Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's approach to science is a radical departure from the Cartesian-Newtonian scientific framework and offers contemporary science a pathway toward the cultivation of an alternative approach to the study of the natural world. This paper argues that the Cartesian-Newtonian pathway is pathological because it has as its premise humanity's alienation from the natural world, which sets up a host of consequences that terminate in nihilism. As an alternative approach to science, Goethe's "delicate empiricism" begins with the premise (...) that humanity is fundamentally at home in the world: a notion which forms the basis for a Goethean science that gives primacy to perception, offers a more organic and holistic conception of the universe, and has as its goal the cultivation of aesthetic appreciation and morally responsive obligation to the observed. As an antidote to nihilism and as the basis for a more fulfilling and morally responsive science, Goethean science may serve as a kind of cultural therapeutics, a project which is necessarily interdisciplinary since it requires the integration of multiple ways of seeing from the natural sciences, the human sciences, and the humanities. (shrink)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's approach to science is a radical departure from the Cartesian-Newtonian scientific framework and offers contemporary science a pathway toward the cultivation of an alternative approach to the study of the natural world. This paper argues that the Cartesian-Newtonian pathway is pathological because it has as its premise humanity's alienation from the natural world, which sets up a host of consequences that terminate in nihilism. As an alternative approach to science, Goethe's "delicate empiricism" begins with the premise (...) that humanity is fundamentally at home in the world: a notion which forms the basis for a Goethean science that gives primacy to perception, offers a more organic and holistic conception of the universe, and has as its goal the cultivation of aesthetic appreciation and morally responsive obligation to the observed. As an antidote to nihilism and as the basis for a more fulfilling and morally responsive science, Goethean science may serve as a kind of cultural therapeutics, a project which is necessarily interdisciplinary since it requires the integration of multiple ways of seeing from the natural sciences, the human sciences, and the humanities. (shrink)

This paper presents a theory of the emergence of ethical relatedness, which is developed through a synthetic reading of the developmental theories of Melanie Klein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Klein's theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions are found to roughly parallel Merleau-Ponty's distinction between the "lived" and the "symbolic." With the additional contributions of Thomas Ogden and Martin C. Dillon, the theories of Klein and Merleau-Ponty are refined to accommodate the insights of each developmental perspective. Implications of the paper's analysis (...) include: Opportunities to clarify key concepts in object relations theory, including projective identification; insight into the development of self-conscious emotions such as shame, guilt, embarrassment and gratitude; the articulation of a phenomenologically oriented object relations perspective which allows for human agency and therefore genuine altruism and compassion; and, finally, a validation of previous assertions that theory cannot and should not be meaningfully distinguished from ethics. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This paper aims to extend Romanshyn's reading of van den Berg's metabletics as a process of recovering metaphoricity. Drawing upon research in contemporary cognitive linguistics, metabletics can be recast in terms of a process of re-metaphorization that requires a repeated sequence of stages. Initially a collective figuration exists in the culture as a form of negative metonymy, which serves the function of concealing a latent and taken-for-granted cultural meaning. By transforming the figuration from a form of negative metonymy to positive (...) metonymy, the metabletic method reveals how one cultural event has stood for another cultural event. In the final stage of the metabletic process, the researcher shows how the cultural event not only has stood for another cultural event, but can been understood metaphorically in terms of, or through, the other cultural event. This final step recovers the metaphoricity of the cultural meaning, which in turn frees up the possibility for creating new meanings that were previously foreclosed. (shrink)

Freud's 1911 case study based on Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness provides the investigator with the opportunity to reexamine Freud's interpretation through a return to the original data Freud used. This study reveals both the insights and limitations of Freud's theory of paranoia. An alternative interpretation of the case is overed from an existential-phenomenological perspective which aims both to expand upon and transform Freud's study without negating its value. Freud draws on the mythologies of the sun to argue for (...) his hypothesis that the "father-complex" lies behind Schreber's God. By following some of the many other mythological themes in Schreber's memoirs, Freud's interpretation is opened to a larger, socially and historically situated context. An examination of cross-cultural and historical studies of mystical experience shows how Schreber's psychosis is simultaneously a form of madness and spiritual breakthrough. Schreber's is viewed as a narcissistic experience of the infant-child in which the imaginal has been exiled from rational, modern adulthood and is inaccessible to Cartesian language. Instead of recognizing the soul-full world of "miracles," Schreber envisions the absorption of the entire world into himself and he thus becomes an inflated caricature of the "heroic ego" at its extreme. (shrink)