Obviously, in studying the so called "prehistory" my interest is not a descriptive one – to know how “they were in the past”, to tell a story, or the stories that make history – but I was initially fascinated by the mythical problems of “origins” so typical of our culture. Origins of humans, origins of art, origins of thought, origins of architecture and the transformation of landscape, etc. This historical matrix I know is mythical – in the sense that there is no origin, but a continuous unfolding of new things.
Prehistory took me to anthropology, and since the beginnings of the 90’s I have read several papers by Tim Ingold, now professor at Aberdeen University, Scotland. Then his book on "The Perception of the Environment" (Routledge, 2000 – pb 2002) appeared and it was a revelation for me. Ingold is very much in the line of phenomenology, and in the ecological psychology (James Gibson, etc.). Indeed, Philippe Descola for instance criticizes very much Gibson. But anyway this is fascinating, because Ingold is changing anthropology entirely. For instance, the famous distinction between mind and body, experience and thought, are dissolved. But he goes very much beyond that, because he even proposes a dissolution of the boundaries of biology and psychology, etc. He is envisaging a new synthesis, in a certain way (see his contribution to the book "Cycles of Contingency", ed. by Susan Oyama and others, the MIT Press, 2001).
Of course the very idea of thinking is to get rid of dogmas, whatever they be, and to be cautions of any fixed set of ideas, even when we admire very much something or some thought. To think is like living in general - to compare, to get and conserve and to discard, to pick from here and there and to try to find your own way.
I do not trust text books, superficial readings, things that I do not have the time to examine carefully by myself. Or, tragically, life does not afford us that availability of time to study anything conveniently, when you are not only domestically concerned with only your own “field” - your "cell" (simultaneously your ideal "freedom" and your real prison, in fact). To get out of “prison” and feel free, but not becoming fool (taken in a sort of autism), lost, is a very very difficult task, only carried out by a very few. It is also a very lonely experience. There is no team work possible in this auto-definition... Although “daily life” forces us to be connected to a multiplicity of experiences and distractions.
This year (2006) I found the work of Slavok Zizek, a very known author, whose work I completely missed until last April. Here in Portugal, a small country, everything is very difficult or slow to get (to have the books in youir hands or to know about them through Amazon for instance, is different...). Surprisingly 5 books by him have been translated into Portuguese this year, after I had bought his book “On Belief” (Routledge - a very nice new collection by this publisher). He is a Lacanian and in a certain way a Hegelian, too.
What do you think about his thought? He has a strange capacity to fly over the entire field of thought and to bring together things that seem to come from very different experiences. Indeed, he his fascinating and he has a very deep philosophical knowledge; also, he knows about movies in a fantastic way!.
I have bought recently in the UK his last book, "The Parallax View", a thick and dense one, where, among many other things, he shows why the Portuguese specialist of the brain António Damasio is wrong in some of his views, or too simple, in his cognitive inspired books (although he talks much of emotion...) and at a certain point (p. 227) he writes:
“(...) what am I? I am neither my body (I have a body, I never “am” my body directly, in spite of all the subtle phenomenological descriptions à la Merleau-Ponty that try to convince me to the contrary) (...)”
Probably the question with this (indeed rich and provocative) line of thought is that is too tied to the old opposition between nature and culture (see p. 214 for instance), body and soul. Probably that was always also the problem with all the “psy” ways of knowledge, including psychoanalysis, since Freud. It is a fantastic and imaginative modern myth, probably the unconscious being the substitute for the soul. Or I am saying something simplistic, too?! Probably!! Certainly Lacan is a very interesting and complex philosopher that I am trying to study now.
But the question persists: do we need, to start thinking, or simply to think, to imagine some black holes, some invisible areas, in order to comprehend the visible? The unconscious could be one of those black holes. I mean, after all, even if we think that Marx, or Freud, or Darwin were wrong in many things, and that their thought was a fantastic imaginative construct, they made us enter into a completely new way of feeling and thinking. It is through these great visionaries that mankind do steps ahead. These steps turn on a light as long as at the same time they open around them an enormous field of interrogations, of indeterminations, of invisible.
To desire to reduce everything to the clear and the visible would not be a ridiculous and supreme reductionism? I wonder, and I try to study, to compare, to learn, having so scarce things to orient me...
Something I know: from any good author you may take very useful things for your own view; and nothing replaces the study of their original works... and ... ultimately the decision pertains to each one of us. The important is only to decide to take a certain path after atudying the "environment" carefully... not to take the wrong one. That demands time, persistence, patience.
Prehistory took me to anthropology, and since the beginnings of the 90’s I have read several papers by Tim Ingold, now professor at Aberdeen University, Scotland. Then his book on "The Perception of the Environment" (Routledge, 2000 – pb 2002) appeared and it was a revelation for me. Ingold is very much in the line of phenomenology, and in the ecological psychology (James Gibson, etc.). Indeed, Philippe Descola for instance criticizes very much Gibson. But anyway this is fascinating, because Ingold is changing anthropology entirely. For instance, the famous distinction between mind and body, experience and thought, are dissolved. But he goes very much beyond that, because he even proposes a dissolution of the boundaries of biology and psychology, etc. He is envisaging a new synthesis, in a certain way (see his contribution to the book "Cycles of Contingency", ed. by Susan Oyama and others, the MIT Press, 2001).
Of course the very idea of thinking is to get rid of dogmas, whatever they be, and to be cautions of any fixed set of ideas, even when we admire very much something or some thought. To think is like living in general - to compare, to get and conserve and to discard, to pick from here and there and to try to find your own way.
I do not trust text books, superficial readings, things that I do not have the time to examine carefully by myself. Or, tragically, life does not afford us that availability of time to study anything conveniently, when you are not only domestically concerned with only your own “field” - your "cell" (simultaneously your ideal "freedom" and your real prison, in fact). To get out of “prison” and feel free, but not becoming fool (taken in a sort of autism), lost, is a very very difficult task, only carried out by a very few. It is also a very lonely experience. There is no team work possible in this auto-definition... Although “daily life” forces us to be connected to a multiplicity of experiences and distractions.
This year (2006) I found the work of Slavok Zizek, a very known author, whose work I completely missed until last April. Here in Portugal, a small country, everything is very difficult or slow to get (to have the books in youir hands or to know about them through Amazon for instance, is different...). Surprisingly 5 books by him have been translated into Portuguese this year, after I had bought his book “On Belief” (Routledge - a very nice new collection by this publisher). He is a Lacanian and in a certain way a Hegelian, too.
What do you think about his thought? He has a strange capacity to fly over the entire field of thought and to bring together things that seem to come from very different experiences. Indeed, he his fascinating and he has a very deep philosophical knowledge; also, he knows about movies in a fantastic way!.
I have bought recently in the UK his last book, "The Parallax View", a thick and dense one, where, among many other things, he shows why the Portuguese specialist of the brain António Damasio is wrong in some of his views, or too simple, in his cognitive inspired books (although he talks much of emotion...) and at a certain point (p. 227) he writes:
“(...) what am I? I am neither my body (I have a body, I never “am” my body directly, in spite of all the subtle phenomenological descriptions à la Merleau-Ponty that try to convince me to the contrary) (...)”
Probably the question with this (indeed rich and provocative) line of thought is that is too tied to the old opposition between nature and culture (see p. 214 for instance), body and soul. Probably that was always also the problem with all the “psy” ways of knowledge, including psychoanalysis, since Freud. It is a fantastic and imaginative modern myth, probably the unconscious being the substitute for the soul. Or I am saying something simplistic, too?! Probably!! Certainly Lacan is a very interesting and complex philosopher that I am trying to study now.
But the question persists: do we need, to start thinking, or simply to think, to imagine some black holes, some invisible areas, in order to comprehend the visible? The unconscious could be one of those black holes. I mean, after all, even if we think that Marx, or Freud, or Darwin were wrong in many things, and that their thought was a fantastic imaginative construct, they made us enter into a completely new way of feeling and thinking. It is through these great visionaries that mankind do steps ahead. These steps turn on a light as long as at the same time they open around them an enormous field of interrogations, of indeterminations, of invisible.
To desire to reduce everything to the clear and the visible would not be a ridiculous and supreme reductionism? I wonder, and I try to study, to compare, to learn, having so scarce things to orient me...
Something I know: from any good author you may take very useful things for your own view; and nothing replaces the study of their original works... and ... ultimately the decision pertains to each one of us. The important is only to decide to take a certain path after atudying the "environment" carefully... not to take the wrong one. That demands time, persistence, patience.
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