G'day Will,

Quoth you:

>You can read the journal online at: http://www.nuncsumus.com

A good read!  I see Eglash mentions the all-but forgotten Paul Goodman (in
his 'romantic humanists' section).  I haven't thought about him for 'k'n'
years.  A very articulate anarchist of the small-is-beautiful
counter-culture school and a founder of the gestalt movement.  If memory
serves, he was always telling psycholgists that we see the particular as
much in terms of the whole as we see the whole in terms of its parts. 
Obviously, said psycholgists were exceptions to the rule.  As are, sad to
say, the economists who make the bucks and the headlines today.

What I liked about him was that he was a conservative at heart, but could
express what he saw as his conservatism only as radical political practice -
proof to him, as it still seems to me, that the world is stuffed indeed. 
For him, society had so alienated itself from human being that it had to
confront itself with the modes, in which we all collude, in which it denies,
distorts and delimits the humanity that constitutes it.  

He was a psychologist who realised the Freudian focus on the individual
wasn't gonna fix a thing - that the psychological is properly and inevitably
about the social (I suppose a homosexual in the USA of the early 1960s would
see that more clearly than most).  In short, a self-styled Freudian luddite
'neolithic conservative' found that he could be true to his principles in
this society only by sounding and acting an awful lot like a Reichian
socialist revolutionary.

If you can reduce as confusing (and perhaps confused) a bloke as Goodman to
a formula, it wouldn't be a million miles from 'psycholgy=social
theory=politics=revolution'.  Hans asked about praxis the other day, and I
reckon the much-maligned (if not completely forgotten) Paul Goodman rather
embodied the notion ...

>I appreciate the energy that this list consistently puts out...keep it up!

Well, I've just extolled the virtues of a C. Wright-Mills-bashing
conservative, so mebbe some of that pent-up energy might be forthcoming
(seriously, folks - I'm running outa tricks - all I have left is a
hagiography of Michael Oakeshott).  

Oh, and Chris - this is your field.  Have I got this remotely right?

Cheers,
Rob.


     --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---

Reply via email to