File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_1998/heidegger.9803, message 59


Date: Fri, 6 Mar 1998 18:02:49 +0100
Subject: Re:  Archetypes (Jung)
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)


Cologne, 06 March 1998

Mike Staples schrieb:
> Michael,
>
> Thank you for your response. Nice talking with you again.

Yeah, me too -- it’s been a while.

> In Michael E's response in which he lashes out against science (I liked
> it!) he ends with a line about Jung's version of archetypes being
> essentially ontic. I passed over this at first, but in fact it seems as
> though it is important. Putting aside the arguable conclusion that
> Jung's thinking was not metaphysical, it seems that Michael is saying,...

Just to stop here for a moment for the sake of clarification, I wasn’t saying 
that Jung's thinking was not metaphysical, but that his thinking does not enter 
the metaphysical dimension, by which I mean that he is not knowingly dealing 
with the problem of the transcendental dimension of beings in their being. 

> MS: This sounds something like (but not exactely like) both Jung's
> notion of archetypes and Johnson's notion of image schemata. For Plato
> this may have been a tad more mystical. Johnson is saying that there is
> indeed an underlying metaphoric structuring pattern that shapes our
> understanding of the world. At least this is my reading of Johnson. Jung
> is saying something similar -- that there is a underlying archetypal
> structuring pattern that shapes our understanding of the world.

My memory of Jung is fading over the years, and I don’t have any Jung in my 
library to look up on the quick, but I’d like to go into Plato being “a tad more 
mystical”. In general terms, Jung’s archetypes are ways of interpreting 
experience. Thus e.g. the archtype of the ‘wise old man’ helps to make sense, 
i.e. interpret, figures that appear in dreams. Figure resembling in some wise a 
‘wise old man’ are matched against the pattern, or archetype, as you say, and 
the archetype itself is further interpreted, with the help of myths, to unravel 
some deep ‘laws’ of the human psyche. But Plato’s ideas slip in before there can 
be any talk of such patterns, for it is not a matter of unravelling the meaning 
of a tree that appears in a dream, but of asking how a tree as such can be given 
to us to perceive. 

As Bob Auler indicated, the tree has to be ‘something’ to appear to us at all, 
and this something-ness is precisely Aristotle’s first category (the categories 
being a further elaboration of Plato’s Ideas). So the categories and ideas are 
given transcendentally to us. They are not beings themselves, but allow beings 
as such to constitute themselves in their self-showing, i.e. to be what they 
are. Understanding a tree as a tree comes before interpreting it using some 
ontic aid such as an archetype. Understanding and interpreting have to be 
distinguished here. 

> MS: Does a patterning that structures our understanding have to be
> equivalent to the being of beings? (I have the suspicion that you are
> going to say "Yes" -- I hope you will elaborate).

The metaphysical question is: Why are there beings at all, and not just nothing? 
Understanding how beings as such (something as something, etc.) are given to us, 
show themselves to us at all is the fundamental question that undercuts, i.e. 
comes before, any interpretation of beings.

The peculiar difficulty in understanding the metaphysical dimension is that the 
Greeks themselves conflated being with beings. _To on_ can mean either being or 
beings. Plato’s Ideas can thus be taken for beings ‘inhabiting’ a transcendental 
realm where they perdure eternally without change, whereas in truth they are 
ways of being that allow beings to be what they are. The Greeks did not clearly 
see the ontological difference, nor did they question the meaning of being, but 
took it in a substantive sense (i.e. as standing presence). Thus, e.g. the 
hegemony of the substantive in Western grammar.

> And what is throwing me off here is that
> Dreyfus seems to have been viewing Johnson's account of this patterning
> business as akin to the "shared background understanding" of
> Heidegger's.

Is Dreyfus ontifying the ontological difference here? (I can’t judge myself.)

Michael
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