REASON AND EVALUATIVE EMOTION
in Diary Practice
by Kristo Ivanov (May 2014,
rev 210824-1635)
Research
Preface
There are occasions in life, not the least in personal private life
when we are supposed to combine what appears to be reason with emotions, the
more so when it is a question of reason about right or wrong, and valuations of
what it is morally good and bad. Until further notice I leave consciously aside
definitional problems of many involved terms that are the object of meta-ethics. In my attempts
to frame this combination, relevant for both my private life and my
professional concern for the deeper meaning of computer-human interaction (logical
thinking reason – valuational emotive feeling), I have been attracted since
some decades ago to the psychology of Carl Jung as well as to Christian thought.
In the essay prefaced here which, I must warn, is "heavy reading", I
expose one path that led me to this choice on the basis of particular events in my
life as they appear in a diary I wrote, stretching during a critical period from
March 1980 to August 1981.
The present text, written in 2014 is intended to be a non-separable
sort of explanatory preface to the diary written more than 30 years earlier. It could
ideally have been heavily edited into a partial biography following more
traditional lines of separation between private, personal, and public. It would
have attempted to adopt a "bird's perspective" or, preposterously
enough, a "God's eye" with the ambition of being objective in its references
to anonymous still living persons and their relatives.
In doing so it would have resembled what I myself tried to do in
witnessing the transformation of the Swedish universities
during the last 40 years with an industrialization of research and education in
terms of increased number of university colleges and of enrolled students. That
process watered down the universities' content of science and research,
increasing administrative burdens and emphasis on profitable commercializations. Instead of
simply complaining for the bureaucratic burdens at the expenses of genuine
research and education, I preferred then to consider the transformation itself
and its bureaucracy as a research problem, beyond Max Weber's conceptions. It
resulted in a special section of my homepage on education and research, which
includes an extensive bibliography.
The same idea pervades my writing of the diary and the present
preface. Instead of only complaining about the emotional distress of what
appears as a sort of provincial passional drama in the broad sense of
eros or, worse, a reality novel, I
want it to be seen as a research or as an attempt to research on dialog seen as an archetype for the illusive process of communicative information that I addressed in an earlier paper. Long ago I read
somewhere the claim that one difference between J.W. Goethe and A. Strindberg is that
Goethe tried to adopt a sort of God's eye perspective on the condition of man
while Strindberg stayed at the human level and with his literary art
occasionally let himself get emotionally submerged in it. With no claim to
further comparisons I would like to strive for a middle position. Alternatively
I would like that my diary be seen as a modest (very) loose analogy to what has
been published as Jung's Red Book that he
wrote following his "divorce" from Sigmund Freud, eventually leading to the conception of psychological types. It is a book with
contents so personal and sensitive that Jung's estate refused for a long time
to make them available to outsiders. Carl Jung's psychology is, by the way, extremely fruitful for understanding complex ties between emotions and reason, as illustrated in one particular radio program at the Swedish Radio, "Passionen kommer med död" [Passion comes with death], broadcasted on 25 July 2016, in the series "Till sängs i kulturen" [Going to bed in culture] (by Samanda Ekman and Malena Ivarsson) available on the net until further notice here).
Regarding sensitiveness to privacy and integrity of involved
persons these last years there has been a blurring of private vs. public in
both mass media and literature. In Sweden this may be exemplified by the
biographic accounts of such authors as Jan Myrdal, Lars NorŽn, and Felicia Feldt, with many
more analogs in the English speaking world. Even when involved people are
anonymized those readers who really care (and should be cared for) can figure
out who is who. And those who do not care, well, don't mind.
Indeed: what is reality? To begin with memory itself: memory
research has reported that it is legitimately dynamic, being functional in trying
unconsciously to create meaning or making sense of what has really happened, forming
a sort of consistent or acceptable puzzle image. "Really happened?" One
might recall the artistic reenactment of this issue in the classic film Rashomon where, as I remember, the
same event could only be grasped through the melding of several different
visual accounts. The question is whose accounts they are, and according to which
principles of historical research or of ("Hegelian"?) inquiring
systems in the spirit of West Churchman in his book on The
Design of Inquiring Systems. I wonder what would have happened to my
own memory since the writing of the diary more than 30-40 years ago, and of
this preface. One may then wonder what would have been the import of my attempt
to purge or rephrase the text of the diary, as I was tempted to do, in order to
revise earlier perceived reality, avoiding present sensitivities. They would
have included my own sensitivities, and self-defense when I feel embarrassed, for
instance, by injustice done to "the other", or by the melodramatic
self-pity conveyed by pieces of my old text. Should I retract what I did write
on the basis of my changed perceptions or memories assuming that they are
"better" now?
Finally, the most important thing is why one should write at all,
why I wrote the whole thing, and why I wish to present it to a wider reading
public. I still entertain the illusion that we all should help each other to constructively
handle the drawbacks of emotional distress beginning with the failures of dialog and debate to which I have
dedicated another
essay. This preface and associated documents can be considered as a
complement to it. A sort of archetypal symbol of the breakdown of dialog and debate
is divorce in the middle of breakdown of the marriage institution and the image of
the traditional family. In referring to this, nevertheless, I have no ambition
of playing the role of untrained psychotherapist as it was done, for instance,
in the past societal trend of problematic sensitivity training. Today it is done again in
the many trends of psychotherapies, not the least the latest hyped cognitive behavioral therapy - CBT, that have succeeded the
earlier hyped but better controlled professional psychoanalysis. My wish is
primarily to capitalize, that is, to use work that I happened to have to do, more than 400 pages of empirical material and analysis, which might be well material for a doctoral dissertation.
I want to show how I attempted to perform a self-therapy that also made sense of many problems in my research on information. It happened to be
consistent with my own professional needs at work. Despite of not having
been an alcoholic I also get from the accounts of Alcoholic Anonymous AA, and the relatives' Al-Anon that my contribution may be seen as a (too
long) rejoinder in a AA or, rather, Al-Anon meeting. The most modern analogy to AA or Al-Anon that is professionally relevant here is, of course, computer addiction in its various forms that in fact may include routine abuse of "serious" computer applications in business and private life, and includes the extreme form of video game addiction.
The prefaced text (in Swedish) referenced above, which is
copyrighted and intended not to be forwarded to third parties, is delivered only for personal
and confidential knowledge to those who qualify after reading this preface. Upon request it is
obtainable from me in two parts, downloadable in pdf-format from my
site under the coded names of:
XReasonValueDiaryPart1.pdf (23 MB, 224 pages)
XReasonValueDiaryPart2.pdf (22 MB, 192 pages)