Author: Walter

This time from James Hillman

Especially—this Neoplatonic tradition is thoroughly Western even if it is not empirical in method, rationalist in conception, or otherworldly spiritual in appeal. This tradition holds to the notion of soul as a first principle, placing this soul as a tertium between the perspectives of body (matter, nature, empirics) and of mind (spirit, logic, idea). Soul as the tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed, has been described as Hermetic consciousness (Lopez–Pedraza 1977), as “esse in anima” (Jung [1921] CW 6, §66, 77), as the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin, and by Neoplatonic writers on the intermediaries or figures of the metaxy. Body, soul, spirit: this tripartite anthropology further separates archetypal psychology from the usual Western dualistic division, whose history goes back before Descartes to at least the ninth century (869: Eighth General Council at Constantinople), occurring also in the medieval ascension of Averroes’ Aristotelianism over Avicenna’s Platonism. Consequences of this dualistic division are still being felt in that the psyche has become indistinguishable from bodily life, on the one hand, or from the life of the spirit on the other. In the dualistic tradition, psyche never had its own logos. There could be no true psychology. A first methodologically consistent attempt to articulate one in a philosophical style belongs also within the perimeters of archetypal psychology (Evangelos Christou 1963).

Nous, Ananke and Eros: Reflections about the Images of the Soul by Marcus Vinicius Quintaes

João talks of love as being “a bridge which helps people connect these two places that are so very distant one from the other”; it is in this mediating space, on this bridge, in this intermediary region that the Greeks called Metaxy, that Eros is located, acts, and comes true. A region neither human nor divine, neither conscious nor unconscious, simply intercourse between regions. It is in this Metaxy, intermediary region where Eros can fly and burn with his arrows, that we find the realm of psychic reality: a place we should all go to, in search for the exercise of our Soul-making.

I have liked to this essay before, it is crucial to my explorations, because the whole of psychotherapy is in the metaxy. The transference is participatory. The Imago match is participatory perception. Cyberspace is participatory, not just justice, good, beauty though these large ideas were the cyberspace at the time.

These theoretical uses, perception, relationships between the ideas, and epistemology are intertwined. The philosopher resembles Eros, because he or she is able to “know” both knowledge and opinion. He / she can know “true knowledge” because of participation in the ideas. Since he can participate in the ideas of justice, good, etc., the philosopher is even able to perceive the world better.(8) Since the philosopher is also able to participate in the (lesser) forms, including justice, good, beauty, he / she will be also be most virtuous. Thus, the theoretical uses of metaxy all band together to form a coherent picture of Plato’s philosophy, a philosophy which is between idealism and realism.

Though I have trouble with the postmodern school as the writing never fully connects with me, there is a strong respect here for the archetypal trdition, here are some paragraphs to mull over from David L. Miller, 1966:

The world is itself a graphic interface with “icons” clicking us rather than we them. As Henry Corbin had noted, the world is mundus imaginalis, a medial imaginal cosmos, like Plato’s metaxy, the realm of the phantasm. We are in a sort of Windows 95: an screen of images pointing to no-thing on either side but a so-called reality that is in fact virtual. William James had remarked that in the twentieth century the greatest discovery was the unconscious. Gilbert Durand has added that in the twenty-first century the greatest discovery will be the content of the unconscious: namely, images. Perhaps we are already there. From TV satellite dish, to computer terminal, laser holography, and imaging centers with diagnostic MRIs, as Andre Agassi says in a camera commercial: “Image is everything.”

A postmodern theologian of culture, Mark C. Taylor (who not incidentally was honored by the Carnegie Foundation as the 1995 Teacher of the Year) has helped in his writings to bring to differentiated articulation the implications of a culture of simulacrae for teaching. In a book (Imagologies) that reports on values in teaching where classrooms in Finland and in Massachusetts are electronically linked, Taylor points out that cultural “imagology insists that the word is never simply a word but is always also an image” (styles). “The return of the figure disfigures the disfiguration of concepts by reinscribing the imago in the midst of the logos” (simcult) The audio-visual trace of the word involves an inescapable materiality that can be thought only if it is figured. The abiding question for conceptual reflection, according to Taylor, is: “How to (dis)figure the wor(l)d?”–a statement written in a manner so as to enable at least four possible readings (styles).

Others besides Taylor, and not only those in the study of religions, have mapped the contemporary hermeneutical task similarly. I have alluded already to the essay in which Derrida writes that “every abstrtact concept hides a sensible figure” (1982: 210). And I have mentioned, also, Wittgenstein and Bachelard. But there is also the important cultural and intellectual work of George Lakoff and J. A. T. Mitchell, both of whom have offered strategies of thinking and working in a world of semiotic simcult, a world in which, as Taylor has observed there is a fundamental irony. “A paradox of the imaginary.” writes Taylor, is that “the proliferation of images is iconoclastic” (communicative practices). This is because of the infinite deferral of final definitive signification. Since closure is not possible, neither is idolatry or dogmatism or ideologism or colonialism. When these emerge, as indeed they do and will, they are defenses against the situation in which we find ourselves.