REASON AND EVALUATIVE EMOTION

in Diary Practice

 

by Kristo Ivanov (May 2014, rev 220509-0640)

 

 

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 Norn, 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.

 

In the way of summary, however, I emphasize that the account presented in these texts must not be considered as a “reality” or an account of raw facts that could be perceived as offensive by affected people, but rather as a daydream, active imagination, and a (non-computer-related) virtual reality, a vision produced by a psyche that in terms of analytical psychology can be classified as being anima-possessed. It is a vision that can be seen as a pale analogy to Carl Jung’s account in The Red Book.

 

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:

 

ReasonValueDiaryPart1X.pdf  (23 MB, 224 pages)

ReasonValueDiaryPart2X.pdf  (22 MB, 192 pages)