Comments on Forever Becoming: All ego?

Our natural "uncontrollable" urges - muc...

2010-01-29T12:49:33.239Z

Our natural "uncontrollable" urges - much like products of the unconscious; dreams, pathologies - serve to remind us of the larger mind/system.

They are uncomfortable because they go against our plans, run counter to the purposiveness of the ego. They counteract our imaginings, our fictions, and point towards the artificial nature of our act.

They bring us back down to the ground (back down the pyramid of meanings, of meta) and humble us with the truth of our larger nature.

These things insult the ego, put it in its place; and so, mostly, we resent them.

Adam and Eve then became almost drunk with excitem...

2010-01-29T12:43:22.619Z

Adam and Eve then became almost drunk with excitement. This was the way to do things. Make a plan, ABC and you get D.

They then began to specialize in doing things the planned way. In effect, they cast out from the Garden the concept of their own systemic nature and of its total systemic nature.

[...] Eve began to resent the business of sex and reproduction. Whenever these rather basic phenomena intruded upon her now purposive way of living, she was reminded of the larger life which had been kicked out of the Garden.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Conscious Purpose versus Nature'), p.441

The body, that inconvenient reminder of mortality,...

2010-01-29T12:34:45.393Z

The body, that inconvenient reminder of mortality, is plucked, pierced, etched, pummelled, pumped up, shrunk and remoulded [...] What seems a celebration of the body, then, may also cloak a virulent anti-materialism - a desire to gather this raw, perishable stuff into the less corruptible forms of art or discourse.

The resurrection of the body returns as the tattoo parlour and the cosmetic surgeon's consulting-room. To reduce this obstreperous stuff to so much clay in our hands is a fantasy of mastering the unmasterable. It is a disavowal of death, a refusal of the limit which is ourselves.

For all its love affair with matter, in the shape of Tuscan villas and double brandies, capitalist society harbours a secret hatred of the stuff. It is a culture shot through with fantasy, idealist to its core, powered by a disembodied will which dreams of pounding Nature to pieces. It makes an idol out of matter, but cannot stomach the resistance it offers to its grandiose schemes.

Taming the Mississippi and piercing your navel are just earlier and later versions of the same ideology. Having moulded the landscape to our own image and likeness, we have now begun to recraft ourselves. Civil engineering has been joined by cosmetic surgery.

'Personalizing' the body may be a way of denying its essential impersonality. Its impersonality lies in the fact that it belongs to the species before it belongs to me; and there are some aspects of the species-body - death, vulnerability, sickness and the like - that we may well prefer to thrust into oblivion.

[Terry Eagleton]
After Theory, p.164-6

[...] there is humility, and I propose this...

2010-01-28T21:43:17.126Z

[...] there is humility, and I propose this not as a moral principle, distasteful to a large number of people, but simply as an item of a scientific philosophy.

In the period of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps the most important disaster was the enormous increase of scientific arrogance. We had discovered how to make trains and other machines. We knew how to put one box on top of the other to get that apple, and Occidental man saw himself as an autocrat with complete power over a universe which was made of physics and chemistry.

But that arrogant scientific philosophy is now obsolete, and in its place there is the discovery that man is only a part of larger systems and that the part can never control the whole.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Conscious Purpose versus Nature'), p.443

He stays always within the archetypal perspective ...

2009-05-10T12:25:00.000+01:00

He stays always within the archetypal perspective of philosophy with its commitment to coherent unity. His ennobled notion of man affirms, and inflates, the ego reflecting this transcendent unity, an ego which must see multiplication only as fragmentation.

[Karl] Jaspers well perceives the dangers of demonology, but not its prospective possibility for releasing the soul from its history of ego domination. Because Jaspers treats the question metaphysically, in the language of 'is' verbs, ("are there demons or not"), for him the issue is one of substance and being.

Were it treated psychologically, the daimons would be considered first as experiences, personified perspectives toward events, and demonology as a mode of imagining. But to approach the issue in this fashion, psychologically, requires an appreciation of the image, and anima.

[James_Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.67