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    ISPDI

    International Society for Psychology as the

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    • tillmann
      Feb 22
      Please
      General Discussions
      Several months ago some members of the ISPDI decided to do a non-agreed upon update of OUR website, including the selective removal of previous postings. As much as I was suprised about this unfamiliar course of actions, that is how little I was suprised that since then, almost no real dialogs have been going on the posted discussion board. I too, in my mix of emotions, did not know how to go on. However, the soul, as understood by PDI, does not care about my personal poutiness. But it does care about being ignored by the world, in particular, by being ignored by that society that credits itself with having a relation to the soul. In our open inquiries, we discuss the book “Working with dreams”. One point in this book is to approach the dream with respect, to take it serious as an expression of the soul speaking about itself. The same is to apply to phenomena in the world. We already had such a phenomena with huge impact and meaning, The Pandemic. But instead of taking it serious, we decided to only elaborate if it is even relevant to be approached as a soul phenomenon. Whether it is the health of your human body or a meaningful personal relationship or a need of the soul, stubborness always only leads to a higher and much more unpleasant cost. So now we are confronted with the danger of something that makes the pandemic look like a neglibility, namely a potential worldwide military conflict. It has nothing to do with the Ukraine, Russia, NATO, or any personal motivations behind it. It is the soul speaking. Please, let us talk about it, let us take it serious, let us show respect. Soul issues can only be solved as a process. Let us add our small contribution to this process. Please share your thoughts, feelings and ideas of what the soul might express in such an incalculable situation.
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    • Michael R Caplan
      Sep 20, 2021
      "Aufheben"/Sublation: A One-Word Lesson in Dialectics
      General Discussions
      Hegel's notion of aufheben is "dialectics in a word" . His particular (though not linguistically incorrect way) use of the common German term itself contains the key to understanding what constitutes "dialectical movement". It is now generally understood that aufheben is not a simplistic "thesis + antithesis = synthesis". This old method of explaining sublation has long been discredited, not only because it's simply not what Hegel meant (most of the time). He and the Idealists would reject it because it's a prime example of "finite thinking" (or "the Understanding" or "the natural mind"), which his philosophical Science aims to overcome (indeed, to sublate): a finite "1" is added to another finite "1" (even if they may be defined as being "opposed" to each other) to produce a finite "2" (a sum or melding or "conjunction" of the previous finite quantities.). But thinking itself is not transformed by this kind of movement (unless one imagines a mystical sort of experience from a mystified notion of "conjunction"), and Hegel's ultimate goal is the transformation of our thinking of Being . We're also familiar with the more accurate and truly Hegelian definition, in which three seemingly contradictory notions are taken together: to "sublate" is to negate , to preserve , and to elevate . Our "natural" understanding tends to place the three terms in a sort of time sequence: first we "negate", during or after which we also somehow "preserve" (despite having "negated"), and this allows us to "elevate" the original notion. This sort of seems reasonable, but it remains very difficult to grasp just what's going on in these movements. Instead, there's another way of understanding the relationship of the three terms that demystifies dialectical thinking very neatly. At the outset, we are in a situation of wishing or needing to move from a point at which two figures or positions are stuck in opposition , and to one in which this deadlock has been broken through, the stalemate resolved, and our understanding refined. This is the situation that calls for a resolution by means of dialectical thinking, and the movement required here is to bridge the aporia , the seemingly insurmountable difference. But how? We neither combine nor neutralize the two "sides", but (merely!) come to realize how they are already combined precisely in their stance of mutual opposition. We "negate" the entirety of the terms' own first-level negation (of the terms by each other) not by rejecting it, but by elevating our own viewpoint – or to put it the other way around: once we've seen the two sides in their function as mutually defining, we have elevated our viewpoint . The "elevation" is something that occurs to our position , to the stance from which we do our thinking, and this is what it allows us to see that the two sides were always-already dialectically interconnected , indeed that they are constituted precisely in and by their interdependence. The opposition of the "sides" is negated as such, but is in the same movement (i.e., not afterwards or as a consequence) preserved as the manner in which they together form one figure , one "shape of consciousness". Once the two "sides" are recognized as the whole (if inherently dirempted) figure they together constitute, our original position (which at first consisted only of these two sides and their opposition) has been "sublated". And this newly achieved position is now itself ready to be "negated" and "preserved" by being identified as "one side" of a more comprehensive whole, and thereby "sublated" or elevated into the next stage of dialectically-driven development. So the very word aufheben , in Hegel's usage, is itself a perfect example of "the dialectic". It contains two moments , one made up of "negate and preserve" and the other of "elevate". The first moment constitutes what happens to our original position and its two opposed sides: they are negated and preserved, and this simultaneous negation/preservation itself is the second moment, sublation as such , in which the two sides are recognized as mutually determining aspects of a single, internally differentiated figure. To elevate IS " to negate and preserve" , or again the other way around, to negate and preserve IS " to elevate" ; the meaning of "elevation" is "negation-and-preservation", and the combined result of "negation-and-preservation" is "elevation".
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    • peter white
      Jul 15, 2021
      Some thoughts on the relationship of the “food of wonder” in the Anishnaabe myth “Mandamin” to the topic of Surveillance Capitalism
      General Discussions
      In the discussion period on the third day of the 2021 Zoom conference, Richard Naegle asked me if I could think of a connection between the Anishnaabe myth “Mandamin ', specifically the image “food of wonder”,' and Robert Dommett’s piece on Surveillance Capitalism. (I hope I heard correctly through the intermittent garble of my poor internet connection.) As is often the case I could not come up with much of an answer on the spot and so I will give a fuller response here. What is the “food of wonder” and does it relate to Surveillance Capitalism and the project of the human being subsumed by the machine? Everything, I think, depends on context. To “export” the image “food of wonder”, just like that, without considering the style of consciousness one is applying it to seems problematic to me. For the purpose of this discussion I see four contexts. 1) the ancient Anishnaabe who created the myth 2) contemporary Anishnaabe such as Basil Johnston who recorded the story in his Ojibway Tales 3) psychology as the discipline of interiority and 4) contemporary surveillance capitalism. When I try to think about these things I find it essential to maintain a sense of historical context or, all too soon, one’s thoughts wind up muddled in a heap at the bottom of a slippery slope where everything means everything and all too soon nothing means anything. Ancient Anishnaabe - If we follow Giegerich’s statements about the history of the soul, in the age of mythological thinking where this story has its origin there would be no acts of reflection about the “meaning” of “food of wonder”. The images of myth and many of the objects in the physical world did not have meaning but rather were meaning. (see Dialectics and CEP III) The story and the spirits that filled the world were the “food of wonder”. When Basil Johnston says as he relates the story, “There is another tale entitled “Corn” that is no less striking. But the story is not really about corn or its origins.” and “one of the story’s themes is . . .” he is speaking from a stance of reflection. This is a consciousness that is no longer in the mythological mode of being-in-the-world. And indeed, Giegerich’s argument is that myth is a transition stage between ritual and religious consciousness. Thus for Johnston, the “food of wonder” is the symbolic meaning of this phrase and the images of the story. As I claimed in my paper, the “food of wonder” for psychology as the discipline of interiority is the soul as logical life. What is done via the medium of images in the myth is done by our psychological method when it negates the images of myth as being archetypal “entities” but then negates its negation of those same images by interiorizing them into themselves such that they form the framework for thinking them as both the identity of themselves and the identity of themselves and their opposite. In my paper I said that for psychology, the “food of wonder” in the Anishnaabe story is allegorical of a new logical form of consciousness. What do changes in the logical form of consciousness look like historically? For one instance Giegerich states in The Soul’s Logical Life that psychology is sublated religion and sublated science, which is to say that psychology (as he conceives it) is a form of consciousness that is logically beyond both religion and science.The crucial thing to keep in mind, I think, is that even though the vessel is the human, the change is within soul. To carry this over to the question of technology as a “food of wonder”, the question is whether it is a “food of wonder” for the soul, not people as individuals. Does surveillance capitalism function as a new logical form of consciousness? It is a phenomenon that has a monumental effect on humanity but is it the soul’s “food of wonder”, the birth of itself in a new form? What I see in Dommett’s paper is that surveillance capitalism is a part of the death of the logic of humanism that has dominated Western consciousness since the Renaissance, but the logic of being “human” in other ages and places was not in the style of humanism. To believe that the ancient Egyptian mind whose mythology inspires Dommetts reflections on surveillance capitalism, for instance, lived according to the needs and values of humanism would be the fallacy of retrojecting a style of consciousness from one age into another that did not experience the world in that way. (And Dommett carefully avoids this, sticking strictly to the images of Egyptian myth but never speaking about what the style of ancient Egyptian consciousness was.) Viewed from the standpoint of humanism, surveillance capitalism and “machine-dominance” are murderous knives, killing the humanistic soul; it is indicative of a logical form that humanism cannot fathom and cannot give credence to. But this is not new. One could argue that it was structurally the same for the European paganism that, after millennia of functioning as the logical form or style of consciousness, was forced to give way to Christianity. The better is always the enemy of the good. In this way Dommett’s paper articulates the opposite archetypal moment of the one reflected by the “food of wonder” in the Anishnaabe story where the new is a miraculous and wonderful event. The overall feeling conveyed in Dommett’s paper, by contrast, is one of a horrible fate imposed on blind and/or unwilling victims. Best, Peter
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