Interrogating The Peninsular Individual: A Sketch of A Presentation

Interrogating The Peninsular Individual:
A Rumination on
The Dialectical Relationship Constituting
Individual Minds and Group Mind

• Rubinoff:

Art is the map of the human soul; each original piece is proof of the journey. As the artist navigates the unknown, the art adds to the collective memory.
Art has been liberated to address the internal, intuitive reality of the collective human memory.
Art is truth by metaphor.

Call for Papers - Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park

• John Donne:

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), No. XVII

• George Lakoff & Mark Johnson:

Primary metaphors are part of the cognitive unconscious. . . . From a conceptual point of view, primary metaphors are cross-domain mappings, from a source domain (the sensorimotor domain) to a target domain (the the domain of subjective experience), preserving inference. . . . Indeed, the preservation of inference is the most salient property of conceptual metaphors.

Philosophy in The Flesh: The Embodied Mind
and Its Challenge to Western Thought, pp. 56, 58

• Melanie Klein:

The assumption was relinquished of an atomistic, only recently socially modelled individual, who is faced with a closed world, in favour of a mental picture in which the subject and his reality are gradually differentiated and mutually developed.

Rosemarie Kennel, Bion’s Psychoanalysis
and Edelman’s Neuroscience

• W.R. Bion:

The concept of the container/contained, developed by Bion as the model inherent to the human being of psychic development at the link and coordinating point between the soma and psyche seems here to be considerably more differentiated and plausible. Sense and meaning do not come into existence intrasubjectively, but right from the beginning in an interactional connection.

Rosemarie Kennel, Bion’s Psychoanalysis
and Edelman’s Neuroscience

“The human soul” is a phrase that oscillates between the singular inflection and the collective. “My soul.” “Our soul.” “The Soul.” This paper is a study of that oscillation. The human individual (each human individual) is both a particle and wave. A wave in the (genetic and mental) body of the collectivity, the species, the culture.

In addition to its origins in Rubinoff’s insight of Art as a mapping of the human soul and Donne’s metaphor of the peninsular individual, two main themes inform this paper:

1. Abstract concepts are metaphors rooted in the sensorimotor domain.
2. Thinking is enabled by supportive group membership, which may be real or imaginary.

These two themes are united developmentally by the psychoanalytic understanding that the individual does not emerge ab initio from either the union of sperm and egg or from the womb of a mother, but only slowly is created interactively by differentiation out of the cognitive/emotional union of mother/infant. And they are united conceptually by Klein/Bion’s theories of container/contained as the emotional-cognitive basis of thinking.

Contributory, themes include:

3. The importance of sensorimotor metaphors for thinking. (Lakoff)
4. The importance of family and group culture for individual identity formation.
5. The importance of containment in a collectivity for the ability to think.

i. Old thoughts
ii. New thoughts

6. The individual-group dialectic.
7. Lyotard’s figure of discourse genres:

i. The differend between them;
ii. Their embedment in the universal act of phrasing.

8. The Borromean knot–Lacan’s three orders, three consistencies:

i. The Imaginary;
ii. The Real;
iii. The Symbolic.

This is a dispatch from the DreamTime. The place the Australian Aborigine believes is a Reality in some manner superior to objective waking reality. The Dreaming, the EveryWhen. Jung’s Pleroma, Heidegger’s Womb of Mnemosyne.

This is an exploration of the notion that all humans share a single Soul.

The stance I take in these ruminations is that the biophysical medium –the human body— which is the necessary condition of all our life and of all our experience constitutes a structuring basis for all experience and that the genetic universality of that body/brain system in its relation to the biophysical world within which and in adaptation with which –with, not to-- results in a single potential-experience base for all human beings. The stance I take, in addition, is that the experience of being an individual is a cultural experience bonded to both a primordial group membership and emergent group memberships.

Neither an old-fashioned cultural relativism nor a new-fashion postmodernism are in contradiction with this stance. Both are accommodated within it. It is the continent, the maine, of which each man is a peece, each culture is a peece, each discourse genre is a peece, each heterogenous narrative framing is a peece, each aesthetic style is a peece.

This stance shares certain features/approaches/sentiments with the feminist critique of Western phallocentric epistemologies. It also diverges from that critique in certain ways.

This is a reflection on the human imagination. I am here identifying as one the human imagination, the human soul, the Dreaming. My underlying presupposition is that the phenomenon, entity, object, being, process about which I shall speculate in these comments is ineluctably biophysical. However, much of the language I shall use is metaphorical and some of it may seem to be mystical. I am of the opinion that all true mystical statements have empirically biophysical content.

My subject is how we imagine, how we think, how we talk about our experience to each other and to ourselves, how we represent our experience to each other and to ourselves –in whatever medium-- and how that experience is itself already an act of “representation,” or more precisely of signification. Experience is a species –a form—of signification.

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