File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9812, message 2


Date: Tue, 01 Dec 1998 13:49:53 -0800
Subject: Re: The Widening Gyre


Eric Salstrand wrote:

> By the way, are you familar with the work of James
> Hillman and Archetypal Psychology.  He is a kind of
> post-modern post-Jungian psychologist who deconstructs
> Jungians by saying in effect that they have created a
> metanarrative of therapy based on healing and a heroic
> notion of the ego. He is quite incredulous of
> psychology's claims for emanicipation.

I am inclined to see Hillman as more pre-modern than
postmodern.  He is pre-modern in that he has a story that
he proffers as the true story.

I do think Lyotard ties his concept of the metanarrative
to the claims for emancipation more loosely than you seem
to be suggesting.  Marx is not the only one to provide him
with an example of a metanarrative; so does Hegel.  And I
don't think of Hegel (I am thinking of the Phenomenology
of Spirit) as having a claim to emancipation but I do see
him as having a metanarrative in Lyotard's sense.  Also,
look towards the back of the book in his addendum of
Postmodern Condition, where he talks about the postmodern
preceding the modern.  What he means here, I think, is
that we brainstorm in the postmodern and there emerges
something we have some consensus about and then market to
the others as a picture of "how things are."

As I read Lyotard, the postmodern is a state of knowing
that one does not know.  That is why he refers to quantum
mechanics and such as "postmodern sciences."  They are
sciences in which we know we do not know..  When we know
we do not know there is mutual brainstorming and debate,
whereby we can loosen our conceptual rigidity and discover
new paradigms, new ideas, that escape the paradigms of
old.

> In place of this "100 years of psychotherapy and the
> world is getting
> worse", he advocates an artistic psychology based on
> pathologizing,

Pathologizing?  You must be using the word differently
than I do.  Can you explain what you mean here?

> imaging, seeing through the literal and beauty as
> display.  His discription of the anima mundi is a kind
> of post-modern hyle, a vale of soulmaking.

Tell me more about anima mundi.

> Also, if I am reading correcting, it sounds like the
> kind of psychology
> being discussed at your site is interpersonal and of the
> post-rogerian
> variety.  Are you familar with the work of John Dewey
> and George Herbert
> Mead?

Yes, but more Mead than Dewey.  I am more inspired,
though, by Wittgenstein, Derrida, Foucault, people like
that, but I do remember great excitement when I first read
Mead and I have felt some of that with Dewey, too.

> They advocate a social psychology along philosophical
> lines and are
> currently undergoing something of a revival, thanks to
> Rorty, Habermas,
> Jonas and others.  They also have much in common with
> the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations.

   I am certainly familiar with Rortu (who has been very
influenced by Wittgenstein, of course), and Habermas.
Please tell me more about Jonas.

..Lois Shawver


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005