Log24

Monday, January 29, 2024

Self as Imago Dei:  Hofstadter vs. Valéry

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:41 am
 

Google search result:

Imago Dei  in Thomas Aquinas

Saint Anselm College

https://www.anselm.edu › Documents › Brown

PDF

by M Brown · 2014 · Cited by 14 — Thomas insists that the image of God exists most perfectly in the acts of the soul, for the soul is that which is most perfect in us and so best images God, and …

11 pages

For a Douglas Hofstadter version of the Imago Dei , see the
"Gödel, Escher, Bach" illustration in the Jan. 15 screenshot below —

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Imago, Imago, Imago
 

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 11:07 am

Recommended— an online book—

Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory,
by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990.

See in particular

Valéry and the Discourse On His Method.

Pages 156-157—

Valéry saw the mind as essentially a relational system whose operation he attempted to describe in the language of group mathematics. “Every act of understanding is based on a group,” he says (C, 1:331). “My specialty—reducing everything to the study of a system closed on itself and finite” (C, 19: 645). The transformation model came into play, too. At each moment of mental life the mind is like a group, or relational system, but since mental life is continuous over time, one “group” undergoes a “transformation” and becomes a different group in the next moment. If the mind is constantly being transformed, how do we account for the continuity of the self? Simple; by invoking the notion of the invariant. And so we find passages like this one: “The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it’s a functional property of consciousness” (C, 15:170 [2: 315]). Just as in transformational geometry, something remains fixed in all the projective transformations of the mind’s momentary systems, and that something is the Self (le Moi, or just M, as Valéry notates it so that it will look like an algebraic variable). Transformation theory is all over the place. “Mathematical science . . . reduced to algebra, that is, to the analysis of the transformations of a purely differential being made up of homogeneous elements, is the most faithful document of the properties of grouping, disjunction, and variation in the mind” (O, 1:36). “Psychology is a theory of transformations, we just need to isolate the invariants and the groups” (C, 1:915). “Man is a system that transforms itself” (C, 2:896).

Notes:

  Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60)

C   Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61)

Compare Jung’s image in Aion  of the Self as a four-diamond figure:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-JungImago.gif

and Cullinane’s purely geometric four-diamond figure:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-FourD.gif

For a natural group of 322,560 transformations acting on the latter figure, see the diamond theorem.

What remains fixed (globally, not pointwise) under these transformations is the system  of points and hyperplanes from the diamond theorem.

Friday, September 23, 2022

Raiders of the Lost Archive … The Jung Genizah

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:41 am

Jung’s four-diamond figure from
Aion — a symbol of the self –

Jung's four-diamond figure showing transformations of the self as Imago Dei

     For those who prefer the Ed Wood approach —

Monday, July 1, 2019

Inside the Exploded Cube

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:15 pm
 

Metaphysical conceit | literature | Britannica.com

https://www.britannica.com/art/metaphysical-conceit

The metaphysical conceit, associated with the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century, is a more intricate and intellectual device. It usually sets up an analogy between one entity's spiritual qualities and an object in the physical world and sometimes controls the whole structure of the poem.…

This post's title refers to a metaphysical conceit 
in the previous post, Desperately Seeking Clarity.

Related material —

The source of the above mystical octahedron —

'Becoming Whole,' by Leslie Stein

      See also Jung's Imago Dei  in this journal.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Annals of Philosophy

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

The Medium is the Message

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100222-McLuhan.jpg
Marshall McLuhan

From the Wikipedia article
on Marshall McLuhan–

McLuhan 'tetrad' figure with four diamonds surrounding a fifth, the medium

From yesterday

(Click images for some background.)

Ian McKellen at 'Neverwas' diamond windows

Related material:

Feast of St. Louis, 2003,

a web page on McLuhan's
student Walter J. Ong, S. J.,

and Jung and the Imago Dei

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

To Apollo

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:00 am

Yesterday's post may, if one likes, be regarded
  as a nod to Dionysus, god of tragedy.

Here is a complementary passage:

Nietzsche on Heraclitus and the 'play of fire with itself'

Related material:
Jung and the Imago Dei

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Holiday Book

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:00 pm

Time and Chance, continued…

NY Lottery numbers today–
Midday 401, Evening 717  

_________________________________________________

From this journal on 4/01, 2009:

The Cruelest Month

Fictional Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon, as portrayed by Tom Hanks

"Langdon sensed she was
      toying with him…."

Dan Brown

___________________________________________

From this journal on 7/17, 2008:

Jung’s four-diamond figure from
Aiona symbol of the self

Jung's four-diamond figure showing transformations of the self as Imago Dei

Jung’s Map of the Soul,
by Murray Stein:

“… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self….”

For related dynamic movements,
see the Diamond 16 Puzzle
and the diamond theorem.

______________________________________________
 
A piece related to both of the above posts–
 
"The Symbologist," a review, respectful despite the editor's sarcastic title, of Jung's Red Book in the December 6th New York Times Book Review.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Friday February 20, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:01 pm
Emblematizing
 the Modern
 

The following meditation was
inspired by the recent fictional
recovery, by Mira Sorvino
in "The Last Templar,"

of a Greek Cross —
"the Cross of Constantine"–
and by the discovery, by
art historian Rosalind Krauss,
of a Greek Cross in the
art of Ad Reinhardt.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090220-CrossOfDescartes.jpg

The Cross of Descartes  

Note that in applications, the vertical axis
of the Cross of Descartes often symbolizes
the timeless (money, temperature, etc.)
while the horizontal axis often symbolizes time.


T.S. Eliot:

"Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint…."


There is a reason, apart from her ethnic origins, that Rosalind Krauss (cf. 9/13/06) rejects, with a shudder, the cross as a key to "the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it." The rejection occurs in the context of her attempt to establish not the cross, but the grid, as a religious symbol:
 

"In suggesting that the success [1] of the grid
is somehow connected to its structure as myth,
I may of course be accused of stretching a point
beyond the limits of common sense, since myths
are stories, and like all narratives they unravel
through time, whereas grids are not only spatial
to start with, they are visual structures
that explicitly reject a narrative
or sequential reading of any kind.

[1] Success here refers to
three things at once:
a sheerly quantitative success,
involving the number of artists
in this century who have used grids;
a qualitative success through which
the grid has become the medium
for some of the greatest works
of modernism; and an ideological
success, in that the grid is able–
in a work of whatever quality–
to emblematize the Modern."

— Rosalind Krauss, "Grids" (1979)

Related material:

Time Fold and Weyl on
objectivity and frames of reference.

See also Stambaugh on
The Formless Self
as well as
A Study in Art Education
and
Jung and the Imago Dei.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Thursday July 17, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:28 pm
CHANGE
 FEW CAN BELIEVE IN

Continued from June 18.

Jungian Symbols

of the Self —

User icons (identicons) from Secret Blogging Seminar
Compare and contrast:

Jung's four-diamond figure from
Aiona symbol of the self

Jung's four-diamond figure showing transformations of the self as Imago Dei

Jung's Map of the Soul,
by Murray Stein:

"… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self…."


For related dynamic movements,
see the Diamond 16 Puzzle
and the diamond theorem.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Wednesday June 25, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:20 pm
The Cycle of
the Elements

John Baez, Week 266
(June 20, 2008):

“The Renaissance thinkers liked to
organize the four elements using
a chain of analogies running
from light to heavy:

fire : air :: air : water :: water : earth

They also organized them
in a diamond, like this:”

Diamond of the four ancient elements, figure by John Baez

This figure of Baez
is related to a saying
attributed to Heraclitus:

Diamond  showing transformation of the four ancient elements

For related thoughts by Jung,
see Aion, which contains the
following diagram:

Jung's four-diamond figure showing transformations of the self as Imago Dei

“The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula repeats the ancient alchemical tetrameria, which is implicit in the fourfold structure of unity.”

— Carl Gustav Jung

That the words Maximus of Tyre (second century A.D.) attributed to Heraclitus imply a cycle of the elements (analogous to the rotation in Jung’s diagram) is not a new concept. For further details, see “The Rotation of the Elements,” a 1995 webpage by one  “John Opsopaus.”

Related material:

Log24 entries of June 9, 2008, and

Quintessence: A Glass Bead Game,”
by Charles Cameron.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Friday August 10, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:31 am

The Ring of Gyges

10:31:32 AM ET

Commentary by Richard Wilhelm
on I Ching Hexagram 32:

“Duration is… not a state of rest, for mere standstill is regression.
Duration is rather the self-contained and therefore self-renewing
movement of an organized, firmly integrated whole, taking place in
accordance with immutable laws and beginning anew at every ending.”

Related material

The Ring of the Diamond Theorem

Jung and the Imago Dei

Log24 on June 10, 2007: 

WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? some people ask. I never ask. —Joan Didion

Iago states that he is not who he is. —Mark F. Frisch

“Not Being There,”
by Christopher Caldwell
,
from next Sunday’s
New York Times Magazine:

“The chance to try on fresh identities was the great boon that life online was supposed to afford us. Multiuser role-playing games and discussion groups would be venues for living out fantasies. Shielded by anonymity, everyone could now pass a ‘second life’ online as Thor the Motorcycle Sex God or the Sage of Wherever. Some warned, though, that there were other possibilities. The Stanford Internet expert Lawrence Lessig likened online anonymity to the ring of invisibility that surrounds the shepherd Gyges in one of Plato’s dialogues. Under such circumstances, Plato feared, no one is ‘of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice.’Time, along with a string of sock-puppet scandals, has proved Lessig and Plato right.”

“The Boy Who Lived,”
by Christopher Hitchens
,
from next Sunday’s
New York Times Book Review:

On the conclusion of the Harry Potter series:”The toys have been put firmly back in the box, the wand has been folded up, and the conjuror is discreetly accepting payment while the children clamor for fresh entertainments. (I recommend that they graduate to Philip Pullman, whose daemon scheme is finer than any patronus.)”

I, on the other hand,
recommend Tolkien…
or, for those who are
already familiar with
Tolkien, Plato– to whom
The Ring of Gyges” may
serve as an introduction.

“It’s all in Plato, all in Plato:
bless me, what do they
teach them at these schools!”
C. S. Lewis

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Thursday June 21, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:30 pm

Schopenhauer on the Kernel of Eternity

Philos Website

“Ich aber, hier auf dem objektiven Wege, bin jetzt bemüht, das Positive der Sache nachzuweisen, daß nämlich das Ding an sich von der Zeit und Dem, was nur durch sie möglich ist, dem Entstehen und Vergehen, unberührt bleibt, und daß die Erscheinungen in der Zeit sogar jenes rastlos flüchtige, dem Nichts zunächst stehende Dasein nicht haben könnten, wenn nicht in ihnen ein Kern aus der Ewigkeit* wäre. Die Ewigkeit ist freilich ein Begriff, dem keine Anschauung zum Grunde liegt: er ist auch deshalb bloß negativen Inhalts, besagt nämlich ein zeitloses Dasein. Die Zeit ist demnach ein bloßes Bild der Ewigkeit, ho chronos eikôn tou aiônos,** wie es Plotinus*** hat: und ebenso ist unser zeitliches Dasein das bloße Bild unsers Wesens an sich. Dieses muß in der Ewigkeit liegen, eben weil die Zeit nur die Form unsers Erkennens ist: vermöge dieser allein aber erkennen wir unser und aller Dinge Wesen als vergänglich, endlich und der Vernichtung anheimgefallen.”

*    “a kernel of eternity
**  “Time is the image of eternity.”
*** “wie es Plotinus hat”–
       Actually, not Plotinus, but Plato,
       according to Diogenes Laertius.

Related material:

Time Fold,

J. N. Darby,
On the Greek Words for
Eternity and Eternal

(aion and aionios),”

Carl Gustav Jung, Aion,
which contains the following
four-diamond figure,

Jung's four-diamond figure

and Jung and the Imago Dei.

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Tuesday April 3, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 10:10 pm

Our Judeo-Christian
Heritage –
 
Lottery
Hermeneutics

Part I: Judeo

The Lottery 12/9/06 Mid-day Evening
New York 036

See

The Quest
for the 36

331

See 3/31

“square crystal” and “the symbolism could not have been more perfect.”

Pennsylvania 602

See 6/02

Walter Benjamin
on
“Adamic language.”

111

See 1/11

“Related material:
Jung’s Imago and Solomon’s Cube.”

 

Part II: Christian

The Lottery 4/3/07 Mid-day Evening
New York 115

See 1/15

Inscape

017

See

The image “Primitive roots modulo 17

Pennsylvania 604

See
6/04

Death Valley and the Fisher King

714

See
7/14

Happy Birthday, Esther Dyson

Part III:
Imago Dei

Jung's Four-Diamonds Figure


Click on picture
for details.

 

Related material:

It is perhaps relevant to
this Holy Week that the
date 6/04 (2006) above
refers to both the Christian
holy day of Pentecost and
to the day of the
facetious baccalaureate
of the Class of 2006 in
the University Chapel
at Princeton.

For further context for the
Log24 remarks of that same
date, see June 1-15, 2006.

Sunday, January 7, 2007

Sunday January 7, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:00 am
Birthday Greetings
to Nicolas Cage
from Marxists.org

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Various forms of “the modern movement” that include “… the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalised and canonised in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted…” —marxists.org:

“One of the primary critiques of modernism that Learning from Las Vegas was engaged in, as Frederic [sic] Jameson clearly noted, was the dialectic between inside and outside and the assumption that the outside expressed the interior.* Let’s call this the modernist drive for ‘expressive transparency.'”

Aron Vinegar of Ohio State U., “Skepticism and the Ordinary: From Burnt Norton to Las Vegas

* Jameson, Frederic [sic]. 1988. “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology.” The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986. Volume 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 59.

Steven Helmling, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson, SUNY Press, 2001, p. 54–

Jameson “figures the inside/outside problem in the metaphor of the ‘prison-house of language’….”

      
      Jung and the Imago Dei:

 “… Jung presents a diagram  
    to illustrate the dynamic
      movements of the self….”

…the movement of
a self in the rock…

Stevens, The Rock, and Piranesi's Prisons

Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate
,
by Harold Bloom,
Cornell U. Press, 1977

“Welcome to The Rock.”
— Sean Connery

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070107-Bridge.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
“… just as God defeats the devil:
this bridge exists….”
Andre Weil

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070107-Magneto2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The bridge illustration
is thanks to Magneto.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Saturday August 26, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:00 pm
Philosopher's Rock
 
(continued from  

previous entry)

"Alcatraz, Spanish for pelican, was named Isla de los Alcatraces after the birds that were the island's only inhabitants." —Bay City Guide

Related material

Thomas Kuhn's "Pelican Brief":

"… the Philosopher’s Stone was a psychic rather than a physical product.  It symbolized one’s Self…."

Philosopher's Pelican:

"The formula presents a symbol of the self…."

Jung and the Imago Dei:

"… Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self…."

…the movement of
a self in the rock…

Stevens, The Rock, and Piranesi's Prisons

Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate
,
by Harold Bloom,
Cornell U. Press, 1977

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Saturday April 22, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 pm
Finis
Coronat
Opus

continued

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060422-FinisCoronat.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

See the essay
by Ana Marie Cox
on the final page
of this week's
TIME magazine.

Related material:

Jung and the Imago Dei,
Log24 entries of Feb. 20, 2004,
Space, Time, and Scarlett, and
Crystal's Sweet Sixteen
(Saturday Night Live sketch
starring Scarlett Johansson–
also featured as the clerk in
"Once in a Lifetime Jewelers"–
broadcast on Jan. 14, 2006.)

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060422-Johansson1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"Her wall is filled with pictures,
She gets 'em one by one."

Friday, January 20, 2006

Friday January 20, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Fourstone Parable

"Wherefore let it hardly… be… thought that the prisoner… was at his best a onestone parable
for… pathetically few… cared… to doubt… the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract."

Finnegans Wake, page 100, abridged

"… we have forgotten that we were angels and painted ourselves into a corner
of resource extraction and commodification of ourselves."

— A discussion, in a draft of a paper (rtf) attributed to Josh Schultz, 
of the poem "Diamond" by Attila Jozsef

Commodification of
the name Cullinane:

See the logos at
cullinane.com,
a design firm with
the motto

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060120-Motto.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(Note the 4Cs theme.)

To adapt a phrase from
Finnegans Wake, the
"fourstone parable" below
is an attempt to
decommodify my name.

Fourstone Parable:

(See also yesterday's "Logos."
The "communicate" logo is taken from
an online library at Calvin College;
the "connect" logo is a commonly
available picture of a tesseract
(Coxeter, Regular Polytopes, p. 123),
and the other two logos
are more or less original.)

For a more elegant
four-diamond figure, see
Jung and the Imago Dei.

Thursday, December 8, 2005

Thursday December 8, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:56 pm
Aion Flux

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire…
— Poem title, Gerard Manley Hopkins  

From Jung’s Map of the Soul, by Murray Stein:

“… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self….”

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/JungDiamonds.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a stable quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process.  In the same way, the ancients saw the imago Dei in man not as a mere imprint, as a sort of lifeless, stereotyped impression, but as an active force…. The four transformations represent a process of restoration or rejuvenation taking place, as it were, inside the self….”

“The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula repeats the ancient alchemical tetrameria, which is implicit in the fourfold structure of unity. 

What the formula can only hint at, however, is the higher plane that is reached through the process of transformation and integration. The ‘sublimation’ or progress or qualitative change consists in an unfolding of totality into four parts four times, which means nothing less than its becoming conscious. When psychic contents are split up into four aspects, it means that they have been subjected to discrimination by the four orienting functions of consciousness. Only the production of these four aspects makes a total description possible. The process depicted by our formula changes the originally unconscious totality into a conscious one.” 

— Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 2, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951) 

Related material: 

  The diamond theorem

“Although ‘wholeness’ seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of  spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical recods of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology.  What at first looks like an abstract idea stands in reality for something that exists and can be experienced, that demonstrates its a priori presence spontaneously. Wholeness is thus an objective factor that confronts the subject independently of him… Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality.”

— Jung, Aion, as quoted in
Carl Jung and Thomas Merton

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