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Consciousness and the Paranormal

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It's painfully obvious I lost my meaning in the mechanics of verbalization. Dissected frogs can't tell jokes very well...or...er...we cannot apprehend or grasp our ability to grasp reality through vivisection.

Well, "doch" is kind of a untranslatable German expression ... they also do a kind of inhaled "ja" which is very startling the first time you hear it b/c you think you've shocked them when they are generally agreeing with you . . . I can't think of an exact analogue in English, but in this context, "doch" from Heidegger would be a combination of recognition, approval and encouragement . . . maybe . . . "grok" is as close as it comes but that's a Martian word!
 
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It's painfully obvious I lost my meaning in the mechanics of verbalization. Dissected frogs can't tell jokes very well...or...er...we cannot apprehend or grasp our ability to grasp reality through vivisection.

And I had wanted to reply about losing something when we say it - I've noticed that when words get pulled really tight, then the meaning that slips through is very fine and people don't tend to notice as much as with a looser terminology, also because they have to concentrate on the language . . . so one might be slightly vague on purpose in order that others might notice something important that slipped out. But that's a bit tricky. I suppose a better reason to leave language a little loose is to let it breathe.
 
Think about what it would mean to formulate a definition of the very thing (formal indication) which allows you to find definitions and structures and to overlay that with a relayed message to yourself explaining how you articulate reality to yourself and others. "Reflection" in this context is a too passive metaphor for what is actually happening. When you dwell in a world, you aren't working with a world inside yourself...but are active involved in changing the structures and relations of the very world that others dwell. Your idea of consciousness, of being, of thought wouldn't exist without these "externals." In that sense there is no external or internal "world"--since your own being is part of the very existence you wish to apprehend. If by "living" you work out the relations of yourself to tools, practices and the tools and practices of others, you simultaneously work out what it means to be yourself. This meaning is not an entity abstracted from a not-you--it is the very condition of the possibility of your own awareness.

What you write here makes sense to me; no problem. Not so with your response to Steve [smcder]. But I don't want to put any pressure on you to continue clarifying your ideas on my behalf. Let Being be.
 
It's painfully obvious I lost my meaning in the mechanics of verbalization. Dissected frogs can't tell jokes very well...or...er...we cannot apprehend or grasp our ability to grasp reality through vivisection.

Transcendental Nihilism / Methodological Naturalism[edit]
In Nihil Unbound: Extinction and Enlightenment, Ray Brassier maintains that philosophy has avoided the traumatic idea of extinction, instead attempting to find meaning in a world conditioned by the very idea of its own annihilation. Thus Brassier critiques both the phenomenological and hermeneutic strands of Continental philosophy as well as the vitality of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, who work to ingrain meaning in the world and stave off the “threat” of nihilism. Instead, drawing on thinkers such as Alain Badiou, François Laruelle, Paul Churchland, and Thomas Metzinger, Brassier defends a view of the world as inherently devoid of meaning. That is, rather than avoiding nihilism, Brassier embraces it as the truth of reality. Brassier concludes from his readings of Badiou and Laruelle that the universe is founded on the nothing,[53] but also that philosophy is the "organon of extinction," that it is only because life is conditioned by its own extinction that there is thought at all.[54]

Brassier then defends a radically anti-correlationist philosophy proposing that Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being.

Does that last bit seems to resonate with your ideas?
 
What if in fact there is no subconscious mind at all, and all that is being observed is the totality or expanse of our natural cognitive relationship to consciousness? How do we know that it's not merely the physical portion of ourselves, the organic temporal machine upstairs, the rest of us included, *is* that which* is*, the very nature of that which regulates a very limited relationship to consciousness producing reality specific experience?

Is not the subconscious mind merely a "view"? How can such a view be truthfully substantiated? Even if we (humanity) produce a model explaining cognizant awareness based on Freud's views, do we really have anything substantial apart from the language of mathematics that supports the hypothetical?

This is not meant as an attention getting wrench in the works here in the least. I REALLY don't get this aspect of consciousness research.

Sorry for the late response. The human unconscious is as topic as broad as cosmology, so I paraphrase based on my limited understanding. Apprehending this is a bit like grabbing at smoke that we can see and smell, but whose pervasive shape is always changing and changed in the act of grabbing. I believe the unconscious was originally posited as an explanation for patterned choices and responses we make for reasons of which we are not aware, even after the fact. Perhaps it is an outgrowth or refinement of the arcane theory of our minds being a kind of infinite regression of homunculi inside our heads. This is an apt reminder that all science is mythology in constant refinement. At any rate, you would be correct in stating that it cannot be geometrically or mathematically mapped. It is yet another model produced by inference in observing human behavior.

I am reading over your statement about the organic temporal machine upstairs, and as understand it, see no contradiction between that and classic concepts of the unconscious. I'm not quite sure what you mean my the "totality or expanse of our natural cognitive relationship to consciousness?" I would ask to what consciousness you are referring. I lean in a Jungian direction which sees our personal reality as a kind of floating iceberg with only the tip comprising our immediately accessible self-awareness, resting upon a dynamic personal process (filtered to keep us sane and functioning) which in turn floats on an ocean of infinite information we might dare call the universe. This a rather old and somewhat subjective model and I am probably mangling Jung here as well. But I think that anyone coming away smarting from a heated interpersonal argument will later wonder and be taken somewhat aback by things he or she may have said that have came seemingly out of nowhere, but were craftily targeted to injure. At least I know I have.

So I will lamely fall back on the computer analogy (a poor one since our minds are not so conveniently hierarchical) by likening what we see on our screens to immediate awareness produced by a vast underpinning of higher programming languages sitting on machine code, siting on logic states dependent on the 1 or zero status of logic gates which are in turn dependent on nuts and bolts sub-circuits made up of the most basic of simple components. So where does the information comprising the pictures on our screens actually reside? I would say in none and in all of these things, depending on what level on chooses to analyze. The real technological magic is taking place unseen. The analogy of mind as computer seems the best we currently have. But again, research indicates it to be innately inadequate and flawed.

We do things as individuals: make responses, choices and value judgements in ways that indicate a personal consistency and awareness regulated by a part of our minds of which we are consciously unaware. We demonstrate both "reflexive" real time, and complex calculated behaviors by means of processes of which the conscious "self" is largely unaware.
 
@smcder The impression [of a deeper worldview] comes to me from listening to these lectures repeatedly:

Jordan Peterson on Redemption and Psychology in Christianity | Big Ideas
I didn't catch wind of a deeper worldview, but the lecture was brilliant. I can't thank you enough for introducing me to him.

Among other thoughts, I especially loved his analysis of the symbolism/meaning of ancient sacrifice. Wow. I had been searching for a/the meaning of - particularly blood - sacrifice for a long time.

However, whenever I receive someone's analysis of alleged symbolism, I wonder about the source of the meaning. There is subjective meaning that will be unique to each individual, but Jungians assert that there is objective meaning as well. That is, not just a meaning, but a "the" meaning. Or is there not a "the" meaning?

There is the idea, also, that the subjective meaning of the author may be one/no thing, and that the objective, deeper meaning may be another that escapes him/her. That the author is simply a vessel revealing deeper truth/meaning than even they can comprehend at the time. Beautiful.

I think many religions have cobbled together concepts, practices, and teachings that do bear strong psychological fruit. Much, much deeper than the common sentiment that religion is a "crutch." Indeed, there is plenty of empirical evidence indicating that religious folk are causally happier and mentally healthier than non-religious folk. In the regard, I have always thought Dawkins was a fool.

I'll be watching this lecture again, as well as his others. I'll be grabbing his books as well.
 
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@Jeff Davis

I have been interested in consciousness since I was about 6 years old due to a puzzling sensation that was routinely accompanying by what I call cognitive emergence. This CE consisted of relatively identical and pronounced thoughts that I would get associatively with this sensation. I would be in the act of playing as children do, or caught up in some other activity that I was invested in at the time, when all of sudden out of the blue I would get this feeling, this sensation of profound gratitude accompanied by the realization, "I'm really here, I made it" as if I had arrived at sentience's very front door or something. Strange, but in those moments as I was caught up in bewilderment I knew within myself that there existed a completed oneness of me, almost as if two became one. In reflection I see the "me" as a sentient signature within consciousness resulting in an awakening ID due to my budding cognitive abilities recognizing as much. I was experiencing a completed circuit of signified consciousness.
Wow. That's beautiful!

If that was you consciously realizing you had a you, then I envy you, haha. (That's very Helen Keller-esque and my guess is that there are many other people who have had similar experiences.) I don't recall the moment I acquired self-awareness, but I do remember the first time I read a book. :D It was "Are You My Mother."

I also remember walking in my house one day as a young child and thinking: What's the real difference between inside and outside? There is none. And I spit on the carpet. ... I was a real philosopher, haha.
 
@boomerang

I lean in a Jungian direction which sees our personal reality as a kind of floating iceberg with only the tip comprising our immediately accessible self-awareness, resting upon a dynamic personal process (filtered to keep us sane and functioning) which in turn floats on an ocean of infinite information we might dare call the universe.
Nice.

I would tweak it a bit to say that the "tip" is what we are conscious of at any given moment, and that perhaps there is yet another tip/layer which would be our self-consciousness of that which we are conscious.

What-Is > Unconscious > Conscious > Self-Conscious

@Constance

I was able to find an article which described the filter-theory of consciousness. It is similar to the antenna theory:

The Brain as Filter: On Removing the Stuffing from the Keyhole | Reality Sandwich

Huxley, like Henri Bergson, Ferdinand Schiller, William James, and others before him, believed the brain functions as a filter, normally shutting out perceptions, memories, and thoughts that are not necessary for the survival and reproduction of the organism. Rather than producing consciousness, these observers believed the brain largely eliminates it, diminishing what consciousness is capable of revealing to us. As astrophysicist David Darling says in his book Soul Search, we are conscious not because of the brain, but despite it.4 ...

Frederic W. H. Myers (1843-1901), the British classical scholar, poet, and philosopher, advanced a sophisticated filter theory of brain function that was endorsed by his friend and colleague William James, the Harvard physician and psychologist who is widely considered the founder of American psychology. James, with his superb capacity for metaphor, suggested that the brain acts as a lens or prism that filters, reduces, redirects, or otherwise alters incoming light in a systematic fashion.5 But James didn't consider lenses or prisms as the ultimate metaphor for the brain. As University of Virginia psychologist and consciousness researcher Edward F. Kelly states in his analysis of Myers' views, “Subsequent advocates of transmission or filter models have tended naturally to update this basic picture with reference to emerging technologies such as radio and television” that serve as the filter instead of lenses or prisms.6 ...
The article goes on to describe ways/times in which the normally restrictive filter opens to allow a flood of "experience" through to the individual. What they term "unstuffing the keyhole." They then go on to describe several instances of thinkers/artists being "given" ideas, thoughts, material that they didn't "produce" themselves.

The idea is that there is a source - literally The Source - where all this "knowledge" is and it can be given to us. (The article didn't mention Tesla who seemed to believe this as well.)

I have a (relatively) mundane interpretation of what is going on here. See boomerang's quote above.

That is, the conscious is constantly "receiving" thoughts, ideas, urges, information, etc. from the unconscious. The unconscious is "the source."

We had an extensive conversation about this much earlier in this thread. We talked about various times/mental states in which the interaction - if you will - between the conscious and unconscious is increased - in which the keyhole is unstuffed. I can't find it now, but there is a Youtube video of two comedians talking about how at certain times, material - the best material - just "comes to them" from somewhere and they are blown away, thankful, and reverent.
 
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I also remember walking in my house one day as a young child and thinking: What's the real difference between inside and outside? There is none. And I spit on the carpet. ... I was a real philosopher, haha.

I am assuming your mother promptly disabused you of that surmise......:p

Disabuse:
persuade (someone) that an idea or belief is mistaken.
"he quickly disabused me of my fanciful notions"
disillusion about, undeceive about, set straight on/about, open someone's eyes about, correct on, enlighten on/about, disenchant about, shatter someone's illusions about
 
This is a good podcast of general interest, check out the archives for phenomenology, cosmology, religion and science, literature, art - he covers much ground . . .

in this episode, the first of 2014:

howoldarewe.html

Robert Harrison updates one of his earliest shows with Andrei Linde, found here:

linde_new.html

with this information:

Andrei Linde on the Big Bang and the biggest discovery of all time - FT.com

As Harrison waxed poetic (and he does this beautifully in every opening monologue of the show) about the discovery and its implications - I thought God Himself should blush before such vastness.
 
Wow. That's beautiful!

If that was you consciously realizing you had a you, then I envy you, haha. (That's very Helen Keller-esque and my guess is that there are many other people who have had similar experiences.) I don't recall the moment I acquired self-awareness, but I do remember the first time I read a book. :D It was "Are You My Mother."

I also remember walking in my house one day as a young child and thinking: What's the real difference between inside and outside? There is none. And I spit on the carpet. ... I was a real philosopher, haha.

@Jeff Davis

What seemed precocious to me was the sense of gratitude Jeff described, that seems to go beyond a typical first moment of self-realization.
 
I didn't catch wind of a deeper worldview, but the lecture was brilliant. I can't thank you enough for introducing me to him.

Among other thoughts, I especially loved his analysis of the symbolism/meaning of ancient sacrifice. Wow. I had been searching for a/the meaning of - particularly blood - sacrifice for a long time.

However, whenever I receive someone's analysis of alleged symbolism, I wonder about the source of the meaning. There is subjective meaning that will be unique to each individual, but Jungians assert that there is objective meaning as well. That is, not just a meaning, but a "the" meaning. Or is there not a "the" meaning?

There is the idea, also, that the subjective meaning of the author may be one/no thing, and that the objective, deeper meaning may be another that escapes him/her. That the author is simply a vessel revealing deeper truth/meaning than even they can comprehend at the time. Beautiful.

I think many religions have cobbled together concepts, practices, and teachings that do bear strong psychological fruit. Much, much deeper than the common sentiment that religion is a "crutch." Indeed, there is plenty of empirical evidence indicating that religious folk are causally happier and mentally healthier than non-religious folk. In the regard, I have always thought Dawkins was a fool.

I'll be watching this lecture again, as well as his others. I'll be grabbing his books as well.

However, whenever I receive someone's analysis of alleged symbolism, I wonder about the source of the meaning. There is subjective meaning that will be unique to each individual, but Jungians assert that there is objective meaning as well. That is, not just a meaning, but a "the" meaning. Or is there not a "the" meaning?

Can you expand on this? Objective meaning as in a biological basis for blood sacrifice or other laws in Leviticus such as hygiene and diet?

There is the idea, also, that the subjective meaning of the author may be one/no thing, and that the objective, deeper meaning may be another that escapes him/her. That the author is simply a vessel revealing deeper truth/meaning than even they can comprehend at the time. Beautiful.

Much of Moby Dick I would say falls into this category.

I think many religions have cobbled together concepts, practices, and teachings that do bear strong psychological fruit. Much, much deeper than the common sentiment that religion is a "crutch." Indeed, there is plenty of empirical evidence indicating that religious folk are causally happier and mentally healthier than non-religious folk. In the regard, I have always thought Dawkins was a fool.

I would say religion is the source of concepts, practices and teachings ... (see E.O. Wilson entry at Wikipedia section on religion if you don't believe me, also his own "provisional deism" - though I'd say he's taking Pascal's wager) ... and why reduce it to psychological fruit?

Perhaps one reason for the benefits of religion found in those studies is that it seems to be the default position, unless it's removed - people tend to be religious - Calvin's sensus divinitatis - this underpins some Christian apologetics and is notable in Plantinga's argument that belief in God is properly warranted (and yes, he addresses the "Easter Bunny" objection!) - so it may reflect a healthier psyche to begin with . . . that is speculation of the rankest sort on my part.

I believe Dawkins has bragged that not even Persinger's God Helmet has an effect on him, that he is "tone deaf" to religious experience and yet he talks extensively of awe? Ian McGilchrist states that there seems to be a correlation between autism spectrum and atheism . . . but I wouldn't draw any specific conclusions from this.

In Exodus, God "hardens" Pharoah's heart so that plague's have no effect. Now, this is interesting because the plagues selectively affect Pharoah's people not the Israelites and he has instance after instance that suggests he ought to let Charlton Heston's people go. But, the oringinal Hebrew has been interpreted to be that God allowed Pharoh to harden his heart and as an example of Metonymy, the same way we say "I read Shakespeare" - not literally that God hardened Pharoahs heart - so the story then is about a Pharoah's unwillingness to make the Petersonian sacrifice.
 
What is mathematics about? – James Franklin – Aeon

"People care about the philosophy of mathematics in a way they do not care about, say, the philosophy of accountancy. Perhaps the reason is that the certainty and objectivity of mathematics, its once-and-for-all establishment of rock-solid truths, stands as a challenge to many common philosophical positions. It is not just extreme sceptical views such as postmodernism that have a problem with it. So do all empiricist and naturalist views that hope for a fully ‘scientific’ explanation of reality and our knowledge of it. The problem is not so much that mathematics is true, but that its truths are absolutely necessary, and that the human mind can establish those necessities and understand why they must be so. It is very difficult to explain how a physical brain could do that.

...

Aristotelian realism stands in a difficult relationship with naturalism, the project of showing that all of the world and human knowledge can be explained in terms of physics, biology and neuroscience. If mathematical properties are realised in the physical world and capable of being perceived, then mathematics can seem no more inexplicable than colour perception, which surely can be explained in naturalist terms. On the other hand, Aristotelians agree with Platonists that the mathematical grasp of necessities is mysterious. What is necessary is true in all possible worlds, but how can perception see into other possible worlds? The scholastics, the Aristotelian Catholic philosophers of the Middle Ages, were so impressed with the mind’s grasp of necessary truths as to conclude that the intellect was immaterial and immortal. If today’s naturalists do not wish to agree with that, there is a challenge for them. ‘Don’t tell me, show me’: build an artificial intelligence system that imitates genuine mathematical insight. There seem to be no promising plans on the drawing board."
 
Response to Wolfgang Giegerich’s “The End of
Meaning and the Birth of Man”

John Beebe

John Beebe MD, is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst in practice in San Francisco. He is a past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, where he serves on the teaching faculty. He is the author of Integrity in Depth (1992) and the editor of Terror, Violence and the Impulse to Destroy (2003). A consulting editor to the Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, he was the first American co-editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology and the founding editor of the San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal.
.

I am appreciative that Wolfgang Giegerich, with his keen, philosophically
trained mind, has offered us such an intelligent critique of Jung’s psychology. I feel it to be as important, and as timely, as Jung’s critique of psychoanalysis was in 1913. Just as Jungian psychotherapists who elected to go on with their version of psychoanalysis had to take the critique Jung offered of the Freudian school seriously, contemporary Jungian psychotherapists must really try to integrate the insights offered by Giegerich if they are to be conscious of the intellectual and emotional choices they have made in attempting to carry a Jungian depth psychology forward. This is not to say, as a certain reading of Giegerich’s sometime polemic might dictate, that the practice of Jungian analysis has lost its raison d’être and can only henceforward be an anachronism. Rather, it’s to admit that those of us who want to go on being Jungians can no longer hide behind notions of the unconscious and of the eternal verities encoded as archetypes to avoid looking at the conditions under which such theoretical magic boxes became necessary and the problems Jung was attempting to solve by offering such intellectual gambits to us. As I understand Dr. Giegerich’s argument, he is saying that the promise of ‘meaning’ implicit in the Jungian project of embracing and learning from the unconscious conceals the wish to be let off the hook of threatening aspects of the modern condition that in fact are not susceptible to alteration, even by this alchemical stratagem.
I am not certain how much of Jung’s thinking Giegerich himself would prefer his readers to retain within the psychology he would find suitable were they
to accept their modernity. The Hegelian goal of Giegerich’s approach to Jung can
be found in a word that recurs throughout the essay: sublation. In his book
The Soul's Logical Life, Giegerich explains that “‘sublation’ is the translation of the Hegelian term Aufhebung in the threefold sense of (a) negating and canceling, (b) rescuing and retaining, (c) raising to a new level” (Giegerich, 1998, p. 67). I found on the Internet a passage that seems to me to unpack the intent of this term, in a book applying this thinking process to Hegel’s own philosophy:

Hegel—definitely one of the greatest teachers of mankind—taught us that if we want to refute a philosophy, we cannot do so from “outside” by arbitrary arguments but through unfolding and developing its own immanent and internal contradictions, which it is not yet aware about. (Stojanow, 2001)

Jung, though developing in his essay on the transcendent function something that looks very much like Hegel’s dialectic, seems to have adopted the aversion toward Hegel of a quite another philosophical ancestor, Schopenhauer, and to have written Hegel’s philosophy off as far too speculative, tendentious in his
vocabulary, and ungrounded in the reality of everyday experience. Within this
antipathy for the great German philosopher of mind, I sense the clash of psycho-
logical attitudes for which Jung gave us a typological vocabulary—the irrational
dislike of someone (Jung) accustomed to using intuition in an introverted way
(finding the soul within) toward someone (Hegel) who deploys his intuition in an
extraverted intuitive way (to find the movement of the world spirit). This dislike
of the style of Hegel’s vision is coupled with a parallel psychological antagonism
toward how rationality is configured in this same historical figure. Toward Hegel,
Jung levels the suspicion that someone who prefers what Jung called “extravert-
ed thinking” (and in my view, this was Jung’s most natural—and helpful—way of
deploying his “thinking function”) is all too predictably likely to direct toward
someone who develops his ideas in a more “introverted thinking” way (Hegel).
From this same typological perspective, it is only natural to ask whether in
siding so decisively with Hegel and against Jung in the matter of what Giegerich
calls “the soul’s logical life,” he has not taken a corollary aim at Jung’s introvert-
ed intuition and extraverted thinking. I freely confess that I myself am limited in
my ability to answer this question because (from the admittedly limited perspec-
tive of Jungian typological analysis) I am more like Hegel, and (I think) Giegerich,
in preferring to use my intuition in an extraverted manner and my thinking in an
introverted way. I have always assumed that my tendency to look at the more
dogmatic Jungian formulations with a certain asperity was on the basis of this
type difference on my part from Jung. But a closer look at this paper convinces me
that Giegerich, to the extent that he is looking critically at how Jung’s thought gets
stuck in what I, not he, am calling the “introverted thinking function” and
“extraverted intuitive function,” is actually looking at the failures of these func-
tions to “function” for Jung, that is, by recognizing and critiquing the limits of
their own approach to soul so that his true psychology can emerge. In other
words, it is because Jung is straying beyond his normal type boundaries that a
shadow problem is created where there need not have been one.

The method of analysis Jung gave us in psychological types anatomizes
thinking into its moments, and from that perspective it is Jung when he is using
introverted thinking that Giegerich is taking to task here, not Jung the extraverted
thinker, cheerfully and generously creating categories by which the psyche can be
recognized. It’s only the introverted thinking function in Jung that insists, when it
takes over in its dogmatic voice, that these categories are “within” us and eter-
nal—when in fact they are only remembered from some former moment of soul
living its logical life in the world. . . .

“In-ness,” Giegerich makes clear, can only be imitated nowadays, because
without an overarching mythological perspective accepted by everyone, the way
we think about our lives is irrevocably out, in the sense that we are not “in” any-
thing, and nothing is “in” us. We can, however, think—and now I am using
Giegerich’s terminology, not Jung’s. For Giegerich, who explains this more fully in

The Soul’s Logical Life, thinking is not a function of consciousness; it is consciousness, the soul’s way of being fully out there in the world. For him, the awkward
moments come when thought is replaced by one of its attributes—and that is what
happens when Jung, having implicitly promised not to do so, gets into one of his
Jungianist modes, insisting that life has to mean something, and something particular, as if it were not enough to engage with life as it is. I think, with Giegerich,
this is Jung the senex speaking (he himself called the wise old man “the archetype
of meaning”), and I think, also with Giegerich, that we can move Jungian thought,
and Jungian thinking, past that moment of itself into something more related to
life as it is without any real contradiction of our identity as Jungians. . . .


{the whole text is only about four pages long and well worth reading to gain an understanding of major issues being debated concerning Jungian psychology in our time.}

http://www.junginstitute.org/pdf_files/JungV6N1p95-98.pdf
 
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Transcendental Nihilism / Methodological Naturalism[edit]
In Nihil Unbound: Extinction and Enlightenment, Ray Brassier maintains that philosophy has avoided the traumatic idea of extinction, instead attempting to find meaning in a world conditioned by the very idea of its own annihilation. Thus Brassier critiques both the phenomenological and hermeneutic strands of Continental philosophy as well as the vitality of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, who work to ingrain meaning in the world and stave off the “threat” of nihilism. Instead, drawing on thinkers such as Alain Badiou, François Laruelle, Paul Churchland, and Thomas Metzinger, Brassier defends a view of the world as inherently devoid of meaning. That is, rather than avoiding nihilism, Brassier embraces it as the truth of reality. Brassier concludes from his readings of Badiou and Laruelle that the universe is founded on the nothing,[53] but also that philosophy is the "organon of extinction," that it is only because life is conditioned by its own extinction that there is thought at all.[54]

Brassier then defends a radically anti-correlationist philosophy proposing that Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being.

Does that last bit seems to resonate with your ideas?


I think the sophistication of this view is currently beyond the focal point I'm on so far. Though I have read Metzinger's "Ego Tunnel." Fascinating stuff.

Edit: not so much with grounding or picking sides with Non-Being as opposed to being..but recognizing that the being/non-being framework is a residue. ..not fundamental. It's what we get out of being (which technically presumes it's opposite)...not what being itself is or is not. I take a different route...it doesn't matter whether the universe is either a plenum or is void of meaning. I.e. meaning is what I am when I am coping with my situations and dwelling in the world.

Actually this is an interesting question. ..does it matter whether the universe is meaningful? If it does then the universe is meaningful....If it does not then the universe is still meaningful. We forgot that we slipped the thing we were looking for covertly when we asked the question.


Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk
 
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Here is a somewhat longer but clearer essay on Giegerich's thinking:

Today's Magnum Opus of the Soul
Last Updated on Sunday, 27 October 2013 20:37
Written by Dolores E. Brien
In an essay originally published in The Round Table Review, Dolores Brien explores Wolfgang Giegerich's challenging reexamination of the individuation process and the true "great work" of the contemporary soul.

For some obscure reason the link cannot be copied and pasted, so here is the whole paper.

On Wolfgang Giegerich'’s "Opposition of ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’—Psychology’s Basic Fault: Reflections on Today’s Magnum Opus of the Soul."
Dolores E. Brien

This essay, discussed below, was the subject of an on-line Jung-Seminar sponsored in October,1998 by the C. G. Jung Page and The Round Table Review. The author, Wolfgang Giegerich is a Jungian training analyst with a private practice near Münich, Germany. He is author of The Soul’s Logical Life:Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology as well as many other books and articles in German and English. “Dialectics and Analytical Psychology” (Spring Publications) is the subject of his most recent work in English.


The end of individuation

Those who were present at the Hillman festival some years ago will remember how well Wolfgang Giegerich succeeded in agitating that audience with his provocative talk on bloody sacrifice. In his article “Opposition of ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’ — Psychology’s Basic Fault: Reflections on Today’s of the Soul,” Giegerich now strikes a blow at the very heart of Jungian psychology. What he has to say will be painful, he warns us, and so it proves to be. Despite that warning, however, this essay deserves to be read and pondered by anyone interested in the present situation and the future of Jungian psychology.

Giegerich’s theme is that the individuation process “is psychologically obsolete, truly a thing of the past.” It belongs to “historical psychology” rather than to the psychology of the present. Even if we still engage in this process — and he does not deny its residual value or effectiveness for individuals — “it is disconnected and disengaged from what psychologically is really going on in our age and is suspended within that self-contained bubble that we call our personal psychology.” The life of the psyche is somewhere else; it is in the world. We have forgotten or, more likely, avoided the fact that the psyche is not in us, but that we are in psyche. The magnum opus, therefore, is taking place not in the analytic session or in some alchemical vessel, but “in the world out there, in what belongs to the public domain.” Let me attempt to outline, to the best of my understanding, how Giegerich develops his thesis.

Psychology is about understanding, not curing

First, Giegerich asserts, and this is of central importance to his thesis, that psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are not meant to cure, to heal, to improve, or to make better. If such should happen, it is as a fortunate spin-off, but it is not the essential purpose of psychology. That purpose is primarily analysis, gaining cognition, “doing justice to the psychological phenomena by penetrating to their innermost core and by comprehending them.” To achieve this purpose we have to leave behind our personal feelings and needs and pay attention instead to the “‘objective’ intentionality” of psychology itself. If we persist in holding on to the “fantasy” of psychology as “the rescue of the soul” then we can only do so by acknowledging that the “rescue of one’s own soul consists in the rescue of the world.” There is a dialectic at work here between the “‘subjective’ intentionality” of the individual and the “‘objective’ intentionality” of psychology rather than a simple opposition between individual and collective.

Anima mundi is obsolete

Jung himself, Giegerich points out, never put the individuation process in opposition to the world. He quotes Jung: “This self, however, is the world” (CW 9i: 46). Jungians have not fully understood this or paid much attention to it, and consequently a one-sided approach to the individuation process has developed. For this reason, Hillman and others introduced the idea of the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and stressed the need of “working towards the development of a new cosmology.” But Giegerich claims that this too is as anachronistic as the idea of individuation. Although it makes us “feel good,” and evokes a kind of nostalgia and even “precious promise,” the notion of the anima mundi takes away from the “real psychological necessities of today and lures us away from the soul’s real situation.”

Christianity as the causal factor

Ever since Christianity took hold, it is impossible to locate “soul” in nature. The aim of Christianity has been to “overcome” the world and to replace it with a “new” soul or world. Giegerich cites a passage from Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” in which the disappearance of elves, fairies, goblins — all the little people — is mourned. As far back as the 14th century and probably before, it was evident that nature was no longer “a place invested with autonomous meaning . . .” It no longer was “ensouled” and so had lost its sacredness. The idea of the world as anima mundi has mainly historical meaning, as belonging to ancient cultures, but for our own time and place it is merely “an expression of nostalgia.” What has taken the place of the anima mundi is physics. (He defines physics as “a term that here includes all natural sciences, just as our real psychotherapy of nature or the world is called technology.”) To try to resuscitate the notion of an anima mundi would not only be futile, but wrong. To do so “just because physics and technology do not fulfill our old ideas of what is soulful” only exacerbates an already existing division between the individual and the world.

The changed meaning of what is soulful

Today “all the passion of the soul” goes into physics and technology. “This is where the real action is.” And precisely because this passion is so compelling, it is wrong to deny it as being psychological or ‘soulful’. But, Giegerich explains, what soul and soulfulness mean are no longer what they once meant. What is required, therefore, is a new definition of what is ‘soulful’ and the only way we can achieve this is by “allowing ourselves to be taught by the real movement of the soul itself.” To begin with we have to make room for physics and technology as belonging to “our soul work.” We have to develop a consciousness that is able to recognize “the soul where we least expect it and so far have loathed to see it.” (Italics mine.)

If we do not make this attempt and cling to an outmoded view of the world and an outmoded view of individuation, we “disown an essential part of today’s magnum opus.” Both individuation and anima mundi are a part of “historical” psychology and no longer relevant to what is actually taking place today in the world. He cites the poignant story Jung told about the African medicine man who bemoaned the fact that his power as interpreter of dreams and signs had been taken away from him. His authority had been replaced by the District Commissioner. This old man represented “the subterraneously spreading collapse of an obsolete and forever irrevocable world.”

The world we live in today

Giegerich then turns to the present day economy, which he says is such that it “makes the industrial revolution look harmless.” He points to the by now familiar phenomena of our economy: the rationalizaton of industry through continuous downsizing and restructuring — and he could have added as well, merging and the creation of all-devouring monopolies. A devastating consequence is that workers have become “transit material.” Although different from the slaves and serfs of the past, today’s worker who has become accustomed to think of himself or herself as having “rights” and an inherent “dignity” requiring respect, is now becoming redundant. Indeed, the whole purpose of our economy today is to render human beings superfluous. They are necessary only if they satisfy the needs of the economy. The economy, on the other hand, exists not for the sake of human beings, but for the “maximization of profits.”

Here Giegerich makes a huge leap in his thinking, demanding much from his readers, who will feel ill-prepared for what is coming, despite what he has been saying up till now. He asserts it is the maximizing of profits that has become the magnum opus, the soul work, of our time. He sees the “bottom line” as:

. . .the highest good, the summum bonum. It is the only exclusive value prevailing today: it has no other values, no other suns, before or beside it. It is an end, nay the end in itself. It is our real God, our real Self. This Copernican Revolution is not bloody, but what is happening because of it is terrifying. Its violence is logical or psychological, we could also say metaphysical.


Globalization, not individuation

In this world in which the pursuit of profit is the highest good, there is no place for individuation, nor, Giegerich says, should a place be made for it. It would be beside the point because this process is “totally disconnected from what is going on. Not individualization but globalization is the soul’s magnum opus of today.” What does he mean by globalization? It is “the elimination of personal identity in its own right” and “the subjugation of everything individual under the one great abstract goal of profit maximization: profit must increase, but I must decrease.” Being, in other words, has been surrendered to “the logic of money.”

We are, according to Giegerich, at a new level. We are defining a new standard about what the soul is or is not. It is indisputable to him that soul is out there, in the world, that ensouling is taking place in public — in the economy, in technology, and in the natural sciences. This event is no less a mystery even though it is taking place for all to see. This is the magnum opus, which is no longer taking place in the individual experience. Not that our individuation is not a work; it is, but small scale, more like an opus parvum, a little work. This is not personal, not individual or even collective — if we take collective to mean a “collection of individuals.” It has a dynamism of its own which has nothing to do with human beings. Our “historical” psychology up till now has been about human beings, but not about the soul itself. He states:

As the human being is dethroned from the central place around which psychological life allegedly has to revolve, the psyche can finally in truth be recognized as Jung tried to see it: as objective or autonomous psyche, or as I would prefer to say, as the logical life of the soul, a life that is its own end (even though it lives through us and needs us to give expression to it). Jung said that we are in the psyche, the psyche is not in us.


Anticipating objections

In fairness to Giegerich, it should be clear that he is not proposing these ideas because he thinks they are right or desirable. This is not a program he is advocating. What he is trying to do is articulate what he sees as his “answer to life, to our situation, to our reality,” Just as Jung tried to give “his answer to life and reality as they were conditioned in our 20th century.” By “answer” here, Giegerich is not saying he has the answer or answers, in the sense of solution, but rather offers his understanding of the situation. Individuation, as Giegerich sees it, can still be meaningful for individuals. He does not doubt that there are dreams and personal experiences (such as an awareness of the divine in nature) which carry “an undeniable sense of reality and conviction that is not invalidated by any rational argument.” What he does question is how

. . . all psychological importance is assumed to rest with our archetypal inner experience, our dreams, the imaginal, while what is going on in the world at large is regarded as part of the collective consciousness, which implies that it is of a psychologically more superficial nature and thus of less weight and meaning.

That this should be the case — the opposing of the inner life to the collective consciousness — is the result of another opposition, that between two realms of experience. One of these is the personal process which consists of our dreams, feelings, and visions (which may be archetypal but which are private even if we may decide to share them). The other experience is public, that which is visible to us, is based on common knowledge, and is about everyday concerns. These two kinds of experience, says Giegerich, are distinguished “according to the source of knowledge” or “locus of experience.” The personal process is said to deal with the real mysteries of the soul, while the public experience has to do with the ego’s needs and function and is profane, secular, commonplace. From this perspective whatever is public, politics or economics, for instance, has little meaning for the soul, while what may be hidden can be archetypal and numinous.

Unfortunately, asserts Giegerich, Jungians have assigned the magnum opus to personal, private experience and denied it to the world outside the personal. But he concludes that there is “no a priori reason” why the magnum opus should be confined to “the consulting room or in some other alchemical vessel” and “why it could not take place in the world out there, in the public domain.” He cites Goethe, who speaks of the “blatant mystery,” that is, one which is both public and mysterious. This is analogous to Jung’s comment about the ego. It is known and yet is also “an unfathomably dark body.”

To claim, as Jungians have, that what is inner is deep and what is outer is superficial is a psychological trap. Even if that is what we actually experience, that experience is, nevertheless, obsolete; it belongs to “historical psychology.” Antiques, he says acerbically, have a “lot of soul value,” but they belong to the past. Chaucer and the old African medicine man were at least honest in acknowledging this, but we are not as honest. “All we want to see is our feelings, is that the images produced by the individuation process arouse in us deeply fulfilling personal feelings of meaning and conviction. Because we feel this, we insist that they still must be true.”

Paying attention

Some will find what Giegerich has to say outrageous or offensive because he attacks what seems to be the very heart of Jungian psychology. That is bad enough, they will say; but worse, he replaces what he has demolished with his own “answer” or assumptions for which he does not provide much evidence. This complaint is understandable, but it would be a pity if the reader left it there and did not give Giegerich’s ideas the attention they merit. At the outset of his argument, he defined psychology and psychotherapy as giving attention to, listening to, and going to the depths of what is being analyzed. Curing or healing may occur as a result, but it is not the primary intention of either psychology or psychotherapy. Many will dispute this, but I am reminded here of what Jungian analyst and author James Hollis frequently includes in any talk he gives or book he writes because he regards it as so essential: in its original meaning, the word ‘therapy’ (Gr. therapeuin) meant paying attention to. Hollis interprets it further as “attending the silence,” “waiting upon the darkness.” What will cure or heal, if it happens at all, comes out of the waiting upon and the attending to, which is the essential work.

Although there is certainly a sense of “waiting upon the darkness” in much of what Giegerich has written, I detect a glimmering light as well. In truth my instinctive reaction is that he is on to something momentous which, while it may be painful, as he said it would be, holds the promise of a fresh burst of life and a new direction for depth psychology, providing we are willing to give it the attention it requires. This does not mean that I do not have difficulties with some of his assertions.

The autonomous psyche and the magnum opus

Jung said: “The collective unconscious stands for the objective psyche, the personal unconscious for the subjective psyche.” Giegerich builds his argument for the magnum opus of the world upon Jung’s idea of the objective or autonomous psyche, which he refers to “as the logical life of the soul, a life that is its own end.”

Jung states that the “objective psyche is something alien even to the conscious mind through which it expresses itself.” (CW, 12, para. 44) He further states that the objective psyche is compensatory to the conscious mind, but that it is also “independent in the highest degree.” It is “an autonomous psychic entity; any efforts to drill it are only apparently successful and moreover, are harmful to consciousness. It is and remains beyond the reach of subjective, arbitrary control, in a realm where nature and her secrets can be neither improved upon nor perverted, where we can listen but not meddle.” (CW, 12, para. 51) It is “alien even to the conscious mind through which it expresses itself.” The objective psyche has, according to Jung, its own goal which it will pursue independently without need of any prompting from outside itself. This goal which “promises to heal, to make whole, is at first strange beyond all measure to the conscious mind, so that it can find entry only with the greatest difficulty.”(CW 12, para 3328).

Having drawn on the analogy of alchemy, Jung, as Giegerich sees it, was mistaken in assigning the magnum opus of the alchemists to the individual. In fact, it occurs not in the individual but in the world. Even for the alchemists the work was not personal but cultural although Giegerich admits “the person through whom the Work expressed itself figures in the particular ‘colouring’ of the result.” The magnum opus belongs to the objective psyche. That this should be strange to us or alien is not surprising, for that is, indeed, the character of the objective psyche. This is why he rightly warns us, as Jung had, that this shift of the focus from the private to the public psyche will be so difficult, and why we will resist having to do it.

Giegerich claims baldly that the magnum opus of our time is “maximum profitization,” or “the bottom line.” This idea shocks because we assume that the goal the collective unconscious (objective psyche) seeks is, as Jung said, “to make whole.” Do we attribute a goodness and benignity to the goal of the magnum opus that perhaps it does not have? Perhaps it is true, as some have suspected, that there is something in the psyche that wishes us harm and not good. Maybe it is arbitrary and ultimately soul-less, or as Giegrich proposes, it is a new level of soul-fulness which as yet we cannot recognize. Or is it that there is an unknown good that the collective unconscious drives us towards, and this unknown good is merely symbolized by the maximizing of profit?

I presume Giegerich would say to all of this, we just don’t know. All we can do is pay attention to what is happening and try to understand it without judging it. The problem with psychology, as he sees it, is that even if it would acknowledge that the magnum opus of today is the bottom line, “it has to disparage it as a wrong development, has to deny its origin in the soul, deny that it is the present form of the soul’s symbolic life.”

The magnum opus is all around us

In reality this process (the magnum opus of the maximization of profits) is “all around us, as our absolute; it is the medium or element of our existence, much like the air is the element of the human organism’s existence, and it is the God to which we sacrifice what we hold most dear.” It seems, moreover, that its goal is to render human beings redundant. For Giegerich, this represents a new Copernican revolution in that the human being is “dethroned from the central place around which the psychological life allegedly has to revolve.” The psyche “can finally in truth be recognized, as Jung tried to see it: as objective or autonomous psyche, or as I would prefer to say, as the logical life of the soul, a life that is its own end (even though it lives through us and needs us to give expression to it). Jung said that we are in the psyche, the psyche is not in us.” Not to recognize the autonomous psyche for what it is, is to attempt to force the psyche into “a mold,” into “a sort of appendix” and to “subordinate” it so that “the notion of the soul and of psychological life, cannot be released into its own so as to be given the chance of becoming truly psychological.”

We find this telos of the psyche “brutal,” and because it “destroys what we considered to be part of soulful human existence, because it violates our values and expectations, because it brings about the subjugation of life under the principle of money, it sweeps away much, if not all, of what gives meaning to life.” For this reason, we want to fight against it, to “compensate” for it. Giegerich, however, will have none of what he calls “the moralistic fallacy.” Instead of building a defense against it, we should be “establishing a conscious, knowing relationship to the phenomenon.” At this stage, he says in effect, we do not know what we are up against. Therefore, it behooves us to withhold our moral judgment, which would stand in the way of our being able to understand what is going on, to understand “the order of its magnitude and its psychological significance. A premature moral judgment is unfortunately made in defense of the ego which seeks to retain its place at the center, unaware or unwilling to admit that it has already been dislodged. This, it seems to me, is at the heart of his argument and one which deserves the closest attention and openness.

Some reflections

When Giegerich tells us to leave judgment aside until we have time to attend to this phenomenon, to comprehend it on its own terms, I can agree with him. But I wonder about his conclusion, in reference to the maximization of profits in the corporate world, that no one is to blame or that: “It is a development that engulfs us with compelling necessity, and has to be likened more to an elementary force of nature than to a deliberate human act.” I also wonder when he says that the maximization of profit has occurred “by no means because of the personal greed of those who profit from this profit.” These claims must also be examined before we concede that the human being is obsolete and therefore, no longer responsible for what has happened or is happening now.

In this connection, a passage from Jung on the objective psyche, which I quote in part, is particularly illuminating:

The story of the Temptation clearly reveals the nature of the psychic power with which Jesus came into collision: it was the power-intoxicated devil of the prevailing Caesarian psychology that led him into dire temptation in the wilderness. This devil was the objective psyche that held all the peoples of the Roman Empire under its sway, and that is why it promised Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth, as if it were trying to make a Caesar of him. Obeying the inner call of his vocation, Jesus voluntarily exposed himself to the assaults of the imperialistic madness that filled everyone, conqueror and conquered alike. In this way he recognized the nature of the objective psyche which had plunged the whole world into misery and had begotten a yearning for salvation that found expression even in the pagan poets. Far from suppressing or allowing himself to be supressed by this psychic onslaught, he let it act on him consciously, and assimilated it. Thus was the world-conquering Caesarism transformed into spiritual kingship, and the Roman Empire into the universal kingdom of God that was not of this world. (CW 17, Development of Personality, para. 309.)

Jung identifies the objective psyche with the “power-intoxicated devil of the prevailing Caesarian psychology.” We could try substituting here “the power-intoxicating devil” of the prevailing bottom line psychology. What did Jesus do to avoid falling into the temptations? First of all, he remained faithful to what was deepest and most essential to his being. Jung calls it “the inner call of his vocation.” We might call it his personal, subjective psyche. Having done this, what does he do but leave himself vulnerable and “exposed” to the attacks of the “imperialistic madness that filled everyone, conqueror and conquered alike.” Substitute the profit maximization madness that fills everyone, conqueror (the corporations) or conquered (the consumers). Jung says, Jesus did not suppress it, but let this “psychic onslaught” “act on him consciously and assimilated it.” This is an amazing claim, and it seems to me this is exactly what Giegerich urges us to do in the face of the apparent “madness”of the objective psyche today. What does Jung mean here, or Giegerich for that matter? One would guess that we at least, if not Jesus, have already been assimilated by the conquerors. Clearly, this is an idea which cannot be just asserted but has to be challenged and explained more clearly.
Jesus’ transformation of Caesarism meant the establishment of the “universal kingdom of God that was not of this world.” This returns us to Giegerich’s contention early on in his essay that it is Christianity and its purpose to overcome this world and to seek instead a new world, that brought an end to the possibility of an anima mundi, such as the ancients knew. The irony is that this drive to “overcome the world” and to find a “new world,” is being realized today not by Christianity but by technology. For this reason, I ask if it is not technology, rather than profit maximization, which is the true magnum opus of our time? As Giegerich himself points out, that is where the passion is. Since the drive for profits on such a global scale today is inconceivable without technology, is it not possible that the drive for profit is itself a psychological excrescence of technology? But I also ask whether Giegerich, or anyone else for that matter, can really define for us what the magnum opus of the collective unconscious is at this time or whether, in fact, it remains to be discovered. If I read Jung and Giegerich correctly, this is independent of and precedes our discovery of what its goal or telos might be.

This process needs us

If Giegerich, at times, seems to say there is nothing we can do about it except to try to understand it, this is not really what he intends. At the end of his article, he states with the force of absolute conviction :

We must not dissociate ourselves from what is happening, whatever it may be. On the contrary, much as Jung said about God that he needs us for His becoming conscious, this process needs us, needs our heart, our feeling, our imaginative attention and rigorous thinking effort so as to have a chance to become instilled with mind, with feeling, with soul.

We should not leave it as something that we allow to happen apart from us. We have to bring our consciousness to bear upon it. “It must, as it were, be reborn through the soul and in the soul” and through that will come our “real comprehension.” This means letting ourselves suffer it, to be open towards it, however painful it may be for us to do so, without being either sentimental or merely subjective. He concludes by saying that this understanding will come about through “a slow process of painful experiences.” It cannot remain just an idea in our mind, but it must have “inscribed itself into us.” As Jung said about Jesus’ temptation in the desert, which Giegerich’s plea echoes, we have to let it act on us consciously in order to assimilate it, even if we cannot know, and even dread, the outcome.

“Opposition of ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’—Psychology’s Basic Fault: Reflections on Today’s Magnum Opus of the Soul” by Wolfgang Giegerich was published in Harvest, Journal for Jungian Studies, 1996, V. 42, No. 2, pp. 7-27.

“​
 
@Soupie However, whenever I receive someone's analysis of alleged symbolism, I wonder about the source of the meaning. There is subjective meaning that will be unique to each individual, but Jungians assert that there is objective meaning as well. That is, not just a meaning, but a "the" meaning. Or is there not a "the" meaning?

@smcder Can you expand on this? Objective meaning as in a biological basis for blood sacrifice or other laws in Leviticus such as hygiene and diet?
Objective = Collective Unconscious versus Subjective = Individual Unconscious

When a Jungian says something such as "sacrifice" has a certain symbolic meaning X, how do they determine whether that's 1) their personal, subjective, conscious meaning colored by their own culture/experience, 2) the collective, shared/objective, unconscious (or maybe conscious) meaning of a group of people colored by their culture, or 3) a deeper, objective, unconscious, biologically-innate, meaning shared by all humans.

@smcder I would say religion is the source of concepts, practices and teachings ... why reduce it to psychological fruit?
I would say the human psyche is the source of concepts, practices, and teachings. They are created by the human psyche, for the human psyche.
 
@Constance

The autonomous psyche and the magnum opus

Jung said: “The collective unconscious stands for the objective psyche, the personal unconscious for the subjective psyche.” Giegerich builds his argument for the magnum opus of the world upon Jung’s idea of the objective or autonomous psyche, which he refers to “as the logical life of the soul, a life that is its own end

Jung states that the “objective psyche is something alien even to the conscious mind through which it expresses itself.” (CW, 12, para. 44) He further states that the objective psyche is compensatory to the conscious mind, but that it is also “independent in the highest degree.” It is “an autonomous psychic entity; any efforts to drill it are only apparently successful and moreover, are harmful to consciousness. It is and remains beyond the reach of subjective, arbitrary control, in a realm where nature and her secrets can be neither improved upon nor perverted, where we can listen but not meddle.” (CW, 12, para. 51) It is “alien even to the conscious mind through which it expresses itself.” The objective psyche has, according to Jung, its own goal which it will pursue independently without need of any prompting from outside itself. This goal which “promises to heal, to make whole, is at first strange beyond all measure to the conscious mind, so that it can find entry only with the greatest difficulty.”(CW 12, para 3328).

Having drawn on the analogy of alchemy, Jung, as Giegerich sees it, was mistaken in assigning the magnum opus of the alchemists to the individual. In fact, it occurs not in the individual but in the world. Even for the alchemists the work was not personal but cultural although Giegerich admits “the person through whom the Work expressed itself figures in the particular ‘colouring’ of the result.” The magnum opus belongs to the objective psyche. That this should be strange to us or alien is not surprising, for that is, indeed, the character of the objective psyche. This is why he rightly warns us, as Jung had, that this shift of the focus from the private to the public psyche will be so difficult, and why we will resist having to do it.

Giegerich claims baldly that the magnum opus of our time is “maximum profitization,” or “the bottom line.” This idea shocks because we assume that the goal the collective unconscious (objective psyche) seeks is, as Jung said, “to make whole.” Do we attribute a goodness and benignity to the goal of the magnum opus that perhaps it does not have? Perhaps it is true, as some have suspected, that there is something in the psyche that wishes us harm and not good. Maybe it is arbitrary and ultimately soul-less, or as Giegrich proposes, it is a new level of soul-fulness which as yet we cannot recognize. Or is it that there is an unknown good that the collective unconscious drives us towards, and this unknown good is merely symbolized by the maximizing of profit?
Hmm.

I may be missing something, but isn't this thinking captured in the domain of Evolutionary Psychology? The collective unconscious/objective psyche was forged over billions of years. The "goal" has always been "maximizing profits" where profits equal survival. The bottom line is survival. The "goal" the objective psyche is pursuing is survival.

Now, I believe there are some differentiated structures of the objective human psyche, and so far as I have found, Self-Determination Theory captures these best.
 
Objective = Collective Unconscious versus Subjective = Individual Unconscious
...
I would say the human psyche is the source of concepts, practices, and teachings. They are created by the human psyche, for the human psyche.

I would say religion is the source of concepts, practices and teachings ... why reduce it to psychological fruit?

The Gospel According to Soupie
I would say the human psyche is the source of concepts, practices, and teachings. They are created by the human psyche, for the human psyche.

Preach it, Brother Soupie, preach it!

I don't see the conflict in the two statements? You said religion has several benefits, including physical health? And wouldn't the evolutionary mythos say religious structures predate the human?

E. O. Wilson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Hmm.

I may be missing something, but isn't this thinking captured in the domain of Evolutionary Psychology? The collective unconscious/objective psyche was forged over billions of years. The "goal" has always been "maximizing profits" where profits equal survival. The bottom line is survival. The "goal" the objective psyche is pursuing is survival.

Now, I believe there are some differentiated structures of the objective human psyche, and so far as I have found, Self-Determination Theory captures these best.

I'm surprised EP hasn't come up before - it had tremendous popular appeal at one time.

See also the SEP write-up as a possible balance to Wikipedia:
Evolutionary Psychology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
I like SEP or any other primary source over Wikipedia when available because you have an author responsible for the content, in this case:

Stephen M. Downes<[email protected]>
STEPHEN M DOWNES - Research - Faculty Profile - The University of Utah

Wikipedia is a great starting point but its collaborative nature is its strength and its weakness - in general, I've noticed there isn't a good balance in terms of criticism of a position and I posted something recently on some alleged systematic bias within Wikipedia. Unfortunately it's pushed traditional encyclopedias out.

"Evolutionary psychology is one of many biologically informed approaches to the study of human behavior. Along with cognitive psychologists, evolutionary psychologists propose that much, if not all, of our behavior can be explained by appeal to internal psychological mechanisms. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations—products of natural selection—that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive and reproduce. To understand the central claims of evolutionary psychology we require an understanding of some key concepts in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Philosophers are interested in evolutionary psychology for a number of reasons.

For philosophers of science —mostly philosophers of biology—evolutionary psychology provides a critical target. There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise. For philosophers of mind and cognitive science evolutionary psychology has been a source of empirical hypotheses about cognitive architecture and specific components of that architecture. Philosophers of mind are also critical of evolutionary psychology but their criticisms are not as all-encompassing as those presented by philosophers of biology. Evolutionary psychology is also invoked by philosophers interested in moral psychology both as a source of empirical hypotheses and as a critical target."
 
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