Subject: Re: The Widening Gyre
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 22:00:23 -0600



 Lois Shawver wrote:
>I am inclined to see Hillman as more pre-modern than
>postmodern.  He is pre-modern in that he has a story that
>he proffers as the true story.

I agree that Hillman wobbles and certainly at times is, as you say, more
pre-modern than postmodern - his so-called disciples exhibit this tendency
even more so.  All these books with soul in the title...don't even get me
started.

Still there is a tendency in Hillman that points to the postmodern and this
is what I find interesting.  It also leads to the question - what would a
postmodern psychology be?  I think this is a very provocative question.

>I do think Lyotard ties his concept of the metanarrative
>to the claims for emancipation more loosely than you seem
>to be suggesting.  Marx is not the only one to provide him
>with an example of a metanarrative; so does Hegel.  And I
>don't think of Hegel (I am thinking of the Phenomenology
>of Spirit) as having a claim to emancipation but I do see
>him as having a metanarrative in Lyotard's sense.

I would disagree about your assessment of Hegel's Geist (or Spirit).  Don't
forget that he began as a theologian.  I don't think I am going too far out
on a limb when I argue that his dialectical understanding of history as the
realization of the Absolute basically a philosophical secularization of
Christianity and therefore, absolutely a metanarrative of emancipation
(Feurbach saw this and Marx as well.)

As Nietzsche once argued, the death of God meant that Christianity merely
went underground into the West's cultural unconscious.  What Lyotard calls
metanarratives are basically secular versions of Christianity.  The question
is will we continue to identify with these and act as moderns (Modernism as
Christianity by other means) or will we become postmodern and realize a
transvaluation of all values.  This is what is at stake in the question of
emancipation.

>look towards the back of the book in his addendum of
>Postmodern Condition, where he talks about the postmodern
>preceding the modern.  What he means here, I think, is
>that we brainstorm in the postmodern and there emerges
>something we have some consensus about and then market to
>the others as a picture of "how things are."


I agree.  Postmodernism is an approach, a tendency, an incredulity.  It is
not a chronology.

>As I read Lyotard, the postmodern is a state of knowing
>that one does not know.  That is why he refers to quantum
>mechanics and such as "postmodern sciences."  They are
>sciences in which we know we do not know..  When we know
>we do not know there is mutual brainstorming and debate,
>whereby we can loosen our conceptual rigidity and discover
>new paradigms, new ideas, that escape the paradigms of
>old.

But, going back to the distinction between modern and postmodern, Lyotard
also indicates that the hallmark of modernism is to seek out the new; to
innovate, to save time;  the metaphysics of Futurism.

To be postmodern is to remember what is not remembered, to work through;

"a procedure in "ana-": a procedure of analysis, analogy and  anamnesis that
involves an 'initial forgetting'."


>Pathologizing?  You must be using the word differently
>than I do.  Can you explain what you mean here?


Hillman critiques both psychology and therapy for their metanarrative based
on healing and universal health.  As such, pathologizing is constantly
linked with illness and disease.  It tends to be regarded as an affliction
from which the patient must be cured.

Hillman says that once we step outside this framing narrative and look at
what he calls the soul from its own polytheistic perspective (petit
narratives) and not from the heroic ego's perspective (metanarrative) we
discover that soul is found in its images and these are often pathological -
images and dreams that are often bizarre, twisted, immoral, painful and
sick.  Hillman is fond of quoting Jung as saying: "the gods are in the
disease."

What is interesting about this to me is this. One can recontextualize this
argument and say the medical profession (i.e. therapy and mental health)
advocates a psychology of taste and beauty based on the reflective judgement
of common sense. The archetypal psychology advocated by Hillman is a
psychology of the sublime. As such, archetypal psychology involves the need
for pain as well as pleasure.  When we attempt to remove all the pain we
lobotomize the soul.

It is interesting to read Burke on the sublime and compare him to Hillman.
Unlike Kant, Burke approached the sublime much more psychologically and his
essay on the sublime is filled with similar pathological images.

These are, perhaps, the same images that anamnesis must work through in
order for soul to bear witness to what cannot be presented.  This is the
pychology of the postmodern - after emancipation, art.

>> imaging, seeing through the literal and beauty as
>> display.  His discription of the anima mundi is a kind
>> of post-modern hyle, a vale of soulmaking.
>
>Tell me more about anima mundi.

For one thing, Hillman takes this antiquated Platonic idea and breathes new
life into it.  He relates anima to animal and points out that the world soul
is an animal; it is alive.  From this standpoint, we must reject the
Cartesian dualism that neatly divides mind from matter, human from animal,
consciousness from nonconsciousness.

Hillman uses as one example the cheap delapidated lawn chair on our back
porch.  How does it suffer from lack of attention?  What are its
pathologies?  What is the way in which soul may be restored to it.

Rather to attempt to heal our Cartesian subjective ego while shutting out
the growing pathology of the world's condition, perhaps the psychological
move we now need to make is to reject this dualism and re-enter the vale of
soulmaking in order to restore the lost soul of things, those forlorn
objects which we use and abandon: lawn chairs, automobiles, city plazas,
dumpyards, buildings - everything the Cartesian split has rejected.

Rather than becoming healed, we need to establish a different relationship
to the world so that things may reemerge in their essential beauty as
display; given, present and unconcealed.  (The Cosmos as cosmetics.)

And in the new found silence we begin to sense the sublime from which this
beauty has emerged and which is always hidden, never present, but to which
both art and psychology must bear their  pathological witness.

>Please tell me more about Jonas.
Certainly not in the same league as the American and Austrian MVPs (Most
Valuable Philosophers), but Jonas has some interesting books that have been
translated into English

G.H. Mead - A Contemporary Re-examination of his thought

The Creativity of Action