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Topic: | Re:Re:Re:New book on spiritual Piaget and transpersonal psychology |
Posted by: | ed dale |
Date/Time: | 2014/12/17 2:37:10 |
I addressed these points in the book (a lot), but I'm interested in what you said - so I'll elaborate a bit here! Piaget's spirituality was generally an evolutionary or developmental kind in which evolution and development flowed towards the state of "immanence" which we can think of loosely as a kind of "enlightenment." He was dismissive of spiritualism, parapsychology, astrology, and many indigenous forms of spirituality and religion at all times in his career (e.g. Recherche, Insights and Illusions, and other better known works).?But he distinguished these from moral development, logical development, and affective development, all of which could produce a synthetic cognition of what he called "immanence." In other words, it was much like today's transpersonal psychology. He was spiritual in the way that Maslow was, rather than the way in which tarot readers are. The interesting thing about Piaget is that despite being pressed on the subject by interviewers he never did what people wanted and just said "yes I'm now an atheist. My spiritual phase was a mistake." When he came close to this he would always retract it or say something to make things ambiguous again in the next sentence. When asked about Recherche he would usually say something like (paraphrase) "that was an immature phase in my thinking" but then he would say "however it contained the central themes of my life's work, and immanence is still important to me personally" (paraphrase.) The autobiographical interviews and essays are examples of this - see the book or the articles. He even said that he had found it necessary to conceal his spirituality, as he knew mainstream psychology is not generally open to it. My understanding of Piaget's dualism and monism is that he fell between both positions - through the differentiation of subject and object (dualism) the knower came to know the known (non-dualism). So both structures are maintained and inform each other in typical Piagetian dialectical style, even as they are both transcended in a higher synthesis. Its true that passages can be found in which he talks exclusively as a dualist or exclusively as a monist, but overall the dialectical relationship is prominent. Reading or quoting any one text on Piaget tends to give you a distorted view, on any subject he discussed - logic, the relationship between logic and mathematics, epistemiology, philosophy of science, the relationship between epistemology and psychology, spirituality, the relationship between conventional religion and rational spiritual forms like immanence, are all examples. Yes, the 1965/1995 essays aren't the best example of Piaget's spiritual writing or transpersonal ideas. And yes, most of the spiritual writing is untranslated, I'm working on this. But please don't take my word for it. The question of whether one individual had spiritual sympathies or not is nested within a larger general question or spirituality verses materialism. The question of whether the world is ultimately spiritual or ultimately material is an emotive one, and people usually react to it in the way they were conditioned to react by influential figures in childhood. But this doesn't mean that there isn't also a right and wrong answer to these questions - hence the need for us all (including myself) to keep an open mind. So I really do value all of your responses. Thanks for the emails. |