Dear Arne, Jay, Vera and Michael,
with a mixture of fascination and bewilderment I have read the exchanges
among you on one of the great attempts to implement seriously the evolutive
into our world view.
When Arne looks back at those Hegelian proposals and their Marx-Engelian
twists and 20th century perversions I understand quite well that he wanted
most to have them placed in the historical archive if it were not for their
proven power. They indeed destroyed many a life, though they also opened
many an eye. Yet, nevertheless, more rewarding I find looking at them as a
part of a larger and possibly more fertile tradition to introduce a
non-Platonic and non-Cartesian evolutive world view and image of humans. I
won't dwell now on Herder whom I find crucial in this tradition. But
indeed, in some way these figures from Hegel to Lenin & Co. are hybrids of
Herderian realist evolutionism and (post-)Kantian idealist essentialism or
absolutism in matters of change.
I propose to at the same time return to the roots of the dialectic movement
and to pursue a realist perspective: why not systematically replace the
idea of Dialactics, i.e. of opposing ideas jumping into a new third, by
Dialogics, i.e. the process of two related though different things giving
birth to a third, also related or affine to the two (as in gametic
procreation)? In a general notion of Dialogue, some structure (not
exclusively a logon, a word, but something of sign character in general) is
taken up by a a second structure and thereby a third structure is generated
that usually carries on characters of both of its precursors. This is the
small enough step of bringing about something new that in suitable
recursions produces the systematic changes we call open endedly evolutive
whether it be in ontogenesis of memory endowed individual organisms, in the
phylogenetic near replications of generic organisms in suitabe
environments, or in cultural change of groups of complex individuals in
their common and self-created situations. Dialogue is the medium of the
cultural process par excellence, much more than the somehow ficticious
revulsion or revolutions dreamt of when one wants to change the ideal good
for the real bad in fundamental turns which usually turns out to soom
become more of the same.
Alfred
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Alfred Lang
Internet: lang who-is-at psy.unibe.ch
Psychology, Univ. of Bern, Unitobler, Muesmattstr. 45, CH-3000 Bern 9
Office: Tel (+41 +31) 631 40 11
Fax 631 82 12
Home (preferably): Hostalen 106, CH-3037 Herrenschwanden
Switzerland Tel+Fax (+41
+31) 302 53 42
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