To be honest, when I wrote "maybe this is the end," I was sitting in an uncomfortable place trying to do my thinking and writing, which I think influenced that gloomy ending; I've now changed locales and am ready to thwart even that conceptualization of negation. Onesidedness is a concept in Jung I really can't stand, because it enforces this idea of transcendence as neutrality, as sublime contradiction, and completely ignores what we have made a foundational principle of this blog, which is the equivalence of being and valuation. "The time of your life," "there is no comparison," these value-judgments of peak experience demonstrate how logic relates to emotion, how the detection of presence dissolves the barrier between quality and quantity, for absence can never show up to be counted.
What is now being demonstrated to my thinking is the componency relationship of part/whole, singularity/plurality, in the idea of connection, which itself as a concept is both unified and plural. And the road that led there involved a rather dispassionate discussion of causality, which was initiated because of an association between causality and authority that I made, and an attempt to comprehend causality as the nature of the subject/object split. Causality is a split concept, which constantly authors effectuality. Our dispassionate discussion led us into many pitfalls, and the main mistake we made was in considering perception (as the to-be-caused receptivity) as completely without discretion. This would seem to be a Jungian mistake. I've said this before, in a paper I wrote for school, but onesidedness is a synonym for discretion, and so Jung preaches against onesidedness when he's bashing artists (life/nature/Mercurius is beautiful/ugly, not aesthetic, runs his thinking) and revising Schiller's poetics, and then reviews Ulysses and bashes an artist on the grounds that Joyce lacks discretion. Jung may have an accidental point about Joyce's approach in Ulysses, but it is case of removing a speck out of your neighbor's eye when there is a log in your own, which could be said to be the history of psychoanalysis in a nutshell. I'm not surrounded by Ulysses fans so my words on this subject have not exactly landed well, so I'm tired with reciting the point that the book is far more beautiful than Jung's philosophies. But there, I've done it again. And for being far more beautiful it has discretion, and is onesided, and this onesidedness is indeed its universality.
This is the contradiction of Jungian thought: individuation has been magically blessed with the compensatory relation of universalization through defining the unconscious as collective, and yet onesidedness is a problem that must always be compensated. Onesidedness is however a very great and awesome word, much like connection, for its unity of unity and plurality. With onesidedness Jung wants to wage war with the very idea of valuation, which of course is contradictory to everything he and anybody else thinks and acts like, and to embrace Hegelian dialectic, though mysteriously, he insults Hegel in favor of Kant in another passage. But if we say of one-sidedness that it is the preferentiality that is on the side of unity, we have actually achieved what Jung wishes to achieve with individuation a little more expediently. What, after all, is the difference between individuation and one-sidedness?
We need to abandon Jung's paradigm of scales and balances, for a paradigm of the part is the whole, or rather, a certain point of the part is the whole, which we attempt to select through valuation, which affirms the gestalt of being. We pull the thing by the root, the part which is central. So in any plurality, there is a centrality, through which plurality becomes unity, and this is where valuation is magnetized, to whatever degree of quality and accuracy. What I mean is this: every moment of perception involves the receptivity to an incomprehensible plurality of forces, which act upon us as a being-subject. However within that plurality which we saw converging upon the unity, there is a centrality, which the unity of connection detects as its covalence. So within perception, agency is already present, by way of the choice we make amidst the plurality, which assesses the whole plurality. So it is not just a matter of I like this better than the other options, which enforces a compensatory-style affirmation/negation type of balancing act, and a rather Darwinian picture, what we select in the onesidedness is actually the allsidedness. This may also be the simplicity of the perception, that it is centralized by this valuation, by this preferentiality for that center, defined here as what abstracts all the particulars interceding unto itself.
Now, obviously, such a selection may not necessarily be accurate, or could be accurate but not optimally accurate, center-detection would be a matter of psychological intelligence, and when we are not accurate, we might be said to be "onesided" in the way Jung inveighs against. But Jung works with his myths, including the myth of psychoanalysis authored by Freud, and refuses making recourse to a truly philosophical method, in which such things would become far clearer. Rather, he creates a minefield of superstition and fixed ideas that make it very hard to question the principles, so deeply rooted are they in prior philosophies, religions, and psychoanalysis in a manner that conceals their philosophical amateurishness, the way in which thinking about the world as we find it is kicked to the side in the interest of negotiating a peace with culture, and all culture. This lacks discrimination, and as a result we find ideas of great utility, or ideas that have a partial utility if they are re-thought, in Jung, because without making recourse to the kind of philosophizing even Freud was wont to do, and basing everything on scholarship of religion and myth-- and not even scholarship on artistic masterpieces-- it is as if his entire science were as much an "active imagination" as the Red Book, without claiming to be such. The Red Book was active imagination, and this is science. And hence, perhaps, I ended up arguing for "Science-based creation," rather than "Art-based research." Because "art-based research," without being actually useless or completely dangerous, will only get you so far.
I reflect on my life and my work and I see that I've had many things which in hindsight are "art-based research," but in a way that doesn't necessarily flatter that work. What it shows is that I created something that thought through something unconsciously, without understanding what I was saying. Understanding what I was saying actually renders the work somewhat null and void. I have felt this with my poetry; I write free-associatively and when I edit things, I sometimes catch what I'm saying, and understand it too much, and don't care for it. It loses its aesthetic in the process, like a dream we wake up from, and wake up from a second time when it loses all of its mystery in the banal transparency of what it is saying. It becomes a sign and not a symbol. I don't think this is ultimately the most interesting kind of dream, but a smaller dream that gives a pretty clear judgment we've just not yet realized in mental cognition. We realize it, and it's like, oh, that's what the dream meant. "Science-based creation," perhaps, would involve attempting to say things which cannot be said any other way, which involved the dream-logic of everyday life, and not the logic of everyday life in its precursor form of a repressed or nascent intuition. Today I've looked back upon a dream, from a few weeks ago, which I felt authored a certain situation I found myself in, and what's mysterious is more the relationship between the dream and the real world, than the dream itself. By contrast, I've had dreams that I've thought about for twenty plus years, which never seem to run out of resonances and associations, and I believe they say something that could not be said elsewhere than a dream. And maybe this is the purpose of philosophy, which is to discriminate between the banal logic and the mysterious logic of our lives. Art-based research bothers me, because it is like "active imagination," it is the enslavement of the artistic drive to the pretensions of psychoanalysis. Maybe the key term is "research," the implication that the main purpose of the art is knowledge, and so my reversal, quite subversive with respect to my graduate program, puts the emphasis back on "creating," and roots that in the receptivity of science. Which grants autonomy which arts-based research takes away, because it is creation in the interest of reception, agency in the interest of slavery. Whereas, "science-based creation," is really the definition of an artist as an aesthetic scientist, who does their homework before they create what they create.
And this homework involves the simplification which is the selection of one thing amidst a manifold which expresses the manifold, within many tiers of conceptuality and memory. So, when we play favorites, we pick one thing among others, but we do not merely condemn the others when we select the one. The same conceptual abstraction process is involved in it as is involved in the creation of any conceptual knowledge: "tree" for all trees, "word" for all words. Representation is what we get in perception, and within that pluralistic representation, there is a center, with respect to a periphery, a representation of representation. And this is so when we look at the world, and when we look at our memories. The simplification of intellectual perception, the becoming-transparent, the reduction of complex disorganization of psychic contents, it is all about this process of valuation, of picking a side, for in any playing of favorites, there is the will to find a representative sample for the category.
I am struggling with a geometric visualization of this because it is a bit fractal-like, a continuous componency, in which a pluralistic set always includes within itself one unit which is the whole unity of the plurality. One way of looking at this is simply the center of a circle as a circle. The plurality of forces are all acting upon us when we consider a domain, and yet they all enter through the center. So what we value amongst alternatives is always what coheres, what brings-together, what we value within those alternatives. And this is a nuance that has escaped me until now, and so I'm saying the same thing over and over, while my mind travels to examples of this.
The importance of such a process of valuation/knowledge known as "judgment," is that when we consider our attraction to some general category, we lack a central place to focus that attraction. So, for example, when I say I love films, or when I say I love music, and I love them both enough to suffer for wanting to create them myself, it is difficult to deal with binary influences, with syntheses. We are most enthralled by that love of any category, when there is a specific example in mind, which assesses the category. The same would be true, c'est la vie, of love in general, a fragmented love is an unhappy love. I love this about this person, and that about that person, so I love this and that-- this is a weak experience of love. Love thrives on the establishment of a representative supremacy, which organizes the entire structure of loves. To love one thing in the world more than any other thing in the world, this is what is missing when we are synthesizing loves to find out what we love, when we are in whatever dimension "polyamorous." Polyamory is not love, it is the fragmentation of love which results of a fragmented and disorganized value system. But the singular kind of love is also a plurality, it is a representative thing, which brings a polyamory under the organization of a monogamy. Without this, in some form or another, everything is disordered, and it's "a little of column A, a little of column B." But this negotiation between column A and column B is a process which leads to that row AB, which was the same as column A. Column A and Column B are, in the last analysis, the fight between particular/universal and particular, between centrality and periphery. Hence in picking Column A we pick Column B also, much like the way we can turn a lever more easily that is hooked to the center than we can the outside of the wheel, much like we can tip the scales easier by moving the fulcrum than we can by putting weight on one side. For the scales eventually become the choice between the scales and the fulcrum, the balanced and the balancer, and when we select the balancer the scales fall from our eyes. Judgment.
I do wonder now, if this is the end-- the end at least of my philosophizing on this subject using generalities. I wonder if I must now embrace the difficulty, rooted in no social pressure only intellectual inclination, to speak more specifically about my own life. I wonder if I have to share my judgments, my onesided-ness, which I withhold because they look ugly to me; perhaps they are ugly, because patterned after confessional methodologies I have seen, influenced by social pressure. Perhaps, then, we have done with ontology and must move on to aesthetics, which, as earlier posts explained, is the only way to categorize things, since the whole is greater than the sum of its logical parts, The metalogical nature of an object engenders a certain aesthetic, which is testified to by the feeling of this blog, the sorts of patterns one may see in the rows of words and in the design of the page, and the way the design/title of the blog also evolved in due course from the introduction, the determination of the thoughts it would contain. I believe we have built up certain tools, certain mental structures, which will serve us very well going forward, but now we must deal with aesthetics, as it is upon aesthetics where the valuation is centralized, and where all the logical judgments merge in the definition of an object. Aesthetic selection is the selection of a representation of the plurality, it assesses all things in one things, and therefore is dependent, or influenced by the whole of nature, space, the quality/quantity of our lives. But to say so is to be non-discriminatory in a way we cannot be. Aesthetics is our heart's detection of the heart of things, and nature is plural, multifarious, as is culture. In gripping things by the lever that moves the whole we see the connection that is made between perception and agency, the world and the self, the self and the other. We see how our love stories with anything are also our logical abstraction of our valuation of many things individually.
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