Attracting Our Future into Being–the Syntony Quest

This article explores a new perception of causality and time. It is proposed that our present is not the result of our past; instead it emerges from our futures. The intention to bring into being a world and future where all of us can thrive has been shared by numerous people. Yet despite these intentions, we have not yet been able to effectuate the deeper transformational change required for bringing this forth at the pace and scale now required. This article offers the quintessence of this quest, to liberate our focus from our entrapment within the systems we defined.     

Grieving the Earth as Prayer

The COVID-19 pandemic is not so much a new kind of crisis as our most recent reminder of the dysfunction of human relations with the world we inhabit. This article argues that transforming our relations with other creatures begins with an examination of the call to be human: understanding the kind of creature we are and therefore how to live alongside other creatures with natures distinct from our own. It critiques the tendency to overemphasize human distinctiveness (anthropocentrism) or creatureliness (biocentrism, ecocentrism) to the detriment of our interpretations of human nature. Employing Jean-Louis Chrétien’s phenomenology of prayer as wounded speech, it proposes that climate/ecological grief mediates the tension of our distance from and intimacy with other creatures. Speech expressing grief over the world therefore re-embeds humans in our finitude and contingency while nevertheless treating human nature as containing a particular call to participate in Christ’s transforming work.     

A Theology of the Cross and Ministry in Our Time: How Do You Call a Thing What It Is When You Don't Know What the Thing Is?

Abstract :  This article explores our cultural context and the issues it raises for ministry and theology in our time, especially as it relates to a theology of the cross. By drawing on the work of Jean Baudrillard the article asserts that we live in a time of hyper-reality, when nihilism is ever-present under the thin crust of our entertainment and information-saturated society. In responding to this world, it is argued that a theology of the cross has too often been misappropriated to serve as justification for taking on either the style of a postmodern aesthetic, which provides people a brand in new, hip forms of ministry, or adopting a fundamentalist stance, which provides people with a foundation in a world where it seems there is nowhere stable to stand. By returning to Luther's Heidelberg disputation, it is argued that "calling a thing what it is" in thesis 21 is not a style or foundation, but the invitation to enter (and do theology and ministry) in the nihilism of despair. Therefore, ministry and theology in our time should begin in the nihilism (the nihilism of the crucified Christ).     

Bodily movement – The fundamental dimensions

Bodily movement has become an interesting topic in recent philosophy, both in analytic and phenomenological versions. Philosophy from Descartes to Kant defined the human being as a mental subject in a material body. This mechanistic attitude toward the body still lingers on in many studies of motor learning and control. The article shows how alternative philosophical views can give a better understanding of bodily movement. The article starts with Heidegger's contribution to overcoming the subject-object dichotomy and his new understanding of the primacy of the practical involvement with the surrounding world. Heidegger, however, in many ways neglected the role of the human body. Merleau-Ponty took a huge step forward when he focused on the bodily intentionality of our interaction with the world. The next step was taken by Samuel Todes who presented a better understanding of how we are bodily oriented in space. After having seen how the body is oriented outward towards the environment it is proper that the final part of this article goes inward toward the role of bodily awareness and the role of proprioception in human movement. The goal of the presentation is to contribute to a better understanding of what goes on in sport. The article therefore uses examples from sport, especially football, to show the relevance of the new insights for sport studies.     

The Convergence of Cultures and Religions in Light of the Evolution of Conciousness

This article describes a challenge to the cultures and religions of the world that the author believes is the greatest challenge that has confronted the human race in its entire history. Modernity's search for unity and postmodernity's affirmation of pluralism reflect aspects of our current situation, but more needs to be recognized. We must acknowledge that East and West must face the current challenges together. Multiculturalism and unity encompass all world cultures, and we cannot be content to read our present history only through the lens of western developments. Karl Jaspers's theory of the First Axial period of history, 800-200 B.C.E ., in which all the present world religions have their roots, is useful. It reveals that our present flowering of culture and spirit in the Western world, including our science, is not so much a product of the Western Renaissance and Enlightenment, as it is rooted in cultural events that belong to East and West equally. We are now in the Second Axial Period, which challenges the world religions to allow their energies to move toward convergence, just as in the previous millennia they moved toward differentiation. Teilhard de Chardin's thought is a guide for us, in his vision of a complex convergence of consciousness, in which differences will not be abolished but will be transformed in their coming together. This convergent perspective will also join with the perspective of rediscovering our roots in the earth, and it will repossess the spirituality of the primal peoples, in its understanding of the entire human race to be one tribe. The world religions are faced with the task, therefore, of encountering each other in "dialogic dialogue," and channeling their spiritual resources toward the solution of real-world global problems.     

Deconstructing episodic memory with construction

It has recently been observed that the brain network supporting recall of episodic memories shares much in common with other cognitive functions such as episodic future thinking, navigation and theory of mind. It has been speculated that 'self-projection' is the key common process. However, in this Opinion article, we note that other functions (e.g. imagining fictitious experiences) not explicitly connected to either the self or a subjective sense of time, activate a similar brain network. Hence, we argue that the process of 'scene construction' is better able to account for the commonalities in the brain areas engaged by an extended range of disparate functions. In light of this, we re-evaluate our understanding of episodic memory, the processes underpinning it and other related cognitive functions.     

Bodies in Dialogue: Empathic Connectedness in the Realm of the Unspeakable

ABSTRACT

This article joins in contemporary psychoanalysis’ ever-expanding conversation about the “something more” than spoken language that has long been privileged in our profession. Specifically, the notion is explored that infant research’s conceptualization of mind as dialogic in origin—that we are prewired from birth to participate in nonverbal, affective communication—is consistent with the position that an embodied, dialogic, co-created, empathic connectedness can evolve with severely traumatized, frozen patients whose experience is not just unformulated but unspeakable. This is illustrated with an in-depth account of a challenging therapeutic journey with a highly intelligent man whose social relatedness hid a world of frozen grief and terror of violation. It was only when the therapist could connect with trauma-generated aspects of herself that had remained frozen, could she find an empathic way of being-with and ultimately understanding her patient’s wordless, frozen world.     

A PROPOSAL FOR THE CREATION OF A HUMAN AND COMPUTER METALANGUAGE

Since the beginning of the last century, with the development of the Theory of Relativity, an ever-growing gap has come into being between our knowledge about the structure of the world around us and our ability to conceptualize it. Because language plays a major role in our ability to describe the world and our role within it, a need has been created to match the capabilities of language to the knowledge we currently possess about the world we inhabit. This article will focus on two main arguments: (A) our ability to describe and conceptualize the world using a language that is limited, problematic and finite and (B) The possibility of developing a new language based on other principles than those governing verbal speech, which can deal with these limitations and problems and which is better suited to describing the world as we know it today.     

Learning time-varying categories

Many kinds of objects and events in our world have a strongly time-dependent quality. However, most theories about concepts and categories either are insensitive to variation over time or treat it as a nuisance factor that produces irrational order effects during learning. In this article, we present two category learning experiments in which we explored peoples’ ability to learn categories whose structure is strongly time-dependent. We suggest that order effects in categorization may in part reflect a sensitivity to changing environments, and that understanding dynamically changing concepts is an important part of developing a full account of human categorization.     

Metaphor and Meaning in Early China

Western scholarship on early Chinese thought has tended to either dismiss the foundational role of metaphor or to see it as a uniquely Chinese mode of apprehending the world. This article argues that, while human cognition is in fact profoundly dependent on imagistic conceptual structures, such dependence is by no means a unique feature of Chinese thought. The article reviews empirical evidence supporting the claims that human thought is fundamentally imagistic; that sensorimotor schemas are often used to structure our understanding of abstract concepts; that these schemas can be selectively combined to result in novel structures; and that there are inextricable connections between body, emotion, and thought in both everyday and philosophical cognition. It also provides a review of a recent trend where, explicitly or not, scholars from a variety of backgrounds have begun to take metaphor more seriously as a foundational bearer of philosophical meaning in early China.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Special Topic:</Emphasis> Confucian and Christian Conceptions of Creativity

In this article the concept of God as creativity (rather than as “the Creator”) is explored. Though creativity is a profound mystery to us humans, it is a plausible concept today because of its interconnectedness with the belief that our cosmos is evolutionary: new orders of reality come into being in the course of time. Three modalities of creativity are explored here: the initial coming into being of the universe (the Big Bang); the creativity manifest in evolutionary processes; the human creation of culture. It is suggested that this creativity itself should be thought of as God: God is creativity. Thus God-talk is given a referent that is specifiable in terms of today’s understandings of the world and the human. God remains a profound mystery here, but one with a significant place in our modern understanding of the world and human life. This article includes text and ideas taken from my book, In the beginning…Creativity (Kaufman 2004).     

Omniscience And Pantheism

This article argues that theism entails a species of pantheism on the grounds that there is simply no discernible difference between the God's knowledge of the world and the world that God knows. The case against this thesis begins with the traditional theory of distinctions. But since God is necessarily omniscient there is not even the possibility that these might be considered apart and thus distinguished in that way. But neither is it possible to do this by means of Leibnitz's law, that is, by finding some feature possessed by the one but not the other. Three potential areas of difference are considered but rejected, first, that knowledge unlike the world is representational, and second, that knowledge unlike the world is phenomenal – there is something that it is like to have. Both of these features, though able to distinguish ordinary knowledge from its objects, cease to provide the difference we require when extended to the case of divine knowledge. A final area of potential difference lies in the transcendent nature of God over the world, especially with respect to time, finitude and possibility. But this, in the end, is found no more able to distinguish God's knowledge from its object than the previous two suggestions.     

On incomprehensibility in schizophrenia

This article examines the supposedly incomprehensibility of schizophrenic delusions. According to the contemporary classificatory systems (DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10), some delusions typically found in schizophrenia are considered bizarre and incomprehensible. The aim of this article is to discuss the notion of understanding that deems these delusions incomprehensible and to see if it is possible to comprehend these delusions if we apply another notion of understanding. First, I discuss the contemporary schizophrenia definitions and their inherent problems, and I argue that the notion of incomprehensibility in these definitions rests heavily on Jaspers’ notions of understanding and empathy. Secondly, I discuss two Wittgensteinian attempts to comprehend bizarre delusions: (a) Campbell’s proposal to conceive delusions as framework propositions and (b) Sass’s suggestion to interpret delusions in the light of solipsism. Finally, I discuss the phenomenological conception of schizophrenia, which conceives delusion formation as resulting from alterations of the structure of experiencing and from underlying self-disorders. I argue that although a psychological understanding that seeks to grasp meaning in terms of motivations, desires, and other more straightforward psychological connections between mental states is impossible in schizophrenia, we can in fact have a philosophical understanding of the schizophrenic world and of the emergence of delusions typically found in schizophrenia.     

An Argument For Metaphysical Realism

This paper presents an argument for metaphysical realism, understood as the claim that the world has structure that would exist even if our cognitive activities never did. The argument is based on the existence of a structured world at a time when it was still possible that we would never evolve. But the interpretation of its premises introduces subtleties: whether, for example, these premises are to be understood as assertions about the world or about our evidence, internally or externally, via assertibility conditions or truth conditions – and what sorts of beings are included in the `we' upon whose cognitions the antirealist supposes the structure of the world to depend. I argue that antirealism can provide no defensible, fully articulated interpretation of the premises that either shows them not to be true or defeats the reasoning. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Psychological conceptions of randomness

This article presents a critique of the concept of randomness as it occurs in the psychological literature. The first section of our article outlines the significance of a concept of randomness to the process of induction; we need to distinguish random and non-random events in order to perceive lawful regularities and formulate theories concerning events in the world. Next we evaluate the psychological research that has suggested that human concepts of randomness are not normative. We argue that, because the tasks set to experimental subjects are logically problematic, observed biases may be an artifact of the experimental situation and that even if such biases do generalise they may not have pejorative implications for induction in the real world. Thirdly we investigate the statistical methodology utilised in tests for randomness and find it riddled with paradox. In a fourth section we find various branches of scientific endeavour that are stymied by the problems posed by randomness. Finally we briefly mention the social significance of randomness and conclude by arguing that such a fundamental concept merits and requires more serious considerations.     

The self in action: lessons from delusions of control

Patients with delusions of control are abnormally aware of the sensory consequences of their actions and have difficulty with on-line corrections of movement. As a result they do not feel in control of their movements. At the same time they are strongly aware of the action being intentional. This leads them to believe that their actions are being controlled by an external agent. In contrast, the normal mark of the self in action is that we have very little experience of it. Most of the time we are not aware of the sensory consequences of our actions or of the various subtle corrections that we make during the course of goal-directed actions. We know that we are agents and that we are successfully causing the world to change. But as actors we move through the world like shadows glimpsed only occasional from the corner of an eye.     

Pre-Reflective Ethical Know-How

In recent years there has been growing attention paid to a kind of human action or activity which does not issue from a process of reflection and deliberation and which is described as, e.g., ‘engaged coping’, ‘unreflective action’, and ‘flow’. Hubert Dreyfus, one of its key proponents, has developed a phenomenology of expertise which he has applied to ethics in order to account for ‘everyday ongoing ethical coping’ or ‘ethical expertise’. This article addresses the shortcomings of this approach by examining the pre-reflective ethical know-how individuals first develop and on which all later forms of ethical expertise are dependent. In the first section an account is given of the ‘ethical second nature’ which every individual develops from childhood onwards and which forms the basis of pre-reflective ethical know-how. The acquisition of an ethical second nature early on opens up the very domain of ‘the ethical’ for us in the first place and is constitutive of our sensitivity to it. The second section turns to pre-reflective ethical know-how and whether it is conceptual in nature. Just as sensorimotor understanding forms the basis of our reflective perceptual concepts, pre-reflective ethical know-how is similarly proto-conceptual and is the source of our reflective ethical and moral concepts. Finally, the third section examines the process whereby ethical second nature and pre-reflective ethical know-how are actually acquired, namely, through immersion in an ‘ethical world’. This world consists of both the web of ethical meanings and significances which has evolved in a particular society or community as well as its members whose actions and interactions continually reproduce that web.     

Construction Of Reality Or Dependent Origination? From Scientific Psychotherapy To Responsible Attention

The term ‘postmodernism’ has carved itself a niche in everyday, and specialised, vocabulary. We understand it as being the new mentality that emerges from the critique of modernity. This transformation, which has been underway since the second half of the twentieth century, undermines the foremost myth of the modern world, that we can discover an objective and stable truth, that is to say independent and lasting. This change is affecting all areas of human knowledge, from philosophy to physics, as well as human practices and experiences. Its origins are to be found in the theories that label themselves critical, starting with Marxism and existentialism, and in further developments such as hermeneutics, symbolic interactionism, post-structuralism, ethnomethodology, deconstructionism, and others. In this article we wish to recover one of the principal ideas of this change of mentality, the idea of ‘construction of reality’ and contrast it with ‘dependent origination’ (Paticcasamuppada) characteristic of the Dharma, a system of liberation from suffering synthesised by Buddha. We are interested in this relationship in the specific field of Psychotherapy, or in the broader field of Integral Psychology. To this end, firstly we inquire how constructivism has made a space for itself in the scientific world; we then address the constructivist features of the Dharma.