Psycho-Logical Fate and Freedom

2014

This dissertation examines the dual impacts of evolutionary theory and the industrial revolution on late 19th and early 20th century transatlantic fiction, particularly in articulating the concepts of perfectibility and degeneration. Darwinian evolutionary theory made real the possibility failing to successfully evolve and adapt as a species could cause humans to go extinct or, maybe worse, devolve into monstrosities. The industrial revolution, on the other hand, enabled humans to conquer nature to a degree that suggested a power to become engineers of our own future world and selves. At the same time, this ability to understand and alter ourselves dissolved the distinction between humans and machines, and the realities of industrial technology under a capitalist system revealed that humans could also be reduced to machine-minding cogs. The two (sometimes conflated) categories of animal and machine, which we have long used to distinguish ourselves as humans, were breaking down and threatening to undo our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. The authors whose works I discuss in this dissertation recognized that human could no longer be considered a stable category or entity, and they worked from within the received conceptual language of animals and machines to challenge our ideas about what being human means. They believed that by using imagery and narrative to re-articulate human identity and purpose, they could change behavior, morality, politics, economics, culture, and the future evolution of the species. In this dissertation, I examine the different approaches that H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, and D.H. Lawrence used to engage this dangerous and exciting problem of reimagining human meaning and human potential through narrative. By situating these authors in conversation with each other, I am able to highlight different facets, concerns, and shortcomings of each approach. This study also reveals that these authors were already engaging in a dynamic discussion currently gaining prominence and urgency in our own time as we explore through science, technology, philosophy, and narrative what we are and what we want to be.

The systems discipline of apithology was established to look specifically at the wellbeing of the humanity system. Being a systems theory of generative dynamics it provides the potential for a different research focus in the field of human systems. It looks for systemic outcomes for human health and offers a counterpart perspective to the mitigation of problems. This enables a generativist approach to the complex challenge of governance for humanitarian outcomes. This paper comprises an introduction to the application of apithology theory and practice to humanity psychology. While apithology theory can be applied to many forms of generative systems, its greatest value is possibly in its application to the formation of human motivations. This involves the analysis of dynamic tensions in systems of conceptions. This form of human systems inquiry illuminates the changing capacities of human conceptions across varied human contexts. The result is a systems discipline for the ethical care of the generative potentials necessary for humanity-scale wellbeing. In this paper the distinction between generative and dissipative dynamics is clarified. The tensions involved in the formation, continuation and actuation of systems of conceptions are described. This is done using the systems principles of autopoietic systems, purposive systems and complex systems. The delineation of three systemic dimensions comprising coherence, orientation and integration is made and the effects of their interactions explained. From this analysis the basis for a generativist approach to the health of humanity-scale systems is proposed. The generation of an apithology triptych is demonstrated. This is used to illustrate three forms of systemic health as a focus for the enablement of humanity's capacity for adaptability. The practical challenges and ethics of practice, as well as the abilities of practitioners in this field, are also mentioned. The paper concludes with a description of the governance challenges for the wellbeing of a future humanity.

Abstract The disciples of Psychology and Sociology and the social sciences more generally, are and have been for some time, in a state of flux, especially with regard to research methods. The tension, in the view if many, is between the approaches to research in terms of positivist verses naturalist [1,2]. This tension has to a considerable degree remains unsolved and has been exacerbated by the postmodernist’s discourse as exemplified in the works of Foucault [3] and Lyotard [4] (see Rosenberg, 2003 for an overview of this discourse). This short commentary cannot address all of these issues. Instead, it will [5] provide an introduction to the history of 19th century and early 20th century social sciences focusing on key differences and similarities in research methods and their philosophic underpinning [6]. This will be followed by a short statement regarding the nature of mid 20th century evolution of the social sciences, touching on both the philosophical and practical aspects of research [7]. This essay will end with an overview of some psychology research conducted within the parameters of the Human sciences. Keywords: Jerome Bruner; John Dewy; GH Mead; Shawn Rosenberg; Michael Westerman; Peter Wench; Cultural psychology; Social psychology; Psychological anthropology; Meaning; Narrative, Mind, Culture

Great books, Nietzsche taught, are made small by their readers, "who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole. " 1 Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition has too often been made small, picked over for Arendt's conceptual analysis exploring labor, work, and action. So much attention has been focused on these chapters that we forget that The Human Condition is not principally a conceptual account; it is, first and foremost, an "historical analysis". (6) To consider the meaning of The Human Condition today means to understand how Arendt explores the fate of humanity in the aftermath of the scientific age. She argues that the modern age of science began "in the seventeenth century [and] came to an end at the beginning of the twentieth century." (6) In the aftermath of the scientific revolution, we now live in what Arendt calls the modern world, a world defined above all by earth and world alienation. Earth and world alienation have their origins in the scientific foundations of the modern age. Arendt asks: how does the rise of science in the modern age lead an alienated humanity to turn away from the earth and also the humanly conditioned world. Humans are both earthly and worldly. To be humanly conditioned includes the fact that we are born and live on this earth. "The Earth," Arendt writes in her Prologue, "is the very quintessence of the human condition." (2) At the same time, we humans are different from animals insofar as we transcend our earthly existence. She writes, "The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment." (2) We live on the earth and are of the earth, but we can make and remake our earthly habitat into a human world. We can bring forth cities, temples, and works of art. Above all, we can tell stories that build a web of relations that emerges as an "altogether different in-between which consists of deeds and words and owes its origin exclusively to men's acting and speaking directly to one another." (183) While we live on the earth that is given us, we live too in a humanly created world of tangible and intangible things. Humans thus are at once created and creating. It is from the condition of our split humanity that we develop those "human" capacities that include labor, to preserve life, work, to create a durable world, and act, to express our freedom. The human condition is threatened by the historical advent of modern science, which promises to overcome the split between man's biological mortality and his worldly immortality. The danger posed by science is pictured in the event of the launch of Sputnik, which made palpable that the long-deferred dream of mastering the earth was finally within reach of the human species. It was now possible that humans could leave the earth and build new worlds. We now can build a purely artificial world in a spaceship or on an artificial planet, one in which every object—the water, the earth, and even our bodies—would be artificially constructed and humanly made. Sputnik shows that we have finally acquired the technological means to free

This essay is a précis (for which I take full responsibility) of Chapters One and Two of Leslie Dewart’s seminal book consisting of Nine Chapters. The perspective he presented here, to my mind, sets a fresh intellectual trajectory for philosophical contemplation. Written towards the end of the 20th century the book is not an easy read, but since it introduces an alternative and refreshing philosophical interpretation, I offer this précis in the hope that it may inspire readers to read the entire book in the context of the 21st Century experience. His “single mosaic” is not the unified intellectual fruit of classical Western philosophy, but rather is an insightful statement of the alternatives (described in the epilogue of the book) consciously available to the human species of the future.

Social function of science as ii relate to societal and vice versa. The work focused on science and humanism. Humanism emphasizes the importance of the inner world of the learner and places the individual's thought, emotions and feelings at the forefront of all human development. The work briefly discussed humanism, humanism movement characteristics of a humanist, humanism and education, humanism and science, humanism and rationalism, humanism and social reformation

Explanation, Prediction, and Confirmation, 2011

In this paper I take the human sciences to comprise psychology, social, economic, and political sciences, archaeology, history, ethnology, linguistics, philologies, literary and cultural studies, and similar fields having emerged besides and in between. So, the human sciences study the individual and collective ways and products of the human mind. After the term "Geisteswissenschaften" has narrowed its meaning, the term "Humanwissenschaften", "human sciences", seems more appropriate. By contrast, the natural sciences are to comprise all the other fields of empirical study, physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, geology, engineering, etc. In this paper I would like to give an update of, and a fresh attempt at, the long-standing heated issue whether or not there is a principled difference between the human and the natural sciences.