For more than a decade James Hillman has been my favorite writer and most influential teacher. I discovered him in 1996 when The Soul's Code was published, which I devoured, or perhaps more rightly stated, which devoured me. My ideational world was turned inside out. From The Soul's Code I went on to read Hillman's opus, Re-Visioning Psychology. It is no exaggeration to say that the Ideas from this Pulitzer Prize nominated book changed practically everything about the way I viewed psyche, religion, myself, others and the larger world--specifically through the four main chapters titled Personifying, Pathologizing, Psychologizing, and Dehumanizing, which the author describes as "four ideas necessary for the soul-making process" (ix). His view of pathologizing was especially revolutionary, helping me to make room for emotional suffering and psychic fragmentation in a culture obsessed with chronic emotional well being and wholeness. In short, I am a devotee of Hillman's work. However, over time I have become troubled by some of Hillman's postmodernist and Romantic predispositions and their implications for psychology and socio-cultural ethics. I want to stress the word "some" when I say I am troubled by Hillman's work since I also feel that his radical correctives are extraordinarily necessary. That being acknowledged, James Hillman's methodological approach is heavily slanted in a modernist/postmodernist direction, which Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker describes:
James Hillman
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| Steven Pinker |
Beginning in the 1970s, the mission of modernism to afflict the culturally secure and comfortable] was extended by the set of styles and philosophies called postmodernism. Postmodernism was even more aggressively relativistic, insisting that there are many perspectives on the world, none of them privileged. It denied even more vehemently the possibility of meaning, knowledge, progress, and shared cultural values. It was more Marxist and far more paranoid, asserting that claims to truth and progress were tactics of political dominion which privileged the interests of straight white males. According to the doctrine, mass-produced commodities and media-disseminated images and stories were designed to make authentic experience impossible. (Blank 411)
Hillman
clearly sets out to afflict the culturally comfortable and psychologically
secure, approaching the soul by utilizing the postmodern procedures of
relativistic fantasies and labyrinthine meanderings--minimizing psychological
universals, fixed meanings and any kind of preordained psycho-social linear
development.
Hillman is also a self-confessed
purveyor of Romantic assumptions. Romanticism
is an 18th century philosophical movement affecting literature and art, marked
by an emphasis on the imagination, emotions and poetry, often very personal and
with a penchant for emphasizing suffering. Hillman
admits that his adopted term, soul-making,
"...comes from the Romantic poets...William Blake...[and]...John
Keats," and that we must return to their way of thinking, allowing
"the [Romantic] Gods" of "Blake, Keats, Shelley...to govern our
thinking..." (7).
I will critique Hillman's
postmodernist Romantic methodology by looking at what he calls the
Enlightenment fallacies of literalizing, moralizing and naturalizing. I will
refer primarily to his book Re-Visioning
Psychology. Hillman identifies his methodological approach by calling
himself a member of the "mafia of the metaphor to protect plain men from literalism," (149
italics mine). Notice that Hillman mentions his concern for the "plain
man," which according to the Online
Merriam-Webster Dictionary is a distinguishing trait of Romanticism: "an exaltation of the primitive and the
common man" (Merriam-Webster). He also approvingly quotes Norman
Brown: "The thing to be abolished is literalism...the worship of false
images; idolatry...Truth is always in poetic form; not literal but symbolic;
hiding, or veiled; light in darkness...the alternative to literalism is
mystery" (149). Here we clearly see his mission to protect plain men from
literalism--to deliver the emotionally distraught and psychologically maltreated,
and misdiagnosed, from classical authoritarian elitist psychological systems which
adhere to the doctrinaire letter of the therapeutic law. Hillman lays the
responsibility for this literalist fallacy primarily on the Reformation in
Northern Europe and the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation and Cartesian
Enlightenment:
...from a tradition that has progressively depotentiated both images and words in order to maintain a particular vision of man, reason, and reality...The push toward progress has left corpses in its wake...Roundhead minds were more concrete than the stones they smashed...[acting out] the new literalism that was losing touch with metaphorical imagination. (10-11)
Hillman uses
the pejorative term "Roundhead"
to refer to the supporters of the Parliament against the Monarchy during the English
Civil War. This included many of the Puritans who
wore their hair closely clipped round the head, providing an obvious
distinction between them and the men of courtly fashion with their long ringlets. These Puritans and other
literalizers, in Hillmanian parlance, were those who opposed images, the veneration
of the Saints and the mystery of personification via imagination in favor of a
strict monotheistic factual adherence to holy Scripture or pure reason.
This is Hillman's revolution. He
wants to restore psyche as imagination--to return to soul as that which
provides access to perpetual mysteries which cannot be frozen in facts or
systems. He seeks to re-vision Psyche as always shifting with no fixed location
or absolute perspective. In fact he describes[i] soul as:
...a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective, it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground...[soul] refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences...the imaginative possibility in our natures...that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical. ( x, bold italics mine)
From this
description of soul/psyche we see Hillman's predilection for the Romantic geist which emphasizes deep personal
emotions and autobiographical experiences over that which is traditional and
authoritative. Hillman roots psyche in the emotionally charged archetypal
realm, the sphere of the vibrant Gods, of the "little people" in the
depths Who exist prior to the human's being. This view of a vacillating psyche
neither freezes the perspectival frame nor solidly frames an experience since
"all realities" are symbolic rather than literal, fluid rather than
fixed. This approach is similar to Martin Heidegger who begins his
philosophizing methodology with the human as Dasein,[ii]
or simply being-in-the-world. Dasein refers to the human not so much as "the thing
that thinks," but as the "thing that is thought," and then
thinks. In such a view, the horizon is always open and opening--solid facts and
systems are dead and stifling.
Robert Avens book, The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman and
Angels, artfully explicates the procedural relationship between James
Hillman's archetypal psychology and Heidegger's philosophy of Being, making it clear that neither man
supports objective or factual Truth. Rudiger Safransky, arguably Heidegger's
best biographer writes of Heidegger's methodology, which captures Hillman's as
well:
Near the end of his life, Arthur Schopenhauer once said, 'Mankind has learned a few things from me that it will never forget.' No such statement is known of Heidegger. He did not create any constructive philosophy in the sense of a world picture or moral doctrine. There are no 'results' of Heidegger's thinking, in the sense that there are 'results' of the philosophy of Leibniz, Kant or Schopenhauer. Heidegger's passion was for questioning, not answering. Questions appeared to him as 'piety of thinking,' because it opened up new horizons...where man experiences himself as a location where something gapes open. (429)
Similarly
Hillman concludes Re-Visioning Psychology
by writing: "Though this has been a groundwork of irreplaceable insights,
they are to be taken neither as a foundation for a systematic theory nor even
as a prolegomenon for any future archetypal psychology" (229). Both
Hillman and Heidegger denied that they were constructing systems, neither
philosophical nor psychological. Heidegger never spoke of "a"
philosophy, but of philosophizing (What 65), and Hillman never spoke of "a" psychology but
of psychologizing (113). Heidegger called his philosophical
method a "talking through" (67) while Hillman called his
psychological procedure a "seeing through" (113). For Hillman all
exercises in literalizing or systematizing are fallacious attempts to freeze
the eternal mystery into solid facts--facts which stifle and suffocate soul.
For Hillman, even literalisms and facts are reduced to non-factual mysteries:
Literalism is itself one kind of mystery: an idol that forgets it is an image and believes itself a God, taking itself metaphysically, seriously, damned to fulfill its task of coagulating the many into singleness of meaning which we call facts, data, problems, realities. The function of this idol--call it ego or literalism--is to keep banality before our eyes, so that we remember to see through, so that mystery becomes possible. Unless things coagulate there is no need for insight. The metaphorical function of the psyche depends on the ever-present literalist within each of us. (150)
With Hillman
there are no literal ideas or solid facts. As a methodological reductionist he
shrinks all literalisms to just another part of the psychic mystery and demotes
facts to nothing but coagulated ideas perpetrated by the misinformed ego. All
ego-generated facts are false
Gods--idols which simply serve to remind us that everything is fluid and ever
shifting.
Let me state clearly that I generally
agree with Hillman's critique of western literalism and absolutism, however, he
goes too far. While his perspective is a welcome corrective to the many
reductionist philosophical, religious and psychological systems smugly
asserting unassailable ideologies, he tends to reduce everything too simply to
"only" mystery and Romantic emotionalism. Without apology Hillman strives to deflate, deconstruct and dethrone the
heroic human ego which he feels has
usurped the archetypal dynamism of the Gods. Yet by being so one-sided in his
campaign to move away from any form of literalism, morality and facts, he seems
at times to literalize deliteralization, to absolutize relativity and to
construct a deconstructionist "non-system" of Psychologizing, getting himself into a paradoxical pickle. Novelist Walker Percy quipped, "a deconstructionist
is an academic who claims that texts have no referents and then leaves a
message on his wife's answering machine asking her to order a pepperoni pizza
for dinner" (Blank 209). While it may be true that humans cannot live by
bread (or pizza) alone, it is just as true that humans are not able to live on
a strictly liquid diet of capricious ideas alone. By moving too quickly and too
dogmatically from the possibility of literal facts and ethical rudiments, one
runs the risk of becoming practically meaningless--leaving the plain man with
neither a compass nor rudder on his psychological boat.
Hillman tends toward a kind of
neo-gnosticism, as Avens' book The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman and
Angels
suggests, by reducing psyche solely to some sort of mysterious
non-physicality--something like the proto-physical prakriti in the Hindu Sankhaya philosophy. Hillman runs the same
risk, as do all gnostical systems, of devaluing matter by positing psyche as
not only the matrix from which realities emerge, but the amorphous essence as
well. His emphasis on psyche as invisible, unstable and relative makes it
difficult to function in this solid world where Newton and Descartes still have
seats at the methodological table. A reality ultimately comprised of psychic
fiction[iii] and
ethereal images comes close to elevating the anima over the mundi,
diminishing the human capacity to get hold of something solid. Steven Pinker
takes on this postmodernist tendency to reduce reality to representation, or to
what many postmodernists call a "crisis of representation". Pinker
points out that the Concise Glossary of
Cultural Theory emphasizes the primacy of images in postmodernism and
cultural studies:
Reality is seen rather as always subject to, or as the product of, modes of representation. In this view we inescapably inhabit a world of images or representations and not a 'real world' and true or false images of it...In a further move...we are thought to exist in a world of HYPERREALITY, in which images are self-generating and entirely detached from any supposed reality. This accords with a common view of contemporary entertainment and politics as being all a matter of 'image,' or appearance, rather than of substantial content. (Blank 213-14)
This
pretty much describes Hillman's position on the imaginal realm, a hyperreality
that never firmly plants itself in the literal materia mundi. Recall what Hillman said about literalism and
reality: "Literalism
is...damned to fulfill its task of coagulating the many into singleness of
meaning which we call facts, data, problems, realities" (150 bold
italics mine). For Hillman there are no literal facts or realities in Psyche. Pinker's critique of imagination as a hyperreality, and even
hierarchical reality, appears to be applicable to Hillman:
Actually, the doctrine of hyperreality contradicts the common view of contemporary politics and entertainment as being a matter of image and appearance. The whole point of the common view is that there is a reality separate from images, and that is what allows us to decry the images that are misleading. We can, for example, criticize an old movie that shows slaves leading happy lives, or an ad that shows a corrupt politician pretending to defend the environment. If there was no such thing as substantial content, we would have no basis for preferring an accurate documentary about slavery to an apologia for it, or preferring a good expose' of a politician to a slick campaign ad. (214 second set of italics mine)
I'm not sure
whether Pinker intended the phrase "matter of image" as a play on words, but it is apropos. A
methodological attitude that does not place as much ontological significance
and value on matter as on image implicitly devalues the world of matter,
accurate information and factual truth. This does not mean that facts and
matter ought to trump images and become an alternative hyperreality, but that
there can be true and false images which correspond with true or false factual
manifestations. This is the same debate that went on in the early Christian theological
deliberations regarding the nature of Christ as divine fantasy and/or human
flesh--what came to be known as the Gnostic vs. Orthodoxy conflict. A similar
discussion is currently going on in the world of quantum physics around the
question of whether light is comprised of waves or particles or both?[iv] While I am sympathetic
with Hillman's methodological emphasis on image, fantasy and imagination, I
believe he often devalues the substantiation of the invisibles. It might be
argued that he tacitly creates a kind of Cartesian split, which he abhors,
between psychic and material (factual) realities.
An unintended consequence of this postmodern
Romantic relativism may be that it actually prepares people to become
vulnerable to utopian political and religious fantasies based on an asymmetrical
and ungrounded view of human nature
and worldly reality. If all is flux and fantasy and there are no solid
standards of any kind, then the preacher or politician with the most
emotionally appealing fantasy finds easy recruits for his/her great new society
of imagination--a virtual reality with no substantial truth.[v] Some of
Heidegger's critics point to this methodological and epistemological Romantic
relativism as the reason Heidegger was so easily recruited into Hitler's early
Nazi socialist utopian vision. John
Lennon's song, "Imagine," serves as an example. While it provides an
emotionally satisfying image of some utopian future, is it grounded in the
actual condition of the current cosmos? This is Pinker's incessant critique of
the postmodernist attitude--a propensity to "wish it so" and to make those
fantasies the foundation of some magical, even multicultural, future. Is not
soul-making better served by facing the hard actualities of the world rather
than resorting to an escapist fantasy realm? The path seems to lie somewhere
between imaginal fantasy and factual reality.
Hillman's methodological disdain for
anything solid and permanent causes him to exhibit a disdain for the pragmatic
and moralistic use of myths:
Despite their graphic description of action and detail, myths resist being interpreted into practical life. They are not allegories of applied psychology, solutions to personal problems. This is the old moralistic fallacy about them, now become the therapeutic fallacy, telling us which step to take and what to do next, where the hero went wrong and had to pay the consequences, as if this practical guidance were what is meant by 'living one's myth'"...to try to use a myth practically keeps us still in the pattern of the heroic ego, learning how to do his deeds correctly. (158)
Hillman's
point that we need to keep the hermeneutical options open is well
taken--however, humans are "in fact" limited by and to space, time,
matter, culture and their "heroic egos," requiring at least
provisionally solid solutions and practical guidance for a given situation.
Jung made it clear that he counseled two kinds of people: those who needed
solid factual steps to resolve a pressing problem, and those who were in touch
with the Collective Unconscious and capable of dialoguing with the imaginal
realm. Not everyone is adept at "psychologizing".
It would seem that a truly polytheistic methodology could make room for the
literalists among us. The fact is that many if not most polytheists view their
deities as literally existing in some way.[vi] Hillman places much of
the blame for literalism on monotheism. He critiques Kant's "categorical
monotheistic mind" (157), but we need to recognize that such a mind is as
much a part of the human psyche as are the erratic polytheistic Gods of
"Orphic and Neoplatonic mythology" (147).
And while we are on the topic of
Platonist ideas, I find it a bit ironic that Hillman spends so much time
touting the procedural ideas of Plato and Plotinus without a discussion of how
their polytheistic archetypal forms were based on a kind of actual metaphysical
if not factual Absolutism, found in Plato's middle and later writings. Such an
argument is seen in the Euthyphro where Socrates and his opponent
agree that the eternal Truths, pietas
in this case, precede and supersede the wills of the gods. In other words,
virtues like Piety, Justice, Beauty, Truth, Love and so forth were not dependent
on the fickle gods--Hillman's archetypes--but that even the deities are
subservient to some sort of absolute, quasi monotheistic Being called The Good, Beauty, etc.. This Platonic monotheistic
realm of Absolutes allowed Philo the Alexandrian Jew, the early Christian
theologians (especially Augustine) and later Islamic scholars to sympathize
with if not outright borrow so heavily from Plato and Plotinus for their
monotheistic notions of absolute virtues, as well as posit a universal basis
for an unchanging moral code. Even during Homer's pre-Platonic period, the
Goddess Themis was understood to
reign not only over the proper relations between all humans, but was viewed as
the basis for order upon Mount Olympus as well: "Even Hera addressed her as 'Lady Themis'...The sword [Themis often
held] is also believed to represent the ability Themis had [of] cutting fact
from fiction, to her there was no middle ground" (Themis). This idea of a foundational,
factual moral base is also found in ancient Hindu and Egyptian cultures which
subordinated all of the divine and human rulers to Maat (Egyptian) and Rta
(Hindu)--the Goddesses of law and order, truth and justice. These examples
point to some sort of absolute notion of "rightness" in the world.
These ancients seemed to defend the idea of fixed standards[vii] for the human psyche,
for Nature and for political society. So you see, while I appreciate Hillman's postmodernist
methodological course correction, I am compelled to call for a balance which
allows room for the actual existence of absolutes and standards as more than
literalist stooges located in the heroic ego--nothing more than some part of
the ethereal mystery.[viii]
Hillman's post-modernity also brings into question the human
attempt to interpret dreams factually and practically. He once again splits
nature and imagination by referring to what he calls the "Naturalistic
Fallacy":
...nature cannot be the guide for comprehending soul. To understand dreams in terms of their likeness to nature simplifies both nature on the one hand and the spiritual and psychic meaning of dreams on the other, by finding analogies for what is presented in dream images only in the realm of nature...[for example]...a blighted tree in the mind must be compared with...blighted trees in the realms of psyche and spirit...Naturalism soon declines into materialism...[insisting]...that material reality is first and psychic reality must conform with it: psyche must obey the laws of physis and imagination follow perception...the fundamental fact that the events of imagination do not occur in empirical nature. (Re-Vis. 84-85)
Hillman very
rigidly declares that "nature cannot
be the guide for comprehending soul," and that "the events of
imagination do not occur in empirical
nature". First, I am very sympathetic with this view, and do believe we
are not limited to a naturalistic approach to psyche and dreams. Thus, I am not
completely disagreeing with Hillman, but simply stating that he is far too dogmatic
in his deconstruction of the relationship of the dreaming psyche to nature and
actual daily life. Since the beginning of recorded history humans have
interpreted their night dreams as providing clear and natural images that
correspond to their day lives. In the Hebrew Bible Joseph interprets his own
dreams as well as the dreams of a baker, a cup-bearer and a Pharaoh in a
naturalistic fashion--providing help for daily material existence. Catherine
Albanese in her work, A Republic of Mind
and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion, speaks of
the Algonquians, the Iroquois, the Seneca[ix], the Huron and many other
indigenous Native Nations as "dream cultures" guided by "dream
logic" whose "dreams provided guidance for daytime matters"
(105). Albanese cites Jesuit missionaries and European settlers reporting that
the earliest African-Americans frequently consulted their dreams as sources of
instruction for guidance in the material world (88, 238). Jung's dreams gave
him unceasing instruction through clear symbolic correspondences between psyche
and nature. I reject Hillman's reductionist methodology which too strictly
separates psychic dreams from any possibility of natural correspondences.
Let me conclude by qualifying all
that I have said--Hillman is a slippery fish. His relationship to Henri Corbin
demonstrates that he can allow room for spirit and metaphysics, although at
times it feels more like a begrudging acceptance or circus juggling act. He
does this by resorting to a kind of sleight of hand Cartesian split between spirit and soul in Re-Visioning
Psychology (67-70). Corbin scholar Tom Cheetham underscores Hillman's
balancing act in The World Turned Inside
Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism, explaining how Hillman's
psychological relativity might be reconciled with Corbin's Sufi-based
metaphysical spiritual psychology. At one point Hillman resorts to calling his
archetypal notion of pathologizing "an
operational mode" rather than an ontology with reference to Corbin's pure
light realm of the mundus imaginalis
(Cheetham 80-81). Hillman clearly creates a nook in his postmodernist approach
for Corbin's metaphysical certainty. This, and many other examples, make it
clear that Hillman is not a consistent postmodernist.
So then, in this critique I am not
arguing that I find Hillman wrong as much as I find him imbalanced. I am mildly
disagreeing with his tendency toward reductionist relativism. In his crusade
"to save the phenomena of the imaginal psyche," (3) Hillman sets out
to "free the vision of the psyche from the narrow biases of modern
psychology, enabling the psyche to perceive itself--its relations, its
realities, its pathologies--altogether apart from psychology's modern
perspective" (3). He believes that the domains of psychology,
psychopathology, science and metaphysics have "fixed the methods in all
these fields so that they present a unified front against soul" (3). The
phrase "fixed the methods," provides us with a very telling clue from
the pen of James Hillman. His methodology wants to unfix the fixed, and he does
it well. However, Hillman's methodological relativity does not do justice to
the other, more "fixed" realities, of human existence. One may posit
a realm of archetypal relativity and a world of facts and truths. The
contemporary postmodern perspective forces many in the
academic community to shudder at such a prospect, but that shudder may reveal a
desire to avoid taking a stance and defending an idea as being true and
substantial--unless of course one is conversing in the privacy of his/her
ideological clique, or ordering a pizza.
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposes
a sort of solution to this conundrum between factual law and total relativity
by suggesting that we speak of "habits of nature" (Sheldrake) rather
than the laws of nature. This way we can see the ever evolving flux and form of
nature (and psyche), recognizing both the metaphorical and poetic as well as
the provisional periods of "factual" literalisms needed to have laws
and solid forms as we navigate the world of science and the practical events in
the "Vale of Soulmaking".
Hillman
knows what he is doing and what his methodology is, but I don't think he actually cares that he is a postmodern
Romantic reductionist--after all he is a proud member of the "mafia of the metaphor to protect plain
men from literalism". Mafia members know they are breaking the
law--they just don't give a damn. Hillman is fully aware that he is a Romantic
reductionist and employs his deconstructionist methodology by intentional
design. He believes that the past 2,000 years of Western culture and psychology
have neglected images and the imagination:
...psychology has been obsessed by one overvalued idea; man...[we have been] looking at soul in the ego's mirror, never seeing psyche, always seeing man...monotheistic Reformational man, enemy of images. But to move toward a renaissance, psychology would have to abandon one of its most tenacious Reformational convictions. It would have to move from concern with the moral to a concern for the imaginal; the image before the judgment, the imagination before the human, Psyche before Prometheus and Hercules, before Moses, before Christ...We have not yet witnessed a psychology of the depths elaborated from the other side of the mountains, from the imagination of Hellenism, Renaissance Neoplatonism, and polytheism. (Re-Vis. 223)
In his concluding remarks in Re-Visioning Psychology Hillman writes
with a whimsical smirk: "...all that is written in the foregoing pages is
confessed to with passionate conviction, to be defended as articles of faith,
and at the same time disavowed, broken, and left behind. By holding to nothing,
nothing holds back the movement of soul-making from its ongoing process"
(229). It seems to me
that Hillman is first and foremost a Trickster, and in that regard,
postmodernism is neither that "post" nor "modern," but an
ancient form of afflicting the culturally secure and comfortable. Bravo Dr.
Hillman--just allow me a few facts.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Postscript: I recently found this comment by Ravi Zacharias which
shows the ultimate failure of an exclusively postmodern perspective: "An utterly fascinating illustration of this
duping of ourselves is the latest arts building opened at Ohio State
University, the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts, another one of our
chimerical exploits in the name of intellectual advance. Newsweek branded this
building "America's first deconstructionist building." It's white
scaffolding, red brick turrets, and Colorado grass pods evoke a double take.
But puzzlement only intensifies when you enter the building, for inside you
encounter stairways that go nowhere, pillars that hang from the ceiling without
purpose, and angled surfaces configured to create a sense of vertigo. The
architect, we are duly informed, designed this building to reflect life
itself-senseless and incoherent-and the "capriciousness of the rules that
organize the built world." When the rationale was explained to me, I had
just one question: Did he do the same with the foundation? The laughter in
response to my question unmasked the double standard our deconstructionists
espouse. And that is precisely the double standard of atheism! It is possible
to dress up and romanticize our bizarre experiments in social restructuring
while disavowing truth or absolutes. But one dares not play such deadly games
with the foundations of good thinking." For citation: Click here.
[i] Hillman does not
"define" soul, but "describes" it "by set[ting] down a
few fence-poles to begin with" (Re-Vis. x).
[ii] For Heidegger, the human subject had to be reconceived
in an altogether new way, as “being-in-the-world.” Because this notion
represented the very opposite of the Cartesian “thing that thinks,” the idea of
consciousness as representing the mind’s internal awareness of its own states
had to be dropped.
[iii] Christine Downing
said in our Jewish traditions class that she once told Hillman he was a monotheistic
polytheist.
[iv] This was also a point
of contention between Platonists and Aristotelians. Radical Platonists viewed
the realm of Ideas as free from material impurities while those favoring
Aristotle advocated a closer relationship between the Forms and Nature.
[v] John Lennon's song,
"Imagine," serves as an example. While it provides an emotionally
satisfying image of some utopian future, is it grounded in the actual condition
of the current cosmos? This is Pinker's incessant critique of the postmodernist
attitude--a propensity to "wish it so" and make that the foundation
for some magical future--Freud's chimerical neuroses. Is not soul-making better
served by facing the hard actualities of the world rather than resorting to an
escapist fantasy realm? The path seems to lie somewhere between.
[vi] Religious scholars
point out that taking myths and religions as literal and factual are the norm.
Clifford Geertz says that religion is "…a system of symbols which acts to
establish...moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a
general order of existence and clothing
these conceptions with such an aura of factuality
that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic" . According
to the Encyclopedia Britannica article
on myth: “Every myth presents
itself as an authoritative, factual account,
no matter how much the narrated events are at variance with natural law or ordinary
experience"[vi]
(Britannica Online). These descriptions recognize that myth and religion
require a period of factual and literal psychological identity with a group
before one can evolve to the metaphorical.
[vii] Steven Pinker the
secular Harvard psychologist also addresses the facticity of fixed
psychological norms from a strictly materialist point of view in his critique
of modernism and postmodernism, specifically with reference to the existence of
a universal standard of beauty: "Once we recognize what modernism and
postmodernism have done to the elite arts and humanities, the reasons for their
decline and fall become all too obvious. The movements are based on a false
theory of human psychology, the Blank Slate...Human nature did not change in
1910,[vii] or in any year
thereafter...Art is in our nature--in the blood and the bone, as people used to
say; in the brain and in the genes...In all societies people dance, sing,
decorate surfaces, and tell and act out stories...art
is deeply rooted in our mental faculties...Regardless of what lies behind our
instincts for art, those instincts bestow it with a transcendence of time,
place, and culture...Though people can argue about whether the glass is half
full or half empty, a universal human aesthetic really can be discerned beneath
the variation across cultures" (The Blank Slate 404-411). In chapters 15,
"The Sanctimonious Animal,' Pinker addresses the existence of universal
moral standards, albeit slippery at times, but nevertheless existent. Pinker
cites a growing movement, even a revolution in the arts, against postmodernism.
Graduate students are speaking out, critical of Foucault, Derrida, Butler and
other postmodernist authors, in spite of the fact that critics are calling
these students "a bunch of crypto-Nazi conservative bullshitters"
(416-17). Karen Wynn Professor of Psychology and Cognitive
Science at Yale
University
has recently shaken the worlds of psychology, sociology and ethical studies
with her work on 6- and 10-month old infants. Wynn has investigated early
social preferences and judgments, demonstrating the ability of babies to
distinguish helpful from unhelpful characters in simple interactions enacted by
hand puppets. Over 80% of the time, infants
prefer the good helpful characters to the hinderers. On her web site
Wynn states as one of her research interests: "We are exploring the
origins and development, in infants, toddlers and preschoolers, of moral
concepts such as 'good' and 'bad.' What are the conditions that influence
infants and young children to judge certain acts and individuals as good or
right, others as bad or wrong?" (Wynn). Her husband and collaborator, Paul Bloom says:" What we're finding in the
baby lab, is that...there's a universal moral core that all humans share. The
seeds of our understanding of justice, our understanding of right and wrong,
are part of our biological nature. The results make it clear to Wynn and
her colleagues that children have an innate, structural awareness of good and
bad" (60 Minutes). Bioethics philosopher Peter Singer wrote that these
studies “have upset the previous wisdom, associated with such stellar figures
in psychology as Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, and Lawrence Kohlberg, that human moral
development is the product of our rearing and our culture" (188). Pinker's
and Wynn's work support what Levy-Strauss discovered--the human brain is
comprised of innate structures or categories which give rise to similar stories
cross-culturally. Neuro-scientists like Newberg draw similar conclusions from
their S.P.E.C.T. scans of the human brain. If, as Hillman says, the soul has an
autonomous ability to pathologize (57), why not an autonomous ability to make
beauty and establish facts?
[viii] The Greek word
musterion is most often used when referring to something previously hidden but
now revealed. In other words, there could be facts or laws, or habits of
nature, as well as mysteries.
[ix] Albanese includes an
account from a Roman Catholic missionary named Father Fre'men
regarding how the Seneca observed their dreams: "The people think only of
that, they talk about nothing else, and all their cabins are filled with their
dreams. They spare no pains, no industry, to show their attachment thereto, and
their folly in this particular goes to such excesses as would be hard to
imagine. He who has dreamed during the night that he was bathing, runs
immediately, as soon as he rises, all naked, to several cabins, in each of
which he has a kettleful of water thrown over his body however cold the weather
may be" (105). Father Fre'men's account gives no explanation,
but it is likely that the Seneca dreamer took the image to mean that he needed
cleansing, or to avert an imminent drowning accident.
