January 12, 2008 – 5:21 pm
Toroidal Influxion
In his book Alchemical Studies Chapter 1 section 1 Carl Jung is at pains to make clear to his readers he doesn’t fully understand the text nor does he feel it possible for Westerners in general to become completely intimate with it. He does however, point to elements of Chinese culture that are implicit in the text and can be understood from a Western viewpoint.
These are:
The world is created by sets of opposite realities that are in continual manifestation and actively in tension with each other.
These opposites cannot be fully intellectually unraveled since intellect can only analyze and understand observable and/or otherwise known things. The limit set to the intellect is due to at least one set of opposites—the known/unknown because the intellect stops where the unknown begins.
Opposites also cannot be fully understood as independent ‘facts’ because they exist only in tension to each other and by definition with each other. When they are abstracted or qualified independently of each other we lose our grasp of them and they become ‘something other than’ what we were attempting to investigate. Unfortunately, we may for a time mistakenly believe we are still dealing with the true opposites.
Due to the limitation of the intellect in fully unraveling what are unconscious (unknown) processes, the only way left to unravel them is through life experience. Life itself shows which things in life are important through repeated experiences because those experiences repeatedly arise in our consciousness and demand our attention.
Westerners have developed a type of analytical science and intellect that relies most strongly on one-sided viewing of facts. This one-sidedness is like solving for an equation where all the variables are placed on one side and a constant on the other side of the equation. In a similar manner western science seeks to quantify and manipulate the relationships between objects and phenomena. The down-side to this method as Jung points out is that this one-sidedness is a form of barbarism in that it willfully ignores much in experience in order to make its equations work-out in very narrow contexts and for very narrow interests. Nevertheless, Jung also clearly recognizes that this one-sidedness of the western intellectual process has resulted in many natural discoveries and the ability to manipulate phenomena.
But while Jung doesn’t undervalue the methods of the western intellect he also points to the great costs and suffering engendered to the psyche and cultures of the west by hyper-extensions of the intellect. The costs to the psyche being extensive neuroses where people are expected to conform to the currently defined high ideals and to ignore or revile the opposites implicit in those ideals, unknowingly turning the high ideals themselves into ugly caricatures of themselves.
Jung’s view is that it’s pointless to emulate the eastern ideals since they weren’t meant to address the specific starting points of the western psyche. They were solutions to the entirely different problems arising from uniquely eastern concerns. He I believe correctly sees that problems are relative to their contexts. We can only correctly solve a problem when we’ve accurately identified the specific context in which it occurs. After all problems arise only when something is missing or amiss and that something is a specific item in a specific situation, not an abstract solution to a hypothetical make-believe problem.
Jung’s attitude seems to be there’s nothing for it but to solve the problems we’ve created through grossly unbalanced uses of the intellect because those are the current real problems that are facing our cultures. Otherwise we’re like people who use the wrong tools to fix what’s broken. Stated in gross terms it’s like someone who decides to use a chain-saw to fix a TV set.
