just the facts please
The NY Times Magazine, last week, ran an article enticingly entitled The Holy Grail of the Unconscious, about a soon-to-be-revealed book apparently authored by C.G. Jung himself. The article caused excitement among the C.G. Jung acolytes, leading to interesting letters in this weeks edition.
Karin Barnaby of Sea Cliff, New York, writes:
Jung himself had no illusions about the reception of his work and keenly felt his isolation in the face of his contemporaries' incomprehension and rejection, but this does not alter the hard facts of is discoveries.
Those who are expecting the promised hard facts, however, are severely disappointed by the following:
The facts are these: Every human impulse, feeling, thought or action, for good or ill, originates in the unconscious human psyche.
Even minus the "for good or ill", in my book, that's the deductive formulation of what presumably started out as an abductive postulate--or, more supportively, an insight. I would call this a premise, a background assumption or an axiom of Jung's theory. To be honest, it is not even clear to me how Jung could ever roll things so that this would be a hard fact. Compare this to the sentence: Every human blood cell originates in the bone marrow.
I wonder whether any medical professional would be willing to treat this sentence as a fact. Current best hypothesis, for sure; maybe they would also secretly admit that they dont really mean hard universal quantification. Still, at least one can conceive of experiments that might support this, e.g. separating out the marrow into some solution and then showing that erythropoiesis continues, etc. Blood cells at least can be delineated (at our level of resolution), counted/estimated, etc.
I would be surprised to hear a claim that one could successfully delineate thoughts and feelings; I understood one of the key points of Arthur C Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History to be that actions can only be interpreted within the frame work of meaning that the executors give them, but do not by themselves reveal beginning and end or similar sub-structures and demarcation.
To be honest, I would be hard-pressed to accept This action X originated in this entity Y.
as a statement of fact. regardless of whether Y was the unconscious or the kidney.
PS: Not surprisingly, Ms Barnaby's sermon ends with an exhortation: Jung understood the implications of the unconscious psyche's pivotal role .... It is time that we all did.
More likely it is time we all brush up on argumentation theory. Or Charles Sanders Pierce.
Karin Barnaby of Sea Cliff, New York, writes:
Jung himself had no illusions about the reception of his work and keenly felt his isolation in the face of his contemporaries' incomprehension and rejection, but this does not alter the hard facts of is discoveries.
Those who are expecting the promised hard facts, however, are severely disappointed by the following:
The facts are these: Every human impulse, feeling, thought or action, for good or ill, originates in the unconscious human psyche.
Even minus the "for good or ill", in my book, that's the deductive formulation of what presumably started out as an abductive postulate--or, more supportively, an insight. I would call this a premise, a background assumption or an axiom of Jung's theory. To be honest, it is not even clear to me how Jung could ever roll things so that this would be a hard fact. Compare this to the sentence: Every human blood cell originates in the bone marrow.
I wonder whether any medical professional would be willing to treat this sentence as a fact. Current best hypothesis, for sure; maybe they would also secretly admit that they dont really mean hard universal quantification. Still, at least one can conceive of experiments that might support this, e.g. separating out the marrow into some solution and then showing that erythropoiesis continues, etc. Blood cells at least can be delineated (at our level of resolution), counted/estimated, etc.
I would be surprised to hear a claim that one could successfully delineate thoughts and feelings; I understood one of the key points of Arthur C Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History to be that actions can only be interpreted within the frame work of meaning that the executors give them, but do not by themselves reveal beginning and end or similar sub-structures and demarcation.
To be honest, I would be hard-pressed to accept This action X originated in this entity Y.
as a statement of fact. regardless of whether Y was the unconscious or the kidney.
PS: Not surprisingly, Ms Barnaby's sermon ends with an exhortation: Jung understood the implications of the unconscious psyche's pivotal role .... It is time that we all did.
More likely it is time we all brush up on argumentation theory. Or Charles Sanders Pierce.