[Mark Allinson]

Thanks, Andrew.

Yes, Hillman's Imagination is the same as Blake's, and Coleridge's "primary imagination."

As for “there is no spiritualization without imagination,” well, that is ridiculous. The goal of philosophy, says Plato, is direct knowledge of Being. And Being is beyond all representation, therefore beyond images.

For Hillman, the Kantean noumenal is entirely collapsed into the phenomenal - "archetypal psychology rigorously refuses even to speculate about a non-presented archetype per se. Its concern is with the phenomenon: the archetypal image." AP, p 13

And for Hillman, an image is not only an object of experience, but the quality of the being of the observer ... "an image is not what one sees but the way in which one sees." The experience may be beyond representation, ineffable, as the mystics say, but the state of being of the psyche is itself an image. And so the "direct knowledge of being" is thus a psychic image, in Hillman's extended sense.

Experience of the void, while it may have no representable images, is itself an archetypal image. And if something is beyond all experience, then how can we say it exists at all? Nothing can exist unless it becomes an image experienced by a psyche. Even imagining a world entirely devoid of observers is an image to a psyche.

So I agree with him that even the most exalted spiritual state is still happening within Psyche, even while the fantasy of the pneumatic transcendence of the Psyche is experienced. The idea that the mystical observer has somehow escaped from the psychic realm, into wordless and imageless experiences of "pure being" is for Hillman a literalism of yet another psychic image.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Maybe, Mark. I’m fine with saying that everything is psyche, if Hillman is saying that psyche is, by definition, everything ones sees as well as the way one sees. Hard to find fault with an argument as circular as that.

[Mark Allinson]

Jung, while clinging to the belief in a noumenal reality, agrees that the only reality we can ever experience is psychic:

"Whatever [the psyche] may state about itself, it will never get beyond itself. All comprehension and all that is comprehended is in itself psychic, and to that extent we are hopelessly cooped up in an exclusively psychic world. Nevertheless, we have good reason to suppose that behind this veil there exists the uncomprehended absolute object which affects and influences us ... ‘pyschic existence is the only category of existence of which we have immediate knowledge, since nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image’."(Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p 385.

So all beliefs in a non-experiential transcendent are also psychic phenomena. In terms of our human experience, the "beyond" is always "here".

As Hillman says, his psychology is truly a Western form of Zen Buddhism, which says the same thing.

[Alder Ellis]

I'm definitely on Andrew's side of the question in the recent posts.

Mark, since you cite Schuon somewhere, I seem to remember Schuon making a sharp distinction between true spirituality & what he called "psychologism." In any mystical tradition the "unmanifested" (e.g. Eckhardt's "Godhead") is at a higher ontological level than the "manifested" or phenomenal, & the goal of mystical practice is to realize that higher level, which is nothing if not unimaginable, surely. To say that "the unimaginable" is itself an image is to play with words while disastrously missing the point (i.e., the difference in levels of being).

Jung's assertion, that the psyche "will never get beyond itself," has problems. Insofar as it means simply that the experiencer can never experience anything it is not equipped to experience, it is a meaningless tautology. Insofar as it means that the contents of the psyche's experience derive exclusively from the psyche itself, it is a nightmarish solipsism. It's like saying a finger, touching a rock, never gets beyond the finger. Is not the act of touching a way of seeing what's outside?

"nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image" is subject to the reductio ad absurdum of infinite regress. "psychic image" is a subjective impression treated as a object: one does not simply experience the image, one has the image & then "knows" it. Why the extra step? & if it is admitted, it generates the infinite regress: I know that I know that I know that I know... for each potential object of knowledge, a "psychic image" needs to be substituted.

"Experience of the void, while it may have no representable images, is itself an archetypal image." Here again the gratuitous extra step: not "the void" but "experience of the void." The void itself has, by definition, no images. To say that experience of the void is an image is.... a curious proposition, when you think about it. How does one imagine the experience of nothing?

Psychologism really is bad business, Mark, largely because it's so good up to a point. It works out well until it doesn't. And then...

Mind you, all this is poetry-fodder....

[Andrew Frisardi]

What AE said.

Schuon is excellent although I think he and his Traditionalist associates (Guénon, especially) don’t give Jung enough credit. They do tend toward the same old mind-body dualism that we talked about earlier in this thread. Really, the poets have been the best cure for that.

Which brings me back to Philip’s topic, ecstatic poetry. Here’s a phenomenal one on noumenal experience:


The Annunciation

The angel and the girl are met.
Earth was the only meeting place.
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.

See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other's face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steadily there.
He's come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time.
Immediacy of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So greater wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings.

Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way.
Sound's perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered voice.

But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

---Edwin Muir

[Mark Allinson]

Hi, AE, great to see you in this discussion.

Let me start with your last point:

Mind you, all this is poetry-fodder....

Absolutely! And that is certainly consistent with one of Hillman's central expressions - that Archetypal Psychology assumes "a poetic basis of mind":

“Here I am working toward a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behaviour, but in the process of imagination”. Re-Visioning Psychology, p xvii.

The strangeness and complexity of Hillman's psychology is not easily conveyed in short quotes on threads, and really deserves a great deal of thought and study - and a new way of seeing our experience. I am aware that every point I make creates new problems for explanation. I taught a course at Monash University in Melbourne in the late eighties which included among its texts Re-Visioning Psychology. But even that course was far too short to do the material justice.

Mark, since you cite Schuon somewhere, I seem to remember Schuon making a sharp distinction between true spirituality & what he called "psychologism."

I am so glad you raised this point, AE. Hillman is constantly warning of the danger of "psychologism". Psychologism attempts to interpret events or ideas in subjective terms, explaining things by way of a reduction to psychological factors.

Hillman differentiates his process of "psychologizing" (or "seeing through") from the illegitimate process of "psychologism".

"Psychologism means only psychologizing, converting all things into psychology. Psychology then becomes the new queen and - by taking itself and its premises literally - becomes a new metaphysics. When the insights of psychologizing harden into systematic arguments, becoming solid and opaque and monocentric, we have the metaphysical position of psychologism: there is only one fundamental discipline and ultimate viewpoint, psychology ... Philosophical and scientific assertions are, of course, not only psychological statements. To reduce such assertions wholly to psychology commits the psychologistic fallacy, or 'psychologism. This point is important." Re-Visioning Psychology, p 133.

The key difference between Hillman's "psychologizing" and the fallacy of "psychologism" is that for him the psyche of individuals does not involve the "container fantasy" - the "skin-encapsulated ego" - the mind as a purely subjective entity, possessed by a human person "within" the head.

"Archetypal psychologizing ... avoids the psychologistic fallacy because ... the archetypes remain the perspectives of mythical persons who cannot be reduced to human beings or placed inside their personal lives, their skins, or their souls ... We keep from psychologism by remembering that not only is the psyche in us as a set of dynamisms, but we are in the psyche." p 134.

Archetypal psychology, Hillman stresses, "is NOT a humanism."

So Hillman's psychology is not reductionistic in the way of other psychologies: "psychologizing does not mean making psychology of events, but of making psyche of events - soul making. So psychologizing methods may be applied to psychology itself." p 134. The process of "seeing through" literalisms is never ending - where it does come to an end and a conclusion, Hillman sees paranoia. We do not so much have a psyche within us, but, as Jung says, Esse in anima - we have our being in the midst of soul or psyche, which is everywhere. As much "out there" in the world of things as "in here".

In any mystical tradition the "unmanifested" (e.g. Eckhardt's "Godhead") is at a higher ontological level than the "manifested" or phenomenal, & the goal of mystical practice is to realize that higher level, which is nothing if not unimaginable, surely. To say that "the unimaginable" is itself an image is to play with words while disastrously missing the point (i.e., the difference in levels of being).

Did I say "the unimaginable" is an image? - I think I might have said that "nothingness" or "the void" is an image, because it may be experienced. It might not be describable but unless it can be experienced, where is it?

When Hillman sees such expressions as "different levels of being" he looks for the archetype behind the statement - in this case, the archetype of Hercules, the fantasy of heroic conquest of "higher and ever higher" levels of being and mystical attainment. Hillman would call this a type of literalism - the heroic ego battling ever upward in a quest for ultimate enlightenment. Hillman sees all metaphysical statements as literalisms of images.

Jung's assertion, that the psyche "will never get beyond itself," has problems. Insofar as it means simply that the experiencer can never experience anything it is not equipped to experience, it is a meaningless tautology.

I don't think it is meaningless. The idea of a transcendent really - entirely apart and distinct from all psychic elements - is itself a psychic idea or image. The image of a transcendent reality always remains an immanent image.

Insofar as it means that the contents of the psyche's experience derive exclusively from the psyche itself, it is a nightmarish solipsism. It's like saying a finger, touching a rock, never gets beyond the finger. Is not the act of touching a way of seeing what's outside?

If the psyche is conceived in humanistic terms, which it invariably is today, as a thing entirely contained with the head of a human person, this would indeed imply a solipsistic nightmare. But again, we live in the sea of psyche, esse in anima, which is not simply "in here."

"Experience of the void, while it may have no representable images, is itself an archetypal image." Here again the gratuitous extra step: not "the void" but "experience of the void." The void itself has, by definition, no images. To say that experience of the void is an image is.... a curious proposition, when you think about it. How does one imagine the experience of nothing?

AE, you might have missed my earlier point that for Hillman, "image" is not simply an object to psyche, but "the way of seeing" of that particular psyche, resulting from trans-individual archetypes. The archetypal orientation of a psyche is as much an "image" as its objects. As Meister Eckhart says:

"The great wastes to be found in this divine ground, have neither image nor form nor condition, for they are neither here nor there. They are like unto a fathomless Abyss, bottomless and floating in itself ..."

This mystical way of seeing is itself the "image" here. Where is this "void" unless an experienced image - and we should note this is not Eckhart's consciousness of the void, but God's consciousness, which he participates in.

"A man who verily desires to enter will surely find God here, and himself simply in God; for God never separates Himself from this ground."

As I said, Hillman dispenses with the Kantean noumenon - the thing in itself. Anything we might say about such a transcendent object is ALWAYS an immanent image.

Psychologism really is bad business, Mark, largely because it's so good up to a point. It works out well until it doesn't. And then ...

Well at least we can agree on this point, AE, and I am as much against it as Hillman, and yourself.

As I say, I am aware that posts such as this will probably generate a degree of protest, horror and confusion - if not outright rejection.

All I can really suggest is to read Hillman - start with Re-Visioning Psychology where most of the principles of AP may be found. But have a google at the many other books and essays Hillman has written.

[Mark Allinson]

Sorry, Andrew, we cross-posted.

That's a fine poem - I love Muir!

But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

This seems to suggest an influence from one of the great ecstatic poems of the English Renaissance - Donne's "The Ecstasy". Because it is possible that some here have never seen this poem, given our current education system, I will paste it in here:

THE ECSTACY.

- John Donne


WHERE, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swell'd up, to rest
The violet's reclining head,
Sat we two, one another's best.

Our hands were firmly cemented
By a fast balm, which thence did spring ;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string.

So to engraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one ;
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.

As, 'twixt two equal armies, Fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls—which to advance their state,
Were gone out—hung 'twixt her and me.

And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay ;
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day.

If any, so by love refined,
That he soul's language understood,
And by good love were grown all mind,
Within convenient distance stood,

He—though he knew not which soul spake,
Because both meant, both spake the same—
Might thence a new concoction take,
And part far purer than he came.

This ecstasy doth unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love ;
We see by this, it was not sex ;
We see, we saw not, what did move :

But as all several souls contain
Mixture of things they know not what,
Love these mix'd souls doth mix again,
And makes both one, each this, and that.

A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour, and the size—
All which before was poor and scant—
Redoubles still, and multiplies.

When love with one another so
Interanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls.

We then, who are this new soul, know,
Of what we are composed, and made,
For th' atomies of which we grow
Are souls, whom no change can invade.

But, O alas ! so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though not we ; we are
Th' intelligences, they the spheres.

We owe them thanks, because they thus
Did us, to us, at first convey,
Yielded their senses' force to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay.

On man heaven's influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air ;
For soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair.

As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can ;
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot, which makes us man ;

So must pure lovers' souls descend
To affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.

To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look ;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.

And if some lover, such as we,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
Small change when we're to bodies gone.

[Andrew Frisardi]

As you say, we cross-posted, Mark. With the additional material you are posting here, I am still drawing a blank on how Hillman has anything useful to say about metaphysics. I just can’t see the point of reducing it to psychology, even Hillman’s relatively ample and imaginative version of psychology. I certainly wouldn’t want to read Plotinus or Heidegger or any great metaphysician with those preconceptions. I’m interested in reading them in their own terms.

That's fascinating about the echo of Donne in Muir!

[Gail White]

Originally Posted by Cally Conan-Davies

Bernini's Ecstasy of St Teresa is, for me, the most wonderful sculpture ever. I remember when I first saw it, in an art book, and I had to photocopy it, and that tattered page has been with me for years. My great art dream is to see it, in the flesh so to speak.

Cally

Cally, I was really surprised when I saw this, finally, in Rome. She is in a very confined space, high up -- you can't walk around the statue and see it from the back. And there are "spectators" painted on the walls, looking on.

Still, I can sit and look at it for a long time. Hope you get there!