Monday, October 01, 2007

again, Jung



With the discusion about Jung and his types, I attempted to analyse the working of these types in a new way. And not entirely successfully. If I've just derived a model of sorts from intuition I could still list the various assumptions and preconditions that underwrite its validity, after Hotelling's look at the Coke/Pepsi problem.

supposing Jung's formula can be legitimately reduced to something like:

"there are two faculties of intellection of which you possess one"

(I'm violating an important legalistic convention here: that you shouldn't represent that which you criticise: the same person shouldn't be defence counsel and magistrate. This is for the sake of simplicity, but the argument also comes back to this convention)

I'm assuming firstly that the statement's abstracted out of definite context, and as a corollary of this, that the way the formula functions: it's development of meaning and affectivity, vary depending on the way you intend or desire these things: here "thinking" and "feeling"; and as a further consequence of this that the parts of the formula are associated; you want to reconcile the parts of the formula into a coherent whole; this has to do with the convention that you structure the implicit error of statements univocally etc. According to Empson "we think not in words but in directed phrases".

These rules or conventions that follow from an originary state of abstraction probably ought to be called:

1. Rule of intention

2. Rule of association

If I wanted to illustrate the rule of intention, there's this thing by Pessoa: He passed me, came after me, (which otherwise might be worth considering in its confluence with Fascism, but) as an example here it demonstrates this point quite elegantly: it finishes "I'm lucid./Bloody hell! I'm lucid". This exclamation "Bloody Hell!" does nothing except reverse the expected intentionality or directedness of this "I'm lucid". So Pessoa's juxtaposing the senses of "I'm lucid", intended contrarily; as if he's registering the momentary incandescence of "I'm lucid" and its degradation; it's, as it were, registered as credit and deficit. The punchlines to jokes degrade this way. Pessoa, I suppose, finds his sense of everything: society; language - all this appears to warp in sympathy with desire.

This apparent paradox develops in Book of Disquietude into "I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped", which diverges from Pascal in having an established dichotomy to invert: Pessoa is "reasoning" apparently, and not "feeling" the substructure of his belief. The literal meaning is implicitly an inversion, and so the opposite is, in a sense, also stressed. You're maybe reminded of the two faces of Gauguin's cow. Again, I think Pessoa's fascinated here, and not analytically, with the possibility of shifting the directedness or intention of the assertion "I reasoned", from credit to deficit, and so volatalising his otherwise rather conservative (or reactionary) consequence "he should be worshipped". Pessoa's formula is close to Jung's formula. Already there are "types" of intellection: reasoning and feeling ("since the human spirit tends towards judgements based on fealing instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God"); and a structurally generated "incompleteness" built around this quirk in conceptualisation.

In my next piece, if I write such a thing, I'll come back to how this develops with Jung.

I'm not sure how to value my new method. The brevity of the argument here seemed the least inappropriate thing to do. It all came out of the critique of political economy, but Nitzan and Bichler, for instance, seem to have done rather better with this with ordinary empiricism.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

...the first example "I'm lucid" is more likely he's noticing, and with horror, that hitherto he'd been living under the sign of illucidty - nevertheless I still want to hold to "I'm lucid" registering deficit as one implied meaning