https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=kkykBqApP4A
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. So last time we followed Heidegger into the depths where we encountered Eckhart and this non-teleological relationship to the play of being and that led us very directly into Corbin and Corbin’s core argument that Gnosis as we’ve been using it relates centrally, the ability to engage in this serious play to the imagination but Corbin is making use of this term in a new way. He makes the distinction between the imaginary which is how we typically use the word the imagination and mental images in my head that are only subjective and have no objective reality and the imaginal which mediates between the abstract intelligible world and the concrete sensible world and transjectively mediates between the subjective and the objective and that is not done statically. All of this mediation and mutual affordance is done in an ongoing transformative, trans-framing and that the symbol captures all of this and then I wanted to bring out Corbin’s core symbol and it’s a core symbol that relates directly to Gnosis because in Gnosis in this transformative participatory knowing and this goes up to the core of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, the being whose being is in question, we have to see self-knowledge and knowledge of the world as inextricably bound up together. In order to do that we are pursuing Corbin’s central symbol, the angel, which of course is immediately off putting to many people including myself but I’ve been trying to get a way of articulating how Corbin is incorporating both Heidegger and Persian Sufism, Neoplatonic Sufism into this understanding of the symbol and I recommended that we take a look at the work of first of all of Steng, the historical work showing how throughout the ancient Mediterranean world and up and through the Hellenistic period and beyond up until the easily pseudo-Dionysus around the 5th century of the Common Era, there’s the pursuit of the divine double and then the idea is one that is deeply transgressive of our cultural cognitive grammar of decadent romanticism where we are born with our true self that nearly needs to express itself a la Rousseau and that the core virtue is authenticity which is being right true to the true self that you have, you possess rather than for example a Socratic model in which the true self is something towards which you are constantly aspiring and then I recommended trying to make this so and what’s the transgressive mythology? Sorry, the transgressive mythology is that the self that I have now is not my true self. My true self is my divine double. This is something that is superlative to me. It is bound to me. It is my double. It is bound to me but it is superlative to me. It is both me and not me. It’s me as I’m meant to be, as I should be and that the project, the existential project is not one of expressing a self that you have but of transcending to become a self that is ecstatically ahead of you in an important way and then I pointed out that for many of you this would still be sort of like okay but I get the transgression but I still find this notion of a divine double unpalatable. Maybe for some of you you don’t but nevertheless I think there is an important way by picking up on like by asking the question why did so many people for so long believe in this so deeply. Picking up on the question of what’s going on there and focusing on this aspirational process and this takes us back into work that was core to the discussion I made about Gnosis and has had a resounding impact at various places throughout this series which is L.A. Paul’s work on transformative experience and then somebody who’s from the same school influenced by Paul having a different view whereas Paul is more her transformations are more like insight. Agnes Callard’s notion of aspiration is much more developmental but I argue that they can be I think readily reconciled together if you see development as a linked sequence of insights that bring about qualitative change in your competence. So we were zeroing in on this right I’m using L.A. Paul and Agnes Callard to triangulate in to this relationship of aspiration and picking up first of all on Callard’s important point that is not addressed and this is an important point by L.A. Paul the the deep connections between aspiration and rationality. That rationality is itself a rash is an aspirational process and if we make the process by which we become rational itself not a rational or irrational process we will get into serious a position that is seriously self- undermining similarly if the way in which you become wise does not involve sort of wise acts and behavior if the process itself is not itself wise you’re going to get into all kinds of difficulties if it’s not in some sense a rational process again I last time I reminded you how broadly but I think also deeply I’m using the term rational or being educated I mean we make ourselves better maybe even more rational or wiser by going through an education but education at least a liberal education is a deeply aspirational process if that itself is not part of what makes us rational is that if it’s not itself a rational process then of course our rationality is again being undermined in and right self-contradictory fashion so the basics of this argument is if we take if we do not understand a kind of rationality callard calls proleptic rationality that’s the rationality of aspiration the rationality that allows you right that is the rationality that emerges in education that emerges in the cultivation of rationality that emerges in the cultivation of wisdom then a lot of human behavior is right in prop is not going to be called rational and it’s going then that is going to render our notion of rationality as I’ve said self-contradictory and self-undermining in some very fundamental ways and so again we see the rejoining of right love and reason that was originally talked about so deeply in Plato so now we’ve come back to this problem I gave you the example of somebody in a liberal education and this is a colors example right here’s the self at this time and this self at this time and something I brought out that color doesn’t but important because it’s a it’s a it’s a concise way of talking about the relationship between them and that there isn’t a direct inferential relationship between these which is non logical identity right this is part and parcel like think about what I would said earlier how to be broaden the notion of rationality outside of logic if color does right and we have to include rationality proleptic rationality in our model of rationality and involves this non logical identity then of course we’re stepping beyond sort of a purely logical understanding of rationality yet again for yet another reason okay so what’s the problem here though well the problem is the problem of non logical identity so I don’t appreciate always remember both meanings of that term too deeply and they’re interwoven the two sides of aspiration I deeply understand it and I deep I’m deeply grateful for it I value it right I don’t appreciate classical music I don’t have the taste for it I don’t get it and I want to be somebody who appreciates class classical music now if I want if I do that because I want to satisfy a current desire I have a current value I have like I value impressing my friends or I value attracting members of the opposite sex or something like that then of course I’m not actually aspiring because this person doesn’t appreciate classical music because it impresses their friends or because it helps them in their dating life or for whatever other reason they appreciate it for a a perspectival and participatory knowing that s1 doesn’t have that’s the point the appreciation that s2 has is bound to perspectival and participatory knowing of which s1 is ignorant and that of course is one of the central points who you remember of LA polls argument about transformative experience so that looks like there’s something right there’s a fundamental discontinuity here okay now to bring out the problem that we need to to sort of resolve and bring back and tie this back to the notion of the divine double I want to talk about a way in which callard shows us how this is problematic as we try to talk about it and she makes use of the work of strawson get on strawson and he talks about a paradox of of self-creation right now strawson points out that for self-creation and doesn’t this look like self-creation here’s a self creating itself right right for self-creation to be true to be truly an instance of self and creation sort of emphasizing both sides of that double firm two things are needed one requirement right is a continuity requirement there has to be something deeply continuous between s1 and s2 because right if they are not the same self then it’s not an act of self-creation right they’re not the same self it’s not an act of self-creation so that’s the continuity requirement and so I’m going to represent it like this right s1 equals s2 so what this means is if like if s1 is hit by a motorcycle and their brain is damaged and right and they act and behave in a different way that’s not an act of self-creation that is not an act of self-creation s1 has to be totally responsible for s2 or else it’s not an act of self-creation putting an emphasis on the self okay but now let’s shift to the creation side right which is that there has to be real novelty between them or else there’s no creation involved if s1 just develops a skill or ability they already have that is not real novelty that is just more of the same that’s quantitative development not qualitative development so right if all that happens is s1 you know improves a skill you know deepens their capacity to acquire something that they already value etc that right is not real novelty so real novelty means there has to be a fundamental difference between s1 and s2 now what strawson does with this right is he points out notice how right in s1 and s2 for the continuity requirement have to be equal but the real novelty means there has to be a real deep difference between s1 and s2 right or it’s not creation and the so what he argues is he argues that self-creation is paradoxical in fact the point he’s trying to make is it’s self-contradictory there can be no such thing as self-creation right so another way of thinking about this is if you remember when we talked about this in connection with transformative experience we can invoke Fodor’s notion of the idea that you can’t you can’t sort of create a stronger logic by logically manipulating a weaker logic no matter how much I manipulate the machinery of predicate logic I won’t get modal logic because what I have to do right is I have to introduce axioms that are outside for good DeLian reasons ultimately are outside the system of predicate logic so putting it this way right in order to get the real novelty between s1 and s2 I have to introduce something that’s outside the logic of s1 the logic of its values and beliefs right that will then make it into s2 but if it comes from outside of s1 it is foreign and strange and right and therefore it right is not an act of self-creation what that shows voters idea about you can’t infer a stronger logic from a weaker logic and that goes back to a point we’ve made before there is no inferential way there’s no way you can sort of infer yourself from s1 to s2 and this of course is part of Kierkegaard’s whole point about the leap and the leap of faith the leap of faith is to leap into a process of development that is going to put you through this kind of qualitative change in your identity but Strassen makes this very problematic by saying right this makes absolutely no sense right and so we’re caught between two things either we’re caught we can break this by saying right there is ultimately no self we could go rabidly empiricist I’m just a blank slate and all that happens is stuff from the outside changes me and then I go for the novelty but there’s no underlying self or I can just do the continuity requirement I can become sort of a Rousseau and romantic and myself is myself is identical throughout right and all I’m doing is expressing what was already within myself that’s all that’s happening you see empiricism and romanticism choose one of the two over the other and when Strossen says is you have to make such a choice because self-creation is itself self-contradictory Callard says this is all a mistake and I agree with her she argues that this is both the empiricism and the romanticism at least the Rousseauian decadent romanticism right is not right is not adequate or accurate of our experiment of developmental change what breaks this I argue helping her I believe is that the relationship between s1 and s2 is one of non logical identity something of course we practice the narrative practice hypothesis by engaging in narrative all the time and making ourselves into temporally extended selves that have a non logical identity through time and through development so I think both the in their romantic expressionism and the empiric empiric the empiricist you know writing upon the blank slate do not capture what’s happening between s1 and 2 it’s not that s1 is just changed randomly into s2 from the outside neither is it the case that s1 simply makes s2 the first self does not make it right it’s not it’s neither pure passivity nor pure activity this of course is why I have continually emphasized the notion of participation we’ll see how barfield is trying also to step above both you know making and active completely active making and completely passive reception in his notion of participation a better way of describing the relationship is s1 does not receive nor make s2 but participates in s is to emergence s2 emerges out of s1 to the point that s1 disappears into s2 it’s an emergence we participate in an emergence so aspiration is colored its name for that process by which s1 participates in the emergence of s2 out of s1 such that s1 has disappeared into s2 self one has disappeared into has become s2 so colored now reformulates the problem that remains once we acknowledge this there is a problem that remains because it again thwarts our usual cognitive cultural grammar what’s the problem that remains well here’s the problem s1 in some important sense causes s2 my actions now are necessary and perhaps in some important sense sufficient for setting forth a course of development that is going to result in s2 right but although s1 is therefore temporally prior it’s before s2 right in the in the arrow of causation the opposite is the case normatively s1 normatively depends on s2 all of s1 actions only make sense can only be justified once s2 comes into existence because only s2 appreciates the music only s2 is rational only s2 under can understand and justifies the value of rationality the value of the classical music so although s1 causes s2 is and temporally prior s1 is normatively dependent on s2 in terms of normativity s1 is right is not primary it’s secondary to s2 the first self right all everything that the first self is doing ultimately only makes sense when the second self has come into existence it’s only after the aspirational transformation that s1 behavior is made can be made sense of can be justified can be understood it’s interesting because the state that justifies s1 action is the state of s1 having disappeared into and through the emergence of s2 because only s2 understands and appreciates rationality understands and appreciates classical music understands and appreciates what it is to be a parent understands and appreciates what it is to be a spouse so this this goes against our normal way of doing things right because we’ve got this is temporally prior but this is normatively primary okay so this is the s1 is temporally prior but s2 is normatively primary and that it’s where we find the justification explanation right legitimation of the aspirational process that the person that has become in s2 and that’s weird for us because normally the thing that is temporally prior and causes is also the thing that is the source of justification and explanation now the temptation here of course is to be teleological to think that in some sense s2 pre-exists us and causes s1 and I think that’s partially what’s coming out in the mythos of the divine double trying to deal with this really difficult way of thinking an easy way of thinking about it is well the divine double pre-exists it’s already there fully formed and they’re drawing me out teleological until I eventually become s1 right but we’ve already I’ve already argued last time in the time before and earlier on in the series is that that the teleological explanations are often thwarting us in important ways and they were certainly thwarting what Heidegger was talking about so let’s try and do this a little bit more slowly I want I want to say s1 has the causal power but s2 has the normative authority so s1 has the causal power but s2 has the normal authority so how do we relate to the self to which we was a spot so when I am s1 and I’m aspiring to being more like Socrates more rational how do I now relate to this s2 that doesn’t yet exist but has authority over me how do I how do I do that well I sort of slipped it in there right I sort of slipped it in there when I talked about right aspiring to be like Socrates so let’s take this take it step by step I need I’m relating to this the aspired for self the self that I aspire to there’s a non logical identity between myself now and that self then that self that I’m aspiring to is not logically accessible to me and those two reasons are deeply those two points are deeply connected I can’t infer my way to it right and my representation of that future self my current representation to me now has to afford me somehow tapping into this non logical identity this non logical process and that representation has to actually afford the transformation of me into the aspired to self it has to actually help me become a more rational person now notice of course what this means what kind of thing does this for me and this is Corbin’s point it’s a symbol not in the imaginary sense but in the imaginal sense it’s only a symbol that right puts these two together in the right way it’s a kind of relationship that right between things that are non logically identical it is not something that is processed in a purely logical fashion it is a representation that is participatory and it’s supposed to help to actually afford you going through the transformative process now let’s add a little bit more my representation of the aspired to self is it’s a symbolic self it’s a symbolic self that I can internalize into my current self and agogically right this is member we talked about this we become we transcend ourselves by internalizing how other people’s perspectives are being directed on us right so member Spencer internalizes my perspective so that he becomes metacognitive the stoic aspirant internalizes Socrates so that he can self transcend and become more Socratic right so the symbolic self has to be internalized and notice what’s happening in internalization right internalization is something other than you yet it becomes something that is completely identified as you not just as an idea right it becomes part of your metacognitive reflective rationality in the case of internalizing Socrates it becomes part of the very guts of the machinery of yourself why an agogically because what I’m doing right is I’m internalizing this symbol this symbolic self and what it’s doing is it’s reordering my psyche so that I see different ways of being in the world and as I inhabit those new ways of being in the world they allow me to then re-internalize remember this I internalize Socrates and right right and then I indwell the world in a more Socratic fashion which allows me to better internalize Socrates so that I indwell the world in a more Socratic fashion or perhaps for the Christian right right they Christ comes to live within them until they live more Christ-like so that Christ comes to live within them more they write so there’s more internalization more indwelling and that anagogic and that anagogic process takes off of its own accord but it’s not something that is you’re just pass that’s just passively happening to you that coupled loop it’s not something you’re just making happening it’s something that transcends receiving and making it is participating so what we’re doing is that you have this symbolic self that internalizes other people’s perspectives others who live away they make viable to you this the self you aspire to but as you internalize them and that self is transformed the world is anagogically transformed also the world is playing an important role in this so what I’m suggesting to you is the divine double is a mythos way of trying to capture this dynamic process which we’ve discussed at length in this series and what it does is it represents this process in kind of a linear narrative and therefore it simplifies it into a simple kind of teleology but there’s a sense in which I think that teleology is overly simplistic it’s not capturing the participatory nature the danger with the teleology of course is it tends to overemphasize the passive receptivity on the part of s1 in the face of s2 so the divine double I think what people were trying to say with the mythos of the divine double it’s an imaginal symbol that affords the dynamic coupling of anagogy that allows you to participate in the act of self-creation the act or a better way of putting it the act of aspiration the divine double is you but it’s not you it’s it’s the advanced others that you’ve internalized into you but it eventually become you and so you live differently in that work in a new world a way of being becomes viable to you right it is the self you will be not the self you are now but if there is no inkling in your current self of if there’s no inkling of an identity possible and already beginning to be actualized between your current self and if you’re to self right then of course it’s not going to be part of that aspirational process here’s you right you’re in this frame right you’re trying to move to this one I’m going to separate them just so I have room to write normally this one is round and encompassing so please allow me this just so I have room to write right the divine double right allows you to internalize from this more encompassing frame into your current frame but that is simultaneously and here’s the shining in here’s the shining in through the divine double angels are glorious they shine here’s the shining through right into your frame but that’s shining that internalization affords you moving towards indwelling that more expanded world it engenders a trans framing so that you can come to indwell this more expanded the agent and the arena are simultaneously transformed here’s right so the divine double shines the greater frame into the current frame but it also right draws you out by the way it would withdraws into the more encompassing frame it gives you a sense right of right the closing into your relevance but the opening into the greater self see the gnosis the divine double allows you to conform conform in process to the very play of being itself the way being is shining but also withdrawing and how that affords your radical self-transcendence which is always a process also of becoming a greater or better self so what I’m suggesting to you right is that the divine double is a central example of the imaginal and that that is often represented in the mythos of angels so we see how the divine double is transjective how it’s trans framing how it’s integrating the abstract form or a concept of the better self I have some act track sense of the better self but it’s it’s integrating that with my concrete the concrete actions of causal actions of my current self there being the abstract and the concrete are being drawn together is the divine double subjective no that’s not right is it part of just about the objective part of my world no that’s not right either it’s it’s deeply symbolic in nature and in action and although it is a symbol it is not just imaginary it is imaginal in nature it it makes it affords right the true development it affords the core of the being mode the being mode is not about having things it is about becoming someone there’s a deep interconnection between the imaginal the divine double gnosis and the being mode so the angel in Corbin is a representation of the divine double the thing to note is that for Corbin every everything has an angel right because it’s not only the agent that is being transformed it is also the arena your world is also being opened up and aspects of being are disclosing themselves that otherwise would not disclose themselves every object is shining and is also withdrawing into its mystery everything is a thing beyond itself and so you are a thing beyond yourself as an agent coupled to sets of things beyond themselves as an arena and you are both going through this coupled process that’s what Corbin means by the angelic aspect of the angelic order of being now given the way I’ve tried to interpret and I think explain but not I hope dismissively explain away Corbin I would want to make I want to note as I said there’s deep connections between Gnosis and this divine double between the being mode between self-transcendence between all of this I’m a little bit unhappy with staying term though the divine double because it seems to bind us a little too much to the mythos and the the teleological simple narrative struck narrative structure that I think doesn’t adequately capture everything that we can see in this in the work of LA Paul and callard and the response to straw since problem right and also the notion of divine seems to bind this to theism which is problematic given its deep connections to Gnosis and the Gnostics and also it precludes non theistic cultures or sets of religions from having something like this whereas I think you can readily see the divine double in Buddhism where it’s talked about the Buddha nature and the Buddha nature is very much the aspired self but things have a Buddha nature the Buddha nature is both the their ultimate real nature but not their conventional nature or you can see the same thing in Vedanta when there is a deep identity perhaps between the Aakman and Brahman what I’m pointing out is that this way of talking about aspiration can be seen clearly in non theistic religions it’s clearly in Gnosticism which I think is very much should not be interpreted theistically I’ve tried to show you that it’s clearly the case in Neoplatonism staying makes this case for it both in platinus and aspects that at least the neoplatonic aspects of Dionysus and so and that’s clearly not theistic so I’m not going to use the divine the term divine double anymore because I want to try and separate this idea from its commitment to theism and so I’m going to call this symbolic self I’m going to call it the sacred second self the sacred second self it gives me even more alliteration than the divine double so I win right so so the idea of the sacred second self perhaps perhaps this is a way wow I don’t know I don’t know what how what I’m going to do right now but I’m going to do it because I have an inkling of its value perhaps the notion of the sacred second self is a way of bringing back the idea of having a soul in fact that’s even the wrong way of putting it perhaps that’s part of what I’m trying to transgress against your sacred second self is the soul that you are becoming the soul that you are aspiring through and to and perhaps that is a way of bringing it back the reason I raised this is because that will allow us to make a bridge to another one of the prophets Carl Gustav Jung because this notion of a relationship to a sacred second self that is perhaps what we were always talking about when we invoke the word soul is central to young’s work one of young’s crucial text for representing the meaning crisis and linking it to his particular psychology is the book modern man in search of a soul so the response to the meaning crisis is that modern man has lost his soul now that doesn’t mean that a ghost has slipped free of a person’s corpus and is somehow floating around untethered young is trying to talk about the I’m going to argue the loss of a real relationship to the sacred second self that is needed for responding to the meaning crisis and there are deep connections therefore between Jung and Corbin and this is not just similarity of argumentation Jung and Corbin had deep had a deep interaction a deep influence on each other they met regular together at the Uranus conferences and discussed as I mentioned I find that Corbin is more responsible to that relationship than young Corbin talks more often about it explicitly whereas I do not see young given enough credit to the influence of Corbin on his thinking nevertheless we can move between Corbin and Jung by picking up on this idea of your relationship to your sacred second self and I think this is the best way to understanding the process that is central to Jung’s whole notion of it’s both a notion of development and a notion of self-transformation and a notion of how to fundamentally respond to the meaning crisis this is Jung’s notion of course of individuation so how do we get to this notion well we’re going to get to this notice each thinker gets into it in a different way and what Jung is doing and he’s he’s picking up on something that is not it’s not really present in Heidegger it’s present in Corbin but it’s present more implicitly than explicitly and this is psychology right the the the processes within that psyche that are conducive to responding to the meaning crisis and by individuation Jung and he clearly uses this adjective to describe it describes this as a psychological process now the way to get a little bit clearer about how Jung is using the notion of psychological is right to contrast him to the most important influence on him his progenitor Freud and I’m not going to get into a deep analysis of Freud right that’s that would be too far afield Freud is a Titan even if ninety-five percent of what Freud has said is wrong it doesn’t matter he gets to be in the hall of the immortals because he came up with the idea of the unconscious he comes up with the idea of that it’s neither nature nor nurture but the interaction between them in stages of development these are all just they become so deeply interwoven with our fundamental way of trying to understand and theorize about ourselves like I said so Freud is a titanic figure however let’s pick up on the difference in what fundamental way did Jung’s model of the psyche different from different from Freud’s so here I’m picking up on work done by Paul recur in his book on Freud and some work done by store Anthony store in his work on Jung in an important contrast so Freud ultimately has what has been called a hydraulic model of the psyche it’s it so the psyche is basically a Newtonian machine like a steam engine things are under pressure and the pressure has to be relieved and it drives and sort of pushes various processes into operation so Freud and of course this makes perfect sense Freud has a Newtonian machine hydraulic model of the psyche young ultimately rejects that and this is more in store than in record because records primarily concentrating on Freud but what store argues is that and this becomes clear in the language in the metaphors that young use young replaces that hydraulic metaphor with an organic metaphor he sees the psyche as a self-organizing dynamical system ultimately as an autopoetic being so he sees the psyche as going through sort of a complex process of self-organization and that you have to understand individuation as this kind of organic self-organizing organic self-organizing process that you neither make nor receive but you participate in okay so this takes us to one of the quintessential notions from young young gives a psychological analog of Plato’s idea of the form a structural functional organization this is the archetypes the archetypos these right people people should go back arcade foundational like in archaeology getting to the origins and the foundations tip-offs the patterns so the archetypes are the are the formative founding patterns of the psyche these are the ways in which these are the structural functional organizations by which the selfie by which the psyche self organizes the archetypes are therefore very much psychological of the platonic forms and young is much better at acknowledging Plato’s influence than Freud is for example so the archetypes are not images right the archetypes are not images right you have to take the images and treat them in an imaginal fashion not as imaginary things you possess in your mind but as imaginal things that are leading you into into the aspirational process of individuation think of the archetypes more the way we talked about earlier there there they are systems of constraints they are virtual engines that regulate the self organization of what is salient to us so if the hero archetype is active in me it’s not it doesn’t mean that I have I’m carrying around in my head images of the hero it means that right this is an imaginal relationship in which I’m an agog my salience landscaping is being transformed so I’m an agog acly interacting with the world and undergoing aspirational self transformation so that I am becoming more and heroic think of the archetypes much more adverbally than you then adjectively an archetype is a way in which you are an agog acly coming to be not something in you right that you possess and reflect upon so Young argues that all of these like the psyche as a whole these archetypes insofar as they are virtual engines of self organizing processes are autopoetic they have a life to them a life to them these archetypes are the way I hear this word deeply way is method and path of development the archetypes are the way that psyche makes itself as a living organism that’s why I mean think of archetypes in a deeply adverbial fashion rather than archetypal I’m sorry adjectival so that was a mistake so where where’s the sacred second self well let’s talk about the ego and what young called the self and he’s influenced right by Vedanta this is the egoic self and this is Atman right and the and the notion of the self with the see that was such a bad choice in some ways because unless you’ve done all the stuff we’ve just done and talked about the relation between like as self one and self two and all right you don’t and you unless you’ve got the aspirational sense of what itself is if you if you come to young with just decadent romanticism you’re going to hear ah but this this is my this is my inner true self that I have to be true to you’re going to relate to this the self adjectively from the having mode very great temptation to get into right narcissism right I understand why you know did this because he capitalizes the s because he’s trying to point towards I would argue the sacred second self right so the ego is the archetype of the conscious mind the ego is the virtual engine that regulates the self organization of the conscious mind what’s the self well it’s kind of the archetype of the archetypes it’s like Plato’s notion of the good which is the form for how to be a form the idos of the idos it is the virtual engine regulating the self organization of the psyche as a whole it is the principle the self is the principle of autopoiesis itself it’s the ultimate virtual engine that constellates all the other virtual engines so that the psyche can continue its process of autopoetic self organization remember when a system is self organizing its function and its development are completely merged it develops by functions and it functions by developing so this functional model is simultaneously a developmental model that’s what makes it aspirational it is simultaneously functional and developmental right so one of the things you can do is you can set up an interaction with these imaginal symbolic entities the archetypes and that interaction can be internalized into the perspective so I can interact with the hero archetype or the shadow archetype and that will actually be internalized into the way the ego self organizes ultimately that can be we can become part of this the dialogue between the ego and the self what Jung calls the axis Mundi the axis of the world very maybe overwrought way of putting it but in some ways I understand what he’s trying to get at this is the process right as I in dialogue through the archetypes with the self the ego’s perspectival knowing and its participatory being is being fundamentally altered this is the individuation of the ego the ego individuates through its dialogue notice that anagogic resonant way of talking its dialogue with the sacred second self I notice ultimately how that falls back to Plato and Socrates this notion of dialogue this of course is the basis of Jung and notice the similarity here again of Jung’s deep right deep criticism of literalism and fundamentalism because of course the imaginal right the archetype as imaginal sits right here it mediates between these right why is Jung so critical of literalism and fundamentalism because it is to reduce the imaginal nature of the archetypes into him simply being imaginary it is to lose the being mode and this is the simply having of subjective representations rather than engaging in the process of individuation right it’s a form of inflation in which the ego pretends that it is sufficient unto itself and tries to take on the right the role of the complete of the self tries to just have an identity rather than continually becoming in the process of individuation it is deeply disturbing to see someone who is would claim to be committed to a Jungian approach being deeply enmeshed or involved with proponents of literalism or fundamentalism this would be a believe a deep form of self-contradiction what’s my main criticism of Jung which will then allow me a counter criticism to Corbin both and this is a these this is a criticism that Corbin makes of young but it’s also independently a criticism that Boeber the existentialist the person who talked about I it and I thou and picked up on the difference between the being mode and the having mode as well right this is also converges with the criticism that Boeber made of young young young understands all of this and that’s how I’ve explained it to you as intra psychically happening within the psyche now my friend and colleague Anderson Todd tells me that towards the end young seems to be breaking out of this purely psychological way of talking right but for most of his writing young understands all of this and this is of course this is problematic right and this is what Corbin was trying to get him to see he was understanding all of this as subjectively his Kantianism was making him see this is all happening in a very deep sense within the mind the archetypes are understood ultimately for a very long time in young as subjectively rather than transjectively and because of this and then this is where Boeber’s criticism bites into young young misses all of the existential modes that Boeber wants to talk about young can’t talk about you know the having and the being modes because he doesn’t have a way of representing the transjective relationship for Corbin young seems to be reducing the imaginal to the imaginary and for Corbin this is a mistake because the mystical for Corbin doesn’t just disclose the depths of the psyche the mystical also discloses the depths of the world in an integrated coordinated fashion that’s because Corbin is ultimately neoplatonic and not Kantian this is why I said if you don’t understand Kant you don’t get young now in fairness to young young can say but what’s missing from Corbin is a psychology what’s missing from Heinegger is a psychology how does all of this existential ontological neoplatonic stuff play out within the psyche if you’re going to talk to me about internalizing I get it I’m answering on behalf of young young can say I get it I leave off the indwelling in the world that Corbin right is pointing to and Heidegger has been pointing to but what young can say is yeah but you haven’t told me what the internalization looks like how does the imaginal get internalized into the depths of my psyche so what I’m suggesting to you this is neither Corbin nor Buber nor is it right young but Vervecky is arguing to you that you can integrate the three of them together and then you get something much better than either young or Corbin or Buber I want to take a look next time at somebody who shares a lot with all three of these Corbin young and Buber and like them is deeply influenced by Heidegger and that’s Paul Tillich thank you very much for your time and attention