Epistemology, Evaluation, Action, and Health

I've been wanting to do this for quite a while now, and avoiding it because it is a significant task that I have set before myself -- specifically, re-doing my Honours Thesis in Psychology which that I wrote almost 30 years ago.

The essay was primarily a work on language, epistemology, values, and health -- specifically, showing how the first three factors affected -- even largely determined -- the outcome of the fourth factor, mental, emotional, psychological, and physical -- health.

At the same time, my honours thesis was my first or second major swing at what today I am calling 'Hegel's Hotel' and/or 'DGB Philosophy'. In the 1980's, I called it 'Gap Psychology' as I learned and integrated important elements of Gestalt Therapy, Adlerian Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Jungian Psychology, and Transactional Analysis. In the 1990a I started calling it 'Gap Philosophy' or 'Gap Philosophy-Psychology' as I took Gap Psychology into the realm of philosophy and started studying the various philosophers that I viewed as relevant to my evolving work.
In the 1990s, I started calling my work 'DGB Philosophy' or 'DGB Philosophy-Psychology' which still covertly retained part of the names of 'Gap Psychology' and 'Gap Philosophy' because the initials 'DGB', as well being the initials of my name, were also an anacronym for 'Dialectical-Gap-Bridging' Philosophy-Psychology. At one point in my writing, which will see in some of my essays, I even started calling it 'DGBN' Philosophy which stood for 'Dialectical-Gap-Bridging-Negotiations'.

But Hegel's Hotel and DGB Philosophy all started with this present-day rendition of my original Honours Thesis back in 1979 called 'Evaluation and Health'.

Looking back at it now, I see the work as having been very dry, stale, and mechancial -- I was trying to treat human epistemology and evaluation as an 'objective science' which it partly should be treated as an objective science -- just like what is supposed to happen in a court of law, and/or, for those of you who might be able to remember this far back, like in those old 'FBI' television shows (the 60s, 70s, maybe?) where the one detective would always say something to the extent of: 'Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts.' The essay was kind of like science was during the 'Enlightenment Period' of the late 1700s and early 1800s before Nietzsche arrived on the scene and came at the apparently indestructible 'objective arrogancy' of Science and pulverized it with his philosophical wrecking ball -- which building on the work of Schopenhauer -- showed the world just how much every aspect of man's life -- his thinking, his feeling, his actions, and every aspect of his culture including religion and science -- is subjectively biased by by what Freud would later call 'human narcissism'.

That philosophical picture hasn't changed today. We cannot properly approach the study of epistemology without fully realizing that there is a world of difference separatedd by a major 'gap', 'chasm' or 'abys' between what we might want to call 'ideal human epistemology' ('Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts.') and 'applied human epistemology' which quickly and quietly gets bent out of shape by the dominating influence and force of human narcissism and the resulting subjectivism and bias. One only has to listen to a 'he said, she said' argument to realize that 'ideal objective epistemology' has just been blown out the door.

It is becoming increasingly apparent to me by the moment that this network of essays to follow on 'Epistemology, Evaluation, Action, and Health' is going to involve a huge re-making, modification and extrapolation of what I originally wrote in 1979. I cannot copy the old thesis, word for word, because I am no longer there. I have to take that old, dry, mechanical thesis and turn it into something more 'human', more interesting, and more relevant to Hegel's Hotel: DGB Philosophy-Psychology today as it is currently evolving in 2008. And to do that we will start our re-make of this work with a discussion on rationality and irrationality in man.

I think what I am saying here is that we need to move out of the realm of 'epistemology' and examine an overview model of the workings of man's whole psyche before we can properly come back to epistemology and do it full justice. I didn't expect to be doing this, but that's the way it is going to go down. You can find my next segment of essays in my 'Ten Most Recent Essays' section and/or the section on 'From Mythology to Personality Theory'. I hope to see you in either section before I come back here.

-- dgb, April 6th, 2008, modified and updated May 11th, 2008.