Marvelous insights Adolphus! What a noble middle name. And yes we have to somehow touch the mammalian and the reptilian as well as the angelic in our complex unruly natures. Though you haven’t read Gebser I sense you do have a handle on the basic ideas. There is a great video series on that book that Marco and Jeremy and many of us worked on together, a most stimulating read.
Gebser recognizes the value of the mental/rational, the capacity to take a perspective is something the magical cannot do. But the rational rides piggy back on the mythical and magical. The higher octave that is Integral would be transparent to the deep truths each stage offers without privileging any of them. Gebser is aware of the dark side of each stage and the emergence of the deficient forms of each stage is triggered by the presence of the new structure. So the healthy rational is required but the deficient rational, that reduces complexity to the quantifiable is clearly a dangerous trend.
I believe healthy magic is an attempt to stabilize qualities of the transphyscial worlds, music and art are dreaming up so much, and the rational too is dreaming up as well. Science can be immensely creative and sublte, full of awe and wonder. So we can use all of our knowledge and use all of it well. Currently, as we all are aware, our societies, due to competition and greed and over rationalizing, are cut off form sharing our knowledge, we quantify, commodity nature, we have lost a sense of connection an appreciation for qualities. So your comments are true to the spirit of Gebser!
@johnnydavis54: I was able watch / listen to more than half of that conversation between John Berger and Susan Sontag, before householder duties (and growling stomachs) pulled me away. Every once in a while, I see a television-era conversation like this (Foucault / Chomsky comes to mind, as well as the more explosive Ginsberg / William F. Buckley Jr. encounter) and am reminded of how impoverished our culture of conversation has become.
Although, to be fair, there are many great conversations happening now (podcasts especially offer a renaissance in dialogue), nonetheless, witnessing the quality of presence of these two fine minds, it becomes apparent how much spaciousness, stillness, and clarity is destroyed in the digital mind.
Perhaps this has something do with the Pandora’s box of diabolic forces you’ve mentioned.
Or maybe it was just something about these particular figures…
I had never seen Susan Sontag speak before. What struck me above all was her incredible composure and utter clarity of thought. John Berger was interesting as well, in a different way. I found him to be a bit self-indulgent in his eloquence, but still sincere and passionately intimate with his thoughts.
Regarding your work with Clean Language and the 3Ts of “trauma, trance, and transcendence,” what would be helpful to you to take the next steps? Perhaps we could start a topic in the ‘Creative Studio’ to map out possibilities?
On my end, I have been focused, as you know, on co-op development, as well as on preparing for relaunching Metapsychosis. However, once that latter happens (which I think can be on Monday, with pieces by Jonathan Cobb and Brigid Burke which directly adresss the election), we can soon then publish your most recent story, as well as the podcast episode we recorded (which I finished editing a few weeks ago, and just need to add the station-identifying “outro”).
Just to throw out another prompt: since our reading of Gebser last year, I’ve thought it would be a worthwhile project to put together some kind of guided course through his thought. Maybe something @achronon would be interested in? Oli Rabinovitch had begun transcribing our video hangouts, and there is a lot of material here on the forum (and even more elsewhere) that could be drawn on to accompany new readers through the text. We will be working on a course for Philippa’s book, Involution, and a course on Gebser (“The Jean Gebser Experience”???) could be wonderfully complementary.
To relate this to @care_save’s original post—I’d like to suggest that we could use the meta-space to develop our own particular ideas and spaces cooperatively, which we turn into offerings that others can engage with, thus providing some of the cultural medicine that seems so needed right now:
Thanks, Marco, for your creative response to the Berger/Sontag video. I have a nostalgia for those times, which were not that far away, but which strike me now as so much more sane compared to what we are dealing with currently. They perform some very fine thinking about writing-talking-storying-narrating-theorizing and they are so polite even when they differ.
I so agree that there are fine podcasts and videos being produced now and there are many ways of bringing highly quality performances and conversations into our current discourse events. We are in this thread doing just that and you/we have sponsored some fine efforts here.
I just feel that we are riding upon the vast contributions of many recently departed persons who have set the stage for our current debacles ( which were brewing back then). Whatever they couldn’t deal with we are going to confront head on. and we must also honor the ancestors for they accomplished much.
I am looking forward to this most recent dialogue between Berger and Chomsky. Please note the elder statesman quality of these distinguished scholars. The voice of Berger on this video is mesmerizing, as he is much closer to death than he was with Sontag… I am not sure what he is talking about but the way he says it is so absorbing. I have yet to finish listening to the entire conversation. You can sense that they are so self aware when they speak, a quality of discourse that is swiftly being drowned out by the quick chat fests of reality TV. It feels to me, in our post modern frenzy, as if everyone, even the young, are displaying signs of dementia.
But if that is the problem space-what is the solution space? I don’t know that there is one. I have been caught in problem/solution dynamics before, and tried to solve the problem at the level of the problem and to no avail. I am moving away from that and more towards a Tricksterish Generative Self, that asks perpetually for what is your desired outcome? CL, as we have discussed before, can unleash Imaginal forces while supporting a disciplined flow state. That would be my desired outcome for our Inquiry here and I am open to believe that can happen. Creating the conditions for that kind of desired outcome is perhaps what many of us are in our own way is trying to put across.
Also I want to carry forward something I posted on FB to try to circulate between different imagined audiences. This experience is what I imagine we mean when we talk about Irruption, one of Gebser’s popular terms. We are in the midst of trying to shape a new vocabulary to honor those Magical, Mythical forces with the healthy Mental participation. I offer this experience as what is happening in the crack of my particular Cosmic Egg.
The theme here is Trauma and Transcendence. This could be developed perhaps in another thread but I offer it here as just a teaser for what I want to explore in much greater depth. I am now gathering and sharing data and am open to and welcome any response to my weirder and more deviant kinds of adventures, adventures which many of us are having but may fear deportation if we speak about it in public.
Betelle is the 95 year old wise woman I have been taking care of for five years. She has dementia and most recently has been put on a liquid diet.
Betelle told me that I had taught her that there was something beyond her. She expressed gratitude and I told her I loved her and would be with her always. " You are in my heart forever and ever."
I was asked by a relative of hers to take Betelle to where she needed to be. Last night, at home in my bed, fifty miles away from her location, I practiced my breathing exercises for an hour, increasing CO2 which basically shuts down the brain. After immersing into a deep peace I turned over to my right side and found myself in a large room with a mirror in it. I noticed as I stared back into the mirror that it was empty of all reflections. This was a cue that I was in a dream space and I notice also that I was hovering above the floor. I wanted to transform the lucid dream into an OBE.
I said," I want the dream to stop."
The dream became an OBE and I asked that I might assist Betelle in her transition. I traveled a short distance and noticed that there was a white room with shimmering images, and assumed I was seeing through Betelle’s visual system. I gathered her up and took her to a place that looked like a big hotel and booked her a room. She was walking okay but became nauseous. She lay down and rested. I chatted with a nurse.
Then I noticed that a handsome shy young Japanese man, dressed in a white suit and tie, and a white fedora, was in the room. I knew that Betelle had lived in Japan many years ago and I sensed this young man was connected to her and was going to escort her further.
I am so grateful for this turn of events and sense that she is becoming a great teacher for me. As we face the difficulties of an aging population, and more dementia cases on the rise, we are under pressure to evolve more quickly.
Perhaps I can offer an Astral Escort Service? We will take you to where you need to be.
Meta-Comment. What has this to do with Politics and Ethics of Empowerment? I’m not sure .Enough said. All manner of thing shall be well.
To help someone go to where they need to be is the essence of empowerment,
it is the essence of conversation and discourse too. That you would kindly
usher someone to make a transition in their life or in their thinking… to
be a space-holder and supportive presence for a mind-opening experience,
layers of what-you-thought-was-true peeling back, selves immolated and
revivified… these terrifying experiences were often held in social
frameworks–like shamans, wise grandmothers, priests and priestesses,
etc–for those who were called to “go beyond.” We are the rare who have
gone beyond, *and come back, and are willing to help others make the
journey. *That’s the essence of empowering others–to push them to go
beyond their unconsciously-self-imposed mental limitations in positive,
healthy ways. The politics and ethics part is just the matter of: what is
the imperative of us acting in manner & purpose of empowering one
another… and what would social structures look like if that imperative
were widely adopted/enacted?
“and what would social structures look like if that imperative
were widely adopted/enacted?”
Thanks, Caroline, for holding the meta-space open for my inarticulate pang of confusion-seeking-clarity in the land of the unfree and home of the of the unfair.
The gross inequities we see multiplying all around us must stop and they will. We are running out of gas. And a revolt is underway. I am all for that and wish we could undo this knot in our collective pastiche driven post modern culture asap but I am aware we are addicted to and feel safer with our pain and our stuck states than we are with the vulnerability that entering a new cosmology will require of us. So we wobble and crash and burn as disconnected as a broken zig zag on a confused flow chart on some CEOs white board.
And so we play pin the tail on the donkey over and over again, and vote for one of the teams we like better that year and perhaps the next phase of our journey together would be acknowledge that the game is over, the party is over, the separation between ourselves and others is a great mirage, we are different but never separate, me here, you over there. There will be people who will want to keep the rigged system in place for as long as possible but that is probably on its way out and we are as Hedges says in free fall for a decade or so.
Our current crisis is partly created because we imagine we are connected through some kind of mechanical device we call the Internet. I think this is a temporary and perhaps necessary delusion we are going through in our technological, profit driven overkill. We assume a dependence on an advance technology that usurps our dignity as creators, we, who have access to a much vaster symbolic landscape than what the Corporate predators are inviting us to consume. This is a bind that you and many of us on this thread are wrestling with.
And I sense the mission here among us is to use the gifts of the technology that we have created in ways that are still unimagined as of yet. There are many groups and individuals, in the forbidden zones, facing taboos, they are often members of underclass, the starving class, or the practitioner of the occult, who now have internet access and this is revitalizing.
Those who got thrown out of the village, are able now to talk back and take back what was stolen from them by the unearned wealth of the few who are seeking to control in top down managerial style the same old stale, flat and unprofitable mess that the majority are having to live with. This is an ancient tale told by idiots and I think we have a Master Spin-Meister in Mr. Trump.
And what would social structures look like if the shamans and the grandmothers and the priests and priestesses of various kinds got together and injected some of their magical and mythical knowledge into the deficient mental political landscape that wants to certify everyone to pledge allegiance to a quantifying principle that shuts out the qualities of experience, the experiential, the uncanny? The actual and the possible, I imagine, would fall out very differently.
New ways of entertaining ourselves perhaps would be possible and desirable, rather than snoozing before the TV with a bowl of potato chips!
Heh, heh, heh … @johnnydavis54 expresses best what needs to be said to this, about 6 posts down.
But just for clarification: I agree that more explanation is needed. When I use the terms “magic” and “myth” it’s always in a Gebserian sense, knowing full well that these meanings are obscure to most people. It’s not to obfuscate or obscure, but, in the sense you have shown, to stimulate repsonse, hence conversation.
Recently, there has generally been an incresed use (especially in the political press) of “magical” at any rate, and in a way that I find particularly disturbing. I’m used to fighting the myth=fiction/untrue battle, but now there is the magic=emotional/superstitious one looms. (And to be perfectly honest, it all gets very Sisyphusian very quickly.)
Personally, I think you’d really enjoy Gebser, once you get used to his density; and I’m sure you will get around to reading him one of these days. You’ll be glad you did.
" I’m used to fighting the myth=fiction/untrue battle, but now there is the magic=emotional/superstitious one looms. (And to be perfectly honest, it all gets very Sisyphusian very quickly.)"
Ed, I wish you would elaborate a bit about this 'magic=myth/superstition" as I get very perplexed, too. I know several young people who are in the cracks of society who are studying Crowley and the Neo Platonists seriously. I find much of this fascinating as a new kind of post New Age movement continues to show up, in times of severe inequities, when there the deficient rational rages to put everything into a statistical arrangement, everyone turned into meta-data. I see many young people ( very smart) studying the obscure texts and taking ritual seriously. I saw a lively Netflix series called the Magicians which was a sly parody and celebration of this kind of underground experimentation.
I would point out that in many ways Science is a kind of magic, controlled experiments, conducted often in secret societies seeking government sponsorship, comparing stories about experiments, using metaphors, signs and symbols in mysterious ways. Most science conferences sounds like they are doing literary theory. The best of science probably like the best of the arts, disciplined guesswork.
Recently, Douglas Ruskoff said that the V for victory sign was created by Aleister Crowley and given to Churchill to counter attack the use of Hitler’s swastika. This was a battle of sigils and though not everyone believed in the supernatural there was a deep understanding of how these signs work on the culture. In a way I suppose most of advertising and the mania for branding is a form of magic.
Political parties are being accused of black magic as in the current pizza gate scandal. Certainly the backstabbing of the DNC makes one wonder what the hell is going on behind closed doors. It appears that WikiLeaks and Ed Snowden are blowing the covers off of those closed doors.
I believe it is under appreciated how different signs are from symbols and to get confused about them. A red light means stop. It is a sign. A symbol on the other hand, from a dream or a poem or a political speech is very messy. Symbols are ambiguous in a way that a sign is not. Symbols and signs are at the heart of our current ’ narrative collapse’.
Anyway this is a vast topic and what I loved about Gebser is how he sorted through this obscurity but out without giving us a dogmatic program to follow. It seems the intergenerational struggles that are now much more complexified by the wide us of the internet has lots of people of different ages blurring the lines between different kinds of symbol systems. A play or a movie requires a lot of background knowledge and if you don’t have it you tend to ‘cut and paste’ in your own preferred way of making sense. Standards of taste and what is true or false are all over the place.
Just a few random thoughts on this Sisyphean task! When healthy rational meets healthy magic we will probably witness a new kind of fireworks display. So far most of our current science and most of the magical minded are in service of the military-industrial contests, such as the CIA funded remote viewing experiments back in the 90’s. What might happen if we were released from doing that dirty work?
One person I would highly recommend in making myth less obscure is Professor Jordan Peterson from the University of Toronto. I briefly met him last year at a symposium put on by the University where Dennis Mckenna was the keynote. He had not heard of Gebser, however his work over the last 30 years has been 100% focused on the ideas of myth as introduced to us by Jung.
Peterson burst onto the international scene in 2016 due to his stance on a free speech issue here in Canada which subsequently him on many of the top podcasts in the space of a few months where he was able to talk about the meaning of myth. The latest was with Sam Harris, a two hour, painful discussion that had respective fans buzzing. Sam shut the talk down after two hours of wrangling over just the basics of these issues. It never even got off the ground. Sam then issued a crowd sourcing call as to whether they should meet again. Over 80% of 30,000 people said try again! I believe even Sam Harris doesn’t grasp myth (rather his strict rationalist model doesn’t let him). And unfortunately Peterson was not nearly as clear as in the interview mentioned above. Yes, these are difficult things to discuss and get but they surely constitute us and are living in us right now (usually unconsciously), just as Gebser said - and Peterson is one of the strongest voices today who is articulating myth for this generation.
Jordan Peterson also has a very good youtube channel unpacking these mythic realities. To proceed from the interview mentioned above, perhaps start with this one called Tragedy vs Evil, then dip into the 2017 Maps of Meaning series.
Contrary to my usual “old guy” habits, I stayed up last night and listened to the whole thing in one sitting. I have long been looking for someone who – OK, IMONSHO – “gets it” and is a living, breathing example of what Gebser talks about. Given Peterson’s affinity for Jung and considering the fact that Gebser worked and taught at Jung’s institute in Basel for more than a decade-and-a-half, I’m fairly sure they’d get along fine.
What I particularly liked about Peterson’s approach is the deep link he establishes between biology and ethics. Gebser went back to the Savannah, as one logical starting point, but Peterson’s insight that a whole lot had to happen beforehand to make that break out of the Savannah possible anchors the whole enterprise a bit more firmly in being and not only in consciousness à la the human expression thereof. There is a lot to be gained from serious interaction with his work, to be sure.
Peterson is much kinder to Dawkins (and his ilk, as he puts it, to which I include Harris) and the rest of the militant atheists out there. He’s right: they want to have their cake and eat it too, but they’re not even clear on who they are. Again, Peterson is spot on: they’re Newtonians, not Darwinians, but they’re bad Newtonians as Sir Isaac was a driven alchemist, a fact, as is so often the case, they would prefer to ignore. It doesn’t surprise me that Harris doesn’t grasp myth: for him it doesn’t exist because it is not material. Not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured. The likes of Dawkins and Harris are to science what fundamentalists are to religion. Unfortunately, they have the upper hand in the scientistic community at the moment; fortunately, they are a dying breed as more Petersons and others like him are exposing the limited scope of their understanding.
If it weren’t for the State of Confusion, I’d hardly ever know where I am.
On the Myth side of things @bradsayers provided a wonderful link to the work of Jordan Peterson in another reply to this post. It’s worth every minute spent engaging it, for here is a person who understands myth … it the Gebserian sense, even if he’s never heard of Gebser. As we know, Gebser’s is one way of approaching the subject and a good one because of the context it provides in getting a better handle on the whole consciousness thing. Peterson’s focus is a bit broader as he’s approaching it from ontology itself. As he notes in the interview, “We don’t know what role consciousness plays in being,” yet Gebser provides us with an approach and some useful tools for understanding consciousness in and of itself, thereby providing us with some substance on the futher quest.
Another issue to which Gebser sensitizes us is what I will call “the unfoldment of consciousness in time”. Gebser used the word “mutation” to describe the transitions from one structure to another, but he also took great pains to try and prevent his model from falling into the hands of unenlightened Darwinists. Too many thinkers have overlayed Darwin’s theory with a teleos – a development toward a goal or some end (and here @Jonathan_Cobb’s essay in the Metapsychosis part of this site on the Eschaton could be helpful). This may or may not be the case, but we do not, and I believe we cannot, know at this point in time. After watching the video Brad pointed to last night, I feel much better about the Darwinian aspect of Gebser’s model itself, but I digress. The point is that there was an identifiable structure of mentation prior to the Mythical, which Gebser calls Magical.
In the Magical structure of consciousness, the ear is the organ of emphasis, the expression of its forms of realization and thought is what is called “vital experience” in English (the word is erleben in German_, derived from the noun Leben meaning “life”) as contrasted to the “undergone experience” (German: Erfahrung) of the Mythical structure, and its forms of expression are graven images, idol, and (I believe, most significantly) ritual. This is an experienced world that is both timeless and spaceless. It’s motto, per Gebser, is pars pro toto (any part can stand for the whole).
The “heard word” (for some, merely voices in one’s head … which is where Julan Jaynes lost the plot in his The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, another materialist who simply can’t come to terms with something as ethereal as “consciousness”) is a big deal. This is the Word of Creation (the Logos, in Christian terminology), the Tetragrammaton (the ineffable Name of G-d), and more. As Peterson points out in his interview, these are the folks who figured out the notion of “sacrifice” and – this is key: – embodied it; that is, they found a way to give this notion expression in reality. The spirits, the power-that-be, whatever is driving Life and their lives are encountered as reality, hence they are, in the most literal sense of the word, real. Yes, you can cut an image out of stone or wood, for that provides you a point of focus, but the truth of this reality is expressed in the cult, if you will, in the ritual acts which must be performed, in this way at these times, precisely if they are to be effective. This is the relegere, the careful observance, of which Gebser speaks and which term he takes as one of the possible (and likely) roots of our word “religion”. In sum, then, what we have are clearly delineated ways of means of tangibly affecting the world around us. These effects can be felt/experienced (erlebt) and be effected at will (for we will remember that Power is firmly rooted in the Magical structure of consciousness).
This is, of course, the efficient mode of this structure of consciousness, and it exists and can be observed to this day and every day. Just go to a Catholic mass: it is sung (and should be in Latin which most people don’t understand (neither then nor now) for it is to heard not understood (a mental act)), it is a precisely proscribed set of actions (ritual) that, if performed successfully transubstantiates the wafer of common bread and the chalice of common wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. For me, a classic case and example. But, so is your own related (already mythologized) experience regarding your own astral experience with Betelle (a carefully observed procedure resulting in a real, lived experience). There are those who will tell you that you didn’t really have the experience, you only thought you did, but you and I know whoever is saying that has no idea what they are talking about. Similarly, the Dawkinses and Harrises of the world can claim that the transubstantiation thing is only a superstition, but they’re just mouthing words, they’re not really saying anything. They can’t know because they simply deny that such is a “real” possibility.
It is easy to see how such approaches – especially given that Power (in some way, shape or form) is involved – can quickly devolve into something selfish and self-serving. That’s what happened historically: the magical structure became deficient, and good and proper spell casting becomes witchcraft and the ensuing chaos is then overcome by the mutation toward envisioned myth. (It is also interesting to note that in English we still use the word “spell” to describe the activity of calling out the correct letters in the correct order to form a given word … this most likely derived from the Old Norse and their runes (which were magical symbols, as were all original alphabets), and knowing the runes of another’s name gave you power over that person.) These were realities and people were affected by them in observable ways. Nobody was “making this stuff up” it was happening, for real. Hell, even in the last century, the Nazis practially perfected the art, black as it was (though Hitler and Goebbels used Harvard pep rallies as the model for developing their own approach), and which was almost pure magic: Blut und Boden (lit. "Blood and Ground (territory) to justify their racism and push to the East for territory), Blood being the localization of the soul for the magical structure. Racism based in blood; that is tribal (which is what I find so troubling about a number of newer social scientists who approach this topic with not enough seriousness). Social structures based on undifferentiated temporality (Thousand-year Reich … who’s going to live to see that?).
What Gebser makes us aware of (and I believe Peterson substantiates from an entirely different angle) is that the magical is a reality and it can express itself efficiently or deficiently. The recent resurgence of interest in magical matters is both interesting and disturbing. The Crowleyites and Neo-Platonists have been active for some time now. They were very visible in the Reagan and Clinton years, but the overt political emphasis on power was driving them out of every corner of the woodwork. I was living in California (Silicon Valley) at the time and the number of Thelemans (followers of Crowley’s founded religion), Chaos Magickians, and other practitioners plying their trade was legion. Many of them, of course, were already working in IT, artifiical intelligence, but soon found their ways into banking, financial services, derivatives trading … the list goes on, and I believe that’s part of the reason why were confronted with so much Chaos today. I suppose I lost sight of many of them when the world descended into the perpetual-war struggle for power. I don’t think most of the practioners I knew then were evil by nature, but they were all mere Sorcerers’ Apprentices in the end. If there is a reinvigoration of this occurring now, then I’m disturbed because too many people aren’t paying attention. They weren’t then, and they aren’t now. And that’s our fundamental problem as humans I think:
Too many of us are too willing to do too much with too many things that we know too little about. We’re not paying enough attention. Sloughing off magic as emotional superstition and myth as mere stories is paying no attention at all. To my way of thinking, we can pay attention or we can pay the price.
PS @JDockus – I know this comes across overly professorial, and I apologize for that, but I was trying to be clear about what I had in mind and why. I’m plodding again. I’m sure you understand.
This is greatly helpful, Ed. I absolutely appreciate how you lay matters bare, refusing to dress them up and present them to be more than what they are. It’s why I apologized to you. I recognize you have much to teach and that your intention is to help toward clarity and understanding. You’re not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. Part of what I was raising objection to is what appears to be an attack on logic and rationality. On the other side of that, forget understanding. There, everything becomes interchangeable, drained of meaning, and turns to quicksand in which the individual, if no one throws him a branch, flails around until exhausted, and then, because nothing means anything anymore, is pulled under into a bizarre world where flourishes a kind of occultism and so-called magic practiced by predatory charlatans. Terms are hijacked from where they belong and applied in ways to deliberately confuse the understanding of others, and to hold their intelligence captive and spellbound, creating around them an artificial paradise, or a cobbled together “alternative reality”. Conspiracy theories also flourish there, and phantasmagoria which whips individuals into fear and hysteria, a state in which they are easily controlled and pumped full of crazy ideas. That’s where cult leaders gain their power, and it’s disturbing to see how much it can succeed and through time be “normalized”.
As you wrote: "What I particularly liked about Peterson’s approach is the deep link he establishes between biology and ethics.” There you go. That’s what I’m driving at too.
I haven’t listened much to Jordan Peterson yet, but I’m aware he’s fighting for words to retain their actual root-meanings and is finding himself under attack by certain groups for not budging, seeing longer-term implications, potentially catastrophic for humankind. It’s interesting how the hysteria refracted makes him appear to be an alarmist. Anyway, as all good thinkers do, he forces us to question our assumptions, and he does so not with hocus-pocus, but using deep logic and rationality. And he has the courage to hold his ground, not be bullied by mobs and group-think. My impression is that Gebser has done the same. He doesn’t talk about magic and myth in a vacuum, or wrest those developments out of context, divorced from nature, but sees them as part of a much larger complex, all interconnected and integrated, those two things like the rainbow which couldn’t appear unless there was first sunlight and rain or mist. The perspectival likewise (I put forward in my as yet very limited understanding of Gebser) is a strand of the Aperspectival, not leaving it behind but absorbed and integrated into it.
In other words, magic isn’t like a genie let out of the bottle. It’s not something fantastic, or merely illusionism, and it’s definitely not a miracle.
I don’t discount magic and myth, I’ve indulged my own curiosity, but there are many harmful things floating around, disguised or I might say costumed by the terms. One almost wishes for a new terminology, because magic and myth have been so abused and prostituted, while in popular circulation, that when one now hears the terms one has an incredibly hard time recognizing what they actually are anymore. When I hear someone talk about magic now, honestly, my first reaction is to be on my guard. “Great, another starry-eyed wizard who’s gonna enthusiastically talk nonsense.”
I generally agree with these words of yours, Ed: "Too many of us are too willing to do too much with too many things that we know too little about. We’re not paying enough attention. Sloughing off magic as emotional superstition and myth as mere stories is paying no attention at all. To my way of thinking, we can pay attention or we can pay the price.” But to my own way of thinking, there does exist magic as emotional superstition and myth as mere stories, in the same way there are put into circulation countless reproductions of only one original. We can understand many things about the original through the reproductions, but the problem now is that many take the reproductions to be all there is.
Anyway! Perhaps a satire should be attempted entitled, “The Ever-Present Reproduction”. I’ve read the first chapter of Gebser’s "The Ever-Present Origin”, liking the tone and style he writes in, and hope soon to catch up where I can contribute more to these interactions.
P. S. In the Berger and Sontag discussion Johnny posted, somewhat pertinent to your words about the ear as the organ of emphasis, etc., I thought it really interesting near the end of it, in their respectful disagreement with each other, that Berger sees or envisions, and struggles to find words for that, or to make a frame for the images he sees, feeling that he always fails, only able to find approximate correspondences, whereas Sontag hears. She says she hears voices in her head, doesn’t see as a writer, and so feels freer in invention. She creates images on the spot, in language, not feeling bound to anything external to herself, like Berger does by the images he sees and struggles to find words for. She’s a modernist, open to all possibility, and he’s more pushing back to origins, and traditionalist. I thought the tension in that significant difference between them made for a very interesting discussion.
That’s a great observation JD about the Sontag/ Berger differences that make a difference. It seems that they were in many ways both modernists at the cusp of the post modernist deconstruction frenzy, when all hell broke loose, and the narrative collapse was in the making. Sontag even chides Berger for switching allegiance to the earlier forms of story telling which she seems to disparage.
I think Berger and Sontag are both very visual and both very auditory/digital but when they talk about their working methods they feature what supports their own theory. He is more loyal it to the oral tradition, where the story was told out loud around the campfire, to provide ‘shelter’. She claims to like the fantastic and the non conformist.
The eye and the ear controversy, (don’t tell me show me), is in a lot of writing classes. Coleridge in the Ode to Dejection speaks to the sunset," I see but do not feel how beautiful you are." This lament comes out of the kinesthetic/visual spit which is now epidemic world wide. The kinesthetic/visual split is pathological dissociation, a feeling of numbness and disconnection. Many artists are trying to heal this split or to pay attention to it.
This clash emerges out of the Modern ‘Romantic’ debacles and is ongoing in our own time, and Sontag and Berger are both bitten by that alienated bug. But the stillness of their delivery, the self awareness they both possess, is in many ways has a pre Internet aura about them, I feel that the protective sheath has not been torn open yet, that there were still in place certain norms and a Modern Self that could be held in common that one could make different claims about. Hyper modernism, or post modernism had not yet take over.
So now that we have gone through the 'collapse of meta-narratives", and there is no clear way of communicating at all, we are as Hedges says in free fall. We are in a sorry state of affairs where we aren’t sure what reality is so what could an alternative reality be?
If there is enough stability in the complex unstable system there is a possibility that perturbations can be handled effectively to maintain that system. Treating a complex unstable system as it were stable and simple ( as Trump does in public) is a recipe it seems to me for disaster. Cool heads, warm hearts are needed when entering a new relationship the Systems we are working with.
Looking at the recent past for exemplars makes this Internet Age so fascinating. We have so many models out there and each model dies with sleep, we wake up each day and have to come up with a new one.
Anyway thanks again for helping me figure out my attraction to this Sontag/ Berger discussion In a previous post, our friend, Ed, asks if you know Walter Benjamin’s Work. It may be of interest to you that Berger did a television series inspired by Benjamin. I’m sure you have plenty to watch but I offer it as a compliment to our current study. So many tangents and bifurcations! I do hope this adds to our Ethics of Empowerment theme.
“Too many of us are too willing to do too much with too many things that we know too little about.”
I think this is an ever apparent danger, Ed, and thank you for the clear presentation. I find this is the best of times and the worst of times, the intensification is ongoing and I am ever hopeful, ever despondent. So we must find the center each day, clarify intention, open to the field.
Or as Simone Weill said, “We must take the tree up by the roots, turn it into a cross and carry the cross every day.” Simone was a mythic genius I think and a very tragic person as she moved from Jewish to Christian frameworks, from physics to mathematics, while trying to make sense of a world run amok, contemporaneous I believe with Gebser.
I believe we are in free fall in many ways and must find center or the Internet and the field of infinite possibilities will drive us mad. Maybe that has already happened? Not sure-
But your observations are very reassuring, re-stabilizing! look forward to looking at the Peterson materials
I agree, John, that logic and rationality need not/should not be attacked, and I hate to think that that was the impression I was giving. Allow me, then, to add a couple more, hopefully clarifying, remarks:
I do believe that we have stop considering both logic and rationality to be standards of some kind, especially standards of “the good”. This is how their usage most often sounds in my ears when they are invoked. They are both, at best, methods, and the effectivity of a method is in its application, not in itself. In neither instance is there anything in them that is final or absolute. The word “logic”, as it is most often used, could easily be replaced by categories like “consistent” and “cohenrent”; too often it is also given causal overtones, which I believe is misplaced for non-causal phenomena, such as art, can be logical as well. “Rational” is even worse, for here, too often, it is used to oppose notions such as irrational which, in turn, are implied to be crazy or insane, not merely primarily emotional.
Not only Gebser but also Peterson, it would appear, is skeptical of the “rational”, at least in its extreme forms. The ratio is by nature divisive (a/b is a ratio) and the rational approach – within limits and in full awareness of these limitations – can be useful, no doubt about it at all. But the end of rational thinking is being “right” and there it becomes problematical. What is more, in its deficient mode, or as Peterson phrases it, as “hyperrational intellect” is for this very reason absolutizing and totalitizing. If this is right, then everything else is wrong. What “right” means in most contexts is never clarified. In other words, the rational carries within itself, much more than other mentation modalities, the seeds of its own undoing which it most often refuses to ignore. Things end in absurdity, like dissecting dead bodies in search of life. For these reasons, I tend to like to avoid using the word if I possibly can. It has simply become, in my mind at least, too loaded.
However, something else you said piqued my interest even more, namely
Could you provide a couple of examples. I’m particularly interested in magic as “emotional superstition”, which given my own blinkered understand of the term, I’m having trouble seeing. I’m also not sure that “reproduction” in and of itself reduces a myth to a mere story, though it would be helpful to know what a “mere story´” is. (Oh, and by the way, have you ever read Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction? You might enjoy it.) Most Disney versions of the Grimm fairy tales, for example, have been sanitized, literally altered and edited, almost to the point of banality, but for some reason, there are still elements that remain (otherwise the story would fall apart completely and no longer be a story), well, mythical. I’m obviously “standing on the hose”, as the Germans say, meaning, I’m most likely the cause that I’m not gleaning the output of the thought that’s intended, and I’d like to.
Yes, Ed: “They (logic and rationality) are both, at best, methods, and the effectivity of a method is in its application, not in itself.” See my other comment above in this thread ending with the “business man” painting. That’s what I myself wrote.
It’s ironic that in my first interaction with you at “need for new left?” (Zizek) post, I advocate for occasional scrambling of codes so as not to settle into habitual use of rational thinking, not because it is harmful in itself, but because it settles into automation and operating with blinders on. See other ways that I have commented to help keep conversation alive and not settling into mind-numbing monotony. Maybe I shouldn’t have apologized to you at all but tossed over to you a fun-bomb which on contact with the ground explodes into a surreal poem. The point is to keep us awake within, the spark alive, and open to possibility.
All this makes me think about dialectical thinking. Not un-useful in itself, but in its extreme turning into a kind of tank which rolls over and crushes everything in its path. Some thinkers who use it don’t have good intentions, or the power of it goes to their head and they employ it like weaponry. I recall a long time ago when I read Kierkegaard that he wrote, amusingly, that Hegel through its use had created an immense mansion, and never moved into it.
Anyway, I don’t want to get into splitting hairs and looking at the specimens magnified a hundred times under a microscope in the lab, at least not presently. Got to leave shortly.
Oh gosh for examples of emotional superstition. You brought up this phrase, not I, and you burden me with coming up with examples? Maybe the present trend or discovery in media of “fake news” is a good example. People go to it and allow it to work on them emotionally even when deep down many of them know it’s not the truth. It moves into the bloodstream like a poison, finally gets to the mind, and could have one when activated or triggered by certain code-words initiated by certain talking heads acting quite irrationally but in line with a group. Under that kind of hypnosis, or one might even say addiction, you can get individuals to believe many absurd things, and keep them coming back to be filled up with more, and prepare them to a drum beat to carry out atrocities which they believe are for the common good. That’s emotional superstition turned malignant.
Not long after I posted my last comment, thinking of reproduction (I have read Walter Benjamin’s essay, but that was a long time ago), I also began thinking about what a counterfeit is. This too is a whole other can of worms, and I have the taste for spaghetti.
But seriously, Ed, you’re right that more scrutiny and rigorous thought needs to be brought to terms we use. I’m certainly guilty of my own assumptions, and I’ll write again, I have much to learn. The Sisyphean rock awaits, the hill is steep, and I haven’t even had my vegetables and done my stretching exercises. Wah.
P.S. Johnny, I also found intriguing the part of the Berger and Sontag discussion where Sontag describes the kind of “speaking across” that happens, citing three books she had recently read, how elements or details sort of lift out of their original book context and come together in a new synthesis. She describes a kind of transcendent experience. I thought she had a real epiphany at that point of the discussion. Also really interesting when Sontag describes two different mindsets she brought to writing fiction and to writing essays. She did not approach each the same way. Berger, interestingly, replied that he sort of does.
Well, I gotta go. Sorry if threadbare and bare bones.
I just wanted to follow up with sincere appreciation for your instructive comments, and the care you take in details. It occurs to me that you and I won’t be able to engage in a fuller and more nuanced exchange until I have read Gebser’s The Ever-Present Origin, and absorb its concepts and how language is used in it. At present, since I haven’t read it and am not familiar with it, I find myself to communicate at all with you reduced to improvising, searching for words as best I can for what I perceive. Of course I don’t always do a good job of it. I’m really but an amateur autodidact, rough around the edges, and probably will always be this way. You could say you yourself fly, so far as Gebser is concerned, while I still have on my training wheels.
(Brian George, a potent and challenging thinker and artist, is one who’d be really stimulating to engage in conversation with about all this. He could definitely keep up with you, and probably would push thought into new and surprising, and even disorientating, directions. Sometimes reading him I feel like I have a blindfold on, have been teleported to the top of the world, teetering where the very Devil tried to tempt Christ, and there have had the blindfold suddenly torn away. The heart leaps into the throat, if not turns to a stone which drops to the bottom of oneself. I listened on more than one occasion, and was disturbed to find that I’m an empty well! No splash could be heard! More disturbing still, after several minutes had passed, bats flew out! I’d be content to sit on the sidelines and watch the two of you. I think he’s working on his own pieces presently. He once sent me quotes from his own writings paralleling quotes from Gebser, which he wrote before he ever read him, and they are uncannily similar.)
But as a peace offering (before I disappear for a while to do what I prefer to do - draw and paint), I want to leave for your enjoyment, regarding superstition and its nature, something by Giacomo Leopardi, 19th century Italian poet, philosopher, essayist and philologist, from his Pensieri:
"The following is not a pensiero but a story, which I set down here for the reader’s amusement. In 1831 I lived in Florence with my friend and soul-companion, Antonio Ranieri, a young man whose name - if he lives and if men don’t ruin the gifts nature has given him - will soon be famous. One summer evening, while walking down Via Buia, he saw on a corner up by the Piazza del Duomo a crowd of people gathered beneath the ground-floor window of what is now the Palazzo Riccardi. They were all terrified and were saying “Oh! Oh! The Phantom!” Looking up through the window into a room illuminated only by the light of the street lantern, Ranieri saw what looked like a woman’s shadow tossing its arms around, while the rest of the figure remained still. Being preoccupied with other thoughts, however, he went on his way and for the rest of that evening and the following day he hardly remembered the incident. The following evening at the same time, he happened to pass by the same spot, where he found a crowd even larger than that of the evening before. And again he heard the people, still terrified, crying out repeatedly, “Oh! Oh! The Phantom!” Looking up through the window, he saw the same motionless shadow flailing its arms. The window was not much higher from the ground than a man’s height, so someone in the crowd, a policeman apparently, said: “I’ll climb up, if you think you can hold me.” So Ranieri boosted himself, his feet set squarely on the policeman’s shoulders. Looking inside the room, he saw a black smock stretched out on the back of a chair close by the window-grating. When stirred by the wind, the smock gave the impression of flailing arms, and leaning against the rear side of the chair was a tall distaff, which created the illusion of the shadow’s head. Taking the distaff in hand, Ranieri showed it to the people assembled below, who then dispersed laughing.”
“Why this little story? As I said, for the reader’s entertainment. But also because I suspect that philosophy and historical criticism might learn something from it. Namely that in the nineteen century, in the very heart of Florence, which is the most learned city in Italy and whose inhabitants are particularly discerning and sophisticated, people still see ghosts that they believe to be spirits - ghosts that are distaffs. Foreigners had better not laugh at this, as they do so willingly at our Italian ways, for it is too well known that of the three great nations which, as the journals say, marchent a la tete de la civilisation, Italy is the one least inclined to believe in ghosts."
Thanks, John, very helpful … and sorry about burdening you with the examples. But in true form, you got me thinking down avenues I might not have otherwise.
