Re: The human condition

From: Alfred Lang (alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch)
Date: Thu Jul 11 2002 - 07:31:08 PDT


>Alfred,
>I would contend that LSV's Thought and Language comes the closest.
>Would you agree?
>eric

My answer to your question needs a more than one word; there's a risk
of being misunderstood. Yes, Eric, LSV's cultural-historical approach
is a great step in the right direction towards understanding the
human condition when compared to all what has been done in the basic
human sciences such as psychology, sociology and the related fields
in the last two centuries. And, today, I judge it one of, if not the
most comprehensive ans important theoretical perspective. It also
suggests and guides great practice, simply great. CHAT is, in some
ways, ecological (stretching beyond the individual), evolutive
(including historical becoming), and semiotic (emphasizing mediation
and meaning). Strangely enough, I have reason to believe, as I have
claimed before on this list and elsewhere, there has been one even
more comprehensive approach, more than two centuries ago: Johann
Gottfried Herder's -- similary or even more marginal, given the
scientific and anthropological scene.

Yet, as I have attempted to convey as a discussant on Anna's
Symposium on status and future of CHAT in Amsterdam, the
cultural-historical approach has little chances, in my judgment, in
getting influence on a much broader field in the modern world. For
various reasons, the most important of which may be that it has no
process theory on the concrete level. This makes it weak in view of
the present power of the natural sciences and their functioning
techniques, however much (non)sense and (reckless in)humanities those
two produce.

Ironically, the present situation of CHAT looks as promising as
marginal as did Herder's ideas around 1800 when scientific and
technical modernity had its actual beginnings. To some measure
because Kant had apparently demonstrated that reason could take
something like the place of God (to say it cuspidally). Such prospect
and Kant's ambivalences as to whether reason was universal or
individual, objective or subjective, had born that bifurcation into
modern individualism, subjectivism (Fichte etc.) and objectivism,
materialism (Hegel and Marx etc.) respectively. The latter opened
that broad avenue for natural law and, in addition, has lead to the
most silly consequentual human project, namely to understand humans,
as individual and as social bodies, also according to natural law and
to research them by means of the same logic of science. The former
took reign in matters of greed and exploitation, in the modern way
life, for short. What hypocritical coalition of the two: to believe
-- as the scientific faith! -- in determinististic natural law for
everything, salted with a pinch of chance, and at the same time to
promote and to savor personal "freedom" in the sense of "everybody's
license to do what s/he likes (short of killing and stealing others
exept in power position).

One of the weaknesses, then, of CHAT may be that it sometimes
comports itself and looks to others like any other science whereas it
also resembles very much also an interpretative, hermeneutic project
like a classical Geisteswissenschaft. This ambivalence, perhaps,
makes it unattractive to both, normal scientists and traditional
humanists.

Since I think that both these prospects are equally limited and, in
particular erroneous if extended beyond their original domain, I
follow the path that emerges from my suggestion that, unfortunately,
CHAT is not radical enough in implementing its evolutive, ecological
and semiotic base.

I have started to elaborate a bit on my ideas about problematic
features of CHAT and how I could go beyond. Would anybody be
interested?

Alfred

-- 

Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland --- alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch Website: http://www.psy.unibe.ch/ukp/langpapers/



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