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The Institute for Absolute Psychologism Inc.~
Ray Coutant,
Ph.D.
in Communications
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Announcing
ABSOLUTEPSY.ORG -- Ray Coutant's
website launched December 28, 2018,
is now discontinued at that URL due
to Ray's unexpected passing on January
6, 2019. I first met Ray Coutant in
1964, when he was Director of the
Fairfield, Connecticut YMCA, when
he sponsored a so-called "T-group"
(Therapy), for group discussions on
issues of developmental psychology.
As a life-long devotee of Ray's intellectual
work, and with his wife Tempa Coutant's
permission, I have replicated his
home page here on AzothGallery.com,
and am in the process of adding outlines
of my conversational notes with him
over the past decade. There is much
more to come, with substantive reconstructions
of detailed conversations, audio recordings,
and scholarly references.
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| Hegelism in the 21st century | ||
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Psychologism is a philosophical position, according to which psychology plays a central role in grounding or explaining some other, non-psychological type of fact or law. (Wikipedia) Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): Consciousness is spirit as concrete, self-aware knowledge. Hegel, an early 19th Century philosopher, labeled his metaphysical system as the science of Spirit. The spiritual process is to evolve consciousness in the universe eventually through the aid of human intellectual products both conscious and unconscious to man. Hegel built a new logic based, not on the immediate world of obvious relations, but on the intricate patterns of language forms leading to thoughts, which he proposed in some aspect, reflected the workings of spirit. Here then, humans could produce creative products in reflection of the creative process of the Universe. Rejecting the empirical, mechanical methods of a static mental perspective, but through introspection and thought experiments, Hegel proposed a dynamic system of a spiraling-web interplay restructuring mental perspectives he called the Dialectic. This paradigm preserved the past mental states but created new ones through new viewpoints giving the thinker greater freedom in creative possibilities but greater complexity in his products. The Universe is also evolving in consciousness and the result is more and more complexity. There are two points here: Technologies without metaphysics cannot adapt with primitive Ego functions such as repression and neurosis, and they will need to be expanded with the development of poetry, music, mathematics, etc. We will study two other thinkers who came to similar viewpoints: Nietzsche and Freud as well as more contemporary thinkers. Please sign up to receive a newsletter of our progress we plan to finalize early in 2019 and receive more extended position papers to help you prepare for your education. |
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| ~ Ray Coutant, Ph.D. (1933-2019) | ||
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| For further information: Please contact Johnes Ruta, Independent Curator & Art Theorist: azothgallery@comcast.net | ||
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| Website in progress. More conversational philosophical text to be added soon. | ||
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OUTLINES
OF MY CONVERSATIONAL NOTES OF RAY
COUTANT'S
PHILOSOPHICAL THESES by Johnes Ruta AzothGallery.com, friend and devotee since 1964. |
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| May 16, 2013 | ||
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| The Golden Mean - sections and means. | ||
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| Pythagoras (c.570 Samos - c.495 BCE Croton) | ||
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Samos,
Ionia |
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Pythagoras traveled to study mathematics
in the temple of Memphis, Egypt on the
recommendation of the astronomer Thales,
to reference contemporary priests there
to the teacher priests of Thales, years
before. He is accepted for years in
the
study of mathematics, geometry, and
astronomical observation. |
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| *
On the invasion of Persian army under
Cambyses into Egypt c. 530 BCE, Pythagoras
is arrested as a foreigner. He is taken
to
Baghdad under Persian control and, due
to the demonstration of his mathmatical
skills, is given as a slave to the Magi
Priests
there. The Magi are mathematicians and
astronomers in possession of tablets
of vast astronomical tables compiled
by
the Babylonians from the 2nd millenium
BCE, and from the Sumerians going back
to the 4th Millennium BCE. |
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After 20 years in the service of the
Magi Priests, Pythagoras is released
to return to his homeland. He brings
with him theknowledge
of the mythos of Sophia, the Eastern
goddess of Wisdom. He qualifies
himself a "lover of Wisdom, a "philo-Sophia."
In Samos, he opens a school, where structural
geometry is theorized and taught. Women
are accepted as
students. The term "sophos,"
though its origin was obscure, had already
been in use for generations as being
applied to tradesmen,
such as carpenters, masons, and others,
who were masters at their craft. |
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Pythagoras'
school comes into political conflict
with the Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos,
so Pythagoras moves his |
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to Croton, a Greek colony at the southern
end of the Italian peninsula. |
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| Empedocles (494 Akragas, Sicily - 434 BCE Akragas) | ||
| inverses
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| structure
in the brain |
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| abstracted
in the brain |
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| structure
of evolution |
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| Topolgy of the brain | ||
| L.
E J. Brower d. 1916: "Life, Art,
& Mysticism" |
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| intuitionism
led to mathematics |
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Relevence in the 21st century to Hegel. |
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basis in the Unconscious = evolution.
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structure of Reality (Gnostic theory
of the "Hypostasis of the Archons") |
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Hegel:: "The brain is a result
of Universal Principles." |
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| Ray
Coutant developing principle:
"Mathematics is
the structure of the cosmos and of the
material world -- but there is something
unexplained, deeper and metaphysical,
under the
working principles of mathematics. We
now have seen that the principles of
Mathematics and
numbers work down to the farthest subnuclear
level of the three-part Quark, the up-
and the down-Quark
and the fire Gluon connector. --- But,
what we don't understand is WHY these
principles
are so-constructed or what mathematical
synchronicity set them up in this way?
This is
the key question of an ineffable force
of the cosmos. The
internal structure of animal and plant
life also follows this pattern in neural
and cellular structures. |
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neural structure = the structure of
the universe |
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| Excerpt
from the Wikipedia.org article on the
Science of Logic: Science of Logic (SL; German: Wissenschaft der Logik, WdL), first published between 1812 and 1816, is the work in which Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) outlined his vision of logic. Hegel's logic is a system of dialectics, i.e., a dialectical metaphysics: it is a development of the principle that thought and being constitute a single and active unity. Science of Logic also incorporates the traditional Aristotelian syllogism: It is conceived as a phase of the "original unity of thought and being" rather than as a detached, formal instrument of inference. For Hegel, the most important achievement of German idealism, starting with Immanuel Kant and culminating in his own philosophy, was the argument that reality (being) is shaped through and through by thought and is, in a strong sense, identical to thought. Thus ultimately the structures of thought and being, subject and object, are identical. Since for Hegel the underlying structure of all of reality is ultimately rational, logic is not merely about reasoning or argument but rather is also the rational, structural core of all of reality and every dimension of it. Thus Hegel's Science of Logic includes among other things analyses of being, nothingness, becoming, existence, reality, essence, reflection, concept, and method. As developed, it included the fullest description of his dialectic. |
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Hegel's general concept of logic According to Hegel, logic is the form taken by the science of thinking in general. He thought that, as it had hitherto been practiced, this science demanded a total and radical reformulation "from a higher standpoint." At the end of the preface he wrote that "Logic is the thinking of God." His stated goal with The Science of Logic was to overcome what he perceived to be a common flaw running through all other former systems of logic, namely that they all presupposed a complete separation between the content of cognition (the world of objects, held to be entirely independent of thought for their existence), and the form of cognition (the thoughts about these objects, which by themselves are pliable, indeterminate and entirely dependent upon their conformity to the world of objects to be thought of as in any way true). This unbridgeable gap found within the science of reason was, in his view, a carryover from everyday, phenomenal, unphilosophical consciousness. The task of extinguishing this opposition within consciousness Hegel believed he had already accomplished in his book Phänomenologie des Geistes [The Phenomenology of Spirit {or Mind}] (1807) with the final attainment of Absolute Knowing: "Absolute knowing is the truth of every mode of consciousness because ... it is only in absolute knowing that the separation of the object from the certainty of itself is completely eliminated: truth is now equated with certainty and certainty with truth." Once thus liberated from duality, the science of thinking no longer requires an object or a matter outside of itself to act as a touchstone for its truth, but rather takes the form of its own self-mediated exposition and development which eventually comprises within itself every possible mode of rational thinking. "It can therefore be said," says Hegel, "that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind." The German word Hegel employed to denote this post-dualist form of consciousness was Begriff (traditionally translated either as Concept or Notion). |
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more | |
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| Hegel in the 21st century | ||
| questions of the basis of the Unconscious = Evolution. | ||
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| Hegel : "The brain is a result of Universal Principles." This is the structure of Reality. | ||
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| "Mathematics creates the structure. But there is something deeper under the mathematics, which are the principles of the ineffable and amourphous elements of the Unconscious." The neural structure of the brain has a n equivalence to the structure of the Universe. | ||
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| Frederich Wilhelm Nietszche (1844-1900): | ||
| "We are not in charge of our evolution. -- We must keep trying to move our evolution forward ourselves." | ||
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| "Psychoanalysis is basically Hegelian, and subsequently Hermaneutic." | ||
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| "There is no such thing as Time in the Unconscious." | ||
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| "The structure of the Mind is indentical with the structure of the Universe." | ||
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| Johnes Ruta note: I would expand the heretofore vague notion of "the dialectical method" to clearly relate the historical progression and continuous conversation of "philosophers" through time. That is to say, that dialectical argument and comment can be addressed to pre-deceased commentators, both to support and expand their contributed works and theories, or to indicate discrepancies in those arguments, or to take antithetical, synthesized, or further syllogized positions. | ||
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Pythagoras
(569 -495 BCE ) -- travels in Egypt
to study astronomy. First visiting the
elder astronomer Thales of Miletus,
the young Pythagoas is given the names
of Thales mentor prients in the same
temple in Memphis, and told to give
his name there and the names of the
teachers Thales had studied with many
years previously. Pythagoras is accepted
when present teachers know the names
of Thales' masters of years past. Pythagoras
studies there for 20 years until the
invasion of the Persian army of Cambyses,
when he is taken prisoner as a foreigner.
Demonstrating his mathematics skills
to his captors, he is given as a slave
to the mathematician Magi Priests of
Baghdad. Pythagoras is introduced to
the extensive astronomical tables of
the Babylonians, and to their Creation
gospels, including the narrative etymology
of Sophia the goddess of Wisdom. After 12 years working with the Magi, Pythagoras is given his freedom to return to Samos, where he opens an Academy to study mathematics and geometry. Women are welcomed as students here. Pythagoras coins the term "philoSophia" to identify a lover of Wisdom. The Eastern term "sophos" had long before been incorporated into the Greek language to identify a person who is master of his trade, such as building, carpentry, or masonry; but this new term applies to a new type of persuit for the studies of Ethics, Mathematics, Music, Metaphysics, Politics, and Mysticism. As a center for free studies, the Academy eventually comes into conflict with Polycrates, the dictator of Samos, and Pythagoras moves the Academy to the city of Kroton (Croton), a Greek colony, located on the "sole" of the "boot of Italy." The Academy flourishes there, and its teachings filter strongly into the Helenic traditions of learning and scholarship. |
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| Website in progress. More conversational philosophical text to be added soon. | ||