Search Results for Id
Cupid
Cupid and Psyche (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Cupid ((Latin Cupido, “desire”) comes under many guises. As the Roman god of Love, he’s the son of Venus.
The 2nd century Latin writer Apuleus portrays him in The Golden Ass as the lover of Psyche. But the timeless tale of Cupid and Pscyhe goes back at least to the 4th century BCE, where its depicted in Greek art.
Depth psychologists have much to say about the relationship between Cupid and Psyche. In Jungian archetypal psychology Psyche is taken as the cold, somewhat icy soul in need of a “shattering” or “melting” from the warm, sensitive Cupid. Cupid, on the other hand, risks utter destruction unless Psyche’s gaze is tempered with love.
In the language of symbols, the successful union of Cupid and Psyche represents a fruitful togetherness, not unlike the Yin and the Yang, love and knowledge or affection and wisdom.
In art Cupid is usually depicted naked. He’s often winged with bow and arrow, wearing a boyish or cherub-like countenance.
In folklore, Cupid, like the Indian kama, afflicts human beings with a proverbial “dart to the heart.” His marks invariably fall in love or become filled with desire for another person. His chief mythic parallel is the Greek god Eros.
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Candide
Candide being swindled (in Voltaire’s Candide, or Optimism) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Candide is Voltaire‘s parody of 1759 which lampoons the philosopher Leibniz‘s view that God created the best of all possible worlds.
In that work the character Dr. Pangloss is a mouthpiece for the Leibnizian view. Pangloss clings to his rosy philosophical outlook despite undergoing horrendous personal sufferings.
Votaire, himself, had his fair share of suffering. He was imprisoned in the Bastille for speaking out against a French nobleman who’d insulted him. And his imprisonment came after he was beaten up by the nobleman’s servants and denied compensation.
In 1726, Voltaire responded to an insult from the young French nobleman Chevalier de Rohan, whose servants beat him a few days later. Since Voltaire was seeking compensation, and was even willing to fight in a duel, the aristocratic Rohan family obtained a royal lettre de cachet, an often arbitrary penal decree signed by the French King (Louis XV, in the time of Voltaire) that was often bought by members of the wealthy nobility to dispose of undesirables. This warrant caused Voltaire to be imprisoned in the Bastille without a trial and without an opportunity to defend himself.[9] Fearing an indefinite prison sentence, Voltaire suggested that he be exiled to England as an alternative punishment, which the French authorities accepted.[10] This incident marked the beginning of Voltaire’s attempts to reform the French judicial system.¹
This no doubt set the scene for Voltaire’s Candide, and many other works which advocated fair play and the betterment of society, to include freedom of speech and religion.
Candide was banned by the authorities for being blasphemous. But Voltaire’s sharp wit and clever insights couldn’t be resisted by Enlightenment thinkers. The book was secretly circulated and extremely popular. Voltaire’s fresh approach influenced many other authors, and Candide is now recognized as a classic of Western literature.
As often happens, if a petty, jealous or fearful authority tries to hold back a great personality, this usually spurs the creative soul on to even greater heights of achievement—which, ironically, supports Leibniz’s position.
The American conductor Leonard Bernstein wrote the music for an operetta based on Voltaire’s work. Also called Candide, it opened on Broadway in 1956 to lacklustre reviews.
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¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire
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Druids
18th-century engraving reproducing a bas-relief found at Autun, France, depicting “two druids” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Druids were Celtic pagan priests. Although much pseudo-history and quasi sacred lore can be found, in actual fact we don’t know too much about them because they were sworn to secrecy and not permitted to express their beliefs in writing. We do, however, have written accounts from indirect sources.
When in Gaul, the Roman leader Julius Caesar noted that the Druids worshipped gods, passed on their traditions to the young, practiced human sacrifice in oak groves and forbade certain people from attending sacrificial ceremonies. Because attendance at sacrificial ceremonies cemented one’s in-group status, those forbidden to attend were marginalized.
Caesar also says the Druids met annually at a location taken to be the center of Gaul. Like contemporary priests, they didn’t fight in wars nor pay taxes. The Roman writer Pliny (the Elder, 23-79 CE) wrote that, in addition to their priestly role, the Druids were seers, diviners and healers.
The ancient Roman senator and historian Tacitus (56–117 CE) mentions Druidic presence in Britain. The Druids served as officials at their allegedly bloody and frightening human sacrifices, the victims usually being criminals. Sometimes, however, innocent people were sacrificed in times of national calamity.
English: An 18th century engraving of a Celtic wicker man. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Caesar says that giant casings of intertwined branches held victims as they were burnt alive by the Druids. Humans and animals, alike, were used as burnt offerings for the gods. However, it’s been suggested that the Romans cited the Druidic practice of human sacrifice to undermine the Druid’s political power. The Romans, themselves, executed human beings for the apparent good of the State (in the form of scourging to the death or crucifixion) but human sacrifice to the gods was no longer practiced in the classical world.
Despite New Age philosophies based on the alleged teachings of the Druids, there is scant hard evidence that they possessed any detailed body of esoteric knowledge or, as S. G. F. Brandon puts it, “any subtle and sophisticated philosophy.” Brandon, in fact, suggests that the Druids were not unlike any other “barbarian priesthood.”¹ And there’s no visible evidence to link the Druids with Stonehenge, as suggested by the English writer John Aubrey in 1649 and by numerous TV specials and contemporary enthusiasts.
Through the fantasy literature of writers like J. J. R. Tolkien and Terry Brooks, the idea of the Druid-Sorcerer is firmly established as a kind of archetypal image depicting the powerful, brooding, wise and yet somewhat ambivalent magician. Not surprisingly, Druids feature prominently in off- and online gaming.
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¹ S. G. F. Brandon ed., “Celtic (Pagan) Religion” in A Dictionary of Comparative Religion: New York: Scribner, 1970, p. 180-184. By way of contrast, Neo-Druidism is a movement that, among other things, venerates nature.
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Jacques Derrida
Elisabeth Roudinesco – Jacques Derrida (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was an influential French philosopher of language born in Algeria who taught at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Derrida and his followers suggest that the semiotic sense of denotation is, for the most part, chimerical and that everything is connotation.
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Euripides
Medea (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Euripides (480-406 BCE) was a Greek dramatist, born in Athens. As a youth he was an athlete, winning prizes at Eleusinian and Thesean gymnastic events. After studying philosophy under Anaxagoras (along with his friend Socrates), rhetoric under Prodicus and dabbling in painting, Euripides realized that literature was his forté.
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. Yet he also became “the most tragic of poets”,[nb 1] focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown.¹
He wrote some 80 dramas, out of which 19 remain. Medea, Electra, and Trojan Women were performed during his lifetime but his work became increasingly popular after his death. The Bacchae, for instance, was performed in Athens only after he had died.
Euripides is also relevant to contemporary psychiatry and, in particular, depth psychology. His play Heracles (416 BCE) most effectively personifies Madness as the daughter of Heaven and Night, sent to drive Heracles insane:
Madness has mounted her chariot
Groans and tears accompany her
She plies the lash, hell-bent for murder
rage gleaming from her eyes
A Gorgon of the night, and around her
Bristle the hissing heads of a hundred snakes²
Fully versed in the myths and legends that permeated his culture, he was also aware of the Sophists and the early scientists and philosophers like Anaxagoras.³ So Euripides didn’t buy into but, rather, satirized the popular religion of his day. He did believe in the idea of divine providence but was skeptical of many of the religious beliefs and practices that dominated the ancient Greek world.
Put simply, he preferred to find his own answers to questions concerning ultimate truth. As such, he’s been called ’the poet of the Greek enlightenment,’ among a variety of other things by his detractors and admirers.4
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¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euripides
² Euripides, cited in Eric Flaum and David Pandy, The Encyclopedia of Mythology: Gods, Heroes, and Legends of the Greeks and Romans, Philadelphia, Courage Books, 1993, p. 99.
³ Peter Burian ” Euripides ” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. Ed. Michael Gagarin. © Oxford University Press 2010. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome: (e-reference edition). Oxford University Press. Toronto Public Library. 25 May 2012 http://www.oxford-greecerome.com/entry?entry=t294.e458
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Erasmus Desiderius
Desiderius Erasmus (1466/69–1536) in a 1523 portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Erasmus Desiderius (originally Gerrit Gerritszoon 1467-1536) was a Dutch scholar, man of letters and statesman born in Rotterdam. His humorous and insightful writings about religion during the Renaissance, especially the practices of the clergy, won him renown and gained controversy among the intellectual and religious elites of his day.
A former Augustinian monk (1487) and priest (1492), his most famous work, In Praise of Folly, (1509) apparently was written in only a week as an idle pastime while visiting, and for the benefit of, Sir Thomas More. But its numerous scholarly references suggest that it was re-worked prior to publication.
Holding many views that would not seem out of place for a contemporary thinker, Erasmus has the extra benefit of not being swayed by contemporary scientific materialism. Insanity, for instance, is said to be of two types:
One kind is sent from hell by the vengeful furies whenever they let loose their snakes and assail the hearts of men with lust for war, insatiable thirst for gold, the disgrace of forbidden love…or some other sort of evil…The other is quit different, desirable above everything, and is known to come to me. It occurs whenever some happy mental aberration frees the soul from its anxious cares and at the same time restores it by the addition of manifold delights.”¹
Probably due to his keen intelligence, he was never persecuted for his views. He seems to have mastered the art of getting the knives of notables to butter his bread instead of stabbing him in the back.
Erasmus was a humanist who believed that the ethical principles of religion were more important than its rules, regulations, doctrines and ceremonies. He took great pains to illustrate that the clergy was rife with hypocrisy and corruption. Colloquia familiaria (1519) was a parody of abuses and degeneracy among the clergy.
After some time Erasmus denounced the Reformation figure Martin Luther, whom he had formerly praised. Luther’s dogmatic theology was too rigid for Erasmus’ free-style thinking. Among his other works, Erasmus was the first to translate the Greek New Testament.
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¹ Erasmus of Rotterdam, Praise of Folly and Letter to Martin Dorp, 1515, trans. Betty Radice, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 121.
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David Hume
David Hume's statements on ethics foreshadowed those of 20th century emotivists via Wikipedia
David Hume (1711-76) was a Scottish philosopher who developed a naturalist perspective on all aspects of human life.
For Hume, the highest good is based on the pursuit of happiness. We are personally happy when we’re good to others, not due to some high spiritual reward but because this approach leads to a harmonious social whole. So personal and social well-being go hand in hand.
This means that morality isn’t based on austere rational principles but on the desire for enjoyment. Accordingly, Hume believes that reason cannot determine anything without experience. And he goes as far to say that reason is the “slave of passion.”
Hume’s metaphysics, in particular his critique of the belief in cause and effect, remains an important challenge to our conventional way of seeing. All we can be sure of, says Hume, is that certain events occur one after another in a given region and for a certain duration.
In billiards, for instance, the white ball appears to cause the motion of other balls when impacting them on the gaming table. But here’s the radical part. Hume says that all we can truly know is that, in the past, the first ball impacted and the other balls moved. We cannot prove that the first ball’s impact will always be followed by movement of the other balls. And for Hume, there is no rational way to demonstrate a causal connection:
Reason can never shew us the connexion of one object with another, tho’ aided by experience, and the observation of their constant conjunction in all past instances. When the mind, therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determin’d by reason, but by certain principles, which associate together the ideas of these objects, and unite them in the imagination.¹
Put differently, from prior experience we build up a series of expectations and habitual ways of interpreting observations. Hume calls these “ideas.” But ideas they simply are. Although we expect the billiard balls to move, we have no way of proving or knowing that they always will.
At first, this may seem absurd. But Hume’s critique of causality had a profound effect on one of the most important thinkers in the history of Western philosophy, Immanuel Kant. Mortimer Adler says “…Kant tells us that David Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers.”²
In addition, on a quantum level of reality, contemporary physicists claim that observations of subatomic particles support the ideas of probability and simultaneity instead of linear causality.
However, some say it’s invalid to compare quantum and macroscopic levels of reality because subatomic particles exist in an entirely different arena, and behave in different ways than the larger aggregate objects which they make up.
This debate continues to this day, the answer to which might depend on one’s core beliefs and related worldview. Or in Hume’s terms, one’s “customs of thought.”
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¹ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1896 ed.), SECTION VI.: Of the inference from the impression to the idea, paragraph 278.
² Adler, Mortimer J. (1996). Ten Philosophical Mistakes. Simon & Schuster. p. 94, cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason#cite_note-2
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Individuation Process
Original Statue of Carl Jung in Mathew Street, Liverpool, UK (1988). Made of plaster, it was vandalised and replaced in 1993 - Rodhullandemu via Wikipedia
Individuation process is a phrase coined by C. G. Jung to denote a life-long process of self realization. For Jung, the goal is not necessarily the riddance of evil and Christian perfection, which he sees as a somewhat skewed approach, but rather, ‘wholeness.’ Jungians – that is, followers of Jung – strive to know themselves and to become fully responsible for their actions.
Individuation entails an increasing awareness of various personas and primordial/inherited impulses that can obscure but are also a part of the self. The individuation process is said to move through various stages, symbolized and possibly aided by esoteric systems such as kabbala, alchemy and the Tarot.
Jung says that individuation gives us a new perspective on the cultural relativity of social norms. Although one may become more introspective and even ‘removed’ at some point in the journey, this hopefully does not end up in mere neurotic withdrawal (and this is a point where much debate could arise).
Instead, individuation gathers instinctual and social forces into a greater, more expansive sense of self. In contrast to individualism, individuation ‘sees through’ social norms but, at the same time, doesn’t entirely reject them. In fact, Jung often seems to say that a successful life is one that adapts to society—at least, in some way (another point where much debate could arise).
To compensate for the guilt that comes from being different or from partially leaving social norms and expectations behind, the individuating individual feels that she or he must create something of value to atone for his or her departure. Jung, in a rather authoritarian manner, says society has the “right” and “duty” to judge the individual harshly if she or he does not produce such a compensatory work.
Jung’s view here seems to limit compensatory works to material objects that can be perceived through the five senses—that is, the ‘great compensation’ must be something that everyone can understand. In his Collected Works Jung jokes about Tibetan Lamas sending him positive thoughts from some remote hill station. But Jung doesn’t pursue the idea much further.
Not surprisingly, Jung rarely displays genuine appreciation for the idea of spiritual intercession and the transfer of sin. But he’s not totally out in left field here. His work on alchemy and the psychological dynamic of transference provides a glimmer of hope. Jung concedes that personalities may mysteriously intermingle. But that’s about it.
For deeply prayerful and contemplative people, Jung may be seen as not totally “wrong” but definitely at a kind of kindergarten level with regard to the subtle dynamics of the spiritual life. The American guru Ram Dass implied as much in his work, and it’s likely that other contemplatives in diverse faith traditions would see it this way too.¹
However, Jung was often feisty and quick to respond to a challenge. Were he alive today, he’d probably retort that contemplatives are absorbed in, or identify with, a particular archetypal reality without being able to appreciate other perspectives. And in some instances, this too seems valid.
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¹ In a recent article about David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method, Jim Slotek describes the Jungian idea of synchronicity as “Jungian spookiness.” But for contemplatives around the world and throughout history, meaningful coincidences are often seen as evidence of our essential interconnectedness and, in the largest sense, God’s plan. And for Catholics and other Christians, they could be evidence pointing toward the “mystical body of Christ.” As Colin Wilson once put it, they’re healthy, not scary.
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Individual Rights and Freedoms
Detail from Corrupt Legislation. Mural by Elihu Vedder. Lobby to Main Reading Room, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. via Wikipedia
Individual Rights and Freedoms is an admirable political ideal that aims to defend the fundamental rights of an individual within society. However, once put into political practice, defining and upholding the idea of individual rights and freedoms usually presents an ongoing challenge.
For sociologists like Zygmunt Baumann, modern democracies exhibit an uneasy tension between individual rights on the one hand, and individual freedoms on the other hand.
The problems is this: How can individuals be perfectly free while belonging to a society which by definition requires some kind of functional interdependence? What if, for example, your neighbors’ freedom to have a party interferes with your right to sleep at night or, if you work the night shift, during the daytime?
Due to potential conflicts like these we have laws that are continually being created or modified to try to protect and promote individual rights, as well as the ideals upheld by a certain social body.
This sounds great. But some like Scott Turrow suggest that laws do not necessarily solve problems because justice systems often favor high status groups at the expense of lower status groups. And in unduly corrupt societies, legal systems tend to go lightly on some offenders while slamming others.
The following outlines some of the issues about rights and freedoms as experienced in Canada: “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”
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Ideology
A segment of a social network via Wikipedia
The word ideology is fairly well known today but not too long ago its mention, except among sociologists and historians, would probably have been met with a blank stare.
Ideology refers to a body of social, economic or political ideas and beliefs informing a person, a group or a nation. At least, this is the standard dictionary view. Social thinkers – who tend to question dictionary definitions – argue that ideology is an often deceptive set of beliefs willingly or possibly unwittingly advanced by those with the social power to do so.
According to Karl Marx, Roland Barthes and, to some extent, Michel Foucault, the unwitting masses tend to reproduce ideologies until the point where they become aware of the shallow and deceptive character of a given ideology.
At this time the so-called ordinary person, and not just the so-called intellectuals, may try to change or even revolutionize ideologies.
It’s been argued that all religions contain an ideological component. And this may be true. But to reduce the spiritual aspect of religious experience to mere ideology is probably a mistake or, at least, incomplete.
Academic treatments of the idea of ideology are often complicated and extensive. And, one could say, that although they may appear radical and progressive to naive young students, in reality the academic treatment of ideology is still, for the most part “safe,” and thus ironically reproduces the very social structures and attendant issues which are outlined in class (along with those issues that are overlooked).
That’s a cynical view, of course. And like any opinion, it’s biased and incomplete. Another view is that it’s better to talk about some things than entirely ignore or deny their existence. And social change need not be revolutionary but can, in fact, be gradual or subtle. So, university is not necessarily just “finishing school” but can help to spark young minds into positive action.
Another thing to consider about ideology – or, more properly, academic views about ideology – is that it need not be an evil or sinister process. Ideologies can be good or, at least, better than competing ones. This point is often overlooked by derisive professors who seem to be lopsidedly critical and unfairly trash the very system that gives them their bread and butter.
In the arts, Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn had this to say in the 1980′s song, “Call it Democracy.” I’m not sure what his stance would be today.
Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament –
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called “developed” nations’
Idolatry of ideology.¹
¹ Full lyrics and subsequent author comments (up to 2005) here: http://cockburnproject.net/songs&music/atcid.html
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