International Society for Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority

We will find no justification outside ourselves for our actions. Our interests guide us fuled by emotion. Nothing is hidden. But we sure can believe in impossible things, which is a blessing and a curse. Our malleability may be infinite...at least we have created some amazing things....we do not know what we could be...attention can lead to emotion...so ideas are key...I feel that a bunch of people are working toward a supreme fiction..."there being nothing else". Here is Latour looking... 

Respect for creation, nice idea. The Orthodox have some fascinating thoughts about that, they seem light-years ahead of Western Christianity in the development of most areas..... Western theology comes across as childish and unsophisticated when compared.

My interest is that there is a disconnect between the science and the size of the threat that people mention about Nature, the planet and the climate and the emotion that this triggers. So we are supposed to be extremely frightened people, but despite that we appear to sleep pretty well. So either the threat is not that strong, or we have not built the kind of emotion we have built for war, for religious conflict and all sorts of other issues which make us very emotive.

Emotion precedes and drives interest in and attention to every topic, its there no matter what.... the subject of interest in turn incites further incursions of emotion, and changes the emotional mixture.....  you are never free of the movement of affect and it's influence is irresistable. At best you can be between emotions but not free of them. At best you can sometimes bring one emotion to bear against another, to dominate the effects of another- like anger against fear.

Interesting way of wording things- that we havent yet "built" the emotion -he points to fear- for the environmental threat people mention. Obviously the scientists working on this are emotion-driven, some of that would be fear, some anxiety, and others.... but its true people are pretty unworried by it all. Maybe thats because most people havent witnessed the facts of the threat like scientists or low-lying island peoples already have.... or maybe the fantasies of threat offered in the media have not encompassed your local town, house and freinds- "Global warming to send massive tornado and flood to Osgood next week - destruction expected". There has to be something sensuous to incite the fear. 

Gany

"...we haven't yet 'built' the emotion..." ....don't you whiff good old BF Skinner slipping back in...yet that is what I think they are thinking to some extent. I watched a little bit of something that had Fergie working with this horse...what went on was amazing...it wasn't the old reward and punishment / ignore(Rules , praise and ignore ...that was my old psych teachers montra)...it was in terms of dominance and social order and they were using that...did you know if you use something call ropem(sp) that kind of knocks out a bull when you do work on it, if it wakes up with other bulls it will loose its place in the pecking order and be a lower rank? Cool stuff. I tried to stay awake to watch one of Sapolsky's classes last night but had a hell of a time...it was on neuroscience...they got a long way to go to figure out what is going on up there but thoughts seem to play a major part...that was Sapolsky's thing in the book Why Zebras don't get Ulsers....they are either dead or its over and they are back grazing...we, on the other hand are moved just by the thought of being eaten by a lion and have the same physical response without the real lion. So here we are with this wonderful imagination that lets us imagine all kinds impossible things with good results and the same imagination is killing us with stress.  And what am I reading today? " the demon and the angel"  by Edward Hirsch...guess that makes some sense. I heard James and Margot got home to CT...I know they wanted that. Jim

Pecking order tends to work but is malleable, the rank is a changeable thing. The attraction in ranking is that it orients "I Am Here".... it offers security and becomes habitual. Then the fantasy changes- the lion cub replaces the old king and there's a lot of jostling along the way. Sometimes the tiger bites the handler as if to say fuck the pecking order.... long live the King. Am thinking of Casey's work on Place as something giving a sense of "me" equally important as having your mother and father tell you what you are.

BTW, a side note on Geigerich's disaffectation formula; its important to use the word emotion and emotional arousal when talking about what he leaves out of his account of logical processing. If -like many people- you use the word "feelings" to refer to the entirety of interrelated emotional processes (physical, imaginal, moral, mental), it offers Giegerich a coward's escape whereby he can overlook your broader use of the term by appealing to Jung's much narrower moral definition of feelings as subjective value judgments- which later of course Giegerich will have no part of in his unbiased search for truth. In this side-stepping he avoids the larger emotional process altogether. Stick with the word emotion -ie. physiological arousal- then there's no excuse for his neglect of emotion and it's pivitol role in the desire to uphold a doctrine.

A quote of Jung's definition of feeling:

Feeling is primarily a process that takes place between the ego and a given content, a process, moreover, that imparts to the content a definite value in the sense of acceptance or rejection ("like" or "dislike")... Feeling is distinguished from affect by the fact that it produces no perceptible physical innervations, ie., neither more nor less than an ordinary thinking process... Feeling, like thinking, is a rational function, since values in general are assigned according to the laws of reason, just as concepts in general are formed according to these laws.

And affects:

By the term affect I mean a state characterized by marked physical innervation on the one hand and a peculiar disturbance of the ideational process on the other. I use emotion as synonymous with affect.

That last bit that emotion creates "a peculiar disturbance of the ideational process" sounds a lot like Whitehead.

Gany

Hiya, Gany et al. I've made it over here at last.

I happen to be a member of this new Society, because I've become quite involved with a Giegerich discussion group here in Toronto spearheaded by Greg Mogenson. A nicer bunch of people you couldn't hope to meet, in both the group and the Society ...

Of course, I totally and utterly disagree with Gany about Giegerich, but that's nothing new! For now, I'm just officially stating my position as a long-time friend of some of the old-timers here - I'm the heretic. Plus I wanted to say hi to everyone!

All the best and no malice intended,
Michael (tipothecap)

Hi Cap,

Good to hear from you.

There's just as many Geigerich lovers here as Hillman lovers.... so how come you get to be the heretic? I thought I was! lol

PS. if you find anything interesting in Giegerich's writing about how he deals with affects, please enlighten us. All I ever found were dismissive comments.

Cheers

Gany    ←Emoticon

Like many of us, then, I guess I'm happiest in a place like this, misfitting with a group of misfits!

No, I don't have an immediate answer to your question about affect -- I know that's a topic of particular interest to you. If anything comes to me, I'll pass it along ...

Until then, just another heretic to heretic hello!

Michael

Here is one for you from good  old Plato. It's out of the book The Soul of the Greeks by Micheal Davis...just now finished it.

" Socrates seems to say that to define something means not to describe what happens to it but to say what it is in its being or essence--its ousia. Euthyphro had tried to say that the holiness of something consisted in its happening to be loved by the gods. Still, couldn't there be something the being or ousia of which was to have a certain sort of pathos? Isn't this just what we mean by soul, which  cannot be anything apart form a power or ability to suffer or undergo, certain sorts of experiences? Soul is thus inseparable from its affects: its being is first to be affected. If we were to understand gods to be perfect souls, they would have to have the perfection of this suffering, undergoing, or being affected. Worshipping them would then amount to worshipping pure receptivity---the fact that there is such a thing in the world as  'being affected.' "

This book is worth a look. I'm going to check this guy Davis out...Jim

P.S. Hi Cap! I"m working on my guitar skills...no singing yet.

Found this Shivaro piece on the old site, placing here as relevant;

Through his analysis of “subjective form,” Whitehead privileges feeling over understanding, and offers an account of experience that is affective rather than cognitive. Even if we restrict our focus, as Kant did, to “sensa” (qualia, the basic atoms of sense-perception in the mode of “presentational immediacy”), the “main characteristic” of these sensa “is their enormous emotional significance” (1933/1967, 215). Every experience of perception involves an “affective tone” (176), and this tone precedes, and both determines and exceeds, cognition. We do not first perceive what is before us, and then respond emotionally to these perceptions. Whitehead says that the order is rather the reverse. For “the direct information to be derived from sense-perception wholly concerns the functionings of the animal body” (215). Perception is first a matter of being-affected bodily. Contact with the outside world strengthens or weakens the body, stimulates it or inhibits it, furthers or impairs its various functions. Every perception or prehension thus provokes the body into “adversion or aversion” – and this is already the “subjective form” of the prehension (1929/1978, 184). It is only later that (in “high-grade” organisms such as ourselves, at least) “the qualitative characters of affective tones inherent in the bodily functionings are transmuted into the characters of regions” in space (1933/1967, 215), so that sensa can be taken to qualify (or to give us information about) objects of knowledge in the external world. We respond to things in the first place by feeling them; it is only afterwards that we identify, and cognize, what it is we feel. Whitehead’s account of perception as feeling is a refinement, and an extension, of William James’ (1983) theory of the emotions.... Whitehead radicalizes this argument, and expands its scope, by describing all experience as emotional. This includes bare sense-perception; it also includes modes of “experience” that are not conscious, and not necessarily human. Indeed, Whitehead’s philosophy “attributes ‘feeling’ throughout the actual world” (1929/1978, 177). For Whitehead, “feelings” are identical with “positive prehensions” in general, which are all the ways in which entities interact with one another, or affect one another (220).13 To feel something means to be affected by that something. And the way that the feeling entity is affected, or changed, is the very content of what it feels. Everything that happens in the universe is thus in some sense an episode of feeling: even the “actual occasions in so-called ‘empty space’ ” discovered by modern physics (177). Of course, quantum fluctuations in the void do not involve anything like consciousness or sense-perception. But when we examine these fluctuations, “the influx of feeling with vague qualitative and ‘vector’ definition is what we find” (177). Overall, there is “a hierarchy of categories of feeling” (166), from the “wave-lengths and vibrations” of subatomic physics (163) to the finest subtleties of human subjective experience. But in every case, phenomena are felt, and grasped as modes of feeling, before they can be cognized and categorized. In this way, Whitehead posits feeling as a basic condition of experience, much as Kant establishes space and time as transcendental conditions of sensibility.

This brings us back to the “Transcendental Aesthetic.” If time and space are the forms, respectively, of inner and outer intuition, then feeling is their common generative matrix. It is by the receptive act of feeling that I locate things in space and in time. In other words, feeling is the process by which all entities get spatialized and temporalized. Whitehead thus agrees with Kant (1996) that “space represents no property whatever of any things in themselves” (81), and that “time is not something that is self-subsistent or that attaches to things as an objective determination” (87). Space and time are basic forms of affectivity; they cannot be pre-assumed, but need to be constructed in the process of experience. Whitehead
is in accord, then, with Kant’s contention that space “is the subjective condition of sensibility under which alone outer intuition is possible for us” (81), and that “time is nothing but the subjective condition under which alone any intuition can take place in us” (88). Whitehead’s one crucial difference from Kant on this point is that, for Whitehead, such “subjective conditions” apply for all entities, and not just for human (rational) minds. Time and space are not epistemological necessities that we alone impose upon the world, but “subjective conditions” that all beings in the world effectively produce, in the course of their experiences.

And another:

In line with this assertion of the constructed, conditional nature of time and space, Whitehead denounces what he calls “the fallacy of simple location” (1929/1978,137; citing 1925/1967, 49ff.). This fallacy consists in believing that a “bit of matter” can be located absolutely “in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time” (1925/1967, 58). But so to posit “the individual independence of successive temporal occasions” (1929/1978, 137), and the correlative notion of “absolute places” in space (71), is to ignore the way that feeling is relational, and “essentially a transition” (221). Feeling always points from place to place; and feeling inherits from the past, and projects towards the future. Through the process of feeling, different points in space “are united in the solidarity of one common world” (72). And every process of feeling produces time: both as the “perpetual perishing” of the entity that feels, and as “the origination of the present in conformity with the ‘power’ of the past” (210). This “power” of the past, which marks time as transition, and which forges relations from one point in space to another, is the force of repetition. Every “present” moment forcibly “inherits,” and thereby repeats, what came before. “The notion of ‘simple location’ ” is a fallacy, because it “is inconsistent with any admission of ‘repetition,’ ” or of a time that intrinsically refers to another time (137). To establish a particular spacetime location is always, first of all, to affirm repetition, and thereby establish a difference, by referring elsewhere and elsewhen, to other stretches of space and other periods of time.14 Actual entities, then, are not primordially located in space and ordered by time. Rather, spatial location and temporal sequence are themselves generated through the becoming of these actual entities. That is to say, an entity composes or creates itself by feeling the other entities that have influenced and informed it; and it feels them as being spatially and temporally distinct from itself. This self distinguishing action of each new entity, and the consequent differentiation of time and space, is a necessary concomitant of the very process of feeling. Every “pulse of emotion” (163) is both a fresh creation of spacetime, and an immediate perishing, or “objectification.” The “emotional continuity of past with present. . . is a basic element from which springs the self-creation of each temporal occasion. . . How the past perishes is how the future becomes” (1933/1967, 238). It is only when an actual entity perishes – when it is no longer actively engaged in the process of feeling – that it is fully “ ‘spatialized,’ to use Bergson’s term” (1929/1978, 220; cf. 209). It is thereby fully temporalized as well, since “the atomization of the extensive continuum is also its temporalization” (72).15 Only when a process of feeling has completed itself and perished, can it be circumscribed as a datum to be felt, “a definite fact with a date” (230).16

To summarize, feeling can be conceived as vector transmission, as reference, and as repetition. These three determinations are closely intertwined. Every feeling involves a reference to another feeling. But reference moves along the line of the vector. Feeling as reference is a transmission through space, a direction of movement as well as a magnitude. This transmission is also a process in time. In the vector, time has a direction: the arrow of time is always moving from the already determined to the not-yet-determined and to-be-determined. The feeling entity is “conditioned” by, or is an “effect” of, all the other entities that it feels (236); and this entity, in turn, becomes a condition, or a cause, for whatever subsequent entities feel it in their own ways. Every entity thus “conforms to the data” that it receives from the past, “in that it feels the data” (85). But in the act of feeling its data, every entity also selects among, shapes, and alters these data, until it reaches a final determination. In so doing, it offers itself to be felt by other entities in its own turn, so that it is “referent beyond itself” (72). The “objectification” of the entity, once it has been completely determined, allows for its repetition. And this repetition is the key to the future as well as to the past; for every new process of becoming “involves repetition transformed into novel immediacy” (137).

And from Whitehead:

Whitehead's entire book Modes Of Thought is online (see link). Here's some from his chapter 'Importance':

"There are two contrasted ideas which seem inevitably to underlie all width of experience, one of them is the notion of importance, the sense of importance, the presupposition of importance. The other is the notion of matter-of-fact. There is no escape from sheer matter-of-fact. It is the basis of importance; and importance is important because of the inescapable character of matter-of-fact. We concentrate by reason of a sense of importance. And when we concentrate, we attend to matter-of-fact. Those people who in a hard-headed way confine their attention to matter-of-fact do so by reason of their sense of the importance of such an attitude. The two notions are antithetical, and require each other."

"The notion of 'Importance' is equally dominant in civilized thought. It can be inadequately defined as 'Interest, involving that intensity of individual feeling which leads to publicity of expression'. We are here trenching upon the topic of the next lecture. The definition is inadequate because there are two aspects to Importance; one based on the unity of the Universe, the other on the individuality of the details. The word 'Interest' suggests the latter aspect; the word 'Importance' leans towards the former. In some sense or other interest always modifies expression. Thus, for the sake of reminding ourselves of this aspect of 'Importance', the word 'Interest' will occasionally be used as a synonym. But 'Importance' is a fundamental notion not to be fully explained by any reference to a finite number of other factors.

As an explicit thought it is somewhat at odds with the concept of 'Fact'. A sound technological procedure is to analyse the facts in disregard of any subjective judgment as to their relative interest. And yet the notion of importance is like nature itself: Expel it with a pitch-fork, and it ever returns. The most ardent upholders of objectivity in scientific thought insist upon its importance. In truth, 'to uphold a doctrine' is itself such an insistence. Apart from a feeling of interest, you would merely notice the doctrine and not uphold it. The zeal for truth presupposes interest. Also sustained observation presupposes the notion. For concentrated attention means disregard of irrelevancies; and such disregard can only be sustained by some sense of importance.

Thus the sense of importance (or interest) is embedded in the very being of animal experience. As it sinks in dominance, experience trivializes and verges towards nothingness.

The notion of a mere fact is the triumph of the abstractive intellect. It has entered into the explicit thought of no baby and of no animal. Babies and animals are concerned with their wants as projected against the general environment. That is to say, they are immersed in their interest respecting details embedded in externality. There is the merest trace of the abstraction of the detail. A single fact in isolation is the primary myth required for finite thought, that is to say, for thought unable to embrace totality.

This mythological character arises because there is no such fact. Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types. It is of the essence of types, that they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered. No fact is merely itself. The penetration of literature and art at their height arises from our dumb sense that we have passed beyond mythology; namely, beyond the myth of isolation.

It follows that in every consideration of a single fact there is the suppressed presupposition of the environmental coordination requisite for its existence. This environment, thus coordinated, is the whole universe in its perspective to the fact. But perspective is gradation of relevance; that is to say, it is gradation of importance. Feeling is the agent which reduces the universe to its perspective for fact. Apart from gradations of feeling, the infinitude of detail produces an infinitude of effect in the constitution of each fact. And that is all that is to be said, when we omit feeling. But we feel differently about these effects and thus reduce them to a perspective. 'To be negligible' means 'to be negligible for some coordination of feeling'. Thus perspective is the outcome of feeling; and feeling is graded by the sense of interest as to the variety of its differentiations."

Gany

Missed this post by Jim;

" Socrates seems to say that to define something means not to describe what happens to it but to say what it is in its being or essence--its ousia. Euthyphro had tried to say that the holiness of something consisted in its happening to be loved by the gods. Still, couldn't there be something the being or ousia of which was to have a certain sort of pathos? Isn't this just what we mean by soul, which  cannot be anything apart form a power or ability to suffer or undergo, certain sorts of experiences? Soul is thus inseparable from its affects: its being is first to be affected. If we were to understand gods to be perfect souls, they would have to have the perfection of this suffering, undergoing, or being affected. Worshipping them would then amount to worshipping pure receptivity---the fact that there is such a thing in the world as  'being affected.' "

"Being affected"- affective-being, has a ring to it... that the ousia exhibits affect and is known via affect. Corbin's piece the Pathetic God comes to mind;

"The etymology it suggests for the divine name Allah projects a flash of light on the path we are attempting to travel. Despite the reticence of Arabic grammer on this point, it derives from the word ilah from the root wlh connoting to be sad, to be overwhelmed with sadness, to sigh toward, to flee fearfully toward.... This Name then expresses sadness, nostalgia aspiring eternally to know the Principle which eternally initiates it: the nostalgia of the revealed God (i.e., revealed for man) yearning to be once more beyond His revealed being...
   What is the foundation, what is the meaning of this sadness of a "pathetic God"? How does the mystic come to regard it as determining the sympathy between the invisible and the visible, as the secret of a human-divine sym-pathetism? To begin with let us recall the hadith which all our mystics of Islam untiringly meditate, the hadith in which the Godhead reveals the secret of His passion (his pathos): "I was a hidden Treasure and I yearned to be known by them." With still greater fidelity to Ibn Arabi's thought, let us translate: "in order to become in them the object of my knowledge." This divine passion, this desire to reveal Himself and to know Himself in beings through being known by them, is the motive underlying an entire divine dramaturgy, an eternal cosmogony. This cosmogony is neither an Emanation in the Neoplatonic sense of the word nor, still less, a creation ex nihilo. It is rather a succession of tajalliyat, of theophanies...
   We know the divine Names only by our knowledge of ourselves (that is the basic maxim). God describes Himself to us through ourselves. Which means that the divine Names are essentially relative to the beings who name them, since these beings discover and experience them in their own mode of being.... And it is these latent individualities who from all eternity have aspired to concrete being in actu. Their aspiration is itself nothing other than the nostalgia of the divine Names yearning to be revealed. And this nostalgia of the divine Names is nothing other than the sadness of the unrevealed God, the anguish He experiences in His unknownness and occulation."
________________________________________________________________________

The point in that is we come to know something/someone by pathos. Allah certainly has that figured out, so do all the Gods. And that's Whitehead's point regarding importance.... how do we come to uphold a doctrine or a God, or get intimately aquanted with anything if not by affect? If it weren't for the pathos- we would merely notice the outline and pass on by.

Gany

"myth is the spatialzation in time of the eternal" did somebody say that? There is something I just read about Hegel and how ideas work that sound something like your last 3 posts but its at the farm...I'll see if I can find it...it was a short bit. Thinking  somehow trys to get out of the rut or the habit...but can it? "Pretending to know" seems to me "the problem" right now...in interesting times like these when the old is going away and the new is not yet is the time of monsters...reminds me of the poem Lost. Jim

Lost

Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
You must let it find you.

An old Native American elder story rendered into modern English by David Wagoner, in The Heart Aroused - Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte, Currency Doubleday, New York, 1996.

Here is the piece where the Hegel stuff was...the idea here is "communism"  but it could be "soul" or as with Hegel "Spirit"...the point is how he thinks it works...how it produces itself, becomes real, has affects. Jim

I read this in  book form in Living in the End Times by Zizek and found this online googling for a translation of "critique of pure communism" ...I wish I understood what he means by the "not-all" and the "gap" and the historism/ historicity thing...but it sounds like there is something interesting going on in there...I haven't been able to make any sense out of what Badiou says and I tried listening to him several times...haven't looked at any of his books yet but Critchley seems to like him and so does Zizek...there are some strange folks out there... 

Saturday 07 May 2011

The Left today faces the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing with political economy—that there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, violating its rules will indeed cause economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, facilitated by global market conditions (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists, but an urgency imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse. For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.

The idea of communism, as elaborated by Alain Badiou, remains a Kantian regulative idea lacking any mediation with historical reality. Badiou emphatically rejects any such mediation as a regression to an historicist evolutionism which betrays the purity of the Idea, reducing it to a positive order of Being (the Revolution conceived as a moment of the positive historical process). This Kantian mode of reference effectively allows us to characterize Badiou’s deployment of the “communist hypothesis” as a Kritik der reinen Kommunismus. As such, it invites us to repeat the passage from Kant to Hegel—to re-conceive the Idea of communism as an Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, as an Idea which is in the process of its own actualization. The Idea that “makes itself what it is” is thus no longer a concept opposed to reality as its lifeless shadow, but one which gives reality and existence to itself. Recall Hegel’s infamous “idealist” formula according to which Spirit is its own result, the product of itself. Such statements usually provoke sarcastic “materialist” comments (“so it is not actual people who think and realize ideas, but Spirit itself, which, like Baron Munchausen, pulls itself up by its own hair”). But consider, for example, a religious Idea which catches the spirit of the masses and becomes a major historical force? In a way, is this not a case of an Idea actualizing itself, becoming a “product of itself”? Does it not, in a kind of closed loop, motivate people to fight for it and to realize it? What the notion of the Idea as a product of itself makes visible is thus not a process of idealist self-engendering, but the materialist fact that an Idea exists only in and through the activity of the individuals engaged with it and motivated by it. What we have here is emphatically not the kind of historicist/evolutionist position that Badiou rejects, but something much more radical: an insight into how historical reality itself is not a positive order, but a “not-all” which points towards its own future. It is this inclusion of the future as the gap in the present order that renders the latter “not-all,” ontologically incomplete, and thus explodes the self-enclosure of the historicist/ evolutionary process. In short, it is this gap which enables us to distinguish historicity proper from historicism.

Zizek again....Jim

The same is true of love: when you are passionately in love, you think that even though you know that it is something coincidental, you've been waiting for that person all your life. That is the most impressive thing in Hegel: it is not a popularised version of evolution that states that everything takes place based on a conceptual need. The Hegelian need is indeed retroactive: when things happen, they create their own need retroactively. This idea is also found in Kantian ethics, which justifies the greatness of German idealism: we are not completely free because we are always conditioned. Although we can choose which causes we are conditioned by. It is important to be able to think about necessity and contingency together.

here is where I got this quote: http://www.barcelonametropolis.cat/en/page.asp?id=21&ui=509