https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DKJb8PUfcr8
We’re going to collapse lecture eight and nine together since there’s no class on the 27th. The essay is now due on the third of April, the next essay. I suppose for the next essays, although once again you’re obliged to pick your own topic, some reliance on the secondary readings would probably be useful. Because one of the things that concerns me is that people aren’t going to do the secondary readings since we don’t talk much about them in class and since I don’t make a point of pestering you with exams or such regarding the secondary readings. They are important. I want to ask you, did I go over in this class the purpose of each of the readings? No. Okay. I did that in my other class. I’ll do that now. I want to tell you why I wanted you to read what I outlined. Well, the purpose of the neuropsychological papers, does everybody have their syllabus? Okay, good. The purpose of the neuropsychological papers is pretty much obvious. I mean I wanted to give you some additional material bearing on neuropsychology to sort of flesh out the initial discussion. Okay. Newman’s book, The Origins and History of Consciousness, provides the best overview that I know of hero mythology, the most accurate overview. It’s a book that’s much like Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, except I think it’s, see the problem with Joseph Campbell is that he’s too optimistic. For Campbell, the hero’s journey is something that’s always positive and I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s more, well I mean the standard hero myth in western culture is Christ’s passion that involves exposure to a hostile group, torture and then death. So that aspect of the hero myth at least could not be construed as particularly positive. So anyways, I think that Newman’s work is more original. And the great mother, well the reason that I want you to read the great mother is because, let me read you something from Hab here first. It would be a good introduction to this. I like this quote because Donald Hab is extraordinarily well regarded by physiological psychologists. He was the person who originated the hypothesis of neural networks basically and suggested that learning occurred as a consequence of the potentiation of the communication between neurons. Anyways, Hab states, even in ourselves, the civilized, amiable and admirable parts of mankind well brought up and not constantly in a state of fear, there are signs that this urbanity depends as much on our successfully avoiding disturbing stimulation as on a lowered sensitivity as already suggested. The capacity for emotional breakdown may be self-concealing, leading the animal to find or create an environment in which the stimuli to excessive emotional responses are at a minimum. It is so effective is our society in this regard that its members, especially the well to do and educated ones, may not even guess at some of their own potentialities. One usually thinks of education in the broad sense as producing a resourceful, emotionally stable adult without respect to the environment in which these traits are to appear. To some extent this may be true, but education can be seen as being also the means of establishing a protective social environment in which emotional stability is possible. Perhaps it strengthens the individual against unreasonable fears and rages, but it certainly produces a uniformity of appearance and behaviour which reduces the frequency with which the individual member of the society encounters such causes of disturbance. On this view, the susceptibility to emotional disturbance may not be decreased, it may in fact be increased. The protective cocoon of uniformity in personal appearance, manners and social activity generally will make small deviations from custom appear increasingly strange and thus if the general thesis is sound increasingly intolerable. The inevitable small deviations from customs will bulk increasingly large and the members of the society finding themselves tolerating trivial deviations well will continue to think of themselves as socially adaptable. What exactly does that last sentence there mean? Because first his points used to be that even the slightest difference will be noticed as large, but then he’s saying that they will be born well. Does that mean that because society does tolerate small deviations? He just means that maybe I’ll be able to tolerate you if your hair is an inch longer than mine. If I can do that I will think I’m tolerable, but if it’s three inches longer, well, look out. So, what he’s basically saying is the range within which the definition of tolerance exists will become increasingly restricted. So that… Nonetheless, society will continue to think of itself as tolerant. Tolerant, absolutely, right, absolutely. So, now, what does that have to do with the great mother, which was of course the question that I addressed the quote to. Now, if Hebbes Wright, and other people have made very similar suggestions, including Jung, who said that… This is quite hilarious, I think. Jung said, what is ordinarily called religion is a substitute to such an amazing degree that I ask myself seriously whether this kind of religion, which I prefer to call a creed, may not after all have an important function in human society. The substitute has the obvious purpose of replacing immediate experience by a choice of suitable symbols tricked out with an organized dogma and ritual. The Catholic Church maintains them by her indisputable authority. The Protestant Church, if this term is still applicable, by insistence on belief in the evangelical message. So long as these principles work, people are effectively protected against immediate religious experience. The notion being that the purpose of dogma culture is to protect people from religious experience. Now, you might think, well, what does it have to do with Hebbes’ statement? Well, the essence of religious experience might be regarded as overwhelming emotional experience. And what Jung is saying is that the purpose of dogma is to protect you from encounter with the most fundamental of emotions. And Hebbes points out that culture may protect you so well that you have no idea what it is that you’re being protected from. Now, the general thesis of this course is that the thing that you are protected from is so terrible that you’ll do anything to maintain the protection, even though under most circumstances you won’t even know that it’s there. The reason I want you to read The Great Mother is because it contains a description of symbols that have been accumulated in innumerable societies over thousands of years that have been created in an attempt to portray the nature of what is so terrible that you cannot tolerate it. And to the degree that art works, the symbolic representations of the unknown are effective because most of those, I would say in fact that what art does, you know, if you think about it this way, is that the purpose of culture isn’t a simulant of organ, that’s one way of looking at it. And the processes that exist around the perimeters of the organ, so to speak, think of it as an island that’s always expanding, the processes that work in the middle of the island aren’t the same processes that work on the edges. The closer you are to the middle, so to speak, the more things are absolutely defined, which is to say that you can explain them in words, they’re very predictable, they’ve been given a rational underpinnings, they’re explicitly discussable, they’re semantically formulated, but around the edges, that’s where peculiar activity still takes place, that would be the initial stages of the assimilative process, and that’s where fantasy plays a big role, because fantasy is the place where the unknown first transforms itself into the unknown, and while you could say that people’s use of symbols and that sort of thing in artistic productions are their attempt to make of the unknown something provisionally known, I mean I think that’s what art is doing, it’s always working as the locale where new information is being fed, new cultural information is being fed into the culture, that’s its purpose. There’s a book by, there’s an address by Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Prize winning address, I think it’s called Beauty Will Save the World, which is a Dostoevsky quote, and this is an argument that Solzhenitsyn makes at length, a purpose of higher order culture, the humanities and the arts are in fact to open a window into those domains that still exist as unknown and to let some new information in, and Jung would say, well, artistic and religious symbols of that sort function to do that, over time they perform their function and they lose their vitality, so you can’t tell what they mean anymore, they don’t intrinsically attract your attention anymore, forget what they mean. The reason I want you to read The Great Mother and to look at the representations in there is so that with any luck what the people who made those representations were trying to communicate will reattain its significance, so that you can see the nature of the terror, that religious dogma, culture in general, which gives everything a uniform appearance of regularity, what that was all erected to protect us against, so that’s the purpose of that book, and I think if you read it, it will do it. What’s the title of it, Solzhenitsyn? Beauty Will Save the World, I have the essay in the collection that I can show you. See, if you look at it this way, so you walk into a museum, this has happened to me on a number of occasions, there’s all paintings everywhere, and some of them have no emotional significance at all, you might try to generate some sort of artificially, but a lot of them just don’t capture you. Now and then if you’re lucky, and if you’re in a good museum, I suppose whether you know something or not also makes a difference, but you’ll come across a painting or a statue that will grab you, and the reason it grabs you I think, say it’s a visual portrayal, Van Gogh, irises, that’s a good example, or sunflowers. What Van Gogh manages to do is to present you something that’s familiar, or that you think is familiar, which means something that you’ve habituated to, which means something that you think you understand, but he twists it so that the phenomena now reattains the novelty that perhaps it once had when you first encountered the thing, or in the primeval state I suppose would be a symbolic way of looking at it, so what the artist forces you to do at least momentarily is to snap out of your habituated complacency, and to view the object that’s being represented as something that has not yet lost its sheen or its pristine aspect, so then you can see what’s actually there instead of looking at your own memory, which is what you almost always do when you look at something, and you have very limited attentional capacity, and almost everything that you encounter you see as a representation of that thing, everything that you’ve explored before, that’s how your brain in a sense makes the most use out of its limited capacity, you always watch your own memory, and a great artist is someone who can snap you out of that momentarily and make you see what’s actually there, and theoretically that can give you some insight, some additional insight into the nature of the world, and art in that sense still has a religious function, art originally only had a religious function, it’s only had a non-religious function in the west for maybe 400 years, so for the bulk of human history art played an explicitly religious role, and that’s what it’s trying to do, it’s the place where information first manifests itself before it becomes something that’s concrete and data, so anyways hopefully if you look at the great mother you’ll be able to see these constructions with the same eyes that the people who originally made them and you can tell if that happens because the objects will stop looking like foreign cultural artifacts and start looking like representations of something, and it’s really I think you can really see a shift in perception if you are doing the right thing, what you want to try to do is to occupy the territory of the person who originally constructed the representation to see what it was that they were trying to portray, a lot of these figures they took a lot of work, you have to be highly motivated to spend hours or weeks or even years constructing a representation of something that you don’t really understand, you have to put yourself in the position of those people and see what it was, and think about what it must have been that gripped them so hard to motivate them to produce something that has so little apparent economic value and yet takes so much effort, so it’s very worthwhile to do that, the use and abuse of history that’s the next book Nietzsche, it’s a very small book, the reason that I want you to read that is because it’s the only book that I know of that clearly describes the pathological aspect of culture, not the pathological aspect of any particular culture, but the fact that culture as a phenomenon necessarily has a pathological impact or pathological aspect that’s inevitable, Nietzsche basically points out that history is a burden as well as a great advantage, and to put it simplistically I suppose what you might think of is the fact that if you’re going to be a classical musician for example, the fact that innumerable classical musicians have lived before you is a tremendous opportunity because you have the opportunity to master the skills they developed and transmitted, but by the same token it’s also an incredible impediment to your own progress because your domain of competition has become so broad, you not only compete for preeminence and recognition in the present with all the other people who are trying to become classical musicians, but you necessarily pit yourself against those people who were the absolute best at that for as long as that particular activity has been recorded, so as a consequence you’re necessarily trivialized in relationship to these heroic figures of the past. Nietzsche also added to that by saying that the great composers of the past have also limited the present composer by making the eyes of everyone around them used to the kinds of stuff that the previous ones had created and would expect that of yours. Yes, yes certainly. I think you can see minor indications of this on an ongoing basis in our own culture. I think one of the things that the mass reproduction of music for example has done is, and this also occurs with televised events because maybe the television is even more accurate, what a television does is make history out of an event as it occurs and the fact that you get the historical perspective on things as they’re instantaneously occurring I think is very hard on your own perception of the utility and meaning of your own life. It strikes me that increasingly we’re in the position of not presuming that anything is real unless we see it on television and that people have devalued their own personal culture, and I mean by that their individual culture and their familial culture in favor of this global culture which although it appears to be ongoing is really sort of instant history. So the thing about a television is it will capture your attention no matter what’s on it, it will capture your attention instantly which basically means that you’re considering the thing that’s being portrayed as more important than anything that you could be doing at that present time. But how does that, is that what you mean by history or do you mean something else by turning it into history, meaning like taking away the myth, taking away what people would add to it or I mean what, I don’t understand what you mean. It’s just part of the weight of it, like the thing about a television is that it’s the whole culture right in your living room. It competes tremendously for your attention. I mean it offers you access theoretically to all these cultural resources but at the same time simultaneously while you’re engaged in getting access to these resources you’re not actually living, you’re not producing or creating anything of your own. It’s a good example of what Nietzsche is talking about when he talks about the abuse of history. It’s a weight, it’s an opportunity because it’s information but at the same time it’s a tremendous weight. So you see this when you get people sitting around, this used to happen to me in graduate school now and then, when people would sit around and a large chunk of their childhood memories, their shared memories were television shows that they had all watched. And what that means is that instead of having individual memories about events you have transpersonal memories about the same events that aren’t even real and I think that’s another indication of how… It’s very peculiar. What about the world of music players in that? Well I was thinking, this was more trivial, but I was thinking that this has only happened over a span of 40 years, rock music is only 40 years old, but as there was more and more of it, the likelihood that stations like these golden oldies stations popped up in the 80s and they played the music of the 60s and the 70s. And what happens is there’s a limited bandwidth of radio and the historical productions occupy a broader and broader section of the bandwidth until the new bands, so to speak, are not only competing against all the other bands who are now, but all the other bands that have accumulated over this 40 year period. When Nietzsche talks about the weight of history, the accumulated weight of history, well that’s a trivial example as I said, but it’s still something that’s happened over the span of over 40 years. So it’s a burden. So it’s a very short essay and I thought it was the best essay I’ve ever encountered on that particular topic. So Nietzsche, see the reason I like that is because Nietzsche being an extraordinary genius was always cognizant of the fact that you don’t get this, which is like the protective aspect of the great father, that’s the thing that renders everything predictable and tolerable. You don’t get that and you can’t get it without also getting this, is that the wise king and the tyrant are inseparable. There can be some movement back and forth from one to the other. I mean it does seem upon occasion that all of culture can turn into something tyrannical, but Nietzsche was pointing out that even in its most positive guises, the fact that there is culture constitutes an impediment to your own success as well as one of the preconditions of your success. You get kind of warped views of that. This is mostly interesting for those of you who are interested in clinical psychology or psychopathology. The humanistic branch of psychology basically took this argument, but only half of it. They said, well because one of their questions was where does human evil come from or human suffering I suppose. Carl Rogers, St. Abraham Maslow, probably the foremost exemplars of humanistic psychology, they basically made the presupposition that this is their story. The individual is intrinsically good. If you just provide the proper preconditions then everything will turn out positively. To the degree that the individual isn’t good, it’s because society, which is then cast implicitly in the negative role, distorts the possibilities of the individual as he or she matures. Well, that’s a good story and it’s true. I mean it’s obviously the case that as you mature, all sorts of arbitrary limitations have been placed on you, really arbitrary limitations, many of which have crushed and distorted and warped your character in some manners that might even be inalterable. But by the same token, this is also true, is that you were an ill behaved nasty little brute when you were little and it was the positive aspect of culture enforced on your behavior that made you even vaguely socially acceptable. The humanists tend to tell one side of the story. This is another reason why I really like this diagram because it’s a pretty simplistic diagram. But the fact that it’s a complete story is very useful. If you know the complete story, you know that, well yes, there’s negative aspects of culture but they’re inseparably tied to the positive aspects. And yes, there are negative aspects of nature or the unknown but there are also positive aspects. And likewise for the individual, then if you know that, if you understand what it means, then it can stop you from falling sort of wholeheartedly into what I think are relatively one sided simplistic ideologies. Because if someone says, well, all human evil is attributable to the faults of society, yes, but here are all sorts of counter examples to that particular claim. Or if people say, well, because this is a common environmentalist claim sort of, I meant, this is kind of funny, I had another friend in graduate school who was a German, great big guy. I mean, he was of German ancestry. He was really a nice fellow, which meant that in your contact with him you would never observe any overt aggression. And he told me once, he was a left, sort of, he had your typical left leaning liberal philosophy, ideology. He was environmentally concerned and he was anti-big business and so on and so forth, which is all perfectly reasonable. But he told me once, the planet would be better off if there were no people on it, meaning that human beings intrude onto nature and destroy things and that it would be better when then I thought, well, that’s an interesting example of the collective unconscious, I suppose. Because the notion that the planet would be better off without people on it presumes this. Impression is something that’s all beneficial. The pristine and unspoiled nature is all positive. So he is dominated by the archetype. He is dominated by this archetype in his thinking, unconsciously. He thought nature was a French impressionist landscape. And then he said, well, the planet would be better off without people on it, which meant that if he was given his free reign of expression, he would immediately become an exponent of this part of the great mother and do his best to decimate everything that he could lay his hands on. That was the point. Yes, the people. And I thought it was interesting and in part given his German cultural ancestry because the idea that the planet would be better off without people on it was certainly something that motivated the Nazis, for example. So whenever you hear anybody say that, he was no problem because he was a graduate student and at most he could wreak havoc on his girlfriend and maybe a few friends if he really went all out. But anyways. Professor, I don’t understand what the frame of reference is. Is that negative, positive, positive to the individual or is it just innately negative? It’s the emotional valence of the different domains. All I’m saying there is that any phenomena has the capacity to produce both positive and negative emotions depending on the context of interpretation, sort of an implicit part of them. I guess it would be in reference to the individual. Okay, so. Presumes a subject. So the negative aspect. Okay, so the great mother on this side, where the individual is positive, is seen by the individual as negative. Oh well, I see what you mean. Well all I’m saying here is that the positive aspect of culture protects you from the negative aspect of the unknown. Okay? And here it’s that the negative aspect of culture forbids your contact with the positive aspect of the unknown, which was your point, say, with regard to the composer. There are ways that you should conduct yourself, which means here’s a whole set of alternative possibilities which you’re forbidden to explore. Now that’s useful because you won’t become afraid, but it’s constricting because it restricts your potential domain of activity. Then I would say here, well, the reason these two are matched is because it’s the negative aspect of the individual that we’ll see later that heightens the likelihood that culture will take on a negative or tyrannical aspect. So I would say, for example, let’s take a look at the Nazis. Now one of the things the Nazis were trying to do is they had a tight ideology and they were trying to produce a domain that was very secure. Now they were sacrificing people all the time to construct this particular domain. And I would say that, well, there’s two reasons possibly to persecute other people. One is because they’re in your way and you’re trying to construct a domain that’s secure. So if you’re an explorer, for example, and you come across another tribe of people who don’t speak your language, well, as far as you’re concerned, they’re barbarians and your job is to establish your territory. But then the other reason for persecuting other people is because you enjoy it, because there’s something pathological about you. And I would say that the cultural movement, which is to establish new territory, tends to become aligned with individual pathology. And when that happens, then you get increased likelihood that when territory is being established, that people will be persecuted. So people like the Nazis would say, well, this is necessary because we want to establish the Third Right, which is our particular brand of utopia on earth. That’s their justification that they wear like a uniform so that when they look at themselves in the mirror, they can tolerate it. But really what’s going on is that they really like to hurt people, and they can use the cultural movement, which is part of the hero’s journey in a sense, to mask that even to themselves. So can you look at each circle then as some kind of fortress, I guess, or a castle? Yeah, this is a castle. And the positive and negatives, when you, or likes attract and dislikes whatever repels, so I mean the positive doesn’t let in the negative, the negative doesn’t let in the positive, but the positive will let in the positive and negative will let in the negative. I think that’s a reasonable way of looking at it. This could easily be conceptualized as a castle wall here in particular, with this domain being the outside, the individuals surrounded by the culture, which is what I would say with regards to the great mothers. You never get to look at this even because you’re so well protected by this, you don’t even know it’s there. So it’s like in the story of Buddha, you know, Buddha’s brought up by his father, and on, just before Buddha’s birth, a sage told his father that he would either grow up to be a world saviour or a political leader, and his father wanted him to be a political leader. Anyway, so one of the things he did to help ensure that he would stay in love with the world, so that he would occupy that domain, was to erect a wall around him, and to put a paradise, that means a walled city by the way, that’s very interesting I think, to put around Buddha, Gotama, a castle wall, and inside the castle there was nothing that was sick or old or in any way diseased because he didn’t want Buddha to become conscious essentially, become self-conscious, and to abandon the world. So that’s another good, that story has this structure explicitly, the great father erects the wall around the individual to protect him or her against the negative aspect of the unknown, and that’s the subject matter for today’s discussion basically. So you’re reading use and abuse of history because nature outlines the positive and the negative aspects of history. I’m sorry, I just wanted to ask you something about what your friend said about the world being better off without people, because that seems to me to be sort of a strange and really meaningless projection, because without sort of an anthropomorphizing of the state of the world, because without people the world could not be said to be better or worse in any way whatsoever. Yes, it’s beyond good and evil. It would be completely meaningless. Yeah, well that’s why I would immediately look for an alternative motive, especially given his ancestry, which isn’t to say that there’s anything peculiar about Germans necessarily, just that we’re not far enough away from what happened in the Second World War for the reasons for what happened to have disappeared or changed in any significant way whatsoever. It’s another reason why I’m trying to work with this material. In the introduction of the book, one of the things I tried to point out was the fact that we don’t know what to remember about the Holocaust or what to change in our behavior as a consequence of its occurrence. It’s only happened not even yesterday, and we’re still the same people that we were. So when he says that the planet would be better off without people on it, then I immediately wonder, well, precisely what does that mean? Like, what’s your real motivation? Well, his motivation is something like, people are tainted intrinsically so badly that the only solution to the problem of their existence and to the problem they pose to nature, so to speak, the fact that they are blight upon nature, is to rid the planet of them. Now, you might think that’s making a lot out of an offhand statement, but the point is that people do act very often as if they’re motivated by precisely that set of motivations. So do you think that’s an identification of the positive aspect of the individual with the positive aspect of the unknown? Because if you’re saying that he wants to destroy, somebody who wants to save nature, well, if what he’s reacting against is essentially the negative aspect of the Great Father, which is composed of all the, as you were saying, of the identification of the negative aspect of the individual with the negative aspect of the Father, then what he wants to eliminate is essentially the negative aspect of the Father. But the reason you would do that would be for the sake of the positive individual. And it seems to me that then to project that on, in terms of, you’re trying to save the planet, which is nature, I think people seem to identify nature in the positive sense with the positive in… So you’re making the point essentially that he was confused in his mythological presuppositions? Well, possibly. I don’t know. It seems to me that, well, you know, like the idea that there is the God that is everything everyone has in them. I mean, it seems like if you’re saying, it seems to be strangely paradoxical to say that you would want to eliminate the human race for the sake of nature, because what it really seems to me that you’re saying is that you want to save what is natural in people. Well, that’s why I was wondering about the confusion of the mythological presuppositions. Well, I don’t know where to go exactly any farther with that particular argument. I mean, he had… well, I don’t know what else to say about that. But even lying? But even saying… I mean, can you say that you like nature and also say that you want to help the world? Because… I mean, could he be lying? When he says he wants to save the world, could he actually say, I want to kill a bunch of people? Yes, absolutely. Certainly. Sure. That’s the best excuse for killing a bunch of people. Yeah. It’s the one that if you adopt makes you tolerable to yourself. So… I suppose it would always be the case in a sense, because if you’re saving your world, I mean, in terms of… Sure. It’s a logical justification, which perhaps upon occasion is even true. But it’s also the kind of justification that can easily and rapidly be twisted for your own particular nasty ends. Because one of the things that’s interesting about war is the fact that people will commit crimes in the course of warfare that go beyond… that don’t actually help the cause of the war in any particular manner. And not only that, undermine necessarily the things that that person is theoretically fighting for. Like one of the things that springs to my mind is the planned rape of the Muslim women in what used to be Yugoslavia. And it takes particularly the justification that we are just establishing our own secure territory is not sufficient to motivate the planning of that kind of event. You need some other little bent twist to come up with something that brilliantly cruel. Anyways, I’m discussing this in part as a precursor to the whole last section of this particular course. Because one of the things we’re going to discuss in detail is the nature of that additional twisted motivation. We haven’t talked anything about this at all yet. So… Yeah? Wait, so I’m trying to understand what you just said. Is the only way that you can justify the planned rape is not only for the war to be warring over land, but also over the subjective territory? I would think if a whole land of women were to be raped, it obviously affects… It breaks down the morale of the women that were raped and also the community because women can go to half the community. So it’s not only a material win, but also an emotional one. Well, I would say under most conditions it would be the reverse. Because I think if you want to defeat someone, I think anything you do to them that’s gratuitously cruel likely only heightens their will to resist. So I think it actually would work as something counterproductive. So anyways, I want to leave this because we’ll get back to this in detail later in the course. Like I said, this is just sort of a preview in a sense. I want to get your mind thinking about this other… Because one of the things we don’t take into account, and this is true in general psychology I think, is we have a hard time coming to terms with more complex base motivations. We’re not very good at conceptualizing things like cruelty undertaken for aesthetic purposes. So we can’t really come to grips with that. Like even when we talk about antisocial personalities, for example, we don’t tend to think about it in terms of some sort of… All the evil is being taken out of the personality. It’s something that’s just a matter of heightened approach systems and reduced response to anxiety and so on. There’s a whole set of complex motivations we’re not very good at. Like the desire to kill things, to hurt things. We don’t know how to deal with that or how to conceptualize it. So we’re going to talk about that. The more complex positive? The complex positive, like maybe the desire to learn from pushing the board. Possibly. Which is even more important. Okay, so the structure of scientific revolutions. I want you to read that because what Kuhn discovered with regards to scientific revolutions I think is just… Did you skip Beyond Good and Evil? Oh yes, I did. Beyond Good and Evil I would like you to read because… Nietzsche wrote it after Western culture had moved into an intervening period of chaos. As a consequence of the loss of its religious foundations. And so you could say that when there’s the bouncing ball diagram… Well when Western culture… The religious presuppositions of Western culture were shattered. There was an intervening period of time where morality as such had an unspecified reason for being. And Nietzsche was trying to explore the nature of what used to be taken for granted. Which was the existence of the religious structure. And the possibilities for reconstructing an alternative morality I suppose that would be rationally comprehensible. I guess. The reason I want you to read Beyond Good and Evil more particularly though is because reading that should do to you… It’s like an initiation ritual I guess in a sense that’s intellectually produced. Because Nietzsche, he said to himself, he philosophized with a hammer. His point was to break down presuppositions. That’s what he wanted to do. For a defined end, he wanted to release the will to power I suppose. Or to make people aware of it. And I would say the will to power could be most accurately conceptualized in terms of the thing that allows people to continually erect structures of knowledge. Break them down and re-erect them. I think that’s what Nietzsche was driving at. I mean it’s difficult to see what he was driving at. So there would be lots of debate about that. But Beyond Good and Evil is useful to read for a number of reasons. First of all, you’ll never find another book I think in your whole life that’s so remarkably brilliant. Nietzsche said that he wanted to write in a sentence what other people could not write in a book. And I think that he accomplished that particularly with Beyond Good and Evil. Every sentence is a thought. And most of the thoughts are brilliant. And there are many books that have one thought in them. And not even such a good thought. So it’s also very useful from a stylistic perspective because Nietzsche was a master, a literary master. And reading him can help clear up your thinking. He’s an amazingly clear thinker. So anyways, those are the reasons for it. He’s also questioning. See, Nietzsche said that he was the first philosopher who didn’t set out a priori to prove that a particular morality that already existed. That already existed was true. Like Nietzsche said, look, up to me every Western philosopher has worked within an established moral system. And only attempted to justify it. Even though they didn’t know that’s what they were doing. He thought that he was the first philosopher in history who was capable of saying, of seeing that alternative moralities existed everywhere. And thus the fact of morality had become a problem. Why is there morality? Not which morality is right even. Or that our particular morality is necessarily right. But why is there morality? And can there justifiably be morality? Is there any reason for presuming that the question, what is good and what is evil, is even worth asking or answering? Or has any reasonable answer? Those are all questions he was attempting to address. Because Nietzsche believed, if you knock the god out of a religious system, which is a moral system. That the entire moral system therefore no longer has any reason to exist. And if it has no reason to exist, it will disappear. It might take hundreds of years. But it will disappear. And that’s why he said, God is dead. And we have killed him. He also said, to finish that phrase off, that we will have a difficult time finding enough water to wash away all the blood. Which was his prophecy for the 20th century. And the part of the quote that many people don’t realize follows the first part. He was attempting to address the problem, we lost our religious belief, so now what do we do for morality? So it’s worth reading for a number of reasons. The structure of scientific revelations. Thomas Kuhn discovered… We don’t mean to imply by that that before, when lesser society had God, there was any less bloodshed. Yeah, well that’s a complicated question. Because part of it’s technologically related. Yeah. The way that we… No, I don’t mean to imply that. I don’t think probably he meant to imply it either. But his point, I think, was more particularly that the demise of fixed religious systems would necessarily mean that the conflicts of the 20th century would be ideologically motivated. Specifically, ideologically motivated. As new ideologies rose up to try to occupy the territory of the previous ideology. A religion really isn’t an ideology because most of a religion is implicit. And most of an ideology is explicit, I think, because someone actually wrote it down. Communism, for example, is more like, in a sense, more like a scientific system because all the presuppositions are actually explicit. So I think there’s some reason for distinguishing them. But Nietzsche thought, well these new ideologies would necessarily rise up to occupy the position of world ideology. And we’d see warfare on a grand scale in Europe as a consequence of that. So, no, because it’s not reasonable to say that. It’s hard to say, you know, because people compare what Stalin did, for example, in the name of ideology, to what the Catholic Church did in Spain during the period of the Inquisition. But the Inquisition was nowhere near as horrifying as the Stalinist purges. But it’s difficult to tell if that’s because the motivation differed or because by the time of Stalin, the technology for implementing Inquisition-like procedures was so far advanced. So Solzhenitsyn believed that the Stalinist purges were worse than, say, anything that had happened in Russia’s previous history under the Tsars and worse than the Inquisition as well. But again, there’s this complicated factor of technology, so I don’t know what to say about that precisely. I don’t think people have probably changed that much. So it had to be people who ran the Spanish Inquisition had access to the technology. They probably would have been just as horrible. Okay, for the structure of scientific revolutions, Kuhn basically attempts to demonstrate that this bouncing ball diagram also applies in the scientific domain. That’s not exactly right. He attempted to say that a process like this applied in the scientific domain without necessarily considering the fact that it might characterize all cognitive revolutions, including those that operate in the domain of morality. The reason I want you to read this book is because one of the risks of the approach that I take in this class is over-reliance on a few sources. I tend to rely heavily on Jung, for example, and Mercier Eliade. That’s partly because they’re the only people that I know who actually deal with this material, so I don’t think it’s so much narrow as just lack of options. But I wanted you to read Kuhn because that’s a book that was very well received. It made Kuhn world famous. It was published in, I think, 1960 or 1962. I want you to see for yourself that these sorts of ideas appear relevant in other fields and have been discovered by other people who are working from entirely different set of presuppositions. And also because Jung has such a terrible academic reputation, which I cannot actually understand to allow you to see for yourself that an idea that made Kuhn world famous in 1960 was posited 30 or 40 years earlier by Jung on a much broader scale and was, as far as I can tell, more or less completely overlooked. I don’t know why that is. Anyways, the devils. Okay, the devils, Paradise Lost, Notes from the Underground, and the Gulag Archipelago all make a unit, and the unit is a discussion of the negative aspect of the individual. Paradise Lost. This is the first time I’ve used this book in this course. Paradise Lost is the story of the fall of the devil from heaven. Now, what Milton tried to do, well, he tried to do two things. He said he was trying to justify the ways of God to man, which is an amazingly ambitious project. You know, it’s amazing that someone would take it upon themselves to seriously conduct an enterprise like that. But also what he did was, there’s a kind of a, okay, remember I used the example and say if you wanted to think about what art and mythology does with relationship to the construction of knowledge that you might think that, if you think of culture as an island and the processes around the edge of the island being qualitatively different from those in the middle, myth and art sort of circulate around the outside. So as information goes more towards the center, it tends to take more on the shape of dogma or codified knowledge, and on the outside it’s less, it’s more amorphous. And it seems to contain more an image, that’s my impression anyways. Less verbal, more image. The farther out it is, or at the farthest reaches, it’s still behavior, it’s in ritual, it’s in imitation. You don’t even really have an image of it, yet you just act it out. Surely can you not talk about it? You can’t form an accurate image of it, but you can still act it out. Anyways, what Milton did was to collect a myth that had formed around the central core of Christianity, and to give it a more or less formal structure. And the myth is the notion that there was a rebellion in heaven, and that the devil fell who was God’s highest angel, one of his two sons I guess, one being the other one being Christ, Satan being the oldest son. Rebelled against God in an attempt to occupy his position and was cast into hell. Oh, it’s an interesting, it’s a story that has always run around in my mind for some peculiar reason. Lucifer means light bringer, and Lucifer is the agent of consciousness, even in Genesis as far as, that’s my particular take on it anyways. Lucifer is the serpent who gives both Eve and Adam the apple that makes them self-conscious. He brings them to the light, and the Bible represents that as a catastrophe. Obviously people get thrown out of paradise, but there’s some split, apparently according to Jung, there’s even split in the medieval Christianity about the absolute negative quality of that particular event, because it was also regarded as a fortunate error, because the fact that Adam and Eve got kicked out of paradise provided the precondition for the necessary appearance of Christ, who’s a savior, a hero. So anyways, I’m interested, look, Christianity took the discussion of the devil and his nature farther than any other formal religion has ever taken the discussion of evil. You could say that for us to conceptualize, say as a culture, we have been trying to abstract out from our general behaviors the pattern that characterizes evil, ever since we attempted to map who we were as a conscious endeavor, which is to say that we’ve taken tens of thousands of years to try to come to grips with the essential nature of the behavioral pattern and the attitude pattern that characterizes evil. We obviously still don’t have a very good verbal description of what that means, because you can’t just go up to your neighbor and say, spout me off a paragraph or two that will define the boundaries of behavior that would generally be recognized as evil. We don’t know that. You can say, well I know it when I see it, which means that it’s still kind of implicit knowledge. I would say that the idea that the devil seemed to have derived from Zoroastrian religion, there’s a god in Zoroastrianism named Ahura Mazda, and he has two sons, whose names escape me. That was the first religion, and by the way, the Zoroastrians also believed that the universe was engaged in an eternal battle between the forces of good and evil, and that they were basically balanced, which Christianity didn’t exactly do on that. It’s referring to this, and perhaps to this as well, the battle between good and evil. Anyways. Christianity seems to have alienated the evil from the self, thereby leaving it to be repressed. Well, it’s something, yeah, it’s something that’s, well the thing, you know, there’s a lot of sense in this. Sorry? What about original sin? Well yes, but wasn’t it, I mean, one of the things that Jung found out was that the triumvirate, the trinity, that is, that God is really a quaternity. Yeah, with the devil and Mary vying for the last position. Christianity attempts to eliminate the evil from the individual. Yeah, well that was something that Jung had a particular bone about Christianity with, because he thought that, he thought exactly that Christianity tended to view evil as the absence of God, whereas Jung tended to view it as an actual presence in and of itself. Something that was complex enough and solid enough, so to speak, that you couldn’t just account for it by the absence of something good. And that was, I suppose, in medieval times, that would be viewed as a remarkably heretical statement. So that was Jung’s particular take on it. But there are good reasons for believing the opposite too, like to believe that evil can be understood as the absence of good. That’s a logical argument too. I don’t think it’s one that Jung gave enough credence to. But that is still your presentation, is what he thought. Anyways, I’m going to get back to this myth. Lucifer is associated with rationality in Christian mythology. And the reason I want you to read Paradise Lost is because I think what Paradise Lost is about, and this is, I don’t know, this is pure speculation on my part, it’s certainly about something that we know. People have been working on building that myth for a long, long, long time. It’s about something. But what it’s about, and I doubt very much if it’s a description of empirical reality. So it’s about something else. Now what that myth says is that the highest angel in God’s kingdom, which I would view as something as a description of an intra-psychic state, the place where there are spirits, so to speak, attempted to usurp God’s position, which is characterized by omniscience, omnipotence, and, let’s forget the other one. It’s three cardinal attributes of God. Omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence. Omnipresence, right. It said, I can occupy the position of God. Instantly, he’s in hell. Now I think what that means, and this is something that Northrop Friar also commented on, was that, say, if you think of the development of rationality, human rationality, which is one of the things that necessarily distinguishes us from the animals and which Western culture has put more stress on than any other culture, I think that can be reasonably portrayed from the mythological perspective as the highest angel in God’s heavenly kingdom, so to speak. Think about that as the description of an intra-psychic hierarchy. What that myth says is that if rationality constructs something and then attempts to make of it a god, instantly everything around it will turn into something that resembles hell. And it’s a story about, I think it’s a story about the dangers of authoritarian presumption. So, I want you to read it in the context of these other works, and you can make your own judgement about that. Which is to say, look, all it is to say this. If you construct a system of belief with your rational faculties, and then make of that system something that has all the attributes of God, then what will necessarily happen, because you’re completely opaque to any anomalous information, is that within a brief span of time, everything around you will turn into a wasteland. And also, that all you have to do to get out of it is admit that you’re wrong, which is one of the things that happens to Milton Satan. All he has to do to get out of where he is, is admit that he was wrong. That’s it. But he won’t do that. I’d rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. And I think, from my perspective as a clinical psychologist, that that’s the most accurate representation of a neurotic personality that I’ve ever encountered. Because that’s exactly the situation. You’re doing something that follows up your life, you’d rather do that than change. Simply because you’re the master of it? That’s right. Well, we know how that works. It’s known territory, isn’t it? You don’t have to go through this process, for example, to stay there. It might be miserable, and it’s going to get worse all the time. And it will get as bad as it can possibly be. All you have to do to get rid of it is to posit that if you stepped outside of it, something good might happen. But you won’t do that. Is that what you mean when you talk about Communist Russia? Yes. Absolutely. That’s exactly it. If you think about it, though, it’s difficult within the domains of rationality to reject rationality. There is really no way out of it. Well, that’s not necessarily the case. Look, I’ll get to you right away. We’re talking about the relative importance of phenomena. So let’s look at it this way. Say, what your rationality does is help you make sense out of phenomena that you encounter. But it is not necessarily the thing that propels you forward to the place where you’ll find something to make sense out of. So I would say that your rationality is doing a proper job, which means that it’s in the right place in the hierarchy of values. If it’s always serving the tendency to go out and make order out of chaos. Now, that’s not rationality. That’s something else. That’s the thing that makes rationality useful. But if your rationality, then it sort of follows that you wouldn’t understand this. Or that you wouldn’t necessarily like it. That’s right. Well, you don’t necessarily want the subordinate position. It’s something that’s very relevant to Western culture. So I believe this is the case. I hope this is true. I believe that after the French Revolution, one of the first things that happened was the erection of a statue to the goddess of reason in Notre Dame Cathedral. Does anybody know if that’s true? I think that was one of the immediate post-revolutionary acts. But it’s very symbolic, I think, because the French Revolution was one of the first extra-religious movements in Western culture in the sense that they had to put reason up on the highest pedestal. And there’s a problem with that. And that’s the problem that Milton, I think, was wrestling with. He said, well, yeah, rationality is a good master, a good servant, but it’s a terrible master. So then the question is, what’s supposed to be the master? Now, the thing that’s interesting about this is there’s a line of mythology in Christianity that sort of points out that this is vague again. And there’s no canonical basis for it, as far as I know. But that Satan was God’s oldest son who was passed over in favor of the youngest son, who was Christ. And that’s a common mythological theme, by the way, the passing over of the older and wiser son in favor of the younger and more questionable son. That’s part of the mythology of the trickster. But anyways, the point is here is that rationality is supposed to serve the hero and not to constrain it. So you could say it’s supposed to be a subordinate process. And as soon as it’s not a subordinate process, which means as soon as it says, what I have created is everything that’s necessary, then it… Well, that’s a tantamount to this revolution in heaven. This is why Spock was not a captain at the end of the movie. That’s not what I meant. No, no, no, that’s a really good observation. Because Star Trek is pure mythology, right? It’s to boldly go where no man has ever gone, no one now. But that’s right, because it’s a well-constructed kingdom. And Spock is subordinate to the irrationalities of the human beings. That’s right. And the drive to explore. Right? A very funny… He also has pointed ears and kind of a reptilian… Green blood. He made a great deal of that. That’s right. I think we’ve got data. Right, right. My question is, if rationality is not supposed to extract itself from the attributes of God, what are the attributes of God? All-knowing is the big thing, as far as I’m concerned, with regards to ideology. Because that’s what an ideology does, right? If you’re an authoritarian… Sorry, go ahead. At what point can we talk in more crude terms about what religion might be trying to tell the individual about his or her place within the community? Well, I’m trying to lead into that in today’s discussion. And this is all sort of preliminary material. But most of the last half of the course talks about this relationship, which is what you’re trying… What’s the proper balance between the individual and the culture? The thing that has always been very meaningful to me is the idea that religion is supposed to liberate the individual from the prison of the self. Well, given that line of reasoning, what would you use as the definition of the self? The ego, in other words, that everything is within my own self. Everything I see is what’s real. So what I see is real, and what you may see is not necessarily real, because I’m operating simply within myself. Well, the idea of liberation from a prison, I think, in part… Well, the problem is that there’s two aspects to religious systems as a general rule. There’s the aspect that socializes, and then there’s the aspect that attempts to transcend the consequences of socialization. And then there’s the aspect that attempts to get into work at cross purposes. That’s why one of the stories you’ll read later in the manuscript is just this… I edited down Dostoyevsky’s story, The Grand Inquisitor. And in The Grand Inquisitor, Christ comes back to earth, and he runs into the Inquisitor, who imprisons him immediately and says, I told you, you established this, but now that it’s here, you shouldn’t come back to mess it up. Fine. The next day, when he’s supposed to kill him, he lets him go out the back door. Well, that’s regarded sort of as the pinnacle of Dostoyevsky’s literary achievement, that particular story. And it is a brilliant story, because it basically says that, well… And that’s mostly with regards to the Catholic Church, that a religion necessarily has to impose a structure. It has to, because if there’s no structure, there’s no protection. But in order to maintain that structure, it has to allow the process that creates it, in order to exist, at least to the degree that it can continue to update the structure. And that’s exactly dead-on relevant to your question with regards to the proper role of the relationship, proper role of the individual with regards to culture. It’s the same relationship that the Pharaoh had in Egyptian society. You’re supposed to embody the culture, and I would think in part the notion of the prison of the self, is partly the idea that you embody the culture, which is the… You’ve swallowed the particular morality and the ways and the means that your culture says to act. But then there’s this other part which says, yeah, you are that, and you’re necessarily that, but you’re also the thing that created that, and the thing that can update it when necessary. And you also swallowed the religion, which creates… I’m not necessarily sure that religion would free man from self, because it creates a self that only needed… Well, it depends. Because you have to… Okay, this leads in directly to what we were going to discuss today. Because I titled the chapter that we’re discussing today, Apprenticeship and Enculturation, and that has to do with the adoption of a shared map. And so the issue is… Let’s look at this particular diagram. I want to read you something again. I’ll get to this in one sec. I just wanted to finish going through these books. The last three books have to do with alchemy, and alchemy is a discussion… Jung’s writings on alchemy, anyways, are a discussion of a collection of 2,000 years of symbols that Jung thought illustrated that process, which is the process of radical re-adaptation. So, okay. I want to read you something from Nietzsche. It’s kind of long, but I want you to listen to it carefully. This is from Beyond Good and Evil. And if you listen to this, then you’ll also know why I want you to read Beyond Good and Evil, because the whole book is like this, not just this particular paragraph. Every morality is, as opposed to letting oneself go, a bit of tyranny against nature, also against reason. But this in itself is no objection, as long as we do not have some other morality, which permits us to decree that every kind of tyranny and unreason is impermissible. What is essential and inestimable in every morality is that it constitutes a long compulsion. To understand Stoicism or Puritanism, one should recall the compulsion under which every language so far has achieved strength and freedom, the metrical compulsion of rhyme and rhythm. Okay, so what Nietzsche is trying to say there is that there’s a necessary relationship between morality and slavery. To adopt any particular viewpoint means to exclude all other viewpoints. But also that having done so, having adopted one limited viewpoint, means the possibility to develop all sorts of skills that you might not otherwise be able to develop. So he uses the metaphor of poetry. He says, look, what a poet does to produce poetry and to develop the language is to put way more constraint on his or her domain of action than is normally the case. And paradoxically, as a consequence of applying this constraint, something is created instead of just being repressed. You don’t have to only allow yourself to write in rhyme and rhythm. It’s much more difficult to do that, which you might say would constitute a barrier to achievement. But Nietzsche is pointing out that it is in fact the imposition of those constraints that constitutes the precondition for freedom. So he’s making a strange claim that in some context of interpretation, slavery is a necessary precondition for freedom. Now then the question is, you better understand the context in which that’s true and the context in which that’s not true. But we’ll get to that later. How much trouble the poets and orators of all peoples have taken, not accepting, a few prose writers today in whose ear there dwells an exorbitant conscience, for the sake of some foolishness, as utilitarian adults say, feeling smart, submitting abjectly to capricious laws, as anarchists say, feeling free or even free-spirited. But the curious fact is that all there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness, whether in thought itself or in government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts, just as in ethics, has developed only owing to the tyranny of such capricious laws. Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his most natural state is. The free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of inspiration. And how strictly and subtly he obeys thousand-fold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts. Even the firmest concept is compared with them not free of fluctuation, multiplicity, and ambiguity. Another thing that Nish is pointing out there, and this is an example of how decades of thought that are still to come are embedded in his sentences. Laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts. He’s saying, well, when you are free as an artist, you’re acting according to precepts that are inviolable, that are so archaic that you can’t even say what they are. They’re still implicit, they’re still procedural. What is essential in heaven and earth seems to be, to say it once again, that there should be obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction. Given that, something worthwhile always develops and has developed for whose sake it is worthwhile to live on earth. For example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality. Something transfiguring, subtle, mad, and divine. The long unfreedom of the spirit. The mistrustful constraint in the communicability of thoughts. The disciplined thinkers imposed on themselves to think within the directions laid down by a church or a court, or under Aristotelian presuppositions. The long spiritual will to interpret all events under a Christian schema, and to rediscover and justify the Christian God in every accident. All this, however forced, capricious, hard, gruesome, and anti-rational, has shown itself to be the means through which the European spirit has been trained to strength, ruthless curiosity, and subtle mobility. Although admittedly in the process, an irreplaceable amount of strength and spirit had to be crushed, stifled, and ruined. That for thousands of years, European thinkers thought merely in order to prove something. Today, conversely, we suspect every thinker who wants to prove something. That the conclusions that ought to be the result of the most rigorous reflections were always settled from the start, just as it used to be with Asiatic astrology, and still is today with the innocuous Christian moral interpretation of our most intimate personal experiences. This tyranny, this caprice, this rigorous and grandiose stupidity, has educated the spirit. Slavery is, as it seems, both in the cruder and in the more subtle sense, the indispensable means of spiritual discipline and cultivation, too. Consider any morality with this in mind. What there is in it of nature teaches hatred of just letting go, of any all too great freedom, and implants the need for limited horizons and the nearest tasks, teaching the narrowing of perspective, and thus, in a certain sense, stupidity as a condition of life and growth. You shall obey someone and for a long time, else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself. This appears to me to be the categorical imperative of nature, which is not addressed to the individual, but to people’s races, ages, and classes, above all to the whole human animal, to man. That’s a brilliant page, as far as I’m concerned. What’s he saying? Well, this bears on your question. What’s the proper relationship of the individual and culture with regards to the unknown, you say? Well, that’s why I wrote this diagram on the board here. The unknown is both negative and positive. And the culture is both negative and positive. You have to have a culture, because a culture brings predictability to the objects that you encounter, and to all of your interpersonal interactions. You have to have that, because in its absence, everything is so chaotic that you cannot actually exist. That’s the literal truth. Your culture regulates your emotions. You can’t just give it up. And if someone comes along with a different idea, and that different idea, if you accepted it, would upset your whole culture. Well, you can’t just accept that idea. But the alternative to accepting it often seems to be to attempt to destroy the person who brings the new information. And the problem with that is that now we’re so heavily armed that if one camp attempts to destroy the other camp, the overwhelming likelihood is that both will disappear. So on the one hand, you can’t just get rid of your culture, because someone else comes along and says that’s not the way to do things. But you can’t do what we’ve always done in the past either, which is have a war about it, and settle who’s going to rule what territory. So then the question is, well, given those two options as theoretically the only two options, and that both the outcomes of those two options are negative, well, what’s left to do? Well, that’s a real difficult question. That’s a paradox, as far as I’m concerned. Well, this diagram speaks to that to some degree. Say, Nietzsche is pointing out that in order to be able to do anything, you have to restrict what it is that you’re going to do to a narrow domain. This is the notion of an apprenticeship. Say, if you want to become, let’s say, a classical pianist, they say to become a classical pianist, you need 20,000 hours of practice before the age of 18 to become a concert. That’s assuming you have the innate ability, which basically means that you have to exclude from your life any number of things that would have occupied those $20,000 alternatively, and that you have to subjugate all of your diverse individuality to this extraordinarily narrow range of action. But the theory is that having voluntarily subjugated yourself to a set of arbitrary and fixed rules, because the rules that make up music are in many ways arbitrary and fixed, that if you master that territory, then you’ll come out the other side with all those skills at your disposal, and then with the capacity to do something that actually constitutes freedom with them. So the notion of the apprenticeship is the long, subvoluntary subjugation of the spirit, followed by the capacity to create a masterpiece. You know the word masterpiece. That signifies the end of an apprenticeship, right? That’s even, I suppose, where the master’s degree came from, is that a masterpiece indicates that you are now free from the tyranny of the person to whom you were bound. It means that you’ve absorbed everything they know, plus you’ve added to what they knew and transmitted to you something that’s uniquely yours, that justifies the entire subjugation. Well, that’s, for me, that seems to be the way out of this cultural paradox, because that’s an apprenticeship model of adolescence. I think that group identity is, the construction and strengthening of group identity is the appropriate developmental stage for adolescence, that it has to be gone through. This gets rid of some of the more annoying aspects of standard humanistic psychology. You have to accept, as a precondition, that if you subjugate yourself to a set of rules, that a lot of what you are is going to not be developed in the process, because you always sacrifice possibility for actuality if you pursue any actuality. But the hope is that you’ll come out the other side with whatever is you still intact. And it seems to me that, well, that gives you the benefits of both situations. The purpose of culture is to protect the individual who is no longer a child from the negative aspect of the unknown. Children are dependent on their mother, so to speak, initially. As they grow, they start to encounter problems in living that their mother can no longer solve. For example, under most conditions, like in our culture, if you’re a male and you’re 14 and your mother is still trying to solve the problem of finding someone to date for you, something seriously has gone wrong. Because she’s attempting to extend her domain of protection past its logical bounds, which is to say, the psychoanalysts used to refer to that as the necessary failure of the mother. Anyways, the point is that as you grow up, life starts to present to you problems that weren’t there to begin with, that your mother can’t handle. And what moves in to fill the gap before you’re fully mature is the processes associated with group identification. So I think it’s a bridging mechanism. And I think the problem that we face as a race, in a sense, is that we’re stuck at an adolescent level of adaptation. People even still view the identification with a culture, which is essentially the adoption of a patriotic stance, that’s what we’re looking at, as the highest level of possible attainment. And in short, people never individuate. Rarely enough so that being stuck at the level of cultural identification still poses a constant threat to our… poses a constant threat. Not a blanket statement, obviously. Right, not a blanket statement, because… but I guess the idea perhaps is that… well, at least that something beyond near adequate group identification might realistically be posited as an ideal. Without necessarily undermining the idea that group identification as a developmental stage is absolutely necessary, and that it has to be gone through. I mean, you see people who never make the transition to group identity, which means that they remain dependent on their mother. There’s a whole category of personality disorder for that. That’s dependent personality disorder. They don’t even make the first transition. People who get through the group identification process, I think, very often are those who actually master it. So they have gone through an apprenticeship, which means they’ve allowed themselves to be subjugated to the group identity, and have absorbed all the discipline and possibility that that subjugation allows. It seems to me you see some people too who manage to reach… to go beyond that stage without having very much group identification. Who manage to reach a stage… reach individuation without going through a great deal of… Okay, can you think of an example of that? Because I’m not convinced that that’s the case. I think that this is an invariant developmental stage. That you can’t make… I don’t think you can make the leap… and I shouldn’t say never. But I don’t think that under most circumstances you can make the leap from childhood to adulthood without this intervening inculturation, which is mostly group fostered. Because it’s then that you learn, for example, as an adolescent, that’s when you learn how to cope with people in groups, and how to act as the responsible member of a culture. Once you’ve got that skill, then you can go beyond it. But if you don’t have it, well it seems to me that that provides a pretty vicious impediment to your continued progress. Could you get them more or less at the same time? I’m someone who is not particularly socially capable until they become self-capable. I think most kids go from being children to being members of a group. And then if they’re lucky they move beyond that. But what about people who go from children to being essentially nothing and then building to doing both at the same time? Because sometimes if you have a little enough social ability, you can be very vulnerable or outcast from the group situation. But at the same time there are people who are in that situation who also have a fair amount of self-confidence, but no social confidence. Do you see what I’m saying? Well, I was thinking about possible exceptions to this. I guess I would say perhaps that if someone is popped out of the group identification game because they’re pursuing an interest that’s unique to them, that it’s possible that the continued development of the interest might lead to proper establishment of an adult as an adult. But I would also say that it’s inappropriate to presume that group identification necessarily means something that happens at the normal level of adolescent behaviour, which is I’m not saying necessarily that to make the gap, to make the jump from childhood to adulthood, it’s necessarily to associate with a gang of peers in a sort of classic adolescent mode. I would also say, for example, that if you’re interested in something, let’s say you’re really good at the violin, that might be an example. If you have a particular talent, your peer group then becomes all those people who have had that talent in the past whose process of adaptation you’re imitating and mimicking to develop your skills to move towards the point where you’re going to be an individual in your own right. So for us, I mean this is especially true for people who are abstractly capable. Your peer reference group might be the group that you find in books, because that’s where the group identity has been abstracted up into ideas. It doesn’t necessarily, especially in a culture as complex as ours, there are peer groups who you can identify with at every level of functional analysis. There are peer groups that are based purely on ideas, there are groups that are based more explicitly on shared patterns of activity. But I would still say that to get from the point of being a child to the point of being an adult, there has to be this intermediary process of enculturation. You can choose, you can pick and choose what that’s going to be. But you need a framework. So if you’re someone who is capable enough in the semantic domain, it may never make it back to procedures, essentially. Well I would say that would also be a mistake as a general rule. Right, but it can happen at least. Yeah, I think it does happen. Well what you said about books seems to be a representation of that. Someone who is maybe socially uncomfortable, but reads a great deal. So you’re saying that they’re essentially getting something? Sure, of course they are. It’s just that the group they’re identifying with is being abstracted up into some… Their peer group may be people who are mostly dead, who live only in books, which is not necessarily such a bad peer reference group. It depends on your… although I would also say that the inability to deal with the living, so to speak, sooner or later is going to constitute a… Is likely going to constitute a problem. I mean it might not be a fatal error, but it’s still going to be a problem. And even somebody who is as… what would you say? Socially isolated as Nietzsche, especially in the later part of his life. He still wrote. I mean, the desire to be part of the community is very paramount, even among people who are very individualistic. And it’s also the case that the hero is not the person who discovers the gold, gets the gold from the dragon, and then wanders off up into the hills. The hero is the person who gets the gold and then goes back to the community. So that presupposes the capacity to make the knowledge that’s being gathered on the individual route accessible to the community. And the skills that allow that to occur. It sure seems different to be dealing with the representation of the group than with the group itself. Yeah, right, definitely. The whole interaction that demands the whole thing seems to be pretty… Sure, there’s all sorts of other things that come into play when you’re actually dealing with the person. Because then it’s a two-way… I mean then you have to give back as well as receive, which seems like a part of what you’re describing as a process of acculturation. Right, right. And there’s other things that come into play too, like sexual tensions and dominance hierarchy maneuvering and all sorts of other things to be part of the community. You have to master. I’d always thought of… well, I think that… can I write on this? The way I see it is… So I’ve always… well, before I was a freshman in college, I always thought that details weren’t important. So to look at what you’re saying as a cake, I always went for the frosting instead of the base of the cake. And I think that it’s possible to still add, to get a feel for the frosting. But in my experience as an undergrad, I think that knowing the details or going through this downward process… I don’t know if it makes for a steeper slope, but it does allow you to get… there’s this level here that you just can’t get to without this. Okay, so now I want you to tie that more concretely into the discussion that we just had. Okay. With him? Yeah. Okay, so what it seems to me, what you’re saying, I don’t know, is possibly that it’s… that you don’t understand… that you’re getting a feel for the frosting. And you’re saying that maybe you don’t need to have a group to grow on this individuality. You can have a mix on it. But what I take you to be saying is that you need to have… you need to know the group fully before you can go to the highest level of individuality. Yeah, and I guess the way to specify this would be to say that in-group… I wasn’t trying to ignore the cake. No, no, no, fair enough, fair enough. I want a cake too. I think the notion is like if you think of the capacity to interact in a group as composed of knowledge that’s implicit and tacit as well as explicit… and if you only go for the explicit knowledge then you risk missing the tacit knowledge. That’s the stuff that’s embodied, say, in non-verbal behaviour. But people seem to have different levels of ability of transforming explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge. And also different willingness to do that. Yeah, I mean the interplay between the memory systems, the ability to go down the hierarchy as well as up. Right, right. Well, we often don’t think that going down it is necessary. Right, and I think that’s because we take the attitude that you just described. If you know the words you don’t have to know the music, you don’t have to know how to put it into action. I think that’s part of the reason actually, by the way, that the general public in the USA, for example, holds intellectuals in contempt. It’s because we think the fact is the knowledge and that’s wrong. Unless you can act out the fact, you’re an idiot. That’s why I like Woody Allen movies actually, because Woody Allen’s characters are just so stuffed full of facts that it’s appalling. They’re completely, almost completely useless because they haven’t made the transition down the hierarchies. That’s right, that’s right. Or they confuse, I think what they confuse is knowledge with wisdom. And that’s what academics do in general. That’s what intellectuals do. We think because we know facts that we’re smart. And that’s dumb because knowing useless facts, that’s stupid. Yeah, I’m not stupid. What about gender? I had a question about to what extent you think this enculturation is necessary. Would you say that in order to be a successful artist and do something new, you would have to understand all the arts that came before you? Or could you, like sort of working in isolation, still do something? Okay, well look, that’s a tough question because when you’re working in isolation, you’re not working in isolation. Because, like say by the time you’re 20 or 21 or whatever, and you’re working in isolation, your head, so to speak, is already stuffed full of your culture. And many of the things that you discover, you’re actually just remembering. Like it’s already, the presuppositions that you’re, I remember, let me give you an example. The first political science class I took when I was 17, I wrote an essay with a friend of mine that outlined the, we outlined the preconditions for an ideal state. We thought this was a very original piece of work. We handed this in to the professor. And the next week we studied John Stuart Mill and John Locke. And everything we had written down was in their writings. And I had never read John Stuart Mill or John Locke. But the point is that what they said 400 years ago is so much part of everything that we do that even if you don’t know it, you know it. So then if you start thinking about what constitutes the ideal, all you end up doing is recapitulating what’s already been done. So that’s like one answer to your question. Another answer is, I would say in general, keeping in mind Nietzsche’s objections, that the more you know about what people did before you, the greater your chance of going somewhere that no one has ever gone before. Because otherwise you risk reinventing the wheel. And in a way that’s inefficient. Like Einstein, I think it was Einstein, he said, I can see so far because I stood on the shoulders of giants. And that’s a reference to the, because Einstein was a revolutionary. But he still said, despite the fact that I’m a revolutionary and I undermined my ancestors, so to speak, the only reason I ever got there is because I knew exactly what they knew. I do think that’s the way to go about it. One of the things that, there seems to be some, it’s awkward to talk about this because we think independence is good and dependence is bad. And interdependence sort of is some sort of a liminal condition. I mean, we don’t quite know what to do with it in our culture. And it seems to me that some of the unease about this is related to that. But I actually wanted to ask about gender difference in relation to this process we’re talking about and whether that’s significant. I don’t, my guess is that at a fundamental level I would say probably not. Whether there’s, where were you thinking about gender differences in relationship to this? In the group connection, the group experience, what the group experience is like at adolescence? Oh, I think there are probably gender differences in adolescence, partly because women hit puberty like two years earlier than men do. I think that makes quite a big difference. So their groups get fragmented earlier. What difference that makes I don’t know. But I would suspect that it’s a severe enough difference to have some at least short term implications. I mean, girls hit puberty at 12 or 13, 14, and it’s like two years later for boys. So by the time boys have to deal with all that, they’re two years older. And they have two years more experience. Also I think what happens to girls’ peer relationships is that when they hit puberty they start associating immediately with older boys, two or three years older. Of course then they’re immediately put in at least a temporarily subordinate position. And they don’t get a chance to develop their peer network groups quite to the same degree. Whereas boys have to kind of do that by default. Maybe when they’re 13 or whatever they’d rather be associating with girls of their own age, but the girls won’t have anything to do with them. So it’s like, well they’re off together by default. I don’t know what that means in the final analysis. I’ve been thinking subjectively that there may be powerful gender differences in the entire story all along the line. That could be. We might be able to come back to it at the end of the course. Yeah, well if you had ideas about that, that would be a really useful topic for an essay for example. If you want to explore that more thoroughly. Because the gender issue is, well first of all, there’s gender problems so to speak. If you look at classical religious, western religious traditions, there’s big gender issues occurring there all the time. The central figure in Christianity is male. This is troublesome, even from the perspective of ritual imitation. It’s troublesome. It also does seem to me the case that in mythology as a general rule, the figure of the hero is represented as masculine. I don’t know what that means for, it doesn’t mean that heroes are masculine. It certainly doesn’t mean that. But in a sense it does because you have to ask about the culture. The culture is represented as the great father. We tend to think that we have a patriarchal culture in the west. We’ve talked about individual stories. There are some very important developmental differences between boys and girls. I think maybe in the 70s and 80s we weren’t willing to investigate. But now maybe we are in the field of psychology. One of those is that boys have to leave their mothers. Girls do not. A lot of the themes of the course in terms of your nephew, his terrifying dreams of having to go out on his own. And the hero having to leave and having to kill his mother. All of these themes seem to be very tied into this masculine experience of having to leave one’s mother. For example, in a lot of monkey colonies, the young males don’t have to leave. Elephants too. But girls don’t have to leave. They have a very different developmental perspective. It doesn’t mean that girls get along with their mothers. It just means that you never expected to make that break the same way the boys are. You never put in that same position. It’s also the case that boys’ initiation rituals tend to be much more violent and dramatic than those of girls. And I think it is very much for this reason. Because there’s a break that, there’s a more severe break that necessarily has to be made. This has really profound implications for the constructions of ideals too. Because it seems to me, this is my own personal opinion of course, but it seems to me that the feminist movement, especially in the 60s and the 70s, has missed the boat in some regards by presuming that the male pattern of development and the construction of the patriarchal society necessarily constitute an ideal form of behavior and one that women would do well to emulate. I mean you can say that separately from saying, from, from, you can say that separately from… What should they ever do though? Well, I’m not so sure about that. Maybe some. Okay, I mean this is an issue obviously that there’s all sorts of area for debate. But that’s my general impression. So, anyways, it is an absolutely useful, useful topic. And I don’t know how to address it from… One of the things that’s interesting with regards to this though is that, it’s not so much the case in this class, but most of Jung’s students were women. And the appeal of his writing has generally been to women. Now, I don’t know why that is exactly. I think that’s because more it relates to the unknown and more abstract information. And I think that has to do a lot with like the historical moment. I think that women and men experience their historical moment, like adolescent formation and identity in such different ways, like due to a large part that, you know, men are just yanked away from their mothers as boys and then they have to go through this initiatory rite and then they see women no longer as mother, but as, you know, mate for reproduction to marry and perpetuate society in order, whatever. So the point being is that not only do they have very different experiences, so that like the feminist movement, you know, you can’t parallel like the woman’s experience to a man’s experience, so that like the way Jung interprets, you know, life is just, it’s more effective, you know, to a woman because, you know, he deals with, women are socialized in much different ways and he deals with, you know, issues relating much more to a woman as a woman does where history is like, you know, historically dominated by men and man creates history. So what do you think it is about his writings that make them in particular more attractive to women? I mean, they’re so interesting. I mean, they’re just fascinating because I think it’s just, because it’s more, I don’t know, maybe, you know, your soul or, you know, it’s just, it’s not really something you can, you know, articulate very well, but I guess just his references to… Well, Jung believed that the idea of how things were connected was more intrinsically attractive to women than the idea of how things are different and that masculine consciousness has a discriminative quality which cuts things into pieces and I think that might be, I think that might be true. Yeah, because males are more bilaterally split in their hemisphere. Well, I mean, I don’t know… Or the idea that that represents. I mean, I know that’s not, that’s somewhat speculative in terms of physiology, but the idea of the strength of the masculine identity with the semantic system. Well, that’s a possibility. I mean, if I was going to speculate in that direction, that’s probably the path down which I would go. That’s also his manner. What’s that, smaller? Yeah, I think that’s the case. Okay, one other thing. I just want to pop some ideas out with relationship to this before we close out the class because I really want you to think about this because this is important. Look, you know, if you’re searching for information about how to behave, well, that’s a search for wisdom. And the question that sort of underlies the search for wisdom is an eternal philosophical question. And the question is, what is the good? And I try to make something of this in this manuscript because I think that posing the question in that way has caused us a lot of trouble. Now, I would say that, like, if you’re here, okay, so mum’s gone, you know, you’re not a child anymore, and she can’t solve your problems anymore, and that has, that’s just the way it is. You’re too big. So then you’re here in this chaotic intermediary position, and someone comes along, and this is what initiation rituals do. They tear the boys away, and the women all cry because the boys are gone, and when they come back they’re going to be men, and that’s the truth. So when they cry, they mean it. The boys are taken away from their mother, and they’re terrified half to death, which is basically what happens to Marines when they put through boot camp, and they’re for precisely the same reasons. It’s like, you’re no longer a child. We’ll put you through the wringer. Your old identity is no good. It has to be killed. We’ll kill it because it’s better that it dies now than that it hangs around for like 20 years torturing you, which is what it would do otherwise. So we’ll just scare the hell out of you and put you in a very suggestible state, and what would a suggestible state be? Well, I would say, I’m going to strip away all your past beliefs and put you in a situation you’ve never been in before, which is to say, you’ve always been afraid of the dark, but mum was always there. So what I’m going to do is find the darkest and most frightening place that I can possibly imagine, and I’m going to put you in it. And that’s what people do in initiation ceremonies. It’s like, here’s a cave. You don’t know what the hell’s in it. Maybe there’s a monster. In fact, there is one that your imagination has put there, and it’s the worst monster you can think of. That’s where you’re going. So we’re going to put you in there until you discover that although you feel that you’re going to go crazy, you won’t. That’s your heightened state of suggestibility is, I’m in a place where nothing makes sense, including me, because I’ve never felt like this before. What do I want? I want an answer. Well, that’s when inculturation occurs. It’s like, you’re no longer a child. Here’s the mysteries of the tribe. That’s your new story. That’s brainwashing. That’s a brainwashing procedure. So you’re all chaotic. You want a new story, including one that will cover everything you’ve just experienced. Someone comes along and hands it to you on a silver plate. You take it in. That’s your inculturation. So now you’re an adult, and you’re a standard bearer of the community. So you could say, well, the question here is, being a child is no longer an answer to your problem. So the next problem is, what is the good? And that’s conceived of as a concrete question. What is the good? And the answer is, our culture. That’s where the human beings live. And many cultures, the word many cultures use for the members of that culture is the word that’s the equivalent to human, which is that if you’re from this culture, you’re human. If you’re from another culture, well, whatever you are isn’t human. I mean, it’s something that sort of looks like human, but partakes more of the domain of novelty than of the domain of the encountered. So a given culture is a specific answer to the general question, what is the good? And it’s the question that’s answered when you make the transition from childhood to adolescence. But we know that an answer to the question, what is the good, is troublesome. Say in the Old Testament, for example, it says, shouldn’t make an idol out of God. No graven images. Why is that? Because you shouldn’t confuse the abstract thing with the concrete thing. And the problem with the question, what is the good, which is a question that Western philosophy has been trying to address for 4000 years, is that it presumes that there’s an answer to a question like that, which is to say that in the way the question is phrased, there’s an assumption that it can be answered in that form. And I would say that when you adopt a group identity, that’s what you’ve answered. But there’s a better question. And it’s the question that you answer when you make it to the next step. So you say, chaos, group identification. Bang, that’s your solution. What is the good? Well, here’s a whole bunch of rules. Those are concrete representations of how you should behave and what constitutes good and evil from a particular perspective. But then there’s another question that might rear its ugly head later, which is a much more profound question. And that is the question, what is the nature of the process by which answers to the question, what is the good, are formulated? It’s a meta question. It says not what’s the answer to the question, but what’s the nature of the procedure that you engage in when you’re answering the question. Which you really have to know, because the question, what is the good, shifts with environmental circumstance, which is to say that what’s good for you one day is not necessarily good for you the next day, or what’s good for your culture now might do it in in a hundred years. So if you answer the question, what is the good, with an answer, then you’ve already made an error, because the answer presupposes that there is a permanent answer to that question, and that’s wrong. So I would say that when you get to this level of analysis, which is the next stage beyond your cultural identification, what you’re looking for is a description of the process that leads you to be able to answer questions of the sort, what is the good, when you have to, and to update them constantly. And so I would say that what you identify with when you move from here is the process by which these structures are actually generated. So it’s the process that erects stories itself, and that gives you all the wisdom that you already have as a consequence of your cultural identification, with the additional knowledge that you’re also the one that builds the stories. And that’s where your central point of identification can be. So then if you say you’re involved in settling a dispute between people from two different cultural positions, and the thing is you know that person A and person B are both exemplary representatives of their particular culture, but they’re at odds with one another. So then the question then is, well, what constitutes common ground? Because you need a position. Remember we were wondering what’s the issue? Here’s one story, here’s another. They’re not the same as a consequence. Trouble is breaking out. But we don’t know what… we’ve got to maneuver out here where there are no rules. Because neither side accepts the rules on the other side. So then the question is, well, what are the rules that allow you to maneuver when you’re outside the place that there are rules? And I would say, well, I would hope that I could appeal to you on a general basis, as someone who’s not only an exemplar of the culture as specified territory, but an exemplar of those members of the culture who had enough courage to construct the culture to begin with. And that’s the place where we hope to operate. And then I would also hope to be able to say to you that your culture differs from my culture, but where they’re the same is that they were both erected by people who had enough courage to erect them. And so if you really want to identify with your culture, then you stop identifying with the rules, and you start identifying with the process. And also, to the degree that you only identify with the rules, you stop yourself from identifying with the process. The problem is most people are not those courageous people. Well, I think partly it’s a problem of conceptualization, is that until you can perceive the possibility. Look, if you want to stop kids, for example, from forming gangs, and from proceeding morally within the gang, but immorally with regards to the rest of the world, I don’t think that saying to them, well, the way that you construct your gang is inappropriate. It’s going to work, because they need the gangs. And what you might be able to say is, well, what you think what you’re doing is the most courageous thing that can be done. Because a lot of gang activity, for example, is quite dangerous. But then you say, well, it’s not. Because there’s a whole other realm of courage that’s outside of the domain that you’ve considered that’s much more difficult. And if you were a real human being, so to speak, that’s what you’d do. Because if you want to offer someone an option and have them take it, I think you have to offer them something that’s more difficult. That’s the moral equivalent of war, to quote David’s building. That’s right, the moral equivalent of war. Absolutely. Something that’s just as exciting and just as dangerous, but where the territory is different. But the problem is war is something procedural, and therefore it’s easy to grasp as an alternative. Whereas this is something that’s rare.