PRACTICE IN USING THE GESTALT FRAME
The preceding section on The Gestalt Frame covers the four archetypes of experiencing, namely Phenomenology, Morality, Plausibility, and Preferentiality. After reading through them first (each is a page), then try some of the following suggestions (or do similar things that will also illustrate the desired points): Take any one of the concepts within the Frame and apply it to an issue of interest to you. The issue might occur in a media story, in a book or magazine you read, in a conversation you have, in a presentation you attend, or it might be something that just springs to mind.
In the case of Phenomenology, ask yourself “Is the past or future as real as the present?” “What is there about the past or present that is real, and what is not?” Imagine how someone with a different sense of the past or future might think or feel about events. Next, try considering something like this: Does the saying “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” make sense to you; and whether or not it does, what does it mean? Are there occasions when the importance of “wholes” or “parts” changes in importance, or when the relation between them may vary? How could that happen, and why? For a third challenge, think about how unity might be occur even in the presence of diversity in some situations, and they might not co-exist in other situations, and try to determine what makes the difference. In all of these cases, how you perceive your reality is not just a question of observation, but also of the sub-conscious labels you apply to your perceptions. What some people perceive as aggression, others perceive as defensive. What some people perceive as generosity, other perceive as patronizing. There are no definitive answers to the above questions – it all depends upon what you believe, and about your willingness to suspend your beliefs and consider other possibilities.
In Morality, ask yourself “How do changing social and economic circumstances affect how you assess right and wrong or good and evil?” To what extent are people's habits and tratitions inner-directed or outer-directed? For instance, consider the possibility that you only know peoples' principles from either their words, or their actions, either or both of which may be contrived to mislead, or not sufficiently complete to give a conclusive result. If you reflect on this, you will realize that this is actually a description of the situation we all find ourselves in – don’t panic, or despair. Instead ask yourself how social coordination actually occurs, and consider the results of practicing either more or less tolerace.
For Plausibility, examine how you tackle a problem or question when one occurs. Do you look for the facts, or fit what you already know into an explanation and then seek to confirm it? Does the overall situation concern you most, or the specifics? Are you looking for precise conclusions, or just an approximation? Now try role-playing, and switch your answers to the above questions. How do your methods change under these new approaches? In knowledge work, you may have to switch methods depending on each assignment and the role in it that you perform.
Preferentiality gives you the most room to maneuver. Try pretending you like the things you loath, and dislike the things you prefer. How different would the outlook of a person who really had those preferences be from your own? Try the same tactic for anything that you improvise on the one hand, or just passively consume on the other – what difference would that make to your lifestyle, or quality of life? Think about what would happen if you became more, or less, fashion conscious. Very different.
Now contemplate some combination of Gestalt elements and think about the implications. WOW!
FOLLOWING IMPLICATIONS
Cognitivity
"I think, and therefore I am" was Descartes' famous dictum. This reflects a much older claim made by Aristotle in Ancient Athens, namely that "Man [humanity] is the rational animal." Now that we are into the Information Age and the Knowledge Economy, the cognitive aspect of knowing is getting the lion's share of the attention.
The point is however, that cognitivity is one aspect of knowing, not a separate type of knowing. The cognitive aspect of knowledge has been the quality most readily transferred into explicit form, particularly as text in the age of print, and then as software in the digital age. We are often told that "teaching machines how to feel is much more difficult than teaching them how to think." But computers only simulate thinking anyway, which is all they would ever do with feelings as well. Now the implications of feelings are being programmed into algorithms so that they can factor in affective responses even if machines do not actually feel a thing. This development was inevitable, and will continue (Kennedy, 1990).
Don't get caught up in pointless arguments about whether machines can "think" or "feel" - just remember that your own knowing combines both, so keep that in mind as you learn.
Affectivity
Suzanne Langer made a very credible case for the claim that all of human knowledge could be interpreted as an elaboration of affectivity, feelings, rather than cognitivity, ideas. Novak has developed a paradigm of knowledge creation, learning, and use that traces effective knowing to a combination of cognitivity, affectivity, and methodology - concepts, feelings, and skills must work together to produce meaningful understanding (Novak, 1998).
How is affectivity involved in learning and knowing? It provides the motivation for what is important and what is interesting. Affectivity ranges all the way from the widest possible context to the narrowest of issues - it is our answer to Bertrand Russell's "So what?" comment. He advised that we always ask ourselves whether either a question or an answer made any real difference to us anyway. To the extent that we pursue anything rather than just drop it, we have found an affective reason to bother.
References
