Speaking of Carl Jung

[Ian Livingston]

I'm studying it when I'm unconscious.

Really, Matthew, I do not believe Jung is some psychopompous guru who
spouted genius. I do not, on the other hand, dismiss him because I
know he was wildly wrong in many (even most) areas. I also find it
useful to know material in Plato, Freud, Lucretius, and Dylan, even
though I know they were all wildly wrong about many things. I read 'em
anyway, because great authors read 'em (or, in Dylan's case, hear 'em)
and their influence shows up in the work of others, and being able to
recognize allusions and influences increases my reading pleasure. I
can't read everything, either. There's no way I'll live long enough to
make it through my reading list. I'm a working stiff, so I only get so
many hours per year to read. But everything I read makes life a better
experience for me, personally, and helps me to become more available
to those with whom I spend time, so I have no intention of letting up
on it. Read Jung. I really enjoyed the volumes on alchemy. The notion
of syzygy is fascinating. I read them in conjunction with a
straight-through read of all Pynchon's novels and, although it
predisposed me to see Jung in too many places, it also made other
works available to me. Cormac McCarthy is another writer who is
strongly influenced by Jung--among others. But I only reach for
secondary sources to help me grasp difficult primary ones--except in
fields where I could never read the primary texts, such as math and
physics, among others. It is also, yes, I'll concede that, too, almost
impossible to call any non-fiction work a primary source, as every
discovery is built on work that has gone before, but I think you know
what I mean.

We'll never know enough. That's the whole point of it all. I am more
entertained than offended by know-it-alls, when I meet 'em.

Oh, and as to the location of the mind, well, serious neuroscientists,
Antonio Damasio for one, do not embrace the materialist claim that
mind is a function of the brain. Even those who favor the notion of
the embodied mind as a function of the entire physical organism find
room to be mystified, and leave certain areas of understanding to the
psychologists. There are, after all, it seems, things we understand
without knowing how they work.

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 8:22 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good use!
>
>
> On Thursday, March 29, 2012, Jed Kelestron wrote:
>>
>> I've used it for a surfboard.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mar 29, 2012, at 8:12 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I've not "read" the Red Book, only rolled in it's pictures.
>> Go there.
>>
>> On Thursday, March 29, 2012, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>
>> Back to Who might have read Wolin's The Seduction of Unreason? I have not.
>> I may now, BUT I have read some Wolin and have heard him speak once.
>> I think I read some of Wolin's Benjamin book and I know I read some of the
>> book on Heidegger he edited, since dealing with Heidegger was important to
>> me.
>>
>> I have read other philosophers on the conceptual emptiness of Freud
>> (and/or Jung by simple extension. That is, if the Unconscious goes, then the
>> Collective
>> Unconscious goes..). Grunbaum was one. Frederick Crews--a literary guy
>> previously cited here was another who turned on Freud(ianism)...
>>
>> I tell (usually to myself) one personal story. How, when I had first
>> discovered such ideas as Freud's, and full of confusion and wanting to learn
>> whatever "truth" was, I had read Sartre who argued against Freud's
>> conception of The Unconscious. I had a narrow, repressed upbringing,I say.
>> So, I was young and away from home (for the first time) at university [in
>> Toronto], yet felt overtly so happy to be on my own, to be learning every
>> day in a different country, full of life-and learning embracing happiness
>> (it seemed).
>>
>> That year,the song--later to appear in Vineland---I'm So LonesomeI Could
>> Cry was a pop chart hit. But I hated country music so I did not like it.
>> Overtly.
>> upon hearing it after some while of it being played often,one day when I
>> heard it, I was semi-overcome with an immense sadness. A feeling of home
>> sickness
>> from the song's lyrics I came almost immediately to believe.
>>
>> Which convinced me that The Unconscious and some other ideas which the
>> most logical philosophers and rationalists could refute with impeccable
>> scientific
>> reasoning, often missed something else, something perhaps true but
>> not so scientifically provable with---"you're gonna want cause and effect"
>> (?)----and, more literarily, "there are strangerthings in the world than in
>> all of your philosophy,Horatio".......
>>
>> this is one reason I love Pynchon and one way I think he uses such as
>> Freud and Jung........not JUST as conceits but as (some) truth carriers
>> metaphorically.......
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> From: Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>
>> To: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 10:56 AM
>> Subject: Re: Speaking of Carl Jung
>>
>> I agree completely. Of course the question is how much do you interrogate
>> a text like Hegel's "Phenomenology of the Spirit" before going on to
>> secondary sources, and with the load of secondary material how does one
>> choose what to read? This is where one needs the guidance provided by
>> someone with experience and familiarity with the subject. In other words, a
>> professor or mentor of some sort.
>> As a character Jung is very interesting. His writing deserves to be read.
>> However, his ideas are hokum and the problem is that people continue to draw
>> on them because they continue to be granted legitimacy from certain
>> quarters.
>>
>> I'd like to take a gander at the Red Book. Must be bizarre.
>>
>> cheers Dave
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: David Mo



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant