The Life Cycle Completed

Picked up this short book from a Little Free Library in my neighborhood.  As I am now entering old age, it made some sense.

The Life Cycle Completed by Erik H Erikson

NY:  WW Norton, 1982

ISBN 0-393-30229-6

(9)  Thus, a look back on this century’s last few decades makes it clear that old age was “discovered” only in recent years - and this both for theoretical and historical reasons - for it certainly demanded some redefinition when an ever-increasing number of old people were found (and found themselves) to represent a mass of elderlies rather than an elite of elders.  Before that, however, we had come at last to acknowledge adulthood as a developmental and conflictual phase in its own right, rather than merely the mature end of all development (ie, Benedek 1959).

(25-26)  There is, in whatever order, the biological process of the hierarchic organization of organ systems constituting a body (soma);  there is the psychic process organizing individual experience by ego synthesis (psyche);  and there is the communal process of the cultural organization of the interdependence of persons (ethos).

(29)  In childhood, sexual development undergoes three phases, each of  which marks the strong libidinization of a vital zone of the organism.  Therefore,  they are usually referred to as the “oral,” the “anal,” and the “phallic” phases.  The far-reaching consequences of their strong libidinal endowment for the vicissitudes of human sexuality have been abundantly demonstrated - that is, the playful variety of pregenital pleasures (if, indeed, they remain “forepleasures”), the ensuing perversions, if one of the other remains demanding enough to upset the genital primacy;  and, above all, the neurotic consequences for the undue repression of strong pregenital needs.  Obviously, these three stages, too, are linked epigenetically, for anality (2i) exists during the oral stage (1) and must take its place in the “phallic” stage (III), after its normative crisis in the anal stage (2ii).

(34)  The mouth primarily incorporates, even as it can also eject content or close itself up to incoming matter.  The anus and the urethra retain and eliminate, while the phallus is destined to intrude, and the vagina include.  

(44)  and here, while we are always inclined to pair an infant with its mother, we must of course allow for other maternal persons and, indeed, for fathers, who help to evoke and to strengthen in the infant the sense of a primal Other - the I’s counterpart.

(48)  The epigenetic chart, however, will insist that the dramatic does not replace but rather joins the numinous, and the judicial elements, even as it anticipates the elements as yet to be ontogenetically;  namely the formal and the ideological.

NB:  Epigenetics -  literally means "above" or "on top of" genetics. It refers to external modifications to DNA that turn genes "on" or "off." These modifications do not change the DNA sequence, but instead, they affect how cells "read" genes.

Source:  https://www.livescience.com/37703-epigenetics.html

syntonic - of a person) responsive to and in harmony with their environment so that affect is appropriate to the given situation. "culturally syntonic" of a psychiatric condition or psychological process) consistent with other aspects of an individual's personality and belief system. 

suffix: -syntonic "this phobia was ego-syntonic" relating to or denoting the lively and responsive type of temperament that was considered liable to bipolar disorder.

(55)  To restate the sequence of psychosocial stages throughout life means to take responsibility for the terms Joan Erikson and I have originally attached to them - terms that include such suspect words as hope, fidelity, and care. These [hope, fidelity, and care], we say, are among the psychosocial strengths that emerge from the struggles of syntonic and dystonic tendencies at three crucial stages of life:  hope from the antithesis of basic trust vs basic mistrust in infancy;  fidelity from that of identity vs identity confusion in adolescence;  and care from generativity vs self absorption in adulthood.  (The vs stands for “versus,” and yet also, in the light of their complementarity, for something like “vice versa.”)  Most of these terms seem not foreign to the claim that, in fact, “qualify’ a young person to enter the generational cycle - and an adult to conclude it.

NB:  generativity - a concern for people besides self and family that usually develops during middle age especially : a need to nurture and guide younger people and contribute to the next generation —used in the psychology of Erik Erikson

(59)  Hope is “expectant desire,” a phrase well in accordance with a vague instinctual drivenness undergoing experiences that awaken some firm expectations.

(62)  No doubt, the role of old age needs to be reobserved, rethought.  To this we can here try to contribute only by rviewing our scheme.  So back to the chart:  What is the place of old age in the length and width of it?  Located as it is chronologically in the upper right corner, its last dystonic item, we said, is despair;  and as we take a quick glance at the lower left left corner we remember that down there the first syntonic element is hope.  In Spanish, at least, this bridges esperanza and desesperanza.  And indeed, in whatever language, hope connotes the most basic quality of “I”-ness, without which life could not begin or meaningfully end.  And as we ascend to the empty square in the uppper left corner, we realize that up there we need a word for the last possible form of hope as matured along the whole first ascending vertical:  for this, certainly, the word faith suggests itself.

(65-66)  For individual life is the coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history;  and all human integrity stands or falls with the one style of integrity of which one partakes.

(78)  … some anal-muscular self-will

NB:  the relation between anus and muscles

(87)  “As may be said of our life, it is not worth much, but it is all we have…”

The Child’s Conception of Geometry by Jean Piaget, Inhelder Bärbel, and Alina Szeminska

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:  An Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig

NY:  Bantam Books, 1974

(5)  We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.

(27)  We were all spectators.  And it occurred to me there _is_ no manual that deals with the _real_ business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all.  Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

(146)  When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

(174)  Feininger’s painting “Church of the Minorities”

(186)  In another class he changed the subject from the the thumb [write about the back of your thumb for an hour] to a coin, and got a full hour’s writing from every student.  In other classes it was the same.   Some asked, “Do you have to write about both sides?”  Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say.  It was a confidence-building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s.  Classes where he used the coin exercise were always less balky and more interested.

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin.  This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion.  Little children didn’t have it.  It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.

(194)  Grades really cover up failure to teach.  A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not.

(198)  Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.  The reality of your own nature should determine the speed.  If you become restless, speed up.  If you become winded, slow down.  You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.  Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.

(199)  “It’s all right,” Phaedrus said.  “We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from."

(225)  Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and can be apprehended only by non-rational means, has been with us since the beginning of history.  It’s the basis of Zen practice.  But it’s not an academic subject.

(241)  Reality is always the moment of vision _before_ the intellectualization takes place.  _There is no other reality_.  This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality.  Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge _from_ this preintellectual reality, Quality is the _parent_, the _source_ of all subjects and objects.

(257)  Then, having identified the nature of geometric axioms, he [Poincaré] turned to the question.  Is Euclidean geometry true or is Riemann geometry true?  

He answered, The question has no meaning.

As well ask whether the metric system is true and the avoirdupois system is false;  whether Cartesian coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false.  One geometry can not be more true than another;  it can only be more _convenient_.  Geometry is not true.  It is advantageous. 

NB:  Geometry comes from the nature of space and time and human perception

(261)  Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis of “mathematical beauty,” of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance.  “This is a true esthetic feeling which all mathematicians know,” Poincaré said, “but of which the profane are so ignorant as often to be tempted to smile.”  But it is this harmony, this beauty, that is at the center of it all.

(269)  There has been a haze, a backup problem in this Chautauqua so far;  I talked about caring the first day and then realized I couldn’t say anything meaningful about caring until its inverse side, Quality, is understood.  I think it’s important now to tie care to Quality by pointing out that care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing.  A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares.  A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.

NB:  appamada

(284)  It [a wall in Korea] was beautiful because the people who worked on it had a way of looking at things that made them do it right unselfconsciously.  They didn’t separate themselves from the work in such a way as to do it wrong.  There is the center of the whole situation.

NB:  Watching Vietnamese workers work in Ho Chi Minh City

(297)  The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one’s own stale opinions about it. But it’s nothing exotic.  That’s why I like the word.

(304)  Quality, value, _creates_ the subjects and objects of the world.  The facts do not exist until value has created them.

(305)  … just _stare_ at the machine.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  Just live with it for a while.  Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, you’ll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you’re interested in it.  That’s the way the world keeps on happening.  Be interested in it.

(314)  Because we’re unaccustomed to it, we don’t usually see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of exapnding our understanding in an unrecognized direction.  We don’t even have a term for it, so I’ll have to use the Japanese mu.

Mu means “no thing.”  Like “Quality” it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination.  Mu simpley says, “No class;  not one, not zero, not yes, not no.”  It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given.  “Unask the question,” is what it says.

NB:  Buddhist logic:  yes, no, not yes, not no, neither yes nor no, both yes and no
Plus two:  don't understand the question? and none of the above
Also, there are quite a few Chinese characters that can be translated as "no"

(315)  Yes or no confirms or denies a hypothesis.  Mu says the answer is _beyond_ the hypothesis.

(335)  You point to something as having Quality and the Quality tends to go away.  Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye, and so I look at the lake below but feel the peculiar quality from the chill, almost frigid sunlight behind me, and the almost motionless wind.

(351)  Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices - TV, jets, freeways and so on isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity.  It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil….  Quality destroys objectivity every time.

(352-353)  Reason was no longer to be “value free.”  Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of out technology, the tendency _to do what is “reasonable” even when it isn’t any good_.  That was the whole thing.  Right there.  I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason.  This is what I meant.  Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then.

(370)  “What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism,” Kitto comments, “is not a sense of duty as we understand it - duty towards others:  it is rather duty towards himself.  He strives after that which we translate ‘virtue’ but is in Greek arete, ‘excellence’… we shall have much to say about arete.  It runs through Greek life.”

There, Phaedrus thinks, is a definition of Quality that had existed a thousand years before the dialecticians ever thought to put it to word-traps.

(371)  Phaedrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of “duty toward self’  which is almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the “one” of the Hindus.  Can the dharma of the Hindus and the “virtue” of the ancient Greeks is identical?

(372)  HDF Kitto, The Greeks:  Arete implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization.  It implies a contempt for efficiency - or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

(386)  The Church of Reason, like all insitutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness.  What’s really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability.  Then you are considered teachable.  A truly able person is always a threat.