Heidegger

Dear Bernard,

More good context thanks (and thanks That Pete for a clarification on the
use of the name “Persia” and “Iran”. ). I don’t have time to respond today
maybe next week. At any rate the juxtaposition of what I was saying with
your ongoing presentation of your ideas makes you clearer to me. I think I
have said some things on Vico before so your mention of his recorso in
relation to sublimating regression is a connection I would want to explore
further. I am particularly interested in his approach to poetry and the
imagination in relation to what Henry Corbin called the Mundus Imaginalis
using Latin. I am also interested in listening to you more on how you as a
Marxist and psychologist might read this experience and history of ideas.

Dear tympan;
Again, I would like to thank you for those websites. But I am neither a
“Marxist”
or a psychologist but a painter, poet and man of letters. at large and with
no
previous or present academic affiliations. What Corbin elaborates as the
imaginal
and imagination has some diffiuclty from a psychological perspective insofar
as it is the object of the medium of the endopsychic intuition. As such it
comes under question as something less than real and the utopos
insubstantiality.
>From my standpoint the imagination is part of a conscious process and, as
such,
a fabricated or designed illusion. Intuition, on the other hand, indulges
experience,
in this case psychic experience. Since experience has no object reality but
is a medium
to an inner reality it cannot be classified as either real or illusion.
[Tympan]: But adding what Corbin has to say on “nowhere land” or an ideal
utopia in
the following part from an essay on the mundus imaginalis he writes a little
about a tale by Sohravardi where he precisely discusses the return of
thoughts from an enslaved will to a possible intellect. It is the freedom of
the will that allows the possible intellect to be a possible intellect which
in Hegel is also the removal of the road block to the telos of happiness:
“Let us take the very beautiful tales-simultaneously visionary tales and
tales of spiritual initiation-composed in Persian by Sohravardi, the young
shaykh who, in the twelfth century, was the “reviver of the theosophy of
ancient Persia” in Islamic Iran. Each time, the visionary finds himself, at
the beginning of the tale, in the presence of a supernatural figure of great
beauty, whom the visionary asks who he is and from where he comes. These
tales essentially illustrate the experience of the gnostic, lived as the
personal history of the Stranger, the captive who aspires to return home.
At the beginning of the tale that Sohravardi entitles “The Crimson
Archangel,”1 the captive, who has just escaped the surveillance of his
jailers, that is, has temporarily left the world of sensory experience,
finds himself in the desert in the presence of a being whom he asks, since
he sees in him all the charms of adolescence, “0 Youth! where do you come
from?” He receives this reply: “What? I am the first-born of the children of
the Creator [in gnostic terms, the Protoktistos, the First-Created] and you
call me a youth?” There, in this origin, is the mystery of the crimson color
that clothes his appearance: that of a being of pure Light whose splendor
the sensory world reduces to the crimson of twilight. “I come from beyond
the mountain of Qaf… It is there that you were yourself at the beginning,
and it is there that you will return when you are finally rid of your
bonds.”
The mountain of Qaf is the cosmic mountain constituted from summit to
summit, valley to valley, by the celestial Spheres that are enclosed one
inside the other. What, then, is the road that leads out of it? How long is
it? “No matter how long you walk,” he is told, “it is at the point of
departure that you arrive there again,” like the point of the compass
returning to the same place. Does this involve simply leaving oneself in
order to attain oneself) Not exactly. Between the two, a great event will
have changed everything; the self that is found there is the one that is
beyond the mountain of Qaf a superior self, a self “in the second person.”
It will have been necessary, like Khezr (or Khadir, the mysterious prophet,
the eternal wanderer, Elijah or one like him) to bathe in the Spring of
Life. “He who has found the meaning of True Reality has arrived at that
Spring. When he emerges from the Spring, he has achieved the Aptitude that
makes him like a balm, a drop of which you distill in the hollow of your
hand by holding it facing the sun, and which then passes through to the back
of your hand. If you are Khezr, you also may pass without difficulty through
the mountain of Qaf.

Two other mystical tales give a name to that “beyond the mountain of Qaf and
it is this name itself that marks the transformation from cosmic mountain to
psychocosmic mountain, that is, the transition of the physical cosmos to
what constitutes the first level of the spiritual universe. In the tale
entitled “The Rustling of Gabriel’s Wings,” the figure again appears who, in
the works of Avicenna, is named Hayy ibn Yaqzan (”the Living, son of the
Watchman”) and who, just now, was designated as the Crimson Archangel. The
question that must be asked is asked, and the reply is this: “I come from
Na-koja-Abad.”2 Finally, in the tale entitled “Vade Mecum of the Faithful in
Love” (Mu’nis al-’oshshaq) which places on stage a cosmogonic triad whose
dramatis personae are, respectively, Beauty, Love, and Sadness, Sadness
appears to Ya’qab weeping for Joseph in the land of Canaan. To the question,
“What horizon did you penetrate to come here?,” the same reply is given: “I
come from Na-koja-Abad.” Na-koja-Abad is a strange term. It does not occur
in any Persian dictionary, and it was coined, as far as I know, by Sohravardi
himself, from the resources of the purest Persian language. Literally, as I
mentioned a moment ago, it signifies the city, the country or land (abad) of
No-where (Na-koja) That is why we are here in the presence of a term that,
at first sight, may appear to us as the exact equivalent of the term
ou-topia,
which, for its part, does not occur in the classical Greek dictionaries, and
was coined by Thomas More as an abstract noun to designate the absence
of any localization, of any given situs in a space that is discoverable and n
verifiable by the experience of our senses.
[Bernard]: What is “dicoverable,” however, is not the imaginal qua utopos
object illusion but the intuitive experience.
[Tympan]: Etymologically and literally, it would perhaps be exact to
translate
Na-koja-Abad by outopia, utopia, and yet with regard to the concept, the
intention,
and the true meaning, I believe that we would be guilty of mistranslation.
It seems to me, therefore, that it is of fundamental importance to try, at
least, to
determine why this
would be a mistranslation. …”
[Bernard]: Then what more would you make of it?
[Tympan]And on it goes… here is the link to the article
 http://www.hermetic.com/bey/mundus_imagi…

[Bernard]: Insofar as Corbin is trying to find greater substantiality for
utopos
through Na-koja-Abad he also tries to make more of it: “Thus the name
Na-koja-Abad:
a place outside of place, a “place” that is not contained in a place, in a
topos, that permits
a response, with a gesture of the hand, to the question ‘where?’ But when we
say, ‘To depart from the where,’ what does this mean?” He attempts to
requalify utopos and notes: “But an odd thing happens: once this transition is
accomplished, it turns out that henceforth this reality, previously internal and
hidden, is revealed to be enveloping, surrounding, containing what was first of
all external and visible, since by means of interiorization, one has departed
from that external reality. Henceforth, it is spiritual reality that envelops,
surrounds, contains the reality called material. That is why spiritual reality
is not “in the where.” It is the “where” that is in it. Or, rather, it is
itself the “where” of all things; it is, therefore, not itself in a place, it does
not fall under the question “where?”-the category ubi referring to a place in
sensory space. Its place (its abad) in relation to this is Na-koja
(No-where), because its ubi in relation to what is in sensory space is an ubique
(everywhere). When we have understood this, we have perhaps understood what is
essential to follow the topography of visionary experiences, to distinguish their
meaning (that is, the signification and the direction simultaneously) and also
to distinguish something fundamental, namely, what differentiates the visionary
perceptions of our spiritual individuals (Sohravardi and many others) with
regard to everything that our modern vocabulary subsumes under the pejorative
sense of creations, imaginings, even utopian madness.”
Interiorization is, of course, the way to go especially that the topos
space is purely perimorphic, a topical or topological delineated space and
surface of a sphere. Unfortunately in modern Western language topos is the only
word for space (or place). Corbin thus has to dig deeper but if only he had read
Plato’s Timaeus he would have in the Greek that another kind of space is
recognized, the space of
Chora (xwpa) or receptacle. This inner space is likened to a virgin womb that
is stirred by the germ
of eternal ideas, the Intelligibles or apriori archetypal ideas. This results
in the birth of a new image that
is both arche (original) and typos (reproduceable). Todau we would metaphor
this interior space
as the unconscious (as matrix to consciousness). But in the ordinary modern
sense or even the philosophical or psychological sense these apriori ideas are
untenable as purely metaphysical and hence
the concept of chora space has been discarded until the modern coining of a
psychological unconscious
and also the sub-nulear reality of modern quantum physics. But Corbit– and
perhaps Heidegger– must limit this interior space to the space or place of
Being. Corbin must ask: “What dimension, then, must this act of being have in
order to be, or to become in the course of its future rebirths, the place of
those worlds that are outside the place of our natural space? And, first of all,
what are those worlds?” He notes three possible worlds for this interior world:
“These few lines refer us to a schema on which all of our mystical
theosophers agree, a schema that articulates three universes or, rather, three
categories of universe. There is our physical sensory world, which includes both our
earthly world (governed by human souls) and the sidereal universe (governed by
the Souls of the Spheres); this is the sensory world, the world of phenomena
(molk). There is the suprasensory world of the Soul or Angel-Souls, the Malakut,
in which there are the mystical cities that we have just named, and which
begins “on the convex surface of the Ninth Sphere.” There is the universe of pure
archangelic Intelligences. To these three universes correspond three organs
of knowledge: the senses, the imagination, and the intellect, a triad to which
corresponds the triad of anthropology: body, soul, spirit-a triad that
regulates the triple growth of man, extending from this world to the resurrections in
the other worlds.” But curiously, he omits the endopsychic world and its
experiencial media of intuition, or inner perception. For Plato the endopsychic
intuition is reified as units of archetypal ideas or intelligibles when in fact
his use of Chora space is determined as a space and place of generation (of
images). Corbin is getting hot in his search but needn’t have had recourse to
Shiite mysticism but look to Plato. Nevertheless he observes: “We observe
immediately that we are no longer reduced to the dilemma of thought and extension,
to the schema of a cosmology and a gnoseology limited to the empirical world
and the world of abstract understanding. Between the two is placed an
intermediate world, which our authors designate as ‘alam al-mithal, the world of the
Image, mundus imaginalis: a world as ontologically real as the world of the
senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of
perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as
fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition.
This faculty is the imaginative power, the one we must avoid confusing with the
imagination that modern man identifies with “fantasy” and that, according to
him, produces only the “imaginary.” Here we are, then, simultaneously at the
heart of our research and of our problem of terminology.” He thus begins to
understand that the imaginal realm is spurious in the sense that it
never digresses from consciousness. But he misses the point of the Platonic
Chora or womb-space when he proposes: “The technical term that designates it in
Arabic, ‘alam a mithal, can perhaps also be translated by mundus archetypus,
ambiguity is avoided. For it is the same word that serves in Arabic to
designate the Platonic Ideas (interpreted by Sohravardi terms of Zoroastrian
angelology). However, when the term refers to Platonic Ideas, it is almost always
accompanied by this precise qualification: mothol (plural of mithal) aflatuniya
nuraniya, the “Platonic archetypes of light.” When the term refers to the world
of the eighth climate, it designates technically, on one hand, the
Archetype-Images of individual and singular things; in this case, it relates to the
eastern region of the eighth climate, the city of Jabalqa, where these images
subsist preexistent to and ordered before the sensory world. But on the other hand,
the term also relates to the western region, the city of Jabarsa, as being
the world or interworld in which are found the Spirits after their presence in
the natural terrestrial world and as a world in which subsist the forms of all
works accomplished, the forms of our thoughts and our desires, of our
presentiments and our behavior. It is this composition that constitutes ‘alam
al-mithal, the mundus imaginalis.” In doing this he eludes the purely experiencial
nature of the endopsychic intuition as something purely involentary as would be
the case for all perception. What the intuition “sees,” of course, for the
Greeks was through the eidos, grasping the nature and particulars of unconscious
or endopsychic activity. such intution was rejected by Freud but became the
major resource for Jung’s approach to the unconscious. It is perhaps out of
hand rejected or avoided by both Freud and Corbin insofar as it refers to the
inner space of chora as feminine. In terms of the masculine psychology the
feminine is supressed as representing the unconscious and a dreadful place. Thus
corbin must settle for his mundus imaginalis as in fact a buffer and suppresive
agency to the unconscious as represented by the anima mundus. Corbin makes no
reference to Sophia (wisdom) as the bride of God nor does he note such an
image in his survey of Shiite theosophy. Thus he is stuck in the purgatory of the
imaginal. Notably, imaginare in Latin refers to the imitation and the typos
aspect of the archetype and thus losing arche. Thus, his limitation to the
imaginal represents a stasis of the masculine consciousness: “For the world into
which our witnesses have penetrated-we will meet two or three of those
witnesses in the final section of this study-is a perfectly real world, more evident
even and more coherent, in its own reality, than the real empirical world
perceived by the senses. Its witnesses were afterward perfectly conscious that they
had been ‘elsewhere’; they are not schizorphrenics. It is a matter of a world
that is hidden in the act itself of sensory perception, and one that we must
find under the apparent objective certainty of that kind of perception. That
is why we positively cannot qualify it as imaginary, in the current sense in
which the word is taken to mean unreal, nonexistent. Just as the Latin word
origo has given us the derivative “original,” I believe that the word imago can
give us, along with imaginary, and by regular derivation, the term imaginal. We
will thus have the imaginal world be intermediate between the sensory world
and the intelligible world. When we encounter the Arabic term jism mithali to
designate the “subtle body” that penetrates into the “eighth climate,” or the
“resurrection body,” we will be able to translate it literally as imaginal body,
but certainly not as imaginary body. Perhaps, then, we will have less
difficulty in placing the figures who belong neither to “myth” nor to “history,” and
perhaps we will have a sort of password to the path to the ‘lost continent.’”
Unfortubately, when my book, *The Polyimagical Realm* was published I had not
investigated Corbin’s
Limitation to The Imaginal World insofar as the book was a critique of
analytic psychologist James Hillman whose notion of *archetypal psychology* is
largely derived in the imaginal world of Corbin. In any case, I thank you for
leading me notice Corbin and in turn the Shiite theosophy.
Sincerely;
Bernard
Posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
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