ABOUT SEEING
Jean Piaget’s revolutionary insight into cognitive development offers a useful lens to look into the archetype of the artist and its development. During formal education, an artist takes the same development steps as a child might in its grasp on cognitive perspectives. Piaget established a biological base to observe how children develop their cognitive abilities. It starts with responses that are intuitive; becoming more empirically scientific; and then socially acceptable. But it does not end there, as cognitive development continues, the inherited schema made from standard variation, and learnt subjectivity from others, are ultimately replaced, by new schema that resonates with the child’s own image making of self within an aggregation of assigned world views.
That aggregation starts with a selection of significant lessons about how the world works is offered as reliable measure. The child starts their selection by feeling out every item in their mouth. Between gums and teeth, a model of the world is built. The different forms and characteristics are then handled and observed and modeled between hand and eye. The physical memory is the legacy data that we all use to establish a landscape of classification. The imagination is enriched by empirical observation, except bring mice and beetles into the house offers an opportunity to learn about social boundaries. All these physical mementos are used to trade up for something more individually assertive.
The binding element in reciprocation is made of trust. Selecting the measures to evaluate, and valuing the measures used becomes a system of values that will be ultimately challenged. The moment the purchase becomes an actuality, the potential value proposition becomes the actual value participation. The clearing made for the expected pay-off is shaped by past lessons that have been valuable. There is a model to select from, and having to settle for a substitution that falls short of the ideal requires accommodation. The opening for acceptance is a negotiated space between what still expects and what can compromise and adapt.
Piaget’s work was picked up again by developmental psychologists in the 1960s. Adapting to the substitute as well as keeping back a part of the ideal model that refuses to assimilate, leads to a schism that prompts the imagination to create a complex that can still hold to its original ideal while it lives with the accommodation of substitutes. This challenge the imagination is to hold to its authority as author, and be willing to find closer alternatives that fit the previously held ideal. This requires being clear about the characteristics that make that ideal so fitting. The imaginative process is alchemical in nature. It requires Solve et Coagula that metabolizes a more useful symbol from the rough raw material. Creating through modeling symbols becomes part of the artist’s skill set.
Symbol making is a feature of self-organizing systems in general, and self-identification in particular. The notion of autopoiesis introduced by Francisco J. Varela, can be seen as a bridge that keeps the author, their ideal, and their substitutes in closer relationship. Creating a greater imaginative space for the ideal to occupy and be used to validate, as well as for reconfiguring the substitute, is the difficult task facing the artist as most of that process is barely measurable in consciousness. Psychological tools developed by Jung and his peers are a useful place to start tracking this process.
Henri Corbin was a scholar, philosopher and theologian, who taught as Professor of Islam & Islamic Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, and at the University of Teheran. His criticism of totalitarianism of all kinds led him to champion the transformative power of the imagination as a transcendent reality for the individual to reliably draw on to explore the originality of ideals, and a history of archetypal adaptations. He introduced the concept of the Mundus Imaginalis into contemporary thought. The imaginal already had a champion in the psychologists C. G. Jung, who proposed image making was inherent to developing self-awareness by recruiting Gnostic contexts that keeps the psyche anchored to a prevalent archetype.
James Hillman took up this thread, and wove it into his ideas about “Senex and Puer” – the imagination’s tension between the well-rooted elder and the mercurial younger. Hillman had a pluralistic view of deities that he saw as influencing the psyche. This plurality broke with Jung’s ideal of a monotheistic God. This gave Hillman the operating space to introduce his concept of “soul-making” to psychoanalysis. He made the important distinction, contrasting modes of imagination, by introducing soul as valley, and spirit as peak. Spirit has the movement up and out. Conversely, soul moves down and in. Although soul can be seen as the keeper of the ever-present origin, and keeping the ideal promises made as a practical reality, spirit loosening that grip in its explorations into alternative spaces in its search for a more exciting ideal. Underlying this quest is the practicality that we are all mortal, and that termination of the current forms is inevitable.
The underlying anxiety brought on by mortal considerations becomes more apparent later in life, as the soul sees some of its earlier ideals come to fruition. The substitutes that are still governing practical life are also there, not as a tension to be resolved, but a grief that can be managed. Although spirit has discovered many escape routes that avoid the mortal reality, it settles on a few immortal symbols that it can lift into its imaginative peaks. That requires promoting the substitutes in the hope they can be converted into a lasting self-identity.
Piaget, Corbin, Jung, and Hillman all valued the need to cast the imagination as the agent of personal research and development. The “imaginal” as defined by Corbin, should not be confused with disembodied fantasy. The metabolizing body is the process that Corbin considered as the organ to experience what he termed the Mundus Imaginalis. This world view lives beyond empirical observation or socially bound subjectivity. It is not an escapist’s domain for substituting ideals. The imaginal adopts the spirit, and directs it back to reconnect with the persisting ideals of the soul. Between vales and peaks, the imagination resides to offer a life-pattern-eye that reads the world from its ideals and substitutes.
The observed self as object needs a third subjective observer; a tempering of self-inflation is required. The image of the self has a reflector that has been followed by Platonic and Neoplatonic observation. The notion of a divine double; a daimonion guide that the individual’s own daimonion soul can follow, is talked about by Socrates, Plato, and the Neoplatonic practitioners who came after them. Many artists have commented on their process as being reflective and reflexive. When the mirror of creativity is fully cleansed, it reveals a clear center that becomes a portal to see into the soul labyrinth, and to feel the spirit’s inspiration anchored at its base. Underworld monsters and heavenly angels, come as allies. All have something to tell the artist as they compose and use their medium of expression.
In response to these uninvited incursions, the impulse is to sever from the imaginal source, and look elsewhere for substitutes. Patience and the life-pattern-eye accommodates the intensity of that linkage, and keeps it intact. Observation changes the item being observed. This morphology is at the crucial center of imaginative work. What is finally captured in a work are those entrants who want to be heard and seen. They demand their existence in this world of matter, where the Mundus Imaginalis is able to leave its mark.
