Heidegger

In a message dated 8/29/2006 10:50:09 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
daxsein at hotmail.com writes:

Tympan: Jung’s discussion of Hermas sublimation of Rhoda is another way of
thinking about introversion. It defines spiritualization. The libido in this
case is flowing into the spiritualized expression as much as sinking into
the unconscious where it provides the energy for images to rise that
correspond to the spiritualized expression. So the symbolic expression that
emerges is actually a way of retaining libido. If it is spiritual
imaginative iconography then it withdraws libido from inner and outer
objects and that heals the soul. In
this case phrases would be the expression of a mandalic consciousness. So
you see for people like myself who are negative theologians introversion is
seen as mystical praxis where there is a differentiation between desire
or holy affections and need. The most important affections here are those
that come from the experience of being nothing which are painful or a
difficult
enjoyment. For me the word “introversion” refers to contemplative prayer.
[Bernard] Good, You have done your homework. But I am not fain to limit
introversion as mystical forebearance. Only an extravert desperately
trying to get inside him/herself would see it in such unmediated extreme and
which simply amount to an attempt to further suppress the personality
attitude type, introversion.
[Tympan]: I’m supposed to understand that? If I understand you correctly it
is
not an ummediated extreme if the ongoing transformative association of
symbols are being worked on.
[Bernard]By what means are the symbols worked on? More likely a symbol works
on us insofar as it is not simply a denotative sign and possesses an
unfathomable archetypal predisposition.

Tympan: Yes, your way of putting is not as willful as mine but I thought
your interest was in personotypes not archetypes? For more on how I approach
symbols see below.

Bernard: It is in this sense that the archetype transgresses and distresses
ego consciousness

Tympan: Yes, the ego gets stressed because according to Jung the unconscious
compensates for the one-sideness of consciousness. This is the opposition;–
consc.-unconsciousness. So the emergence of subliminal substance causes a
conflict, a polemos and a struggle.

Bernard: . We cannot by an act of will manipulate introversion insofar as it
may or not be a given perdsonality predisposition.

Tympan: Yes, that’s why the will has to become receptive or free which
releases it from conscious control like it happens in sleep. Remember that I
pointed out the Jung in the “The Transcendent Function” suggested that
introversion as a psychotherapeutic technique is kind of like sleep, an
*abaissement du niveau mental* (Janet). In the days of Schelling and Hegel
they used to talk about the role of mesmeric sleep or hypnosis in
negotiating the passage from nature (unconsciousness-necessity) to freedom
or human consciousness.

[Tympan]The symbols mediates ultimately which is
different for each person. Your libido seems to be turned on by the trinity
of Demeter, Persephone and Hekate but that’s just your imagination and
particular nostalgia that then you use against a generalizing description of
Christianity. Both your nostalgic mythologizing and the Christian one are
rafts that get us to the other side so to speak. For people with a different
accident of birth the symbols are all different. Your use of mythology is
too dogmatic and doctrinaire. The point it seems to me is to get to the
conflict that is there in a conjunction of opposites rather than to get
caught up in the waving of the flag of a particular cultural imagination
over and against others.
[Bernard]That is certainly true and we all perdure according to out own
mythogenic cultural perogatives.

Tympan: Sure, I am always up front with mine. Your trinity is not unlike
Tympan’s trope that everyone here is familiar with but I am sure it means so
much else and other things to you. My descent into the underworld in search
of Persophone is one in search for innovation and fresh ideas or symbols if
you will that move me to go on in the way I do. Around the easter holidays
it all came up to consciousness for me, I mean I became aware of the
affinity between the major narrative threads that attract me. I saw the
Christian easter story as a neoplatonic Orphic one as much as the life of
Moses and the Jewish passover. These are my “mythogenic cultural
perogatives”. To descend into darkness is just to realize that the sublime
makes of darkness a dwelling place [Ps. 18:11]. The Greek Church Fathers who
I read and trust like Gregory of nyssa refer to an absence of knowing, a
longing of intelligibility that to them shows that true knowledge is “seeing
that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all
knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind
of darkness.” (From Nyssa’s The Life Of Moses).

Bernard: The conflict and reconnciliation of opposites is a mere structural
abstraction if it does not have any meat on its bones and which is provided
by a particular imagotypal specificity by which the symbol effects itself.
Otherwise we remain untouched and remain stuck in the windy pneuma of
abstract thinking. In any case, the process enantiadromena that takes place
is not a social exercise or a competive game on a public playing field but a
me, myself and I proposition. There, waving a flag is meaningless because we
have only ourselves for an audience.

Tympan: I had to look up “enantiadromena” it means: “I use the term
enantiadromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of
time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an
extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally
powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious
performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.” (Fron
Psychological Types) but what is “imagitypal specificity” and how does it
effect the symbol. For me there is a symbolical network that makes up a
neoplatonic Jewish Christian Orphic narrative that captivated me around
easter as I said. It’s my house language and prison. I’m a hostage of this
greater struggle or polemos.

Tympan:

[Tympan]I don’t see at all how introversion as contemplation where there is
a
constant withdrawal of libido from inner and outer objects is suppose to be
the extraverts suppresion of the intraversian. It sounds senile to me.
[Bernard] It certainly would be an old man’s delusion if it was thought
libido, or psychic energy could be manipulated in so deterministic a manner.
But that is what geriatric dreams are made of otherwise known as living in
the past.

Tympan: I have to apologize I shouldn’t have implied you were going senile.
Your attitude towards Christianity was sounding like the expression of a
taste or opinion or the sound of a barking dog who had lost the way towards
humanization and generosity and I just started to loose my temper and go a
little ballistic but I am okay now. Please excuse me for taking such liberty
with you. But it looks like Lucio and his two trolls Jud and Micheal
Pennannacor or whatever his name is detonated a list flood. You made Jud
look like a rather interesting poet. The first poem you edited sounds
brilliant ripped out of context. They have been talking like that forever.
Nobody believes me they are a persona of the same person. It’s acting out
it’s all it is.

Bernard: The other alternative is chronic foregetfulness: as living in a
Libnitzian windowless monad.

Tympan: Talk about the unconscious of analytical psychology…in appetitus
of the monad
or vis primitiva Heidegger (GA26) starts to see a drive that is distinct
from Aristotle’s dynamis, energia, and entelechia. Drive is a pressing
forward, a tending… a sort of motivation where one is set on something, is
fixed on… Drive doesn’t need an external push but is self-moving it just
needs only the removal of a hindrance (sola sublatione impedimenti -
Leibniz). Heidegger illustrates it by a bent bow, an important symbol given
his further discussion of it in his essays on Holderlin that I discussed
here at one time with Rene who is curiously silent. He can’t stop talking
day after day usually. It’s close to Schopenhauer’s will which is everywhere
in nature.

[Bernard]: I have had some extraverted art students who want to make
“mystical” paintings. This was, of course, a mere subterfuge for avoiding
introversion as a psychological state.
[Tympan]: “of course”? I expect people to say that any kind of imaginative
practice is a screen against the truth of the mystery of the Godhead or
whatever you want to call it, the ineffable, Sophia, depending on what
spiritual symbols you are attached to
[B ernard] But of course, we have many professional “mystics” these days
lost in the sea of saeculum.
[Bernard]: On the other hand, if there is in fact a genuine inclination to
the
mystical it must be understood as either apophatic or kataphatic,
respectively, either introverted or extroverted. But Jung does not go into
this and I shall not elaborate on it at this time (you might take a peek at
Rudolf Otto’s *Mysticism East and West,* copyrighted 1932 and 1960 byÂ
Macmillan Pub.)
[Tympan]: I’ll check it out but the best is to get closer to the primary
texts. I was talking about apophatic definitions which work through
abstraction in the sense of withdrawing libido from both inner and outer
objects. But that’s nothing the hard part is that one is always separating
from both inner and outer objects until there is the habitual clinging to
nothingness which for philosophers is the truth and has nothing to do with
symbolical mythology.
[Bernard]That is true and it has nothing to do with the psyche and a process
ontology.

Tympan: No it doesn’t, the symbols are a raft one lets go off. They also
have a heuristic or pedagogical value that’s all.

[Tympan] I am trying to defend and give a place to the
imagination against a hardcore reading from philosophy like you hear from M.
Eldred. I am asking a question like what is the role of Biblical imagery
knowing that ultimately it has nothing to do with truth if the ineffable is
unknowable?
[Bernard]Unknowable but present. But what kinf of truth are you citing,
aletheia as the unconcealed or truth as Revelation?

Tympan: I’m just pointing to whatever is going on in a particular
circumstance.

[Tympan] The words “Biblical imagery” just points to a set of symbols
that could be something else. It’s a context of symbols that mediate
someone’s spiritual transformation. It’s different for different people.
[Bernard]Yes, of course. But I would not relativize a set of symbols as if
any old symbols will do to satisfy a context.

Tympan: Of course not you have to pick those that hold your attention or
draw your libido and concentrate it into a potent essence so to speak. This
is what jung says symbols do. They suck up libido from consciousness so it
goes unconscious therefore in my way of thinking they are contemplative
devices or icons.

[Bernard]: For the moment I would prefer to keep in discourse the subject of
extraverted sensation and which has to do with the material object (of
perception). If we get to it, the expression of introverted sensation is a
real hairy subject.
Tympan: Okay then tell what is the material object of perception?
[Bernard]Whatever you can see, hear, smell, touch, etc.

Tympan: yes and that is what is going in my particular circumstance at this
moment. I think I will let go to some Chopin’s nocturnes (Rubenstein
playing) that I like during early morning and time for bed.

Tympan

Sincerely;
Bernard
regards,
Tympan

Posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 8:35 am
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