Heidegger

In a message dated 8/28/2006 6:00:06 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
daxsein at hotmail.com writes:

[Tympan]The idea is to see the mind and body as one whole right? This is what
is happening when you go from the judgements of the understanding to the
judgements of reflection. Kant is a man of sensibility. For him to be
reasonable is to be sensible and to restrict and limit the work of the
undestanding. Of course he is a religious man so the point he really is
making is that you can’t know the sublimity of divine greatness through
conceptual thinking but as I showed rather he points to the experience of
respect and “negative feelings”. Your reading is understandable but its not
what the textual evidence shows. I thought I made it clear that the point he
makes is that the sublime is not some sort of fearful monster. This is the
experience of people he would call superstitious. Rather than the experience
of terror there is esteem, respect, admiration, and above all, humility.

Dear typam;
But that is just the point. Kant was a pre-psychological sort of man-0f-mind
but had no mind for the experience of the tremendum that through the
understanding is literally banished form mind. Respect, admiration and above
all humility make up the persona concealing, in the true sense of
Hiedegger’s *Lethe,* what are in fact the terrors of immediate unconscious
experience and the transgressions of an archetypal content in consciousness.
This suppression robs the phenomena of unconscious experience of its vitality
as a presentation of the unknown.

Tympan: This has been on my mind since I read it. I let it stay as an object
and have given it some interest or not withdrawn any from it. For better or
for worst we can’t always withdraw our libido from inner objects and be
blissed out on nothingness with a mantra or Jesus prayer as companion.
That’s the reality of people who think. Thoughts come and go and any
conscious attempt to quiet the mind like we do during meditative prayer or
contemplation just makes us all the more aware of the particulars of the
stream of consciousness although it might also have something to do with the
trascendent function in Jung’s sense and the release of symbols from the
unsconsciousness as he discusses it in his essay on Schiller.

[Bernard]: Stream of consciousness and the way it is induced on the couch has
little to do with unconscious archetypal images but is more often limited to
the personal rather than the collective unconscious or what Jung calls “the
objective psyche.” At this psychoid level we cannot speak of ideas or other
residues of conscious thought. and a thinking process (ratio) to which Kant and
Schopenhauer are limited. For example: Rudolf Otto speaks of “numinous”
experience and which is hardly exemplified in Kant’s transcendent noumenon. Indeed,
the numinous transcends the noumenon which is limited to an idea rather than an
archetypal image. The idea is aposteriori the apriori (archetypal as ur and
given) image. Jung notes “Schiller’s expression for the symbol, viz, ‘living
form’ is happily chosen, because the phantasy material thus animated contains of
the individuality in its successive states…” Jung’s idea of a transcendent
function thus overlaps the nature of the symbol which, unlike a [semiotic] sign
serves a mediation between the opposites, “…the combined function of
conscious and unconscious elements…” The philosophers on the other hand were not
dealing with an unconscious process composed of proto-morpological
transpersonal contents. They are dealing rather, with conscious and historically evolved
ideas. This where the line is drawn between philosophers, such as Heidegger,
and an understanding of spontaneous and autonomous unconscious contents that
are original [arche] and without ideational precedent.
[Tympan]There is something to what you say. I hear Kant dealing with it in
his
discussion of the interpretation of the sublime based on fear by the
superstitious. Heidegger also in Being and Time goes on for a few pages on
fear, anxiety and the encounter with nothingness. I am not tuned in enough
to Jung to know what the terrors of the”transgressions of an archetypal
content in consciousness” would be? It seems like the anticipation of
something horrible.
[Bernard] But of course it is something “horrible” insofar as such content is
not pre-conditioned by idea but is simply *urrr,* a raw and unconditioned
experience of an image not accommodated in and thus utterly disturbing to,
the status quo of ego consciousness. In that sense the irruption of the
archetype is “transgressive” to the extent that it has a potential to dissociate
ego consciousness. This is what happens in the case of psychosis and delusional
states. The samething happens in artistic creativity except that the aesthetic
pastiche serves as a buffer or intemediary container for the raw and rude
nature of such transgression. The same was true for the alchemist who had his
curcubita or vessel in which such unconscious contents were contained without
invading the consciousness of the operator. In that sense it is a symbolic rather
than semiotic event.
[Tympan]Discussing the *vitality* of the presentation of the
unknownable or of that which remains to be thought and is outstanding as far
as our thinking sensibility is concerned seems much more neutral.
[Bernard] It is “neutral” insfar as it is dissipated in known ideas, and
apodictic understanding that make up conscious philosophic judgements. This
distinction was what Jung was trying to get across in his interpretation of
Schiller who, against his better judgement was stumbling into a realm of unconscious
contents and the transcendent symbol as “living form.”
[Tympan]Also it’s not the understanding that is a problem at this juncture in
Kant. The judgements of the understanding have been restricted and limited
and what is in question is reflective judgement. There is two kinds of thinking
at issue. Thinking by way of the understanding which is always subsuming
sense data that comes from senses under concepts then there is reflective
thinking that deals with immesurable magnitudes.
[Bernard]Here Jung speaks in his seminal work, *Psychology of the
Unconscious* (1919) of “two kinds of thinking,” directed thinking and discursive thinking
or what you (and Kant) call “refelctive thinking.” In that early work Jung
began to notice that such “thinking” departed from the judgement and the
understaning and was functionally irrational and what he soon noticed as a mode of
intuition as unconscious and hence endopsychically directed as virtually the
perception function of the unconscious. Like sensation it was, as a perception
function, irrational and not contigent upon ratio. Perception carries on
without reason, awake or asleep as reflexive rather than reflective.
[Tympan] Kant says that these like following the moral law for its own sake
causes negative feelings, a kind of pain that makes us feel small and unworthy
so to speak.
[Bernard]Yes, Freud generalised this as the Super ego and the conditional
voice of paternal authority, or as simply “conscience.”
[Tympan] He does give some concrete content to the experience of being
nothing, of being an inferior without position or a point of view before a superior.
Pehaps another way of looking at a persona or mask is to see it as the
pretensions and airs of a superior intellect that is not earned. He gives us an
understanding of a hierarchical relationship as well as anyone. It’s not a bad
thing for him.
[Bernard]But of course, since it allows the elitism of the philosopher’s
identification, as Freud would say, the super-ego conditioned in the patriarchal
hybris and inflation or identification of the philosopher persona as god-like.
For both Freud and Jung this was a form of pathologism, and not limited to
“philosophers.” Melville most discriptively represents this in his Captain Ahab
and which was protypical of the psychology of Great Dictators to come in the
variety of 20th Cent. Socialist dictatorships.
[Tympan]It gives us the kind of relationship that often is there in life and
doesn’t go away, that between a son and father, a student and a teacher, a
vassal and his Lord or Lady, etc.
[Bernard]Yes, that would be the personal manifestation but it equally applies
to the the great Dictator and his people but which on so massive a scale is
horrific since it involves all the elements of what Freud discribed in the
Oedipal complex, father murder, castration and maternal incest..
[Bernard]: This Kant reserves for the noumenal as beyond the capacity of the
understanding and thus retained as the transcendental as an unempircal
given. Certainly Kant cannot be dunned for this, given his time, place and
in accordance with the *instatuerre* of the culture at hand and its prevailed
institution of an unapproachable God.
Tympan]: But the curious thing, and this the textual evidence shows, is that
there is empirical evidence at work which Kant refers to as “negative
feelings”. This is the exprience of feeling unworthy, small, humiliated,
inferior. God is approachable like any superior in the culture to which you
allude to through what are essentially acts of submission and prostration.
We have a hard time seeing this today because our culture imagines that
people are equal but its not the reality, today or anytime. I want to be the
Lord don’t you? But I’m not you know.
[Bernard]The dysfunctional nature of inflation of the personality is now
collectively distributed and concealed in the public adoration of :fame as the way
to “historical immortality.” But of course only for the utter materialist
would “immortality” be “historical,” e.g. the embalmed corpse of Lenin in his
tomb at Red Square. But this is a form of secular monotheistic historicity
whereas in the USA qua Hollywood “Stars” and noisy politicians it takes on a
polytheistic nature (viz., my *Polyimagical Realm*). Or by the ordination of a POP
Andy Warhole 15 minutes of fame (historical immortality) for all, creating as
such a nation of tinplate gods.
[Tympan] I suppose this could be further discussed through Hegel’s master
slave dialectic but that gets us somewhere else.
[Bernard]Not really, especially since Marx stood Hegel on his head to convert
the dialectic of the Spirit to a dialectical materialism which, for its
inversion by negation has no application in Science, Art, Politics or Economics,
i.e., because “Capitlaism” is its necessary predicate through negation:
Communism and Caspitalism are inscrutable binary opposites, e.g. you can’t have one
without the other.
[Bernard]: Any notion of the phenomenality of the sublime would constellate
it as all and other to the instituted ideals of judgement: In other words
the sublime as the psychological expression of Satan. The Church would
certainly agree with this. But in either case the nature of the endopsychic
intuition (as “inner” perception) must be rejected and the best Kant can do
is allow it transcendental as the intellectual intuition.
[Tympan]: I haven’t come across the words “endopsychic intuition” before,
what does it mean? Sounds like some sort of inner object. Is it a goal to see it
in dissolving the masking that you are talking about?
[Bernard]I use the predication “endopsychic” to insure that I am not talking
about discursive or “reflective” thinking. But look in the glossary of Jung’s
*Psychological Types* for a very clear definition.
[Bernard]: In effect, the endopsychic intuition is defused by entering it in
the field of noumena and the transcendental and which amounts to banishing
the endopsychic intuition to the bottomless pit or, as in the case of the
Gnostic Ialdabaoth, conceived by Sophia (wisdom) parthenogenically, to the
fiery place of Tartaros.
[Tympan]: The endopsychic intuition is not unlike Ialdabaoth? How does
pathenogenic conception happen or what is “parthenogenicality”? Is it
incubated in the Vas or empty page?
[Bernard]Parthenogenic refers to virgin birth (parthenos=virgin+generation).
During the matricentric Neolithic childbirth was not exemplified as the
result of the sexual act but thru a spirit toteem that entered the woman. This was
because there was no monogamous rule set in place, lovers came and went so
that the woman (and her children) was behooved to know the actual father. It was
hardly important in such a society and it seems recapitulated today in the
diminished importance of the male in a growing (at least Euro/American) society
of pan-feminism. But this has always been in place for the U.K. from the
pre-Christian Celtic Queen Boudica through Elisabeth, Victoria and then Margaret
Thatcher without whom Britain would not have attained its claim as a world power,
i.e., because “mistress” of the seas.But perhaps America will give it a shot
with Hilary as president and with Bubba, her foppish consort (or as the smoker
asked in the smokeshop, “do you have Prince Albert in the can?” “Yes” was the
tobacconist’s reply: “Well, then, let him out!” But this is not unlike
Albee’s “who hung Dad in the closet?”– and which is of course a Gay lament..
[Bernard]: Such a sireless child of Wisdom would then represent the same old
pure and right reason with its ground in tautologism. From the theological
standpoint it would retain evil in privation: evil simply as the abscence of
the good (the privatio boni), ie., as simply a dialectical truth by
negation. If The Psychological did not intevene in this uninterrupted
evolution it could only resolve in Lyotard’s view. Fortunately the presence
of Jung intervened with the notion that evil was not an insubstantial
article of negation, or “nothing,” but an archetypal something. In this
way the phenomenolgy of the psyche is given weight and not dissipated in the
untouchable transcendental reality of sein an sich. Yet, even today the
phenomenal and the noumenal, or consciousness and the unconscious remain as
one the negation of the other and by which we enjoy the nominalism of the
pathologic, i.e., evil and the pathological as synonomous, hence the “curability”
and rehabilitation of evil.
[Tympan]: Okay then what is evil supposed to be as an archetype? Is this what
we become more conscious of through individuation or whatever psychological
practice is at work in Jung?
[Bernard]Well, for Jung evil is personified as *the shadow* as an unconscious
property and the proper complement of the ego. It is necessarilly
unconsciously retained since it represents the inferior or undeveloped potentials of the
personality. Thus, hooked on to it are all our shortcomings, errors of
behaviour if not criminal intentions and acts. Its historical personification is, of
course, Satan and the Devil. In my view and not Jung’s such figures are
represented in thanatos or Hades as the Lord of Death. But such contents are
related to aspects of the endopsychic intuition and its primitive expression as
trickster image and also Hermes (qua Hades) as priapric and also known in the
Homeric poem as Hermes the thief (because as an infant he stole his big brother
Apollo’s cattle by stealth and not like Herakles the cowboy style cattle
rustler. Thus Hermes represents a phallic rising up as well as the rising up of the
intuition. But this is also condensed in the image of Lucifer (the
light-bringer and herald to the rising star of Miriam and Mary in the Eastern dawn,
otherwise recalled as Venus or Aphrodite, born of the sea and by which “Mother” and
the sea are referred to as Mere, and the French negative mother as merde,
notwithstanding Liberte, the Amazonian virgin Artemisian freedom fighter of the
revolution who now stands carrying a torch in New York harbour. As a boy my
favorite painting was Eugene Delacroix’ Liberte carrying the flag over the
ramparts. When , as an adult, I saw this painting in the flesh I nearly passed out
and fainted in the museum (a museum guard noticed this and stood behind me
ready to catch me especially that I had my nose almost touching the painting.
The painting was at the Met. on loan from the Louvre and it would not have
diplomatically correct to fall into the painting and damage it. That is a minor
example of “archetypal transgression” that apparently followed me from childhood
to my more senior years.

sincerely,
Tympan

Sincerely;
Bernard

(bxbovasso)

Posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 6:10 am
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