Nancy:
> I agree that the digital world is with us for good or for ill. The
> focus for me has been trying to figure out how we got here. If we
> could detect a repeating pattern in the past, then we might be
> better prepared for what will come next.
Excellent suggestion . . . !!
Gregg likes to draw pictures. Or, perhaps we should call them
"flow-charts." I even have a few of the IBM "Flowcharting Template"
(dated 1975.) I'm here, for good or for ill, for only one reason.
Gregg separated "sensation" from "perception" in his "mind map." Two
separate boxes. That is the key.
The "how we got here" isn't all that complicated if you pay attention
to forms. Since we are "communicating animals," our *forms* of
communications have undergone a fairly uncontroversial progression.
We call them psycho-technological environments and, indeed,
understanding the "how we got here" should be helpful to understand
the consequences of the digital world -- our new environment -- in
which we all now live.
The sequence -- all of which is "above" the Culture "joint-point" in
Gregg's ToK diagram -- seems to have been:
ORAL (???? -- 500BC, aka "Mythic")
SCRIBAL (c. 500BC -- 1600AD, aka "Symbolic" or "Literate")
PRINT (c. 1600 -- 1850)
ELECTRIC (c. 1850 -- 2000, including Telegraph, Radio, Television &c)
DIGITAL (c. 2000 -- ????)
Gregg's intuition that we need a *new* psychology is correct.
However, collecting bits-and-pieces from the panoply of ELECTRIC
psychologies will only generate a "camel" (i.e. a "horse designed by a
committee") . . . <g>
For roughly 2000 years -- from Aristotle to Brentano, stretching from
the Greeks to the Arabists to the Latins and beyond -- there was a
very different understanding of human psychology. That now-forgotten
approach was uniform in its separation of sensation from perception.
The details of this separation, illuminated by our greater
comprehension, are what we now need to retrieve.
This is the separation between what were called the "internal"
(perceptual) and "external" (sensatual) senses. And, at the crucial
juncture in the internals of the "internals," there is something
called the "passive intellect." This is where we humans first
distinguish "kinds" (not just "particulars") and where we perceive
(not intellectually "abstract") the all-important "forms."
This internal sensory "faculty" is altered by the environment in which
we live. The structures in our culture generated by the technologies
that shape our world, in turn, shape us. This is the origin of the
phrase, "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us," by John
Culkin in 1967, which he used to introduce Marshall McLuhan to the
wider world, on the eve of McLuhan's 1967-68 sabbatical at Fordham.
It's also the meaning of "The Medium is the Message."
Since it was described by many people, over millennia, the passive
intellect has many names. One of the more evocative is "cogitative
reason." This, in turn, is what modern-day psychologist Richard
Gregory, referenced by Gregg, called the "Hypothesis Engine." It is
"sub-conscious" and it would be interesting to trace its trajectory
through Freud's "super-ego" and, indeed, Gregg's "Justification
Hypothesis."
In 1942, The French-Canadian Julien Peghaire, published his "A
Forgotten Sense, the Cogitative According to St. Thomas Aquinas," in
the "Modern Schoolman," a journal at St. Louis University, where
McLuhan had just completed his PhD "The Classical Trivium" (awarded by
Cambridge University in 1943.) It begins with --
"The concept of psychology in vogue today is quite different from that
which was in favor some two centuries and more ago. Modern
psychologists are in search of psychical facts and seek for them will
the care and exactness that characterize the positive sciences. They
frequently subject these facts to complex experiments and, with no
consideration whatever for metaphysics, elaborate laws and theories in
need of constant correction and completion. The ancients also take
facts and experience as their starting point, but only as a
springboard to rise to a metaphysical explanation of the reality of
the soul and its operations . . . "
The "forgotten sense" -- inside Gregg's box marked "perception" -- was
long understood to be only one of four *internal* senses (or
"faculties"): the "sensus communis," imagination, memory, and
"cogitative reason." This is why Gregg is trying to somehow
accommodate memory on his chart, based, in part, on his interactions
with me. But where should he put it?
This is critical because this is the "faculty" that is now being
radically up-graded in our new environment. Whereas the ELECTRIC
environment emphasized "imagination" to the point of Fantasy, the
DIGITAL environment emphasizes "memory." This distinction comes from
the structures/forms of the underlying technologies and their
"shaping" impact on our mentality -- via the "passive intellect." Or,
as McLuhan put it in the "retrieval" quadrant of his Tetrad for
computers: Perfect Memory -- Total and Exact.
Yes, intellectuals tend to miss this point -- absorbed as they are in
exercising their "active intellect." But the "sub-conscious" isn't
just the "Monster Id" as depicted in the 1956 classic "Forbidden
Planet," where we first met "Robby the Robot," later reappearing in
the 1960s TV-series "Lost in Space." It also wasn't discovered by
Freud, although he did rename it the "un-conscious," while confusing
its operations, frantic as he was to appear "scientific" and to avoid
anything "metaphysical."
Freud was trained, perhaps badly but nonetheless actually schooled, in
"faculty psychology" by his teacher at the University of Vienna, Franz
Brentano. This schooling likely generated his final "mind map," after
the previous ones failed to align with his "experiments": Ego,
Superego and Id. This can be thought of as Freud's attempt, clumsy as
it was, to retrieve the earlier "wisdom of the ancients."
Your intuition about the importance of "how we got here" is the
correct one. For psychologists, trying to design a new psychology
appropriate for the DIGITAL era, it is important to literally remember
"how we got here" in the history of psychology. As Max Weber put it
in his 1917 lecture "Science as a Vocation," the world had become
"disenchanted" (i.e. forgotten metaphysics.) He didn't know it but
that was a result of ELECTRIC structures and their "shaping" of our
perceptions by de-emphasizing memory.
But now that we're DIGITAL, we don't have to do that anymore. Now,
finally, we can remember "how we got here" . . . !!
Mark
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