One continuation of earlier thoughts about psychoanalysis, is my fatigue with the concept of the "unconscious," mainly because it is so often mystified by both Freud and Jung, and yet the term is useful and probably cannot be usefully substituted. It's too convenient to refer to something as having an "unconscious origin," some inclination or idea, though because of philosophical copyright, we can't help but flip back to the pages of those books where the idea was outlined and made into a never-never-land. (I reserve the right to be wrong, and to revise any iconoclastic claim I make on this blog.) Two ways I tried to circumvent the typical thinking about the unconscious is to refer to it as instinctive will and perception, which is fine for characterizing some ways in which the unconscious phenomena comes about, but doesn't quite get that invisibility, that spectral quality. To refer to it as a subliminal will and perception is perhaps an improvement on this, because we get that "below-threshold" etymology and we get a ready synonym for the unconscious with a more straightforward meaning. But here as with many other issues I'm struggling with, is the problem of not wanting to get too nihilistic and mechanical here, while at the same time wanting to place certain inflationary tendencies towards religiosity found in Jung in check.
The answer, as I always find it, here as elsewhere, is in the arts, I believe, and in a less systematic and scientific description. What might be irritating about the "unconscious" is that it is a scientific description that is treated like a religious idol by both Freud and Jung, who establish this false choice between the benefits of seeing unconsciousness as either primal guilt at animality, or alchemical Luna incarnate. Science or religion, take your pick. I believe a poetic, not a mythopoetic, solution is the right one. Two expressions that have come to my mind as of late seem to underscore this anti-systematic metaphysics of the aesthetic approach--"poetry is the dream-logic of everyday life" and "reality is symbolic." Both of which say the same thing in different ways, and both of which react to Jung's views. Jung's views are more to the effect of "symbolic is reality," whereas my experience as a musician, poet, and overall obsessive artist has me see the synchronistic and metaphorical dynamics he wishes to integrate with Western philosophy as existing in a much more free, and spontaneous, way, and J'accuse the psychology of the archetype as the psychology of the religious, not the spiritual, the urge-- understandable but unpleasant-- to try to make peace with the old myths, to see everything in grandiose continuity with them, rather than, as I, from a lonely place, see as far more optimistic, to see that life is still creating, still revealing, that only who doesn't remember history has to repeat it, that our only original Idea we need to rediscover is that of creation itself, which is demonstrable as a contingent psychological issue of sexuality, political freedom, not to mention artistic independence. Creation is the peak experience and it is that of being, not becoming. It is the optimism of youth, the hopefulness that can face anything, even death, with wonder and awe and curiosity, rather than a banal attempt to find in the present, and future, what the past has foreordained. If anything, I think the future is the transcendental category beyond the dialectic of past and present.
But I'm in a lot, a lot of conflict about what I'm saying and so that's why I reserve the right to throw everything out if I bump up against a better mentality than what I'm theorizing here. It's possible at the bottom of all this is just my rejection-- which does not seem likely to change-- of a particular attitude I find disagreeable which is associated with Jungianism and has nothing to do with artistry. And which I am flailing about, desperately, trying to find a stable place in my agon with it, since the instability of the world of arts and entertainment seems precisely what exiled me in stupid Jungland to begin with. But hey, if my opinions come to reverse themselves, and I bow in honor of the Red Book, you'll be the first to know, Blogger of all spacetime causality and platonic Form.
So--onwards from angst and confusion and into profitable and new ideas, which my graduate program seems less interested in than in validations of what they already believe-- ah, how I envy being so convinced of anything intellectually that you can close your eyes and meditate with contemplative bliss! Schopenhauer says that-- within the span of a few pages in which he says stuff about music I quite like, which is that it is the closest depiction of the World-Will whereas other arts are further deferments into representations, and shows us the Will in all its clearest movements, and which is a good thing, the best of things-- and then he goes on to be like, oh, but its Representation, the contemplation of Representation where true peace is found. And in that I feel some elemental, barely-there sympathy for Nietzsche's rejection of this mentality, this mentality of will-negation. Not to say I'm onboard for music being "will," but as being the closest we can come to the pure forms of movement, the "archetypes," Schopenhauer's saying something I'll need to use in my grad program. And possibly demonstrates the idiocy of the worship of the image as blissful-- I believe what Schopenhauer's getting at is that music represents the will in the greatest totality and so we are the most separated from it, the most contemplative, though he never says so overtly, and seems more interested in flipping the page to a horseshit embrace of the "ascetic," will-negating lifestyle of the Hindus while he has illegitimate children and insults people to their face, a hypocrisy Bertrand Russell seems to have pointed out.
But this notion of music as maximal separation from the will, which is the only way I can make sense of the high esteem Schopenhauer places it in, since the will is striving and suffering, is nonsensical, for the effect of music is of a great immersion, not of a great separation. Nietzsche, for all his nonsense, is far more clear on this point when he refers to musical and poetical beauty as 'trans-subjectivity.' I mean, we get into John Dewey, we hear a simple point made about "doing" and "undergoing," willing and contemplation, as one, as no binary choice, in the aesthetic experience. So perhaps music is this paradoxical experience-- oy, how I hate abusing the term 'paradox' right now-- which is very evident in songwriting, where we experience willing and contemplation in one thing, subjectivity given the anchor of an objectivity that makes it feel like trans-subjectivity, makes the subject of the song, the singer, exportable to all others' experiences through relatability, whereas the subjective speech would otherwise become locked in an agonistic dialogue. For me, and strangely here again I'm agreeing with that fascist bastard Nietzsche, it's the world of representation where the agonistic begins, what tragic journey he pointlessly thought to affirm with "will to power." It's a pretty standard thought, the idea of a doubling, a simulacrum, a splitting-asunder, and bam, you've got evil, you've got conflict. The Triforce is dispersed and one jerk has the powerful part, and the courageous knight and the wise princess have to take him on. Sublime original unities dispensed into conflicted representations, that's Jung, Nietzsche, and the Legend of Zelda, not to mention the Bible, Milton, and Shakespeare. But no, no, Schopenhauer's going to tell you that everything is will and everything is agonized striving-- even Wagner who took the rhine-gold from that one couldn't make that work, it's the conflict between the river-maidens and Alberich the dwarf which sets the end of the world in motion, at the beginning of the world, which is just the separation of the gold from the river. In the Beatles movie "Help!" Ringo's got a ring that belongs to a Kali-cult and bam, we've got a plot to sacrifice the drummer to the succubus of destruction, over and over. "Help!" is a much better opera than Der Ring Des Nibelungen, by the way but I've been saying that since I was 22, and the people I was annoyed with when I said that are all gone.
Nevertheless we keep fighting the same battle over and over, and we win, but never seem to win anything for it. When I was 22, I made an album called "Der Ring Des Schrotflinte" which was a remark on the end of my band Shotgun, the name seeming expressive of a kind of destructive aggression on my part which I wasn't, in my psychedelic optimism, so down with anymore. Eventually I believe that same decision led to me creating the recording name JOKE SCIENCE, which I believe is a vast improvement over Shotgun, though I've gotten nostalgic for Shotgun from time to time. But I created an ouroboros ring out of the Shotgun, rather than the stupid, racist Dwarf character, and the original name of this blog was "Decadence Devoured." If you flip back to the first post, I started this fucking stupid thing as a resurgence of Decadence Devoured and then I got tired of it, re-enacting past history I suppose. I'm living in Pasadena for the second time of my life, and so I decided to go for Pasadena Sun, since the original blog I did here was Pasadena Moon, and I just changed that today. I got a lot of fucking shit on my mind.
Anyway this is endless deferral of a simple point I set out to make-- which is that "dream-mind" came to me as a term to describe the "unconscious" in a way that is more poetic, and which coheres with the maxims I listed above: "poetry is the dream-logic of everyday life," and "reality is symbolic." For I keep thinking more and more about dream-logic and how important it is for everyday life. Freud's system attempts to destroy dreams with interpretations, and Jung misses the chance to destroy interpretations with dreams, which falls to artists and not scientists. Instead Jung destroys dreams with religions, and prides himself in being intuitively in a class above the reductionist Freud. Shamanism I believe is a different cream of wheat from religion, and completely consistent with the art-game. Religion is coherent with power-systems, with politics, with nationalism, with war, with legality, with interpretation. It is about dumb, repeated rituals which lose relevance every time they are unveiled. Shamanism is not a ritual, it is an act, which harnesses imaginative freedom to set our psyches afloat in the dream-logic which is the author of all things, and and all religions. But one has to walk a razor's edge here, because you nail down as unambiguous too much about that dream-logic and you start a fucking cult like Jung did. Shamanism doesn't belong to anyone, it rears its head in nature like to civilization, it's in my racial bloodstream just as well as yours, because it's just an act, not a ritual, something that is a priori like the art of music, which is the simple involution of the dream into ordinary life. The dream of interpretation. And if I am special for making this point it is only on account of the education that permits me to make it, since this practice can be found everywhere-- in whomever is worth their artistic salt in the Western psychic prison just as well as indigenous cultures. It is decidedly not found in a consulting room.
So anyway, the whole idea of "dream-mind" is that we create here an aesthetic just as well as shamanic term, which aims to underline how vitally important is this "Dream-Logic" to our everyday lives, and how it's basically the stem of the rotting branch of world religion that is what Jung suffers for feeling the loss of in a society of scientism. It's what he calls "active imagination," and in another voicing, "synchronicity." But "dream-logic" can carry all these things at once.
[To go back to Schopenhauer, and break with a passage I admire, he calls music the form without material of all the Platonic ideas, all the states of being and movements of the will. He agrees with me that if we can find archetypes anywhere it's in music and everything else should be highly suspect, containers for material. However, to throw "dream-logic" at Arthur S., it's the music's playfulness which makes it one with this dream-logic, which is the true "will," without any conflict-- and without any conflict perhaps to an extent we might find disturbing, lowly terrified creatures as we are! It would have to be, if representation is a dream, then its thing-in-itself is its logic, hardy har har. But what I mean is that Schopenhauer, like to Jung and Nietzsche, and likely any philosopher I can think of right now outside of, gasp, Lacan, is so fixated on the representation, because logic, and not dream-logic, is so focused on the representation. There's a fundamental assumption here, that a philosophy of the world must marginalize playfulness, which is not just a comic insincerity, but an ambiguity, which may yet be a very serious thing, like any form of ironic displacement. Schopenhauer's emphasis on "representation" is refreshing and we can see how Nietzsche ran with this in Apollo v. Dionysus, yet, perhaps this is another of those fundamental errors that plague the Western mind, outside of the realm of the arts where the, sigh, "indigenous" shamans yet persist, sigh, but even there the artist-shamans are just positively plagued like an infestation of insects by critical theorists who reduce their mysteries down to idiotic simple premises, who can only love an artist's work if its a great manifestation of Marx or Freud, because of course, it's that kind of idiot they are, so they need to tell themselves a myth in which the artist is a figment of their very unimaginative imagination. I dunno, sometimes I think philosophy is just a sin; but I can't stop; my thought-process is essential to my art-work, which contains it. I got way off the rails of a clause I never finished saying: here it is: Schopenhauer and all these morons treat a representation like a component where context means nothing, like a word for which tone of voice or syntactical placement is not a psychological factor. A great study could be made about the impact of the use of fonts in literature, and how a change of fonts in the reprinting of a book may mutate the communication of its meaning, for good or for ill, and to the writer's glory or detriment, but that seems like too much fun for academia.]
Representations-- like logic itself-- are juggled by a dreamy playfulness everywhere we look. We see it in other human beings and their speech and acts constantly, we see it in their dreams, and we see it in chance events that have, ostensibly, little to do with anyone other than the someone seeing it happen. Schopenhauer's philosophy could not explicate John Ashbery's poetry, and neither could Jung's, since he had no stomach for James Joyce, what Jung would do is just pathologize it and glue the pages shut. The most disillusioning thing, the most heartbreaking thing, that took a former intellectual hero off his throne for me was reading that derogatory horseshit he writes about surrealism in his Ulysses review. In my program, I've mouthed off a lot about this in great or small ways, and really, I fear people think I'm like this Joyce super-fan, when I'm just seeing in Jung the ignorant appraisal of my own surrealism, which I see as continuous with shamanism, which I'll do out in the forest after putting a padlock on the Church with all such Hawthornes inside it, and with no fear of God, only of dumbasses. You can't praise active imagination and synchronicity and then bash a book like Ulysses which has that going on to an insane degree. The living God is at work in Joyce's book and only an idiot misses that. "God is a shout in the street," not once quoted by Jung's review. Of course, Jung thinks God is a religion he is an archetypally reborn priest for, called depth psychology. A shout in the street is just not grandiose enough for him. I dunno-- I'm bitching about more than Jung when I go off on this. There's so much that irritates me about this that extends far beyond this subject.
So we have a mind and a dream-mind, a logic and a dream-logic, and every day, we are hit over the head with both of them. And a philosophical method that does not factor in this dream-mind-- and yes, he said begrudgingly, here Jung deserves credit-- is writing about the world from the perspective of the mind which is all practical, phenomenal business, talking about a representation in the language of the representation, and not the thing-in-itself. But how do we get will out of what remains when we talk about representation? Where the heck does willing come into it? Isn't willing itself only something that emerges from representations, within representations, and cannot be reasonably abstracted as the meaning of those representations especially given so many cases in which representations are not as they appear? That's like saying oh, we have a representation, so we have a will-to-representation. Nietzsche's naivete in a nutshell, nihilism annihilated, decadence devoured. How the fuck do you know that a representation can be justified so simply? Why is "contemplation" the negation of the will? It didn't seem so for Prince Hamlet, it completely manufactured his will, and the contemplation really sucked for him, or so it seemed, it wasn't ascetic transcendence. Machiavelli seems to have it a bit more right: the fox and the lion, the perception and the will, together, constitute representation, or communication. But here's the problem with the dialectical equivalence of that: willing is nothing if not a representation! If there is anything that is outside of will, force, choice, anything that is outside of representation-- I mean Schopenhauer's contradiction is summed up in the title: The World as Will and Representation. Okay, so for what does the World exist? The world has agency and visibility, got it. But that agency occurs within visibility, like the a priori sense for causality that Schopenhauer sees as the intelligence, or understanding, implicit in preverbal perception, which is what my earlier post, "The Reality of Intelligence," was about.
There's no way out of this logical trap, except perception, and I know because I stupidly deluded myself for a time I could get out of what I was calling "perceptionism." Any "thing" that is conceivable is conceived by that intellectual perception, which Schopenhauer is right to conclude exists before the mind starts conceptualizing, and right to contradict Kant on that score. That's probably the main thing he accomplishes, is not this horrible, crazy, atheistic mysticism of thinking about the World-Will but just squeezing the Descartes out of Kant. Will but comes through perception to be known, as a representation. Our disinterested contemplation-- which is not always so peaceful as I said-- is knowable as a representation but only knowable through another contemplation. You cannot have a will without an a priori perception of it. Furthermore, the sense for causality that Schopenhauer sees in the Kantian idea of "understanding" as the prime a priori of perception, and which leads him to call perception intellectual and leads me to say that intelligence is the amplitude of perception, is something that I believe can be explained with less obscure abstractions as Kant and Schopenhauer do, as the intelligence that is a factor of perception's temporality, which is achieved by way of the combination of imaginative memory and sensory being-in-the-present. In other words, I'm sort of flipping on myself in the previous post "The Reality of Intelligence," and saying that intelligence, an a priori sense for causality, is but memory. After all what could be a priori of all a priori concepts except that everyday a priori itself, the memory? The memory is the master-concept of all supposedly a priori concepts of intelligence, which induces a sense for space, time, and causality, as it would in any animal, who sees the continuity between frames of film, 2D images becoming a 3D world moving in time on a causal chain. Occam's Razor--it's memory.
And all of that is the product of the irritability of my mind, but not my dream-mind, which feels a bit worried, and excited, by these words passing through my mind. Because my dream-mind gazes at a different phenomenon while I gaze at these ideas-- the great fatigue of the pessimistic or traditionalist mentalities which philosophies make us slice through vigorously with our sword, which is not so in need or bloodthirsty for red paint. This is a dream-mind trying to shut the mind up, to return bourgeois mental slavery right to sender. But Ganondorf took the Triforce and I'm not sure what the fuck I have to do with Epona to learn the next tune for my Ocarina. Maybe I've broken sequence a bit. Better find a walkthrough.
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