulalistic, Multi-Dialectic, Multi-Cultural, Multi-Religious and Mythological, Multi-Political, Multi-Philosophical, Multi-Psychological Reductionistic and Wholistic Truth-Value of Life'...
Call this in partly Jungian terms if you wish...'The Pluralistic, Multi-Dialectic, Multi-Bi-Polar Truth Value and -- Mandala -- of Life -- and of The Wholistic, Evolving Self'
Now at this point, we start to enter a very, unorthodox, partly 'Copernican' -- DGB Multi-Dialectical-Humanistic-Existential-Mythological Pantheistic World'...
Paradoxically, I come from a very orthodox, Protestant background that, partly like Nietzsche (Nietzsche's dad was a Lutheran Pastor before he died when the little Nietzsche was only 5 years old) -- and many, many others -- before me, I both partly reject, and partly embrace and accept...at the same time...This should not be shocking or even surprising as it is a very, very, common recurring paradoxical human psychological and philosophical phenomenon to 'accept' something (an idea, a belief, a value, a thing, a person...) and to 'reject' him, her, and/or it at the same time...
Whether we like this phenomenon or not, 'Hegelianism' in the sense that I am about to define it -- i.e., as the idea of holding seemingly paradoxical, contradictory ideas in the personality at the same time -- is the ruling principle of the human psyche, not the exception...and only turns 'neurotic', 'psychotic', and/or 'pathological'...to the extent that we 'dissociate', 'disavow', 'alienate', 'bury', 'isolate', 'reject', 'betray'...'our hidden opposites'...in 'the deepest Shadow(s)' of our personality...It is a psychological truism of sorts that has been affirmed by Freud, Jung, and other 'psychologists of the deep' that 'what generally goes down in the personality -- as in 'hidden', 'ostracized', 'ex-communicated', 'buried', 'suppressed', 'repressed'... -- comes back up again, often in shocking energies and formats...
Traditionally, this has been called 'the return of the repressed'...and it might be a 'buried trauma and/or memory', a 'character-trait', an 'impulse'...a 'hidden counter, compensatory upward movement and energy in the personality'...
This can be either good or bad depending on the type of energy that is surfacing, how it is surfacing, in what context, and whether it is properly understood in the 'wholistic, multi-dialectic, dynamic context of the evolving personality' -- or not...
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Enough for today...I am burnt out...
We will come back to 'The Cross and Mandala' Model of The Personality tomorrow...
-- dgb, Nov. 2nd, 2010...
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectical Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Have been resurrected....
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Why Anaxamander is One of The Most Important Philosophers in Western Philosophy (and How His Primitive, Archaic -- But Inherently Brilliant -- Ideas Are Still Being Used)
October 26th, 2010...
I have reached a point in my self studies in philosophy where I have at least a pretty solid basic overall knowledge of most of the history and evolution of Western philosophy...
And one thing, one point, keeps coming back to me over and over again...
The second oldest recognized philosopher in Western history -- one Mr. (or shall I give him the post-humous respect that he deserves and say 'Dr.') Anaxamander who philosophized in the late 500 BC years -- in my opinion is still not given his rightful due respect as one of the greatest philosophers in Western history....comparable to Lao Tse or Confucous in Eastern Philosophy, and even though his work is very sparse, vague, and fragmented, what remains of it, if interpreted in the right light -- and of course I have 'the right light' -- is in essence a philosophical masterpiece, both a precursor of, and the philosophical equivalent for such an early age, of Hegel's much, much more fully recognized and honoured 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' (1804).
In short, Anaxamander's philosophy was a 500 BC 'roughly construed' template or archetype of 'The Phenomemology of Spirit' some 2300 years plus before the 'real Hegelian thing' came into published existence in 1804.
In fact, it is quite possible that Anaxamander invented the word 'arche' (see....http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Bios/Anaximander.html) which means basically 'first principle' as in the word 'archetype' which would become an indispensible word in Jungian Psychology some 2400 years plus... (more on the connection between Anaxamander and Jungian Psychology below...)
Anaxamander has been connected to 'evolutionary theory' and has been called the first 'evolutionist' because he believed that men evolved from fish. Anaxamander could still be right here, or we could go even further back in the evolutionary life chain and say that man probably evolved from 'amoeba'...if not some even more 'archetypal substance'....
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Amoeba (genus)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Amoeba (disambiguation).
Amoeba
Scientific classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Amoebozoa
Phylum: Tubulinea
Order: Tubulinida
Family: Amoebidae
Genus: Amoeba
Bory de Saint-Vincent, 1822
Species
Amoeba proteus
Amoeba (sometimes amœba or ameba, plural amoebae) is a genus of Protozoa.[1]
Contents
1 Terminology
2 History
3 Anatomy
4 Genome
5 Reaction to stimuli
5.1 Hypertonic and hypotonic solutions
5.2 Amoebic cysts
5.3 Marine amoeba
6 References
7 External links
Terminology
There are many closely related terms that can be the source of confusion:
Amoeba is a genus that includes species such as Amoeba proteus
Amoebidae is a family that includes the Amoeba genus, among others.
Amoebozoa is a kingdom that includes the Amoebidae family, among others.
Amoeboids are organisms that move by crawling. Many (but not all) amoeboids are Amoebozoa.
History
The amoeba was first discovered by August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof in 1757.[2] Early naturalists referred to Amoeba as the Proteus animalcule after the Greek god Proteus who could change his shape. The name "amibe" was given to it by Bory de Saint-Vincent,[3] from the Greek amoibè (αμοιβή), meaning change.[4]Dientamoeba fragili was first described in 1918, and was linked to harm in humans.[5]
Anatomy
Anatomy of an amoeba. The cell's organelles and cytoplasm are enclosed by a cell membrane, obtaining its food through phagocytosis. Amoebae have a single large tubular pseudopod at the anterior end, and several secondary ones branching to the sides. The most famous species, Amoeba proteus, averages about 220-740 μm in length while moving,[6] making it a giant among amoeboids.[7] A few amoeboids belonging to different genera can grow larger, however, such as Gromia, Pelomyxa, and Chaos.
Amoebae's most recognizable features include one or more nuclei and a simple contractile vacuole to maintain osmotic equilibrium. Food enveloped by the amoeba is stored and digested in vacuoles. Amoebae, like other single-celled eukaryotic organisms, reproduce asexually via mitosis and cytokinesis, not to be confused with binary fission, which is how prokaryotes (bacteria) reproduce. In cases where the amoeba are forcibly divided, the portion that retains the nucleus will survive and form a new cell and cytoplasm, while the other portion dies. Amoebae also have no definite shape.[8]
Genome
The amoeba is remarkable for its very large genome. The species Amoeba protea has 290 billion (10^9) base pairs in its genome, while the related Polychaos dubium (formerly known as Amoeba dubia) has 670 billion base pairs. The human genome is small by contrast, with its count of 2.9 billion bases[9].
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dgb...continued...
Here is how Anaxamander was smarter than all the other Pre-Socratic philosophers, most of whome were looking for the 'ultimate primordial archetype substance of life'...
Thales said 'water'....
Anaxamenes said 'air'...
Heraclitus said 'fire'....
But Anaxamander -- who fit in there historically right after Thales -- was sharper than all the other Pre-Socratics when he argued that each one of these so-called (in my words, not theirs) 'primordial, archetypal life substances' was in essence 'restricted by its particular molecular structure and boundaries' (again, my 21st century words, not in Anaxamander's 500 BC vocabulary ) that precluded the evolutionary existence and/or development of all the others...thus, none of these particular substances in themselves ('water', 'air', or 'fire') could be the 'primordial, archetypal life substance' that they were all looking for...
There had to be some larger, over-riding principle and/or 'structure' that contained them all, and in particular, 'contained all of the opposites' that Anaxamander saw around him in life...
Anaxamander conceptualized and named this 'over-riding, infinite storage structure' of all of 'life's (and death's) chaotic, unorganized, undifferentiated opposite structural and dynamic pieces' -- 'The Apeiron'...
Now I will argue right here and now -- and I will argue in front of any other philosopher -- that 'The Apeiron' -- as archaic as the concept may appear to us at first glance now -- was, and is, the most important concept that was ever invented in the history and evolution of Western Philosophy. More important than any concept that Socrates or Plato or Aristotle created...We will come back to Lao Tse, Heraclitus, and Spinoza because they had some important conceptual insights into this same 'life mystery' that Anaxamander was shining his philosophical light on...
What Anaxamander had his conceptual finger on was an idea that was superior to Darwin's theory of evolution and far superior to his own idea that 'man evolved from fishes'....
I will give Anaxamander's philosophical and cosmological theory a 21st century name and call it 'binary evolution theory' or 'multi-dialectic theory'.
Anaxamander, in essence, was the 'Hegel' of Pre-Socratic times...Hegel some 2300 years plus before the real Hegel published 'The Phenomenology of Spirit'...and Heraclitus, like Lao Tse in The East, added one more essential piece to Anaxamander's 'binary theory of evolution' that was indispensible to Anaxamander's 'binary evolution theory' that he didn't get to -- and that was/is the theory of 'homeostasis' or 'homeostatic balance' or 'equilibrium'...which Walter Bradford Cannon would 'formalize' some 2500 years later in modern medicine in his classic book called 'The Wisdom of The Body' (1932)...
We could almost say that Heraclitus' philosophical relationship to his (indirect?) teacher, Anaxamander, was similar to Marx's philosophical relationship to his main (indirect) teacher -- Hegel. Except the relationships were essentially different. Marx turned Hegel's idealistic dialectic philosophy upside down and made it both 'materialistic' and 'one-sided towards the political left' whereas Heraclitus both learned from Anaxamander, indeed, added an essential component to Anaxamander's theory of binary evolution (homeostasis or equilibrium) but Heraclitus was not as 'visionary' a philosopher as Anaxamander was. Anaxamander had a 'better overall philosophical world picture' of how everything in life and death came together -- and blew apart -- Anaxamander saw the 'competition of opposites' and their 'will to defeat each other' whereas Heraclitus saw the 'attraction of opposites', how they needed each other to survive and evolve which is the one part of Anaxamander's binary evolution theory that he missed -- i.e., the 'attraction and need of opposites for each other'...
Anaxamander saw only how opposites tried to conquer and destroy each other like 'Sparta' and 'Athens' continually tried to conquer and destroy each other. Anaxamander didn't see how Sparta and Athens 'needed each other' to fend of 'outside threats'...like 'the Persian Army'.
Which brings us to another important Western philosophical, psychological, and political concept that has taken thousands of years to develop -- another essential part of DGB Multi-Dialectic Philosophy-Psychology-Politics...just like the concept of 'binary or dialectic evolution' -- and that is the concept of 'binary or dialectic negotiation, integration -- and unity'. A totally Hegelian concept (with the name being added here within the confines of 'Hegel's Hotel').
So Anaxamander saw the 'competition of opposites' whereas Heraclitus saw the 'co-operation of opposites' -- both essential ideas in 'the geneological conceptual tree' that branches from Anaxamander (the main 'tree trunk'), to Heraclitus, to Spinoza, to Kant, to Fichte, to Schelling, to Hegel, to Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy) to Freud, to Jung, to Perls, to Foucault, to Derrida, ...and all the way up to 21st century philosophy -- and DGB 'Multi-Dialectic or Binary Evolution and Homeostatic Theory'...
Schelling is basically a 'dialectic' version of Spinoza. I love them both for what they accomplished philosophically -- and spiritually. Spinoza was a 'philosophical bridge' between religion and science -- but nobody, even in 'the philosophically liberal' country of Holland at the time, could see Spinoza's integrative brilliance. All they could 'smell' in Spinoza's spiritual brand of 'wholistic philosophy and religious-scientific pantheism' was a 'sneaky form of atheism'. And Spinoza is lucky that that 'particular Church judged perspective' of his philosophy at the time didn't get him killed. It did get him 'ex-communicated' from both the Judist Church and his community. Spinoza was not the first or the last philosophical genius to be rejected by his community.
Creative brilliance is the birth child of three things:
1. An unusual -- and sometimes shocking -- organization of The 'Apeiron-Chaotic-Shadow Self';
2. An unusual integration of the ideas of others before you who you have learned from;
3. 'Thinking outside the box' in both the above respects...
Either some people have it and some people don't, and/or we all potentially 'have it' except some people are more 'suppressed' and 'repressed' by 'the philosophy of the herd'...
What was Spinoza's religious crime?
I partly cry for the man who had the courage in the 1600s to say...'God is in everything'...(and everyone)...God is both our Creator and our Creation...The two are mutually indispensible parts of each other...Spinoza was Heraclitus partly reincarnated except Spinoza was a far gentler man than Heraclitus was and Heraclitus was a 'dialectic philosopher' whereas Spinoza wasn't...They were both 'pantheists' in that they both 'saw God in everything'...all of life's Creations...)
Wow! What a brilliant concept! But how do we bring this concept back to Anaxamander?
By means of the psychological concepts of 'introjection' and 'projection'...
Man is the Ultimate Projector...He (and she) projects him and herself into EVERYTHING!!
Into 'God'...into other 'people'...into 'structures' and 'statues'...into 'animals'...into 'art'...into 'philosophy' and 'psychology' and 'politics' and 'architecture' and 'culture' and 'religion'...Wherever man goes, whatever he sees, he 'projects him/herself into his outer environment'....
In this regard, man also is 'the Ultimate Narcissist' -- man is the legend of Narcissus -- he looks into the pond and sees his reflection, he looks into everything and everyone and sees a reflection of him or herself...he or she just doesn't always know that they are doing this -- about 80 or 90 percent of the time (unless you teach yourself how to 'catch your projections' -- this 'cognitive process' is carried out almost entirely un(sub)consciously...
Now, how can all of this -- Spinoza, Schelling, pantheism, projection and introjection, archetypes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Perls, Foucault, Derrida... -- be tied and integrated back to Anaxamander?
You've got to think outside the box...or perhaps, rather, 'inside the box' where all others are 'thinking outside the box'...
The 'Apeiron' can be defined as 'Primordial, Archetypal Undifferentiated Binary Chaos'...
And the 'Primordial, Archetypal, Undifferentiated Binary Chaos'...Is Not Only Outside of Us...It Is Also Inside of Us!!!
Freud called 'it' -- i.e., our 'Internal Apeiron' -- 'The Id'...
Jung called 'it' -- again, our 'Internal Apeiron' -- 'The Shadow'...
And the 'Id-Shadow-Primordial Binary Self' is an 'Internal Mass of Undifferentiated, Disorganized, Opposing, Social and/or Anti-Social, Loving and/or Hating, Kind and/or Evil Thoughts, Ideas, Impulses, Feelings, Talents, Skills, Potentials...Waiting to be differentiated, expressed, rise to the surface of the personality, and/or stay underneath and manipulate the personality from underneath...'Satan', 'Dionysus', 'Hell', 'Hades', all different concepts, ideas, Gods, myths, mythologies, symbols, projections...aimed at describing our darkest, inner primordial selves...and the clash between 'God' and 'Satan' -- our inner most beautiful and most evil selves...Satan evicted from God's Kingdom...and forever alienated, disavoved, always looking to strike back at the God, the man, the part of his Dialectical Binary Self that rejected him and kicked him out of 'Heaven'....which is the 'Spirit and The Soul of The Self in Dialectical Unity, Wholism, and Peace with him or herself...which is then 'projected' out into the 'community', or conversely, the 'disavowed and rejected internal Shadow of ourselves -- whether it be the metaphorical, symbolic, mythological 'Dionysus' or 'Satan' or whoever....'projects' his rejected, sad, mad, and/or blatantly evil Satanic Self back out into the World, The Heaven, that rejected him...
And this, my dear readers, is the essential 'geneological tree' that connects Anaxamander to me...through all the rest of the philosophers who I may or may not have mentioned...
Regardless of whether my 'lofty, unorthodox vision' of man, life, and evolution is viewed as 'creatively brilliant' or 'outrageously stupid', I could not have developed this vision without all of the philosophers and psychologists who I have read and who I hold the greatest of respect for...
I love my parents and their 'Protestant religious beliefs' -- and how they apply them in their day to day lives...
But my interpretration of 'The Bible' changed in university -- decades ago, in the 1970s, if only in its initial percolating form -- the day I opened Erich Fromm's 'The Forgotten Language' (1951) and read how he interpreted The Bible 'metaphorically' and 'mythologically' rather than 'literally'.
It is the 'Fromm-Jung-Freud-Schelling-Spinoza-Heraclitus-Anaxamander' Connection that has just a few minutes ago resulted in my creation of probably the most unorthodox, shocking interpretation of 'The Cross' that you will probably ever get...and it is not meant to offend anyone, regardless of religious or non-religious mindset...
In this DGB 'Dialectical-Humanistic-Existential-Pantheist' interpretation of The Cross...
1. You have 'God' at the top of The Cross...symbolizing both the 'highest of man's rational, sane, humane, self and social ideals' as well as the 'highest of man's creative and humanistic-existential potentials'....paradoxically and ironically representative in this regard also of Nietzsche's (paraphrased) 'Will To Creative Self-Empowerment'...
2. You have 'Satan' at the bottom of The Cross...symbolizing both man's inherent potential for 'assertive, unorthodox opinions, perspectives, and lifestyles' (which may not necessarily be bad but still perceived as 'bad enough' to be 'disavowed, dissociated, alienatated from society') and for what Satan is usually most symbolized for -- mans' potential for Evil against both himself and/or others which is usually arrived at through some radical internal combination of 'trauma', 'rejection', 'abandonment', 'betrayal', 'alienation', 'disavowal', 'internal dissociation', 'righteousness', and 'narcisissm'...
3. On the 'right' side of The Cross, you have 'Apollo' symbolizing man's 'most Logical, Rational, Just and Fair, Equal Rights and Democracy Oriented, Enlightened Self'...
4. On the 'left' side of The Cross you have 'Dionysus' symbolizing man's most 'Sensual, Sexual, Romantic, Creative, Irrational, Unpredictable, Romantic Self'...
5. Finally, in the middle of The Cross, you have 'Jesus' who can represent either of two things: 1. 'the Integrative, Harmonious, Peaceful, Dialectically Unified Self'; and/or 2. 'The Crucified, Internal, Strife and Conflict-Ridden, Alienated, Disavowed Self', the Ultimate Symbol of Man's Internal and External Propensity for Fear, Anger, Rage, Violence, War...When The Personality Is Not Dialectically Connected and At Peace and Harmony With Itself...
The first symbolization of Jesus is probably closer to a 'Christian' symbolization of Jesus (introjected and integrated into the personality and the Self); the second symbolization is a symbolization of Jesus' victimization by his fellow man (and/or by Himself)' when He failed at His -- which is now 'our' -- task of integrating peacefully both within ourselves and within our community of others...
I will let you chew on this essay for a while...
-- dgb, Oct. 26th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...For Now...Have Been Completed...
I have reached a point in my self studies in philosophy where I have at least a pretty solid basic overall knowledge of most of the history and evolution of Western philosophy...
And one thing, one point, keeps coming back to me over and over again...
The second oldest recognized philosopher in Western history -- one Mr. (or shall I give him the post-humous respect that he deserves and say 'Dr.') Anaxamander who philosophized in the late 500 BC years -- in my opinion is still not given his rightful due respect as one of the greatest philosophers in Western history....comparable to Lao Tse or Confucous in Eastern Philosophy, and even though his work is very sparse, vague, and fragmented, what remains of it, if interpreted in the right light -- and of course I have 'the right light' -- is in essence a philosophical masterpiece, both a precursor of, and the philosophical equivalent for such an early age, of Hegel's much, much more fully recognized and honoured 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' (1804).
In short, Anaxamander's philosophy was a 500 BC 'roughly construed' template or archetype of 'The Phenomemology of Spirit' some 2300 years plus before the 'real Hegelian thing' came into published existence in 1804.
In fact, it is quite possible that Anaxamander invented the word 'arche' (see....http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Bios/Anaximander.html) which means basically 'first principle' as in the word 'archetype' which would become an indispensible word in Jungian Psychology some 2400 years plus... (more on the connection between Anaxamander and Jungian Psychology below...)
Anaxamander has been connected to 'evolutionary theory' and has been called the first 'evolutionist' because he believed that men evolved from fish. Anaxamander could still be right here, or we could go even further back in the evolutionary life chain and say that man probably evolved from 'amoeba'...if not some even more 'archetypal substance'....
......................................................................................................
Amoeba (genus)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Amoeba (disambiguation).
Amoeba
Scientific classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Amoebozoa
Phylum: Tubulinea
Order: Tubulinida
Family: Amoebidae
Genus: Amoeba
Bory de Saint-Vincent, 1822
Species
Amoeba proteus
Amoeba (sometimes amœba or ameba, plural amoebae) is a genus of Protozoa.[1]
Contents
1 Terminology
2 History
3 Anatomy
4 Genome
5 Reaction to stimuli
5.1 Hypertonic and hypotonic solutions
5.2 Amoebic cysts
5.3 Marine amoeba
6 References
7 External links
Terminology
There are many closely related terms that can be the source of confusion:
Amoeba is a genus that includes species such as Amoeba proteus
Amoebidae is a family that includes the Amoeba genus, among others.
Amoebozoa is a kingdom that includes the Amoebidae family, among others.
Amoeboids are organisms that move by crawling. Many (but not all) amoeboids are Amoebozoa.
History
The amoeba was first discovered by August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof in 1757.[2] Early naturalists referred to Amoeba as the Proteus animalcule after the Greek god Proteus who could change his shape. The name "amibe" was given to it by Bory de Saint-Vincent,[3] from the Greek amoibè (αμοιβή), meaning change.[4]Dientamoeba fragili was first described in 1918, and was linked to harm in humans.[5]
Anatomy
Anatomy of an amoeba. The cell's organelles and cytoplasm are enclosed by a cell membrane, obtaining its food through phagocytosis. Amoebae have a single large tubular pseudopod at the anterior end, and several secondary ones branching to the sides. The most famous species, Amoeba proteus, averages about 220-740 μm in length while moving,[6] making it a giant among amoeboids.[7] A few amoeboids belonging to different genera can grow larger, however, such as Gromia, Pelomyxa, and Chaos.
Amoebae's most recognizable features include one or more nuclei and a simple contractile vacuole to maintain osmotic equilibrium. Food enveloped by the amoeba is stored and digested in vacuoles. Amoebae, like other single-celled eukaryotic organisms, reproduce asexually via mitosis and cytokinesis, not to be confused with binary fission, which is how prokaryotes (bacteria) reproduce. In cases where the amoeba are forcibly divided, the portion that retains the nucleus will survive and form a new cell and cytoplasm, while the other portion dies. Amoebae also have no definite shape.[8]
Genome
The amoeba is remarkable for its very large genome. The species Amoeba protea has 290 billion (10^9) base pairs in its genome, while the related Polychaos dubium (formerly known as Amoeba dubia) has 670 billion base pairs. The human genome is small by contrast, with its count of 2.9 billion bases[9].
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dgb...continued...
Here is how Anaxamander was smarter than all the other Pre-Socratic philosophers, most of whome were looking for the 'ultimate primordial archetype substance of life'...
Thales said 'water'....
Anaxamenes said 'air'...
Heraclitus said 'fire'....
But Anaxamander -- who fit in there historically right after Thales -- was sharper than all the other Pre-Socratics when he argued that each one of these so-called (in my words, not theirs) 'primordial, archetypal life substances' was in essence 'restricted by its particular molecular structure and boundaries' (again, my 21st century words, not in Anaxamander's 500 BC vocabulary ) that precluded the evolutionary existence and/or development of all the others...thus, none of these particular substances in themselves ('water', 'air', or 'fire') could be the 'primordial, archetypal life substance' that they were all looking for...
There had to be some larger, over-riding principle and/or 'structure' that contained them all, and in particular, 'contained all of the opposites' that Anaxamander saw around him in life...
Anaxamander conceptualized and named this 'over-riding, infinite storage structure' of all of 'life's (and death's) chaotic, unorganized, undifferentiated opposite structural and dynamic pieces' -- 'The Apeiron'...
Now I will argue right here and now -- and I will argue in front of any other philosopher -- that 'The Apeiron' -- as archaic as the concept may appear to us at first glance now -- was, and is, the most important concept that was ever invented in the history and evolution of Western Philosophy. More important than any concept that Socrates or Plato or Aristotle created...We will come back to Lao Tse, Heraclitus, and Spinoza because they had some important conceptual insights into this same 'life mystery' that Anaxamander was shining his philosophical light on...
What Anaxamander had his conceptual finger on was an idea that was superior to Darwin's theory of evolution and far superior to his own idea that 'man evolved from fishes'....
I will give Anaxamander's philosophical and cosmological theory a 21st century name and call it 'binary evolution theory' or 'multi-dialectic theory'.
Anaxamander, in essence, was the 'Hegel' of Pre-Socratic times...Hegel some 2300 years plus before the real Hegel published 'The Phenomenology of Spirit'...and Heraclitus, like Lao Tse in The East, added one more essential piece to Anaxamander's 'binary theory of evolution' that was indispensible to Anaxamander's 'binary evolution theory' that he didn't get to -- and that was/is the theory of 'homeostasis' or 'homeostatic balance' or 'equilibrium'...which Walter Bradford Cannon would 'formalize' some 2500 years later in modern medicine in his classic book called 'The Wisdom of The Body' (1932)...
We could almost say that Heraclitus' philosophical relationship to his (indirect?) teacher, Anaxamander, was similar to Marx's philosophical relationship to his main (indirect) teacher -- Hegel. Except the relationships were essentially different. Marx turned Hegel's idealistic dialectic philosophy upside down and made it both 'materialistic' and 'one-sided towards the political left' whereas Heraclitus both learned from Anaxamander, indeed, added an essential component to Anaxamander's theory of binary evolution (homeostasis or equilibrium) but Heraclitus was not as 'visionary' a philosopher as Anaxamander was. Anaxamander had a 'better overall philosophical world picture' of how everything in life and death came together -- and blew apart -- Anaxamander saw the 'competition of opposites' and their 'will to defeat each other' whereas Heraclitus saw the 'attraction of opposites', how they needed each other to survive and evolve which is the one part of Anaxamander's binary evolution theory that he missed -- i.e., the 'attraction and need of opposites for each other'...
Anaxamander saw only how opposites tried to conquer and destroy each other like 'Sparta' and 'Athens' continually tried to conquer and destroy each other. Anaxamander didn't see how Sparta and Athens 'needed each other' to fend of 'outside threats'...like 'the Persian Army'.
Which brings us to another important Western philosophical, psychological, and political concept that has taken thousands of years to develop -- another essential part of DGB Multi-Dialectic Philosophy-Psychology-Politics...just like the concept of 'binary or dialectic evolution' -- and that is the concept of 'binary or dialectic negotiation, integration -- and unity'. A totally Hegelian concept (with the name being added here within the confines of 'Hegel's Hotel').
So Anaxamander saw the 'competition of opposites' whereas Heraclitus saw the 'co-operation of opposites' -- both essential ideas in 'the geneological conceptual tree' that branches from Anaxamander (the main 'tree trunk'), to Heraclitus, to Spinoza, to Kant, to Fichte, to Schelling, to Hegel, to Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy) to Freud, to Jung, to Perls, to Foucault, to Derrida, ...and all the way up to 21st century philosophy -- and DGB 'Multi-Dialectic or Binary Evolution and Homeostatic Theory'...
Schelling is basically a 'dialectic' version of Spinoza. I love them both for what they accomplished philosophically -- and spiritually. Spinoza was a 'philosophical bridge' between religion and science -- but nobody, even in 'the philosophically liberal' country of Holland at the time, could see Spinoza's integrative brilliance. All they could 'smell' in Spinoza's spiritual brand of 'wholistic philosophy and religious-scientific pantheism' was a 'sneaky form of atheism'. And Spinoza is lucky that that 'particular Church judged perspective' of his philosophy at the time didn't get him killed. It did get him 'ex-communicated' from both the Judist Church and his community. Spinoza was not the first or the last philosophical genius to be rejected by his community.
Creative brilliance is the birth child of three things:
1. An unusual -- and sometimes shocking -- organization of The 'Apeiron-Chaotic-Shadow Self';
2. An unusual integration of the ideas of others before you who you have learned from;
3. 'Thinking outside the box' in both the above respects...
Either some people have it and some people don't, and/or we all potentially 'have it' except some people are more 'suppressed' and 'repressed' by 'the philosophy of the herd'...
What was Spinoza's religious crime?
I partly cry for the man who had the courage in the 1600s to say...'God is in everything'...(and everyone)...God is both our Creator and our Creation...The two are mutually indispensible parts of each other...Spinoza was Heraclitus partly reincarnated except Spinoza was a far gentler man than Heraclitus was and Heraclitus was a 'dialectic philosopher' whereas Spinoza wasn't...They were both 'pantheists' in that they both 'saw God in everything'...all of life's Creations...)
Wow! What a brilliant concept! But how do we bring this concept back to Anaxamander?
By means of the psychological concepts of 'introjection' and 'projection'...
Man is the Ultimate Projector...He (and she) projects him and herself into EVERYTHING!!
Into 'God'...into other 'people'...into 'structures' and 'statues'...into 'animals'...into 'art'...into 'philosophy' and 'psychology' and 'politics' and 'architecture' and 'culture' and 'religion'...Wherever man goes, whatever he sees, he 'projects him/herself into his outer environment'....
In this regard, man also is 'the Ultimate Narcissist' -- man is the legend of Narcissus -- he looks into the pond and sees his reflection, he looks into everything and everyone and sees a reflection of him or herself...he or she just doesn't always know that they are doing this -- about 80 or 90 percent of the time (unless you teach yourself how to 'catch your projections' -- this 'cognitive process' is carried out almost entirely un(sub)consciously...
Now, how can all of this -- Spinoza, Schelling, pantheism, projection and introjection, archetypes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Perls, Foucault, Derrida... -- be tied and integrated back to Anaxamander?
You've got to think outside the box...or perhaps, rather, 'inside the box' where all others are 'thinking outside the box'...
The 'Apeiron' can be defined as 'Primordial, Archetypal Undifferentiated Binary Chaos'...
And the 'Primordial, Archetypal, Undifferentiated Binary Chaos'...Is Not Only Outside of Us...It Is Also Inside of Us!!!
Freud called 'it' -- i.e., our 'Internal Apeiron' -- 'The Id'...
Jung called 'it' -- again, our 'Internal Apeiron' -- 'The Shadow'...
And the 'Id-Shadow-Primordial Binary Self' is an 'Internal Mass of Undifferentiated, Disorganized, Opposing, Social and/or Anti-Social, Loving and/or Hating, Kind and/or Evil Thoughts, Ideas, Impulses, Feelings, Talents, Skills, Potentials...Waiting to be differentiated, expressed, rise to the surface of the personality, and/or stay underneath and manipulate the personality from underneath...'Satan', 'Dionysus', 'Hell', 'Hades', all different concepts, ideas, Gods, myths, mythologies, symbols, projections...aimed at describing our darkest, inner primordial selves...and the clash between 'God' and 'Satan' -- our inner most beautiful and most evil selves...Satan evicted from God's Kingdom...and forever alienated, disavoved, always looking to strike back at the God, the man, the part of his Dialectical Binary Self that rejected him and kicked him out of 'Heaven'....which is the 'Spirit and The Soul of The Self in Dialectical Unity, Wholism, and Peace with him or herself...which is then 'projected' out into the 'community', or conversely, the 'disavowed and rejected internal Shadow of ourselves -- whether it be the metaphorical, symbolic, mythological 'Dionysus' or 'Satan' or whoever....'projects' his rejected, sad, mad, and/or blatantly evil Satanic Self back out into the World, The Heaven, that rejected him...
And this, my dear readers, is the essential 'geneological tree' that connects Anaxamander to me...through all the rest of the philosophers who I may or may not have mentioned...
Regardless of whether my 'lofty, unorthodox vision' of man, life, and evolution is viewed as 'creatively brilliant' or 'outrageously stupid', I could not have developed this vision without all of the philosophers and psychologists who I have read and who I hold the greatest of respect for...
I love my parents and their 'Protestant religious beliefs' -- and how they apply them in their day to day lives...
But my interpretration of 'The Bible' changed in university -- decades ago, in the 1970s, if only in its initial percolating form -- the day I opened Erich Fromm's 'The Forgotten Language' (1951) and read how he interpreted The Bible 'metaphorically' and 'mythologically' rather than 'literally'.
It is the 'Fromm-Jung-Freud-Schelling-Spinoza-Heraclitus-Anaxamander' Connection that has just a few minutes ago resulted in my creation of probably the most unorthodox, shocking interpretation of 'The Cross' that you will probably ever get...and it is not meant to offend anyone, regardless of religious or non-religious mindset...
In this DGB 'Dialectical-Humanistic-Existential-Pantheist' interpretation of The Cross...
1. You have 'God' at the top of The Cross...symbolizing both the 'highest of man's rational, sane, humane, self and social ideals' as well as the 'highest of man's creative and humanistic-existential potentials'....paradoxically and ironically representative in this regard also of Nietzsche's (paraphrased) 'Will To Creative Self-Empowerment'...
2. You have 'Satan' at the bottom of The Cross...symbolizing both man's inherent potential for 'assertive, unorthodox opinions, perspectives, and lifestyles' (which may not necessarily be bad but still perceived as 'bad enough' to be 'disavowed, dissociated, alienatated from society') and for what Satan is usually most symbolized for -- mans' potential for Evil against both himself and/or others which is usually arrived at through some radical internal combination of 'trauma', 'rejection', 'abandonment', 'betrayal', 'alienation', 'disavowal', 'internal dissociation', 'righteousness', and 'narcisissm'...
3. On the 'right' side of The Cross, you have 'Apollo' symbolizing man's 'most Logical, Rational, Just and Fair, Equal Rights and Democracy Oriented, Enlightened Self'...
4. On the 'left' side of The Cross you have 'Dionysus' symbolizing man's most 'Sensual, Sexual, Romantic, Creative, Irrational, Unpredictable, Romantic Self'...
5. Finally, in the middle of The Cross, you have 'Jesus' who can represent either of two things: 1. 'the Integrative, Harmonious, Peaceful, Dialectically Unified Self'; and/or 2. 'The Crucified, Internal, Strife and Conflict-Ridden, Alienated, Disavowed Self', the Ultimate Symbol of Man's Internal and External Propensity for Fear, Anger, Rage, Violence, War...When The Personality Is Not Dialectically Connected and At Peace and Harmony With Itself...
The first symbolization of Jesus is probably closer to a 'Christian' symbolization of Jesus (introjected and integrated into the personality and the Self); the second symbolization is a symbolization of Jesus' victimization by his fellow man (and/or by Himself)' when He failed at His -- which is now 'our' -- task of integrating peacefully both within ourselves and within our community of others...
I will let you chew on this essay for a while...
-- dgb, Oct. 26th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...For Now...Have Been Completed...
Monday, October 18, 2010
From Kant to Korzybski to DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis
Kant's epistemology was important but too perfectionistic to be practically applicable. This is where Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, and Alfred Korzybski all needed to step in to save epistemology from a Kantian death.
You see, Kant was both right and wrong at the same time. He drew our attention to the 'subjective-objective -- or Kantian -- split'. He correctly ascertained that none of us could get outside of our own minds, bodies, and senses in order to 'fully know' the 'complete objectivity' of the 'real object'.
In other words, there will always be human error involved in the sensory and interpretive perception (or perceptual interpretation) and evaluation of any 'external object'.
This is a given. And speaking as a person whose eyesight is definitely not the same now as it was when I was 20 years old and my vision was '20-20', and could hit an eighty mile an hour fastball...the importance of our senses is likely to become more and more appreciated as we begin to lose their 'accuracy' with age.
So what Kant was missing here, given the perfectionist that he was, was the idea of 'perceptual and conceptual representation' being important -- indeed, essential -- to our survival, even if it was imperfect.
In Kantian epistemology, there is essentially no distinction between 'physics' and 'metaphysics' because even physics becomes 'metaphysical' because no one can step outside of themselves -- and outside of their own senses and perceptual-conceptual-evaluation system -- to get a 'perfect representation of any physical object'.
In this regard, technically speaking, all physics becomes metaphysics because, paraphrasing Kant, no one can 'perfectly know the real ('noumenal' was the technical term Kant used back then) object'.
Technically, that may be true but we do not need 'perfect knowledge' in order to survive, and indeed, will never achieve 'perfect knowledge' unless we are talking about a math question like 2 plus 2 equals 4. Here -- and only here -- can we achieve 'perfect knowledge'.
All other knowledge, we can view as 'imperfect' and 'subject to change' based on 'new incoming information' which may -- on the basis of new or different observation, preferrably from more than one source, logical, interpretive deduction, common sense, and so on -- effectively 'over-rule, other past, outdated forms of information and/or purported knowledge'.
Such was the case, for example, with 'the world becoming perceived and conceived as round' as opposed to 'flat', and 'the Earth becoming perceived and conceived as revolving around the Sun' as opposed to 'the Sun revolving around the Earth' (i.e., 'The Copernican Revolution'). The 'objective world' did not change in either of these cases of 'revolutionized conceptuology and epistemology' -- it was just man's generalized 'view' or 'perspective' of the 'objective or real or noumenal world' that changed.
So, whereas Kant said that we 'Kant Know' our 'real, objective, noumenal world' because of the inherent subjectivity of our Sensory-Perceptual-Interpretive-Evaluative' ('SPIE') System, each of Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, and Korzybski would say that we 'Can Know' our 'real, objective, noumenal world' -- it is just that this knowledge is always going to be imperfect, never perfect -- again, because of the inherent subjectivity tied up to our SPIE System. But our knowledge can still be 'good enough' to function properly, particularly if we learn a set of 'good rules' to 'good epistemological functioning'.
This DGB concept of 'Good Enough Epistemology' can be compared to Donald Winnicott's Object Relations concept of 'Good Enough Mothering'.
As long as we can see the car coming as we cross the street, our 'internal epistemology' can be considered 'good enough epistemology' even if we cannot see 'every little scratch or dent' on the car coming our way.
Alternatively, if we 'don't see the car coming', then our 'internal epistemology can be considered not good enough for purposes of functional survival'.
Whereas Kant basically told us that we cannot use a 'representative model' of the 'external, real, objective, (noumenal) world', because we have no way of 'knowing' whether the 'representative model' is right or not, on the other hand, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Korzysbki, all agreed to disagree with Kant, not choosing to be quite so 'anally retentive and technically perfectionistic', and argued instead in favor of a 'probability of accuracy' of a 'representation model' as long as certain 'epistemological rules' were adhered to.
Korzybski went the furthest of the three (Russell, Wittgenstein, and Korzybski) in this regard, laying down a set of 'epistemological rules' that he turned into a 'school' of philosophy and epistemology called 'General Semantics'.
What Russell, Wittgenstein, and Korzybski did that was different than what Kant would not do is, they provided a 'range and a degree of probability' of 'truth value' of particular 'assumed or proclaimed truth assertions/ statements'.
This is essentially the same 'pragmatic' way of 'establishing truth' as what our courts of law do when they say that 'the man has been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt'. (That is not to say that innocent men and women can't still be convicted guilty on the basis of 'conceptualized false truths' -- with Kant rolling over in his grave and saying, 'I told you so'...)
But we all have to function on the basis of what we think or believe are 'truths' -- even if they aren't. In this regard, a distinction can be made between 'iron clad truths' and 'evolving, uncertain truths' but even this distinction is not iron clad because how many of our so-called 'iron clad truths' have been shown to be 'untruths' over time?
It happens all the time over time because both the world inside and outside of us is always changing -- and some of our 'conceptual representation skills and results' improve over time because of advances in technology such as the microscope, the telescope, the hearing aid, the MRI, the CT Scan, the Ultra Sound Machine, the Xray Machine...and so on...
Other than that, the only iron-clad truths that remain indisputable over time, and more time, are truths such as: 2 plus 2 equals 4.
Unfortunately, man cannot live only on the basis of 'mathematical truths' -- which means that we still need to find some fascimile of 'epistemological truth' in the works of the likes of Aristotle, Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, David Hume, Kant, Hegel, Russell, Wittgenstein, Korzybski, and Ayn Rand...
This is what Hegel's Hotel is still evolving to do, DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis is still evolving to do, and 'Central Ego Functioning and Dysfunctioning' is aiming to do.
The results of this work on 'The Central Ego' will then be integrated with the rest of the DGB Quantum Psychoanalytic Model as we move along.
Enough for today...
-- dgb, Oct. 18th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
You see, Kant was both right and wrong at the same time. He drew our attention to the 'subjective-objective -- or Kantian -- split'. He correctly ascertained that none of us could get outside of our own minds, bodies, and senses in order to 'fully know' the 'complete objectivity' of the 'real object'.
In other words, there will always be human error involved in the sensory and interpretive perception (or perceptual interpretation) and evaluation of any 'external object'.
This is a given. And speaking as a person whose eyesight is definitely not the same now as it was when I was 20 years old and my vision was '20-20', and could hit an eighty mile an hour fastball...the importance of our senses is likely to become more and more appreciated as we begin to lose their 'accuracy' with age.
So what Kant was missing here, given the perfectionist that he was, was the idea of 'perceptual and conceptual representation' being important -- indeed, essential -- to our survival, even if it was imperfect.
In Kantian epistemology, there is essentially no distinction between 'physics' and 'metaphysics' because even physics becomes 'metaphysical' because no one can step outside of themselves -- and outside of their own senses and perceptual-conceptual-evaluation system -- to get a 'perfect representation of any physical object'.
In this regard, technically speaking, all physics becomes metaphysics because, paraphrasing Kant, no one can 'perfectly know the real ('noumenal' was the technical term Kant used back then) object'.
Technically, that may be true but we do not need 'perfect knowledge' in order to survive, and indeed, will never achieve 'perfect knowledge' unless we are talking about a math question like 2 plus 2 equals 4. Here -- and only here -- can we achieve 'perfect knowledge'.
All other knowledge, we can view as 'imperfect' and 'subject to change' based on 'new incoming information' which may -- on the basis of new or different observation, preferrably from more than one source, logical, interpretive deduction, common sense, and so on -- effectively 'over-rule, other past, outdated forms of information and/or purported knowledge'.
Such was the case, for example, with 'the world becoming perceived and conceived as round' as opposed to 'flat', and 'the Earth becoming perceived and conceived as revolving around the Sun' as opposed to 'the Sun revolving around the Earth' (i.e., 'The Copernican Revolution'). The 'objective world' did not change in either of these cases of 'revolutionized conceptuology and epistemology' -- it was just man's generalized 'view' or 'perspective' of the 'objective or real or noumenal world' that changed.
So, whereas Kant said that we 'Kant Know' our 'real, objective, noumenal world' because of the inherent subjectivity of our Sensory-Perceptual-Interpretive-Evaluative' ('SPIE') System, each of Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, and Korzybski would say that we 'Can Know' our 'real, objective, noumenal world' -- it is just that this knowledge is always going to be imperfect, never perfect -- again, because of the inherent subjectivity tied up to our SPIE System. But our knowledge can still be 'good enough' to function properly, particularly if we learn a set of 'good rules' to 'good epistemological functioning'.
This DGB concept of 'Good Enough Epistemology' can be compared to Donald Winnicott's Object Relations concept of 'Good Enough Mothering'.
As long as we can see the car coming as we cross the street, our 'internal epistemology' can be considered 'good enough epistemology' even if we cannot see 'every little scratch or dent' on the car coming our way.
Alternatively, if we 'don't see the car coming', then our 'internal epistemology can be considered not good enough for purposes of functional survival'.
Whereas Kant basically told us that we cannot use a 'representative model' of the 'external, real, objective, (noumenal) world', because we have no way of 'knowing' whether the 'representative model' is right or not, on the other hand, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Korzysbki, all agreed to disagree with Kant, not choosing to be quite so 'anally retentive and technically perfectionistic', and argued instead in favor of a 'probability of accuracy' of a 'representation model' as long as certain 'epistemological rules' were adhered to.
Korzybski went the furthest of the three (Russell, Wittgenstein, and Korzybski) in this regard, laying down a set of 'epistemological rules' that he turned into a 'school' of philosophy and epistemology called 'General Semantics'.
What Russell, Wittgenstein, and Korzybski did that was different than what Kant would not do is, they provided a 'range and a degree of probability' of 'truth value' of particular 'assumed or proclaimed truth assertions/ statements'.
This is essentially the same 'pragmatic' way of 'establishing truth' as what our courts of law do when they say that 'the man has been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt'. (That is not to say that innocent men and women can't still be convicted guilty on the basis of 'conceptualized false truths' -- with Kant rolling over in his grave and saying, 'I told you so'...)
But we all have to function on the basis of what we think or believe are 'truths' -- even if they aren't. In this regard, a distinction can be made between 'iron clad truths' and 'evolving, uncertain truths' but even this distinction is not iron clad because how many of our so-called 'iron clad truths' have been shown to be 'untruths' over time?
It happens all the time over time because both the world inside and outside of us is always changing -- and some of our 'conceptual representation skills and results' improve over time because of advances in technology such as the microscope, the telescope, the hearing aid, the MRI, the CT Scan, the Ultra Sound Machine, the Xray Machine...and so on...
Other than that, the only iron-clad truths that remain indisputable over time, and more time, are truths such as: 2 plus 2 equals 4.
Unfortunately, man cannot live only on the basis of 'mathematical truths' -- which means that we still need to find some fascimile of 'epistemological truth' in the works of the likes of Aristotle, Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, David Hume, Kant, Hegel, Russell, Wittgenstein, Korzybski, and Ayn Rand...
This is what Hegel's Hotel is still evolving to do, DGB Quantum Psychoanalysis is still evolving to do, and 'Central Ego Functioning and Dysfunctioning' is aiming to do.
The results of this work on 'The Central Ego' will then be integrated with the rest of the DGB Quantum Psychoanalytic Model as we move along.
Enough for today...
-- dgb, Oct. 18th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
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