Scatterbrained thoughts
Oct. 18th, 2006 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirSherman Fairchild, on the Feast of St. Luke
Hm, I've never received a list of paper topics this specific before. O_O I mean, the professor even included notes about organization, e.g. "Then, in the last portion of your paper, give your best critique of Freud's treatment of sexuality." Although come to think of it, most of these notes on structure require incorporation of a counterargument, which makes sense. Hey, it means I'm writing a proper historiography paper again! I haven't done that since high school.
Still, these topics are a little overwhelming, in that they allow you very few loopholes to sidestep the thorny issues. Which I suppose is the point of assigning paper topics in the first place. I'm tempted to choose one of the vaguer topics: "Both Nietzsche and Freud articulate quite aggressive critiques of religion. Compare and contrast their respective views of religion." But broader topics are usually more difficult to pull off than more specific ones, and there's no need to handicap myself further given that departmental courses are graded with higher standards than Core courses.
Maybe I should attempt: "Intellectual history combines attention to the internal meaning of texts with a historical sensitivity to the context. Given this approach, assess the merits and demerits of Freud's analysis of Dora." I could bring in Darwin and Einstein! Scientific paradigmatic shifts! But then I have to actually read Popper and Kuhn, and I don't have the time to do that much research. Or: "In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud analogizes the process of the civiliation of the human species and the development of the individual (i.e., 'phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny'). He is also, however, quick to point out that the former is a higher order abstraction than the latter and that analogies should not be pushed 'to an obsessional extreme.' Given this qualification, how is one to understand the connections between Freudian psychoanalysis and Freudian psychoanthropology and psychohistory?" (Yes, the main attraction of this topic is the evo-devo quote.) I could talk about...emergent properties? Chaotic/stochastic systems? Argue that psychoanalysis is nondeterministic and contextual? But then psychoanalysis dethroned the individual and identified a common model of ego-development. Also, I suppose I still need to propose a way in which psychohistory is still valid...preferably without mixing it up with Asimov.
I put up a memo on my computer at home to note down Freud's analogy of self as membrane (the ego acts like a "cortex" between the id and the external world), which I like as a metaphor. Although Freud does say that while the ego serves to provide a boundary between the id and reality, it is also a specialized extension of the id--more like a pseudopod than a membrane--and in the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents, he suggests that in certain cases the ego can become continuous with objects outside itself (Romain Rolland's "oceanic feeling", the foundation of mysticism). That must be where Erich Fromm derived his theory of love as the ego's identification with other. Although unlike Fromm, Freud seems to consider love a regression to the infantile state of the undifferentiated pleasure principle, where there is no boundary between ego and external world.
For Freud, ego-differentiation is part of becoming a mature and functioning individual in civilized society. I wonder what he would think of Laozi, for whom the Way (道) is "the undifferentiated source of all being" as Prof. Puett puts it.
That reminds me, xuande (玄德), which is Liu Bei's zi, is referred to frequently in the Daodejing, translated in our text as "Enigmatic Virtue". I suppose the term is supposed to contrast with the defined Virtue of the Confucians, which is verbalized as ren (仁) and yi (義)? Anyway, I've no idea if that throws any light on Liu Bei's character himself, but it's an interesting connection.
Prof. Puett is usually a great lecturer but he was extremely repetitive when it came to Laozi. I've been wondering whether it was due to the nature of the text, which is difficult to discuss analytically because one of its major points is that the real state of things defies division and analysis, or whether he was just unprepared.
I started reading Zhuangzi, who has so far won the prize for being the most confusing philosopher we've encountered so far. I would also venture to call him the most modern, insofar as his very use of language is meant to demonstrate its inability to communicate meaning. Almost a deconstruction of sorts? Although perhaps it's also a function of the translation because I have Thomas Merton's The Way of Chuang Tzu, which has translations of the verses, and it sounds a little less alien than the translation we have in the course text. I can see though why Zhuangzi influenced the development of Zen Buddhism because his writing is pretty much an endless chain of koan after koan. Seriously, it's quite mindbending. Oddly enough, he's my favorite philosopher so far. I liked Mengzi too, which only goes to show that I still fall for the idealists.
Yours &c.
Post-script: You know, it occurs to me that the question in biology that fascinates me most parallels the central problem of Asimovian psychohistory: how does one describe the behavior of a complex, interacting population of individual agents in terms of systematic rules? Except it's molecules I'm dealing with, instead of human beings. The crucial difference, I suppose, is that human beings are self-aware. (Although occasionally selfish gene theorists slip into language that seems to attribute sentience to genes as well. Tangentially, it occurred to me that Freud's whole theory of the pleasure principle as the driving energy behind all human behavior kind of mirrors the selfish gene theory of the "replication principle" being responsible for all biological phenomena. The ego as a construct for the id to fulfill its desires in a hostile reality; the organism as a construct for genetic material to self-replicate in a hostile environment.)
Hm, I've never received a list of paper topics this specific before. O_O I mean, the professor even included notes about organization, e.g. "Then, in the last portion of your paper, give your best critique of Freud's treatment of sexuality." Although come to think of it, most of these notes on structure require incorporation of a counterargument, which makes sense. Hey, it means I'm writing a proper historiography paper again! I haven't done that since high school.
Still, these topics are a little overwhelming, in that they allow you very few loopholes to sidestep the thorny issues. Which I suppose is the point of assigning paper topics in the first place. I'm tempted to choose one of the vaguer topics: "Both Nietzsche and Freud articulate quite aggressive critiques of religion. Compare and contrast their respective views of religion." But broader topics are usually more difficult to pull off than more specific ones, and there's no need to handicap myself further given that departmental courses are graded with higher standards than Core courses.
Maybe I should attempt: "Intellectual history combines attention to the internal meaning of texts with a historical sensitivity to the context. Given this approach, assess the merits and demerits of Freud's analysis of Dora." I could bring in Darwin and Einstein! Scientific paradigmatic shifts! But then I have to actually read Popper and Kuhn, and I don't have the time to do that much research. Or: "In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud analogizes the process of the civiliation of the human species and the development of the individual (i.e., 'phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny'). He is also, however, quick to point out that the former is a higher order abstraction than the latter and that analogies should not be pushed 'to an obsessional extreme.' Given this qualification, how is one to understand the connections between Freudian psychoanalysis and Freudian psychoanthropology and psychohistory?" (Yes, the main attraction of this topic is the evo-devo quote.) I could talk about...emergent properties? Chaotic/stochastic systems? Argue that psychoanalysis is nondeterministic and contextual? But then psychoanalysis dethroned the individual and identified a common model of ego-development. Also, I suppose I still need to propose a way in which psychohistory is still valid...preferably without mixing it up with Asimov.
I put up a memo on my computer at home to note down Freud's analogy of self as membrane (the ego acts like a "cortex" between the id and the external world), which I like as a metaphor. Although Freud does say that while the ego serves to provide a boundary between the id and reality, it is also a specialized extension of the id--more like a pseudopod than a membrane--and in the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents, he suggests that in certain cases the ego can become continuous with objects outside itself (Romain Rolland's "oceanic feeling", the foundation of mysticism). That must be where Erich Fromm derived his theory of love as the ego's identification with other. Although unlike Fromm, Freud seems to consider love a regression to the infantile state of the undifferentiated pleasure principle, where there is no boundary between ego and external world.
For Freud, ego-differentiation is part of becoming a mature and functioning individual in civilized society. I wonder what he would think of Laozi, for whom the Way (道) is "the undifferentiated source of all being" as Prof. Puett puts it.
That reminds me, xuande (玄德), which is Liu Bei's zi, is referred to frequently in the Daodejing, translated in our text as "Enigmatic Virtue". I suppose the term is supposed to contrast with the defined Virtue of the Confucians, which is verbalized as ren (仁) and yi (義)? Anyway, I've no idea if that throws any light on Liu Bei's character himself, but it's an interesting connection.
Prof. Puett is usually a great lecturer but he was extremely repetitive when it came to Laozi. I've been wondering whether it was due to the nature of the text, which is difficult to discuss analytically because one of its major points is that the real state of things defies division and analysis, or whether he was just unprepared.
I started reading Zhuangzi, who has so far won the prize for being the most confusing philosopher we've encountered so far. I would also venture to call him the most modern, insofar as his very use of language is meant to demonstrate its inability to communicate meaning. Almost a deconstruction of sorts? Although perhaps it's also a function of the translation because I have Thomas Merton's The Way of Chuang Tzu, which has translations of the verses, and it sounds a little less alien than the translation we have in the course text. I can see though why Zhuangzi influenced the development of Zen Buddhism because his writing is pretty much an endless chain of koan after koan. Seriously, it's quite mindbending. Oddly enough, he's my favorite philosopher so far. I liked Mengzi too, which only goes to show that I still fall for the idealists.
Yours &c.
Post-script: You know, it occurs to me that the question in biology that fascinates me most parallels the central problem of Asimovian psychohistory: how does one describe the behavior of a complex, interacting population of individual agents in terms of systematic rules? Except it's molecules I'm dealing with, instead of human beings. The crucial difference, I suppose, is that human beings are self-aware. (Although occasionally selfish gene theorists slip into language that seems to attribute sentience to genes as well. Tangentially, it occurred to me that Freud's whole theory of the pleasure principle as the driving energy behind all human behavior kind of mirrors the selfish gene theory of the "replication principle" being responsible for all biological phenomena. The ego as a construct for the id to fulfill its desires in a hostile reality; the organism as a construct for genetic material to self-replicate in a hostile environment.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-18 07:50 pm (UTC)This just goes to prove that you are way way deeper than I am, because I don't even know what that means. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-18 08:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-18 11:23 pm (UTC)I will confess my ignorance on this one, but since I like Liu Bei, curiosity begs me to find out what he has to do with Freud XD
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-19 12:29 am (UTC)