Episode 73: Carl Jung and the Power of Art, Part One

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 13 May 2020 11:30:00 -0400

This is the first of two conversations that Phil and JF are devoting to C. G. Jung's seminal essay, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," first delivered in a 1922 lecture. It was in this text that Jung most clearly distilled his thoughts on the power and function of art. In this first part, your hosts focus their energies on Jung's puralistic style, opposing it not just to Freud's monism (which Jung critiques in the paper) but also to the monism of those other two "masters of suspicion," Marx and Nietzsche. For Jung, art is not a branch of psychology, economics, philosophy, or science. It constitutes its own sphere, and non-artists who would investigate the nature of art would do well to respect the line that art has drawn in the sand. Weird Studies listenters will know this line as the boundary between the general and the specific, the common and the singular, the mundane and the mystical...

REFERENCES

C. G. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry"
Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century
Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity
Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychologist
Kinka Usher (director), Mystery Men
Theodor Adorno, “Bach Defended Against his Devotees”
Aleister Crowley, English magician
C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus
Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
C. G. Jung, The Portable Jung
Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" in: Untimely Meditations
Weird Studies, episode 49: Nietzsche on History
Weird Studies, episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio
Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal
Paul Ricoeur, French philosopher
Rudolph Steiner, Austrian esotericist

Episode 44: Doomed to Enchantment: The Psychical Research of William James

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 11:30:00 -0400

The great American thinker William James knew well that no intellectual pursuit is purely intellectual. His interest in the "supernormal," whether it take the form of spiritual apparition or extrasensory perception, was rooted in a personal desire to uncover the miraculous in the mundane. Indeed, the early members of the British Society for Psychical Research and its American counterpart (which James co-founded in 1884) were united in this conviction that certain phenomena which most scientists of their day considered unworthy of their attention were in fact the frontier of a new world, an avenue for humanity's deepest aspirations. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss two papers that James wrote about the first phase in the history of these research societies. James lays bare his conclusions about the reality of psychical phenomena and its scientific significance. The bizarre fact that psychical research has made little progress since its inception lays the ground for an engaging discussion on the limits of the knowable.

REFERENCES

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Frederic W. H. Myers, theorist of the "subliminal self"
Weird Studies, Episode 37: Entities
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka "Darwin's Bulldog"
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld
Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Trilogy
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
James Randi, professional skeptic
Dean Radin, Real Magic
Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious
Lionel Snell a.k.a. Ramsey Dukes, British magician
Changeling: The Lost tabletop roleplaying game
Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Joshua Ramey, "[Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux]("Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux")"
C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Pluralism”

Episode 73: Carl Jung and the Power of Art, Part One

Episode 44: Doomed to Enchantment: The Psychical Research of William James