Speaking of Carl Jung

[Jed Kelestron]

I wish there were 'The Essential Ian' because I don't have time to read this post. 



On Mar 29, 2012, at 9:34 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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