Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Hints on Paradigms and Scaffolds

It has been an eerie year for me in terms of intellectual progression. I have literally invented several disciplines to navigate what seemed to be very difficult territory. In some ways I'm still lost in the specificity of my project, even though the subject in its most meaningful form is highly general, and yet  capable of insight. What began as a Unity Project dealing with subjectivity, God, objectivity, and the soul has morphosed into, first, a book of knowledge which has not been published, secondly my Theses folder which is mostly devoted to literature for which I cannot claim credit, although much of it I have not discovered in print, and thirdly my Dimensional Encyclopedia, the volumes of which will sometimes include disciplines which do not yet exist in the same sense with which I intend them.

One of my encyclopedias is devoted to Paralogy, the philosophy of fractions, in a sense that builds on earlier volumes concerning such subjects as Philosophy, Psychology, Biology, Phenomenology, Aesthetics, and Criticism.

I have continued my sometimes disappointing encounters with the published literature, where entire books frequently lack a strong thesis statement or fail to propound the wealth of insights that a strong thesis might suggest.

As the year wears on (comfortably and uncomfortably), I muse on the strength of my own theses, theses which I have so far been approaching in the individual contexts of each encyclopedia. Yet the titles of future volumes meaningfully weigh into some of the content considerations. Paralogy has a meaningful presence in the beginning of my Phenomenology Toolkit (Dimensional Encyclopedia, Volume Four).

It has been meaningful to address subjects which others have not cared to consider, and to ponder on combinations of subjects which yield meaningful variables.

For example, in Psychology, it seems to me that the work of Freud on dreams, Otto Rank on Beyond Psychology, and Carl Rogers on individualized therapy offer inadequate concepts of meaning, even though meaning is a relatively fertile concept for study.

Taking philosophy as an example of the completeness of knowledge, psychology gains an aura of incompleteness, but in providing this kind of sketch, meaningful holistics concur in the prediction of the ends and middles of theory; where pragmatics is not obvious, theory becomes more obvious; where the therapist and the patient are isolated in 'one booth', the psychology of both becomes more evident, and a few telling details become more extraordinary. While I have avoided some of the generality present in my first volume---which was notable for such---I have also re-introduced the categorical method as a foundation for the admittedly sketchy methodology of past therapists. Where therapists tend to be more socially adept and knowledgeable on the subject of individual therapy, I have also made a point of not overlooking all of their faults. This process has provided a significant groundwork for knowledge of therapy, and perhaps psychology in general, if it is adequate to reach for a social theory.

The way I have earlier reached for a Paroxysmic shift (in the Dimensional Philosopher's Toolkit), conversely I am currently struggling with the limitation of such categories as History and Politics, topics which I intend to eventually creatively address within later volumes of the encyclopedia. It requires a certain amount of psychic motivation to see that these subjects are still relevant to individual study. Why not go mad, as in the first volume, or become sane, as in the second volume, or acquire moodlessness, as in the third volume? Or transcend perspective, as in the fourth volume? Something of these subjects and their implied varaibles will remain to investigate in the later subjects, I promise.

What about the scaffolds I connoted? I have provided hints. Dimensional Psychology is my current subject, the topic of my present work to be published next year. In the future, I will have an opportunity to apply psychology to such subjects as biology, phenomenology, aesthetics, criticism, and paralogy. The concept is an endless ladder.



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