15.8. 'Evaluation and Health' Re-visited

In 1979, I wrote my Honours Thesis in psychology called, 'Evaluation and Health'. The paper was my first major venture into the study of epistemology which is the study of knowldege (although I didn't know it at the tiem) and the effects that language and semantics or meaning have on epistemology, evaluation, emotions, action -- and health.

I now view the essay as a kind of 'virginal' paper. It was written before I had been exposed to many theorists -- philosophers and psychologists -- who I came to either later study or study in signifantly more depth, such as Perls, Adler, Freud in any depth, Jung, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heraclitus, Anaxamander, Kierkegaarde, Foucault, Derrida, and more...Amd subject wise, it was written before I had studied these three topics in any depth: 'narcissism and narcissistic bias', 'transference', and 'dialectics'--meaning 'dualistic and dialectic theory' (as primarily espoused by Hegel -- 'thesis', 'anti-thesis', and 'synthesis').

In other words, the paper was written from an 'Apollonian' perspective (see Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy', and/or Greek mythology) before I'd seriously come into contact with the idea of 'Dionysianism' (again see Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy', and/or Greek mythology) and what Dionysianism means relative to human nature and human behavior. It was like I was trying to be an 'Enlightenment philosopher focusing on the domain of 'thinking' and 'reason' in man's life without fully or even partly acknowledging the domain and impact of 'unreason' (or a different type of reason -- specifically, the influence of 'narcissism' and 'romanticism' on human nature and human behavior.

It was a very big 'gap' in the study of human behavior that I was missing. How well can anyone fully understand human behavior without studying at least to some significant introductory extent, Freud, Jung, Perls, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. I can say that 30 more years of living -- and quite a bit more reading and learning -- has gone a long way towards my more fully understanding, appreciating, and filling in the gap of human narcissism, dionysianism, and dialecticism relative to the understanding of human nature and behavior.

The 1979 paper that you are about to read, was influenced primarily by three sets of theorists: 1. the General Semanticists, Alfred Korzybski and S.I. Hayakawa, 2. the 'cognitive' philosophers and psychologists of 'reason': Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand, Albert Ellis, and Aaron Beck; and 3. Erich Fromm and other humanists.

As important as I think the following paper is -- relative to its epistemological process, structure, and general realm of study -- it can be viewed now, 30 years later, in Psychoanalytic terms as a study of 'The Central Ego (without seriously going into its 'mediating' and 'negotiating' functions which would come more into play as I started to learn about Gestalt Therapy, Psychoanalysis, Jungian Psychology, and Hegel).

Thus, it more or less represents all of the 'dry' elements of studying central ego function without the 'soap opera stuff' added into this study that comes with studying human narcissism and romanticism.

At least in part, the study of human narcissism and narcissistic bias can be viewed as the study of 'anti-epistemology' at least to the extent that it often influences humans to distort, manipulate, embellish, diminish, screen, cover up, and 'subjectify' the 'objective facts' of a particular situation or investigation in order to serve our own wishes, goals, and other fancies. But that is the subject of later work. We will deal with other factors and 'ego-states' in the study of human epistemology, ethics and anti-ethics, in the 'psychology' blog site that deals more specifically with the study of 'human behavior'.

Right now, let us look at the study of what might be called 'objective epistemology' -- epistemology more or less in a 'vacuum' without the extrusive and intrusive influence of 'narcissistic bias'.

db, March 9th, 2007.