Re: [xmca] Emotion at Work

Dear Steve:
   
  I forgot to say that I agree completely with your reformulation: we have differently valenced psychological emotions because we have common motives and shared desires which through the vicissitudes of socio-cultural life in a class society are very differently satisfied.
   
  The problem is that I also agree completely with Wolff-Michael's original formulation: we have motives and desires because we have differently-valenced psychological emotions which through the vicissitudes of establishing and managing an identity acquire different loadings.
   
  What is worse, I do NOT accept any of the usual ways of expressing this, to the effect that motives and emotions are mutually constitutive, or construct and are constructed by each other, or symmetrically emergent. NOR do I accept the rejection of causality that both makes this symmetry plausible and logically flows from accepting their synchrony. I believe in cause and effect in the socio-cultural world just as I believe in cause and effect in the physical world, and it seems to me that to deny it is to deny monism.
   
  It all looks pretty hopeless, doesn't it? Wolff-Michael says that emotion/feeling causes motives/desires, and Gimpel the Fool says that is right. Steve says that motives/desires engender emotions/feelings, and Gimpel says that is right too. Then Rabbi Menachem complains that one must cause the other, so they cannot both be right, and all Gimpel can say is that the good Rabbi is also right.
   
  But perhaps Gimpel has a point. When two people dialogue, there is always an initiate and always a reply, and they are crucially NON-symmetrical and NON-synchronous. Merely because the reply becomes, in its turn, an initiate does NOT obliterate the asymmetry and the asynchrony; on the contrary. Still less can it obliterate the distinction between the initiate and the reply. NOR can it obliterate the causality of the reply by the initiate or the structural boundedness of the reply to the initiate. All it can do is to change speaker into listener and listener into speaker.
   
  In phylogenetic terms, physical desires give rise to psychological emotions (more or less in the way Darwin or even Damasio might describe it). In ontogenetic terms, these phylogenetically evolved emotions in turn lead to new, higher (because language mediated) socio-cultural motives and desires among which are identity and perhaps even the development of higher forms of self-consciousness (just as Wolff-Michael and LSV himself would have it). And in microgenetic terms, what we have is not two people both talking and listening at the same time, but rather the speaker becoming a listener and the listener becoming, in turn, the speaker. This is all—but this is EVERYTHING!
   
  David Kellogg
  Seoul National University of Education
   

       
---------------------------------
Take the Internet to Go: Yahoo!Go puts the Internet in your pocket: mail, news, photos & more.
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Tue Jul 31 12:26 PDT 2007