SubscribeJanuary 4th, 2011
wait just a &%#%^&# minute
I like Hillman, I really do. There is so much to admire, but really, must he? I mean is this really necessary?
Hillman writes:
Our model is the microcosm/macrocosm and the doctrine of correspondences between them. A man or a woman is a smaller arrangement (kosmos) in which all things in nature are proportionately represented. Not only is the macrocosmic world personified and alive with subjective qualities that we nowadays allow only to human beings, but the microcosm of the human being, because it is a microcosm of nature, is also a mineral, physical object, consisting of substances such as salt. The difference between this psychological substantiality and that of chemistry, which too holds that mineral and physical elements enter into the composition of a human beings, is that the chemical model does not require consciousness or soul. There is a radical split between conscious subject and the physical substances. Whereas the alchemical model suggests: as within, so without. The physical world has its interiority and subjectivity because it is a larger arrangement of human nature. For alchemy, both man and world are ensouled. Sensitity, meaning, consciousness—these are potentially present throughout.
The microcosm/macrocosm model requires a micro/macro-awareness. It asks that we feel into the world of matter with sensitivity for qualitative differences. It asks that we find in our objective experiences analogies with and metaphors of physical processes and substances.
We have lost this substantial view of personality. And because we no longer imagine ourselves substantially, we place substantiality onto the brain and bio-chemistry as basis of mind and soul. Or, we substantialize various functional and relational concepts such as instincts, drives, motives, energy, complexes, ego, repression, and the like. We cannot escape the psyche’s need to imagine itself substantially, as having physis or being a microcosm of physis, even if not a gross and palpable physical stuff. And when psychology does not have an adequate language for the soul’s need to substantiate, then reified substantiations spring up willy nilly.
Alchemical psychology took care of this psychic need by using a language that was both metaphorical and physical at once. We know that we are not silver and sulphur and antimony—and so we can speak of ourselves as such all the while realizing that these concrete materials are also metaphorical: both gross and subtle at once. The substantialites of modern psychology—ego, drive, aggression—are conceived literally, and we forget that they are fictional constructs. So the great value of alchemical psychology is its animated language of matter, which recognizes soul in physical substance and admits the ‘stuffness’ of soul. It puts soul into nature and nature into soul.
He’s right that we tend to take these narrative constructs as real, but the assertion that we know we are not made of antimony—one of the most persistent problems is that people literalize narratives. Most alchemists probably take the as above-so below narrative literally, for example. As it appears Hillman does. Soul in nature? They are separate?
To be fair, Hillman is probably saying that alchemy is a better metaphor for us because it allows us to see ourselves as part of nature and our bodies as “soul stuff” and the soul as “body stuff.” I’d agree if the narrative wasn’t based on the same basic assumptions as Plato’s ideals and Aristotle’s prime matter.
All of this is based on the assumed dialectic between substance and change. That is, we assume there is something substantive, that there is something we can find,called matter and something else we can find that changes matter’s inherent substantive form. In alchemy this comes out as prime matter (the substantive form) and various “cooking” processes (the process of change done to the substance) all of which involve the will or intent of the alchemist.
The problem is that this dialectic is itself a narrative and almost certainly not a function of the universe itself. This Hillman seems not to realize and it annoys me. Why? Because even though the alchemical narrative is better suited (than, say, Christian dogma) to realize humanity’s place in the world, it is still a dialectic based on notions of purification and the release of the red from the black. And when we literalize this—and we will, we are presently incapable of not doing so, at least not as a group—where does that leave “black”? Matter still loses here.
As for the “psychic need”…so? We have a mind that is a bit of a conjuring trick. It has a view that it is a “self” and because we are embodied creatures and therefore recognize and react to reality as embodied, our new little “mind” can only imagine itself based on the pattern it knows. That doesn’t mean it is true, nor that it can’t be moderated. Yes we narrate the universe. We can work on recognizing that this is a human trait and not a function of sub-atomic forces. We do this all the time. There was a time when we saw the stars move and assumed that meant we were the center of the universe. Our perception along with our tendency to read the universe as if it were a human extension mislead us, but we figured it out and changed the story. Must we see the universe as “ensouled?” Can we not treat our environment with respect without such a notion? It’s not as if the “recognition” of the human soul has stopped us murdering each other. Why on earth would Hillman think that it would help us navigate a more respectful path with the inanimate?
Must we continue to see ourselves as “ensouled?” It is no longer the best narrative we can create to explain ourselves.
I’m going to stop now. My blood pressure is rising.
Tsk. This makes me techy.
January 7th, 2011 at 5:36 pm
[...] ontological metaphors (e.g. viewing ideas as entities). The orientational metaphor that underlies Hillman’s analysis of salt is based on our valuing of “up” in specific ways. Good is up. Virtue is up. What if, [...]
August 13th, 2011 at 9:50 pm
Consciousness is an expedient way for the brain to summarise what’s currently happening in and around the organism. This is the main reason why we find ‘soul’ such a tempting idea: since we aren’t aware of eveything that happens, we find ourselves wrapped in the illusion of a disembodied self (o such paradox!).
Rather than the idea of ‘ensoulment’, perhaps we might construct a story of the world as a mutually interdependent web of poetic motion…with some emphasis of “collective” fate, rather than personal fate. But that can easily be taken literally as something bad. That pesky idea of free will lurks in the background
August 14th, 2011 at 8:12 am
I agree that our phenomenological experience, along with the way we reason through metaphor creates the narrative of a free-floating “I” that is variously thought of as the soul, archetypes, consciousness, spirits and the like. I love the idea of an interdependent web of poetic motion, sounds vaguely Buddhist, and since I love poetry I can go there for a personal narrative. However, I’m not sure how much general purchase it might get in society (the thought makes me grin).
Seriously though, I’ve long thought it would be useful to take Jung, Dogen, Chuang Tzu, Hillman, Cowan and a few others, mush them up with some useful social/political philosophy like Charles Taylor’s Communitarianism and some good cognitively based philosophy and then try to find a way to reconcile their insights with empirical reality. I see the putative writing-team culling the idea-pudding and ruthlessly sifting out any and all bits that start trying to levitate the mix out of the bowl onto some god/spirit-plain/plane.
Jung, for example: can his notion of archetype be reconciled with what we now know about how the body thinks? I rather think it could. The collective unconscious would be grounded in the reality that human beings share a form, share an electro-chemical signalling system and share an environmentally based learning system that structures what and how we learn. That seems far more useful than labeling archetypal impulses in ways that almost forces us to imagine them as spirit people.
August 27th, 2011 at 4:13 am
I think the idea of ensoulment is a way for people to make the unfamilar familar to them. We treat objects as if they were people, endowed with feelings and thoughts. For example, we can get frustrated and angry at the printer as the paper jams inside it.
Of course this is precisely that idea’s weakness: it doesn’t allow people to confront the essentially inhuman world in its own right.
As for this paragraph…
“All of this is based on the assumed dialectic between substance and change. That is, we assume there is something substantive, that there is something we can find,called matter and something else we can find that changes matter’s inherent substantive form. In alchemy this comes out as prime matter (the substantive form) and various “cooking” processes (the process of change done to the substance) all of which involve the will or intent of the alchemist.”
I find a hidden context of matter submitting to man in the alchemical story, which sucks, given the face that we’re at the mercy of our chemical nature every day. It’s that slave-to-master idea which makes it unsatisfying for me (and you, as I would guess).
In chemistry, as far as I know, we don’t force molecules into existence. Rather, they self-organise into their minimal energy state. We can’t physically move them around to do that: they’re tiny! All of these events are cooperative in nature, rather than metaphorically beating the heck out of these substances to our imagined will. Matter changes itself with time, on different scales of existence, moving down and around the Gibbs free energy landscape…building up all matter of wonderfully temporary structures.
August 27th, 2011 at 8:52 am
That’s the task for the next generations, to come to some acceptance that we no longer live in a human world, but rather we live in a non-human world, out of which we come. It’s such a wonderful story, and has such room for creative expansion. I see pieces of it starting to surface into thought, but the power of it has yet to crown.
One of the things that will change as a result of this new non-human reality will be our understanding of what matter is/does. I fully expect some Buddhist influence here. A friend of mine introduced me to the idea of “arising” in which life is a continually arising. Matter is not really seen as a “noun” but as a “verb”. Match this with Heidegger’s idea of Being, one has the beginnings of a mind-changing new narrative about the nature of matter. Another piece: Merleau-Ponty and his ideas about the body. Once all these get together in something like embodied philosophy, given their insistence on empirical studies as part of contemporary philosophy, then you have a first foot print in the future narrative.
All of these ideas swirl around a new idea of matter as something not-passive, and also not-dependent on some quickening “form”. The ancient idea of “form”, or some enlivening force that acts on a passive, dependent matter, is dying (finally!). Matter is coming to be understood as self-actualizing – in a way, exactly what I think Katagiri means (in part) by the notion of arising. The idea that there is no permanence at the “bottom” of the universe, that seems like it will uproot our notions of a passive material world, and that idea is fundamentally at fault in our continued problems with imagining matter as something that comes to think.
And these new notions – down to science. Yeah science!