Logical Positivism, Jonathon Swift, and Neurosis

[coberst]

Logical Positivism, Jonathon Swift, and Neurosis

One might think of God as a great practical joker. S/he creates a species that considers it to inhabit an area between god and animal. Humans then seek to repress the animal side of its nature and to inflate the god like part of its nature, its aspect that is at various situations is consider as soul, or consciousness, or mind.

Jonathan Swift is perhaps the most famous of authors to parody the human eccentric behavior in attempting to repress recognition of our animal body. If there is a God s/he must be a very witty practical joker. Can you imagine the delight s/he must enjoy while observing humans contending with the problems relating to the scattering of the love apparatus among the eliminating portals of the human body?

Psychoanalysis is about the nature of repression; the essential characteristic of the human psyche.

There is a constant conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. Societies repress the individual and the individual represses the self.

Neurotic behavior, dreams, and various “Freudian slips provide us with e-mails from the unconscious that elude the conscious repression mechanism. These behavior characteristics are meaningful because they manifest the purpose of the unconscious that remains hidden from consciousness.

The conscious mind strenuously disowns and resists the rumblings of the unconscious. The conscious self disowns and resists its human nature.

Neurosis is the label given to these human phenomena of conflict between the conscious and unconscious self. All of us are neurotic to one degree or another. When this neurosis interferes with ‘normal’ human behavior then, and only then, does it require outside interference by society.

Universal neurosis is the analogy of “original sin for theological doctrine.

“The most scandalous pieces of Swiftian scatology are three of his later poems—“The Lady’s Dressing Room, “Strephon and Chloe, “Cassinus and Peter—which are variations on the theme:

Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia, #*^%^.

Aldous Huxley explicates, saying, “The monosyllabic verb, which the modesties of 1929 will not allow me to print, rhymes with ‘wits’ and ‘fits’.

Swift’s metaphor for humans as Yahoo’s, which are excrementally filthy, is even more in tune with his overall parodying human eccentricities when it comes to recognizing the nature of the body.

It appears to me that logical positivism, more appropriately called logical empiricism, is philosophy’s attempt to separate completely the human mind from the human body. Logical empiricism travels on the back of a system of symbolic logic whereby a scientifically codified set of symbols is developed which permits ordinary human language to be converted in to a system of symbols for the purpose of analyzing conscious thought for its truth value. Anything that does not fit into this symbol system epistemology is rejected as meaningless.

As best that I can understand it logical positivism is a philosophy that attempts to define meaning as being confined to empirical observations modified somewhat by rational processes, which does deposit some characteristics to the observed data.

[CARLA]

:wah::wah: Swift can speak for himself, I'm not filthy or a Yahoo..

[QUOTE]Swift’s metaphor for humans as Yahoo’s, which are excrementally filthy[/QUOTE]

[Clodhopper]

:wah:

Best I can paraphrase Swift, his comment on trying to separate the human mind and body is (roar with laughter) "Yeah, fine firkin chance mate!"

He also gave us the Houynhnms (sp?) who were the "angelic" sides of ourselves, which he put into the bodies of horses in contrast with their beasts of burden, the Yahoos, which inhabited human bodies...

[Clodhopper]

Thinking about your post, try Pope's Essay on Man