Beyond Imaginal Privatism (Pt. II)
Intimating imaginal mutations amid our time-in-transition
In the previous article, the first of this series, I introduced the idea of imaginal privatism, linking it with the thought of Henry Corbin and the philosophical background of Sufi mysticism to which he adhered. I considered the powers and perils of collective modes of experience in relation to the process of individuation, situating this question within the broader frame of comsogenesis. I concluded by suggesting that our time is marked by a cosmological imperative toward a deepening reconciliation between sovereignty and communion, and that there is an imaginal background to this process. I hinted that this process is what we would expect to see amid Second Axial Age.
Before leaping into a more sustained reflection on the leap beyond imaginal privatism, it will be important to consider the circumstances leading to the historical emergence of a intensified private dimension in consciousness as such. From there we can prepare to consider ways we may be witnessing, in our own time, the early stirrings of a leap into something reaching beyond a private consciousness…
My approach here will be nonlinear, tracing a path through a meshwork of thinkers and traditions that underpin the way of thinking I’m applying here.
Into the labyrinth, we leap…
In Obedience to a Living Idea
If someone, after taking in the thesis I’ll be laying out here, were to characterize this as a Neo-Romantic way of thinking, I wouldn’t feel any reflexive urge to protest. The endeavor fueling this series of articles circulates around a core idea with undeniable roots in the Romantic philosophical tradition.
Many others have served as mouthpieces for this core idea, each articulating it in a distinctive way.
My first encounter with this idea came through the Epilogue of Richard Tarnas’s The Passion of the Western Mind:
. . . the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its own being . . . to recover its connection with the whole: to differentiate itself from but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul . . . for the long evolution of human consciousness has prepared it to be capable at last of embracing its own ground and matrix freely and consciously. The telos, the inner direction and goal, of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation.1
Participation mystique is a term introduced by French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Put very simplistically, it points to a state of consciousness characterized by a condition of psychological non-differentiation between the human and the natural world. The world appears as a living matrix expressing purposes and meanings. There is no impression that these meanings are subjectively fabricated and then projected out upon the world from a separate interior. These meanings are experienced as belonging to and expressing the patterned movements of an ensouled world.
Jung, in connection with this, gestured the Latin phrase esse in anima, “being-in-soul.” The psyche is not in us. We are in the psyche.
The idea of “the Western mind,” for Tarnas, points to a form of consciousness that has separated itself from this experiential continuity with nature and with the greater whole of life. Yet, he regards this separation as a prelude to a reconnection, driven by deeper forces.
This reconnection will not simply restore the condition that had prevailed prior to the separation. It will also preserve and integrate what emerged amidst the separative process.
Tarnas explicitly situates himself amongst a line of thinkers tracing back to the Romantics.
The Romantic Legacy
Goethe was particularly influential in the emergence of this idea—notably through his application of what he called a gentle empiricism (“zarte Empirie”) to the observation of the dynamics of plant metamorphosis.
Gentle empiricism approaches the observation of living forms by attempting to see beneath the visible surface of organic phenomena and into the living processes at work in the unfolding of morphogenesis.
The Latin term natura naturans has historically been used in reference to nature’s animacy. Natura naturans, “Nature natruring”: nature unfolding, not as noun (i.e., natura naturata), but as process, as verb.
For Goethe, gentle empiricism requires that direct observation be complemented by a disciplined application of imagination. Rather than assuming that imagination can do nothing other than impose a distorting influence upon what would otherwise be an objective observation of bare empirical facts, he suggested that the imagination carries the potential to serve as an organ for sympathetic participation between human consciousness and the inner workings of life.
To the following question posed by Schelling, the philosopher of nature (Naturphilosoph) who was a friend and collaborator of Goethe’s—“What then is that secret bond which couples our mind to Nature, or that hidden organ through which Nature speaks to our mind or our mind to Nature?”—the proper Romantic answer would be: that secret bond is natura naturans; that hidden organ, the imagination.
According to this view, it is indeed possible for the “inner” workings of the imagination and the “outer” processes of organic phenomena to conjoin in a naturally established harmony. The living, archetypal movements at work through morphogenesis are also accessible to the imagination because the human mind is a product of the same natural living intelligence as the lifeforms it beholds. Natural phenomena and the human mind are rooted in, and spring from, the same existential soil.2
So long as the observer skillfully accesses and draws from the true depths of their imaginative capacities, their looking holds the potential to pass through the mind’s twilit veil, descending through the dark corridor in consciousness to reconnect with the originary spring. This source is where the mind’s living roots mingle with the living roots of organic phenomena—the primordial abyss of natura naturans.
Polarity and Intensification in Plant Metamorphosis
Goethe, applying this method in his search of the archetypal plant (Urpflanze), discerned two basic movements of natura naturans consistently exemplified in the metamorphosis of a wide variety of plants. Through these observations, he ultimately came to regard the whole unfolding of plant growth as a series of metamorphoses of the leaf.
The first of these two movements is polarity (Polarität). Goethe suggested that wherever a novel phase of growth emerges—leaf from stem, bud from leaf, flower from bud—an initial movement of differentiation is in evidence. The movements of life energy display a separative striving, as if the new growth were seeking to detach from its antecedent basis.
In the second movement, often translated as intensification (Steigerung), the living energy that had moved toward differentiation for the sake of generating a novel form now flows back into connection with the original whole of the plant body. The “separated parts seek each other out once again and may find one another and reunite,” thereby conjoining the differentiated parts, now harmoniously integrated to form a more complex unity.3
Polarity and Intensification in the Unfolding of Consciousness
Other Romantic thinkers came to regard this basic dynamic that Goethe articulated as exemplifying a far more general pattern.
Schelling held that this dynamic works itself out repeatedly through the evolution of the world soul (Weltseele). Coleridge, who drew a great deal from Schelling (going so far as plagiarizing him), spoke of this movement in terms of “separative projection” and “productive unity.” The essence of this idea, he argued, echoes throughout nature as “the tendency at once to individuate and to connect, to detach but so as either to retain or to reproduce attachment.”4
Here we must observe that there was something peculiar about the Romantic moment in the unfolding of thought, of nature, of spirit, of the cosmos. Romantic thinkers were thoroughly modern individuals: they had passed through the Cartesian prism and experienced the resultant change in consciousness. They, too, inhabited the kind of mind that most of us now occupy by default.
I don’t need to tritely protest against Descartes’ mind-body dualism—doing so has become culturally normative, as was inevitable. Addressing the full spectrum of consequences accompanying the birth of the modern mind is a more subtle matter than this. Simply railing against Descartes’ specious mind-body dualism, while important, is not in itself sufficient.
The experiential sense of being psychologically isolated against the outer world, of being an atomized island of interiority adding to the sum of other enclosed human psyches, tends to be phenomenologically engrained in the “modern” person, regardless of what our philosophical position on the matter may be.
This unparalleled sense of disunity with the collective, with nature, with cosmos, was the presumable cost exacted in order to realize the intensified sense of individual autonomy that rapidly emerged with the birth of what we call modernity.
Those of us who have passed through the modern prism do possess a genuinely private dimension of interiority. Psychological projection is real, and the extent of our ability to recognize and own our projections is a measure of psychological health and maturity.
Yet, this private dimension of our psychological existence is a recent outgrowth of cosmogenesis, and is not absolute. To be a “modern”5 person requires moving toward undoing this baseline disposition toward a dualized psycho-phenomenology with respect to the world and the collective—albeit, in the right measure.
We need to consider two truths, held in tension:
The birth of the modern mind entailed the clarification of individuality through a withdrawal of projections upon the world, a parsing apart of “interior” from “exterior”
The modern mind went too far with this, effectively colonizing the earth’s interiority by positing itself as the only possible source of all meaning and purpose (i.e., any meaningfulness experienced as arising “out there” can only be a projection)
The unprecedented will toward stabilizing a differentiated, autonomous self that accompanied the emergence of modernity was often paired with a sense of triumph. Many streams of thought and culture held no qualms with this intensified state of otherness from nature. Human otherness was taken a sign of exceptionality, the foundation of our capacity for progress, of our power to effect a gradual improvement of our situation through techno-scientific mastery.
Two major exemplars of this disposition would be Hobbes and Bacon. To strip them down to a caricature, the former placed an emphasis on civilizational progress (“life immersed in nature was nasty brutish and short”); the latter emphasized scientific progress founded upon knowledge as power (“put nature on the rack till she reveals her secrets”).6
Here, we must clear up a common mischaracterization of Romanticism: the uncritical equation of Romanticism with Retro-romanticism. This idea sets up Romanticism as the opposite of the views outlined above: a nostalgic longing for return to a premodern Edenic state.
The caricatured exemplar in this case would be Rousseau: civilization as deviation from nature (“life immersed in nature was more healthy, equitable, and happy, and we should therefore strive to emulate this natural state as far as is possible given our present collective situation”).
There is a shade of accuracy to attributing this disposition to the Romantics, but the greatest of the Romantic philosophers do not flatly conform to any of these caricatures.
There is no simple image here of a triumphant ascent from powerless submersion in nature, nor of a tragic fall from an Edenic state of union with nature. There is a generative metamorphic tension expressive of the ongoing unfolding of cosmogenesis.
Indeed, the Romantics celebrated the critical power of the modern mind, as well as the unprecedented potential for singular creative genius carried by the modern individual. Indeed, many of them revered Bacon as an unparalleled genius.7 Rejecting none of this, they also foresaw the destructiveness wrought by a form of consciousness operating from a dualistic mode of perception, discarding feeling and imagination as invaluable in the pursuit of knowledge, situating itself over and against nature.
The greatest of the Romantics ultimately intuited the emergence of the modern mind as a moment within a spiritually-determined arc of rupture and repair with the world soul, the anima mundi. The phenomenological dualism of the modern mind is here conceived as a moment of polarity preceding an intensification—the deep structure behind Goethe’s observations in plant morphogenesis unfolding in consciousness as a moment in cosmogenesis.
Schelling therefore anticipated what he called “the true philosophy,” which “proceeds from that original divorce to unite once more, through freedom, what was originally and necessarily united in the human mind, i.e., forever to cancel out that separation.”8
Clearly, one need not strain themselves to recognize the Romantic roots informing Tarnas’s intimation of a “mature participation mystique.”
The Metamorphosis of Natura Naturans
Of course, a lot has changed in the natural sciences since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the Romantics were thinking and writing.
The collection of ideas and modes of thinking under the aegis of terms like systems theory, complexity theory, living systems, self-organization (autopoiesis), or emergence did not enter in full force until the mid-to-late twentieth century.
And yet, the dynamics of life remain as much a mystery as ever. Even today, Kant’s following pronouncement (—and his thinking here and elsewhere was profoundly galvanizing for the Romantics), still resounds with relevance over two hundred years later.
“It is quite certain that we can never adequately come to know the organized [living] beings and their internal possibility in accordance with merely mechanical principles of nature, let alone explain them; and indeed this is so certain that we can boldly say that it would be absurd for humans even to make such an attempt or to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered; rather, we must absolutely deny this insight to human beings.”9
The aformentioned contemporary paradigms are our most recent labels for natura naturans. What we call “emergence” essentially gestures toward sudden movements whereby collections of entities at various scales self-organize into metastable10 patterns that we remain incapable of predicting or explaining.
I make no claims about future attempts to conjoin metaphysics and science in response to Kant. Kant was, famously, the philosopher of setting limits to knowledge. Ever since, there are those who have taken his limit-setting as a challenge.
I would suggest that Matt Segall’s way of approaching the etheric imagination and Bonnitta Roy’s theory of complex potential states, both of which draw significantly upon the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, offer two deeply compelling (and correlated) visions for understanding the vital movements of life, and our essential continuity with, and participation in, these invisible currents of cosmogenesis.
The inner movements of nature’s animacy is here envisioned as arising from primordial currents of Eros experienced by entities at all scales (atoms, cells, organisms). All entities are woven in together in an aether of intimacy mediated by a primordial fabric of feeling.11 The experience of aliveness and appetite persuasively lures entities into dynamic constellations of relationships with other entities. These lures of aliveness are linked with relevant potential. The greater the complexity of self-organization and cognitive capacity that an entity enjoys, the broader the corresponding degree of freedom and creative agency that entity possesses for navigating the living field of potential states.
Eros-Aliveness-Appetite
Potential
Creative Urge-Impulse-Choice
Relationships-Interconnections
I hold these as essential and mutually implicated ingredients of imaginal practice and its relevance for cosmogenesis. Much of them are nothing new with respect to the philosophy of the imaginal. The emphasis on relationships and interconnections, however, represents a crucial dimension of the leap beyond imaginal privatism. These dimensions imply a recasting of the relevant locus of ingression for the prior ingredients—leaping from a strictly individual focus toward an opening upon a more-than-individual emphasis.
All elements are essential, but not exhaustive, features of becoming imaginal cell.
I want to hold these recent iterations of conceptualizing natura naturans in close conversation with what I’ve here labelled the core idea. The idea that we are approaching the culmination of a movement through polarity and intensification in consciousness is a helpful map to bring to the territory where we presently stand.
It is not the only relevant “map” or “image or “idea” for our moment of cosmogenesis. Nor should it be. What, then, does this specific way of looking offer us?
It suggests a renewal of intimacy with what has long been lain dormant, what has been habitually rendered unconscious in us.
In our crucial moment of Gaian metamorphosis, we are called to achieve a necessary maturation in our capacity for participation with the inner life of cosmogenesis.
More Mouthpieces of Imminent Intensification
There are a number of other thinkers who, I would argue, lend unique expression to this same core idea. Here are just a few:
Jerome Bernstein, a Jungian analyst, has described his encounters with what he has deemed a transrational consciousness.12
Gloria Anzaldua also heralded the increasingly widespread emergence of a new consciousness, which she called la consciencia de la mestiza—a “mestiza consciousness.”13
Owen Barfield, friend and influential interlocutor to both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, elaborated the birth of a new consciousness marked by a condition he called final participation.5
Sri Aurobindo anticipated an evolutionary “descent” of supramental processes into human consciousness.
Each of these perspectives are rich and unique in themselves, not easily reducible to the others. For the sake of brevity I will refrain here from elaborating on them in detail (maybe I’ll do so in future writings). However, I do want to emphasize a common feature that, I would argue, they all share:
Each of these thinkers, in their own individual fashion, suggest that the modern mind is presently undergoing a spiritually-determined process of transformation. This transformation is driving toward a re-sensitization to transpersonal operations, invisible to the waking eye but quite amenable to direct experience, with which humanity was once pervasively in contact.
The birth of the ego, especially its culmination in the modern mind, generally rendered these sensitivities dormant, relegating them to the sphere we now call “the unconscious.”
Increasingly, our culture will be rediscovering a variety of portals fir transpersonal influx—even without the use of entheogens. (Yes, entheogens will remain quite relevant, even if they aren’t the only game in town).
There is one final thinker of this disposition I want to mention here, with whom I’ve found profound resonance in recent years:
Jean Gebser went to great pains to articulate and compile evidence for the idea that we are presently witnessing a mutation in consciousness.14 He suggested that the presently dominant mental-rational structure of consciousness, characterized by a perspectival orientation, is now giving way to an emerging integral structure of consciousness which will break through into an aperspectival orientation.15
I will draw further on Gebser in coming installments of this essay series (and beyond).
Toward a Second Axial Age
The process driving toward polarity that gave birth to the modern mind, thereby constellating the existence of “the unconscious,” did not begin with the emergence of the modern mind. The consolidation of the modern ego marked a culminating crystallization of a process set in motion well over two thousand years ago.
This marked the advent of an unprecedented amplification of the movement toward polarity in the unfolding of consciousness.
It was also the beginning of a mass departure from participation mystique.
A crucial feature of the first Axial transformation that I’ve obliquely alluded to but under-emphasized here is the departure from a mode of consciousness that is far more dispersed among the collective.
A Second Axial Age, marked by a cosmogenic movement toward intensification in consciousness, will necessarily feature a fresh encounter with this long-neglected stratum of consciousness.
This is where the leap beyond imaginal privatism comes in.
I’ll deepen into these topics in articles to come…
Afterword
I rarely write from a prefabricated plan, relying on consciously crafted outlines.
I begin with the urge to write, the felt sense of pressure exerted from the depths by an unclear “something” seeking expression, and then grope my way through the dark in obedience to the urge, on movement at a time…
Creative endeavors have a life of their own, do they not?
I say this in discomfited acknowledgement that my previous cliffhanger set-up about a Second Axial Age only crept in again, and barely so, just at the end of this installment…
Apparently, the hidden whisperer had other plans.
I reserve the right to remain a blind emissary to the hidden whisperer, allowing my cleanly charted straight lines to be obliterated by the whisperer’s labyrinthian windings…
If you are comfortable wandering, confident in the knowledge that you aren’t lost, then perhaps the whisperer will continue luring you along, like me…
Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 477.
Along similar lines, Rudolf Steiner, who considered his Anthroposophy to be an instance of Romanticism come of age, remarked: “Hidden within that which is perceived by an organ, there lies the force whereby that same organ was formed.” (Occult Science: An Outline).
Pierre Hadot, the Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the idea of Nature, p. 221.
Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, p. 216.
Yes, even those who identify with “postmodern” or even “metamodern” worldviews still generally fall within this psychological baseline. Whether we construe these distinctions in terms of paradigmatic axioms or developmental stages marked by degrees of cognitive complexity, what I am signifying by modern here is analogous to what Jean Gebser designates as the mental-rational structure of consciousness. Transformations on this level are far more radical than a shift of paradigm or even a stage of cognitive development (—and here I mean “radical” in the etymological sense: radix (“root”); “structures of consciousness” point to a deeply fundamental source of the way our experience of self, other, and world are structured).
Bacon’s empirical approach bears an obvious contrast to Goethe’s gentle empiricism. Take the following passage from Goethe’s Faust (notably delivered not through prose, but poetry): “Mysterious by Day's broad light, Nature retains her veil, despite our clamors, and what she won't reveal to human mind or sight cannot be wrenched from her with levers, screws or hammers” (p. 67). The image of the poet-philosopher lifting the veil of Isis was a central motif among the Romantics, suggesting that a poetic mode of attunement can be brought to natural phenomena, enabling a revelation of the intelligible forms guiding organic autopoiesis. Poetic attunement is the means to “decipher the goddess’s hieroglyph” (as Goethe stated in The Metamorphosis of Plants).
Take Wordsworth, who declared that Bacon possessed “as much of the divinity of intellect as the inhabitants of this planet can hope will ever take up its abode among them” (M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, p. 59).
F.J.W. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, p. 11.
https://footnotes2plato.com/2014/07/30/no-newton-of-the-grass-blade-on-the-impossibility-of-scientific-genius-in-kants-critique-of-judgment/
Metastable: of a state of equilibrium that maintains its stability provided it is subjected to no more than small disturbances. Metastability is process, a dance. Our animal body is a metastable flow of systems and subsystems comprised of cells in communion.
Whitehead coined the term prehension to designate this primordial, proto-sensory feeling, and it underpins his panpsychist or panexperientialist view of the cosmos.
Jerome Bernstein, Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma.
Gloria Anzladua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin.
Jeremy Johnson’s book on Gebser is an excellent primer that I could not recommend highly enough. Disclaimer: picking it up may have radically transformative—dare I say, mutative—consequences.