Ideas, images in service of the active imagination....

 Northrop Frye, in The Educated Imagination, writes:

So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In our imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them as also possibilities. It’s possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common that bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.

Note, ‘there are no rights or wrongs (in the imagination)” a phrase and concept with which Hillman would concur. And for readers in this space, you will already, perhaps long ago, be aware that this entire enterprise is premised on the notion, expressed when the process began well over a decade ago, that what I need to learn is the beacon in the lighthouse that helps chart these pieces.

The insights, nuances, images and their access of James Hillman’s writings in and about archetypal psychology have been, are, and continue to be so captivating, magnetic, expansive, challenging and, in a word, ‘stretching,’ that they warrant further study, reflection, exploration and assimilation by this scribe. Hence, we dig a little deeper into his thought, in a continuing endeavour to become not only more familiar with their meaning and applications, but also to experience their ‘washing’ over, and through my own imagination.

The question of what is an image, and how do we know one if and when we ‘sense’ one, seems to be lurking throughout these meanderings. And, not surprisingly, for Hillman, not only are images redolent of ripples of meaning and questions, they are also accessibile, not only in and through ‘ideas’ but also in and through the senses.

Let’s try to unpack.

For us, ideas are ways of regarding things (modi res considerandi), perspectives. Ideas give us eyes, let us see. The word idea itself points to its intimacy with the visual metaphor of knowing, for it is related both to the Latin videre (‘to see’) and the German Wissen (‘to know’). Ideas are ways of seeing and knowing, or knowing by means of insighting. Ideas allow us to envision, and by means of  vision we can know. Psychological ideas are ways of seeing and knowing soul, so that a change in psychological ideas means a change in regard to soul and regard for soul. Our word idea comes form the Greek eidos, which meant originally in early Greek thought, and as Plato used it, both that which one sees—an appearance of shape in a concrete sense—and that by means of which one sees. We see them and by means of them. Ideas are both the shape of events, their constellation in this or that archetypal pattern, and the modes that make possible our ability to see through events into their pattern. By means of an idea we can see the idea cloaked in the passing parade. The implicit connection between having ideas to see with and seeing ideas themselves suggests that the more ideas we have, the more we see, and the deeper the ideas we have, the deeper we see. It also suggests that ideas engender other ideas, breeding new perspectives for viewing ourselves and world….Therefore, the soul reveals itself in its ideas, which are not ‘just ideas’ or ‘just up in the head,’ and may not be ‘pooh-poohed’ away, since they are the very modes through which we are envisioning and enacting our lives….(But) when an insight or idea has sunk in, practice invisible changes. The idea has opened the eye of the soul. By seeing differently, we do differently…(The soul) learns by searching for itself in whatever ideas come to it: it gains ideas by looking for them, by subjectivizing all questions, including the How? To give any direct answer to ‘how’ betrays the activity of soul-making, which proceeds by psychologizing through all literal answers. As it gains ideas by looking for them, the soul loses ideas by putting them into practice in answer to how? There is in fact a direct relation between the poverty of ideas in academic and therapeutic psychology and their insistence upon the practical. To work our answers to psychological questions not only immediately impoverishes the ideational process but also means falling into the pragmatic fallacy.—the assumption that ideas are valued by their usefulness. This fallacy denies our basic premise: that ideas are inseparable from practical actions, and that theory itself is practice; there is nothing more practical than forming ideas and becoming aware of them in their psychological effects. Every theory we hold practices upon us in one way or another, so that ideas are always in practice and do not need to be put there. (Hillman, A Blue Fire, pps. 53-4-5, from Revisioning Psychology, 115-116, 121-123)rfhetypal p

Readers, you and I are exhorted and guided to shift from considering an idea as a concept from the perspective of both intellect/cognition and action….this would remove ideas from a purely ideological, or a theological, or a philosophical or an engineering, legal or medical or scientific perspective and use. This alternative ‘perspective,’ that of psychology, not only perceives the idea, but is enabled to see by the idea, and its import and meaning in considered from within. In a culture in which most of us have been educated, raised, mentored, role-modelled and incentivized by multiple classical conditioning ‘schemes’ to ‘do’ and to ‘implement’ and to ‘perform’ and to ‘provide value’….this process seems counterintuitive to many.

We have been rewarded if and when we brought honour to our family, we won a competition, we passed an examination or graduated from college or university. We have also been rewarded if, upon entering the workplace, we provided insights, ideas and innovations that reduced costs, enhanced sales and revenue, endeared us to the hierarchical structure, and paved the way for potential and actual promotions. We have also been ‘set back’ if and when we ‘failed’ some important test, and we ‘crossed some culturally and conventionally determined ‘line’ or boundary through which experience we ‘learned’ how to ‘succeed,’ and to ‘fit in’. Nuggets of wisdom, gleaned from a special poem or novel, our ‘tips’ for ‘success’ from an admired role-model, were epithets for many of us, that offered both guidance and inspiration. We deployed those ideas, in our ‘idea’ of our own best interests.

The shift Hillman notes, from that perspective, is more than miniscule, psychologically, and personally and professionally.

However, in a manner to evoke not compliance but serious consideration, Hillman goes on to note a profound insight to justify his contention:

…(P)sychological learning or psychologizing seems to represent the soul’s desire for light, like the moth for the flame. The psyche wants to find itself by seeing through; even more, it loves to be enlightened by seeing through itself, as if the very act of seeing through clarified and made the soul transparent—as if psychologizing with ideas were itself an archetypal therapy, enlightening, illumination. The soul seems to suffer when its inward eye is occluded, a victim of overwhelming events. This suggests that all ways of enlightening soul—mystical and meditative, Socratic and dialectic, Oriental and disciplined, psychotherapeutic, and even the Cartesian longing for clear and distinct ideas—arise from the psyche’s need for vision. (Ibid).

Try to imagine a moment, a day, a week or even a month or longer, when your life seemed to be overwhelmed by events, as if the events ‘had’ you by the throat, or had so clouded your capacity to function that you felt lost, ‘out to sea’ perhaps, or ‘falling off a cliff’…..such a moment, perhaps, is the nexus of Hillman’s argument. And, surely we are all conscious or such moments, and also of how we came out on the other side….and how those moments/events have shaped our lives. In such moments, surely ‘our inward eye is occluded, a victim of overwhelming events,’ and any pathway to enlightening that darkness, is eminently worthy of considering.

We can see how important ideas are to the process Hillman is carving through the ‘underbrush’ of clinical and academic psychology. We have previously considered the ‘active imagination’ and what its purpose is NOT. And we already, in several spaces, noted and underlined the significance of images, whether those images carry or convey an idea or not. Just to further enrich this journey into the unknown world of the soul, Hillman provides some guidance as to how, where, and through which of our capacities, we might come to ‘recognize’ a significant image.

Seeing, as through the ‘eye’ is, as we can all agree, not merely observing the external world, in a glance. Indeed, ‘seeing’ is metaphorically a far more intense and complex process in and through which metaphorical ‘insight’ emerges. Hillman suggests this ‘insight’ happens largely because I slowed my reading of the image from narrational sequence (what happened next? and the, and then?) to poetic imagistic reading. In narrational reading, the sense emerges at the end, whereas in imagistic reading there is a sense throughout…..The sense of smell alone may be a better analogy for image-sensing than both seeing and hearing together, because smell is more concrete, and less. Heraclitus…considered smell to be the mode of psychic perception…When Heraclitus further implies that the nostrils are the most distinguishing of the sense organs, and that the gods distinguish by means of aroma, he is referring to invisible perception or the perception of invisibles. Like perceives like: the invisible, intangible, inaudible psyche perceives invisible, intangible essences. Sensate intuition of intuitive sensation. Even the word essence has a double sense: both a highly volatized substance like a perfume and a primary principle seed-idea, form. Smell involves us in what is most sensate and most subtle; primitive and primordial in one and the same sense. (Hillman, A Blue Fire, pps.61-62)

He then goes on, in a response to a hypothetical ‘protester’ to list his reasons for his contention of the sense of smell as an analogy for ‘sensing’ images..These include:

· Smell is more gutsy than sight and sound

· Smell is the most parasitical sense, having hardly any language of its own…smells, like images are reflections, effluvia; smells cannot stand alone and must be linked to an particular body

· Smell refers to a particular image in which the smell inheres.

· Smelling images guards against optical illusions about seeing images…keeping them deliteralized, like archetypes: nonpresentable form.

· Smells are all there at once, like images, less likely to be read narratively

· Smell has a bad connotation, something negative, offensive is carried along with the sense, reminding us of our aversion to images. There is an intolerable aspect to every image, as image.

· The smelled image is both immediate and remembered, both animal and memorial.

· Smells cannot be summoned; we are subject to them, assailed by them, translated into their world. The egoless spontaneity of smell is similar to that of imagining.

· Spontaneity beyond control of will is not beyond limit…it is always of something, so imagining is always held within the bounds of a specific image—this image, right here, under your nose.

Having focused on ideas, and then the analogy of smell as a pathway to recognition of images, Hillman then poses one of his more significant, and perhaps difficult and diffuse notions, for the rational mind that bases its perceptions on the empirical: “Imagination, the ground of CERTAINTY”!

When the mind rests on imaginal firmament, then thinking and imagining no longer divide against each other as they do when the mind is conceived is the categories of nous (intellect). Now, nous can as well by psyche; the noetic, the psychological. Knowledge comes from and feeds the soul, and epistrophe of data to its first meaning ‘gifts.’ Knowledge is received by the soul as understanding, in exchange for which the soul gives to knowledge value and faith. Knowledge can again believe in itself as a virtue. Here is knowledge not opposed to soul, different from feeling or life, academic, scholarly, sheerly intellectual or merely explanatory…but knowledge as a necessity demanded by the silvered mind by means of which the soul can understand itself…..Modern psychological methods of examining images and imagination in terms of sensations or feelings start the wrong way around. 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 imagination we 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…and this image is composed not only of wrinkles, muscles, and colors accreted through your life, thought they make their contribution to its complexity. To see you as you are is an imagination….of structure, the divine image in which your essence is shaped….To read lines on the face of the world we need an animal eye. This eye not only sees man as animal but by means of the animal, seeing each other with an animal eye. To this eye, image and type appear together….The animal eye perceives and reacts to the animal image in the other. (A Blue Fire, pps. 64-5-6-7)
It seems to this ‘animal eye’ and nous, that Frye was echoing some core insights, and Hillman, whether or not he read Frye, is extending both Frye’s thought as well as Jung’s, into a kind of perceptual vortex, merging ideas, images, senses, and myth into a rich and captivating ‘rain forest’ of potential psychic sense. The potential in the process is open to all, irrespective of academic credentials, holy orders, scientific and professional training, or an archive of mythological gods and goddesses.

Neither is the process a ‘free-for-all’ without either intellectual or ethical boundaries, while depending on the active imagination to keep digging, together with a therapist or colleague, sharing a commitment to the process’s value and integrity. Not everyone is or needs to be a published poet, a consummate artist, or a professional composer; yet, we all have an imagination and the inherent interest in mining our ‘ocluded moments’ nor for the ‘right meaning’ but for the meaning that is innately ours.

Are we up for the adventure?