Metaphor and Imaginal Psychology

A Hermetic Reflection

Marc Slavin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317232643
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Metaphor and Imaginal Psychology: A Hermetic Reflection provides the first full-length exploration of the significance of metaphor in post-Jungian psychology. Its portrayal of the mythological figure of Hermes as a personification of metaphor marks an original contribution to the field of metaphor studies.

After a 2,500-year exile from philosophy and related areas of study, beginning with Plato's ejection of the poets from the ideal city-state, metaphor is today experiencing a season of renewal. Among the fields where its significance as a way of seeing, thinking, and feeling has been especially prominent is archetypal psychology, perhaps the most philosophically attuned of psychological disciplines.

Approaching the work of James Hillman and other key archetypal psychologists from a poststructuralist perspective, Metaphor and Imaginal Psychology draws insightful comparisons between archetypal psychology and the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida, a principle theorist of metaphor's philosophical resurgence.

By linking two disciplines that might at first appear as strange bedfellows, Metaphor and Imaginal Psychology underscores the influence of metaphor in reason and emotion, and makes a compelling case for the Mercurial ethos of our postmodern world. Aside from representing essential reading for therapists and theorists working in post-Jungian studies, the book will appeal to readers, students and scholars of literary criticism, psychology, philosophy and mythology.

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PART I

Metaphor in philosophy

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1

A HISTORY WITHOUT ORIGINS

A history of metaphor is, in a sense, an ecology of metaphor. Metaphor’s growth as a field of study became possible only in the middle of the last century with the appearance of conditions sufficient to establish a habitat. In the several chapters of this part, I present the preparation of the ground for metaphor in philosophy as the result of a reciprocal husbandry. As philosophy became aware of metaphor’s influence, so too did metaphor awaken to its own philosophical qualities. The epistemic urges of philosophy and metaphor found themselves co-creatively intertwined. Their congruence followed a prolonged period of latency in which metaphor lay unacknowledged within, just beneath, philosophy proper. In poststructural discourse, the proper is a term of art meaning the literal, as in the French le sens propre, “the literal meaning.” Indeed, the claim of philosophical discourse to a native propriety is in part what determined its literalism and concomitant weeding out of figurative or nonliteral language.

Metaphor’s emergence as a topic worthy of philosophical attention was dependent upon the cultivation of and philosophical contention with the idea of irreducible ambiguity. An engagement with doubt has been native to philosophy at least since Socrates’ incessant questioning of the Athenians. An ambiguous figure himself, Socrates was a consummate ironist. He interrogated belief in order to instill belief. Seeking to challenge the assertion of the Sophists that knowledge was unattainable outside of individual experience, he proffered the idea that a general knowledge might be arrived at after all, but only if it was approached from an admission of ignorance. He propounded a methodology more than a set of convictions. However, as the character “Socrates” blended into that of Plato, his creator, or one might say, literary executor, a set of convictions definitively emerged. Based in the metaphysical reality of Ideas, Platonism could assure seekers of wisdom that they would be rewarded with transcendent knowledge of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Ambiguity in philosophy thus became overgrown with presumptions of truth until, in the eighteenth century, Kant made not-knowing a respectable component of epistemology. As irreducible conditions of possibility emerged into philosophy, so too did metaphor, a claim we will unpack in the subsequent chapter. With Kant, and even Nietzsche, who threw himself onto the suffering creature, metaphor’s appearance in philosophy was merely episodic. Not until poststructuralism was the ground significantly disturbed.

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Poststructuralism turned over foundationalist truth claims (those asserting themselves as necessary rather than as pragmatically satisfactory). Aerating them, it loosened the densities of philosophical propriety, propagating a field of inquiry that might produce not another purchase upon eternity, but truths no less mortal than the questions that inspire them. It is in this regard that metaphysics releases itself into metaphorics. As distinguished here, a metaphorics legitimates fictions, props open the texts of philosophy to reveal their literary propensity. It suggests that an artistic logic is the abiding prelude to a conceptual logic.

My purpose in proposing the term metaphorics is to take up Hillman’s (1989b) call “to grapple constructively, positively, with metaphysics” (p. 216). At a conference in 1983 devoted to discussions of his creative endeavor alongside those of Jung and Alfred North Whitehead, Hillman (1989b) addressed the issue of metaphysical literalism, saying, “In my work so far I have shunned metaphysics. I have kept mainly within the critical tradition” (p. 214). Conceding “the paranoid restlessness of the soul to be metaphysically satisfied by ultimates of meaning” (p. 216), Hillman explored the inevitability of “the terrible need for metaphysics” and how it is met in imaginal psychology (p. 215). “Our practice turns ever on its own metaphysics with its own deconstructionist tropic shiftings,” he said (p. 219). Invoking “encounters with the psychopompos” as a “way of knowledge” (p. 228), he posed the rhetorical question, “Beyond the verbs that carry us across—to doubt, to ask, to repeat, to twist, to echo—are there any nouns and adjectives on the farther shore?” (p. 220). Unsurprisingly, there are. These he characterized as “aesthetic images” given to the “sensate imagination” (p. 227). Each image toward which we are drawn ceaselessly against the current is another myth, another metaphor, the fundaments of a poietic universe, which—to invoke Whitehead contra objectivism—are the “processes and realities” of the cosmos (p. 220). “Cosmology cannot help but be mythical,” Hillman said. “Its language will bespeak this mythicality regardless of the very demythologizing purpose of its metaphysical intention” (p. 229). A metaphysical declaration is a declaration of and by a myth. Why, then, not a metaphysics whose farther shore is “quite literally a mythical region, even literarily a mythical region of poiesis, making images” (p. 220)? Why not a metaphysics that is overtly a metaphorics?

Fielding a metaphorics entails sticking with the poietic propensities in imaginal psychology, which is fostered in the transfer from the literal to the literary. “Cosmologies,” Hillman (1989b) said, “are built in language and not merely of language” (p. 229). Worldviews are word views, purchases upon reality afforded by language. “Words are little mythical beings” (p. 230), Hillman said, and the metaphysics of an imaginal psychology is an “unpredictable diction” (p. 230). The engagement with metaphor by Hillman and other “imaginologists” (Adams, 2008a) unsettles the literal and transcendental claims of metaphysical systems. As Patricia Berry (2008) put it in her essay on Demeter, “the concrete natural world, unlike the mystical denial of it, is the very way and expression of soul” (p. 26). Like Demeter in search of what has been lost to the depths, imaginal psychology wanders the earth, the vale of soul-making, its phenomenological progress de-literalizing the absolute to let rhetoric flower.

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From its earliest philosophical formulations, metaphor has been regarded defensively. Like res extensa, it has been split off from reason, and like the carnal in Christian morality, it has been warned against, condescended to, at best admired for superfluous loveliness. As decorative speech, it has been denied the capacity to engender knowledge. Metaphor is vexing because it requires of philosophy that it justify itself. It questions conceptual origins, intervening between the concept and its claim to primordiality. The logic of metaphor grapples with ontotheology, a term first employed by Kant (1996) to indicate a rationalism that “believes it can know the existence of an [original being] through mere concepts, without the help of any experience whatsoever” (A632). The term was adopted and redefined by Heidegger to describe the conflation within metaphysics of the question of being, ontology, with the question of a supreme being, theology. In contradistinction to ontotheological speculations concerning the grounds of Being that may or may not pertain beyond the actualities of existence, metaphors appear in medias res. The middle of things, as Heidegger (1962) in particular insisted, is where we always already find ourselves. Our embeddedness in a life-world situates us amidst both cultural and natural contingencies, a circumstance Heidegger called the facticity of our being (p. 174). Hans Jonas (2001), the scholar of Gnosticism and a prewar student of Heidegger’s, said of Heideggerian phenomenology that it was a turn toward “the phenomena of existence, i.e., the individual enmeshed in the concerns of life, being more than an ego cogitans, being engaged in the business of living and dependent on the ‘facticity’ of his being which he had not chosen himself” (p. xv).

As Heidegger (1962) saw it, the basic circumstance of the human is as Dasein, “being there” or “being here,” a situated quality, or thrownness into a pregiven world. Working out this state of entanglement in his philosophy, Heidegger intended to make metaphysics capable of a sense of Being more commodius than the ego cogitans or thinking thing postulated in the Cartesian tradition. Hillman (1983a) said that for the psychology that draws on Heidegger, Dasein denotes “psychic existence” (p. 94), the soul’s essential want—its desire and lack, a Sartrean notion of nothingness against which existence has its constitutive state. Nothingness, as Vernon Gras (1973) put it, “yearns for the condition of a thing-in-itself” (p. 9). For Sartre, of course, the yearning is in vain yet also the inspiration of human freedom. For Heidegger, however, the appeal to transcendence had not to do with the inaccessible in-itself, but with the importunate accessibility of Dasein’s mortality, its relationship to death, the awareness of which is its defining characteristic. Dasein’s temporal circumstance was distinguished by Heidegger not as a chronology, but as an engagement with the question of Being, what to make (poietically) of our life in time. Dasein is a temporal disclosure, a clearing by which a world becomes manifest. The finitude of this world is not solely composed of the thinking human, but of all forms of being within its horizon. He expressed the idea in part with the terms present-at-hand and ready-to-hand, pointing, in the former case, to the objects of the world as they might be perceived in objective insularity, and, in the latter, in environmental relationality. By metaphorizing human being in terms of existential relation, Heidegger redressed the theoretical need for predication of the ontological on the theological—the essentialist in-itself despaired of by Sartre.

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Not an existential psychologist, Hillman (1978c) was nevertheless a psychologist of the existential. A central theme was “the transformation of psyche into life” (p. 3). He reminds us that in the tale by Apuleius, Psyche is mortal (p. 53), and (quoting Aileen Ward’s biography of Keats) “had to submit to a world of circumstances” (p. 55n). It is the investigation into the phenomenology of being-in-the-world that links the work of Heidegger and Hillman. Neither is trying to appeal from the encounter with circumstance to another order. According to Roberts Avens (2003),

The path they [Heidegger and Hillman] have chosen to thread literally leads nowhere. It is as if they were trying, in the wake of Hui Neng, one of the early patriarchs of Zen Buddhism, “to awaken the mind without fixing it upon anything.” One might call it a deflating enterprise peeling the hundred integuments of the onion and finding that there is nothing special at its center. . . . As a result, the most prominent feature these two men have in common is a certain style of thinking or a style of consciousness rather than certain views about the world aiming at overall coherence. (p. 2)

One imagines that Avens’s term deflating is a description that Hillman, the deflater of analysis, may have well appreciated. The deflationary aim, said Avens, “is to destruct the very impulse to imprison reality in a system of concepts which frame it out and circumscribe it” (p. 2). Critical insight into the ontotheological residues within metaphysics coincides in poststructural thought with a reconsideration of the opposition concept/metaphor, and, as Avens said, characterizes the style of both Hillman and Heidegger as one that destabilizes absolutes. Hillman (1978b) assigned a central role to the process of seeing through, construing it as seeing deeply, penetrating the literalization of the facts and memories that structure our ego-identifications, so as to see them as archetypal fantasies, “primary patterns,” or lived myths “established in the imaginal world,” the province of symbols and poetic imagination to which they can be “led back, reverted, returned” (p. 50) so as to open the polysemic possibilities of existence. “Hillman’s strategy,” said Avens, “consists in ‘seeing through,’ which is the counterpart of Heidegger’s method of destruction or deconstruction of Western metaphysics aiming at a new, and at the same time more original, experience of Being” (2003, p. 6).

The novelty premised of seeing through is no ultimate formation, but a constant accommodation of ambiguity. Facticity spans an abyss of contingent meaning that becomes foreclosed by conceptualization. Metaphor maintains the modicum of undecideability, eschewing Cartesian first principles. A metaphorics is not a discourse of absolutisms, but of situated paradigms, each of which is to a greater or lesser degree therapeutic. On the ideological scale of absolutism to relativism, it tends toward the relative, particularly in William James’s (1975) formulation, as a “pluralistic monism” (p. 14). “The world is indubitably one if you look at it in one way,” James said, “but as indubitably is it many, if you look at it in another” (p. 14). The theory of paradigms, or rejection of absolutes, ascribed to in this book, takes reality, in Hillman’s (1978b) expression, to be “partly observed and partly conjectured” (p. 225). Truth is not entirely given nor entirely constructed; it is an interplay. As Hillman also put it, “Seeing is believing, but believing is seeing” (p. 221). Foundational principles, including that of the discontinuous paradigm, and their inherent relativity, are, to borrow from Edward Casey (1976), “co-essential” (p. 38). This capacious, inherently roomy view is given expression by Richard Tarnas (2006) in his discussion of two contrasting strains of historicism, a rise toward reason and a falling away from the sacred:

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One is reminded here of Niels Bohr’s axiom in quantum physics, “The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth,” or Oscar Wilde’s “A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.” What is difficult, of course, is to see both images, both truths, simultaneously: to suppress nothing, to remain open to the paradox, to maintain the tension of opposites. Wisdom, like compassion, often seems to require of us that we hold multiple realities in our consciousness at once. (p. 14)

Stephen Pepper (1970) identified the varieties of philosophical speculation as “world hypotheses,” a term metaphysically uncharacteristic for its provisional nature. Each of philosophy’s overarching, globalizing theses, Pepper said, is based on distinctive suppositions or root metaphors. Again, Hillman (1975): “We see what our idea lets us see” (p. 126). In this perspectival sense, metaphor marks a semantic bifurcation point amidst the always-already at which something new and provisionally decisive is inscribed into experience. Metaphoric ambi-valence is irreducible, singularly ungraspable. It renders the as-if unto perception as from a lacuna, “opening” as possibility and as gap. At the crossroads of the subject, it piles philosopher’s stones, marking the leap between the synapses that extrudes signifier and signified, image and concept, from the dark matter of the cognitive fire. In Avens’s “more original” experience of “Being,” relative and absolute entail one another as kin and shadow.

But, you say, wherefore is metaphorics not an ontotheology? Hermes is a god. Does not the trickster figure figure doubly as the lack to be despaired of, the deus absconditus who has absconded with God, and the “psychic existence” of being “there” or (was he) “here”? Indeed, nestled unobtrusively among the ready-to-hand examples that Heidegger (1962) supplies for “items of equipment whose specific character as equipment consists in showing or indicating,” one finds an entry for “boundary-stones” (p. 108). Metaphorics, then, requires of us that we reverse ourselves and aver that while factical being arises in metaphor’s plastic nature, it culminates after all in first principles or contra-metaphorical fixities: the world as it is.

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Hillman (2000b) said, “[N]ature is itself a metaphor” (p. 14), by which he meant not to question the reality of nature but to suggest that the nature of reality is metaphorical. How to classify this oddity of physis? The question has compelled thought at least since Aristotle, who bequeathed a definition in the Poetics based in the taxonomic imperative he impressed into history. “Metaphor,” Aristotle (2005) said, “is the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion” (§1457). This formula will be at issue in the coming discussion, but for now, suffice it to say that, pace Aristotle, metaphoric definition appears to be susceptible of variety.

The metaphors for metaphor are countless. David Leary (1990) catalogued a few of them:

Metaphor has been likened to a filter, a fusion, a lens, a pretense, a screen, a tension, a displacement, a stereoscopic image, a form of linguistic play, a false identity, a semantic fiction, a contextual shift, a translation of meaning, a twinned vision, and an incongruous perspective. (p. 4)

I add to this list later in this part, and bring a fresh sense to it in Part II based on contributions from imaginal psychology. Metaphor as a literary trope is defined customarily as “simile with the prepos...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Metaphor and Imaginal Psychology
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Toward a Poststructural Archetypology
• PART I Metaphor in Philosophy
• PART II Metaphor in Imaginal Psychology
• Bibliography
• Index