Category Archives: Our current Lebenswelt is not the Lebenswelt that we evolved in

Human psychology evolved under in the social milieu of constrained complexity. Currently, humans live in unconstrained complexity. What has this done to our minds? These topics are addressed in various parts of An Archaeology of the Fall, particularly in chapters 8C and 11B.

01/30/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 H-2

[The single actuality that encompasses valves and boilers emerges from and situates two potentials that seem to have nothing to do with either boilers or valves.

The single actuality underlies the two normal contexts that describe the normal functioning steam engine.

It also belongs to a context that seems to have nothing to do with the mechanics of an engine. The normal context for the single actuality is the running of the engine.

That normal context is informed by the perspective of transportation in figure 2.3G.]

01/27/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 H-1

Summary of text [comment] page 80

[Of course, trains are well and good until something goes wrong.

Did the know-it-alls who named ‘the engine bearing unit of a train’ the ‘locomotive’ also know that the word ‘loco’ is slang for ‘crazy’? Word historians take note!

When something goes wrong, the actualities of the boiler and the valves merge into a single problem. The piston does not work!

What could the issue be? The fuel? The flow of water and steam? The pressure? The regulators and valves?]

01/25/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 F

Summary of text [comment] page 80

[The piston of the steam engine could accomplish work.

What type of work?

‘Work’ has a technical definition in physics. Here, I mean ‘getting a task accomplished’ in contrast to ‘wasting effort’.

This goes with the perspective level of a steam engine.

The perspective level of the piston may interscope with higher nested forms.

The result is another interscope.]

01/20/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 C-2

[How about this metaphor?

The person’s psyche is like a steam engine.

Perhaps, the normal contexts of think and law act like regulators. Conscience and dispositions act like fuel.

Sigmund Freud, one of the founders of psychoanalysis, started with a picture of the unconscious as a steam engine powering a locomotive.

Freud wrote between 1890 and 1950 AD (7690-7750 U0′).]

12/23/16

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.2 DY

Summary of text [comment] page 78

The limited goods (that a sinful person chooses) have a tendency to slip away. A sinful person may cling to a shred of virtue. But only for so long.

Schoonenberg wrote that fallen man is unable, without grace, to keep the commandments of the natural law for a long time.

[Why did Schoonenberg refer to ‘the commandments of the natural law’ and not ‘the divine law’?

Does Schoonenberg conflate thinkdivine and lawessential?

Or does his intuition implicitly comply with the explicit model of the intersection of virtue and sin?]

12/22/16

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.2 DX-2

[The hero stands for Progressive television producers (whose way of talk exploits the viewers, since they cannot talk back). The victim stands for the viewer (who cannot talk back to the television, therefore is a victim).

The expectation is that the victim-viewer will join the television producer-exploiter in a mutual hatred of the one designated as the anti-object. ‘The bad one’, in many these shows, stands in for those who do not watch TV and mind their own business.

Thus, in contradiction to Jesus’ words in John 15:5, the so-called Progressive mainstream American TV portrays a world where both producer and viewer love one another while both hating their fellow “man” (the stock character accused of the projector’s moral failures).]