Understanding The Process of Taoistic-Informed Mindfulness from a Meadian Perspective

In the recent years, mindfulness-based research has experienced a boom. Yet, the majority of those studies treat mindfulness in a positivistic way, thus solely as a variable. Within such a lens of inquiry, we ignore the theoretical and historical underpinnings of mindfulness that are still important, nowadays. For that purpose, I instance a theoretical and historical framework of mindfulness grounded within Taoism - relying on the notion of the polarity of life and wu wei (the principle of not-forcing) and try to bridge that focus with Mead's Social Psychology. By means of an autoethnography, I show that mindfulness-based activities such as meditation unfold the power of an individual to experience and own a new I which then acts in a new fashion upon the demands of the (social) environment (Me). In this process, a new personality is born that integrates wholistically the polar sides of life within himself/herself.

A polycultural theory of wisdom based on Habermas’s worldview

Building on Habermas’s worldview, this paper attempts to construct a theory of wisdom that integrates the advantages of Eastern and Western cultures. To this end, we review previous definitions of wisdom and their problems and analyze the importance of worldview for wisdom. A worldview provided by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas is eminently persuasive. We argue that Habermas’s worldview provides a more suitable basis for a polycultural theory of wisdom. The specific components of the wisdom theory are: (1) a relationalist belief in the universal world; (2) transcendental agency in the subjective world; (3) intersubjective communication orientation in the social world; and (4) integrated principles of certainty and uncertainty in the objective world. Inspired by this theory, people could adopt different principles for their subjective, social, and objective worldviews and coordinate them to deal with the problems of human survival, which would also promote the long-term flourishing of human civilization.

Self as an Aesthetic Effect

Mainstream psychology has assumed a notion of the self that seems to rest on a substantialist notion of the psyche that became predominant despite important critical theories about the self. Although cultural psychology has recognized the diverse, dialogical, historical, narrative, and performative nature of self, as opposed to the idea of self as entity, it is not clear how it accounts for the phenomenological experience of self as a unified image. In this paper, we offer a theoretical contribution to developing the implications of a genetic approach to self in cultural psychology, taking into account an otherwise overlooked dimension: art and aesthetics. We draw on the work of classical authors relevant to cultural psychology, who, although geopolitically and theoretically diverse, are concerted in understanding human psychological life as part of a living process of becoming: James, Mead, Dewey, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Vološinov. Overall, the hypothesis developed throughout the paper is that self is produced within psychological individuation as an effect of the aesthetic activity involved in everyday discursive life. We deepen the ideas that self is not an entity but a process of open becoming and that cultural life entails a radical experience of alterity, but we recognize the psychological importance of the sense of unity and closure generated in this process. We argue that self entails not only the process of becoming but also an aesthetical effect of unity in becoming. Self as an aesthetic effect emphasizes the self as a discursive and technical process of production, involving a product that, despite not being a finished entity, is felt as unitary and as mine by virtue of a specific transformation of experience. We thus propose to define self, on one level, as an epistemological category that points to the paradoxes of identity and agency in psychological individuation, and, on a different level, as a twofold operation that makes possible the subjective experience of a constitutive effort as much as a transient but experienced identity or agency.

Personality as a Social Process: where Peter Giordano Meets Boris Parygin

In this paper I comment on the "Individual personality is best understood as process, not structure: A Confucian-inspired perspective" article by Peter Giordano (Culture & Psychology, 23(4), 502-518 (2017)), which addresses the question of how to comprehend a personality which is continuously changing and varying with changes in social contexts and situations. The issue which Giordano turns up I believe to be of great importance and topicality in the quickly changing globalizing contemporary world. Giordano's paper highlights an important problem in the development of contemporary personality psychology, but much remains to be clarified concerning his process-centric model. I introduce the theory of Boris Parygin, which can make a contribution to the discussion of personality as a process. Parygin's theory addresses the same issues that Giordano focuses on: human personality exists and develops in the context of social situation. Parygin's theoretical model of personality involves two personality schemas: a "static" one and a "dynamic" one. The "structure" and the "process" -centered approaches are joint here to complement each other. Personality life-span development, formation of personality structures, is considered as a process of interaction and dialectical confrontation with the social environment, in the course of which the personality, originally engendered by social factors, builds up its autonomy and realizes its unique individual spiritual potential.

Personality Process-Structure Duality: Reply to Two Commentaries

In two commentaries, Kostromina and Grishina (2018) and Mironenko (2018) offered constructive thoughts and questions in response to an article by Giordano (2018, Culture & Psychology, 23, 502-518) on the merits of an approach to understanding individual personality that focuses on the processes rather than structures of personality. In this reply, the authors seek to clarify some of the points made in the original article. The authors also describe a personality process-structure duality, whereby personality is conceptualized in terms of processes or structures based on the methods used to study it. If the goal is to understand the dynamic and emergent properties of individual personality, the authors continue to argue for the merits of a process-centric approach and the avoidance of structural thinking.

The Future of Personality Theory: a Processual Approach

The perpetual discussion of approaches and principles in the study of personality has been one of the notable trends of development of psychological science over many decades. The structural approach, based on the delineation of a person's traits and characteristics, made an important contribution to various branches of psychology, but now the scientific community has recognized the limitations of a structural understanding of personality. Its inadequacy becomes particularly obvious in today's conditions, when fundamental changes pose a challenge to man's ability to respond flexibly to changing conditions of everyday existence, as well as to larger-scale changes. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is obvious that there is a need for new ways to understand and describe the personality: Scholars are calling for study of the dynamic personality, of the personality as an open system. At the foundational level, modern personality psychology should incorporate classical ideas about its structure; secondly, it should consider personality in the context of the individual's lifetime; and - at the highest level - it should describe personality as the subject of Being. We submit our own description of personality psychology's problem field.