Heidegger

Dear Tympan:

[Corbin]: 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.”
[Bernard]In doing this he eludes the purely
experiencial
nature of the endopsychic intuition as something purely involuntary 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.

Tympan: I am not interested in defending Corbin. I don’t have any strong
attachment to this theory of ressurection as an empirical reality. It’s an
odd idea for us. But thinking of what you wrote it sounds like if this
“endopsychic intuition” is involuntary then will must be very passive. Will
or desire must be suspended it seems. Hegel would say this is the freedom of
the will and the work of habit.

[Bernard]: The intuition, as a form of “inner perception” (perception of
psychic activity) that is
active unconsciously, that is to say independant not only of the imagination
but the will. It thus
performs autonomously which, on one hand threatens the will and on the other
compromises
the imaginal (of imitated images). The will, of course, constitutes the
function of thinking as
the ruling agency of consciousness. Without “thinking” the will has no media
of asserting
itself and by which feeling, intuition and sensation are entered as part of
conscious function.
In this sense the exclusivity of thinking and the will perform as the
tyranants of consciosuness
usually in evidence as a colossal onesidenedness. Intuition, because
involuntary and autonomos
poes the greates threat to this oligarchy of thinking

[Bernard]: 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.
[Bernard]: Accordingly, the mundus imaginalis is in service to the Topos
space
and in utter suppression of the Chora space. Where Topos is extra or
peri-morphic,
Chora (space) is centri-morphic and otherwise refered to core, Kore and the
inner space as
virgin (without previous impress (Plato).

[Tympan]: He [corbin] might say that is what the imaginary does. Whatever the
case may
be there can be two ways of thinking of the imagination. One is an aid to
getting to endopsychic intuition which is where you seem to want to go and
another is not. If the imagination is connected to mystery through the
imagery that is in play then that seems to me is making the will more
involuntary, more spontaneous and free. Then it would work in the interest
of sublimating regression making us take three steps back for every step
ahead.
[Bernard]: That would be a non-commutative regression leading only to entropy
and the extinction of Being and ontological necessity.

[Bernard]: 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.

[Tympan]: Not in this essay but in other places he relates this mundus
imaginal to the culture of the fideli d’amore which understood the passivity
or apathetic indifference of the understanding as the bride of God or active
intellect. So its part of the culture of pure love that in many ways puts
out the fire of heaven as much as an interest in creatures.

[Bernard]: That is most true when he references the Shia that has Lady Fatima,
daughter of the Prophet as the superlative feminine and actively associated
with
the Christian Virgin Mary, mother of the Messiah. Strangely enough Mother Mary
makes a miraculous appearance after WWI in Fatima, Portugal making as such
reference to an image also common to the Shia. In as yet unrecognized
possibility
this may anticipate a unity between Shiite and Roman Catholic theosophy..

[Bernard]: Notably, imaginare in Latin refers to the imitation and the typos
aspect of the archetype and thus losing arche. Thus, his [Crobin’s]
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.’”
[Bernard]: Perhaps this “lost continent” anticipates refinding “On earth as
it is in heaven”
or the day of days.
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.

[Tympan]: In your critique of Hillman you seem strongest if this is the right
word. There you are arguing against something you know well. In the end
Corbin is refering to a process of nested hierarchies not that there isn’t
something to what you say. Like Kant’s imagination the imaginal is in
between the intelligibles and the sensibles because it participates in both
realm. It’s the site of contradictions, paradoxes, tensions that leads from
gross sensory perception to increasingly subtle phenomena which finally is
way of reaching the solitary and silent language of angels. The
thing-in-itself or freedom is an angel which is just an image but as an
image it is an aid to seeing further if one likes angels anyway. The images
that work are different for different people. Then there is the breakdown of
the mind where it is torned apart as Hegel points out thinking of Schelling.
>From my point of view the imagination is a bridge that operates like a
focusing device that helps to gather the will into an intensifying freedom.
It makes contact and moves us because it is speaking to the affections as
much as to reason which makes it the expression of symbolic intuition?
[Bernard]: In that case the Will would not be “free” (i.e., limited to the
thinking function)
but receptive to intra psychic or “unconscious” activity. We would then
better be
enabled to reckon with UIO, s, “Unidentified Inner Objects.”

Sincerely;
Bernard
Posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 3:35 am
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