FUN WITH PHENOMENOLOGY PT. 2

 In THE CAVE OF FREEDOM AND RESTRAINT, I sought to clarify the terms of my validation of subjective experience as against objective evidence. In this essay and in FUN WITHPHENOMENOLOGY, I noted that my project had some parallels with that of the phenomenologists, though I’ve read few of their works in their original forms. Yet the parallels are not all-encompassing.

In the earliest days of this blog, my meditations on myth were strongly influenced by my contemporaneous readings of Cassirer. Perhaps I sought to ground my critical outlook, already informed by Frye, Jung and Campbell, with substance drawn from a more strictly philosophical continuum. Even had I read Cassirer earlier, though, I don’t imagine I would have been an acolyte, since my primary interest was/is literature, and Cassirer never wrote a poetics. Indeed, in one essay I expressed doubt that the Marburg scholar’s literary priorities would have resonated with me. That said, Cassirer’s ideas of both literature and “mythico-religious” narratives were informed by his notion of “expressivity”—the attempt to bring forth the subjective universe spawned by objective phenomena-- and in some of my early posts I agreed with him on this point of commonality.

To the best of my understanding, the disciples of Husserl don’t ground phenomenology in any concept similar to “expressivity.” Rather, phenomenologists speak of isolating the “essences” of actual physical objects by ignoring their “empirical contingencies” and subjecting the objects to “free imaginative variation” (both terms taken from Roger Brooke). I don’t dismiss this methodology out of hand, since I haven’t examined its logic in detail. Still, it’s interesting that in a 2008 essay I sought to frame my one reading of Husserl into a Jungian-Campbellian sphere:

One might well wonder whether or not Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious would constitute [Husserl’s idea of] constancy…

In recent years I’ve began emphasizing the concept of epistemological patterns as a method of judging the symbolic discourses of myth and literature, albeit with the caveat that I’ve always followed Campbell on this point, even prior to formulating the specific term. Campbell took much from Jung, but in his epistemology, he diverges from the Swiss master’s purely psychological approach. In his better moments, Campbell seems to comprehend that myth-tales are valuable precisely because they do not represent what Brooke calls “empirical contingencies,” but rather build upon those contingencies, in order to create poetry rather than science.

Campbell’s version of epistemological patterns may have elements in common with Husserl’s essences, if only because they both seek to validate poetic activity for its own sake. However, Husserl and his acolytes are apparently seeking to ratify “free imaginative variation” as being in tune with reductive science, rather than viewing such poesy as epiphenomenal to physical matter. Since human beings are animals who have evolved the ability to imagine deviations in perceived reality—an ability I see as crucial to “affective freedom”—then everything human beings do stands an outgrowth of a scientific cosmos. This goes a little further than Cassirer’s attempt to find validation for the subjective realm through the backdoor of “expressivity.” One might still state, as did Philip Wheelwright, that some imaginative insights are better than others. (Wheelwright used the term “eminent instance,” which he seems to have borrowed from a similar term I found in Melville’s BILLY BUDD.)

For instance, if one expresses the symbolic notion, “The lion embodies strength,” this is not just an aimless fancy, but the translation of a material fact into the world of mythopoesis. Yet though in a physical sense it might be even more correct to say, “the whale embodies strength,” the whale is simply not as “eminent” as the lion, in part because the world of the whale is comparatively removed from the world of human beings, who can under the right circumstances feel more kinship with the lion.

I don’t know whether I’ll investigate the phenomenologists in near future, but I note this divergence from Cassirer as a possible new road to explore.

FUN WITH PHENOMENOLOGY

 

I mentioned here that I recently decided to import the concept of intentionality into my system. One reason for this change of mind was a recent re-read of Roger Brooke’s 1991 tome JUNG AND PHENOMENOLOGY.

Though I’ve devoted several thousand words to the subject of literary phenomenality, I’ve had only a mild interest in the philosophy of phenomenology. One reason is that, even though I believe my Fryean-Jungian-Campbellian system is basically in sympathy with the project founded by Edmund Husserl, I found Husserl’s writing less than compelling, though at least he wasn’t as abominable as Hegel.

For me Brooke offers an easier introduction to phenomenology than did Husserl, precisely because Brooke is making an extended compare-and-contrast between the familiar conceptual terrain of Jung and the schemas of phenomenology. Brooke marshals ample evidence to demonstrate his thesis: that Carl Jung’s depth psychology was at heart in tune with phenomenology, despite assorted inconsistencies. Those problematic areas of Jung’s thought, according to Brooke, arose whenever Jung attempted to line up his psychology with hard science; what Brooke incisively calls “the bland positivist categorization of observables.”

Despite this backsliding, Jung’s core philosophical concept, that the psyche provided the core of human experience, mirrors Brooke’s chosen definition of the phenomenological concept of intentionality: “Intentionality means that consciousness is always and necessarily directed toward an object that is other than consciousness itself.” To be sure, Brooke finds some fault with Jung’s tendency to become almost solipsistic in his attempts to advocate the psyche’s centrality in human experience. Yet as it happens, in my early reading of Husserl I detected a possible current of solipsism, though Brooke does not signal any awareness of such vulnerabilities in his chosen philosophy. For instance, Brooke writes:

For Husserl the essence of a thing is not to be confused with its factically given properties (weight, extension, and so on). Rather, the essence of a thing is given within the imaginative intuition of the consciousness which discriminates that essence from its empirical contingencies.

A few pages later, Brooke writes that Jung’s concept of “amplification is essentially similar to Husserl’s method of free imaginative variation.” I certainly agree with Brooke and with anyone else who downgrades the sort of “empirical contingencies” that thinkers ranging from Comte to Freud have advocated. Still, Brooke doesn’t elucidate any phenomenological concepts that firmly avoid the critique he makes of Jung, that of being too enfolded in the solipsism of the psyche. That does not mean that there aren’t such concepts, merely that Brooke doesn’t map them out.

My own solution to this conundrum is probably nothing like whatever Brooke might present. In my essay AND THE HALF TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE I drew an extended comparison between two of my inspirations, Jung and Joseph Campbell. I found that precisely because Jung was so focused upon viewing every human experience as reflective of a shared, sometimes “collective” psyche, Campbell is more relevant to the study of literature because of the latter’s concentration upon what I call “epistemological patterns.”

Jung possibly followed Kant in the belief that observations about the “outer world” in which human beings live do not demonstrate any ultimate truth about that world. This may be true, and it’s possible that philosophy’s long preoccupation with “pure reason” was a mistake, except in a purely utilitarian sense. However, reason plays a vital (though not central) role in allowing humans to discern patterns in the world, whether cosmological or sociological, metaphysical or psychological. No humans share exactly the same perceptions of the world, and therefore every philosopher—and every creative writer—will see significance in different patterns, or combinations of patterns.

Neither Jung nor Campbell were as intensely focused upon art and literature as was Northrop Frye, and I would guess that neither Brooke nor any of his fellow phenomenologists concentrated on that discipline either. But all of them would seem to agree on valuing “free imaginative variation” as opposed to “empirical contingencies.” The role of reason is not to determine the forms produced by the imagination, but to provide something akin to a medium in which the forms may flourish. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, but one needs water and the other air to do so.

It's arguable that for centuries art and literature have performed the task of searching for “essences” via the imagination. Brooke cites a commentator who summarizes Husserl’s process by saying “we carefully investigate what changes can be made in a sample without making it cease to be the thing it is. Through the most arbitrary changes, which wholly disregard reality as it is and which therefore are best made in our phantasy, the immutable and necessary complex of characteristics without which the thing cannot be conceived manifest themselves…”

Because free variation is paramount in art, any observations that artists make about empirical contingencies prove secondary. Eugene O’Neill may think that if he emulates Freudian theories of psychology in a play like MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, the play has tapped into “reality,” and indeed many critics would agree with him. William Butler Yeats may feel the same way if he conceives a metaphysical magnum opus like A VISION. But non-fiction is the place where pure reportage of allegedly empirical contingencies is the primary value. In the worlds of art, with special emphasis upon narrative fiction, such contingencies become transformed into epistemological patterns, and they exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination. In this, the canonical artist is in no way superior to the toiler in popular fiction; at most, the canonical artist is just better about making his chosen flights of fancy seem grounded in reality. But for a myth-critic like myself, Eugene O’Neill has no greater imagination than Frank Miller, and Yeats has nothing on Steve Ditko.

THE SCIENCE OF BELIEF

In the past decade I haven't read as much academic criticism as I did in previous decades.  However, I suspect that not much has changed; that most literary theorists still stick close to what I've called "those well-traveled titans of tedium, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx." It's not surprising, then, that most comic-book critics follow the lead of reflective philosophy, given that Freud and Marx offer reductive paradigms which boast the rock-solid integrity of the physical sciences.-- me, THE DEAD-ALIVE HAND OF THE PAST.

My continued reading of Skidelsky's ERNST CASSIRER brought to mind my earlier, somewhat-Hegel-inspired judgment on the majority of those who attempt to practice comics-criticism.  The author reveals that some of the early contacts between Cassirer and the Vienna Circle were surprisingly cordial-- surprising, given that the Circle seems to me largely opposed to Cassirer's way of thinking.  Skidelsky writes of the Vienna Circle:

Their ambition was to establish a rule separating sentences of science from sentences of metaphysics or pseudoscience... Only thus could knowledge be purged of all subjective ideological elements...

However, Skidelsky adds that the Circle played favorites, which is the element that most reminds me of contemporary comics-critics ranging from Groth to Berlatksy:

Standing squarely in the progressivist tradition of Comte and Mach, [the Circle] applied its semantic razor only to ideologues of the Right. Marx and Freud it accepted at face value as genuine scientists. It would have to wait for [Karl] Popper, not himself a member of the circle, to question the credentials of these heroes of the Left.

Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, of course, was one devoted to showing a continuity between all the cultural forms: science, myth, religion, and art. His type of philosophy, then, should be deemed "speculative" while those of the Vienna Circle would be "reflective," as Hegel used those terms, both explicated in my essay referenced above.

I may have more to write on this subject, but for now I'll close by noting Skidelsky's aside that Cassirer also had little use for a similar outlook expressed by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl:

Husserl's idea of philosophy as a "rigorous science" with its own clearly defined remit, technical language, and trained practitioners... was anathema to Cassirer.  Philosophy, in his view, is not something to be sequestered from the life of the mind in general. It is the critique of culture in all its myriad forms.

In this early essay I considered the possibility that Husserl's concept of "objective validity" might apply to finding "constancy" in the world of subjective emotions.  However, as I mention here,  I found that even a quick reading of Husserl's work convinced me that his "hyper-rational approach" was not to my tastes.  The concept of "intersubjectivity" at present has tended to better suit my needs with regard to gauging the "inconstant constancy" of the subjective.

DO THE HUSSERL

Just a short note to myself this time:

I've just started reading one of Husserl's early essays, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," as a means of trying to get into his concept of phenomenology. It seems to me at this stage that Husserl's idealist philosophy-- a strong refutation of the empirical philosophies of his time-- may prove useful in valorizing the content of myths, be they religious or literary.

In "Mythicity, Threat or Menace," I wrote:

'Doty's summarization of Gould troubles me: "We live within a world where symbolic meanings may help-- do help-- yet are never fully able to bridge the ontological gap." In other words, primtives who don't know what a storm is, but who simply formulate a storm-god as a relational aid to the unknown phenomenon, have made an ontological myth, but one which is bound to collapse.'

This formula is clearly empiricist at base: it is taken for granted that the story of a storm-god has no ontological reality beside the reality of the storm. At the conclusion of that essay I wondered whether or not Hegel's idea of "conceptual grasping" might have some relevance-- after all, the attempt of a sentient creature to grasp his environment conceptually might be regarded as an ontological fact in itself, apart from the validity of the story in which he places those concepts. I further noted in "Gore and Allegory" that I regarded the patterns found in myths to be ontologically valid, particularly as exemplified by Campbell (though I suspect Husserl wouldn't have much use for Campbell, even as he did differ with Hegel). On the matter of Husserl's attitude toward "constancy" (which approximates my use of the term "pattern'), editor Quentin Lauer says:

"Husserl attempts to solve a Humean difficulty by invoking a new notion of objective validity. For Hume there is nothing in the constancy of a multiplicity of experiences that guarantees their objectivity. For Husserl this is precisely what objective validity means: the constant identity of content in experiences-- without existential implications."

One might well wonder whether or not Jung's concept of a collective unconscious would constitute such "constancy," if one could statistically demonstrate its ubiquity via its appearance in the least likely places--

Such as the popular culture which, from an empiricist standpoint, should never be any better than it had to be...