Why Radical constructivism | Ernst Von Glasersfeld
Porquê o Construtivismo Radical
Well, let me get back to your original question about…what was it? - Wisdom. You see I have written this several times and I have said it often, I am interested in radical constructivism because it seems to me it is one way of delimiting the field of rational though from the inside. You can sort of grope until you come to the boundaries and there are many boundaries you hit very soon. One of them, for instance, is consciousness. We have no rational model of consciousness and I don’t believe we’ll ever get one - but that’s a personal belief, I can’t prove that, that’s an assumption. We have no model of memory at the moment, we may get one but at the moment it’s a boundary. And why am I interested in exploring from the inside the boundaries of rational thought? Because I think what lies outside is very much more important. I think the mystical, the insights of mystics are far more important than any rational insight. But rationally you can’t talk about them and what I object to is mystics, or metaphysicians, who try to convince me rationally that they are right, that is total non-sense, they cannot possibly do that, they can try to show me their beautiful irreducible metaphors and maybe I like them and that’s how I have to be convinced, very much as Vico said, it is poetic wisdom and if I like the poetry I may accede to the wisdom. Being a constructivist The constructivists, you don’t have to think that everybody else has to be a constructivist it takes a long time to get into constructivist thinking, it is not something that after one lecture that you become a constructivist, it’s a very difficult process, because you have to remodel practically everything you thought before and some of those remodels are very disagreeable at first. You see, I think the inherent difficulty is that in order to interact with other people you have to conceive an inter-subjective reality which is not a reality in which things exist in their own right but a reality in which your ideals become more or less compatible with the ideals of the other person.
| | Radical Constructivism and Psychotherapy | Von Glasersfeld
Radical constructivism and Psychotherapy I am not involved in that and I would not like to meddle with what therapists are doing. The only thing that I can say is that I think radical constructivism, to the ordinary person, could be a kind of therapy because if they begin to think in a constructivist fashion they would find that many things in their lives become easier and certainly more agreeable and one of the reasons is that once you really get into constructivist thinking you realize that you don’t have to be right, you don’t have to convince people that your way is the best way. If it works for you, that’s perfectly good enough and that saves an awful lot of energy. If you got to any party or any place where people conversationally interact with each other you will find that half the energy is spent in trying to convince the other that you have the right idea and that’s a waste of effort. So as a constructivist you can relax. If they ask you, you can answer their questions but if they don’t ask you, well it’s their business.
Transcrição/tradução A.S.Branco | Revisão A. Henriques
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