“Esse is percipi George Berkeley, Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, I, 3”
“Three persistent irritations have urged me to this topic. Perhaps you will understand the topic better if I can portray the irritations. The first has to do with elitism. Nature, said Jung, is aristocratic and esoteric (CW 11, §537; 7, §198). It is profligate; only few events come to birth, far fewer to full flowering. Jungians are concerned with these rare events, the opus of individuation, working on one’s individuality so as to be wholeheartedly all that one is. This requires differentiation (by which word Jung defines individuation - CW 6 §755, 757, 761), elaborating differences within oneself and between oneself and others. This stress upon the djfferentness of individual personality and the private modes of its development means that an avowed Jungian suffers the charge of elitism. So, our first problem is how to work with individual uniqueness without at the same time becoming elitist. This problem must be met by every Platonist man of the spirit who at the same time would be a democratic citizen and polytheistic liberal in soul. One way of attempting the dilemma is to examine the other side of elitist fantasy, i.e., egalitarianism.”
“Despite what is revealed of a patient’s psychodynamics, the typical and archetypal patterns of interior life and the soul’s history, until I can envisage this person’s uniqueness I cannot imagine him profoundly enough and therefore cannot recognize who he is. I see individuation but not individuality. If my work is with an empirical embodied self in its individuality, then how [to] perceive a self, not in symbols and synchronicities, not hermeneutically, but immediately in the person before my eyes, concrete and present.”
“The problem is rather the problem of human relations: the experiencing of each other as selves, as individual persons with distinct natures; each person the embodiment of an individual destiny.”
“Had we seen by means of modern psychology, that is, typicalities, we could have missed the target.”
“Hearing these tales of Stein, Faulkner, and Darwin, or rather of James, Stone, and Henslow, we could make a psychological maxim of Berkeley’s principle: “Esse is percipi”To be is to be perceived. Stein, Faulkner, and Darwin become what they were because of having been perceived. Their being was the result, in part, of that being having been perceived.”
“But first we turn to what might get in the way of such perception - types, and the concept of types. Then we turn to modes other than types for the perception of persons.”
“Originally, the way typos was used in Greek gave it the meaning of an empty or hollow form for casting, a kind of rough-edged mold.”
“Owing to this uncertain boundary, types are used most frequently in life-sciences and humanities. Types can flow into one another: there is no sharp border between typical historical periods (Mediaeval and Renaissance), between typical literary styles (heroic and tragic), or between typical groupings of mental disorders, social functions or even animal species.F1uidity, relativity, elasticity is a most distinctive aspect of the type concept.”
“Therefore, there cannot be any pure types because they are not meant to be pure, by definition. [6]A pure type has already become a class where a different sort of logic obtains. My name begins with H, and I was called to military service in 1944. That puts me into two classes with hard edges. There is nothing typical about persons whose names begin with H or who were called up in 1944. We can, however, be classified with H and 44. Classes require an ‘either/or’, types a ‘more/less’, kind of thinking. I am either an H or I am not; I cannot be more of an H than an L or a T, or a lesser H or a little H, etc. But with types I am rather more an extravert than an introvert, a point which Jung made at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (§§4-6). Extraversion does not per se exclude introversion.”
“But ideal types are unlike Platonic ideas because the way in which they are formed gives them a freakish, caricature-like quality. They are constructed by intensifying, exaggerating, and purifying singular traits at the expense of others and subsuming those others within the salient ideal type as a Gestalt. They exist in no single instance, and are thus unnatural - which is precisely their value for seeing through the natural. The act which forms an ideal type is a Wesenschau, an insight into essence, and not a statistical averaging (norms) or a logical reasoning (classes).Neither empirical nor logical methods apply. Rustow (p. 59) calls the principle by which they are formed “morphological”. Ideal types require an imagination of Gestalten or forms. Jung’s types belong here inasmuch as they are an imagined morphology of consciousness, a phenomenology of the shapes of experience.”
“we have entered into a numerical kind of thinking. We have assumed the scientistic eye that sees by means of numbers. Specific qualities, each with its trait-names, are viewed as a mass of chaotic quantity calling for ordering by reduction into a few types, as if the less the variety, the more that we know.”
“In short, type conceits fill a particular place in the ordering of events. They serve as intermediaries between a variegated world of huge quantities of bare particulars and the abstract world of general principles and classes - and types partake of both worlds. [9] They are both anschaulich, descriptive, as well as abstract, conceptual. By connecting individual and universal, or Variety and Oneness, they solve the problem of this Tagung, and we could sit down here. But there is more.”
“One question besetting type theory is this: Are types mental constructs that we impose on the world or are types given with the world? Are they artificial or natural? Have they a logical-epistemological status or an ontological one? When I call you an extraverted feeling type is this a way of organizing perceptions of you, or am I sayingsomething essential about your nature that is given with it?”
“No elements of personality are observable with perfect directness; all are inferred from behavioral indexes”, N. Sanford, “Personality: Its Place in Psychology”, in S. Koch, ed., Psychology. A Study of a Science Vol. 5, N.Y.: McGraw Hill, 1963, p. 514”
“Empirical psychology approaches uniqueness in the same manner. Uniqueness is a CPID, a “consistent pattern of individual difference”. One must first chart consistencies before one can begin to see what is different. It begins with sames to find differents; groups to find singles; egalities tofind oddities. The unique becomes the atypical, abnormal, deviate - an approach which we took up here two years ago. This approach separates human uniqueness from human sameness, missing that they are interchangeable perspectives and not literal actualities. At one moment I can view any aspect of myself as common, a moment later as unique. My very oddness that splits me from humankind can become, in a shift of vision, the common bond that joins me with others. The soul in Platonic usage is always both an all-soul, an anima mundi, and an individualization.”
“A type consists in traits. Because usually a type is defined as the axial system that holds traits together or simply as their principle of correlation, it has no substance of its own. Its substance is in the traits. To let go the multiplicity and exquisite variety of the 18,000 traits is to lose the stuff and gut of persons and turn them into types.”
“Test literature over and again uses the word versus, [20]creating a world for an ego to choose between events that hitherto had not seemed opposed or to demand preferences.”
“Soon, the contrasting poles of one and the same thing on the same dimension have become polar oppositions, then contradictions: to think is not to feel; to sense is not to intuit. (Contradiction is of course not necessary to type construction, but we are not all ‘thinking types’ who can handle logic, especially not when assessing ourselves and others.) So the polarisation of type construction polarizes us; we feel either introverted or extraverted. The inferior then becomes the other pole, a cut-off impossibility, or a heroic task to be developed through “sacrifice of the superior function”.”
“These polarities also make us lose the images of feeling, or intuition, or extraversion, as states in themselves. We see them only dynamically in tension with an opposite. But in actual life, a “feeler” - who can be depicted in literature or biography, or as a hysteric or depressive syndrome with a host of idiosyncratic traits, or depicted as a child of Luna, or Venus, or Saturn - can well be presented without any polarity or opposition. Planetary types, the thirty character epitomes of Theophrastus, and the syndromes of psychopathology as reaction types do not,have to be set up in polar systems. Imaginative, depicted types as backgrounds differ from systematic typologies. I would even hazard that systematic typologies are fundamentally anti-imaginal and that the fantasy of types disturbs our appreciation of the image and our ability to imagine.”
“This brings us to the relation of type and image - a subject with a long history which shows types presenting themselves as images. For example, poetic types are persons from literary legends used as universali fantastici by Vico. Planetary types are figures of Gods displayed in the images of myths. Biblical types are persons of the Old Testament seen as vor-bilder of the New. Morphological types are figures in nature seen, in different ways by Goethe, Cuvier, and Whewill, as manifestations of Urbilder . [22] Goethe’s deep insight into the type concept was that the type is immediately presented in4he image. A type cannot be separated from the image in which it appears. We see types by seeing images; or rather, when we see a type, actually we are seeing an image. No longer is it a matter of the difference between types and images as objects of perception. Now it becomes a matter of viewing one and the same event by typing it or by imagining it, either by means of the perspective of types or that of images.”
“types are not opposed to images, but are a special way of imaging. Rather than conceiving images typically and organizing our styles of perception into types, we are beginning to see types and their systems imaginally. Now by imagining a type in our minds, instantly the type moves into images that display it. Instead of our having to multiply instances to prove the type, the type multiplies images out of itself. Now a typical introvert is not conceptually defined or described, as a cluster of traits. It is my younger brother sunk in thought on the beach under seagulls; myself blushing last night when introduced to the Chairman’s sleek, lithe daughter. Types have now become empty casting molds, out of which a pattern of images flows, and the mind, by generating examples, moves from type to image.”
“So the evidence for a type is in the vision that sees its images. The word evidence refers to an act of vision. Seeing types is a Platonic act which cannot be established by an Aristotelian method. Two eyes even with microscope, can not equal that third eye. To restore images to types means seeing types as a mode of imaging which cannot be satisfied by empirically gathered evidence. (It is anyway the type in our eye - the ability to see similarities and to compare - that allows us to see resemblances in what we gather for evidence and in the questionnaires that yield this evidence.) The scientistic search for evidence betrays itself for what it is: loss of morphic vision, an eye unopened to the image.”
“First of all, his types are formed into a polar construction such as we discussed. The polar construction makes the types not mere random eclectic categories, but a typology. It is this system which gives them their high-level explanatory power. They are axiomatically connected with one another in a tightly-knit, tension-filled “cross” (§983). This cross is also all-inclusive. Jung claims completeness for his typology (§843; CW 11, §246), much as does Aristotle for his four causes, Schopenhauer for his four principles of reason, Popper for his four root metaphors, Pavlov for his four types of nervous systems, Russell for his four types of philosophical statements.”
“The claim to completeness seems characteristic of four-fold systems. That is, it belongs to the rhetoric of the archetypal perspective of fourness to present itself as a systematic whole, a mandala with an internal logic by means of which the system defends itself as all-encompassing.”
“Because Jung’s types are laid out axiomatically as a polar construction, the types rest on their ‘Ology’, on principles even more fundamental than the types themselves: the principles of opposition, [26] even mutual exclusion, operating between the pairs of “subject and object”, “inner and outer”, “conscious and unconscious”, “rational and irrational”, “superior and inferior”, “mind and heart”, “actual and possible”. Anyone using the types in their systematic form is immediately implicated in the premises - and problems - on which the system depends. Jung’s typology, presented modestly as a description of empirical functions and attitudes, nonetheless implicates an entire Weltbild of oppositions and energies held together by its mandala form. If not overtly an ontology or metaphysics, at least we cannot escape its Weltanschauung. It is set forth as the basic structure of our consciousness.”
“The system is envisioned spatially, wholly in terms of the subject/object relation.Others have tried to give the typology a temporal dimension, e.g. H. Mann,. M. Siegler., H. Osmond, “The Many Worlds of Time”, J. Analyt. Psychol. 13, 1968, pp. 33-56.”
“We still turn to typology when we need system. When our ego-comprehension is disoriented and anxious, then we turn to astrology, typology, archetypology, and the like. Types still bring with them their origins in defense against confusions by means of systems. Appeals to founding Jung’s psychology scientifically upon types (Meier) and to relying more on them for understanding clinical psychodynamics (Fordham) bear the same witness to apotropaic system-building for the unpredictabilities of the “confrontation with the unconscious” and its images.”
“27. Jung’sintention with his types was neither scientific nor clinical but Kantian (pp. xiv-xv). Kant is often referred to in this book, e.g. §512, even as an allegory for the superior function opposed to Dionysus for the inferior (§908-l0). The Kantian fantasy of the typology thus correlates with the ‘Dionysian’ experiences preceding it (1913-1919). On the four-fold mandala as defense against the dissolution of Dionysus-Wotan-Nietzsche, see my “Dionysus in Jung’s Writings” Spring 1972, pp. 191-205. On Jung and Kant, see J. R. Heisig’s collection of passages in his Imago Dei in C. G. Jung, Bucknell Univ. Press, forthcoming.”
“A closer look at the way Jung speaks of the types, however, suggests that they too are archetypal. For what determines type? Here the a priori element enters: Jung speaks of a “numinal accent” falling on one type or another (§982). This selective factor determining type is unaccounted for it is simply given. A numinal accent selects our bias toward what becomes our superior function which drives the others into the background (§984). We begin to see that the four types are more than mere manners of functioning. There is something more at work in them, something numinal - and “numinal” means “divine”. And surely when in the grips of our typical set, as we cannot help but be when we imagine ourselves typologically, the structuring power of the type is like that of an archetype or mythologem. Especially the experience of the inferior function, also referred to as numinous, brings with it a radical shift of perspective, as if there has been an ontological shift, an initiation into a new cosmos or archetypal seinsweise.”
“An archetypal background for the four functions has already been intimated by Jung himself. He speaks of a philosophical typology in Gnosticism or Hellenistic syncretism (§§14, 964) by means of which human beings could be called hylikoi, psychikol, or pneumatikoi. Jung does not document this typology but Professor Sambursky considers that these terms were applied less to actual persons than to the imaginal persons of Neoplatonism, especially by Plotinus. These imaginal regions and their beings might thus be the archetypal imagination at work in the functions, giving to them each its nominal accent and each its ontological significance as structuring ground of consciousness.”
“Then hylikoi, or physis, with its attendant ideas of matter, body, actual physical reality would be the archetypal principle in what Jung called sensation; psychikoi, or soul, with its attendant Jungian description of love, value, experience, relatedness, woman, salt, colour would be the archetype within and behind what Jung called feeling; pneumatikoi, or spirit, with its attendant descriptions in terms of light, vision, swiftness, invisibilities, timelessness, would be what Jung called intuition; and finally, not expressly distinguished in this Hellenistic triad, nous, logos, or intellectus, with its capacity for order and cogni- tive intelligence, would be the archetypal principle that Jung called the thinking function. (Jung himself identifies thinking with pneumatikoi, §14.)”
“Despite their mandala structure, Jung does not give his types archetypal significance as such. They are not presented as Idealbilder, Urtypen, or Urformen.Onlythe four-fold system is archetypal”
“This archetypal background gives a deeper sense to what Jung says about the four functions. For instance, if sensation so often brings with it an uncomfortable inferiority, and intuition, superiority, the reason is not functional, but archetypal - the one being hylitic and bearing all the aspersions put upon physis in our tradition, the other, pneumatic, windy with the idealizations of the spirit. [28] Or, it is hardly a feeling function, as an ego-disposable mode of adaptation through evaluations, which can support such redemptive features that Jung claims for “feeling” (cf. CW 14, §§328-34; CW 16, §488-91; CW 13, §222, and also CW 8, §§668-69 where his discussion of evidence for soul turns on “feelings”), unless we realize that “feeling” has become a secular psychologism for soul.”
“Furthermore, we now can grasp better that connection which Jung makes between the four functions and the wholeness of the “total personality” (CW 14, §261), or Adam (ibid. §§555-57). For now we would be dealing with the root archetypal structures or cosmoi of Western human being, our four “natures” as Jung calls them (CW 14, §§261, 265; cf. CW 11, §§184-85) which as he says there in Mysterium Coniunctionis, are an archetypal prefiguration of “what we today call the schema of functions”. The four types are thus not mere empirical functions. They are the physical, spiritual, noetic, and psychic cosmoi in which man moves and imagines.”
“The ancients placed these cosmoi one on top of the other and fantasied the ideal man moving through them from below to above. Jung too imagines the individuating person moving through the functions, not ascensionally in his model, yet still redemptively from one-sidedness to four-foldedness. Although these archetypal powers of the ancients present themselves conceptually, they are nonetheless archetypal persons of the imaginal to begin with.”
“By this I do not mean to replace intuition with spirit, and feeling with psyche, etc., or to equate them or reduce them. Rather I am maintaining that the functions have been carrying archetypal projections which gives them, and typology, a numinal accent. Types conceal archetypes.”
“Only an archetypal appreciation of the functions can take them out of the hands of the ego.”
“Unless the great root principles of Western man’s orientation are seen for what they are, as the modes in which the imaginal operates (functions) in all realms of being, they, and we, are condemned to psychological jargon without numinal accent. Thus we must cling to the types for orientation since they do conceal the archetypal natures of our Western compass.”
“What then was the “fundamental tendency” of the book if it was not to type persons? Jung sets it out most clearly: “Its purpose is rather to provide a critical psychology… First and foremost, it is a critical tool for the research worker” (§986). “The typological system I have proposed is an attempt… to provide an explanatory basis and theoretical framework for the boundless diversity.., in the formation of psychological concepts” (§987).”
“Note that: not diversity of human beings, but diversity of psychological concepts. As a critical psychology, a psychology that offers a critical tool for examining ideas, it belongs to epistemology, and it was a necessary consequent of Jung’s placing psyche first. As Aniela Jaffe has said here at Eranos 1971 - referring to that period between 1913 and 1919 when Jung had been convinced through his own experience of the primacy of psychic reality - “the soul cannot be the object of judgement and knowledge, but judgement and knowledge are the object of the soul”. The types were to provide the fundamental psychological antinomies which enter into every judgement in psychology. The typology was intended as a means of seeing through statements about the soul. [31] It was an attempt at a differentiated understanding of the variety of human psychologies (§851-53).”
“Though intended as a Kantian critical tool for research and imagined as a “trigonometric net” or “crystallographic axial system” (§986) of structural principles behind personal viewpoints, the personal creeps in the back door of this the least imagistic of all his major later works, as if the shadow of the book is its Chapter Ten. There the eight types are depicted anecdotally, imagistically.”
“And here we all get caught by his book - not for the superb analysis of the mediaeval universals problem, or his examinations of Schiller and Spitteler, Jordan and James, for how few even read this part of the work! - no, we all fall for these descriptions (of the introverted intuitive type, the extraverted sensation type, etc.) and take them literally as empirical persons. Such is the movement of the psyche when reading the book: it moves from the abstract to the anschaulich. Types become images. In the hollow roughedged space the psyche would have an engraved gem-stone, a little depiction of a personified image. The evidence that the psyche desires is not satisfied empirically, for it seeks an image: an anecdote, a Theophrastian character, a psychiatric case, a ‘typical example’ from life or literature, a Saint, an ikon of visible traits that accounts for the numinal accent of my type. Without these personified images to give precise substance to a type, a type more easily rigidifies into a defined class.”
“And every well-written typology, such as those depictions in Chapter X or in the older psychiatry texts or in astrological Characterkunde, will capture us and equalize us into its image - especially the pathologized image. As we journey through the planetary houses, typical syndrome to syndrome, we become the description, embody the diseases one by one, fit into each chapter. Such is the power of the well-shaped image, and such is the suffering of the soul until it be perceived in its own image. Thus within every typological system there lurks the abstract emptiness in which we lose our uniqueness until we have the sense of our own morphological individuality.”
““The world lives in order to develop the lines on its face.” T. E. Hulme [32]”
“our problem remains: how to perceive the human phenomenon before us in its uninterpretab1e uniqueness”
“Here we might turn from the empirical and scientistic to the more philosophical psychologies. We should expect help from phenomenology whose very business is to confront the phenomenon directly, or from existentialism whose concern is mainly with the existential person, or from the psychoanalytic tradition whose focus of effort is the individual case in the privacy of practice.”
“But in the first case, phenomenology, “there is no person as such for Husserl, only an empirical and a transcendental ego, united tenously by the body and behaviour” as global abstractions, while Merleau-Ponty gives us hermeneutics, interpretative meanings of body and gesture across the board, in all of us, as universals. In the second case, existentialism, Sartre “dissolves personal encounter into a petrifying scotophilic look - a look which overlooks the crucial minutiae” which are unique and precisely that which govern one’s existence; while Heidegger’s concern is neither with the person nor with the particular except as modes of Dasein, and this despite all his appeal to the concrete. In the third case, psychoanalysis, Freud and his patient never looked each other in the face during the procedure of their ritual, and Lacan admits that: “A psychoanalysis normally proceeds to its termination without revealing to us very much of what our patient derives in his own right from his particular sensitivity to colors or calamities, from the quickness of his grasp of things or the urgency of his weaknesses of the flesh, from his power to retain or to invent - in short, from the vivacity of his tastes. [33] Again the nomothetic dominates. In philosophical psychologies, [34] as much as in scientistic psychologies, the individual is crowded to the wall by the general. So we must try another approach altogether.”
“33. I am indebted to E. S. Casey, Yale University, for the substance and quotations of this paragraph. (The Lacan passage is from his Language of the Self, p. 29.)”
“Physique was related to character by means of a “when/then” formula - the language of prophetic magic not so very different from the language of predictional science. “When his hair and his face is long, then his days are long, he will be poor.” [35] There is no distinction between character and fate. A character statement derived from physique is also a prophecy.”
“Taking our cue from Jung, when we read a person or his soul’s contents (dreams) in order to predict fate (marriage, travel, psychosis), we are moving away from uniqueness which is both uninterpretable and unpredictable. To see essence of character does not mean that we can predict what will happen to that character.That psychologist who “can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not” is the witch says Shakespeare (Macbeth I, 3).”
““There never was an animal with the form of one kind and the mental character of another: the soul and body appropriate to the same kind always go together, and this shows that a specific body involves a specific mental character”.”
“Aristotle next summarizes three different ways of reading persons. We can see them in terms of animal analogies, [37] and of geography and race, and of facial display of emotions.”
“Because we no longer dispose of a richly emotional language for insighting the historical and geographical shadow in the psyche, this entire metaphorical possibility becomes unconscious, returning as literal racial discrimination in the world. But stereotypes are images, of imagination that present physiognomies of the shadow, allowing me to see my own in contrast. By means of these ethnic epithets I am able to discriminate a region of differences between myself and others, and locate each psyche within a distinct landscape, giving it history and soil. Of course all communal thinking, all egalitarian ‘Ologies’ taboo as prejudices these modes of perceptive discrimination, forcing ethnic images and metaphors into literalisms that project shadow rather than letting see and feel shadow.”
“One does not have to accept Darwin’s evolutional explanation even while we may accept both the innate expressive analogies between human and animal physiognomy and the innate commonality in all human faces as one more place where what Jung calls the “collective unconscious” manifests itself. The image that we present in our Selbstdarstellung - to use the term of Adolf Portmann - is the visibility of our emotional nature. Our surface presents ourdepth.”
“types and temperaments determine how we live our complexes”
“The notion of basic types of archetypal suffering appears in the elements of Empedocles and Plato (Timaeus) which were modes of pathos, ways of being buffeted by fate, being moved by necessity. The four temperaments of humoural medicine are terms - choleric, melancholic, etc. - also derived from pathology.”
“what moves the soul most is the “intolerable image” - the face of soft homosexuality, the face of brutal paroxysmal rage - which, because it is so deeply shocking, precisely constellates my repressions, and thus the turns of my fate, even to death.”
“Gestalt psychology has made us remember again that the whole world, and not only the human face, presents itself physiognomically. We perceive not just discrete particular sensations - green blotches, bird notes. We perceive significant whole patterns - the palm frond together with a bird’s melody in which total physiognomy there are emotional qualities. And, it is not our subjective ability to empathize (Lipps) or our intentional set of mind (Brentano) that occasions these qualities; nor do we project them into the face of the world. They are there, given in the image. “Em Ding”, said Wertheimer, “ist so gut unheimlich, wie es schwarz ist, ja es ist in erster Linie unheimlich”.”
“Gestalt psychology contributes to an archetypal psychology of the image as significant form that precedes and is perhaps different from its cognitive meaning. A Gestalt view of the human image, or of any image, gets us beyond interpretations and out of the hermeneutic cages that have trapped our immediate perceptions.”
“We are now distinguishing between the meaning of an image and its signjficance: the first is what we give to it; the second what it gives to us. It bears the gift of significance; it is fecund with implications; or, in Gestalt language, an image has pregnancy. [54] It carries within its own body the potential of archetypal resonance. The archetype’s inherence in the image gives body to the image, the fecundity of carrying and giving birth to insights. The more we articulate its shape, the less we need interpret.”
“To see the archetypal in an image is thus not a hermeneutic move. It is an imagistic move. We amplify an image by means of myth in order not to find its archetypal meaning but in order to feed it with further images that increase its volume and depth and release its fecundity. Hermeneutic amplifications in search of meaning take us elsewhere, across cultures, looking for resemblances which neglect the specifics of the actual image. Our move, which keeps archetypal significance limited within the actually presented image, also keeps meanings always precisely embodied. No longer would there be images without meaning and meaning without images. The neurotic condition that Jung so often referred to as “loss of meaning” would now be understood as “loss of image”, and the condition would be met therapeutically less by recourse to philosophy, religion, and wisdom, and more by turning directly to one’s actual images in which archetypal significance resides.”
“wholeness is not only a construction to be built or a goal to achieve, but, as Gestalt says, a whole is presented in the very physiognomy of each event”
“To read the world, we must read its face, the presenting surface of its landscape and our inscape in response to it. We must stick to the image. That is where each particular wholeness lies. Unity is a quality given with the face of each event.”
“To the artist’s idiographic eye, differences stand out; while to the rationalist’s nomothetic eye it is similarities, classes, types. Neither Gall and his measurements of skulls, nor Carus and his idealized types or models were able to equal Lavater’s imagistic eye for individual differences.”
“In order to describe these individual differences Lavater insists that one be “inexhaustibly copious in language”. He is forced by the immense subtlety of physiognomic expression to “be the creator of a new language” (p. 65).”
“Lavater says that poverty of language makes us unable to grasp what we see, perhaps even to see at all. We see what our language allows us to see, a statement drawing support from experimental studies which show a link between having the ability to be an accurate judge of personality and having artistic and literary interests. [61] I am suggesting that the substitution of clinical language for literary, of mathematical exactness for imaginative precision, the learning of observation through microscopic medicine rather than through bedside portraits and biography, and the reliance upon socio-psychological testing instead of moral-characterological scrutiny, has all contributed to our decline in psychological perception of the individual person, and thus to our age of psychopathy.”
“Sympathy and antipathy are psychological tools; evidently, these gut reactions of the shadow help us perceive.”
“To hold them off in the name of objectivity does not improve perception but falsifies it. So, too, we injure our perceptual ability by supposedly integrating the shadow. By this I mean that my intense feelings of repulsion and dislike about someone - Mr. Nixon say - are not only part of me to integrate. They are part of the percept of Mr. Nixon, part of his physiognomy and given with his Gestalt. The more I take the world in as my shadow to integrate, the less I can differentiatedly perceive the world’s actual physiognomic character. To call a perception “shadow” generalizes the perception; we are no longer seeing but conceiving. If we do not trust our own eyes to see, and ears to hear, and to stand for what we feel when we see and hear, we then increase paranoid suspicions about what we are sensing. As our observational precision decreases, vague paranoid impressions veil us in. The task is age-old: to discern the Devil in his actual manifestations, rather than to theologize about sin.”
“Man is created as an image, in an image, and by means of his images.”
“Therefore he appears first of all to the imagination so that the perception of personality is first of all an imaginative act (to which sensation, emotion, and ideation contribute but do not determine).”
“Since imagination forms us into our images, to perceive a person’s essence we must look into his imagination and see what fantasy is creating his reality.”
“But to look into imaginationwe need to look with imagination, imaginatively, searching for images with images. You are given to my imagination by your image, the image of you in your heart as Michelangelo, as Neoplatonism, as Henry Corbin would say, and this image is composed not only of wrinkles, muscles, and colours accreted through your life, though they make their contribution to its complexity. To see you as you are is an imagination, as Lavater says, of structure, the divine image in which your essence is shaped.”
“We have now moved from persons as faces to persons as images. The imaginative act of seeing requires, Lavater says, a variegated language, self-discipline about projection (knowledge of my own heart and its images), experience of the world - and an eye that sees instantaneity. Here words reach their limit, for language must be strung into sentences. They proceed in time, forming narratives, stories. But the image is perceived all at once, as a Gestalt, all parts simultaneously.”
““Every language of this world, even the most perfect, has an essential imperfection - that it is only successive: whereas the speech to the eye of images and signs is instantaneous. The language of Heaven in order to be perfect must be both successive and instantaneous. It must present a whole heap of images, thoughts, sensations, all at once like a painting, and yet also present their succession with the greatest speed and truthfulness. It must be painting and speech together” (from Benz, p. 199).”
“Lavater here is echoing a classical (Horace), and eighteenth-century, idea, “Ut pictura poesis”: the formal and contentual unity of painting and poetry. [67] His vision is thoroughly spatial, and language cannot adequately speak of spatial relations because it talks in time. But Lavater is going beyond aesthetics; he is speaking of the language of Heaven, of angels to whom all is revealed in a flash, and who read the character of man, and judge him thereby, through his image. Here Lavater deepens Darwin. If the expression of man is transcultural and universal, then so must be the eye that reads the expression.”
“Lavater transforms primitive and primary to mean a priori, the “Ursprache of humanity”, as Benz says. The image of man precedes the interpretation of man.”
“Moreover, Lavater continues, in the same passage (Brief 16, Bd. III, pp. 104-15; Benz, p. 201), the resurrected body will be wholly revealed in its image in which every physiognomic item of the person will express superbly what goes on in us without having to speak a word.”
“The “last judgment’ as the ultimate revelation of the shape of personality, the image in the heart on the body drawn, is always going on because it is eternal. To the watching angel the presentation of a self is in everyday life where we are being visibly created by our imaginings, which means we are not a product of external forces, not what we do or choose, not what we have stocked in inventory, nor does it matter in that ultimate revelation whether our imaginings proceed via intuition or extraversion or feeling. We are being judged in our images, which gives to the image and all our imaginings an extraordinary moral importance.”
“Lavater’s prescription: “It must be painting and speech at one and the same instant”, brings us to our last approach, Imagism, the school of poetry in the English-speaking world that appeared during the same crucial years in London, just before and during the First World War, as did Gestalt psychology in Berlin and Jung’s Symbole der Wandlung in Zurich. Although Imagism was hardly a movement and it lasted briefly, most major poets in the English language since then were in it or affected by it. In the words of Pound (1908), an aim of Imagism is: “To paint the world as I see it”. [68] To put the concrete event as subjective experience into precise images. Imagism recapitulated several traditions: French symbolism, Japanese Haiku, Classical lyrics.”
“In these lines the image tells a story, is the story, and each love story collapses into the instantaneity of the image. Ut pictura poesis; event as tableau to be seen. [71] The surface, concrete and visible, implicates invisible volume and depth like sculpture. Pound (1914) called Imagism: “Poetry where painting or sculpture seems as it were ‘just coming over into speech’.” [72] To bring this out, a poem called “Autumn” from William Carlos Williams: [73] Here, people, open grave, new road, old man on his knees, grasses and goat form a whole wanting nothing, a Gestalt that is a unique perception, or a perception that creates uniqueness. It comes into being with the perception, in the uniqueness of the image.To be is to be perceived: esse is percipi.And now we begin to understand that the act of imagistic perception does not merely see or reproduce a uniqueness that is there. Rather this act creates uniqueness by its imagistic mode of perception. Uniqueness is created by poesis, shaping images in words. But first the imagistic eye that sees in shapes. For images are not simply what we see; they are the way we see. Thus the perception of uniqueness begins in the eye that sees imagistically, [74] whereas the eye that sees by means of scientifically constructed types will always conceive uniqueness as a problem.”
“Scientific method depends on repeatability if an opus in science, an experiment say cannot be duplicated it loses validity.A depth psychology concerned with soul in its individuality cannot proceed as a science. Hence Jung’s remark that individuality means the end of technique, the end of prediction and interpretation which also means the end of ‘scientism’. In place of the scientific fantasy of method for psychology, I am suggesting the imagistic. Instead of measurement, precision. I am suggesting that we see the complex in the patient’s image and not only adduce the complex from his material. But psychologists do not have to become artists and poets, literally. We need but see as if we were.”
“Go in fear of abstractions. . .“ says Ezra Pound. “Use no adjective which does not reveal something.” {76] F. S. Flint says: “. . . no word that does not contribute to presentation…” [77] To find the words for your image I need Lavater’s rich, variegated language, the Allport-Odbert list of 17,923 trait names. Our usual psychological language fails the precision of the image. What is revealed with such terms as “introvert” or “mother-complex”? Moreover, these terms of typicality - unless imaged - bring further perceptions to a halt. Our language also fails the emotion.”
“Jung’s “complex” and Pound’s definition of Image and Lavater’s “whole heap of images, thoughts, sensations, all at once” are all remarkably similar. Pound calls an Image, “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” … “the Image is more than an Idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy” … “a Vortex, from which and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” [79] Thus the movement, the dynamics, are within the complex and not only between complexes, as tensions of opposites told about in narrational sequences, stories that require arbitrary syntactical connectives which are unnecessary for reading an image where all is given at once.”
“Charles Olson, a later poet in this tradition, said: “One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception… always, always one perception must must must move instanter, on another.””
“movement that is not narrational, and the Imagists had no place for narrative. “Indeed the great poems to come after the Imagist period - Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets; Pound’s Cantos; William’s Paterson - contain no defining narrative.””
“This is the very mode that Jung suggested for grasping dreams - not as a sequence in time, but as revolving around a nodal complex. If dreams, then why not the dreamers. We too are not only a sequence in time, a process of individuation. We are also each an image of individuality. We each turn in a vortex, and each movement in that vortex, that complex, opens another perceptive insight, reveals another face of our image.”
“typologies, for all their service in organizing a variegated world of multiple particulars, arise only in a mind that perceives the world in this way. “Chaos” and “order” lie in the eye that perceives as such. “Chaotic multiplicity”, “bare particulars”, “10,000 things” are not givens. They are abstract generalized images hermeneutically applied to the images that are given. The given itself is shaped; everything comes with a face. It is neither a given of nature nor an axiom of logic that the world is a chaotic mass of bare particulars, which then require typing. The world does, however, become such when we remove its face, when we remove its significant subjectivity.”
“Despite Jung’s statement that his typology is not a physiognomy, it is; for even his types could not leave their ground in descriptive exemplary images.”
““To be is to be perceived”. When to-be-perceived as a type is to-be-perceived not as a face, then we are collected into rough-edged bins and roughly handled in terms of resemblance.”
“But notice here how resemblance is not conceived vertically, as an epistrophé in likeness to the image in which I am created and am continually being created. Instead resemblance - also in Wittgenstein’s use of the idea - is conceived horizontally as a likeness to others across the sample. Conceptual types without images. Egalitarian. No longer am I the image I embody. I have become identified with what is not unique, my resemblance with others. My image has been fed to the type. My sense of image lost, my identity seeps out; and so I seem to have no specific shape that can be grasped individually.”
“Therefore, I become a problem. I must be interpreted and predicted about, requiring hermeneutic and scientific methods, and also psychological ego-strengthening to regain an identity that had been given with my image. Regardless of Christian faith in persons and philosophies of humanism and personalism, it is the loss of person as image which opens the door to collective techniques of handling persons. Persons in bins can resemble each other only in their commonality. So we would climb out into individualism by heroic acts of rugged will. Ego is the phantom risen, the idol erected, when the image cannot be seen.”
“Imagism has blessed the problem of this Tagung - Variety and Oneness - by cursing both its houses. We can see through both as fantasies of number. That polar construction between multiplicity versus the unit, unity, and oneness is again a typology which can seduce us from perceiving uniqueness. Both these fantasies of number, and the problem between them, arise when we do not stick to the immediately presented image whose anomaly is its integrity is its uniqueness. Uniqueness is anomalous; in our oddness is our integrity, our individuality.”
“Also the egalitarian-versus-elitism opposition arises from conceiving ourselves numerically, as units. Then to single out any one unit as unique creates an elite particular over and against the equality of the others. The mistake here lies in assuming. that units, or bare particulars, are primary, whereas they are secondary numerical constructions. They result from a class concept - the unit - which has already egalitarianized uniqueness by reducing distinctions. Uniqueness is not a special kind of unit (CPID) that is different from all others, since each unit before it is classified as such is from the beginning different and unique. Unity, too, need not be conceived numerically. Rather, we have been speaking of unity throughout as a quality of perception, the way in which each image is marked by the particular lines of its physio- gnomic character. Did not the Greek word charassein (from which “character” derives) originally describe the act of one who engraves or scratches marks or inflicts wounds. Where units may be added into larger unities, the specific markings that characterize each uniqueness have no common denominators. Oneness as a number dissolves into an image or into the quality of integrity given with each different image. With the dissolution of unity into a quality of the image, oneness can no longer be set up as a goal of integration. This goal is seductive only to its counterpart: ourselves conceived as uncharacterized, unimaged, unperceived units.”
“The character of uniqueness together with its painfully anomalous marks gives each person his or her integrity, his or her sense of being odd and unlike all others, and therefore irreplaceable. This further gives that dignity in the face of death which Unamuno calls the Tragic Sense of Life. The loss of any unit can be reproduced according to type or replaced by a spare part; the loss of uniqueness is irreversible.”
“Let us instead, by following physiognomics, attempt to perceive the animal in man - not merely in Darwin’s and Lavater’s sense of visible analogies. For what is being said in these theories is that there is an animal in man - an old religious idea (cf. 9, ii, §370); and we may look again at man theriomorphically, by which I do not mean merely genetically or in an evolutional sense. I mean rather that the Gods themselves show their shapes the world over as animals, so that the animal is also an imago dei, a face of our eternal nature. By perceiving the animal in man we may perceive rudiments of divinity, essential archetypal modes of consciousness - leonine, hawklike, mousy, piggish - essential natures in the psyche that suppose paleolithic indelibility, and are our guardians.”
“The perspective I am suggesting here considers that the first psychological difference between humans and animals resides in how we regard each other. Humans regard animals differently than animals regard animals (and humans), so a first step in restoring Eden would be to regain the animal eye.”
“image and instinct are inseparable components of a single spectrum”
“As there are images in instincts, so we might say there are instincts in images. Images are bodies.”
“Wallace Stevens, [85]states in his poems that the animal is the first idea, the myth before the myth, whose perception is of physiognomic Gestalt, as a “lion roars at the enraging desert”. This bird before the sun of our ordinary round and mind, this “dove in the belly” perceives, and creates with its response, the innate intelligibility of the world. This animal comes in our dreams, this animal - or is the dove an angel? - perceives sub specie aeternitatis, the brute eye that reads character in the flesh, and, like Lavater, instantly feels like and dislike. The animal eye perceives and reacts to the animal image in the other, the form which we display in our Selbst-darstellung.”
“If even psychology sees man as exemplifying typical functions, then there are no essential differences among human kind. We are functions, or functionaries, of groupings, an inventory of consumer tastes, actuarial probabilities, marketable skills, opinion.”
“I am no longer a typical intellectual, a typical Swiss, leptosome, Jungian, Jew, urbanite American, middle-class, or any of the other comforting places to shelter from the confrontation with me as a vivid calligraphic idiosyncrasy, an image close to your nose, with hands and handwriting, with gestures and intonations, eyes and mouth and creases, syntax and vocabulary, pelvis, gait, and skin-coloring, with a long ancestral history and biography of actions that present myself.”
“the imagination bewildered by this complexity searches for and seizes upon revelatory images to create a distinct individual.”
“Stereotypes help us discriminate ancient depths of difference in visible surfaces, and Jung’s old term ‘racial unconscious’ can be revived not in a literal genetic sense, but in this sense of shadow images that deepen our inner soil.”
“Not only is each person an image and this image is his invisible divinity presented, but each particular aspect of a person is a face, each face an image, this dream and this symptom, this behaviour and this desire, is also a distinct image, a tale condensed into a depiction, a visibility that needs no interpreted meaning, gives no certain feeling, a vortex that expands and so1idifies a cluster of multiplicities rushing through it.”
“The image is itself - this room, you, others, me, the thigh on the hard chair, the attention fading in and out, appetite rising, the light through the leaves, palm rustlings and heat, stereotypically Eranos through forty years; yet, uninterpretable and unpredictable,a presentation, like an animal in its own display that is type and image at once and cannot go beyond itself, only deepen within itself; a presen- tation that sets limits to mind, keeps mind held within the image.As images are psychic reality and the source of every mental act, every meaning and feeling, so they are the dissolution of all mental acts, their end in image. Wallace Stevens said this in his late poem “Of Mere Being”: [88] The palm at the end of the mind, Sings in the palm, without human meaning, You know then that it is not reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The palm stands on the edge of space. The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.”