Abstract
This article is a comment on Maria Lapoujade paper “Life Imaginaries in Gaseous Societies.” Maria Lapoujade argues that due to the increase of pace of human, social life since modernity humanity finds itself in a deeply morally degraded and culturally diseased state. Thus, Lapoujade calls for efforts which need to be undertaken from all possible areas—the humanities, arts, sciences, religions, education, and politics—to the healing of the diseased aspects of contemporary humanity, efforts, aimed at curing our species from overall blind irrational cruelty by promoting positive, joyful “imaginaries.” Viewing psychological science as a powerful creator of “imaginaries,” I address the point whether psychology can and should contribute to that endeavor.
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Notes
“With a real carrot, we can make a donkey move forward. It suffices to make a man imagine one for him to start running” (Lapoujade 2018, p. 9).
“Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtean philosopher, to whom ‘I am I’ is sufficient, man first sees and recognizes himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo.” (Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)
Some authors glorify Athens BC as the ideal of democratic freedom, losing sight of the fact that this society was slave-owning.
“With a real carrot, we can make a donkey move forward. It suffices to make a man imagine one for him to start running” (Lapoujade 2018, p. 9).
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Jaan Valsiner and Luca Tateo for the invitation to write this paper.
Funding
This article received financial support from the Russian Foundation for the Humanities, project № 17-06-50086.
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Mironenko, I.A. Is Psychology in the Position to Contribute to Shape “Healthy and Joyful Imaginaries”?. Hu Arenas 1, 358–365 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-018-0043-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-018-0043-5