ARCHIVED—Threads of Thought

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Extending and deepening the horizons of psychological thinking and new philosophical ideas.

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Tomasz Lange February 28, 2011 at 2:02am

To tell you the truth, I don't know cause I haven't read it. It was just to point out that relations between Derrida and Hillman have been studied for some time now and it's extremely unlikely that Hillman himself is unaware of that.
Kent Palmer February 28, 2011 at 1:37am

Tomaz Langue--

Thank you very much for the reference. Did it support my contention of an affinity or did it come to some other conclusion?

Kent
Tomasz Lange February 27, 2011 at 10:59pm

Hi Kent, as far as discovering connections between Derrida and Hillman you might want to check this:
Adams, Michael Vannoy(1992)." Deconstructive Philosphy and Imaginal Psychology: Comparative Perspectives on Jacques Derrida and James Hillman." In Jungian Literary Criticism, R.P. Sugg (Ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
It's worth mentioning that the source has been included in the bibliography compiled by Thomas Cheetham for Hillman's "Archetypal Psychology"
(2004).
steve wood February 27, 2011 at 10:52pm

Dear Kent,

interesting thoughts. Ed Casey's thinking on place have a wonderful phenomenological plasticity. I've just posted an initial piece on the discussion page titled something like thinking of Merleau-Ponty and expansion of the lived body that might interest you.
Kent Palmer February 27, 2011 at 7:45pm

Bonnie--

I like Ed Casey's work and met him once. And think his reflections on Place are profound. But you mention Heidegger, and there is an excellent book on the subject of Space in Being and Time by Dr. Alejandro Arturo Vallega called

Heidegger and the Issue of Space.l I recommend that book. But be warned there are some pages missing in the published copy and you will have to get them from the publisher if they have not come out with a new edition yet.

The thing is that I know that there is little awareness of the kinds of thing I am talking about among psychologists in general and Jungians in particular. But if you don't know that there is something interesting in other fields that impinges on your own field then there is no reason to go and look beyond psychology for insights that may exist elsewhere. So what I want to do is bring up the possibility that these other theorists might be interesting and germane to the study of Depth disciplines and to the understanding of what Depth means ultimately. And it is also a way to put what Giegerich is saying beyond our fascination with Hillman. If we realize that Hillman's brillance comes from applying an understanding of Hyper Being (Differance) to texts and that his method is essentially the same as Derrida's, but working with Jungian and mythological texts rather than philosophical or literary texts, then we can more or less understand both the insights and the limitations of that approach perhaps for the first time. And perhaps we can see that when Giegerich points us back to Hegel and uses dialectical methods to interpret myths that there is a deeper reason for that than his just beng a Hegelian. See Hillman is like Nietzsche an anti-systematic in his philosophy, and Geigerich in appealing to Hegel can be accused of being a systematic in his philosophy. The dialectic for him explains everything, but for Hillman it is the unexplainable bits that are the most interesting. These are two sides of the same coin. But there is a deeper reason that we need to recognize the place of Hegel in our appreciation of depth, and it has to do with the post-modern readings of him as anti-transcendentalist. When we see Hegel as a transcendentalist as he was interpreted in Hegelianism then it is basically a continuation of Kantianism under another name. But after Nietzsche all this became suspect and anti-foundationalism (especially after Godel) became a more credible approach. Jung is reacting against this anti-foundationalist stance and trying to come up with an alternative to it. He is struggling with this problem in the Red Book. He wants to write an alternative to Thus Spake Zarathustra, probably the preeminent archetypal text that counters this anti-foundationalism. He is struggling with the nature of Christianity and sees in Gnosticism a hope for the revivalism of Christianity. Thus his reflection on Plato's forms and how the reversal of those forms into their dual as archetypes can provide an answer that Nietzsche did not perceive. In other words rather than looking for transcendentals we can look for their opposite, the opposite of ideas, which are archetypes. Now this option which Jung thought of has never really been considered in Continental Philosophy because the are caught up in Freud and Lacan. I think it is rather unfortunate because it is a solution that has a lot of promise. But if those interested in Depth disciplines are unaware of this possibility then it will never be explored.
Bonnie Bright February 27, 2011 at 5:51pm

Hi Kent! I am so grateful for your willingness to share your thoughts here in the community. I'm fascinated by each ensuing post you make, yet I have to confess its a little beyond my own training and experience to be able to engage and comment as my knowledge of philosophy is, I admit, sorely lacking. I know Depth Psychology embraces Philosophy--couldn't be complete without it, no doubt--but I just haven't lived long enough to accrue the insight I would need to respond.

I will say, though, that much of what I have learned has come from Ed Casey, President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. He is an amazing teacher, one who insisted on steeping his students in source material from the greats, and who authored one of my all-time favorite books, "Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place World". There, he speaks to my own deep inclination toward Ecopsychology and innate sensitivity to the concepts of Place, Home, Displacement, and Homelessnes and the works of Heidigger (and Gadamer to some extent) speak strongly to me in this arena.

I hope others in the group have a broader view of Philosophy that I lack and will be able to engage--(otherwise, we'll have to collaborate to set you up with a 'Philosophy Alliance' to attract others of you same merit :) ). Meanwhile, I've read your posts with relish and fancy myself learning from them. I really want ot study Derrida more, and I look forward to reading some of your work!
Kent Palmer February 27, 2011 at 3:24pm

However, since Jung himself was a Kantian but produced the inverse of the idea from Plato which is the archetype. And since his views of Hegel are shaped by Nietzsche whom he is trying to reverse. The situation becomes complex when you apply Hyper Being to Jungian Psychology, in order to get people thinking again beyond it being just a doctrine.
Kent Palmer February 27, 2011 at 3:21pm

The whole nature of Hillman's and Derrida's method in dealing with texts comes from the substantive nature of Hyper Being. Basically if you can understand Plato's third kind of being in the Timaeus one could do what they do with any textual corpus. What makes Hillman exciting is that he is doing it with the Jungian corpus to a group of people who for the most part don't even know that Derrida exists, so it looks like it comes out of nowhere this genius that Hillman possesses. To imitate Hillman or Derrida does not work, and that is where Deconstruction goes astray. What you have to do is actually think on the Hyper Being level yourself, and that is not easy, because the meta-levels of Being get narrower and harder to think as you go up the ladder of meta-levels. So it takes perseverance and practice to think at that level. And that is why deconstruction degenerated, because people tried to imitate Derrida who were not as brilliant as Hillman.
Kent Palmer February 27, 2011 at 3:02pm

Now if you look into this you will see that once we go up to the level of Hyper Being then everything looks very different. Early Derrida is so exciting because he found things in the Western tradition that showed that this very difficult to think kind of Being was always there in the Western tradition in the strange difference between attitudes toward Speech and Writing starting with Plato. He created the discipline of Grammatology and made the study of traces an important component of our understanding of things like Signs, Structures, etc. He pointed out that structures still had a unifying center and so were really only shadows of form. That critique kicked off Post-Structualism and the widespread of use and misuse of Deconsturction as a method.
Kent Palmer February 27, 2011 at 2:50pm

I have said this many times in my papers, so I won't belabor it here. But essentially Husserl came up with the difference between ideas and essences which were considered the same within the Western tradition up to him, and Heidegger made that a difference in Being itself calling them the modalities of Dasein called present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. But later Heidegger realized that there was a fundamental problem with that because it meant that there was another kind of Being that was the difference between the two which was really hard to think about called Being crossed out. Derrida picked that up and called it Differance explained as differing and deferring (Paul Simon called it slip-sliding away). And thus was born Deconstruction as an attempt to rethink the Western tradition in terms of Hyper Being. Merleau-Ponty called it the Hyper Dialectic between Heidegger's kind of Being (Process Being) and Sartre's Nothingness in The Visible and the Invisible. This approach was sealed in the tradition when it was discovered that Plato had pointed out that this "third kind of Being" existed in the Timaeus. Sallis has written a great book about this called Chorology.

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Extending the application of Jung's Psychological Types from clinical experience.

The title remains a starter to the notion that it is through the inferior function of the patient/client where insight can be forthcoming. A second point is that the primary notion of psych' Types can be both simplified and expanded to include archetypal identities as well as each type having objectives within their primary function. Thirdly: there is a critical path of decision making that can be both found, recognised and once understood, can offer insight into dis function according to where…