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Valery Kourinsky
Theme 16 : "Internal progress" in selfstudying
I. Specifics of social hierarchy:
1. The hierarchy of posts, professions, specialties, social statuses.
2. The hierarchy of skills and mastering.
3. The hierarchy of authorities (the official authority and true authority).
4. Education and society; the criterion of social health.
5. Education and tradition; Oriental education and Western education; mixed type of education:
a) education and material wealth (Phales of Mileth);
b) education and social status: desired and actual.
II. Pragmatism and romantic ideals.
1. Stoics, attitude to the world of objects.
2. Su Yu and Yao.
3. Pragmatism and physical (manual) work - estimation of work as such by daily routine
consciousness.
4. Productive thinking as practically useful activity:
a) fundamental research;
b) operative action of the intellect;
c) thinking-playing as relaxation;
d) thinking as common property and the instrument of aim gaining;
e) thinking as ataraxia - practical essence.
5. The ideal of a practical person, the danger of alienation from one's self, rationality "in advance",
diminution of theoretical initiation (reflection), with a paradoxical result: the decreasing
practicality alongside the absolution of orientations on achieving the ideal of a practical
person.
6. The ideal of a romantic person; alienation from common sense, preference to voluntary
spontaneous decisions, aberration of perception actual events and relations between
people; absurdities of inner life - mysticism, pseudo refinement, speculativeness; with a
paradoxical results: deromantization, disappointment in ideals, ruin of hopes and even death.
7. The ideal of a mixed type (romantic realism or actual romanticism):
a) developed philosophic thinking and possibilities to romanticize reality ("genuine thinking is
romantic," impulse, Elan , etc.);
b) reality of the unrealizable;
c) romantic move in the autodidact's strategy;
d) practical approach to cultivation of the romantic ("it is advantageous to be a romantic from
practical viewpoint")
e) deromantization of philistinism, weariness of life, absence of a high ideal and as a result -
narrowing possibilities for a personality's development, under-realization, chronic
spiritual malnutrition;
f) the technique of the "development of an impulse" (constructing the system of growing aims,
methods of anticipation, the method of "waiting for the next station," of "travelling along
the route of one's development");
g) romanticism and mysticism (mysticism as passive romanticism, as romanticism turned inside
out, as the surrogate for active romanticism);
h) activeness combined with romantically authentic thinking ("living of the spirit in the objective
reality", the method of "estimated probabilities, substantiated proposals, encouragement
of striving for the beautiful - "perfection has no limits");
i) idealists and romantics (on daily level; the first don't use common sense, the second don't feel
it is really possible to get greater perfection); resistance to hypocrisy, and prosaic
existence.
III. Criteria of a personality's realization (they are also the indicators of the "inner carrier" made).
1. Possession of the contemporary level of natural and scientific world outlook (thesaurus of
notions).
2. Possession of the thesaurus of feelings and experiences relevant to the civilization(s) one
belongs to.
3. Philosophic thinking (search for the unity of opposites in every phenomenon of life regardless of
its quantity: the small may be a wearer of the great).
4. Clarifying and defining ethical and aesthetic categories at the intimate level (stupidity, beauty,
kindness, shallowness, dullness, creativity, gratitude).
5. Spiritual undertaking, initiative.
6. Ability for independent decision-making in practical daily matters, problems of personal
development and problem of interrelations.
7. Possession of the thesaurus of foothold precedents (personal experiences, information from
books - examples from history).
8) Ability to overcome crucial points (in private life: to drive negative emotions out into creative
activity, sublimation of psychic tensions).
9. Development of natural abilities and availability of specific skills in a particular field.
10. Correction of self-realization ( correlation with the conceived and gained).
11. Aware need for growth and development at mature age as an indication of a self-realized
personality.
12. Withdrawal from intentional outer entertainments; ability for interesting and tense inner life.
13. "Protection of a living soul" and "flexible perception" (R.Stivenson).
* * *
| O, dear Mr Empson, I beg you allow to tell that our houses constantly are on a cliff that we are suspended by nerves and by feelings as if flying is firmness, and badly is well. And here to diminish means adversely to swell, as to exist as a ship is to be a light skiff I contemplate a spring and see a falling leaf where freshly blossoms play the notes of magic smell. All living now is swimming when it's sinking, and in deep muteness when is something singing in most perfect joy when he or she is sad. I hope indeed in moment of lost patience. And happens everything where there are no occasions. I may be had the world because I nothing had. |
Regards,
Valery Kourinsky
Theme 15 Theme 16 Theme 17
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