"SYNCHRONICITOUS"?????????!!!!!!!??????

[Otto]

MalignD:
> I don't quite know why my respected co-lister Calbert chose to grab this
> extended piece from Jung about the I Ching.
>
> Jung is an over-rated quack.  His ideas are interesting, and extremely
useful
> in the world of theater, but as science, which psychoanalysis and
psychology
> aims to to be, he is a world-class embarrassment.
>

1. Because the I Ching is mentioned in Lot 49 I assume.
1b. Because it's the same kind of pseudo scientific-religious hocupocus von
Braun offers in the opening quote of GR.

2. Given the quoted text which is a lot of esoterical blah blah your verdict
is right.

> "(...) Chinese thought, which departs so completely from our ways of
thinking."
-- may I express my usual doubts about this asserted complete
otherness. Do they have other brains?

>From a (post)structuralist point of view the Chinese Yin&Yang binary is as
logocentric as Cause&Effect (in what Jung calls the Western Mind).

> "it is a curious fact that such a gifted and intelligent people as the
Chinese has never developed what we call science"
-- I'm sorry, but this sentence is unbelievably stupid. I think Herr Jung
himself should have dropped "certain prejudices of" his own "Western mind"
in advance.

I think Jung's main error lies in building up the hierarchical opposition of
chance vs. cause&effect. In nature there are causes which have effects,
initiated by chance. He's right in his critique on the Western assumptions
about the laws of nature but simply by turning the opposition upside down he
misses the point of the I Ching, the random generator that sets aside the
usual Cause&Effect reality of the everday reality for a while when focussing
on your own mind.

> "The manner in which the I Ching tends to look upon reality seems to
disfavor our causalistic procedures."
-- He's surely right about this, but why and for what purpose was and is
the I Ching used?

> "for someone who likes to look at the world at the angle from which
ancient China saw it, the I Ching may have some attraction."
-- I dunno why I should want this? Did these people live more "authentic"
then we do? Didn't they had slaves and fought wars and treated women
badly? Wasn't the ancient Chinese society something other than mere
feudalism?

> "In other words, whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the
hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality
no less than in time. To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in
which it was cast -- even more so than the hours of the clock or the
divisions of the calendar could be -- inasmuch as the hexagram was
understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the
moment of its origin.
This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed
synchronicity,[2] a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically
opposed to that of causality. (...) synchronicity takes the coincidence of
events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance."
-- ja wat denn nun! If it is more then "mere chance" there is causality.

> "To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was
cast -- even more so than the hours of the clock or the divisions of the
calendar could be -- inasmuch as the hexagram was understood to be an
indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its
origin."

If the "assumption(s)" Jung ascribes to the creator of the I Ching (I have
my doubts that there was a single one) really are "involved" I wonder why
this ominous creator Jung claims as evidence for his own unprovable theory
of synchronicity didn't formultate that "curious principle" himself and
prevent all those ancient Chinese throwing the coins before planning a
vacation from dying without having understood it to its full extent, 'cause
they had no C.G. to explain it to them.

"Kien," (Yang + + +) which stands for the "strong," "Creative," "Heaven" and
"Father" is just another God-metaphor and structuralistically not at all
that far from Christian ideas and Western thinking as Jung asserts.

Plus, with all his attempts to get something out of the I Ching for his own
theory I mistrust his intentions.

Otto