It's Elemental

Tag: Dissertation

  • Toward an Aesthetic Epistemology – Slideshow Overview

    Toward an Aesthetic Epistemology – Slideshow Overview

    In February 2014 I successfully defended my PhD dissertation, titled “Toward an Aesthetic Epistemology: Transforming Thinking through Cybernetic Epistemology and Anthroposophy.”

    The following is the abstract and a slideshow presentation that pulls out the crux of my arguments.

    Abstract

    The complexity, subtlety, interlinking, and scale of many problems faced individually and collectively in today’s rapidly changing world requires an epistemology—a way of thinking about our knowing—capable of facilitating new kinds of responses that avoid recapitulation of old ways of thinking and living. Epistemology, which implicitly provides the basis for engagement with the world via the fundamental act of distinction, must therefore be included as a central facet of any practical attempts at self/world transformation. We need to change how we think, not just what we think. The new epistemology needs to be of a higher order than the source of the problems we face.

    This theoretical, transdisciplinary dissertation argues that such a new epistemology needs to be recursive and process-oriented. This means that the thoughts about thinking that it produces must explicitly follow the patterns of thinking by which those thoughts are generated. The new epistemology is therefore also phenomenological, requiring the development of a reflexivity in thinking that recursively links across two levels of order—between content and process. The result is an epistemology that is of (and for) the whole human being. It is an enacted (will-imbued) and aesthetic (feeling-permeated) epistemology (thinking-penetrated) that is sensitive to and integrative of material, soul, and spiritual aspects of ourselves and our world. I call this kind of epistemology aesthetic, because its primary characteristic is found in the phenomenological, mutually fructifying and transformative marriage between the capacity for thinking and the capacity for feeling.

    Its foundations are brought forward through the confluence of multiple domains: cybernetic epistemology, the esoteric epistemology of anthroposophy (the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner), and the philosophy of the implicit as developed by Eugene Gendlin.

    The practice of aesthetic epistemology opens new phenomenal domains of experience, shedding light on relations between ontology and epistemology, mind and body, logic and thinking, as well as on the formation (and transformation) of identity, the immanence of thinking in world-processes, the existence of different types of logic, and the nature of beings, of objects, and most importantly of thinking itself and its relationship to spirit.

    Keywords: anthroposophy, autopoiesis, cognition, cybernetic epistemology, distinction, epistemology, esotericism, logic, recursion, Rudolf Steiner, second-order cybernetics, spirituality, thinking

    Slideshow

    thetaPlease note that Slideshare translated the Greek letter Theta into the letter Q. This is unfortunate, because I used the Greek letter for its geometric shape, pictured correctly at left.

  • Observing the Observer: Exploring a Cybernetic Epistemological Recursion

    Observing the Observer: Exploring a Cybernetic Epistemological Recursion

    All epistemologies are observer-dependent; i.e. there is no single epistemology that applies to all possible observers, because every observer is unique in some way.  The necessary inclusion of the observer in any description of the world is a deeply obvious and yet profound principle.  It was neatly expressed in Heinz von Foerster’s article Cybernetics of Cybernetics, where he builds off of Humberto Maturana’s phrase “Anything said is said by an observer,” by indicating that “Anything said is said to an observer” (2003, p. 283) (figure 1).  This is in contrast to the view that anything said is simply… said, as if into a vacuum.  This older view, championed by the scientific revolution, took up the principle that statements could simply be true or false, and were about the world but not really of the world (the roots of these two views can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle).  Cybernetic epistemology modifies this assumption by re-introducing the observer as a part of the world.

    Figure 1: Observers 1 and 2
    Figure 1. A cybernetics of description following Heinz von Foerster. There are two different observers involved in any description; observer 1 is the describer, and observer 2 is the one to whom the description is directed.

    (Side note: it is important to indicate that perspectives on just what this word “observer” might mean can be helpfully explored also through esoteric methods.  In an significant way a central—perhaps even the central—aspect of esoteric practice involves the closing of the loop of observation.  Esoteric practice in general (always with caveats) can be thought of as the experiential exploration of the cybernetic epistemological injunction that no description of reality can be complete without an integration of the describer in the description.)

    While von Foerster links the principle explicitly to the social realm (2003, p. 284) by distinguishing (more…)

  • Portland Japanese Gardens

    It’s been a while since I’ve posted here.  I’m working on my dissertation and hopefully I’ll post some bits when I feel they are polished enough.  In the meantime, my sister is visiting from Durango and we had a great time at the Portland Japanese Gardens.  It rained (expected), showed (whaaaat?) and sunned (OMG!) all within half an hour, which made for some great lighting conditions… enjoy!

    [slickr-flickr search=”sets” set=”72157626480783148″ type=”gallery”]

  • Dissydoodle

     

    I was asked to draw my dissertation (which is in its beginning stages).

    Here’s what happened: