Return to
Home Page
|
Education
Support Services
Thought of the Week Archives
February 2002
February 4
I have tried to make the case that the function of literature as art
is to open us to dilemmas, to the hypothetical, to the range of possible
worlds that a text can refer to. I have used the term "to subjunctivize,"
to render the world less fixed, less banal, more susceptible to recreation.
Literature subjunctivizes, makes strange, renders the obvious less so,
the unknowable less os as well, matters of value more open to reason and
intuition. Literature, in this spirit, is an instrument of freedom, lightness,
imagination, and yes, reason. It is our only hope against the long gray
night.
- Jermoe Bruner
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
February 11
...The archetypes, which are pre-existent to consciousness and condition
it, appear in the part they actually play in reality: as a priori structural
forms of the stuff of consciousness. They do not in any sense represent
things as they are in themselves, but rather the forms in which things
can be perceived and conceived. Naturally, it is not merely the archetypes
that govern the particular nature of perceptions. They account only for
the collective component of a perception. As an attribute of instinct
they partake of its dynamic nature, and consequently possess a specific
energy which causes or compels definite modes of behavior or impulses;
that is, they may under certain circumstances have a possessive or obsessive
force (numinosity!). The conception of them as daimonia is therefore quite
in accord with their nature.
- Carl Jung
Memories, Dreams and Reflections
-
February 18
Through our manipulating roles and games we may attempt to modify the
situation so that it will better fit how we imagine we are and thus maintain
our status quo. Our status quo stems from how we experience ourselves
and, especially, includes the limitations we imagine ourselves to have.
These limitations are in fact a consequence of the narrowness in our choices
of ways to be, or respond to the world around us. In other words, through
the well learned manipulation roles and games that we skillfully use,
we enslave ourselves in a no-growth prison fraught with impasses. I should
point out that this process is not usually a conscious one; most of us
believe that we are indeed responding realistically to whatever is occurring
within ourselves or in the universe around us. The actual condition of
our narrow existence, however, is simply a consequence of limited choices.
- George Isaac Brown
The Live Classroom: Innovation through confluent education and Gestalt
February 25
We achieve our personal identities and self-concept through the use
of the narrative configuration, and make our existence into a whole by
understanding it as an expression of a single unfolding and developing
story. We are in the middle of our stories and cannot be sure how they
will end; we are constantly having to revise the plot as new events are
added to our lives. Self, then, is not a static thing or substance, but
a configuring of personal events into an historical unity which includes
not only what one has been but also anticipations of what one will be.
- Donald Polkinghorne
Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences
(To share reactions, comments or ideas, contact us directly
at feedback.)
|
|
