Re: [xmca] The Frail Chain

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Good morning Mike and David

THIS topic:  Is CHAT a Romantic science?

 seems central to explorations of the yearning and desire to transform the
world.  David , your sharing Hazlitt's insight that volition and will are
not retrospective, or focused on the present, but rather oriented to
anticipating how to act in the future seems to be a wonderful temporal
dimension to explore.

Another way IN to this topic is your comment,

 It seems to me that an even more important reason to reject the epithet of
romantic science is that it assumes a very ahistorical and non-dialectical
opposition between romanticism and enlightenment.

So, I would like to propose that "seeing through" THIS tension [or way of
reading] the historical movement BETWEEN romanticism and enlightenment IS
the narrative to explore.

An analogy to Freud and Jung's ongoing conversation about dreams and where
they come from and their function may be relevant to this topic as a way to
show a dialectic within psychology as an expression of psyche.
Freud saw dreams as retrospective, memory traces, expressing the infantile
wishfulfillment at the heart of the unconscious. Jung saw dreams as having
a teleological function calling us into the future.
Now both Freud and Jung constructed autobiographical myths where they
positioned themselves as the protaganosists who were DISCOVERING this new
realm of the unconscious.  In fact, this conversation had been
EXPLICITLY developing for at least a century as a RESPONSE within German
Romanticism to the enlightenment yearnings for certainty. For example
dreams as PROSPECTIVE and prophetic was a key notion of German
Romanticism. These ideas were being developed and extended by authors such
as Flourney as a deepening conversation between the enlightenment and
German Romanticism.  However, in the egocentric yearning for recognition of
"I"  as the author of a discovery, the HISTORICAL conversation BETWEEN
Romanticism and enlightenment impulses [as the location of the development
of the narrative] becomes lost.
I wonder if this same tendency may be at play in the ongoing conversation
in CHAT exploring the creative imagination and instrumental orientations?

One further aside. Dreams and play were also being explored at this
time for the common functions expressed in rehearsing the NEXT steps in the
developmental process within dreams and play as analogus impulses.

While I'm here, I want to add an insight from Zygmunt Bauman's notions of
solid and liquid modernity in his discussion of Freud's book *Freiheit and
Sicherheit* [translated as Freedom and Security].

Bauman calls our attention to an error in translation of this title as
"sicherheit" is a much more complex term than "security" and expresses the
UNITY of three English terms that are seen as autonomous concepts.
Sicherheit as a notion expresses the UNITY of the terms security &
certainty & safety which are viewed as autonomous concepts in English.

Bauman suggests as we read Freud's writing we see he was exploring the
themes of freedom [romantic notion] and sicherheit [security, certainty,
and safety as enlightenment orientations].

Bauman's key idea is that historically we are in transition from a time of
solid modernity to what he terms liquid modernity.  Freud was writing at a
time of solid modernity when the quest for sicherheit as ORDER and
NORMS made the yearning for freedom vulnerable. Today, in times of liquid
modernity, the trade off is now reversed. Individual freedom is in the
ascendence but the prime consequence is the fragility of sicherheit AS
ORDER and NORMS.
Bauman writes,

"In liquid modernity the dearth of risk-free CHOICES and the growing
unclarity of the game-rules which render most of the moves and above all
the outcomes of the moves - which rebound as perceptions of threat to
SAFETY - first the safety of the body and then the safety of property -
that space-body extension. The withdrawal into the SAFE haven of
territoriality is an intense, desiring temptation - and so the DEFENSE of
the SAFE home becomes the passkey to all doors which one feels must be
locked up and sealed off to stave off the TRIPLE threat to SPIRITUAL and
MATERIAL sicherheit" [Bauman, "social Issues of Law and Order" in The
British Journal of Criminology, 2000, v.40, p205-221]

Bauman's exploring the yearning for law and order as SAFETY would explain
the tea party movement, etc. which he suggests is a GENERAL  response to
liquid modernity and its deep bias towards individual freedom. For Bauman,
this pursuit of a romantic ideal has consequences of increased
vulnerability to sicherheit.  [which is displaced into the pursuit of
SAFETY because security and certainty are existential human  yearnings
but governments can respond to safety concerns

Mike, David, I hope the invitation to explore the hermeneutical historical
conversation BETWEEN romantic and enlightenment will generate further
responses. Opening this theme as a generative conversation within our
Western history may make explicit the tension between freedom [romantic
ideal] and sicherheit [enlightenment ideal] that is in play in our searches
and researches

Larry



On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 6:30 PM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

> Well it turns out that my prior message is relevant to this one from David.
> David - Kind of you to remind us that rust we must and thanks very much for
> the Hazlitt.
>
> I really do not like the notion of Romantic Science  as you characterize
> it. Theme for a longer discussion.
> And thanks for that too!!
> mike
>
> On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 5:26 PM, kellogg <kellogg59@hanmail.net> wrote:
>
> >   First of all, many congratulations to Mike on becoming a robust and
> > even somewhat rusty link in the delicate chain of development. May there
> be
> > many more.
> >
> >
> >
> > I think Virginia Woolf once said that the First World War was, on a
> > microgenetic level, kept going by millions of minuscule failures of
> > imagination, for otherwise it were impossible, knowing what another
> > person's life must mean to him, to take it away. I have been thinking of
> > this in the context of a wonderful essay by William Hazlitt which I have
> > always loved (yes, that is the exactly the right word).
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> http://discoverarchive.vanderbilt.edu/bitstream/handle/1803/1739/An_Essay_on_the_Principles_of_Human_Action.pdf?sequence=1
> >
> >
> >
> > Hazlitt wants to construct a theory of human action to disprove the
> > Smith/Hume odel based on rational self-interest. He does this rather
> > deftly, by demonstrating that neither the past nor the present can be the
> > object of human will (since human will can alter neither) and therefore
> all
> > volition can only be future directed.
> >
> >
> >
> > But the future of the "self", whatever that may turn out to be, is no
> more
> > real to rational self-interest than the future of some other person, and
> in
> > fact is considerably less so, because other persons are a very tangible
> > presence in the present. All volition, whether directed to the self or to
> > the fellow man, is based on imagination, and a strictly rational
> > imagination is hardly anything more than perception, which he has already
> > demonstrated can be no basis for human action (since the objects
> available
> > to perception are in the present).
> >
> >
> >
> > I have always resisted identifying Vygotsky with "romantic science"
> > (although I know that was Luria's phrase), and not just for the obvious
> > reason that Vygotsky had a holy horror for the cult of the individual,
> and
> > for sentimentality, and for the gothic, and in many ways was a true child
> > of Spinoza and he enlightenment. It seems to me that an even more
> important
> > reason to reject the epithet of romantic science is that it assumes a
> very
> > ahistorical and non-dialectical opposition between romanticism and
> > enlightenment.
> >
> >
> >
> > But if there is a frail, romantic link in our clanking chain, here it is.
> > Andy points out that activity theory has suffered a lot from an
> objectivist
> > (that is an instrumental, object oriented) bent, ever since the days when
> > Leontiev declared that motivation is little more than backwash from an
> > object. Here's the antidote!
> >
> >
> >
> > David Kellogg
> >
> > Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > <kellogg59@hanmail.net>
> > __________________________________________
> > _____
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> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
> >
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