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For most of the twentieth century intellectual writing was dominated by two camps: The dialectical materialists and the metaphysical neo-Platonists.
I was not aware of their respective influences at first, because I was deeply influenced by humanistic psychology and the human potential movement.
A few years ago, I ran across a book published in communist Poland about linguistics which had an introduction by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky made a comment in the introduction to the effect that thw Whorf hypothesis could not be true, or the Germans and the British would have different world views.
I read further and realized that a potential for infinite recursion without really saying anything was inherent in the Hegelian dialectic. That style of writing was favored by the ruling elite in Soviet culture, as far as I knew, ever since Marx used it so effectively. But it reminded me of something.
Meanwhile, I had run across a copy of "The Journal of Metaphysics" at a yard sale. It has provided endless hours of amusement. (At this rate I will never need to read a second issue.) These guys are really serious. An entire industry exist in the West devoted to trying to determine what Aristotle and Plato really meant.
I think there can be some benifit for both types of study. Thge reason I bring up these points is that there is (or was?) a curious parallel between the communist related dilectic study of linguistics, and the metaphysics related study of the classics.
But there is a way out, even for those who have devoted much time to either of these views. Here is a quote from Burt Alpert's book, "Inversions":
'...when the borders of perception are defined by panic rather than well being, the situation becomes pathological. How serious this pathology might be was already indicated by Bergson in 1896. At that time, in "Matter and Memory", he suggested that psychosis ought to be understood as an impairment in the human organism's range of responses to it's environment. "That which is commonly held to be a disturbance in the psychic life itself, " Bergson wrote,'
an inward disorder, a disease of the personality, appears to us, from our pont of view, to be an unloosing or a brealking of the tie which binds this psychic life to its motor accompaniment, a weakening or impairing of our attention to outward life.
'Pathology of the psyche, Bergson proposed, is not so much an inner derangement as it is a breakdown in perceptual awareness of the life-space. '
'It is perhaps idle to speculate on what might have been the course of the human sciences had Bergson's lead been followed. Instead, the previous year, Breuer and Freud had already published their "Studies in Hysteria." The science of psychological would spend the ensuing 75 years wandering through its own special desert of detached mentations. Turned inward upon itself, psychology sought for existential realities "in the mind," creating a sensitive but parched science. The very term "psychosis" cam less to mean a splitting away of the person from his surroundings, and, as implied also in the word "schizophrenia," more a splitting of the psyche within itself. In it's alienation from "outward life," psychology itself became, in all essential respects, in Bergson's terms, a species of psychosis.'
Over twenty years ago, we at the memphis branch of Metaphysics Anonymous came up with the slogan: "Min-Body dualism is origina sin."
In twenty years of looking for material on this topic, I had forgotten how much was in Burt's book that I had been exposed to in the seventies. We have studied Reich, Rolf, Korzybski, and Wilson since then, so it is interesting to glance at Aristotle and Chomsky to see what happens otherwise....
Bergson.txt 8-28-2001 Captain Nemo
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