Sunday, January 6, 2019
retrojection
Normally, ‘retrojection’ means “projection into the past” (M-W Unabridged). M-W offers the base-word (transitive verb) example: “...retroject an hallucination into one's childhood.” That seems kindred to displacement, if not exclusion or suppression. “It’s past now...merely past.”
But “the past” is a construction derived from a living sense of pastness (being “past”) that is thereby differentiating presence from presence-no-more: being there: “past.” Feeling pastness irt something allocates that to presence-no-more, yet referring to the past is a pretense of definition (enframing) that is either relative to a narrative about a segment of pastness or is implicitly containing pastness altogether as something discretely apart from being now.
More accurately, then, to retroject—as normally understood—is projection into pastness—distinct, by the way, from symptomatic projection as otherness or projection into/onto another as Other (another thing: discard the object; or another person: exclude him). Indeed, an othering of pastness is expressed in sentiments like “I’m no longer....” A recovering addict who claims to be no longer an addict may be cautioned by fellows whom are longer into recovery that “you will always be an addict.”
A new sense of retrojection—which I want to primarily have in mind when I use the term—is about referring to the past as warranting of one’s position now: a sense of pastness having pretense of being the past that’s relevant: that belongs with life now. “Now” doesn’t have an originist sense of genesis (like a seed growing, as if an axiomaticity expresses an intrinsic determinism); rather, a genesis is understood relative to one’s presence.
Typically, an adult understands her childhood differently than she did as teen, though it was the same childhood in both cases. A developmental psychologist may understand this confidently in terms of well-established aspects of child development, but the adult person will understand that in terms of a variable life (periodically historizing itself relative to orientation by futures, hopes, projects, etc.) that is vaguely grasped by scientific generalization about development.
Moreover, developmental models of recent decades are better than models of a century ago; so, the “same” child development (in terms of specific childrens’ lives) changes in conception with advances in conceptualization.
What is the history of anything? What is the historiology of doing historical narrative (historiography)?
“In a sense, I’ll always be 18, because my inspirations back then have oriented my entire life.” So, the adult is, in a sense mentored by the teen. Yet, as teen, she could not comprehend what was to (?) become of that, which was no fate, but an appropriation of purposes and hopes irt never-anticipated experience, never preconceived individuation that the woman has become.
Doing autobiography at age 70 about one’s 20s may be quite something else than doing autobiography about one’s 20s at 45.
Once upon a time, “God” created the world (which children and illiterates could understand, about what actually scribes can do with cohering narrative—displaced as originating outside of childish worlds because mysticized insight about what’s best for the tribe is otherwise inconceivable as being merely living wisdom). Now, it’s known that “God” is a fine character in Our evolving (but a character that can’t be brought to validly account for predation and suffering, which knowledge of biology and anthropology can explain—as well as explaining the plurality of godly ideals, then Godly perfectibility of ultimate unity personified).
Once upon a time, philosophy sought to be the queen of sciences (and metaphysics was its soul). Now we know that philosophy is interdomainal conceptual inquiry and teaching (where metaphysics is one kind of conceptual inquiry among others).
