I was thinking about counselling and ended up thinking about how in both it and teaching, you don't go forthright in trying to tell people how shit is but have to kind of cultivate an interest, a desire, a change in perspective from them.
http://www.siue.edu/EASTASIA/Tim%20Huson_12-01-2008.htmeaching with an Empty Bucket
According to one well-known model of teaching, the teacher has a big bucket of water from which the students will try to gather a few drops to put into their empty buckets. It's nothing new to say that this model creates dependency and cheap imitation, and not the independence of thought needed to change the world and resist tyranny – which I think are needed today. In both the West and the East, this view has long ago been challenged by a variety of teaching models that focus on the development of latent potential in the student and the role of the teacher as facilitator in bringing the student to the position where she can activate that potential.
There is a long tradition of such teaching in both East and West. The Socratic teaching depicted by Plato is usually characterized by the teacher's use of dialogue to draw the student into making his own conclusions based on his own internal reasoning process. One might think that this reasoning process is social, not individual, if it weren't for the importance given to the role of Socrates' little demon (daimonion) or voice, which invokes a non-social aspect.[8] Again, with the view of education found in Plato's allegory of the cave in the Republic there is something structurally similar to the teachings of Chan Buddhism – the world we normally live in, the one the cave-dwellers see flickering on the wall of the cave, is an illusion and education consists in liberation from that illusion in the "turning of the soul."
If we fast-forward some 2300 years, to Friedrich Nietzsche, we again find the Socratic motif, this time as liberation from the dominant herd-oriented thought: "Your teacher can only be your liberator. And that is the secret of all education: it doesn't offer artificial limbs, wax noses, bespectacled eyes – rather, what these borrowings can give is only the false effigy of education."[9] Again, education comes from inside, and not from outside. And the liberation is not only psychological, but also involves a changed view of reality itself. But here as well, no view is offered as to how teacher plays the role of facilitator. That view comes up, I believe, only when education is seen in terms of liberation from the illusion of an errant discourse and, thus, the teacher's role is seen as an intersubjective symbolic intervention into the student's errant discourse, enabling the student to break from the illusion and achieve the satori of Zen Buddhism or psychoanalytic cure.
And it got me back to thinking stuff expressed by Lacan which complicates the truth/false dichotomy.
Here's a
piece about the pathological nature of cheating.
If we formulate the example of jealousy in terms of the common reading of the formula of fetishism, we get the following statement: 'I know my wife's not cheating on me, but all the same I believe she is cheating on me.' Here, the pathological character of jealousy amounts to the opposition between knowledge and belief: the husband's suspicion is pathological because it opposes his knowledge, and as soon as it proves to be founded, as soon as this external opposition between knowledge and belief is dismissed (in favour of knowledge), the pathological dimension of his jealousy vanishes, too.
Lacan's formula is founded on a more radical concept of the pathological, on a radical notion of mystification as an inherent characteristic of jealousy, which as such remains pathological despite better knowledge. The formula given above entials two key operations. The twofold operation consists of the 'repression' of the belief and the formation of a substitute; that is, rationalisation (Zizek, 1991, p. 242), assuming, say, the following (chauvinistic) form: 'I know she's not cheating on me, but a statistical fact remains that women are cheater not to be trusted.'
Let us oppose this example the formula that doesn't require 'external' negation: 'I know she is cheating on me, but all the same I believe she is cheating on me.' IN the first case the belief ('That she's cheating on me') is 'repressed' because it pragmatically contradicts better knowledge ('that she's not cheating on me'); that is because, it negates the very content of knowledge. In the second case, this ground for 'repression' falls away, since belief in this case neither contradicts knowledge nor negates its content. But the 'repression' nonetheless remains in place and so does jealousy's pathological character. The gist of this pathological nature of jealousy can be formulate as follows: 'You know you are being cheated on, so why are you still jealous? Why do you still believe she's cheating on you when in fact you know well she's cheating on you? Why are you rationalising?
Imagine a husband who suspects that his wife is unfaithful and hires a detective who confirms his suspicion. Yet the husband doesn't want to act upon his knowledge; he refuses to draw the consequences and decides to keep on living the old way. It would be too simple to claim that he doesn't want to know and that he would much rather sacrifice his knowledge (of her unfaithfulness) in favour of his belief (in her faithfulness), sticking to the lie and 'repressing the truth. Such a reading misses the fact that he believed in her unfaithfulness, not faithfulness, and that his decision to stay with her is not a decision to believe in her faithfulness despite better knowledge. The situation is more complex: despite his knowledge of her unfaithfulness, he keeps on believing in her unfaithfulness. His knowledge is not disavowed by a naive illusionof her faithfullness; he disavoids it in an 'enlightened' way by continuing to believ ein her unfaithfulness, which enables him to stick to his (mere) suspciion. The fetishist disavowal thus negates without engating the predicate - knowledge is disavowed not by way of not believing, by not wanting to believe, but, more radically, by believing in it, by wanting to believe. THe husband is deceiving himself by way of the truth. He knows he is being cheated on, but, he continues to act as if he believed he is being cheated on (by, say, performing the usual rituals of suspicion and yielding to excessive outbursts of jealousy). This surplus of belief at work in materiality of his actions, this 'too-muchness' of knowledge, forms the element that engages his enjoyment and effeectively makes his jealousy pathological.
The key element of my formula of 'fetishism without the fetish' thus concerns a contradiction, reduced, in this reading, to its degree zero. The subtraction of the 'external' negation between my knowledge that x and my simultaneous belief that non-x doesn't substract from the contradiction as such but, on the contrary, presents it in its minimal and purely formal state, as a pure gap, a formal surplus of knowledge, which has no content but stands for a pure self-distance of knowledge, for its inherently inconsistent character.
The same point is expressed by Zizek about how the real question isn't about whether something is true, but more about questioning the reason one interprets it or is motivated to affirm that truth, the theoretical perspective that interprets the fact in a certain way.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/2361And exactly the same goes for the looting in New Orleans: Even if all the reports on violence and rapes had proven to be factually true, the stories circulating about them would still be “pathological” and racist, since what motivated these stories were not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be able to say: “You see, Blacks really are like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of civilization!” In other words, we would be dealing with what could be called lying in the guise of truth: Even if what I am saying is factually true, the motives that make me say it are false.
And this complicates a theory of truth which I think helps make some more sense about that
earlier quote about Lacan's approach where he rejects the correspondence theory of truth which treats the subject as a mirror of reality.
The correspondence theory utilizes a mirror model between subject and world; the removal of the mirror leaves us in the dark concerning the real.
The second reason for Lacan’s rejection of the adequation theory is the elimination of the subjective dimension of truth. It assumes that the knowing subject is self-transparent. What is the difference between a proposition “p” and “p is true”? Against deflationary theories of truth, which claim that there is no difference, one can argue that the second proposition, “p is true” is a proposition about a proposition: it adds not more content, but another dimension. This dimension is no longer independent from the subject. Whereas traditional theories of truth only consider the polar opposites true/false, Lacan considers the opposition truth/lie. The reason for his emphasis on the “I am lying” example is exactly this: If one only thinks of the relationship between concept and reality for the question of truth, as the adequation theory does, then one has already foreclosed the dimension where the question of truth gains its relevance for us: the human dimension. Subsequently, on the level of concept/reality alone, the “I am lying” becomes a paradox, because “I” can only be understood as an entity that thinks: being has ontological priority. (This is the shadow of Parmenides.) The contradiction dissolves if one separates “I” from being; the separation shifts the dimension of truth from concept/reality to subject/Other (understood as the locus of the signifier) or to the relationship subject/language. In order to gain such a two-dimensional view of the concept of “truth” one has to accept the priority of the signifier in relation to the signified as a well as in relation to the subject.
Representatives of the adequatio theory realized that although truth is always truth for somebody, it cannot be subjective. They argue that the subject has to be excluded from the definition of truth because we live in a common reality (the facts of the world are the same for all of us). The exclusion of the subject is done with the assumption that the mind – as mirror – is self-transparent and that the subject in its particularity can be separated from the epistemic process. Because human consciousness can be self-referential it is easy to assume that the “I” is identical with itself; the next step is the subtraction of the subject from the equation of truth, even if it is the subject that enunciates the truth-statement. For Lacan, then, the correspondence theory hides the deeper split between the subject and the real as well as the split within the subject itself. What remains is the construction of a common reality.
For every speaking being, the cause of its desire is, in terms of structure, strictly equivalent, so to speak, to its bending, that is, to what I have called its division as subject. That is what explains why the subject could believe for so long that the world knew as much about things as he did. The world is symmetrical to the subject — the world of what I last time called thought is the equivalent, the mirror image, of thought. That is why there was noth*ing but fantasy regarding knowledge until the advent of the most modern science.” 26
And whilst I'm not that acquainted with Lacan, it does at least seem to speak to some sort of mediation in our relationship to reality. And Althusser, someone who I think was influenced by Lacan, expressed that we have a symbolic relationship with one another.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htmWhat is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live.
And this makes me think of those who use
triads perhaps to help overcome the limitations of dualism.
Dichotomies and Triads
Hegel always took care to foreswear, somewhat counter-factually, any commitment to triads, Marx cared not a hoot for any such thing, but Peirce was insistent on the importance of the triadic relation. I side with Peirce on this issue. Wherever we see a relation, we look for the mediating term.
The dichotomous relationships which lie at the heart of positivist, structuralist and poststructuralist theory act, in my view, as a barrier to understanding. The dichotomy acts in two ways: firstly, in response to every proposition, it asks what is denied, excluded or reflected; which is all very well, but secondly, it splits the universe into two independent realms according to what is given and what is denied or reflected. As a result of the failure of the two worlds to be perfect mirror images of one another (there can be no final one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified), each then becomes a self-sustaining and meaningless tautology. The rupture of the world of activity into signifiers and signified is the archetypal case. Dichotomy is the logic of choice for the professional dogmatist, since by its means he can rule in a world composed entirely of text, unchallenged by events in the world beyond the text.
The Peircean or Hegelian trichotomy on the other hand, responds to every relation, every contrast and every meaning by asking what mediates the relation. This has the effect of everywhere generating yet new avenues for enquiry, and instead of rupturing the field of activity into mutual alien and meaningless realms, makes connections between what was otherwise separated. Fichte’s notion of activity, mediating between subject and object, did away with dualism of Kant’s transcendental subject and thing-in-itself. Although Fichte’s activity was not itself mediated activity, it was Fichte’s insight which opened the way for the Hegelian and Peircean systems. The sign-object-interpretant trichotomy is the archetypal case.
To which Lacan has a theoretical triad of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real.
I don't know much about Lacan nor what each part of his triad really means and how they relate to one another.
But if it did make sense to me, then might be able to understand the above passage
The contradiction dissolves if one separates “I” from being; the separation shifts the dimension of truth from concept/reality to subject/Other (understood as the locus of the signifier) or to the relationship subject/language. In order to gain such a two-dimensional view of the concept of “truth” one has to accept the priority of the signifier in relation to the signified as a well as in relation to the subject.
That last part where there's a relationship between the signifier, the signified and the subject.
The material form of something/symbols, the concept it's meant to evoke and the percieving person.
I don't get what it means to give the signifier priority and how this relates to the above points where subjectivity isn't a direct relation to the world though that is part of it for sure.
And maybe this has to do with the subject not being a coherent self/I.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics