Published: December 2021, Issue 40

Keywords:
Tyron Cashman, Elysian Fields, Humberto Maturana, observer, reality, closed system, languaging, solipsism, commensurability Virgil, Socrates, Philip Henry Gosse, Lamarck, Charles Robert Darwin, George Berkeley, René Descartes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Schweitzer, Jonathan Swift, George Orwell, Phineas Taylor Barnum, Arthur Conan Doyle..

Tyron Cashman

Institute for the Study of Natural and Cultural Resources.

American Society for Cybernetics

The American Society for Cybernetics was founded in 1964 in Washington, DC to encourage new developments in cybernetics as an inter-/trans-/meta-disciplinary field.

Ever since, it has remained at the forefront of cybernetic thinking and doing. Society members have made cybernetics central to their work in biology and the life sciences, the arts, medicine, therapy (psychological and social), mathematics, the physical sciences and engineering, design, management, and business. They have reached out to other societies and groups interested in similar areas and approaches. Remarkable people have joined and been recognized by us.

We understand cybernetics as being profoundly interested in and shaped by circularity, recursion, construction and reflexivity, and we constantly consider what cybernetic actions might be and when they should and should not be taken, continuing to consider how to behave in a cybernetic manner—without denying the value, on occasion, of behaving in more traditional ways. We recognize the centrality of the presence of the observer in observing, the speaker in speaking and the actor in acting.

Abstract

“As Virgil described them, the Elysian Fields - although reached through the entrance to the underworld - are a spacious and beautiful region of sunny meadows and woods, comfortable and lightsome in every respect, where the Noble Dead gather and enjoy indefinitely a reward consonant with their lives on earth.

Professor Maturana is at this moment making his way along the shadowy paths that lead to the blessed region where he is going to meet and discuss with lots of bright minds”.

I enjoyed Tyrone Cashman’ s Elysian Dialogues very much, when I first translated this text back in 2014, and now we have edited it for Metalogos. I think that the form, style and the content of Elysian Dialogues are an attractive, postmodernist-orientated adventure. It could be fun and enriching to use it in different psychotherapy ( and not only) training contexts (Fany Triantafillou).

Many thanks to the American Association for Cybernetics for being so generous once more to Metalogos by granting permission to upload in this special issue the text: The Elysian Dialogs, 4, CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION, Summer 1989, Number 17. Editing for Metalogos: Andreana Petridou, Fany Triantafillou, Nikos Anestis.