What was the essential idea propelling Darwin's Theory of Evolution?
Was it the idea that we evolved (or 'mutated') genetically over millions of years and countless generations -- from apes? Or indeed, from animals in general?
Because if so, Anaxamander, the second oldest, recognized Greek and Western philosopher, a Pre-Socratic -- as stated in the last essay, and in a growing number of philosophical essays and biographical articles on Anaxamander life and ideas -- can be viewed as the first 'evolution theorist' as he asserted that man 'evolved' or 'mutated' from fishes...
Or was -- and is -- there a much more profound idea associated with 'evolution theory' that goes way beyond the theory of whether or not man 'mutated from an animal (or indeed, from all animals)' or not?
The particular aspect of evolution theory that I am reaching for, enters into the realm of the 'bi-polar', 'the dialectic', and 'dialectic engagement', 'dialectic energy', and even into 'Quantum Physics' and 'Quantum Energy Theory' that still needs to be more fully integrated with, or into, what might be called 'Quantum Psychic and Philosophical Energy Theory'?
Because here too, Anaxamander showed us in his own primitive, partly mythological way, some brilliant insights into 'the way the world and man works' that have 'continued to evolve' through the work of such famous philosophers and psychologists as Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Darwin, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Freud, Jung, and others...And this is without even touching upon the history and evolution of Eastern Mythology and Philosophy, Middle Eastern Mythology and Philosophy, North American Indian Mythology and Philosophy...
There is a pattern here... Philosophy and Psychology have their collective roots in Mythology...Mythological Symbols remain entrenched in the psychology of man, and in order to fully understand the depths and roots of both philosophy and psychology, we need to better understand -- 'mythology'.
I say this at 55 years old. I was unable to say this at 20 years old -- or 24 years old when I wrote my Honours Thesis in Psychology at the time -- because I was too much 'engulfed in, and swallowed up by, rational-empiricism, which was my Ruling and Idolized God' at the time...
And God said...You shall have no other gods before Me. (1st Commandment)
Ooops...David, you slipped...you were 'worshipping a different God' at the time -- not your 'introjected Protestant God' but rather your conflated, integrative 'God of The Enlightenment'...
What you were (I was) not yet 'dialectically capable of' yet -- because I had not been fully exposed to Fritz Perls, Carl Jung, and Hegel yet -- was the very 'dialectic idea' that the 'two Gods' were not necessarily 'mutually exclusive'...and could indeed, one day, meet each other...
Furthermore, my 'Enligtenment God' had not yet met my 'Romantic God' and furhtermore, neither my 'Enlightenment' or my 'Romantic' God had yet fully met and 'dialectically embraced' my 'Humanistic-Existential God'...
And furthermore, at 29, none of these 'Gods' had met my 'Mythological Gods' which my introduction to both Jungian Psychology and Greek Mythology would later (in my mid 30s and 40s) introduce me too...
I had 'disavowed' Carl Jung for a long time -- he was one of the last of the main psychologists to be fully embraced within the confines of Hegel's Hotel...
In 'disavowing' Carl Jung, I was also disavowing my 'Mythological Self'...and my 'Mythological Gods'...and the connection between 'introjection' and 'projection', 'Gods' and 'Archetypes'....'Gods' are externalized (projected) 'Archetypes'...and 'Archetypes' are internalized (introjected) 'Gods'...The two are dialectically connected and both give 'birth' and 'death' to each other...
At 29, and indeed, right up into at least my mid 30s, I disavowed my 'Mythological Self'...I believed myself incapable of 'thinking mythologically' (even though we all think mythologically at night when we dream...)
Between 29 and probably right up into my 50s, I believed that 'I would never be able to give a 'dream or fantasy or mythological interpretation' like Freud in 'The Interpretation of Dreams', or Jung, or Erich Fromm in 'The Forgotten Language'...
And yet here I am at 55 about to embark -- or to continue in more depth and detail -- a mythological interpretation of the Central Figures in The Christian Religion (modifications can be applied to any other religion) that arguably rival any mythological interpretation that Freud or Jung or Fromm ever presented...Of course, I am narcissistically biased...
Jung was the ultimate 'Master of The Mythological'...Freud was too 'rational-empirical' to fully embrace the Mythological, and as such, rebelled against Jung's activity in this area that went way beyond anything Freud did in this area...Freud delved into 'The Personal Unconscious', Jung went beyond the Personal Unconscious and into the realm of 'The Collective Unconscious'...and I dialectically embrace both -- and the interaction between them...
Incidently, speaking of 'The Coincidental -- or Not', 'The Uncanny', 'The Astrological', and 'The Para-Psychological', I was born on March 3rd, which was the day that Freud and Jung met for the first time on a Sunday morning in 1907 and talked for 15 hours straight!
Although others have been here before me, I consider it my 'unconscious/conscious duty and passion' to re-integrate Freud and Jung and their respective individual and collective ideas as I am doing right here and now (although with a more 'Jungian domination' today) in November 2010...
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The Freud Meets Jung conference held in November 2007 was organized jointly by The British Psycho-Analytical Society, The Society of Analytical Psychology, and The Journal of Analytical Psychology to celebrate the centenary of the first meeting between the two pioneers of psychoanalysis. Speakers and Chairs were from the three organizations with the addition of two historians of depth psychology, Ernst Falzeder and Sonu Shamdasani. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Analytical Psychology and the International Psychoanalytical Association. A tribute was paid to Dr. Joseph Henderson who died at age 104 the week before the conference.
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And now here we are in November, 2010...
With Hegel's Hotel embracing the whole history and evolution of Western Philosophy and Psychology but in particular here the respective and integrative psychologies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung...
Carl Jung used 'the mandala'...as his 'Ultimate Therapeutic Tool'...(Google... Carl Jung and The Mandala... to get a much better visual image of what 'the mandala' looks like in its 'circular structure' which is different than the usual 'rectangular structure' of the psyche that I usually visualize...Today we are switching to a 'circular image of The Mandala with a Christian image of The Cross inside the Mandala'...
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From Wikipedia....(Jung comments on his theoretical and therapeutic movement towards 'The Mandala' as his 'Ultimate Therapeutic Agent of Healing and Change'...)
Writes Jung,
I had to abandon the idea of the superordinate position of the ego. ... I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point -- namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the centre, to individuation.
... I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate. - C. G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
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Before I get back to 'The Mandala' and my particular convergence or integration of 'The Mandala' with 'The Christian Cross' and 'Christian Mythology' (and/or Religion, whichever you prefer -- I am not here to start new 'religious vs. anti-religious wars'...), let's move from Jung back to Anaxamander and then fast forward to Darwin...
Anaxamander gave us his own 'Greek-Style Myth of Creation' which, albeit primitive in some of its ideas and structures, was still so brilliantly profound that it has stayed with us in a host of different philosophical, psychological, political and religious renditions that retain the foundation of its original Anaxamanderian structure, dynamics, and interaction...
We must remember as psychologists and/or as students of psychology that man projects (or externalizes) into the outside world everything inside of himself that is important to him, unconscious, and evolving from the depths of his psyche as a part of his 'individuation' (Jung) or 'self-actualization' (Maslow) process...
But in order for these 'projections' to be understood and utilized properly by our 'Conscious Central Ego' we have to understand 'symbolic, mythological language', and in particular, our own symbolic, mythological language which then can be translated either by a therapist and/or by our Central Ego and 'translated into more rational-empirical language' that can be utilized in our day to day living, to faciliate our 'personal growth' and 'individuation' or our humanistic-existential, 'self-actualization' process...
Let me give you an example from my personal life. The other day I had a dream of an ex-girlfriend (why this ex-girlfriend and not another, I have no idea why) who came to me in a 'symbolic visualization of her having no legs'...(Perhaps I have 'conflated' this particular ex-girlfriend with my mother who has diabetic complications and who I worry about her circulation and her legs -- as I just now 'conflated' with my own personal health complications with my liver, and me too worrying about a loss of circulation -- and particularly the circulations in my legs...
The next day I received an email from a friend showing a video of a man who had no legs and no arms -- and yet he was still very mobile, very active, and very 'positive thinking' towards life... A 'coincidence' or 'the uncanny' and some element of the possibly 'para-psychic' or 'para-normal'...
The dream can also be interpreted on another level or dimension as well pertaining to the process of 'individuation' to use Jung's term or 'self-actualization' to use Maslow's term.
The human psyche -- like the human body -- is built according to the principle of 'homeostatic or dialectical balance' with the principle of 'compensation' (arrived at first by Alfed Adler, and then used a little differenly by Jung) being a part of the human mind-body's natural movement towards homeostatic and dialectic (and democratic) balance...
Jung talked about 'superior or dominant functions and/or character traits in the conscious personality or Ego or Personna (or what I would call the Central Ego)' and 'subsidiary, secondary, inferior functions and/or character traits being more likely to be lost, buried, hidden, suppressed, repressed in the subconscious/unconscious Shadow of the Personality...
Nietzsche (1844-1900) was 15 years old when Darwin wrote 'The Origin of The Species' in 1859.
Well, with me, the application of this principle is easy... My 'superior function' is my 'brain activity', my 'inferior function' is my 'leg activity'...and the dream came to me at least partly as a symbolic message and a form of 'unconsicous compensation' designed to tell me in crypted dream language not to 'ignore my inferior function' -- i.e., my 'leg activity'...(meaning I need to get more physical as opposed to psychological exercise...)
This is how our 'unconscious mind' complements and compensates for what is going on in our conscious mind and our mind-body, taken 'wholistically' as opposed to 'reductionistically'...like the 'therapeutic agent of the whole Mandala' as opposed to only seeing particular parts of our own personal life-Mandela...and ignoring other 'suppressed' or 'repressed' or 'inferior' (at least in terms of self-perception) parts...
You see, even Nietzsche, as he ranted and raved against Christianity and the 'suppression of The Self' or 'The Suppression of The Actualizing Self' which Nietzsche viewed as the 'Anti-Thesis' of the Activity of The Superman'...who thus can also be viewed as 'The Anti-Christ' -- because of the Superman/Anti-Christ's opposition to prevailing Christian religion at the time -- which advocated the 'Suppression of The Individual Self in The Here and Now and in The Face of God' as the necessary expense of living happily ever after in Heaven, God's Palace, after life...
Even as Nietzsche raved and ranted against these Christian 'Anti-Humanistic', Anti-Here and Now, anti-live for the moment, anti-live for health and happiness, principles...
Still, in the Shadow of his personality, Nietzsche embraced the best principles of Christianity and the Spirit/Archetype of Jesus Christ...
As he ran towards the horse being whipped by its cruel master...and stepped between the horse's master and the horse to take the full blows of the whip...who else can this remind us other than The Spirit and The Archetype of Jesus Christ...Nietzsche going down for the count to save the punishment of the horse...and apparently this being the last moment of Nietzsche's sanity as he spent the last 10 years of his life inside a mental institution/asylum...Perhaps -- or so I will throw this argument at you -- Nietzsche might have been attempting to atone for both his own sins and at the same time the sins of all mankind...Nietzche had spent 46 years looking into the face of his own monsters, deep within his own Nietzcschean self-abyss -- and yet over and over again, he had managed to somehow jump, or climb, or fly across this precipice -- from Being to Becoming -- without falling into The Abyss...
And in a Christian moment...Nietzsche fell...into his own existential abyss...never to really surface again except in psychotic moments...
Nietzsche had spent his whole life defeating The Abyss...
And then one day, in protecting a horse, The Abyss defeated Nietzsche...
Was this Nietzsche's 'repetition compulsion'?
Was this his 'Ultimate, Core Nuclear, Transference Complex'?
His fight with his own personal Abyss?
His fight with his own 'Internal Monsters'?
His fight against -- and eventual loss to -- Insanity?
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Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Nietzsche was 38 years old in 1882 when he wrote 'The Gay Science' and pronounced to the world for the first time -- 'God is dead!' -- via a character in his book, and this distinction between author and character is important, the character in the book being a 'madman' on top of that (although maybe this distinction isn't so important in the eventual scheme of things as the character in the book can be projectively interpreted as the 'evolving, soon to be insane, later Nietzsche')...
However, Nietzsche was certainly very sane when he wrote this 'philosophy with a hammer' and 'signature statement' of his 'anti-Christian, deconstrutive, post-modern, pro-humanistic-existential philosophy', and its eventual Copernican impact on the world...
Did Nietzsche murder God? (or was he attempting to murder the Christian ideology of sacrificing all humanistic-existential, health and happiness, and striving to be the best we possibly can be in our short here-and-now life on earth for the sake of a very idealized but highly suspicious 'afterlife' in 'Heaven' (at least from a rapidly evolving 'Enlightenment-rational-empirical' point of view that was just a little behind Nietzsche's own more 'romantic' and 'post-modern' vision of the purpose and meaning of man's valuable time, passion, and energy spent on earth...) In between, were the 'pantheists' and 'deists' like Schelling and Diderot who were trying to 'bridge the dialectic gap' between Christianity and Religion on the one hand , and Science, Rational-Empiricism, and Evolution Theory on the other hand...
Did Darwin murder God with his Evolution Theory?
Did Spinoza start to kill God with his Pre-Enlightenment brand of 'Pantheism'? Spinoza was a 'pantheist' -- a person who believes that 'God is in everything' -- which was looked at by orthodox Jews in Holland during his time as being a 'sneaky form of atheism'...For this, Spinoza was 'ex-communicated' from his Orthodox Judaism and the surrounding orthodox Jewish Community...It could have been worse as it could have been a 'death sentence'...paradoxically from the same 'religious victims' who had managed to escape the deadly nightmare of 'The Roman Church and The Spanish Inquisition'... and were now turning themselves into 'victimizers relative to religious intolerance.)...
Did Heraclitus murder God? (Heraclitus is recognized, among other things, as being the first Western/Greek pantheist)...
Did the first Greek/Western philosophers -- Thales and Anaxamander -- murder 'The Greek Mythological Gods'? Remember, Ancient, Pre-Socratic Greece was 'Pre-Christianity'...before Plato and Aristotle influenced the eventual creation and rise of Roman Christianity...
Did all heretics, the blasphemists, the atheists, the agnostics, the pantheists, and/or the deists amongst us -- past and present -- murder God? (Certainly, many were murdered in the name of 'God'...which is despicable...and still happening...)
The Common, Uniting Signature of The Modern-Day, 21st Century, Post-Hegelian, Humanistic-Existential Multi-Dialectic Theorist....is....
The willingness and ability to hold two or more opposing and competing ideas up together, side by side, and not necessarily feel 'love' towards the one idea and 'hate' towards the other...not to feel 'compelled' to have to choose 'one' or the 'other', 'either/or'...
But rather, to be able to embrace both competing ideas, or sets of ideas, and not to feel 'panic-stricken' by the close proximity of the one competing idea with its opposite, but rather to see the 'dialectical or multi-dialectical (or even pluralistic) truth value of both or all competing ideas converging on each other in the same space and time...
By doing this, we recognize and accept the ultimate 'Plulalistic, Multi-Dialectic, Multi-Cultural, Multi-Religious and Mythological, Multi-Political, Multi-Philosophical, Multi-Psychological Reductionistic and Wholistic Truth-Value of Life'...
Call this in partly Jungian terms if you wish...'The Pluralistic, Multi-Dialectic, Multi-Bi-Polar Truth Value and -- Mandala -- of Life -- and of The Wholistic, Evolving Self'
Now at this point, we start to enter a very, unorthodox, partly 'Copernican' -- DGB Multi-Dialectical-Humanistic-Existential-Mythological Pantheistic World'...
Paradoxically, I come from a very orthodox, Protestant background that, partly like Nietzsche (Nietzsche's dad was a Lutheran Pastor before he died when the little Nietzsche was only 5 years old) -- and many, many others -- before me, I both partly reject, and partly embrace and accept...at the same time...This should not be shocking or even surprising as it is a very, very, common recurring paradoxical human psychological and philosophical phenomenon to 'accept' something (an idea, a belief, a value, a thing, a person...) and to 'reject' him, her, and/or it at the same time...
Whether we like this phenomenon or not, 'Hegelianism' in the sense that I am about to define it -- i.e., as the idea of holding seemingly paradoxical, contradictory ideas in the personality at the same time -- is the ruling principle of the human psyche, not the exception...and only turns 'neurotic', 'psychotic', and/or 'pathological'...to the extent that we 'dissociate', 'disavow', 'alienate', 'bury', 'isolate', 'reject', 'betray'...'our hidden opposites'...in 'the deepest Shadow(s)' of our personality...It is a psychological truism of sorts that has been affirmed by Freud, Jung, and other 'psychologists of the deep' that 'what generally goes down in the personality -- as in 'hidden', 'ostracized', 'ex-communicated', 'buried', 'suppressed', 'repressed'... -- comes back up again, often in shocking energies and formats...
Traditionally, this has been called 'the return of the repressed'...and it might be a 'buried trauma and/or memory', a 'character-trait', an 'impulse'...a 'hidden counter, compensatory upward movement and energy in the personality'...
This can be either good or bad depending on the type of energy that is surfacing, how it is surfacing, in what context, and whether it is properly understood in the 'wholistic, multi-dialectic, dynamic context of the evolving personality' -- or not...
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Enough for today...I am burnt out...
We will come back to 'The Cross and Mandala' Model of The Personality tomorrow...
-- dgb, Nov. 2nd, 2010...
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectical Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Have been resurrected....
