Wednesday, 24 September 2008

Reasonable paths

It is a fundamental error to try to subject our own fate at all costs to our will. Our will is a function regulated by reflection; hence it is dependent on the quality of that reflection. This, if it really is reflection, is supposed to be rational, i.e., in accord with reason.

But has it ever been shown, or will it ever be, that life and fate are in accord with reason, that they too are rational?

The further we go in the direction selected by reason, the surer we may be that we are excluding the irrational possibilities of life which have just as much right to be lived.

[C.G. Jung]
The Essential Jung, p.155

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Posted by at 10:49
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2 comments:

  1. Consider the state of medicine today. It's called medical science. What happens is that doctors think it would be nice to get rid of polio, or typhoid, or cancer. So they devote research money and effort to focusing on these "problems," or purposes.

    At a certain point Dr. Salk and other "solve" the problem of polio. They discover a solution of bugs which you can give to children so that they don't get polio. This is a solution to the problem of polio. At this point they stop putting large quantities of effort and money into the problem of polio and go on to the problem of cancer, or whatever it may be.

    Medicine ends up, therefore, as a total science, whose structure is essentially that of a bag of tricks. Within this science there is extraordinarily little knowledge of the sort of things I'm talking about; that is, of the body as a systemically cybernetically organized self-corrective system. Its total interdependencies are minimally understood.

    What has happened is that purpose has determined what will come under the inspection or consciousness of medical science.

    If you allow purpose to organize that which comes under your conscious inspection, what you will get is a bag of tricks - some of them very valuable tricks.

    [Gregory Bateson]
    Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind ('Conscious Purpose versus Nature'), p.439
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  2. Reasonable paths, purposive paths; ego-paths: with the larger system in mind, and its web of interdependencies, these paths are always going to be unbalanced.

    Thus, conventional psychology attempts to "cure" pathology, to restore the still waters, but perhaps the idea of cure is ignorant to the larger system. The ego can only see pathology as a nuisance, and its purpose becomes to rid itself of the nuisance. But its purpose is ignorant to the needs of the larger system. In setting about its purpose - the cure - it contributes toward an imbalance in the larger system.
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