[Xmca-l] Re: Synoptic Gospel

Sun Aug 9 14:04:13 PDT 2020

David and venerable O's:

I consider the words David has dropped into the mix.

Syncretic = blending of two categories into one.

Synoptic = taking a general view, but in Christianity it is a reference to the synoptic gospels Mark, Matthew, and Luke.

Most people who have done even a little research on the New Testament will know that there's a lot of bad reporting when it comes to Jesus. Still no one knows about those 10 years in the desert. (Though in India there are stories that Jesus came there to study Vedanta, and that he is really a Vedantin).

Repeating the same story three times doesn't make it true. Especially when considering all the other gospels that were sidelined as heretical and forced into hiding. Like some of Vygotky's own writing under Stalinist Russia.

I wonder if we are seeing our own Council of Nicea concerning the interpretations of what happened before?

If you might recall, The Council of Nicea arose from a tiff in Alexandria between Arius and Athansius, the bishop of Alexandria.

Arius maintained that "the Son is of a different substance from the Father, i.e. created." This was also to indicate that Jesus was just a regular guy, like all of us, which then indicates that anyone could become like Jesus, by living like him.

Athansius won the controversy defining the existence of the Trinity, as "one God in three Divine persons". The three persons are distinct, yet are one "substance, essence or nature". This *essential*-ly makes Jesus "special" and unattainable, that he was not of this world, and this distinction separates him from everyone else before, during, and after his lifetime, which basically reaffirms hierarchy within the early church. It also makes for Mary having highly fertile ears in proximity to itinerant angels.

So along with other camps of debate, Arius and Athansius were considered Heteroosians and Homoosians respectively.

Are there similarities in terms of defining our terms? History rhyming I suppose.

In our case, we have those who have come after Vygotsky trying to decipher to truth of Vygotsky's work, and to define and extend the theories.

I almost wonder if it is appropriate to think of Lantiov as creating his own trinity in the development Activity Theory, activity unites everything

(I must ask though, how is AT different from Behaviorism?)

On the other hand, different researchers who wish to hold closer to Vygotsky, pose  perezhivanie arises at a particular time between the individual and the environment, which are different. (Is that fair to state?) In order to measure the change within the individual, one must choose the right unit for analysis, appropriate to what one wants to examine. This isn't relegated to activity, but can include it.

I do not mean to spark a flame here. Please permit me to have a little artistic license in making comparisons. At the same time, please feel free to point out any limits in my comparisons or whether I am mistaken in my understandings.

This kind of reminds me of LSV's The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/index.htm__;!!Mih3wA!VRmqIdBHdE28Ro3v8ezyT6nj9Wr21p58CGwwKnD2JxdiNagIy3sB65jFU9SLffmi34VtIg$ )

Which now I am recognizing and remembering had to do with Vygotsky coming to terms with structuralism of the 19th century and the functionalism of the early 20th.  I feel the need to reread that essay.

As I'm reflecting...and framing... James based his theory upon Darwin's, that functions of mind are operational tendencies derived (arising from) from our biology, right?

The structuralist camp (I presume starting with Freud) state that one understands mind by evaluating the contents of introspection and subjective experience.

But getting back to David's discussion of emotion: One cannot divide Spinoza's ideas into parts out of convenience, is the issue I have, if James and Lange do as you say, David.

Emotions come from somewhere.

Emotion is the uniting key to mind and body, and didn't Vygotsky think so too and isn't that why he looked to Spinoza for guidance.

Emotion is unification of mind and body, in terms of self-preservation and survival.

Further, and I assert this philosophically, emotions can't be higher or lower, so I'm having a problem with that framing. They can be different, they can be more pronounced or subtle, but I don't see the justification of saying that negative emotions are lower while positive ones are higher (if that is the way in which higher and lower are defined concerning functional differences between emotions). In this sense this goes along with David's observation that one can't make distinctions between emotion arising from life events and emotion arising from medicinal substances.

I don't think it makes Vygotsky a structuralist. I think it makes him a vygotskianist, or possibly a spinozanist. I'm not sure what "vygotsky" means in the Russian, but "spinoza" means "thorn" and this does seem to be a thorny debate. "Baruch" or "Benedict" meant "Blessed one."

Thus Spinoza is a "good thorn" for all of us to pick out.

Imagine what our own perezhivanie is for that!

Kind regards,

Annalisa
________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 9, 2020 1:43 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Synoptic Gospel

  [EXTERNAL]

I certainly didn't intend to bring in the kitchen sink, Annalisa. For the most part, our models were clothed and male: the few times we had nude female models I couldn't bring myself to paint more than their mortified faces. And, yes, I did have to bring Christ in; I always worry when we try to understand terms like "syncretism" or "synoptic" without understanding whence they come: my own parents named me David without realizing that I was born on Saint David's Day.

So Vygotsky is developing his critique of James and Lange into a critique of functionalism. Because James and Lange are functionalists, they take from Spinoza ONLY the idea that passions will increase or decrease your power to act. This is consistent with their emphasis on fear and rage, on lower emotions generally: these seem to be whole body sensations that come out of nowhere and seem to cover our whole being at once. But it's completely inconsistent with understanding the structure of a higher emotion because it simply treats the feeling as a black box of undifferentiable visceral or vasomotor sensations. One cannot tell the difference between emotion and edible cannibis; one cannot distinguish or disarticulate an intellectual curiosity, a chaste love, or the numbed feeling my sister puts into her dancing now that she has MS; one can neither part nor parse feelings without the temporality that composed them.

Does this critique make Vygotsky a structuralist? I think it would--if we left time out of the equation. But I think that the whole notion of 'perezhivanie' is born precisely out of bringing time back in--it's the experience but ALSO the after thought, the moment of reflection on the experience achieved (in the French sense of acheve/). Intellectual curiosity is astonishment PLUS thinking about it afterwards, chaste love is attraction PLUS social distancing on second thought, and my sister's "danciness" is a combination of numbness, pain and ecstasy but also my own toe-curling response ex post facto. And that, Andy, is the problem I have with Hegel's Philosophy of History. How can there be any development at all without time? Isn't Spirit an afterthought?

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!VRmqIdBHdE28Ro3v8ezyT6nj9Wr21p58CGwwKnD2JxdiNagIy3sB65jFU9SLffltU8tU1w$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!V1D_yy1lRRo2e2tYuyDgfBxh9bpuyWHVz51kBp_ODMwozzjNX4ove_dGUIt3t4VywuAreA$>
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!VRmqIdBHdE28Ro3v8ezyT6nj9Wr21p58CGwwKnD2JxdiNagIy3sB65jFU9SLffkgZ8pvhQ$ 
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!V1D_yy1lRRo2e2tYuyDgfBxh9bpuyWHVz51kBp_ODMwozzjNX4ove_dGUIt3t4WlZoZqmQ$>

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 10:42 AM Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu<mailto:annalisa@unm.edu>> wrote:
Hello,

Of course if David is going to bring in the kitchen sink, christ and the nude I've got to be seeing what comes of this thread.

Hopefully no one gets crucified in time! 🙂

I am wondering if it is *time* or *change* that is embedded?

Chronology is more a linkage of "this event happens before that," and then "this one happened after that," it can be linear, but also multi-threaded. Sort of like a Rube Goldberg contraption. (See: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.rubegoldberg.com/__;!!Mih3wA!VRmqIdBHdE28Ro3v8ezyT6nj9Wr21p58CGwwKnD2JxdiNagIy3sB65jFU9SLffl5IlrnNA$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.rubegoldberg.com/__;!!Mih3wA!RUYhim3dX3nAgYj-o-Vn-2ppCV16cud4hwN94Je3pBDuDFclU2s0tkDnuEsZs3FQ1fKf3g$> to invent a better mousetrap to water a plant!)

On the other hand, change is the difference between one state and the next. Would time be the span of change as it transforms from one state to the next?

What I recall of Piaget is that he considered development to be very stair-stepped: one plateau for a period until the next change abruptly lifted to the next step which then plateaus and so on.

Is it fair to say that Vygotsky argued this way to measure cannot work given the complexity of variables at work, not just in the individual, but also in the environment.  Does that mean that time starts to become un-measurable, because each individual is going to have a different way to mark time, å la zoped?

The environment is not time-dependent, unless we are going to start marking time like astrologers and divide the globe into longitudes and latitudes to determine the force of energy (and change) for each globe's section. How do we mark time in the environment compared to time for the individual?

Just seems very wacky enough to make my head hurt.

Where is the reference point? you know, by which one measures the change one is seeking to measure?

Kind regards,

Annalisa

________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>> on behalf of David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com<mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>>
Sent: Wednesday, August 5, 2020 9:59 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Synoptic Gospel

  [EXTERNAL]

Oh, I think "category error" is another name for Hallidayan complementarity, Mike.

Let me put it another way. Another name for the synoptic understanding of a crisis is "contradiction". Or, if you prefer, another name for the dynamic understanding of contradiction is "crisis".

(Is that two other ways, or is a pair of ways?)

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!VRmqIdBHdE28Ro3v8ezyT6nj9Wr21p58CGwwKnD2JxdiNagIy3sB65jFU9SLffltU8tU1w$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!WyXxttLrB9FkaVlQnHN9A-lwTXyuPcjUoZ8OUhrmf3F9HCyxvuDh-i5A0ee74vClLe8-yg$>
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!VRmqIdBHdE28Ro3v8ezyT6nj9Wr21p58CGwwKnD2JxdiNagIy3sB65jFU9SLffkgZ8pvhQ$ 
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!WyXxttLrB9FkaVlQnHN9A-lwTXyuPcjUoZ8OUhrmf3F9HCyxvuDh-i5A0ee74vDENgCs7Q$>

On Thu, Aug 6, 2020 at 12:28 PM mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu<mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu>> wrote:
So time needs to be part of a unity for studying cultural/historical processes, David?
Or am I making a category error?

mike

On Wed, Aug 5, 2020 at 7:26 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com<mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>> wrote:
I have been reading Andy's article for the CHARR group, but I have also been working on a new volume of the pedology, and, finally, retranslating Vygotsky's unfinished "Teaching on the Emotions". What all these texts have in common is that they require you to think about units of analysis as simultaneously timeless and time-embedded: on the one hand, the life of Christ ordered by chronologic time and on the other, the "synoptic" Gospels which order the various events of the life of Christ in many different ways according to their anagogic value.

These two complementary perspectives, the chronological and the synoptic, are ever present in Halliday: an expression like "the living of life" is not redundant because the first nominal is  implicitly chronological process and the second implicitly synoptic product. They are less obviously marked in Vygotsky, but they are there. In one chapter he excoriates Busemann for mixing up the Crisis at Three with the Crisis at Seven, but in the next chapter he offers three possible "units" of analysis. They are the same ones Andy cites:

a. word value in in the explanation of the relation between thinking and speech,

b. age periods in the study of psycho-physiological development, and finally,

c. perezhivanie, or переживание,  in the study of the child’s relationship with the environment.

I think you can see that ALL of these not only CAN but MUST be viewed chronologically, else we cannot say how word value develops, how an age period progresses (let alone how one differs from another) or how the personality goes from functioning to dysfunctional to functioning on some higher level. But at the same time, you can also see how it's teleological to talk about the word value, or the age period, or the perezhivanie in the moment before the word value, age period, or perezhivanie has even started to exist. So the process itself is always chronological, but the process of analysis itself has to be synoptic.

Mozart, they say, composed synoptically: with a single piece of music in his head that he could scroll over, back and forth; Beethoven, on the other hand, is all about getting from commencement to cataclysm, in more or less that order.  When I was at art school, we would hire the same model for painting and for sculpture. We painters would do the model as a text: every narrative painting and even every portrait has to have a beginning, a middle, and an endpoint and the painter's eye directs the brush to direct the viewer's eye to follow it. But the sculptors,infuriatingly,had no starting point, no middle point, and no endpoint at all: it was just a matter of more or less finishing at every point. The models would complain that dozed off when the painters sat there reading them over, but they would complain that they got dizzy when the sculptors were circumambulating the studio all the time.

David Kellogg

Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!VRmqIdBHdE28Ro3v8ezyT6nj9Wr21p58CGwwKnD2JxdiNagIy3sB65jFU9SLffltU8tU1w$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!Xj2079oBIkc0uAuoCRaKX47Lnon3UBmjEm2JYY1ehkhi6rns2Sn661_1Rv1Jdtm_kdJzmA$>
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!VRmqIdBHdE28Ro3v8ezyT6nj9Wr21p58CGwwKnD2JxdiNagIy3sB65jFU9SLffkgZ8pvhQ$ 
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!Xj2079oBIkc0uAuoCRaKX47Lnon3UBmjEm2JYY1ehkhi6rns2Sn661_1Rv1JdtlHIYe3Rw$>

--

I[Angelus Novus]<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Novus__;!!Mih3wA!Qius1oGsgiq2UA0kbUZyTjShVIB7BW9A3yU5dyRaH6U_I5nrsaFYbr5M9YEfyW0AX_rpAA$>The Angel's View of History

It is only in a social context that subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity cease to be antinonmes, and thus cease to exist as such antinomies. The resolution of the theoretical contradictions is possible only through practical means, only through the practical energy of humans. (Marx, 1844).

---------------------------------------------

Cultural Praxis Website: https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!VRmqIdBHdE28Ro3v8ezyT6nj9Wr21p58CGwwKnD2JxdiNagIy3sB65jFU9SLfflCQ6yNyA$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!Qius1oGsgiq2UA0kbUZyTjShVIB7BW9A3yU5dyRaH6U_I5nrsaFYbr5M9YEfyW3LROkyyA$>
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Archival resources website: lchc.ucsd.edu<http://lchc.ucsd.edu>.
Narrative history of LCHC:  lchcautobio.ucsd.edu<http://lchcautobio.ucsd.edu>.

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