Psycho-Philo-Sophic-Maxims

Paraphrasing Complimentary Theoretical, & Methodological Framings from Different Disciplinary Contexts

    

 * * 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)