Advanced Search

This is embarrassingly late, and my only excuse is that I've been caught up with reading for the next project and dealing with COVID-related issues (restrictions - not sickness, thankfully! 😶). But Romantic Metasubjectivity Through Schelling and Jung: Rethinking the Romantic Subject (Routledge, 2020) came out May-June of this year. Propaganda material below! Here's a link to the book on Routledge: Romantic Metasubjectivity Through Schelling and Jung: Rethinking the R WWW.ROUTLEDGE.COM Romantic Metasubjectivity Through Schelling and Jung: Rethinking the Romantic Subject explores the remarkable intellectual isomorphism between the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling and...

My apologies to everyone here - in attempting to hive off our discussion of the archetype as a separate forums topic I seem to have obliterated it. F for FAIL for me Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to create a separate discussion topic for the concept of the archetype. So, to recap briefly: @Graham Barnett was asking how it was possible to delineate archetypes if, as Jung says at some point, they all run into each other. My pre-fail response was that I think Jung would say that, apropos of his later, more mature thinking on the archetype, that yes, they are hypotheses, but they also have some sort of foothold in what he at one point calls the "organic-material substrate." This is to say that they are forces which have effects in the natural world, and in this phase of Jung's thinking his favourite analogy for the archetype is that of the "axial system" of a crystal growing in bittern. Just as a crystal self-organises around a string or creates an axial system around which it structures symmetrical crystals in an orderly fashion, so the archetype has a propensity to repeat itself (i.e. its pattern of experience), so while they run together, as the theory goes there is some way to discern some sort of an energic "core" to an archetype. Whether or not this can be "scientifically" measured is perhaps another matter entirely - does it depend on what we mean by "science"? Again, my apolgies for the admin-fail!

My view of Nietzsche was mainly through Lucy Huskinson's work on Jung and Nietzsche--as well as Jung's reading of Nietzsche-- and so I was missing something. Reading Nietzsche directly, I saw that 'God is dead' and 'Apollo vs Dionysus' was barely scratching the surface, and Nietzsche's philosophy was less about demolition than it was construction and honesty in motive, especially pertaining triumph of active forces over ressentiment and bad passions. There is something in Nietzsche that is very visceral, almost Whitehead-ish at times--he's constantly talking of differences of forces and processes, rather than post-hoc static study of things. There's a passage somewhere in Beyond Good & Evil, I forget where, where he sort of 'gives away the game' of what he's doing and defines the Will to Power as these sort of forces; or rather, he states, quasi-hypothetically, "If I were to define the Will to Power as this...". And from that moment on I realized he was as very much covertly systematic as I think Deleuze or Bergson or any of those guys are, once you pull back the rhetoric. They're building something that requires the archetype, the virtual, the active... whatever you want to call it... both within and without, a concrete universal of the world. I think reading Nietzsche directly sort of gave me the confidence to consider all that without Jung as the foundation for me, if that makes sense. I think that all resonates a lot with what's in Jung, but not starting with the container of 'mind' to get there, which in some ways becomes even more liberating I think, in the same way archetypes being found in nature 'frees' them from futile talk about "do we find them in genes? Or brain structures? Or...". I think all that talk is a waste of time, anymore than trying to find genes for broad personality features often is dubious. I think that 'passage' into the world is what a lot of us who study Jung juxtaposed against another philosopher--whether it be Spinoza, Schelling or Deleuze- are after. Unrelated but I should also note that a 'whole that is never reached' is a very Deleuzian idea as well (The Virtual Idea is never finished).

I've been invited to give a paper presenting my dissertation research at "Holism: Possibilities and Problems," an international interdisciplinary conference at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK. The balance of conference participants is equally weighted across Jungian and Deleuzian studies. From the About page: For those of you who are interested, the conference website is here: https://oneworldprojectholism.wordpress.com/

Hey Gord... I know you and a couple others here read Jung. i came upon this and thought i'd pass it along. their webiste is: www.jungsocietymelbourne.com