A Psychohistory of Metaphors (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

How have figures of speech configured new concepts of time, space, and mind throughout history? I answer this question by exploring meta-framing: Our ever-increasing capability to step back from the environment and search out its familiar features to explain the unfamiliar and generate as if forms of knowledge and metaphors of location and vision. I demonstrate how analogizing and abstracting have altered spatio-visual perceptions, expanding our introspective capabilities and allowing us to adapt to changing social circumstances. By illuminating how new introspectable faculties transformed experiences, unexpected linkages among an understanding of historical change, geography, and psyche reveal themselves. In particular, abstraction drives psychological interiorization, so that over the centuries, more and more weight has been given to the inner stuff of the person relative to the external world. Interiorization, conjuring up increasingly abstract images, launched the journey from a supernatural, mystical cosmic to a scientific, measurable scopic worldview beginning in the 1500s. Technological advances, such as the telescope and microscope, propelled meta-framing, ushering in the ability to envision the astronomical vastness of the universe, the hidden world of invisible organisms, and the nineteenth-century birth of experimental psychology that measured the soul s interior. These advances demonstrate how perceptions of physical space and the internal scenery witnessed by the mind s eye are woven from the same intellectual fabric. Interiorization sharply segregating the external from the inner world also explains why dualism has been so central to philosophical debates, how the individualistic self has come to define modernity, and the therapeutization of daily life. Just as significantly, the invention of hypothetical, imaginary spaces allowed us to reimagine the passage of time as future-oriented, giving birth to our faith in political economic progress and the desire to relentlessly re-engineer society. This work combines intellectual history, philosophy, and psychology. It is premised on the notion that the psyche is not a black box but a collection of competencies configured by dynamic cultural conditions and demonstrates that psychological processes are an adaptive force in their own right. Consequently, cultural developments, as much as biological evolution, have shaped the saga of human history."