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[OT] The Second Thread on that Star Wars Salon article
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<blockquote data-quote="V-2" data-source="post: 147230" data-attributes="member: 2005"><p>I haven't read a single line by this Campbell fellow, but your fairly detailed summary makes it sound like it's the worst kind of crackpot Jungianism. </p><p></p><p>That sort of theorizing has been discredited for decades now, and with good reason. It potentially reduces humans to passive puppets of this static model of the unconscious Jung claims to have discovered--it reduces human history to variations of his finite number of themes. I am weary of people who want to ground culture and history in biology. Jung had his flirt with fascism. I'm all for theories that explain how people symbolically express their experience, but here I like models of culture better where people *invent* their myths, as opposed to somehow being condemned to *repeating* them.</p><p></p><p>But this is not just a matter of preference. First, the biological part. It's gonna be hard to come up with sound physiological evidence for that Jungian unconscious. It’s supposedly transmitted unchangingly throughout human history, so it must be biological. So, exactly where on the cortex is it located and how do you experimentally show how it behaves? </p><p></p><p>Second, the historical part. What this kind of "constancy theory" of human experience cannot explain--because it can't deal with truly radical historical change--is the actual disappearance of myth from human experience in the modern period. When Jung was writing his archetype theory, those archetypes had long since gone under. Not to say that they don't crop up in certain very rarified works of art and literature (Joyce, Newman), but those are melancholic or desperate invocations of a past age that is no longer relevant to the vast majority of people in Western industrial democracies--hence the melancholy.</p><p></p><p>And then the methodology.... Your example shows just how arbitrary this symbolic matching game is. The only things that the Tree of Life and Christ's cross have in common is that they're symbolizing salvation--in *very* different ways--and that they're made of wood. That's not a lot, considering that I can spontaneously come up with a better Christian parallel: the Tree of Jesse. At least that's a tree and not two logs of wood nailed together. But if that *is* indeed a good parallel, then I would argue that's because Christianity consciously assimilated (as opposed to unwittingly repeated) the symbolism of other religions. </p><p></p><p>All of which begs the question: Where the hell does that leave Star Wars? Right now I'm tired, so I would have to say: I dunno.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="V-2, post: 147230, member: 2005"] I haven't read a single line by this Campbell fellow, but your fairly detailed summary makes it sound like it's the worst kind of crackpot Jungianism. That sort of theorizing has been discredited for decades now, and with good reason. It potentially reduces humans to passive puppets of this static model of the unconscious Jung claims to have discovered--it reduces human history to variations of his finite number of themes. I am weary of people who want to ground culture and history in biology. Jung had his flirt with fascism. I'm all for theories that explain how people symbolically express their experience, but here I like models of culture better where people *invent* their myths, as opposed to somehow being condemned to *repeating* them. But this is not just a matter of preference. First, the biological part. It's gonna be hard to come up with sound physiological evidence for that Jungian unconscious. It’s supposedly transmitted unchangingly throughout human history, so it must be biological. So, exactly where on the cortex is it located and how do you experimentally show how it behaves? Second, the historical part. What this kind of "constancy theory" of human experience cannot explain--because it can't deal with truly radical historical change--is the actual disappearance of myth from human experience in the modern period. When Jung was writing his archetype theory, those archetypes had long since gone under. Not to say that they don't crop up in certain very rarified works of art and literature (Joyce, Newman), but those are melancholic or desperate invocations of a past age that is no longer relevant to the vast majority of people in Western industrial democracies--hence the melancholy. And then the methodology.... Your example shows just how arbitrary this symbolic matching game is. The only things that the Tree of Life and Christ's cross have in common is that they're symbolizing salvation--in *very* different ways--and that they're made of wood. That's not a lot, considering that I can spontaneously come up with a better Christian parallel: the Tree of Jesse. At least that's a tree and not two logs of wood nailed together. But if that *is* indeed a good parallel, then I would argue that's because Christianity consciously assimilated (as opposed to unwittingly repeated) the symbolism of other religions. All of which begs the question: Where the hell does that leave Star Wars? Right now I'm tired, so I would have to say: I dunno. [/QUOTE]
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