Who on earth still believes that rigorous, scientific thinking can be applied to religion, psychology, morality and aesthetics in the same way as it can be used to, for instance, predict the flight path of a missile?
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein thought, rightly in my opinion, that our well-defined concepts were too limited to operate properly in the non-concrete world. Nevertheless, he grudgingly admired our efforts to break out of the linguistic “cage” and further understand the world. I agree with him, but I think the silence he advocated is for philosophy students only.
Our deepest motivations as individuals, and the madness of crowds, are driven by deeply irrational forces. We embark upon most of our actions literally before we know what we are doing, that is, before the area of the brain to do with conscious decision-making registers any electrical activity. The times when we pause, ponder and weigh up alternatives are the exceptions.
This is unconscious behaviour. How do we understand it? Through speculative thought; poetry and other literature; and yes, even “pseudo-science”.
To dismiss discourse about the unconscious out of hand as woolly thinking just because it is difficult to talk about with our recently evolved and limited logic is to miss out on sharing with others what are vast, and probably the most interesting, areas of human experience.
In reply to Puskas's comment on www.lovetosaydada.blogspot.com, I would say that Jung's speculation about a collective unconscious should be taken in the same spirit as anyone might talk about, for instance, a politician's underlying motivations or a friend's erratic behaviour. It is more akin to criticising a novel than doing a bit of neuroscience.
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