October 1, 2006

• Harvard Psychologist’s Recipe for Disaster

  Tales of Philosophy:

  Recipe for Disaster
   
  according to Jerome Kagan,
  Harvard psychologist emeritus 

  From Log24 –
  The Line	The Cube
  From Harvard’s Jerome Kagan –
  “‘Humans demand that there be a clear right and wrong,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to believe that the track you’ve taken is the right track. You get depressed if you’re not certain as to what it is you’re supposed to be doing or what’s right and wrong in the world.’”	“People need to divide the world into good and evil, us and them, Kagan continued. To do otherwise– to entertain the possibility that life is not black and white, but variously shaded in gray– is perhaps more honest, rational and decent. But it’s also, psychically, a recipe for disaster.”
  Black and White: Log24 in May 2005	Shades of Gray: An affine space and  Harvard’s Jerome Kagan

  The above Kagan quotes are taken
  from a New York Times essay by
  Judith Warner as transcribed by
  Mark Finkelstein on Sept. 29.

  See also Log24 on
  Sept. 29 and 30.

  Related material:

  Kagan’s book

  

  Surprise, Uncertainty,
  and Mental Structures

  (Harvard U. Press, April 2002)

  and Werner Heisenberg–
  discoverer of the
  uncertainty principle–
  as Anakin Skywalker
  being tempted by
  the Dark Side:

  

  (From Log24, May 2005)

   

  George Lucas, who has profited

  enormously from public depictions

  of the clash between

  good and evil, light and dark,

  may in private life be inclined

  to agree with Hercule Poirot:

   

  “It is the brain, the little gray cells

  on which one must rely.

  One must seek the truth

  within– not without.”

   

  (This is another version of the

  “Descartes before dehors” principle–

  See “A Table,” Sept. 28.)

   

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