Many thanks, Mohamed and Nate, for the details of the Luria quote and
its spread and fate. It is certainly in the spirit of the early
cultural-historical thinking, whether formulated by Luria or
Vygotsky. I wonder how well it would also fit Leontiev's way of
understanding activity. Anybody willing to help me?
To Mike and Jay: a sentence similar to: "you have to loose (give up,
abandon, forget etc.) your soul (mind, will, psyche. goals, God etc.)
when you want to find (gain, expand, elevate etc.) it" is rather
standard in most branches of Christian mysticism as well as in many
Buddhist, Taoist and related meditative and practical movements.
Naturally, there are scores of interpretations extant over the
centuries and I would be the last to consider myself an expert in
this field. On a basic level the idea is as trivial as it is mighty:
once you have a prefabricated picture of what you search you shall
rarely find it in cases where it is not a ready-made. Or, prejudice
prevents you from seeing real things.
But in the context given, to me, the phrase simply means something
like: give up looking for what holds humans together, both as an
individual or as a group, within humans. You better look into the
whole situation of a human being, including environment, ingoing and
outgoing streams included; and changes as well as fixations.
Jay has eloquently elaborated on this. But why, Ricardo, would you
not as well renounce a materialistic approach to consciousness? Over
the years, I have lost most desire to get into clear fields of
understanding by reconstructing the history of word use. A very
instructive lesson to get for anybody reading German is the
Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie in 12 volumes, roughly 70cm
of bookshelf. A well weighted dose of history of terminology can
easily eat the rest of your faith that humans can better understand
each other by means of their language. In spite of your knowing that
there is not choice.
And so my ramblings on CHAT climax with Philipp Cappers observation of
>ISCRAT as a Tower of Babel. I noted dialogue after dialogue that
>seemed to me to actually be semi-confrontational discussions (I change from
>'dialogue' to 'discussion' deliberately) about terminology.
>When I shared my observations with others I found that I was far from alone
>in perceiving this.
I have this impression now some 40 and odd years as concerns the
so-called science of psychology, mainstream. Not to mention
philosophy which in so many respect is at the origin of the
conceptual troubles in the modern sciences. In what respect can and
does CHAT evade similar fate?
We are definitely in need of a thorough conceptual reconstruction of
our understanding the human condition.
Alfred
--Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland --- alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch Website: http://www.psy.unibe.ch/ukp/langpapers/
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