THE READING RHEUM: TOWARD A PSYCHOLOGY OF BEING (1968/1999)

My reading of a book on the early works of Colin Wilson, referenced here, moved me to check out one of Wilson's influences, the psychologist Abraham Maslow, in the third edition of the title noted above. 

Of course I'd probably heard of Maslow's basic concept of "peak experiences" roughly since the 1970s, and the author may even have been mentioned in some of the Wilson books I did read, given that the two of them corresponded for some time. I'd also heard bits and pieces about "Maslow's hierarchy of needs," but I simply didn't get around to reading as much of his work as I did with both Freud and Jung.

The above book-- BEING, for short-- might not be the best introduction to Maslow's work, since its chapters are all rewritten lectures that Maslow gave before various audiences. Nevertheless, I got the general schema. Maslow argues that human beings are doubly motivated by their responses to "deficiency" or to "growth" (which Maslow later terms "being," though this term is actually less clear than the earlier one IMO). Deficiency motivations are fueled by the perception that one can only be happy if one can satisfy one's appetite for wealth, food, love, or some similar commodity. Growth motivations are fueled by the perception that one can overcome all boundaries through a process that Maslow termed "self-actualization." Maslow often drew comparisons between his work and that of his predecessor Freud, finding that Freud's entire system was built on the idea of deficiency, with which point I agree.

Now, despite my agreeing with Maslow on all of his main points, I did find the essays in BEING somewhat unexciting. Freud, Jung, and Colin Wilson are all much better at communicating abstruse concepts so as to make the reader excited by said concepts. At present I don't know if Maslow's schema has much application to my overall lit-crit project-- except for this section from Chapter 11, "Psychological Data and Human Values."

The various chapters in BEING don't explore the peak-experience in as much detail as I would have liked, but in Chapter 11, he contrasts the idea of a subject's "great" peak-experiences vs. his "lesser" ones.

...the process of moment-to-moment growth is itself intrinsically rewarding and delightful in an absolute sense. If [these experiences] are not mountain-peak experiences, at least they are foothill-experiences, little glimpses of absolute, self-validative delight, little moments of Being.

What Maslow calls "foothill-experiences" may be somewhat covalent with what he later calls "plateau-experiences." In any case, this has intrinsic appeal to me for its relevance to literary values.

If I were an elitist like the majority of comics-critics, I would value only the peak-experiences, however I chose to define the content that engendered those experiences. Instead, I am (though I've not advanced the term in a long time) a pluralist, and in this context this means that I value even imperfect works when they have at least the SUGGESTION of reaching concrescence with respect to one or more of the four potentialities.

As indicative of my ceaseless pursuit of even the humble "foothill-experiences" as well as those at the peak, in recent months I've been reviewing a large number of the Italian fantasy-films usually called peplum, first for NATURALISTIC UNCANNY MARVELOUS and secondarily for THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA. The more I see of these formulaic productions, the less chance there seems to find any works that hit on all cylinders. When I did find two that developed their mythopoeic ideas-- respectively the 1962 FURY OF ACHILLES  and the 1964 TRIUMPH OF HERCULES. If I wanted nothing but the most well-executed works, then I could stop looking at the subgenre right now, with the conviction that these might well be the only ones that offered "peak experiences."

Nevertheless, even though there are a lot of peplum-films that don't offer even the milder foothill-experiences, there are enough of these to keep the hunt going. For example, a film like the 1962 VULCAN SON OF JUPITER has one good undeveloped mythopoeic idea, that of asserting that if mortals manage to trespass on the domain of Zeus, they can actually diminish the god's power, mirroring the magic by which the ruler of Olympus changes three gods-- Vulcan, Ares and Aphrodite-- into mere mortals. The script doesn't use the idea for anything more than a throwaway rationalization, but I like exploring the potential of even insufficiently-developed ideas.

In Stephen King's DANSE MACABRE, the author suggested than hardcore fans of the metaphenomenal genres (not the word he uses, of course) must be the most optimistic people around, since on a regular basis they plow through reams of badly done junk in search of the proverbial "diamonds in the garbage." But if Maslow's concept is true-- that all human beings have some potential for peak experiences, or at least the related foothill-types-- then the fans' optimism is justified in searching for diamonds wherever one can find them-- and that said diamonds can appear at any level of creative accomplishment.

PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 1

 In NOTES ON WHITEHEAD PT. 3, I expressed my regrets that the philosopher had not chosen to define many of his terms more precisely in his most famous book, PROCESS AND REALITY. I wasn't even able to get a concise sense of what a "prehension" was, even in the chapter "Theory of Prehensions."

However, by sheer chance I found a definition without even looking for it. I happened to pick up an old book I'd not read through despite owning it some twenty years: COLIN WILSON, a literary study by one John A. Weigel, devoted to examining Wilson's works up to the year 1975. I have only read two of Wilson's philosophy books, none of which include RELIGION AND THE REBEL. It's from this book that Weigel alternately quotes and paraphrases Wilson's take on Whitehead's concept of the prehension, which is far clearer than anything Whitehead wrote in PROCESS AND REALITY.

Of central importance is Whitehead's idea of "prehension," which is dramatically defined, following Whitehead's specifications, "as that act of the soul, reaching out like an octopus to digest its experience." Fixing on "prehension" as the basic act in existentialism, an act carefully to be distinguished from "apprehension," which is based on intellectual rather than soulful understanding, Wilson rests his own case.

Wilson's "octopus" metaphor brings to mind a more primitive form of organic life: that of the one-celled amoeba, which has no perceptual organs and so assesses its contact with the "outside universe" purely by touch. I feel like I've resorted to the amoeba once or twice to suggest the base process of perception somewhere, but even if I haven't, I.A. Richards did, as I noted in my summation of his book PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC here:

...the lowliest organism-- a polyp or an amoeba-- if it learns from its past, if it exclaims in its acts, 'Hallo! Thingembob again!' it thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker.

Richards doesn't specifically link his notion of conceptual "sorting" to Whitehead, though as I also noted, the author does mention Whitehead elsewhere in RHETORIC. Both Wilson's octopus metaphor and Richards' amoeba metaphor stress the faculty of perception through non-intellectual methods, which I would broadly compare to Jung's concept of the organism reacting to the world through the irrational functions of sensation and of intuition. Moreover, such metaphors cohere well with what I have labeled Whitehead's "theme statement" for the whole of PROCESS AND REALITY:

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt. Also there is nothing which belongs merely to the privacy of feeling of one individual actuality. All origination is private. But what has been thus originated, publicly pervades the world.

Since I discontinued my reading of PROCESS, I cannot say whether or not Wilson's use of the term "soulful" is accurate with respect to Whitehead's heuristics. But for me, "soulful" embodies a "concrescence" of all four of the potentialities, acting in unison to sort experience in all its multi-faceted variety. And it's with this covalence in mind that I'll examine the idea of prehensions in line with my concept of the four literary personas in my next post.

 

THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL

At the end of one of Colin Wilson's books-- probably MYSTERIES, though I have not hauled it out to check-- I recall that he made a gender statement that would prove utterly unacceptable with many modern readers. Paraphrasing from memory, I believe that Wilson typified women as being "close-sighted" in that they tended to be concerned with immediate reality, while men tended to be "far-sighted," concerned with making long-range plans.

I would imagine that most people can think of examples in which this or that person does or does not conform to the generalization. I'm not interested in the gender statement as such, but only in the contrast of "close sight" and "far sight." These formulations, which are abstractions of the human eye's capacity for both types of visual perception, dovetail fairly well with my notions of the way the literary experience works for readers, as I noted here.

It may be that my revised versions of overthought and underthought will in future serve me as shortened forms for the respective effects that "the function of thinking" and "the function of intuition" have upon literary narrative.  I concluded in REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE PART 3   that both myth-critics and ideological critics were in a similar unenviable position as far as converting the majority of readers to pursue more abstract readings of texts. Most readers quite logically are concerned with lateral meaning, which takes in both "the function of sensation" and "the function of feeling"-- and in truth, the abstractions of both overthoughts and underthoughts are only possible when constructed on the foundation of concrete experience. 

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking" finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.

A further comparison of the two forms of "sightedness" extends to my terms of the two types of will in literature: "the idealizing will" and "the existential will," on which I descanted in the 2013 essay APES AND ANGELS:

First, "existential will" lines up with a focus upon immediate reality:

This will I'll term the "existential will," because it is a will to remain attached to all the affects that call up everyday sensory existence; our feeling of being inextricably a part of the physical world.

While "idealizing will" lines up, not so much with "long range plans," but with ideals that have a sweeping, long-range applicability to humankind as a whole, whether those ideals serve "good" or "evil:"

This will I'll term the "idealizing will," because it seems obvious to me that any "idea" to which a subject becomes emotionally attached becomes an "ideal."

By the power and glory of the transitive effect, then, a given work's lateral meaning may be said to incarnate the "existential will" of all of the characters combined, who are inextricably focused upon their own interests within the diegesis. The work's underthought and overthought, whatever their quality of expression, would then incarnate the "idealizing will" of the plot-action as a whole: that which often receives the cumbersome and inaccurate term of "the theme." I've tended to speak of the two types of will in identifying characters within the diegesis as being heroes, villains, monsters, or demiheroes. However, here I'm addressing the dual ways in which the reader interacts with the text: identifying with the characters' travails within the diegesis even as he may (sometimes) seek an extra-diegetical meaning to the entire narrative, and so the two types of will have a different function when applied to the possible reactions of the reader rather than the functions of the characters.