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Monthly Archives: June 2008

Paths

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

The word “path” refers to both the physical and psychological. Our trajectory in life is called a path but we both follow a worn path trodden by predecessors (the totality of what we call culture and society) and a path of our own making. We assume the latter to be our own making and feel [...]

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Doubt in Kierkegaard

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Kierkegaard approached doubt in the opposite way of Descartes. Descartes’ methodical doubt is an abstract product of reason, therefore conquerable by a systematic application of reason. But Kierkegaard recognized that doubt is a subjective product of consciousness, not of reasoning. Kierkegaard saw that the Greek skeptics had rightly defined doubt as the product of perception [...]

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Reality principle

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

The previous post highlighted some of Freud’s post-World War I speculation about the reality principle and the death instinct. In short, the pleasure principle is not a debauchery principle but a reality check that makes the self or organism strive for balance, stability, and equilibrium, avoiding excitation — the opposite of what pleasure is usually [...]

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Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Freud began edging away from his theory of sexual instincts dominating all neuroses when he witnessed the traumas of World War I, traumas involving no physical causes or lesions, no obvious childhood context. He had already begun to extend the concept of sexual instincts into larger creative or life-giving forces, Eros, as he shifted from [...]

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Monthly Archives: June 2008

Paths

Doubt in Kierkegaard

Reality principle

Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”

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