-
NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
- Start date
Free episodes:
- Status
Wonderful research source. I read only one or two of Stapp's papers some years ago and am very grateful for all these links.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
As you all contributed to significantly improving one of my papers, I thought I would post the two reviewers' comments. They are quite striking:
Reviewer: 1
Comments to the Author
This ambitious paper is worthy of serious consideration, but I don't think it is publishable in its present form. It is to be praised for its eclectic (yet well-integrated) frame of reference, and for its account of three tiered levels of explanation in organism-environment relations: the physiological, the "phenomenal" (which already includes individualized experience), as well as the conceptually or linguistically mediated. What follows are some critical remarks that should be relevant to the author's revisions – and, I hope, resubmission.
Technical errors and stylistic infelicities: the awkward (although inconsistent) avoidance of the first-person pronoun sounds clumsy and sometimes obscures the author's meaning. "The intention is to argue," "The suggestion is," "The proposal is," etc. (See pages 1, 7-8.) Yet the author also uses the first-person (see pages 1, 9): "If . . . I were to ask," "I am suggesting," etc. I cannot imagine this paper being presented as a conference talk and read with its general avoidance of ownership. Why not say, e.g., MY suggestion is this, I propose that, and do so consistently? This grammatical pattern leads to excessive use of the passive voice, which creates ambiguity about whether the author is advancing a view or simply describing it.
Going into more substantive issues, it is an exciting thesis that creatures who learn are adjustable to their environments and "communicate" with their surroundings through a mode of "discourse" (see 3-5), although on pg 5 it would simplify the author's point if "Environment" wwere to say "here" rather than "regarding this particular environment."
The claim (pg 12) that this happens not only in species-level interactions but, in organisms of sufficient complexity, at the level of a "continually evolving [sic] individuated stance," is also provocative yet well-defended. That there are qualitative conscious states in beings not equipped with language or higher-order conceptual thought seems right to me and is articulated cogently here. I think "axiological" would be more accurate than "value-laden" (pg 13), but this is a small matter.
The discussion in Section VII (starting on pg 14) of how a distinctly human perspective in general, and that of a "unique experiencing subject" in each particular case, is suggestive and promising yet brief. Expanding this account of how the human point of view emerges from hierarchically lower modes of experience would be helpful.
Overall, the attempt to accomplish so much in a manuscript of this length leads to more compact explanations than would be ideal. This might also be addressed in the revisions.
Reviewer: 2
Comments to the Author
The paper is about a very important topic in philosophical psychology. Unfortunately, it is not clear, it lacks coherence, it does not address the recent relevant literature in philosophy, biology or psychology, and it has no argumentative structure. I am not sure I could identify the main claim the paper is trying to defend. For example, the term “emergence” appears in the title of the paper. The reader expects the paper to deliver at least some sustained discussion about how emergence differs from other types of causation, how it is understood by the author to be involved in the complex process of evolution, or some standard arguments about causal closure that are the basic background for defining this term. But one cannot find any discussion about emergence, or even a definition of the term, and the term is only mentioned at the very end of the paper. Likewise, there is no sustained discussion of how consciousness might have evolved, or what makes phenomenal consciousness interesting when it comes to evolution, or how to define consciousness.
Large parts of the text contain poorly motivated discussions, which seem to be about biological mappings between environmental and internal structures. These include two examples about creatures and their environment that leave the reader wondering about their relevance for the topic of the paper. There are also large portions of text that seem to be making some vague point about mental representation and aboutness. I was very confused throughout the four times I read the paper in its entirety, and I could not come up with suggestions for improvement or positive remarks about portions of the text because I am not sure about what exactly is the point the author is trying to make. This is a big concern, because I really was trying to make positive suggestions, and could not find a principled way to do so, given the lack of clarity.
With respect to philosophy, in particular, very intricate and important issues are systematically relegated to uninformative footnotes or parenthetical remarks by the author. Critical issues are briefly mentioned, and no sustained discussion is given to them. Although it seems that the author is mostly talking about mappings between biological structures and content, or mental representation in general, or some kind of mapping, it is not clear what the author has in mind. At several points in the text, the author says that there is a kind of “discourse” between a creature and its environment. This characterization seems to play a key role in the text, but I was never sure how to understand it. The author seems to take it literally, as linguistic discourse, but this is not helpful because the background discussion concerns biological and psychological terms that have rigorous definitions. In any case, the author is not clear about what role this “discourse” is supposed to play in an explanation of consciousness, evolution, or emergence. For these reasons, I recommend rejection
Reviewer: 1
Comments to the Author
This ambitious paper is worthy of serious consideration, but I don't think it is publishable in its present form. It is to be praised for its eclectic (yet well-integrated) frame of reference, and for its account of three tiered levels of explanation in organism-environment relations: the physiological, the "phenomenal" (which already includes individualized experience), as well as the conceptually or linguistically mediated. What follows are some critical remarks that should be relevant to the author's revisions – and, I hope, resubmission.
Technical errors and stylistic infelicities: the awkward (although inconsistent) avoidance of the first-person pronoun sounds clumsy and sometimes obscures the author's meaning. "The intention is to argue," "The suggestion is," "The proposal is," etc. (See pages 1, 7-8.) Yet the author also uses the first-person (see pages 1, 9): "If . . . I were to ask," "I am suggesting," etc. I cannot imagine this paper being presented as a conference talk and read with its general avoidance of ownership. Why not say, e.g., MY suggestion is this, I propose that, and do so consistently? This grammatical pattern leads to excessive use of the passive voice, which creates ambiguity about whether the author is advancing a view or simply describing it.
Going into more substantive issues, it is an exciting thesis that creatures who learn are adjustable to their environments and "communicate" with their surroundings through a mode of "discourse" (see 3-5), although on pg 5 it would simplify the author's point if "Environment" wwere to say "here" rather than "regarding this particular environment."
The claim (pg 12) that this happens not only in species-level interactions but, in organisms of sufficient complexity, at the level of a "continually evolving [sic] individuated stance," is also provocative yet well-defended. That there are qualitative conscious states in beings not equipped with language or higher-order conceptual thought seems right to me and is articulated cogently here. I think "axiological" would be more accurate than "value-laden" (pg 13), but this is a small matter.
The discussion in Section VII (starting on pg 14) of how a distinctly human perspective in general, and that of a "unique experiencing subject" in each particular case, is suggestive and promising yet brief. Expanding this account of how the human point of view emerges from hierarchically lower modes of experience would be helpful.
Overall, the attempt to accomplish so much in a manuscript of this length leads to more compact explanations than would be ideal. This might also be addressed in the revisions.
Reviewer: 2
Comments to the Author
The paper is about a very important topic in philosophical psychology. Unfortunately, it is not clear, it lacks coherence, it does not address the recent relevant literature in philosophy, biology or psychology, and it has no argumentative structure. I am not sure I could identify the main claim the paper is trying to defend. For example, the term “emergence” appears in the title of the paper. The reader expects the paper to deliver at least some sustained discussion about how emergence differs from other types of causation, how it is understood by the author to be involved in the complex process of evolution, or some standard arguments about causal closure that are the basic background for defining this term. But one cannot find any discussion about emergence, or even a definition of the term, and the term is only mentioned at the very end of the paper. Likewise, there is no sustained discussion of how consciousness might have evolved, or what makes phenomenal consciousness interesting when it comes to evolution, or how to define consciousness.
Large parts of the text contain poorly motivated discussions, which seem to be about biological mappings between environmental and internal structures. These include two examples about creatures and their environment that leave the reader wondering about their relevance for the topic of the paper. There are also large portions of text that seem to be making some vague point about mental representation and aboutness. I was very confused throughout the four times I read the paper in its entirety, and I could not come up with suggestions for improvement or positive remarks about portions of the text because I am not sure about what exactly is the point the author is trying to make. This is a big concern, because I really was trying to make positive suggestions, and could not find a principled way to do so, given the lack of clarity.
With respect to philosophy, in particular, very intricate and important issues are systematically relegated to uninformative footnotes or parenthetical remarks by the author. Critical issues are briefly mentioned, and no sustained discussion is given to them. Although it seems that the author is mostly talking about mappings between biological structures and content, or mental representation in general, or some kind of mapping, it is not clear what the author has in mind. At several points in the text, the author says that there is a kind of “discourse” between a creature and its environment. This characterization seems to play a key role in the text, but I was never sure how to understand it. The author seems to take it literally, as linguistic discourse, but this is not helpful because the background discussion concerns biological and psychological terms that have rigorous definitions. In any case, the author is not clear about what role this “discourse” is supposed to play in an explanation of consciousness, evolution, or emergence. For these reasons, I recommend rejection
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Yes, it was wrong for me to say the "explanatory" gap would remain. On this view the explanatory gap would be closed.
However, rather, an epistemological gap would remain.
And I should have said in principle a non-human, objective observer may be able to explain why state change X just is experience X, but in practice this seems unpossible.
Likewise, in principle humans will never achieve complete objectivity and this will never be able to see/map reality as it is, and thus in practice won't be able to either.
So I agree with Nagel with caveats/qualifications:
(1) Brains may just be minds viewed from the "outside" but brains do not generate consciousness
(2) What human minds look like to humans from the outside is a representation, a map. So yes, there is an identities between minds and brains, but the map (brains) is subjective.
(3) I don't think that so-called qualia are fundamental; there are not on my view irreducible quake such as green, blue, pain, etc.
These so-called quale emerge from pure experience.
So, while our physical maps may give us some epistemological insight into the structure of minds, the insight we can gain will be limited.
One way of thinking about this is to ask: can a map-making machine ever make a completely accurate map of itself?
It will never be able to remove itself from the equation to achieve a truly objective map.
That is, I think minds emerge from pure experience at such a high, complex level that minds will never be able to gain epistemological knowledge of the primary processes leading to their emergence.
But obviously I could be very wrong about that.
So while the explanatory gap dissolves on this view, the epistemological gap will remain due to the inability to completely remove ourselves from the equation.
Last edited:
Physicalism Versus Quantum Mechanics
Henry P. Stapp
Extract:
". . .The physicalist assumption has apparently led, after 50 years of development, to conclusions that are far from ideal. These conclusions fail to explain either why our conscious experiences should exist at all in a world that is dynamically and logically complete at the physical level of description, or how they can be physical properties that do not entail the existence of the experiential “feel” that characterize them. These longstanding difficulties arise directly from accepting the classical conception of the nature and properties of the physically described aspects of our description of the world. They are resolved in a natural way by accepting the quantum mechanical conception of the nature and properties of the aspects of the world that are described in physical terms: i.e., in terms of properties specified by assigning mathematically properties to space-time regions. . . . ." (pg. 9)
http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/Physicalism.pdf
Henry P. Stapp
Extract:
". . .The physicalist assumption has apparently led, after 50 years of development, to conclusions that are far from ideal. These conclusions fail to explain either why our conscious experiences should exist at all in a world that is dynamically and logically complete at the physical level of description, or how they can be physical properties that do not entail the existence of the experiential “feel” that characterize them. These longstanding difficulties arise directly from accepting the classical conception of the nature and properties of the physically described aspects of our description of the world. They are resolved in a natural way by accepting the quantum mechanical conception of the nature and properties of the aspects of the world that are described in physical terms: i.e., in terms of properties specified by assigning mathematically properties to space-time regions. . . . ." (pg. 9)
http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/Physicalism.pdf
Hi Pharoah. The first reviewer understands where you are going in this paper and I think it would be wise to follow all of his suggestions for development of the paper. The second reviewer also provides excellent advice in the last paragraph of his remarks. In other words, keep going.
ps, I hope you'll share your next version of the paper with us.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
No, but I gather it was about Europa, Enceladus, and other moons in our solar system that contain vast quantities of water and thus locations where we should look for other forms of life. Here's a clip I found at the NASA site concerning Europa:
I read not long ago that there are nine bodies in our solar system now suspected by planetary scientists of having great bodies of water.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Yes! ... that was it, I've not had a chance to catch up yet ... It mat be Sunday but it's fascinating. Nine??
Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
Well, the "physicalist assumption" will always lead directly to the ideal ... which ironically in this case if far from the "ideal" which "explains" to another consciousness the "whys" of its own being. Again--I know I keep beating the same dead horse over and over again--the "problem" or "mystery" results from the very fundamentals that allow consciousness to exist. I.e. the simplest way to put this is to ask "what is it like to be completely unconscious." The answer to this self-questioning requires a living, breathing self-questioner to endure the experience of the question. In fact, the most mysterious part of this "problem" is in our fundamental innate inability to completely illustrate and contain "questioning."
Therefore we cannot expect the framework of our own consciousness to have the ability to resolve the complete nature of the (figure/ground) basis of what makes us "conscious." To have such an ability would actually destroy the fundamentals of our being...or consciousness.
The limitations of our comprehension of our "consciousness" is similar to the limitations of a camera connected to a monitor which is facing the camera...the vanishing point (i.e. the "fundamental object of causality") is obscured by our act of putting our heads in the way in order to "observe" it.
So to be short, physicalist renderings of a world are incomplete, because the very foundation of what is "physical" is a synthetic rendering of the world to itself...an incomplete abstraction that allows our world to "talk and exist" to and through-- and by-- and from...whatever we singularize as a "self."
So in a way, you are right ... I have never experienced consciousness in the way you and others have described in this forum.
The problem we are looking for is in the physical structure of the "we" ... but to find such an answer requires the destruction of the artifact (i.e. the "we") that we are trying to explain (to ourselves).
Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
I know the fundamental question and "hard problem" we are all searching for. The problem with the "hard problem" is very very simple....it is equivalent (i.e. isomorphic) to the "why" of being itself. To be clear, we should be as mystified by the existence of any primitive fundamental thing as we are in the question of the "hard problem." The irony is that the original formulator of the "hard problem" considered the patterns of external "mechanisms" to be "easy." The harder problem is to ask why we consider our questioning of being a harder problem than actual being (unquestioned). Perhaps it is because "we" keep passing over the very infrastructure of ourselves...in the attempt to reduce ourselves to the functions, symbols and objects that only a self can decode. In this manner we see the repeated failures of GOFAI.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
WHAT CAN CONSCIOUSNESS ANOMALIES TELL US
ABOUT QUANTUM MECHANICS?
George R. Williams
Federal Communications Commission –
Washington DC
January 16, 2015
ABSTRACT
In this paper I explore the link between consciousness and quantum mechanics. Often, explanations that invoke consciousness to help explain some of the most perplexing aspects of quantum mechanics are not given serious attention. However, casual dismissal is perhaps unwarranted given the persistence of the measurement problem, as well as the mysterious nature of consciousness. Using data accumulated from experiments in parapsychology, I examine what anomalous data with respect to consciousness might tell us about various explanations on quantum mechanics. I examine three categories of quantum mechanics interpretations that have some promise of fitting with this anomalous data. I conclude that explanations that posit a substratum of reality containing pure information or potentia, along the lines proposed by Bohm and Stapp, offer the best fit for various categories of this data.
Keywords: Quantum mechanics, consciousness, parapsychology, psi
What Can Consciousness Anomalies Tell Us about Quantum Mechanics?
ABOUT QUANTUM MECHANICS?
George R. Williams
Federal Communications Commission –
Washington DC
January 16, 2015
ABSTRACT
In this paper I explore the link between consciousness and quantum mechanics. Often, explanations that invoke consciousness to help explain some of the most perplexing aspects of quantum mechanics are not given serious attention. However, casual dismissal is perhaps unwarranted given the persistence of the measurement problem, as well as the mysterious nature of consciousness. Using data accumulated from experiments in parapsychology, I examine what anomalous data with respect to consciousness might tell us about various explanations on quantum mechanics. I examine three categories of quantum mechanics interpretations that have some promise of fitting with this anomalous data. I conclude that explanations that posit a substratum of reality containing pure information or potentia, along the lines proposed by Bohm and Stapp, offer the best fit for various categories of this data.
Keywords: Quantum mechanics, consciousness, parapsychology, psi
What Can Consciousness Anomalies Tell Us about Quantum Mechanics?
Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion
by WALLACE STEVENS
You dweller in the dark cabin,
To whom the watermelon is always purple,
Whose garden is wind and moon,
Of the two dreams, night and day,
What lover, what dreamer, would choose
The one obscured by sleep?
Here is the plantain by your door
And the best cock of red feather
That crew before the clocks.
A feme may come, leaf-green,
Whose coming may give revel
Beyond revelries of sleep,
Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail,
So that the sun may speckle,
While it creaks hail.
You dweller in the dark cabin,
Rise, since rising will not waken,
And hail, cry hail, cry hail.
by WALLACE STEVENS
You dweller in the dark cabin,
To whom the watermelon is always purple,
Whose garden is wind and moon,
Of the two dreams, night and day,
What lover, what dreamer, would choose
The one obscured by sleep?
Here is the plantain by your door
And the best cock of red feather
That crew before the clocks.
A feme may come, leaf-green,
Whose coming may give revel
Beyond revelries of sleep,
Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail,
So that the sun may speckle,
While it creaks hail.
You dweller in the dark cabin,
Rise, since rising will not waken,
And hail, cry hail, cry hail.
"Psychology is Useless;
Or, It Should Be"
Robert Romanyshyn
Pacifica Graduate Institute
“. . . In "Ode to a Nightingale" he [Keats] hears the song of the bird and it throws him into melancholic despair. Can he, poor poet, even hope to come close to that song? Here in this vale of soul making which is the world, Keats knows only,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin and dies
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Despite his melancholy, he continues to listen. In spite of his sorrow, he obeys the call of the bird, and in doing so he realizes that the key difference between his poem and the song of the bird is that the latter is immortal:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home
She stood in tears amid the alien corn
(1973, p.346-348)
Of the two, the bird is the eternal singer. In the ambiance of his song, the poet who sings with a human voice must recognize the failed reach of his words, their temporary and transitory nature.
In the attitude of negative capability, Keats senses and feels the song of the bird so deeply that it impregnates him with the sense of his mortality. He listens to the beauty of its song, obeys its call and hears the whisper of death. At its deepest level, the sense of the aesthetic is about listening, and to listen is related to the word to obey. At the abyss, the poet's aesthetic sensibility is a way of listening to the call of the world and obeying and responding to it even in the face of death. At the abyss, a word whose own etymology relates it to grief and suffering, the poet's aesthetic sensibility makes him or her a witness who listens to the world's depths, to those depths where what has been forgotten, marginalized, or otherwise neglected, makes its appeal for his or her voice (Romanyshyn, 2000c). With a voice fragile, weak, haunted by the knowledge of death, transitory and for the moment, the poet speaks what he or she has heard. The poet responds, and even in the face of death continues the unfinished and ongoing work of creation. The poet responds because an aesthetic sensibility is responseable, able to respond because it has listened and obeyed. Being a witness is in this sense an ethical act, perhaps the first ethical act, perhaps the highest.
There is no perennial philosophy here, no eternal wisdom in the poem. There is no way to cheat death here, no heroic action to take, no program to establish. There is no illusion that what we say and speak will conquer death's kingdom. Not even Orpheus, eponymous poet, could do that. There is only the act of witnessing the moment and being responsive to it. But for the moment that’s enough. (Romanyshyn, 1999).
The third poet, Rilke {ETA: Heidegger's exemplary capable poet}, knows this territory of the temporary, and how the aesthetic sensibility of the witness is the proper response to the world and its fleeting moments, to the world which looks for "rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all" (1939, p.77). In reverie over Orpheus, Rilke asks again and again what monument we are to leave to him. "Set up no stone to his memory," he says. "Just let the rose bloom each year for his sake" (1962, p.25). (1962, p.25). This is the other face of negative capability's capacity not to hurry after some fact or reason in order to still into permanence the world's passing moments. It is the ability to love the moment in its passing, to love the rose, we might say, which in its blooming is already beginning to fade. Considering the starry night sky, Rilke wonders about the constellations. "See the sky," he says. "Is there no constellation/called 'Rider' ?" He allows himself to hope for a moment that the otherness of creation, these nameless and alien stars, can be brought into the ken of human language, made fixed and certain by our ideas of them. But in the end he forgoes that hope because he knows that "Even the starry union is deceptive." What we would secure in permanence forever slips away, like water in the palm of one's hand. And yet, like Keats, like the poet at the abyss, like the witness, Rilke immediately adds "But let us now be glad a while/to believe the figure. That's enough" (1962, p.37).
“The poet at the abyss, and the psychologist as failed poet who should be there with the poet, is witness to subtle realms. Not fixed in fact, these subtle realms are as elusive as dreams. Not imprisoned in concepts, they are as fragile as dust. Henry Corbin, the great Islamic scholar of Sufi mysticism, and a thinker who deeply influenced Jung's work, has termed this subtle world the "mundus imaginalis" (1969, xvi). This imaginal world is an intermediate world, a hinge or pivot between the intellectual and the sensible worlds, a world which is neither that of fact nor reason, a world "where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual" (p. 4), a world whose organ of knowledge is the heart. Of course, this is not the physiological organ, the heart as a pump, the factual heart which is the only heart we know and in which we believe. On the contrary, it is the heart which is the locus of an active imagination, "the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality" (Corbin, p. 4, his italics).
But the Sufi mystics of long ago are far from our ken, as far as the alchemists of ancient days are, those magicians of matter who in states of reverie before the fire practiced their own kind of negative capability and witnessed the subtle shapes and textures of the natural world, like the salamander roasting in the flames, or the green lion devouring the golden sun. Jung more than anyone has done much to rescue this lost art of visionary gnosis (1967, 1968). But even he more often than not abandoned that state of negative capability and forced the mystery of this other world of subtle bodies into that familiar conceptual scheme where these visions are projections of an interior, subjective psyche onto matter.
In his best moments, however, when Jung escapes the Cartesian heritage which dominates so much of depth psychology, he acknowledged that "there was no 'either-or' for that age, but there did exist an intermediate realm between mind and matter, a psychic realm of subtle bodies" (1968, p.278). In a telling footnote to this notion of subtle bodies, Jung identifies them with the Anima, which is "a subtle perceptible smoke."
The work from which these passages are taken, Psychology and Alchemy, was originally published in 1944. Subtle bodies belong to the landscape of Soul, to the Anima, that same realm from which he was addressed in 1913 with the claim that what he was doing was art. It would seem that alchemy was a bridge between that event of refusal in 1913 and the words of lament about the death of the poet in 1954. It appears that through his studies of the arts of alchemy, Jung was able to acknowledge that psychology practices the arts of the Soul whose reality is a matter of smoke and mirrors (Romanyshyn, 1982, Corbin, 1998).1
We do not have to return, however, to the mystic or the alchemist to recover the true arts of the Soul. Closer to home are the hysterics who crossed the threshold into Freud's and Jung's consulting rooms. Their symptoms were mysteries which yielded their secrets neither to fact nor reason. Shipwrecked survivors of the Cartesian dream of reason, bastard daughters of Descartes' dualism of matter and mind, they rose up out of the abyss pregnant with the visions and the passions of Soul (Romanyshyn, 1989). Their bodies were alchemical vessels where the work of symptom and dream were dissolving the facts of medicine and the reasons of philosophy. These hysterics were silenced poets, their symptoms the unfinished artistry of the Soul, which demanded from Freud and Jung a kind of negative capability.
Mystic, alchemist, and hysteric, are guides who return psychology to the poet, because poet, mystic, alchemist, and hysteric all dwell in one way or another within that same epistemological space of negative capability, that imaginal world of Soul where the "heart has its reasons which reason itself does not know" (Pascal, 1995, p.158). In his introduction to Corbin's book on Sufi mysticism, Harold Bloom, Shakespeare scholar and literary critic, writes that the imaginal world, which is opened to ordinary perception in moments of reverie when one can be in negative capability, is "generous enough to embrace . . . the aesthetic" (1969, p.xix). Is psychology humble enough to acknowledge the aesthetic claims of Soul? "It is art," the voice of Soul said to Jung. Is psychology able to respond to this claim, to recognize that its facts and reasons are works of art, neither more true nor false than a Mozart symphony, or a Rilke poem, or a Shakespeare play? Can it accept that its findings and theories are stories, allusions to that elusive invisible presence which always haunts the visible, a presence which the artist captures for a moment which is, however, enough? In the land of Soul does the psychologist have the heart to be the failed poet companion of the mystic and the poet, the suffering hysteric and the hoary alchemist?” “The poet at the abyss, and the psychologist as failed poet who should be there with the poet, is witness to subtle realms. Not fixed in fact, these subtle realms are as elusive as dreams. Not imprisoned in concepts, they are as fragile as dust. Henry Corbin, the great Islamic scholar of Sufi mysticism, and a thinker who deeply influenced Jung's work, has termed this subtle world the "mundus imaginalis" (1969, xvi). This imaginal world is an intermediate world, a hinge or pivot between the intellectual and the sensible worlds, a world which is neither that of fact nor reason, a world "where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual" (p. 4), a world whose organ of knowledge is the heart. Of course, this is not the physiological organ, the heart as a pump, the factual heart which is the only heart we know and in which we believe. On the contrary, it is the heart which is the locus of an active imagination, "the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality" (Corbin, p. 4, his italics). . . . ."
Romanyshyn is a major Jung scholar who has entered into critical dialogue with Wolfgang Giegerich's interpretation of Jung (which we spent time discussing maybe a year ago). He is focused upon human aesthetic/esthetic experiences in and of the phenomenally sensed, tactile world in which we have our embodied, emotional, existences. We have not yet actually explored in this thread the aesthetic/esthetic qualities of human consciousness [I would say that these qualities are also components of the consciousness of many animals on our planet]. Merleau-Ponty wrote in the Phenomenology of Perception that "the imagination is present in the first human perception." Sartre wrote a major book on the imagination's essential role in consciousness:
The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (Routledge Classics) (Volume 40) 1st Edition
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Amazon description: "A cornerstone of Sartre’s philosophy, The Imaginary was first published in 1940. Sartre had become acquainted with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in Berlin and was fascinated by his idea of the 'intentionality of consciousness' as a key to the puzzle of existence. Against this background, The Imaginary crystallized Sartre's worldview and artistic vision. The book is an extended examination of the concepts of nothingness and freedom, both of which are derived from the ability of consciousness to imagine objects both as they are and as they are not – ideas that would drive Sartre's existentialism and entire theory of human freedom."
The text is sampled here, beginning with the table of contents:
The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (Routledge Classics) (Volume 40): Jean-Paul Sartre: 9780415567848: Amazon.com: Books
{Note: before reading parts of Sartre's text in the translation linked here it is important to read the translator's notes in the front matter.}
{Further note: Sartre's daughter's historical introduction to this work is very interesting and informative.}
Or, It Should Be"
Robert Romanyshyn
Pacifica Graduate Institute
“. . . In "Ode to a Nightingale" he [Keats] hears the song of the bird and it throws him into melancholic despair. Can he, poor poet, even hope to come close to that song? Here in this vale of soul making which is the world, Keats knows only,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin and dies
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Despite his melancholy, he continues to listen. In spite of his sorrow, he obeys the call of the bird, and in doing so he realizes that the key difference between his poem and the song of the bird is that the latter is immortal:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home
She stood in tears amid the alien corn
(1973, p.346-348)
Of the two, the bird is the eternal singer. In the ambiance of his song, the poet who sings with a human voice must recognize the failed reach of his words, their temporary and transitory nature.
In the attitude of negative capability, Keats senses and feels the song of the bird so deeply that it impregnates him with the sense of his mortality. He listens to the beauty of its song, obeys its call and hears the whisper of death. At its deepest level, the sense of the aesthetic is about listening, and to listen is related to the word to obey. At the abyss, the poet's aesthetic sensibility is a way of listening to the call of the world and obeying and responding to it even in the face of death. At the abyss, a word whose own etymology relates it to grief and suffering, the poet's aesthetic sensibility makes him or her a witness who listens to the world's depths, to those depths where what has been forgotten, marginalized, or otherwise neglected, makes its appeal for his or her voice (Romanyshyn, 2000c). With a voice fragile, weak, haunted by the knowledge of death, transitory and for the moment, the poet speaks what he or she has heard. The poet responds, and even in the face of death continues the unfinished and ongoing work of creation. The poet responds because an aesthetic sensibility is responseable, able to respond because it has listened and obeyed. Being a witness is in this sense an ethical act, perhaps the first ethical act, perhaps the highest.
There is no perennial philosophy here, no eternal wisdom in the poem. There is no way to cheat death here, no heroic action to take, no program to establish. There is no illusion that what we say and speak will conquer death's kingdom. Not even Orpheus, eponymous poet, could do that. There is only the act of witnessing the moment and being responsive to it. But for the moment that’s enough. (Romanyshyn, 1999).
The third poet, Rilke {ETA: Heidegger's exemplary capable poet}, knows this territory of the temporary, and how the aesthetic sensibility of the witness is the proper response to the world and its fleeting moments, to the world which looks for "rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all" (1939, p.77). In reverie over Orpheus, Rilke asks again and again what monument we are to leave to him. "Set up no stone to his memory," he says. "Just let the rose bloom each year for his sake" (1962, p.25). (1962, p.25). This is the other face of negative capability's capacity not to hurry after some fact or reason in order to still into permanence the world's passing moments. It is the ability to love the moment in its passing, to love the rose, we might say, which in its blooming is already beginning to fade. Considering the starry night sky, Rilke wonders about the constellations. "See the sky," he says. "Is there no constellation/called 'Rider' ?" He allows himself to hope for a moment that the otherness of creation, these nameless and alien stars, can be brought into the ken of human language, made fixed and certain by our ideas of them. But in the end he forgoes that hope because he knows that "Even the starry union is deceptive." What we would secure in permanence forever slips away, like water in the palm of one's hand. And yet, like Keats, like the poet at the abyss, like the witness, Rilke immediately adds "But let us now be glad a while/to believe the figure. That's enough" (1962, p.37).
“The poet at the abyss, and the psychologist as failed poet who should be there with the poet, is witness to subtle realms. Not fixed in fact, these subtle realms are as elusive as dreams. Not imprisoned in concepts, they are as fragile as dust. Henry Corbin, the great Islamic scholar of Sufi mysticism, and a thinker who deeply influenced Jung's work, has termed this subtle world the "mundus imaginalis" (1969, xvi). This imaginal world is an intermediate world, a hinge or pivot between the intellectual and the sensible worlds, a world which is neither that of fact nor reason, a world "where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual" (p. 4), a world whose organ of knowledge is the heart. Of course, this is not the physiological organ, the heart as a pump, the factual heart which is the only heart we know and in which we believe. On the contrary, it is the heart which is the locus of an active imagination, "the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality" (Corbin, p. 4, his italics).
But the Sufi mystics of long ago are far from our ken, as far as the alchemists of ancient days are, those magicians of matter who in states of reverie before the fire practiced their own kind of negative capability and witnessed the subtle shapes and textures of the natural world, like the salamander roasting in the flames, or the green lion devouring the golden sun. Jung more than anyone has done much to rescue this lost art of visionary gnosis (1967, 1968). But even he more often than not abandoned that state of negative capability and forced the mystery of this other world of subtle bodies into that familiar conceptual scheme where these visions are projections of an interior, subjective psyche onto matter.
In his best moments, however, when Jung escapes the Cartesian heritage which dominates so much of depth psychology, he acknowledged that "there was no 'either-or' for that age, but there did exist an intermediate realm between mind and matter, a psychic realm of subtle bodies" (1968, p.278). In a telling footnote to this notion of subtle bodies, Jung identifies them with the Anima, which is "a subtle perceptible smoke."
The work from which these passages are taken, Psychology and Alchemy, was originally published in 1944. Subtle bodies belong to the landscape of Soul, to the Anima, that same realm from which he was addressed in 1913 with the claim that what he was doing was art. It would seem that alchemy was a bridge between that event of refusal in 1913 and the words of lament about the death of the poet in 1954. It appears that through his studies of the arts of alchemy, Jung was able to acknowledge that psychology practices the arts of the Soul whose reality is a matter of smoke and mirrors (Romanyshyn, 1982, Corbin, 1998).1
We do not have to return, however, to the mystic or the alchemist to recover the true arts of the Soul. Closer to home are the hysterics who crossed the threshold into Freud's and Jung's consulting rooms. Their symptoms were mysteries which yielded their secrets neither to fact nor reason. Shipwrecked survivors of the Cartesian dream of reason, bastard daughters of Descartes' dualism of matter and mind, they rose up out of the abyss pregnant with the visions and the passions of Soul (Romanyshyn, 1989). Their bodies were alchemical vessels where the work of symptom and dream were dissolving the facts of medicine and the reasons of philosophy. These hysterics were silenced poets, their symptoms the unfinished artistry of the Soul, which demanded from Freud and Jung a kind of negative capability.
Mystic, alchemist, and hysteric, are guides who return psychology to the poet, because poet, mystic, alchemist, and hysteric all dwell in one way or another within that same epistemological space of negative capability, that imaginal world of Soul where the "heart has its reasons which reason itself does not know" (Pascal, 1995, p.158). In his introduction to Corbin's book on Sufi mysticism, Harold Bloom, Shakespeare scholar and literary critic, writes that the imaginal world, which is opened to ordinary perception in moments of reverie when one can be in negative capability, is "generous enough to embrace . . . the aesthetic" (1969, p.xix). Is psychology humble enough to acknowledge the aesthetic claims of Soul? "It is art," the voice of Soul said to Jung. Is psychology able to respond to this claim, to recognize that its facts and reasons are works of art, neither more true nor false than a Mozart symphony, or a Rilke poem, or a Shakespeare play? Can it accept that its findings and theories are stories, allusions to that elusive invisible presence which always haunts the visible, a presence which the artist captures for a moment which is, however, enough? In the land of Soul does the psychologist have the heart to be the failed poet companion of the mystic and the poet, the suffering hysteric and the hoary alchemist?” “The poet at the abyss, and the psychologist as failed poet who should be there with the poet, is witness to subtle realms. Not fixed in fact, these subtle realms are as elusive as dreams. Not imprisoned in concepts, they are as fragile as dust. Henry Corbin, the great Islamic scholar of Sufi mysticism, and a thinker who deeply influenced Jung's work, has termed this subtle world the "mundus imaginalis" (1969, xvi). This imaginal world is an intermediate world, a hinge or pivot between the intellectual and the sensible worlds, a world which is neither that of fact nor reason, a world "where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual" (p. 4), a world whose organ of knowledge is the heart. Of course, this is not the physiological organ, the heart as a pump, the factual heart which is the only heart we know and in which we believe. On the contrary, it is the heart which is the locus of an active imagination, "the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality" (Corbin, p. 4, his italics). . . . ."
Romanyshyn is a major Jung scholar who has entered into critical dialogue with Wolfgang Giegerich's interpretation of Jung (which we spent time discussing maybe a year ago). He is focused upon human aesthetic/esthetic experiences in and of the phenomenally sensed, tactile world in which we have our embodied, emotional, existences. We have not yet actually explored in this thread the aesthetic/esthetic qualities of human consciousness [I would say that these qualities are also components of the consciousness of many animals on our planet]. Merleau-Ponty wrote in the Phenomenology of Perception that "the imagination is present in the first human perception." Sartre wrote a major book on the imagination's essential role in consciousness:
The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (Routledge Classics) (Volume 40) 1st Edition
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Amazon description: "A cornerstone of Sartre’s philosophy, The Imaginary was first published in 1940. Sartre had become acquainted with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in Berlin and was fascinated by his idea of the 'intentionality of consciousness' as a key to the puzzle of existence. Against this background, The Imaginary crystallized Sartre's worldview and artistic vision. The book is an extended examination of the concepts of nothingness and freedom, both of which are derived from the ability of consciousness to imagine objects both as they are and as they are not – ideas that would drive Sartre's existentialism and entire theory of human freedom."
The text is sampled here, beginning with the table of contents:
The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (Routledge Classics) (Volume 40): Jean-Paul Sartre: 9780415567848: Amazon.com: Books
{Note: before reading parts of Sartre's text in the translation linked here it is important to read the translator's notes in the front matter.}
{Further note: Sartre's daughter's historical introduction to this work is very interesting and informative.}
Last edited:
For clarification of Romanyshyn's title, I should add his disclaimer:
"Now it is time for confession. The title of my essay is a rhetorical device, a piece of hyperbole, designed to capture the attention of the reader, to seduce the reader into the act of reading. Is it true that psychology is useless? Yes! I stand by the claim, but now with this addendum. In another letter written in April 1819, John Keats says, "Call the world if you please 'The Vale of Soul Making.'" "Then," he adds, "you will find out the use of the world" (1973, p.549). The psychologist is not useful in the same way that a heart surgeon with his or her skill is useful. Nor is the psychologist useful in the same way that a politician might be. On the contrary, the psychologist is as useless as a dream, as practical as a fantasy, as helpful as a moment of reverie. And yet, in this practice of uselessness, the psychologist discovers the use of the world, its purpose and true value. The soul of the world makes its aesthetic claim upon us, and we are called into its service, called to shape its sounds into music, its colors into painting, its rhythms into poems, and through our own sufferings to hear its anguished cries.”
"Now it is time for confession. The title of my essay is a rhetorical device, a piece of hyperbole, designed to capture the attention of the reader, to seduce the reader into the act of reading. Is it true that psychology is useless? Yes! I stand by the claim, but now with this addendum. In another letter written in April 1819, John Keats says, "Call the world if you please 'The Vale of Soul Making.'" "Then," he adds, "you will find out the use of the world" (1973, p.549). The psychologist is not useful in the same way that a heart surgeon with his or her skill is useful. Nor is the psychologist useful in the same way that a politician might be. On the contrary, the psychologist is as useless as a dream, as practical as a fantasy, as helpful as a moment of reverie. And yet, in this practice of uselessness, the psychologist discovers the use of the world, its purpose and true value. The soul of the world makes its aesthetic claim upon us, and we are called into its service, called to shape its sounds into music, its colors into painting, its rhythms into poems, and through our own sufferings to hear its anguished cries.”
- Status