But over the years the decisive difference between psychology and the natural sciences impressed itself upon him. It dawned on him that in psychology it was the soul itself that had to recognize the soul.
Soul is self-reflection, self-relation, and psychology (psychological explanations or descriptions) is one of the ways in which the soul reflects itself. The opposition basic to the sciences of subject and object, theory and nature, does not exist in and for psychology. Psychology cannot be a science. ... The clear distinction between psychology and its subject-matter, the soul, cannot be maintained: psychology is itself soul and soul is interpretation of itself (psychology). Both soul and psychology follow a "uroboric" logic.
This is Giegerich's fundamental idea. On one hand, this is a truism. It is the state of our existence to have reality filtered through a sieve of perception that distorts this reality (to various degrees and in various ways).
But Giegerich takes this limitation of human psychology as a kind of existential weight from which specific intellectual convulsions must proceed. In my opinion this is an assumption that I find overly-dramatic. One (if one were me
) might call this dramatic approach to psychology a "nihilistic implosion".
In Derrida, we get the revised notion of
aporia, which for Socrates was the state of realization that we actually know nothing, or that our notions of a thing were founded on illusions . . . at which point we have achieved an openness that allows us to truly learn. But for Derrida (as I understand it)
aporia had more to do with the result of deconstructing a text. That is, when we remove the syntactical assumptions that textual meanings are based on, the text will eventually collapse into a primal meaninglessness. From this we might conclude that there is no innate meaning, only the illusion of meaning created by webs of shared assumptions (which are based in cultural, or are perhaps unconscious, just not
collective unconscious, constructions).
Therefore, "There is nothing outside of the text." This is fundamentally the same approach that Giegerich takes to the psyche . . . so I will, it seems, have to revise my earlier statement that Giegerich is not a deconstructionist. On of my gripes with deconstruction is that, recognizing this
aporia, the deconstructionists are freed from the responsibility of "meaning-making" or a kind of communication that is dedicated to and values the Other. What a rationalist like me might see as the typical fallout from this linguistic relinquishment of responsibility to the Other is an eruption of masturbatory egoism. The "rules" of communication are discarded, the borders dissolved . . . and now the ego can muck around in the purely abstract stuff it is most oriented to . . . and without any outside force (again, the Other) pressuring it to abide by an agreed upon system of discourse for the sake of communication or understandability.
In Jungian terms, we might call this the "puer mentality", a freeing of oneself from the obligations of groundedness, that agreed upon "reality" in which a sense (yes, a
constructed sense, but that is not the point) of commonality ("the common
ground") prevails. Then there is the flight of pure thought, pure imagination, pure abstraction. But the "hitch" in puer psychology is that this freedom is internal and isolating (i.e., an-Erotic). Also, the granting of such freedom to oneself seems to constellate a shadow provider of this privilege. That is, to grant or allow such a freedom of detachment, we are forced to constellate a self/other dynamic. Detachment from
what? And
who is allowing or granting it to
whom?
Therefore, the puer mentality demands an invisible enabler. The puer's leash is very long . . . but there
is a leash. Mythologically, we associate this enabler most with the Mother (for the puer male). We might say that the puer feels distantly protected by this invisible Mother, and therefore feels enabled to detach from Eros and responsibility to others/the Other.
It doesn't really require all that much insight to realize that we exist in webs of arbitrary illusion. The real trick is to figure out that, illusion or not, this is the nature of our existence. It is the fabric that connects all of us. In transcending it (maya), we are essentially making a value judgment that the Other is not worthy of our attention and relationship. Effectively, this means that the ego-self is given a hierarchical rank on the top of the ladder of valuation. But this selfishness or narcissism, regardless of what we might want, can still violate and injure other people. Even in our detachment, we are not free from Eros. Examined deeply enough, we can come to see that there is no escape from Eros or from the responsibility for our effects on others. If there was an escape, it would require absolute isolation. There would be no reason to interact with others on any level. This state is equivalent to death . . . and when we are living, a force (the libido) opposes such a state, pushing us toward existence and survival (we must eat, for instance).
The ego does not have absolute control over the body . . . and certainly has limited control over other people and the greater, material world.
Sometimes we approach this state of death pathologically, in depression . . . where the pain of engagement or Eros has caused us to retreat from its connective life instinct. But it is often in such depressions (once we let go or retreat sufficiently) that we are confronted with a new and inescapable Other: the Self (a process of reestablishing Eros).
So, for either the deconstructionists or Giegerich, we are forced to move from a smaller conundrum to a larger one. We are pressured to move from the recognition that our worlds are psychically (and arbitrarily) constructed to a recognition that that original recognition is itself not a justification for specific action or even attitude (e.g., retreat or narcissistic abstraction). It is life or nature or the Other that applies this pressure.
What I mean by "nihilistic implosion" is the puer's dramatic "dying fall" in reaction to the recognition of maya. That our worlds are arbitrary and psychic is not a reason to treat them any differently or not participate in them or throw our hands in the air hysterically and gnash our teeth.
This is where Giegerich seems to surpass the deconstructionists. He suffers a mild case of nihilistic implosion, but still chooses to honor the psychic . . . even exalt it.
The problem (for Giegerich) then becomes the nature of the psychic. What is it? Is it a oneness? Is it personified? How do we relate to it? What is its meaning? So here we must return to Giegerich . . . .
The soul is [...] not to be comprehended as a piece of nature, nor in ontological terms (in terms of being: as an entity, a substance). It is essentially mental, noetic, logical.* It is not an immediate, but in itself an already reflected reality. There is not first a soul as an existing entity that then also happens to reflect itself as one of its activities. "The soul" is self-reflection and nothing else: it is interpretation and what it is the interpretation of is itself interpretation. We could express it this way: the real occurrence of such self-reflection, the event that a "uroboric" logic has become explicit, is what we call, with a still mythologizing and substantiating name, "the soul."
Giegerich contrasts this with a quote from Jung (that Giegerich finds "tragic"):
"If we are to engage in fundamental reflections about the nature of the psychic, we need an Archimedean point which alone makes a judgment possible. This can only be the non psychic ... for, as a living phenomenon, the psychic lies embedded in something that appears to be of a non psychic nature. Although we perceive the latter as a psychic datum only, there are sufficient reasons for believing in its objective reality. (CW 8 § 437)"
Here, I agree with Jung. Therefore, it is my burden to demonstrate what those "sufficient reasons" for believing in this non-psychic, objective, "Archimedean point" are . . . and how we can discern their difference from what Giegerich calls the psychic.
To begin with, I get the impression that Giegerich wants to see the psychic as a oneness, a substance that is all essentially the same. A reason for this perspective is apparent: our realities are constructed by our perceptions . . . and there is no way around this predicament, no way to "perceive actually". We can never actually "experience" a rock we hold in our hands, we can only know how it appears or means to us. Human consciousness contaminates everything it comes in contact with. It is fundamentally concerned with what is useful (and to some degree similar) to it.
But I think we need to make a deeper differentiation here. How do we perceive? Do we just have this uroboric, self-reflected thing called psyche that is our instrument of perception . . . case closed? That might be the intuitive "truth" . . . the "whole", the pattern or system . . . but how is this intuitive perception composed? What are its elements? Is the stuff of the psyche only a system or does it have components?
I was reading
an article recently in a computer engineering journal,
IEEE Spectrum. It had to do with hierarchical learning and memory. The application of this research was artificial intelligence, but the study originates in an understanding of human perception and cognition. The researcher (Jeff Hawkins) talks about the composition of cognitive information in memory . . . and how the brain probably stores memory with maximum efficiency. Instead of every bit of memory being encoded as raw data (like a computer file), Hawkins sees data remembered in associative, hierarchical, branching "root-systems". So, when we are learning what a dog is, the brain starts off with elemental information on the dog (e.g., fur, tail, four legs, etc.) . . . but when we then experience a cat, we do not have to start over from scratch in the same way. We know (the brain knows, that is) that the cat is like a dog in many ways, but is defined by its differences.
As we continue to learn, experience, "develop ego", memory becomes more and more complexly associative and comparative in this way. Hawkins proposes that an actual visual look at the neocortex might give us an idea of how these associative "memory trees" "look". Here's an image of just one unfolded layer of the neocortex:
If we want to find a parallel in Jungian thinking, we need only to look at the concept of the sensation function (and its relationship to intuition). In the memory hierarchies that Hawkins proposes, the very bottom would contain the elemental (sensation) data (e.g., fur, tail, says "woof"), while the top hierarchies (intuition) would contain concepts of the whole (e.g., dog). But the whole is founded on its elements.
The notion that the whole is entirely separate from or even transcends its elemental bits is what I often call the "intuitive fallacy" . . . and this fallacy predominates in the Jungian mindset. And not only the Jungian mindset, but many spiritual mindsets are stricken with the intuitive fallacy. We might, for instance, contemplate the idea of Buddhist detachment as a willed blindness toward the foundational elements of human existence (maya . . . relationship, belief, socialization, living in the world, the flesh, etc.). The intuitive fallacy always requires a devaluation of the parts in favor of the whole in order to operate in its "bliss realm". And it is obvious that our consciousness favors such wholes over their component parts. This allows cognition to function much more efficiently. That is, the basic elements are first perceived and then organized and reorganized (as more perceived data is related to them)
unconsciously or autonomously.
The ego is concerned with (and operates in the "environment" of) complexes of relational information. It juggles a few of these balls at a time . . . but it doesn't
make the balls. Therefore, we might equally refer to the intuitive fallacy as the "ego fallacy" . . . although, to be more precise, the ego is concerned mostly with "medium sized balls". Super-large systems cannot be practically and efficiently juggled or easily used to formulate identity-strategies (without significant, abstracting “reductionism”). In this sense, high-level, systemic intuitions are just as autonomously constructed as low-level, elemental sensations. As always, the ego is most oriented to what is useful to it. That is, the ego is strategic in the way it perceives, values, and utilizes information . . . and less useful information appears to be stored more "unconsciously".
In this dynamic of cognition, we can easily recognize two distinct "centers" (but perhaps "poles" would be a better term): the ego and the unconscious, that autonomous expanse of "less immediately useful" information and instincts or processes that operate without consciousness or egoic will.
The question (in regards to Giegerich’s ideas) then is whether these two cognitive poles operate under the same dynamic (or category) . . . and also whether this dynamic is really "self-contained". But we should keep in mind that, abstractly, we can imagine any two things as related under one category. That is, we can assign an abstract category that can enclose any two things (regardless of how many elemental differences there are). We can even say that everything everywhere is the universe or matter or God. These abstractions are not "truths", per se. They are reflections on reality, applications of projected paradigms (and as I mentioned above, they can be reductive about the elements).
Although it is easy to recognize some of the basic differences between the ego and the unconscious, the similarities can be trickier to discern (or imagine). For instance, despite thousands of years of ascribing our egoism to spirit or divine breath mysteriously breathed into our material forms, we must
scientifically conclude that the ego emerges from the unconscious (or the Self), that it is a product or expression of the unconscious . . . and that it has a specific cognitive function in accordance with evolutionary adaptation. This is still a great mystery in both science and philosophy. I.e., why the ego? Why this device that seems so "unlike" the rest of us?
Neuroscience (still a fledgling science) is able to tell us this much: our "consciousness" seems to be a cooperative of various cognitive modules. That is, consciousness is fragmentary. But our sense of identity (the ego) seems to exist among this cooperative, yet "non-locally". So far we have learned that many of the cognitive components of our perception and thinking
do have locality in the brain . . . and we might hypothesize that neuroscience will continue to pinpoint and identify local modules. Still, we are remiss to believe that our egos can be the product of a "mechanistic" cooperative of cognitive modules, i.e., that consciousness and sense of self exist as a high-level on a hierarchy of increasingly non-conscious apparatuses.
Of course, most cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers have no problem believing in the possibility that consciousness can in fact be "created" hierarchically form smaller, lower-level, non-conscious parts (local mechanisms). And, although we have yet to prove or disprove this, we need to be honest with ourselves enough to recognize that these cognitive scientists are not simply the pawns of "positivism" and obtuse rationalistic ideologies. The data we have so far (regardless of
our interpretation of it) does indicate that such a hierarchical consciousness is highly probably. This recognition does not require a prejudice or a philosophy. If we wish to reject these cognitive models of consciousness, we have to reject the data they are founded on . . . not merely an arbitrary belief system.
I find it intellectually irresponsible to assume that we (as psychologists) are entitled to reject potentially pertinent data, simply because it doesn't suit our preferred intuitive belief system and dogma. And it seems to me that Giegerich is coming dangerously close to this. Perception is not merely a high-level abstraction. Even if the ego perceives information on this level, we know that the organism perceives on other non-conscious levels both above and below the ego on the perceptual hierarchy.
So, I believe we have to be extremely cautious about asserting egoism in these non-egoic centers of perception. That is, we know that these unconscious perceptors do not share the ego's sense of usefulness. We know they either have a completely different sense of usefulness (as a basis for what they perceive and store) or that they don't operate on a usefulness dynamic at all (i.e., they are more mechanical than strategic).
These non-egoic perceptors, if they are essentially "mechanical", do not have to be "psychic" in the sense that Giegerich proposes. That is, there is a level in this notion of the unconscious at which information or memory or cognition has a specific biological parallel in the brain. There, spirit and matter are one. This is what memory hierarchicalism entails. We see this hierarchical structure all throughout nature . . . everything is made of smaller things which are made of smaller things, all the way down to subatomic levels . . . and perhaps to charges, spins, waveforms, magnetisms. Matter may very well be fundamentally "immaterial" . . . but even if it
is immaterial, it is clearly hierarchical.
It is not even remotely surprising to find hierarchicalism in nature. It
would be surprising to find non-hierarchicalism in something natural, though. Say, human beings.
Even if this line of reasoning is enough to dismantle Giegerich's unified and specialized formulation of psyche (and although I believe it is, I seriously doubt Giegerich would concede the same), we are still left with one of the core problems of consciousness. That is, there is definitely something to Giegerich's notion that "'The soul'
is self-reflection and nothing else: it
is interpretation
and what it is the interpretation of is itself interpretation."
In other words, we are disinclined (due to our essential egoism) to look upon what may be the more mechanical or biological elements of cognition (the unconscious) as mechanical or biological. Everything we perceive, we perceive egoically. That is, we perceive its nature in relation to our own construction of self, or our nature. To what degree and in which ways does it resemble "me"? We can see in this the same model of hierarchical memory formation that is proposed by Jeff Dawkins in the "Learn Like a Human" article. Ego seems to be constructed hierarchically in conjunction with memory. Ego is constructed in relation to memory (and reciprocally, constructs memory in the way it valuates and privileges ego-likeness). We might even see in this a kind of self-perpetuation: the more the ego develops a specific concept of self, the more it is inclined to privilege self-likeness.
Until, of course, its self-concept starts to break down, becomes dysfunctional as a living strategy. It is in this state of neurosis that we are often most powerfully confronted with an Otherness from the unconscious part of psyche. But of course, we are damned to see this otherness in familiar terms . . . and as "me-like" as it can be (while still maintaining its numen of Otherness). So it is highly likely to be personified, anthropomorphized. Egoism is projected onto it.
So the question then is, does having an ego mean that we can never perceive a thing (a not-me) objectively? Is psyche
really a damnation. My answer to that is, "Yes and no". Yes, we will always be inclined to perceive everything egoically, "as-if", as a strategic story, an abstraction, is it pertains to, is similar to, or may be useful to us. But, no, this is not a damnation.
It isn't a damnation, the ego-prison is not escape-proof . . . because the ego is only ever a fiction, an arbitrary strategy. Its story of self is plastic. It is therefore transformable and regulatable . . . not fixed. If the ego were fixed, it would not be adaptable to human culture and its complex barrage of information. What we can observe in psychotherapy is an attempt to revise ego-strategies in order to live (in the world) more harmoniously (adaptively). We have learned that psychotherapies work best as cooperations between self and other . . . and also, that there appears to be a self-regulatory process in such ego-revisions that emerges instinctually from the unconscious.
In Jungian analysis, the analyst tries to work in accord with this self-regulatory process as it is perceived in the patient. The effectiveness of the analyst is very heavily determined by his or her ability to take cues from the patient's unconscious expressions (especially dreams and acts of imagination or fantasy that seem to carry a lot of unconscious contents with them). The Jungian analyst, then, is an "instinct surrogate" or instinct advocate for the patient, who, by his or her material "realness" helps the patient recognize the unconscious Other as real or valid. As familiar.
This process does not require the patient (the ego) to see the unconscious (or the Self) non-egoically at all . . . but it does require a new development or revision in the ego's story of self. But should we want to
study this process, discover what in it is universal or typical (as the analyst must in order to best serve the regulatory, instinctual process of the patient), we must make an attempt to differentiate and delimit our egoism. This is an attempt to construct a new story or system of valuation that is not designed specifically to serve the ego, but to serve the process of ego-restrategizing itself. This requires a great deal of flexibility in reworking strategies based on individual distinctiveness from patient to patient, but it also has its universals . . . it is, after all, an instinctual process that we are trying to understand here, and therefore something rooted in the biology or nature of our speicies.
In this attempt, what seems to be our short-coming (egoism or projective perception), ends up proving to be a strength. Our capacity to see ourselves in others (and in other things) is equally an ability to recognize otherness in ourselves. We are capable of imagining ourselves in different ego-strategies or with different limitations or abilities. This projective nature of the ego can function as a kind of conduit between polarities, between self and other. Yes, there is an "agreed upon" limitation to this conduit set by how "me-like" we are able to see the Other as. We can think of this like a capacity for a pipeline. Pipeline X can move a maximum number of cubic gallons of water per second through itself. But with our consciousness, this maximum capacity is set by our ability to relate the Otherness to ourselves. Beyond the max. capacity, we are unable to make a useful association, and so the Other seems alien to us to the degree that we cannot relate our sense of self to it.
So in this model, we are perceiving the Other (which, in my opinion is an instinctual process . . . which, in an argumentative approach such as this, would require its own argument or "proof" . . . but as I have taken this up in other posts, I will forgo it here), but only insomuch as we can associate it with the familiar, with ourselves. As a self-regulatory process addressed to the ego-position would seem to have designs on the restructuring of consciousness, it "must" therefore be a conscious entity . . . or so this is how the ego works. This is the nature of archetypal personification.
But as we step back and try to pinpoint the universal aspects of this interchange, we can see that, in spite of our propensity for personification, these archetypal beings have numerous qualities of instinctual, biological processes. We understand this, because we can observe these processes (and usually the "evolutionary logic" of these processes) in other animals to which we do not attribute consciousness (as they seem to us to be excessively not-like-me). In animals (if we have a shred of scientific rigor), we recognize these processes as biological (even if they are, as instincts, non-local . . . or more like "software" than hardware). Therefore, we can assume that our own instinctual processes are similar. We also know that we ourselves have an autonomous, unconscious, self-regulatory aspect that functions without our willing it or even perceiving it. Here, we see clearly that we are like other animals.
From this sort of line of reasoning, we are able to extrapolate the likelihood that our own instinctual processes share a similar foundation in nature to those of other animals. And we can also (if we have studied ego-consciousness as a phenomenon) hypothesize logically that our egos must operate with the "prejudice" of self-relationality and projection. Therefore, we can derive a notion that, in matters of psychological understanding, the ego must be considered to present a standard "margin of error" in our knowing. But this margin of error need not consign our knowing to absolute arbitrariness. We can understand that there is a scale of value or "trueness" to our knowledge. Some things we can determine to be unequivocally true. Other things can be seen as true or truer based on a logical construction of them. And still other things may never be even remotely provable. But we do not exist in a chaotic realm of utter randomness or unknowableness. We are capable of perceiving order, even as our reaction to that perception might be arbitrary, subjective, or relativistic.
So, as we formulate a notion of ego-perception as a margin of error (and a fairly substantial one), we can create or imagine a new and Other perspective to some degree. We can start to valuate information perceived in terms of how egoic it appears, how significantly it can be seen to serve the predominating ego-strategy. Thus, even as we come to the understanding of the immense degree of perceptual arbitrariness of our consciousness, we can also use our cognitive plasticity to imagine a not-me or Other based on the autonomous unconscious beyond our control that operates mechanistically, without consciousness, instinctively, as a self-regulating and self-sustaining process evolved to serve the libido and adaptability of the organism to its environment.
This is why I must side with Jung and against Giegerich on this issue. There
is an Archimedean point outside the ego (which Giegerich muddles somewhat by calling it the "psyche" . . . in a way unlike Jung defined the psyche), which we can intuit and imaginatively (psychically) reconstruct to the degree that we learn how to relate to it and see ourselves in it. So, Giegerich is correct in the sense that this Archimedean point isn't really “outside” the psyche/ego . . . it is only modeled on this outside otherness. But Jung is also correct that our ability to recognize and construct this Archimedean point is essential to our ability to understand the psyche without excessive egoism contaminating it . . . and that there is every indication that a "positivistic" or biological lower-level cognitive hierarchy exists behind the egoic perceptions of psyche. We can even use egoic psyche to “posit” this biological, elemental foundation. It is not incapable of doing this with a high degree of credibility.
Ultimately, the core conflict between Jung's perspective and Giegerich's seems to be heavily semantic. Jung's definition of psyche is both egoic and positivistic or biological . . . but he recognizes that we only perceive the positive through the limited perceptions of the ego (or, as Giegerich might say, "negatively". Jung's concept of the Self is of a biological, instinctual, universal "positive" to which we must relate to "negatively" or egoically. And there is no reason to whine about this . . . as it is our nature and not itself a "failing". Therefore psychic phenomenon should still be taken seriously, taken as real. There is no true valuative divide between the psychic and the real . . . and to concoct one, we must don a prejudicial, personal philosophy or ideology. Jung associated that prejudice with rationalism or materialism.
Giegerich, on the other hand, takes Jung's psyche/soul, but interprets it more abstractly than Jung did. Giegerich's soul is Jung's ego . . . but it is slightly more complex (and abstract) than this, because Giegerich's soul is also Jung's ego perceiving and reconstructing Jung's Self. But the difference on this core level is a difference in language more so than in meaning.
I may go on eventually to deal with Giegerich's notions of psychology that he feels differ from Jung's, but that is enough for today. I'm not convinced such an attempt is really necessary, anyway (as my reactions are implicitly contained in what I have written here).
For now, though, I hope you will permit me the small arrogance of a parting "bow" and the epitaph (which you may certainly tell me I have or have not earned):
Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis.
