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SIX KEYS TO A LITERARY GENETIC CODE

In essays on the subject of centricity, I've most often used the image of a geometrical circle, which, as I explained here,  owes someth...

Thursday, May 29, 2008

PHENOMENOLOGY OF COMPLEXITY

As mentioned earlier, I recently read a collection of two long Husserl essays, but I tend to think Husserl's hyper-rational approach to phenomenology is not quite what I'm looking for. However, having recently encountered Roger Brooke's 1991 study JUNG AND PHENOMENOLOGY, I'm more optimistic about seeing the subject matter of Jung (and, by extension, his sort-of follower Joseph Campbell) reified through the Heideggerian take on phenomenology.

In his opening chapter Brooke cites several rationales for trying to view Jung-- who called himself a phenomenologist at one point, however accurately-- through the lens of the phenomenalist philosophy. The one that most impresses me is where Brooke stresses the need for "an anthropology according to which the adequacy or relevance of Jung's various metaphors can be measured. To say that all knowledge is perspectival or structured through an imaginative vision of the world is not to say that one metaphor is just as good as another. But if some metaphors are better than others, which seems obvious, then the basis on which such judgments are made needs to be clarified."

"Mythicity" is of course my own take on sussing out the reasons why some metaphors (which is also to say symbols, since metaphor is impossible without a symbolic process), so I'm intrigued to see how Brooke will approach the problem of this "anthropology." I tend to favor Campbell's four functions, which will certainly be far outside Brooke's concerns, but it's at least worth noting that Heideggerian phenomenology is reputed, far more than Husserlian, for its emphasis on the meaning of "being embodied in the world." Arguably Campbell does something like this when he avoids allegory, so time will tell whether or not Brooke touches on any of the same points...

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