Speaking of Carl Jung

[Michael Bailey]

Mark Kohut wrote:

>Back to Who might have read Wolin's The Seduction of Unreason? I have not

me neither, though it sounded worthy enough to at least scout the
Amazon reviews.
I really liked this one:

Wolin's great contribution, read critically, is to bring the critique
of irationalism up to date, to disarm the postmodernists of today and
expose their fascist underpinnings. This work, however, has been done
before, long before. Cornforth, in "Marxism and the Linguistic
Philosophy," predicted postmodernism, and ripped it up from an
unfortunately mechanical stance on Marx.

Better, the great Hungarian philosopher [Lukasz]'s brilliant, but
ponderous and hard to find, "The Destruction of Reason," (which Wolin
references) laid the ground for understanding postmodernism before it
existed, tied it to the rise of fascism, and summed up with this: "Now
irrationalism always begins with this (necessary, irrevocable, but
always relative) discrepancy between the intellectual reflection and
the objective original. The source of the discrepancy lies in the fact
that the tasks directly presented to thought in a given instance, as
long as they are still tasks, still unresolved problems, appear in a
form which at first gives the impression that thought, the forming of
concepts, breaks down in the face of reality, that the reality
confronting thought represents an area beyond reason (the rationality
of the category system of the conceptual method used so far).
Hegel...analyzed a..real road to a resolution of these difficulties...
"..What if (however) a virtue is made of ...the inability to
comprehend the world intellectually? What if a virtue is made of this
necessity and the inability to comprehend the world intellectually is
presented as a 'higher perception as faith, intuition, and so on?
Clearly this problem will crop up at every stage of knowledge and
social development, ie., each time that social evolution and hence
science and philosophy are forced to make a leap forward in order to
answer the real questions arising. ..It is not
chiefly intellectual and philosophical considerations which decide a
thinker's choice between the old and the new, but class
allegiance...(which is often) halted at the threshold of knowledge and
turned round and fled in the opposite direction".

Georg Lukacs (1952) Destruction of Reason, Humanities Press, New Jersey p100.

Postmodernism is religion in disguise and its hustlers are the priests
and cardinals. At base, one cannot grasp how things change in the real
world, or why things are as they are, without a study of dialectics
and materialism. Here is a small contribution
http://www.richgibson.com/diamatoutline.html

(so the guy even gives a link to his own precis of diamat, which I
also liked.  He's apparently a teacher.)

> 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 stranger things in the world than in
> all of your philosophy,Horatio".......

wait, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry was a hit in Toronto?  alerting you
to your latent homesickness?
artfully enough that there was no thermidorian reaction making you
simply hate the song?
so there was that in you which responded to an emotion you were not
consciously feeling
- but then it became conscious...analysis via music...

> 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.......