* * The notions considered most pertinent to
the work presented on this site derive from diverse intellectual
disciplines of analysis. Some of their most provocative notions are
presented in the form of interpretive paraphrasing on this page.
These are not quotations. Authors credited with providing the logic
of these statements are indicated in parenthesis. Related quotations
from their works exist in various documents on this site and
relevant sources are found in the general bibliography. The work of
various other authors could also be cited as reference for many of
these statements. * * *
*Human thought and expression re-produce the phenomenon of ‘what
is’ as re-presentation. Representation thus ever leaves the
phenomenon it purports to re-present in some ways un-represented. To
take the representation for what it re-presents, but is not, is to
practice idolatry. (Barfield)
*Society defines identity and reality by imposing fixed structure
on actual phenomena that are actually not static forms but rather,
like social life itself, constitute constantly changing processes.
The fluidity of those processes thus renders them, relative to
notions of fixed structures, ‘anti-structural’—a status that is not
actually suitable to being definitively defined as having constant
status. (Turner)
*Meaning suggested in words is ‘always already’ deriving from and
dependent upon other words that derive meaning from yet other words.
Meaning is thus inherently uncertain, various, contextual,
indefinite. (Derrida)
*Language, and the consciousness it re-presents, are inherently
metaphorical in the ways these construct meaning. The activity of
human consciousness is essentially poetic in how it composes
meaning. (Gibbs)
*Manifestation of phenomena is composed of both an explicate
order of specific forms and an implicate order of dynamic flow.
These ‘orders’ coexist, are interdependent, but are not identical.
(Bohm)
*Reality is known through representational psychic processes of
perception, cognition, and imagination. Thus reality is necessarily
a psychological phenomenon. (Jung)
*Mythical modes of expression and representation manifest
psychical ‘organs’ for knowing the radical complexity of reality in
appropriately multiple, concurrent statuses of being. (Cassirer)
*Society exists in opposition to Nature yet derives from, and is
part of it. Human consciousness is thus both ‘native’ and ‘alien’ to
‘nature.’ (Campbell)
*Language ‘takes place’ in the body. The written word is not
language till it is ‘spoken’ either by mouth or brain/mind. Without
the body, or embodiment, there is no language. (Vernon)
*Physical science posits a plurality of valid reality frames
governed by ‘natural laws’ of phenomenal events. But the latter are
not consistently ‘true’ in all frames. Reality is literally various.
(Greene)
*The end of the search for meaning is the ‘birth of man’ in that
human intelligence becomes the source of meaningfulness and must
take responsibility for tending the dialectical process of its
thought rather than seek transcendent references. (Giegerich)
* The analytically fragmenting methodology of modern science is
incapable of adequately representing radically inclusive
continuity—it cannot ‘conceive’ wholeness. (Bohm)
*Aspects of feeling, thought, and desire that are repressed from
conscious self-awareness or denied expression are likely to ‘return’
as psychic or somatic ‘symptoms’ of distress, disease, disability.
(Jung)
*The advent of the technology of literacy and a phonetic alphabet
inherently literalizes and systematizes human understanding. The
formal medium of expression becomes its elemental ‘message’
regardless of ‘intended content.’ (McLuhan)
*Concepts of spirit and matter are reductive abstractions
deployed to indicate differing but co-generative aspects of a
contiguous phenomenal field of manifestation. That these can be
conceived in/as abstractions does not mean they exist as such.
(Avens)
*The Tao that can be written is not the Tao. (Lao Tzu) The self
that can be said is not the Self. (Taylor, Kugler)
*Mind is constituted by associations of difference that generate
‘information’—mind thus ‘extends beyond’ brain since the differences
that constitute its knowing exist ‘outside’ of the brain.
(Bateson)
*Knowledge changes the knower (Plato).
*The body is known by way of imaginal consciousness. Thus the
bod, however conceived as real or fanciful, is always already an
imaginal body. (Avens)
*Relationship of conscious awareness with the ‘other
self-context’ of ‘the unconscious’ requires ‘crossing over’ into its
version of reality, on its overtly symbolic terms for valid
expression and understanding. The dream and ‘pathological behavior’
must be ‘entered’ if these are to be understood ‘in psyche’s terms.’
(Hillman)
*The Self is a necessary fiction that can be and inevitably is
‘re-written.’ (Hillman, Kugler)
*Social structures are necessarily hierarchical and thus
marginalize or repress aspects of both human consciousness and
reality as inappropriate or invalid. Yet that which is marginalized
thereby accrues importance as ‘the low’ upon which ‘the high’
stands. Thus maintenance of dominant social structure requires some
occasional abrogation of its standards by ‘bringing the marginal to
the center’ and affirming the latter’s potency. Dominant structure’s
ultimately arbitrary definitions of identity and reality depend upon
establishing a valid relationship between it and the liminal
threshold of anti-structural or more-than-socialized reality, which
it typically represses. Ordinary order exists in relationship to the
extra-ordinary. (Turner)
*Mythic themes and images express archaic patterns or ‘deep
structures’ shared by all human psyches. Those motifs thus have an
archetypal existence in a ‘collective unconscious’ that asserts
complex influences on all human expressions. (Jung)
*The Postmodern—understood as a non-hierarchical, fragmentary
confusion of inconsistent, self-parodying social and cultural
phenomena—is Modernism revealed. (Harvey)
*Complex meaning derives from a dialectical process of thought
that is indefinite in its continual logical refinements, thus is not
reductively conclusive—truthfulness is ‘on-going’ rather than
transcendental. (Giegerich)
*Myth is psychological, psychology is mythic in how each
represents psyche. (Hillman)
*The death of God makes possible a truly ‘errant wandering’ of
human consciousness through existence in/as the divine conception of
creation. (Taylor)
*Myth and Science are isomorphic representations of the same
reality. (Thompson)
*Human society can become overtly secular, denying the existence
of gods, but a religious attitude deriving from a psychical ‘need
for god-ness’ appears inherent in the human psyche. (Jung)
*Language has a mind of its own. As soon as one starts speaking
or writing then the language one is using asserts its own biases,
preferences, intentions, suggestions. It leads one’s thoughts off in
unintended directions. Our expressions are always subordinated by
the ‘tongue’ that we use to speak. To use language is to enter a
dialogue with it. (Vernon)
*Thoroughly dialectical thought process is inclusive of all
preceding historical stages of logical development and
understanding. Preceding theses are not discarded but sublated in
genuinely dialectical logical progressions. (Giegerich)
*The Psyche demands initiatory experiences of transformation and
it will create them in/as traumatic events if culture fails to
provide a ritualized version of initiatory experience at times of
crucial life changes. Both extreme ‘acting out’ and depression in
adolescence are primary examples. (Meade)
*Philosophical meaning in the written tradition of Western
intellectual thought can be shown to depend upon binary oppositions
that assume hierarchical priorities of value. Those hierarchic
binary assumptions also can be shown to be logically reversible.
Many philosophical conclusions are thus assertions of socio-cultural
values not ‘unfettered reason.’ (Derrida)
*The individual is the enemy of collective society, yet depends
upon the latter for coming to know his or her self and relation to
the cosmos. Mythologies assist in both socializing and preserving
the individual. (Campbell)
*The conscious subject of modern psychology is radically
alienated from itself as an object of its own ‘reflections.’
(Kugler)
*Metaphor is reality, reality is metaphorical (Gibbs, Romanyshyn,
Wheelwright).
*Brain studies confirm that effective reasoning is dependent upon
emotional experience. (Damasio)
*Imagination is an activity of deforming images rather than
imitation or creation. It re-orders the evidently literal forms of
images of perception to reveal their actual psychical nature.
(Bachelard)
*The self comes to know its self by projecting itself onto others
and world. (Jung)
*Psychotherapy is a practice of attentive, reflective, analytical
amplification of psychodynamics rather than one which ‘cures
illness’ in a medical fashion. (Jung, Giegerich).
*Positivistic literalism collapses the mythical dimensions of
radically complex reality, obliterating human experiential access to
the latter. (Campbell, Giegerich)
*Human collectives generate and share a collective unconscious
that has, and manifests, its own intentions—of which humans
typically lack any conscious awareness. (Jung)
*Genuinely significant changes in essential attitudes about
identity and reality (‘metanoia’) require a radical break-down or
dissolution of fundamental perspectives. Such as shift
psychologically constitutes a ‘near death experience.’ Most people
would rather literally die than undergo such an emotionally
traumatic transformation of their basis for belief and personality.
(Thompson)
*The thingless things of thought and imagination are the
realities by which reality is known. (Emery)
*Human intelligence is not singular—there are different ways of
knowing and understanding that derive from the individualized
character of brain and mind. (Gardner, Damasio)
*The eros of relationship requires failure, suffering, and
despair. (Lockhart, Pedrazza)
*Irrational behavior has its reasons (Jung, Giegerich)
*Literalism, not metaphor, is an illusory production of human
consciousness projected onto phenomenal reality. (Gibbs)
*Brain and consciousness studies indicate that the era of the
singular “I” is coming to a close. (Norretranders)
*Psychology cannot be a ‘helping profession’ if it is genuinely
concerned with understanding psyche. To ‘do psychology,’ to attend
primarily to the ‘logic of psyche,’ one must be ‘dead to the desires
of the ego’ lest one attend to these rather than the larger dynamic
activity of the ‘whole Self.’ (Giegerich)
*Mythical expression is essential to knowing the complex,
pluralistic reality of consciousness and identity. (Hillman)
*The ‘life of the Soul’ is logical but its logic is not the
literalizing, positivistic logic of egoic identity consciousness.
(Giegerich)
*The status of domesticated or ‘tame’ socialized identity can
only be thoroughly known or understood from a status of being
‘wild,’ from experiencing socially unstructured consciousness.
(Duerr)
*Art defined in any hierarchical frame of aesthetic priorities
imposes social order on artistic expression. Only after the ‘End of
the Era of Art’ can there be art. (Danto)
*Myths are the psychic ‘organs of reality.’ (Cassirer)
*Technical mediums of expression, such as writing, ‘amputate’
aspects of psychic capacity by literalizing these ‘outside the
self.’ Thereby, the relation of human consciousness to itself and
its environments is altered. Different mediums alter these ‘ratios’
in different ways. (McLuhan)
*The individualized self is not singularly different but
variously unique. An individualist is not necessarily individuated.
(Jung)
*Positivistic reality is a logical fallacy. (Giegeirch)
*Much modern art enacts ancient shamanic dynamics of relationship
with more-than-ordinary reality. (Tucker)
*The core anxiety of modernity is the religious ‘search for the
self,’ which is no longer experienced as a singular, consistent
status. (Neumann)
*Metaphor is actually metamorphic and transformative when
experienced through ritual enactments. (Turner)
*Both myth and depth psychology portray a divided or plural
status of individual psychic identity that continually frustrates
egoic attempts to assert a uniform, self-consistent personality.
(Jung, Hillman)
*Postmodern contexts involve a theological effort to affirm some
‘divine truth’ without abandoning the ‘powers of reason.’
(Harvey)
*For the most part, persons live ‘behind a mask’ of socialized
identity (persona) that even they mistake for their intrinsic
selfhood. (Jung)
*Socialized order cannot be experienced as such without direct
experience of ‘anti-social’ disorder or non-order—as in Carnival.
Archaic cultures accepted this relationship and ritually enacted it.
Modern ones have attempted to repress it in favor of utterly
consistent ‘civility.’ (Duerr)
*Images are simultaneous or concurrently occurring ‘events’ that
have no intrinsic sequence ordering their parts. Thus the
associations of those ‘parts’ have a polyvalent multiplicity
exemplary of mythical expression and dreams. Such is the
nonreducitve mode of understanding in the non-egoic aspect of
psyche. (Berry, Hillman)
*The medium of expression is a message. Styles and modes of
expression inherently configure consciousness and understanding.
(McLuhan)
*Consciousness is both an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ as the
‘presence’ of what is ‘out there’ occurring ‘within’ the ‘mind’ of
the brain. (Giegerich)
*Ritualized and dramatic performance manifest the inherent
plurality of selfhood as an ‘I’ that enacts a ‘Not-I’ (the dramatic
role) that is also a ‘Not-Not-I’ since the ‘I’ is involved in it. In
this way a person overtly experiences the how selfhood is and is not
the roles it plays in ordinary life. (Turner, Schechner)
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