Interpretation Stack

Heading out to commune with my beloved cohort! Here’s my latest research stack on Interpretation. Getting busy with the busy-ness in the stillest, playful way! Don’t fear the reaper. A stack on the philosophy of symbols and more mercurial finds up next.

Excerpt from Roger Brooke’s Jung and Phenomenology

“The world as a temple is the primordial reality, and without it there would be no reflective consciousness.Its significance as a metaphor for the shape and meaning of human life is therefore a later development, but the existential density of that place at which metaphor is grounded remains. The dawn is still a glorious divine moment of ‘insatiable delight.’ One way to forget this primordial reality is to paralyze the metaphor by locating its meaning as an experience within one's head. On one hand, this allows the world to slip into darkness, and in our time, as both C G Jung and Heidegger agree, while the scientific light glares upon the world, that world which is essentially a temple disappears under the profane darkness of natural law. On the other hand, the Cartesian interiorisation of psychological life loses an essential quality of metaphor, namely its capacity to intensify reality. As Philip Wheelwright expressed it in his classic study on metaphor: 'What really matters in a metaphor is the psychic depth at which the things of the world, whether actual or fancied, are transmuted by the cool heat of the imagination’. Thus a metaphor opens up the world and at the same time situates the imagination. It is important to understand that what might seem like two processes here is in actuality one. Intentionality, it may be recalled, is fantasy. Thus the opening up of the world, as a temple, for example, is imaginative; and to imagine the world as a temple is to open up the very temple-like being of the world. The structural unity between the world and human consciousness is given as metaphorical reality…”

“Metaphors are not abstractions from reality, in which two distinct entities, world and temple, are cognitively linked together. Rather, metaphors are the primordial means within which our shy and ambiguous world comes into being in the imaginative light of human consciousness. The same can be said of symbols, for they have the same essential structure.Now the point of these reflections is that, when Carl Jung refers to the ‘symbolic life or the 'symbolic attitude' as a measure of psychological maturity, he is not intending to evaporate the metaphor into an intellectual abstraction. He is rather trying to encourage the modem person to recover his or her existential heritage and find meaning as It is given through the metaphors within which the world speaks.”