Act and Image

The Emergence of Symbolic Imagination

Warren Colman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000407488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte rinascimentale

How did humans develop the capacity for symbolic imagination?

In this ground-breaking book, Warren Colman provides a reformulation of archetypal symbols as emergent from humans' embodied and affective engagement with their social and material environment. Beginning with the oldest known figurative image in the world, the 40, 000-year-old Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, he traces the emergence of symbolic imagination through the origins of language, the growth of human sociality and co-operation, and the creative use of material objects, from the earliest stone tools through the cave paintings and figures of Upper Paleolithic Europe and beyond. This leads to a consideration of how the imaginal world of the spirit may have come into being, not as separate from the material world but through active participation within a world alive with meaning.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ARCHETYPAL HYPOTHESIS

Where Do Archetypes Come From?

One of the key tenets of Jung’s archetypal hypothesis is that of the “inborn image.” By this, he did not mean an actual image but “a possibility of representation,” a necessary caveat to distinguish the archetype from any proposal of “inherited ideas.” To clarify this he later introduced the distinction between the archetypal image and the archetype in itself although he was notoriously inconsistent about this and habitually referred to images as archetypes.¹ Nevertheless, it is clear that he identified the source of these “inborn images” with the structure of the human brain, as previously quoted.² Similarly, in another reference to the “two-million-year old man” he says,

All men were born with a brain ready-made. It took millions of years to build the brain and the body we now have. Your brain embodies all the experience of life. The psyche, which may be called the life of the brain, existed before consciousness existed in the little child.³

This is clearly a very innatist view of the psyche, especially the notion that the brain is “ready-made.” This links with two further ideas that crop up repeatedly in Jung’s discussion of archetypes—the notion that they are “a priori” and that they are linked with instincts. These themes occur in Jung’s first use of the term archetype in his 1919 paper Instinct and the Unconscious, where he says,

In this deeper stratum [of the unconscious] we also find the a priori inborn forms of “intuition” namely the archetypes of perception and apprehension which are the necessary a priori determinants of all psychic processes.

Just as his instincts compel man to a specifically human mode of existence, so the archetypes force his ways of perception and apprehension into specifically human patterns. The instincts and the archetypes together form the collective unconscious.⁴

Jung continued to refer to the connection between instinct and archetype throughout his writings but it remains uncertain whether he regarded archetypes as instincts or as analogous to instinct.⁵ So, for example, he would describe the archetype as “the instinct’s perception of itself” or “the forms that the instincts assume”⁶ but at the same time would differentiate between “the instinctual forces of the psyche and of the forms or categories that regulate them, namely the archetypes.”⁷

In his later work, especially his 1947 essay On The Nature of the Psyche, he seems to distinguish between the “instinctual” pole of the psyche which he connects with body, nature, and matter and the “spiritual” pole which he connects with the archetype, albeit he uses the image of the spectrum to suggest that they are different forms of the same thing with balances of energy flowing between them. For example, he says, “in spite or perhaps because of its affinity with instinct, the archetype represents the authentic element of spirit.”⁸ At this time, Jung seemed to be redefining his view of archetypes away from his previous reliance on some form of biological inheritance and more towards a metaphysical or transcendent view of archetypes as being somehow inherent in the nature of the world as a whole. So we now see caveats such as “This is not to say that the psyche derives exclusively from the instinctual sphere and hence from its organic substrate.”⁹ Furthermore, the archetype needs to be liberated not only from its physiological (instinctual) origins but even from the psyche.

The archetype, describes a field which exhibits none of the peculiarities of the physiological and yet, in the last analysis, can no longer be regarded as psychic, although it manifests itself psychically … there is probably no alternative now but to describe their nature, in accordance with their chiefest effect, as ‘spirit.’¹⁰

Perhaps the clearest evidence of the shift in Jung’s views away from a biological inheritance model of archetypes comes in his discussion of synchronicity, which provided much of the stimulus for this reconsideration. There he writes “the archetypes are not found exclusively in the psychic sphere but can occur just as much in circumstances that are not psychic.”¹¹

The other key element in this rethinking was Jung’s collaboration with Pauli, which offered him the possibility of grounding his theory of archetypes in physics rather than biology, using the analogy of the atom rather than instinct. Keen as he was in exploring this link, he was scrupulous enough to end his complicated and often downright obscure 1947 essay with the caveat (perhaps prompted by Pauli?) that “we are concerned first and foremost to establish certain analogies, and no more than that; the existence of such analogies does not entitle us to conclude that connection is already proven.”¹²

Jung’s strenuous efforts to link archetypes with atomic physics reveals two things. Firstly, it shows how important it was to him that his theories should have some basis in empirical science. Secondly, it shows that he must have felt that the biological model of inheritance via the “two million-year-old man” of the ready-made brain did not fully encompass what he had in mind and what he believed the nature of archetypes to be.

I think this uncertainty goes back to Jung’s original formulation in 1919 which had its roots as much in Platonic philosophy as biological inheritance. Having spent the first half of his discussion on the analogy between instinct and archetypes (“inborn forms of intuition”), he suddenly shifts his frame of reference from biology to philosophy and refers to the archetypes in Plato (as “metaphysical ideas”) and in Augustine “from whom,” he says, “I have borrowed the idea of the archetype.”¹³ He then traces the “deterioration” of the metaphysical value of the idea through Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer. Ignoring the complex philosophical differences between all these thinkers he concludes, “We can see once again that same psychological process at work which disguises the instincts under the cloak of rational motivations and transforms the archetype into rational concepts.”¹⁴

This conclusion begs the question, to say the least. At a stroke, Jung has claimed philosophical authority for the archetype as a metaphysical conception while reducing philosophy to a rational disguise for his own formulation of instinctual intuition. He has assumed that the philosophical idea of the archetype is itself an archetype which, like mythological motifs, can be traced through philosophical history and reduced back to its putative instinctual origin. This technique, which Jung shares with Freud, uses the notion of the unconscious as a form of superior knowledge and claims to offer more encompassing or “real” explanations for other forms of discourse by tracing them back to their supposed roots in the unconscious. This is an example of “behindology”—the notion that behind the apparent motives, meanings, and rationale of people’s actions, thoughts and behavior are their “real” unconscious motivations which can only be revealed through the particular beliefs about the unconscious that the author happens to hold. These interpretations are then taken as explanatory justification or even proof of the author’s formulation.

Behindology

Psychoanalysis is not alone in its deployment of behindology which, to some extent, is an element of any theory that seeks to discover the underlying structures behind the surface, especially when those surfaces are regarded as mere appearances which belie the underlying reality. The term behindology is derived from the Italian dietrologia, originally referring to the suspicion in Italian political life that the surface or official explanation for something can rarely be the real one, not surprising given the prominence of the Mafia in Italian political life. More broadly, it has become a byword for conspiracy theories and the culture of suspicion that surrounds them. Ironically, as one sociologist of conspiracy theory has pointed out, sociology itself frequently invokes behindology—the attempt to uncover the “real” social forces or structures behind social activity: “Dietrologic has no faith in surfaces and always assumes that the interesting things are happening behind the skin of the world.”¹⁵ The same ploy turns up in neuroscience when claims are made that certain perceptions merely “seem” to be the case while their neural correlates are taken to be what is “really” going on. For example, Daniel Dennett uses research that shows that the brain perceives much less of a perceptual object than is apparent to consciousness. He concludes that consciousness seems continuous but really it is full of gaps.¹⁶ Here, the materiality of the brain is assumed to be the real reality behind the apparent reality of consciousness, which merely seems.¹⁷ Such assumptions are challenged both by phenomenological approaches and emergence theories—the former is precisely interested in the surface “skin of the world” while the latter argues that emergent forms are not reducible to the sum of their parts.¹⁸ Critiques of Jung’s structural approach to the archetypes have come from both directions but it is worth pointing out that Jung himself was quite capable of taking a phenomenological approach, such as his insistence that the dream was not a disguise, his well-known recommendation to “stick to the image,” and his Goethe-inspired emphasis on allowing Nature to speak out of her own fullness.¹⁹ The bewildering shifts in Jung’s discourse are well brought out by Hobson.

Sometimes he claims to use objective observation and classification in accordance with traditional scientific method. At other times his language is very similar to that of those phenomenological psychologists who have been influenced by Husserl. … Yet he also insists that the theory of the archetypes is an explanatory concept similar to that of botanical families—a method of thought quite foreign to phenomenology.²⁰ 20

Knox’s Four Core Themes

These inconsistent formulations and discourses make the archetype a notoriously difficult concept to pin down. One of the most comprehensive efforts to do so is Jean Knox’s identification of the following four core themes or models that repeatedly emerge in the debate about archetypes.²¹

•Biological entities in the form of information which is hard-wired in the genes, providing a set of instruction to the mind as well as the body

•Organizing mental frameworks of an abstract nature, a set of rules or instructions but with no symbolic or representational content, so that they are never directly experienced

•Core meanings which do contain representational content and which therefore provide a central symbolic significance to our experience

•Metaphysical entities which are eternal and are therefore independent of the body

Now, with the foregoing discussion in mind, I think it is possible to reconfigure this excellent summary into just two major themes: the first and the last. From the start, I suggest, Jung saw archetypes as both biological and metaphysical, a combination of instinctual intuition and Platonic Idea. He attempts to merge both of these disparate intellectual traditions in his main definition which is the second of Knox’s models—i.e., abstract mental frameworks with no representational content. This is the definition of archetypes as “the possibility of ideas” or “the archetype as such” which can be derived from or explained by either the biology of the evolved “ready-made brain” or the later, more metaphysical version of the psychoid archetype which exists as a kind of transcendent eternal truth, inherent in the structure of the universe itself as the “principle of meaning” of the unus mundus and, therefore, also inherent in living matter.²² This is also the definition that Knox herself chooses, albeit she gives it an entirely different derivation. She identifies organizing mental frameworks with primitive “image schemas” rooted in sensory-motor experiences of bodily action and spatial orientation. Her ingenious reformulation of archetypes as emergent properties of early psychic development is considered later in this chapter.

As for the third definition, referring to core meanings, this is mainly due to the oscillation in Jung’s discourse noted by Hobson and Fordham between a phenomenological, experiential discourse and a more “scientific” theoretical one.²³ As Hobson puts it, it is

the difference between defining the word in terms of phenomena which it signifies and the direct personal experience of those phenomena. He is not content to describe or point to an event or object so that it can be recognized intellectually, but seeks for a language which will express an experience with its associated affect.²⁴

The “two million-year-old man” is an example of this kind of discourse. When Jung describes this archetypal inheritance as “the Great Old Man” he is, as Stevens points out, using a personification which he considers to be the typical way in which archetypal ideas express themselves, that is, the way archetypal predispositions (the “organizing mental frameworks”) present themselves to the conscious mind in dreams and myths.²⁵ So Jung considers that in order for the abstract principles to do their work as guiding the way we live and giving life a deeper meaning, it is necessary for them to be “incarnated” as symbolic representations but insists that these core meanings are only potentials and possibilities, dependent on culturally available means of representation for their realization.

Knox argues, however, that, in practice, it is not possible to distinguish abstract organising frameworks from core representational meanings, partly because of the way the biological asp...