Matt my friend,
Please be assured that I seek only to clarify; nothing here is about winning or losing. With that in mind let me attempt to clarify my position a bit in the hope that we can all find common ground. I always learn when I read what you write.
Dear Kafiri,
I feel exactly the same way. I think the most (and maybe best) we can ask of a debate or argument is that we individually come to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our own ideas. I will argue ferociously for the theories I'm putting forth, as they are the sum total of my personal (and experiential) attempts so far to understand myself and the world I live in. I also believe that the value of any idea is in its argument, in its ability to make itself understandable and credible. But I also recognize that I stand only to gain from differences of opinion.
For better or for worse, my position is one of defense for the ideas I am trying on for size. I have no interest in conversion. In fact, I am a very mulish person and would not likely be satisfied with either "winning" or "losing" a debate. When I wrestle with another person's ideas (as I have been trying to do with Giegerich's here in this thread), my goal is to understand how they came by that idea, how it originated in that person's own universe. Why does Giegerich need to believe in the containment of psychology, for instance? It isn't because it is "just simply right." Our ideas on these speculative things are never "just simply right." They always have a need behind them.
For me, my ideas address a need to understand the psyche and the human being without being overly hindered by the egoic perspective. This started as a therapeutic effort, a differentiation between ego and Self in the hope of finding at first greater sanity and then greater clarity in self-understanding. This then evolved into a devotion to the Other, to seeing things "other-wise".
I think I have the tendency to confuse many Jungians (who are primarily intuitives and/or thinking types). I speak positively about science and rationalism and logic, and I get instantly pigeonholed as a rationalist or sensation type who concretizes the world and reduces the spiritual out of some misunderstanding or limitation of vision (I don't mean in present company, but in my past experiences with other Jungians . . . and from the conventional Jungian perspective, such a perspective on my ideas and rhetoric is understandable). This is a regrettable drawback to the intuitive fallacy and the mentality that prevails in Jungian psychology. It is a form of prejudice that itself reduces rationalism and science to a form of ignorance (for which intuition, image, and spirit are "conversion cures"). I have come to see this as a form of "othering", or a misunderstanding of the typical Jungian "inferior function" (sensation).
Why? Because I am an "intuitive type", and so I know damn well what being intuitive is all about. I am not coming to Jungian psychology as a scientist or rationalist, asking it to abide by modern science and ditch is phenomenology and fantasy. I understand the "egoic perspective" that mythologizes and narrativizes the archetypes and the psyche in general. I am, after all (or at least I have been) a poet and a fiction writer. I know what it is like to make up stories and characters that are really portrayals of selfhood. I have had my years of both fantasy and spiritual experience. And these years were very educational for me, because as a writer, I had to pay attention to the employment of these devices and learn how to revise with the other/audience in mind . . . toward the goal of making "good fictions". A good writer has to learn how to be both inside and outside the creation . . . much like a scientist, who is also called on to be observer (ego) and the judge of that observer in order to become a credible scientist.
Even as I use words like "rationalism" and "science", I am not seeing these things like a materialistic rationalist normally would. I am seeing them as an intuitive. That is, I am seeing in them their potential more so than "what they really are". I am as aware of the sterile rationalism that limits scientific thinking as anyone. I merely feel the Us vs. Them of spiritualism vs. rationalism has run its course. The only arguments in that realm that still interest me are the ones that seek to conjoin the two . . . not by making one submit to the other, but by finding a middle point.
The problem, of course, is that neither position wants to give even an inch. It is a conflict of Opposites. Both sides want the other to convert or succumb to the will of the personal position. I would have at least as much trouble trying to argue with real scientific rationalists (let's say, many cognitive scientists) about my ideas as I have with Jungians. So, as an Other, a rationalist, I am a straw man.
I don't want to reduce spiritualism to either a biological function or a disease or a delusion. I know its value. But spiritualism (in my opinion) is, in spite of this value,
also fraught with disease and delusion . . . so we need to differentiate the value from the delusion in order to understand the spiritual . . . from either the rational or the spiritual perspective. From the spiritual perspective it is important to make these differentiations so that the value of our spiritual experiences is increased (and to evade narcissism). And from the rational perspective, it is important to know what the spiritual really is.
Perhaps foolishly, I believe that both achievements are possible, even simultaneously. They are compatible. But not in some sort of PC lovefest where everyone "wins". Both sides will have to make concessions, give up sacred cows. I simply believe that these sacred cows are not fundamental to the valuation of the spiritual.
So when I speak of science, I am speaking of something much more robust than either what most Jungians think when they use the term or what most scientists think. I am seeing in it the potential of the scientific method as a form of non-egoic understanding. Science as an attempt to understand nature from nature's own perspective, not merely from humanity's (the ego's). This, to me, is itself a spiritual goal in line with all other mystical endeavors. It is another way of depotentiating and circumventing the flaws of egoism in order to know more deeply or clearly. I see the potential of science as a kind of gnosis. This is merely the "sensation type's mysticism" . . . whereas Jungians and most spiritually inclined people practice only an "intuitive type's mysticism". I see the potential of a coniunctio between the two (what I have been calling the religion-science coniunctio).
I feel that the spiritually inclined would do well to see in science another formulation of the mystical goal of differentiating ego and Self and aligning the ego with the Will of the Self. Mysticism (in my opinion) operates by a "universal grammar", a core archetype that can be approached with different (and all) intelligences. So the conflict that Jung and many Jungians (like Giegerich) see between scientific rationalism and Jungian thinking is for me only a matter of maya. It's an artificial obstacle between the union of Opposites.
So the biological basis of archetypes seems to me to be on a solid foundation. Now let’s take this and play with it a bit. Here is what you have to say:
Biology is the necessary Archimedean point that orients us and allows us to have a clearer understanding of what archetypes are.
But is it the “only,” or to paraphrase Bill Clinton, is it necessarily “The" only position that orients us regarding archetype?
Absolutely not. I was definitely simplifying there (compensating for the conventional Jungian, intuitive perspective). But even in my previous post I advocated the return to psychic phenomenology. This is our source of data for understanding consciousness. A study of the brain alone will never truly explain consciousness. It is only one mode of thinking that devotes itself to the physical structure behind consciousness. My only point here (and the core of my disagreement with Giegerich) is that the study of psychology cannot make an arrogant dismissal of the field of neuroscience. To declare that psyche can be understood entirely while maintaining absolute ignorance of neuroscience seems to me radically irresponsible. Therefore I am advocating a definite connection between the physical and the psychic. I believe that we are (and should be) moving toward a theory of consciousness that can account for both psychological and neurological data.
We aren't there yet, but we have definitely been moving in that direction in the last decades. Also, we should note that the alternative to a so-called "mind-body" connection (or sameness) must amount to a "ghost in the machine" theory. Either the physical produces the psychological or the psychological is bestowed magically on us from outside. I have seen no evidence whatsoever of the latter . . . and in fact, the very notion that such a thing is possible reeks of egoism, i.e., the kind of projective, anthropomorphizing stories that the ego uses to make sense of its world (and itself).
Giegerich's autonomy of psyche from biology, to me, is merely another statement of religious belief, and only a significantly more sophisticated formulation of "intelligent design" or some such notion. If one refuses to believe in the possibility of a sameness between the physical and the psychological (even against ever-increasing evidence of this likelihood), then one is a fundamentalist for a specific belief system. One cannot have an argument with such a person, because the person is a "true believer" and doesn't form his or her belief based on a scientific principle of data valuation.
Giegerich, as far as I can tell, avoids a face to face confrontation with this fundamentalism by wielding incredibly complex rhetoric that few if any people can really grasp sufficiently to refute. This is what the mystical impulse does with language. Severely complicated and abstract rhetoric is a common form of disrupting the ego in order to enter into the mystic mentality in which everything has a numinous, symbolic significance. In such language (which we see everywhere in religions, spiritualities, and mysticisms . . . especially in the occult), what is actually said in the syntax of the language is nearly irrelevant. It is a language of valuation. It is meant to communicate the value of the mystical experience, not the essence of it.
For me, the mystical impulse has carried me from being satisfied with what the Self (or spirituality) is
like into what the Self
really is. It has not said, "Oh know, we remain content with the fiction. That will suffice." It wants to perceive the Self with all cognitive engines firing. So now, as an intuitive thinking out of his inferior function, I am trying to pursue what the Self
really is through biology and scientific rationalism. For me, this is a matter of stripping spiritual experience even further of its egoism, its self-serving fiction. That is, I am choosing an Other here based on my own innate disposition (as an intuitive) . . . and exploring that Other, even though it isn't purely on my own egoic terms. Somebody else with a different innate disposition need not choose the rational, scientific, biological extents of the sensation function in order to establish an Archimedean point. The Archimedean point of biology for me is a reflection of what is Other to me . . . but as an intuitive, I am the prototypical Jungian type . . . and so I suspect that there is some wider validity to Jungian psychology using biology as its necessary Archimedean point.
Which is all in inline, I think, with the quote from James Heisig you posted above.
Reasoning by analogy; are we, here in the Jungian psychology community, not in a position similar to “complementarity?” On the one hand, we are convinced of the biological basis of archetype and their transmission, while on the other hand we cannot rationally explain how biology creates archetypes, so we find ourselves explaining our experiences of the archetypes in a nonrational manner, the only method available currently.
I generally agree, but I also have some gripes with Bohr's Copenhagen school of quantum physics . . . and therefore, the usage of Bohr's idea as a model for psychology. From what I've read, the validity of the Copenhagen school of quantum physics has not hinged entirely on scientific credibility, but perhaps even more so on a kind of academic cultism. Many of Bohr's claims about quantum behavior have been refuted since he made them. I can only direct anyone interested to Carver Mead, whose opposition to Copenhagen ideas sounds to me (admittedly a layman) entirely credible. But the Copenhagen school, through whatever means, came into ascendancy in academic physics (where it has stayed for nearly a century).
The complementarity notion of Bohr, to the best of my simplified, non-technical understanding, not only calls for a dual understanding of light as wave and particle, but also asserts that the particulate nature of light is a product of measuring it. Or, at least, that light "behaves" like a particle when we measure it. This has led to a common New Age appropriation of quantum physics as an indication that human observation can effect matter (at least on a quantum level). Another facet of the Bohr/Copenhagen idea is that we cannot and
should not attempt to understand why complementarity exists. It is verboten to ask why measurement should make light a particle . . . which seems to me the most interesting
philosophical question to ask. We should merely accept this tidbit of quantum "chaos" and feel satisfied with the fact that we can predict (with a reasonably high rate of success) the probability with which light will behavior like either a particle or a wave.
So the core tenet of this Copenhagen theory is not really that light exhibits properties of both a wave and a particle (as Einstein also said), but that the physicist should not bother him or herself with trying to understand what happens behind the veil (i.e., what causes the photon to act like either a wave or a particle). This was the Bohr-Einstein debate, in essence. Einstein said, "Nielsy Baby, God doesn't roll dice" (or something to that effect). That is, Einstein felt that there was a natural principle that determined this quantum behavior, but that we had not yet understood it . . . and should not leap to the conclusion that quantum behavior is lawless (making it unlike everything else in the universe we have observed so far).
Bohr was able to demonstrate that we didn't have a current understanding of quantum behavior that could explain its "lawlessness" . . . and since Einstein was unable to provide a law (instead of a probability formula), it was considered that Einstein lost the debate. But the product of this Copenhagen victory was that a
dogma was made of the probability theory . . . and attempts to think of the quantum level as "law-abiding" were largely given up. Research in the field continued to refine its notions of quantum behavior within a context of probabilities . . . not laws.
Now, I don't know enough about physics and mathematics to get involved in this debate. But I know how to evaluate rhetoric pretty well. And I believe (like Einstein and Carver Mead) that it was simply too early to conclude that the quantum universe was lawless. And when we look at the way complementarity led to a dogma of "not looking behind the curtain" for such a theory, it is actually pretty easy to see what looks like the egoic fallacy in this theory. I.e., measurement (or human interaction via observation) changes matter. In other words, human perspective changes reality. This is the way the ego always works. I think there is a distinct chance that the Copenhagen physicists managed to fall for the egoic fallacy. Faced with one phenomenon they couldn't explain scientifically, they immediately leaped at an egoic or projective explanation. And they were still able to devise mathematical formulae that could account for probabilities of behavior . . . so the rational was satisfied. It had it's equations. Equations that explained quantum behavior "as-if" . . . just like the ego understands things.
But the scientific method should not have been satisfied with this conclusion, because there was still a lot of anomalous data and many unknowns. Scientifically, this should have meant that the conclusions drawn should have been extremely tentative . . . and reevaluated in the face of future data acquisition and testing. But this is not what happened. Instead, modern physics made a non-testable dogma or totem out of this complementarity idea.
By which I mean to say that we psychologists should be extremely cautious to use quantum physics as a model. First we should intuitively recognize in it what looks like the egoic fallacy. Then we should perform a psychological study of how this idea was formed in modern physics. Both of these attempts turn up a lot of red flags. And perhaps the most we can draw from this physics is that the ego is powerfully driven to explain all mysteries in terms of its own nature. Even the "hard science" of physics is not immune when it runs into the unknown. As soon as we face a mystery, we start projecting onto it.
I worry that quantum physics is about as scientifically accurate as alchemy was (or older formulations of physics). So I suspect that what we are learning from it is not so much the way quantum matter behaves, but how we humans perceive when we are working with inadequate data.
And I feel much the same way about psychology. The egoic perspective can tell us a great deal about ourselves and how we think, but this data cannot be properly understood without an Archimedean point that allows us to establish knowledge based on non-egoic evidence. Without that Archimedean grounding, we are at sea in our own projections without a star to steer by.
So, as Jungians, to the degree that we cannot understand the psyche or archetypes as material or biological (in their foundation), we should be very cautious of making a leap into projective egoism. I think we would do better to try to keep one foot planted on the ground while the ego soars. That is why I speak of establishing a "margin of error" for egoism in all of our psychological speculations. We should recognize how the ego works (by projection, filtration, condensation, symbolization, etc.) and understand that when we see an abundance of these things in our intuitive notions of the unknown, we need to consider that the egoic perspective is creating a narrative illusion to some degree, a margin of error. It is only in this attempt that we are able to keep ourselves from self-deception, from believing in our own maya.
I see attempts to ground psychology in the biological as potentially useful ways of giving weight to the egoic margin of error. I.e., when we see that something in our perception of the psyche absolutely discords with what should be the biological foundation of that function in the brain or body, we should consider that we are working with flawed or insufficient data . . . and should therefore hesitate to make prognostications and weave "unquestionable" theories.
And, historically the nonrational explanations of experiences have a numinous, religious quality-hence the “mystique” of the nonrational. To sum up then, as best I can: We can grasp that there is a not yet understood biological basis for archetypes, but to deal with archetypes as we experience them personally in the present, Jung has given us a system to explain, in a scientific fashion, our personal experiences of the archetypes. The language used by Jung to explain the experience, must, like the experiences themselves, have a nonrational, "poetic", "spiritual" quality. It is my speculation that some day, a theory, or other explanation will emerge that will bridge the gap.
I agree that Jung's language is very useful (which is why I use much of it), but we have increased our understanding or biology and neurology since Jung's lifetime, and we can now begin to refine Jung's archetypal notions with this new data in mind. I think we need to have the courage and determination to push toward that unified theory that you predict (and I also see). My concern is that we Jungians have rested too long on our intuitive haunches and now tend to see this intuitives' psychology as a dogma or religion and not a science (which must always respond to new data).
The question for us is this: have we really been responding to new data to refine Jung's ideas or have we been pooh-poohing new scientific data, because we wondrous intuitives (with our profound spiritual wisdom and innate infallibility) think we are too flawless to keep adapting and evolving? Is it the power of dogma or the sheer validity, the Truth of our ideas that gives us pause and prevents us from drawing every bit of knowledge we can from fields like evolutionary biology?
I fear that we have become comfortable with our dogmas and it is going to lead to the extinction of Jungian psychology unless we can adapt. So here I agree with Giegerich, but I worry that Giegerich has converted the egoic fallacy (that for Jungians also favors an imbalance of intuitive perspective) into a complex philosophy of egoism. One that convolutes the egoic perspective so severely, it is very difficult to dismantle or deconstruct. But it seems to me telling that Giegerich is radically opposed to the very Otherness needed in order to deconstruct his theory. If he can be allowed to remain entirely within the egoic realm, he can spin linguistic convolutions indefinitely. He becomes unaccountable for any practicality. And in this defiance of practicality, he is very much within the Jungian tradition of intuitiveness.
But this gripe of mine is not to say that other ideas of Giegerich's are invalidated by this misstep. As you say, Kafiri, even within the non-rational perspective, the storying perspective, we can intuitively approximate "truth" . . . and gather useful phenomenological data. I merely feel that these attempts will never ultimately be able to tell us what psyche
is, only what it is
like. And I don't believe Giegerich would disagree with this statement. The disagreement comes in my belief that there is a material reality behind the psyche (egoic perception), and that an understanding of that material reality is a useful addition to psychological knowing. I think psychology would benefit from an intuition/sensation coniunctio.
-Matt
