2012.11.24 — Jung by Anthony Stevens: Read

Anthony Stevens.
Jung.
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 0192876864. [Note: the link is to 2001 edition, not shown here.]

Begun: 2012.10.29.
Finished: 2012.11.21.

★★★★★

Jung is a tightly written, comprehensive yet short overview of Jung's ideas and biography. Stevens managed to connect how Jung's biography influenced the

development of his ideas and how influential those ideas have been. Stevens' survey of Jung's relationship with Freud is interesting and balanced, as is his refutation of the anti-semitism charges that have floated around Jung since before the second world war.

Now after all that praise, I would suggest that Jung is a book without a really strong audience. The book is detailed enough and I suspect generally as accurate as a 3rd party biography can be. But that is its biggest problem. I suspect that many people completely unfamiliar with Jung's writings are likely to come away from this book with an exaggerated understanding of the power and range of Jung's ideas and influence and decide to not read anything else. They will not understand that the reason people read Jung is to begin the journey of self-understanding, what Jung called individuation.

On the other hand, those who are significantly familiar with Jung will not find too much new here. It remains simply a summary and review, albeit a very good one. It does have some nice quotable bits for those interested in quips or sound bites.

But what moved this book from just a solid four to five stars was something Stevens observed I had until reading it here thought that I had uniquely noticed. Thank god I am not the only one to have spotted the remarkable similarity between Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories and Jung's conceptualization of the collective unconscious and archetypes (p37). Now, it is possible that other Jungian commentators I have previously read made this connection too, but at a time in my life before I was familiar with Chomsky's linguistic ideas. But I do not remember even one such reference, and definitely haven't seen one since then. Nor have I seen anyone from the Chomsky side making the connection. (For those curious about this, a good overview of Chomsky's linguistics is Justin Leiber's Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Overview. I have blogged my review of it here.) And in it was my first publication of my perception of the strong equivalent between Jung's collective unconscious and Chomsky's Deep Structure and Universal Grammar. (No, the writers of the Wikipedia do not make a similar claim.)

Furthermore, Chomsky completely eviscerates behaviouralist models as having been completely ineffectual at explaining anything. Jung found the idea that behaviouralism could explain the human experience as untenable as well. Here's Stevens' summary:

… An archetype, [Jung] said, is not 'an inherited idea' but rather 'an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a "pattern of behaviour". This aspect of the archetype,' concludes Jung, 'the purely biological one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology' (CW XVIII, par. 1228). In a sense, ethology and Jungian psychology can be viewed as two sides of the same coin: it is as if ethologists have been engaged in an extraverted exploration of the archetype and Jungians in an introverted examination of the [biologically postulated] IRM [Innate Releasing Mechanism].

The currency of archetypal theory

Many other disciplines have produced concepts similar to the archetypal hypothesis, but usually without reference to Jung. For example, the primary concern of Claude Levi-Strauss and the French school of

structural anthropology is with the unconscious infrastructures which they hold responsible for all human customs and institutions; specialists in linguistics maintain that although grammars differ from one another, their basic forms—which Noam Chomsky calls their deep structures—are universal (i.e. at the deepest neuropsychic level, there exists a universal [or 'archetypal'] grammar on which all individual grammars are based), an entirely new discipline, sociobiology, has grown up on the theory that the patterns of behaviour typical of all social species, the human species included, are dependent on genetically transmitted response strategies designed to maximize the fitness of the organism to survive in the environment in which it evolved; sociobiology also holds that the psycho-social development in individual members of a species is dependent on what are termed epigenetic rules [epi = upon, genesis = development; i.e. rules upon which development proceeds); more recently still, ethologically oriented psychiatrists have begun to study what they call psychobiological response patterns and deeply homologous neural structures which they hold responsible for the achievement of healthy or unhealthy patterns of adjustment in individual patients in response to variations in their social environment. All these concepts are compatible with the archetypal hypothesis which lung had proposed decades earlier to virtually universal indifference.

This raises an important question. If lung's theory of archetypes is so fundamental that it keeps being rediscovered by the practitioners of many other disciplines, why did it not receive the enthusiastic welcome it deserved when Jung proposed it? The explanation is, I think, twofold: namely, the time at which Jung stated the theory, and the way in which he published it.

In the first place, throughout Jung's mature lifetime, researchers working in university departments of psychology were in the grip of behaviourism, which discounted innate or genetic factors, preferring to view the individual as a tabula rasa whose development was almost entirely dependent on environmental factors. lung's contrary view that the infant comes into the world with an intact blueprint for life which it then proceeds to implement through interaction with the environment, was so at variance with the prevailing Zeitgeist as to guarantee it a hostile reception.

Secondly, Jung did not state his theory in a clear, testable form, nor did he back it up with sufficiently persuasive evidence. His book Transformations and Symbols of the Libido in which he first put forward his idea of a collective unconscious giving rise to 'primordial images' (as he originally called archetypes) was so densely written and so packed with mythological exegesis as to make it virtually impenetrable to any but the most determined reader. Moreover, in arguing that 'primordial images' were derived from the past history of mankind,

Jung exposed himself to the accusation that he, like Freud, subscribed to the discredited theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, originally proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), i.e. that ideas or images occurring in members of one generation could be passed on genetically to the next and subsequent generations.

In fact, the collective unconscious is a respectable scientific hypothesis and one does not have to adopt a Lamarckian view of biology to entertain it. Indeed, as we have seen, it is entirely compatible with the theoretical formulations of contemporary ethologists, sociobiologists, and psychiatrists. Precisely in order to acquit himself of the charge of Lamarckism Jung eventually made a clear distinction between what he termed the archetype-as-such (similar to Kant's das Ding-an-sich} and the archetypal images, ideas, and behaviours that the archetype-as-such gives rise to. It is the predisposition to have certain experiences that is archetypal and inherited, not the experience itself. The French molecular biologist and Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod reached an identical conclusion: 'Everything comes from experience, yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.'

Thus, the Jungian archetype is no more scientifically disreputable than the ethological IRM. Just as the behavioural repertoire of each species is encoded in its central nervous system as innate releasing mechanisms which are activated in the course of development by appropriate sign stimuli, so Jung conceived the programme for human life to be encoded in the collective unconscious as a series of archetypal determinants which are actualized in response to inner and outer events in the course of the life cycle. There is nothing Lamarckian or unbiological in this conception (37-9).

On the day I began this book, it managed to link itself to a small fushigi involving my friend BH. For the curious you can read the fushigi at 2012.09.29 —….

2012.06.17 — Chomsky for Beginners by John Maher & Judy Groves: finished 2012.06.14 & Fushigis*

John Maher and Judy Groves (Illustrator).
Chomsky for Beginners (but published as Introducing Chomsky in the USA).
Cambridge (UK): Icon Books, 1996. [Out of Print.]
ISBN 1874166420. [NOTE: The USA cover for this ISBN is different.]
★★★★★
Began 2012.05.27.
Finished 2012.06.14



This book review also contains a pair of fushigi:, which I've linked.
1. Blood pressure Fushigi
2. Crow Fushigi.

First, the review
I purchased Chomsky for Beginners without much expectation, but as a Chomsky book to put into my library. I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the exposition and thought that went into putting this excellent synopsis of Chomsky's ideas in linguists and their role in utterly transforming our understanding of human language. Even more than that, Maher and Chomsky include a range of contrary opinions and subsequent arguments that, although very concise, clearly illuminate the issues, thinking and controversies.

The basic evisceration of the behaviourist model of language acquisition was well articulated throughout. But I like how he approached Skinner.

The Refutation of Behaviourism
In 1959, Chomsky composed a basic refutation of behaviourist psychology in this review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour. According to Chomsky, children are not born tabula rasa. On the contrary, each child is genetically predisposed to structure how knowledge is acquired.

"The phrase 'X is reinforced by Y' is being used as a cover term for X wants Y, X likes Y, X wishes Y were the case, etc. Invoking the term 'reinforcement' has no explanatory force, and any idea that this paraphrase introduces any new clarity or objectivity into the description of wishing, liking, etc., is a serious delusion."

Skinner's account rejects all postulations of inner states and sees human behaviour as entirely a function of antecedent events. For Chomsky, this reduction of human behaviour to 'conditioned responses' contradicts the actual [and demonstrated] complexity and freedom of consciousness (43).

I find the few quotations supplied to be on point and interesting. As a reader of fiction, even of so-called 'literature' I was bemused to read:

Perhaps literature will forever give far deeper insight into 'the full human person' than any model of scientific inquiry can hope to do (9).

The bulk (2/3) of the book covers linguistics. The balance of the book is Chomsky's political and media criticism. This was of less interest to me, that being where the bulk of my Chomsky reading has been. However with that exposure comes my ability to assess how well that section is put together. But more than that, the precise and clearly articulated criticisms of the media and socio-political thought in general was hugely informative and entertaining to read. For example, the contrast that Chomsky draws between 'enlightenment values' and how far our science and social perspicuity have fallen from them is delightful. For example:

The American Paradox
The United States proudly calls itself 'the leader of the Free World'. We know the US as a free and open society, more so in many ways than societies of Western Europe. And yet, Chomsky has criticized the US as blind to what it really is…
1. One of the most depoliticized nations in the industrial world
2. One of the most deeply indoctrinated societies in the industrial world
3. One of the most conformist intelligentsias in the industrial world.

Q: IS THIS NOT A PARADOX?
A: It only looks that way.

The freer the society the more well-honed and sophisticated its system of thought control and the indoctrination. The ruling élite, clever, class-conscious, ever sure of domination, make sure of that (138-9).

It is clear from the very first page that, unlike the one or two 'Dummy' books I've tried, the writers of Chomsky for Beginners, John Maher and Noam Chomsky, demonstrate deep respect for the readers' intelligence and ability to understand complex ideas. This at no time feels dumbed down. This book has been described as a good introduction to Chomsky's ideas, and it is. But far, far more importantly, this is a book that introduces one to the challenge of really thinking, even those who are, like me, familiar with Chomsky. And I loved that.

Now, everything up to this point would have earned from me four stars. So why five? Because for the first time I read someone else make the connection between C.G. Jung and Chomsky's ideas of language and language acquisition. I was so excited to see this! (For my connection, see my review of Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Review by Justin Leiber.) From Beginners Maher does not elaborate on the connection beyond a citation on the Collective Unconscious which he implies has a correspondence to Chomsky's concepts of Deep Structure and Universal Grammar.

"One part of our biological make up is specifically dedicated to language. That is called our language faculty. UG is the initial state of that language faculty" (77).
…
Universal Grammar is that part of cognitive psychology (ultimately human biology) which seeks to determine the invariant principles of the language faculty and to determine as well the range of variation that those principles allow — that is, the possible human languages(78).

Now compare with Jung's idea of the collective unconscious and archetypes:

The human psyche is composed of innate forms always present, giving direction and form to their actualization in images and action. The collective unconscious is universal: it is shared by everyone. "The autonomic contents of the unconscious or 'dominants' … are not inherited ideas but inherited possibilities, necessities even, of bringing to birth the ideas by which these dominants have been expressed, every region has its forms of speech, which can vary infinitely" (80-1).

Okay, enough book review.

1. Blood pressure fushigi

I took my wife to an appointment with a dietician to talk diet as it relates to her recent onset of diabetes. This was her first time there, and there was an instantaneous clash of personalities. I won't go into the minutiae. However, the nature of the visit may perhaps be epitomized by when she had her blood pressure. For the first time in her life, despite having had her pressure measured many times because of fifteen years of serious health issues, it was taken with an automatic machine. Well, she has a relatively contentious relationship with mechanical devices, and when the pressure on her arm became far more intense than she was familiar with from the manual systems, she freaked. Pure panic. When I picked her up 45 minutes later she was still clammy and sweating from the panic. She commented that her arm still hurt and, to her great annoyance read over 160. In fifteen years of repeated tests under various circumstances, it has never been over 130, and normally sits between 120 to 125 to the surprise of every doctor who always expect it to be high.

So, later that day, when I return to reading Chomsky for Beginners, I read:

Universal Grammar is not a grammar. Neither is it a theory of knowledge. It is a theory about the internal structure of the human mind.

Principles, therefore, are universal to all languages. The specific values for parameters are a fixed property of language which vary within very specific limits from one language to another.

For example, age, gender, and renal function are parameter values (para = in addition to) that determine blood pressure in the human body.

If renal function is damaged by an illness like diabetes, then the blood pressure goes up. Therefore the study of dietary salt intake by itself will not provide an accurate and complete picture of operating renal function.

In a tightly integrated theory with a fairly rich internal structure, change in a single parameter may have complex effects, with proliferating consequences in various parts of the grammar (Chomsky102).

And the graphic to accompany it seems right on point, too.

2. Crow Fushigi

Well a second fushigi happened on the 14th, too. And indirectly it is related to my wife's visit with the dietician, so I'll include it here, even though it is not directly related to Chomsky for Beginners except though the dimension (or element) of time.

It began in the morning while waiting for it to be time to leave for the appointment. We have been observing a pair of crows who have nested nearby. Oddly enough, for the first time in my life I was actually dive bombed by the one the crows the previous weekend. Anyway, my wife asked when crows fledged. I said I didn't know, but that it must be soon.

When I dropped my wife off at the dietician's office, I went and did some banking. After that I had a nice open block of time and then went for a good walk to Queen's Park along 5th Avenue before going to pick her up. On the way back from the park I heard unusual sounding crow squawks. When I looked over to where the noise came from, I saw three crows standing at the edge of the roof of a house. One was in the eave, the other two on the roof. The one that was making the unusual noise was being fed by the other ones: it's beak was wide open and squawked it's demand for food, and the others were feeding it.

'Ah,' I thought, 'it would seem that the crows have fledged.' L.'s question has ben answered.

2012.04.28 — Jung On Synchronicity and the Paranormal edited with an introduction by Roderick Main

C.G. Jung, Roderick Main (Editor)
Jung On Synchronicity and the Paranormal. Princeton, NJ, 1998 by Princeton University Press, ISBN 069105837.

Began 2012.02.01; Finished 2012.03.20

★★★★★

Jung On Synchronicity and the Paranormal (JoS&tP) is an important collection because it brings together in one short and well representative book, in Jung's own words, his interest in and experiences of the paranormal to a degree until now I'd read hints of but had never so plainly seen stated and elaborated. JoS&tP book goes far beyond what Jung included in his near-autobiographical, Memories, Dreams and Reflections. In MD&R there are included some paranormal activities, but my reading between its lines suggested to me that there was much more than was disclosed there. JoS&tP confirms that and then some.

In this anthology Roderick Main has done something quite interesting: even as Jung discloses a personal encounter with a ghost and other paranormal activities, including seances, Main provides linkages to some of the more under-discussed implications of quantum mechanics as they may apply to possible theories of paranormal experiences. Jung was very interested in the modern theories of physics because he saw a tangible theoretical and/or philosophical link between them and what his experiences with and ideas about paranormal experiences were leading him to think and theorize about psychology and the paranormal.

I particularly and thoroughly enjoyed the letters that were included, and not just because I love writing and reading 'heavy' philosophical letters too, but because Jung's informal writing is delightful to read. He relaxes his careful official persona, and expresses some of his unsupported speculations and ideas as to the nature of things inexplicable, such as the meaning of life, in ways always thoughtful, but frequently funny, too.

His face-to-face encounter with a ghost in a British farm house is particularly interesting because my reading of the encounter entangled it to me in one of the most interesting and quite frankly bizarre fushigis I've ever experienced. I have blogged it in 2012.02.02 — Half Face and More fushigis.

Despite this being about the 'airy fairy' concepts of synchronicity and ghosts, mediums and seances, Jung kept his writing and speculations and experiences 'real'. He doesn't leap to conclusions with his experiences, but allows them to challenge and question his pre-formulated beliefs about what may or may not be so-called reality. And in the process he challenges the validity of our ideological fixation on a rationalistic causal — 'Descartian' science. Unlike much of western science, perhaps especially the behaviourists who dismiss as unreal that which falls outside the bounds that their theories delineate, Jung proves his stature as a real scientist by neither dismissing nor idealizing his paranormal experiences: they become simply a part of the chisel that Life provided him to chip away at our false ideas and thinking, even if it is stingy in providing additional clues.

This is a solid five stars.

Now for some text I found to be particularly interesting for one reason or the other.

Pages 108-9
From 'The theory of synchronicity and Jung's astrological experiment. (Letter to A.D. Cornell (9 February 1960), Letters, vol. 2 pp.537-43.)

Jung points out that our perception of the an event is not the event, and that it is irrational — unscientific — to dismiss events because our perception is skewed or limited by our rational understanding of what is perceivable or possible. I laughed at how elegantly he used statistics to refute the completeness of causality's ability to explain 'everything.'

… My emphasis — as in all such cases — lies on the reality of the event, not on its having been perceived. This point of view accords with the hypothesis of an causal connection, i.e., a non-spatial and non-temporal conditioning of events.

Since causality is not an axiomatic but a statistical truth, there must be exceptions in which time and space appear to be relative, otherwise the truth would not be statistical. On this epistemological basis one must conclude that the possibility does exist of observing non-spatial and non-temporal events — the very phenomena which we actually do observe contrary to all expectations and which we are now discussing.

In my view, therefore, it is not our perception which is necessarily para- or supra-normal but the event itself. This, however, is not 'miraculous' but merely 'extra-ordinary' and unexpected, and then only from our biased standpoint which takes causality as axiomatic. From the statistical standpoint, of course, it is simply a matter of random phenomena, but from a truly realistic standpoint they are actual and significant facts. Exceptions are just as real as probabilities. The premise of probability simultaneously postulates the existence of the improbable.

Wherever and whenever the collective unconscious (the basis of our psyche) comes into play, the possibility arises that something will happen which contradicts our rationalistic prejudices. Our consciousness performs a selective function and is in itself the product of selection, whereas the collective unconscious is simply Nature — and since Nature contains everything it also contains the unknown. It is beyond truth and error, independent of the interference of consciousness, and therefore often completely at odds with the intentions and attitudes of the ego.

So far as we can see, the collective unconscious is identical with Nature to the extent that Nature herself, including matter, is unknown to us. I have nothing against the assumption that the psyche is a quality of matter or matter the concrete aspect of the psyche, provided that 'psyche' is defined as the collective unconscious. In my opinion the collective unconscious is the preconscious aspect of things on the 'animal' or instinctive level of the psyche. Everything that is stated or manifested by the psyche is an expression of the nature of things, whereof man is a part.

Just as in physics we cannot observe nuclear processes directly, so there can be no direct observation of the contents of the collective unconscious. In both cases their actual nature can be inferred only from their effects -just as the trajectory of a nuclear particle in a Wilson chamber8 can be traced only by observing the condensation trail that follows its movement and thus makes it visible.

In practice we observe the archetypal 'traces' primarily in dreams, where they become perceptible as psychic forms. But this is not the only way they reach perception: they can appear objectively and concretely in the form of physical facts just as well. In this case the observation is not an endopsychic perception (fantasy, intuition, vision, hallucination, etc.) but a real outer object which behaves as if it were motivated or evoked by, or as if it were expressing, .a thought corresponding to the archetype. Take for instance my case of the scarab: at the moment my patient was telling me her dream a real 'scarab' tried to get into the room, as if it had understood that it must play its mythological role as a symbol of rebirth. Even inanimate objects behave occasionally in the same way — meteorological phenomena, for instance.

Since I assume that our instincts (i.e., archetypes) are biological facts and not arbitrary opinions, I do not believe that synchronistic (or Psi-) phenomena are due to any supra-normal (psychic) faculties but rather that they are bound to occur under certain conditions if space, time, and causality are not axiomatic but merely statistical truths. They occur spontaneously and not because we think we possess a special faculty for perceiving them. For this reason I do not think in terms of concepts like 'telepathy', 'precognition', or 'psychokinesis'.

In the same way, the archetype is not evoked by a conscious act of the will; experience shows that it is activated, independently of the will, in a psychic situation that needs compensating by an archetype. One might even speak of a spontaneous archetypal intervention. The language of religion calls these happenings 'God's will' — quite correctly in so far as this refers to the peculiar behaviour of the archetype, its spontaneity and its functional relation to the actual situation (108-9).
…

Pages116-7
The theory of synchronicity and Jung's astrological experiment. (From 'An Astrological Experiment' CW18 1958.)

Jung argues that the 'truth' of causality relies on the existence of acausality. Again, he cites the use of statistical proofs of scientific truth as an inferred proof of causal relativity. He makes an interesting claim: Meaning arises not from causality but from freedom, i. e., from causality. His arguments are often appear, superficially, to be philosophical, but rest on a scientific attitude: … science gives us only an average picture of the world, but not a true one. If human society consisted of average individuals only, it would be a sad sight indeed.

1186 Naturally I do not think that [the astrological] experiment or any other report on happenings of this kind proves anything; it merely points to something that even science can no longer overlook — namely, that its truths are in essence statistical and are therefore not absolute. Hence there is in nature a background of acausality, freedom, and meaningfulness which behaves complementarily to determinism, mechanism and meaninglessness; and it is to be assumed that such phenomena are observable. Owing to their peculiar nature, however, they will hardly be prevailed upon to lay aside the chance character that makes them so questionable. If they did this they would no longer be what they are — acausal, undetermined, meaningful.

1187 Pure causality is only meaningful when used for the creation and functioning of an efficient instrument or machine by an intelligence standing outside this process and independent of it. A self-running process that operates entirely by its own causality, i.e., by absolute necessity, is meaningless. One of my critics accuses me of having too rigid a conception of causality. He has obviously not considered that if cause and effect were not necessarily5 connected there would hardly be any meaning in speaking of causality at all. My critic makes the same mistake as the famous scientist6 who refuses to believe that God played dice when he created the world. He fails to see that if God did not play dice he had no choice but to create a (from the human point of view) meaningless machine. Since this question involves a transcendental judgment there can be no final answer to it, only a paradoxical one. Meaning arises not from causality but from freedom, i. e., from acausality.

1188 Modern physics has deprived causality of its axiomatic character. Thus, when we explain natural events we do so by means of an instrument which is not quite reliable. Hence an element of uncertainty always attaches to our judgment, because — theoretically, at least — we might always be dealing with an exception to the rule which can only be registered negatively by the statistical method. No matter how small this chance is, (116) it nevertheless exists. Since causality is our only means of explanation and since it is only relatively valid, we explain the world by applying causality in a paradoxical way, both positively and negatively: A is the cause of B and possibly not. The negation can be omitted in the great majority of cases. But it is my contention that it cannot be omitted in the case of phenomena which are relatively independent of space and time. As the time-factor is indispensable to the concept of causality, one cannot speak of causality in a case where the time-factor is eliminated (as in precognition). Statistical truth leaves a gap open for acausal phenomena. And since our causalistic explanation of nature contains the possibility of its own negation, it belongs to the category of transcendental judgments, which are paradoxical or antinomian. That is so because nature is still beyond us and because science gives us only an average picture of the world, but not a true one. If human society consisted of average individuals only, it would be a sad sight indeed.

1189 From a rational point of view, an experiment like the one I conducted is completely valueless, for the oftener it is repeated the more probable becomes its lack of results. But that this is also not so is proved by the very old tradition, which would hardly have come about had not these 'lucky hits' often happened in the past. They behave like Rhine's results: they are exceedingly improbable, and yet they happen so persistently that they even compel us to criticize the foundations of our probability calculus, or at least its applicability to certain kinds of material.

1190 When analyzing unconscious processes I often had occasion to observe synchronistic or ESP phenomena, and I therefore turned my attention to the psychic conditions underlying them. I believe I have found that they nearly always occur in the region of archetypal constellations, that is, in situations which have either activated an archetype or were evoked by the autonomous activity of an archetype. It is these observations which led me to the idea of getting the combination of archetypes found in astrology to give a quantitatively measurable answer. In this I succeeded, as the result shows; indeed one could say that the organizing factor responded with enthusiasm to my prompting. The reader must pardon this anthropomorphism, which I know positively invites misinterpretation; it fits in excellently well with the psychological facts and aptly describes the emotional background from which synchronistic phenomena emerge.

1191 I am aware that I ought at this point to discuss the psychology of the archetype, but this has been done so often and in such detail elsewhere that I do not wish to repeat myself now.

1192 I am also aware of the enormous impression of improbability made by events of this kind, and that their comparative rarity does not make them any more probable. The statistical method therefore excludes them, as they do not belong to the average run of events (116-7).

Page 147
Life after death

Jung argues that so-called 'real' scientific experiments like those of J.B. Rhine suggest that consciousness is comprised of or rests upon a continuity beyond our normal observation of space and time. Jung doesn't say outright there is life beyond death, but the more cautious … there is no way to marshal valid proof of continuance of the soul after death, there are nevertheless experiences which make us thoughtful.

… When one has such experiences — and I will tell of others like them — one acquires a certain respect for the potentialities and arts of the unconscious. Only, one must remain critical and be aware that such communications may have a subjective meaning as well. They may be in accord with reality, and then again they may not. I have, however, learned that the views I have been able to form on the basis of such hints from the unconscious have been most rewarding. Naturally, I am not going to write a book of revelations about them, but I will acknowledge that I have a 'myth' which encourages me to look deeper into this whole realm. Myths are the earliest form of science. When I speak of things after death, I am speaking out of inner prompting, and can go no farther than to tell you dreams and myths that relate to this subject.

Naturally, one can contend from the start that myths and dreams concerning continuity of life after death are merely compensating fantasies which are inherent in our natures — all life desires eternity. The only argument I can adduce in answer to this is the myth itself.

However, there are indications that at least a part of the psyche is not subject to the laws of space and time. Scientific proof of that has been provided by the well-known J.B. Rhine experiments. Along with numerous cases of spontaneous foreknowledge, non-spatial perceptions, and so on — of which I have given a number of examples from my own life — these experiments prove that the psyche at times functions outside of the spatiotemporal law of causality. This indicates that our conceptions of space and time, and therefore of causality also, are incomplete. A complete picture of the world would require the addition of still another dimension; only then could the totality of phenomena be given a unified explanation. Hence it is that the rationalists insist to this day that parapsychological experiences do not really exist; for their world-view stands or falls by this question. If such phenomena occur at all, the rationalistic picture of the universe is invalid, because incomplete. Then the possibility of an other-valued reality behind the phenomenal world becomes an inescapable problem, and we must face the fact that our world, with its time, space, and causality, relates to another order of things lying behind or beneath it, in which neither 'here and there' nor 'earlier and later' are of importance. I have been convinced that at least a part of our psychic existence is characterized by a relativity of space and time. This relativity seems to increase, in proportion to the distance from consciousness, to an absolute condition of timelessness and spacelessness.

Although there is no way to marshal valid proof of continuance of the soul after death, there are nevertheless experiences which make us thoughtful. I take them as hints, and do not presume to ascribe to them the significance of insights(147).
…

Page 159
Miscellaneous insights and speculations
(From: Letter to E.L. Grant Watson (9 February 1956), Letters, vol. 2, pp. 287-9.)

Synchronicity is the link between movement of mass in space and time and psychic energy. So-called statistical truths are made up of exceptions to the 'normal' laws of the universe.

You are surely touching upon a most important fact when you begin to question the coincidence of a purely mathematical deduction with physical facts, such as the sect aurea (the Fibonacci series. My source calls him Fibonacci, not -nicci. He lived 1180-1250) and in modern times the equations expressing the turbulence of gases. One has not marvelled enough about these parallelisms. It is quite obvious that there must exist a condition common to the moving body and the psychic 'movement', more than a merely logical corollarium or consectarium. I should call it an irrational (acausal) corollary of synchronicity. The Fibonacci series is self-evident and a property of the series of whole numbers, and it exists independently of empirical facts, as on the other hand the periodicity of a biological spiral occurs without application of mathematical reasoning unless one assumes an equal arrangement in living matter as well as in the human mind, ergo a property of matter (or of 'energy' or whatever you call the primordial principle) in general and consequently also of moving bodies in general, the psychic 'movement' included.

If this argument stands to reason, the coincidence of physical and mental forms and also of physical and mental events (synchronicity) would needs be a regular occurrence, which, however, particularly with synchronicity, is not the case. This is a serious snag pointing, as it seems to me, to an indeterminate or at least indeterminable, apparently arbitrary arrangement. This is a much neglected but characteristic aspect of physical nature: the statistical truth is largely made up of exceptions. That is the aspect of reality the poet and artist would insist upon, and that is also the reason why a philosophy exclusively based upon natural science is nearly always flat, superficial, and vastly beside the point, as it misses all the colourful improbable exceptions, the real 'salt of the earth'! It is not realistic, but rather an abstract half-truth, which, when applied to living man, destroys all individual values indispensable to human life(159).

For the next citation, I chose to append Main's extract from CW8 with a few more paragraphs that precede his. His citation from 'The Soul and Death' begins with paragraph 809, but I like how Jung leads up to that beginning with paragraph 807. So, from CW8, pars 807-8. Jung suggests that neurosis and nervous disorders derive primarily from being alienated from one's natural instincts. Rationalistic thinking as regards things like death stand in opposition to our instinctual feeling or understanding of death and its potential meaning, and therefore approaches being a neurotic symptom.

807 … it would seem to be more in accord with the collective psyche of humanity to regard death as the fulfillment of life's meaning and as its final goal in the truest sense, instead of a mere meaningless cessation. Anyone who cherishes a rationalistic opinion on this score has isolated himself psychologically and stands opposed to his own basic human nature.

808 This last sentence contains a fundamental truth about all neuroses, for nervous disorders consist primarily in an alienation from one's instincts, a splitting off of consciousness from certain basic facts of the psyche. Hence rationalistic opinions come unexpectedly close to neurotic symptoms. Like these, they consist of distorted thinking, which takes the place of psychologically correct thinking. The latter kind of thinking always retains its connection with the heart, with the depths of the psyche, the tap-root. For, enlightenment or no enlightenment, consciousness or no consciousness, nature prepares itself for death. If we could observe and register the thoughts of a young person when he has time and leisure for day-dreaming, we would discover that, aside from a few memory-images, his fantasies are mainly concerned with the future. As a matter of fact, most fantasies consist of anticipations. They are for the most part preparatory acts, or even psychic exercises for dealing with certain future realities. If we could make the same experiment with an ageing person—without his knowledge, of course— we would naturally find, owing to his tendency to look backwards, a greater number of memory-images than with a younger person, but we would also find a surprisingly large number of anticipations, including those of death. Thoughts of death pile up to an astonishing degree as the years increase. Willynilly, the ageing person prepares himself for death. That is why I think that nature herself is already preparing for the end. Objectively it is a matter of indifference what the individual consciousness may think about it. But subjectively it makes an enormous difference whether consciousness keeps in step with the psyche or whether it clings to opinions of which the heart knows nothing. It is just as neurotic in old age not to focus upon the goal of death as it is in youth to repress fantasies which have to do with the future.

Now I return to the text in JoS&tP.

Pages 142-145
From 'The Soul and Death' (1934) (CW8)

Does death have meaning? Jung's experiences with people and their dreams who are approaching death have provided him with evidence that the unconscious remains unperturbed by its arrival and seems to view it as relatively unimportant. However the unconscious does seem to put importance on how one dies.

809 In my rather long psychological experience I have observed a great many people whose unconscious psychic activity I was able to follow into the immediate presence of death. As a rule the approaching end was indicated by those symbols which, in normal life also, proclaim changes of psychological condition — rebirth symbols such as changes of locality, journeys, and the like. I have frequently been able to trace back for over a year, in a dream-series, the indications of approaching death, even in cases where such thoughts were not prompted by the outward situation. Dying, therefore, has its onset long before actual death. Moreover, this often shows itself in peculiar changes of personality which may precede death by quite a long time. On the whole, I was astonished to see how little ado the unconscious psyche makes of death. It would seem as though death were something relatively unimportant, or perhaps our psyche does not bother about what happens to the individual. But it seems that the unconscious is all the more interested in how one dies; that is, whether the attitude of consciousness is adjusted to dying or not. For example, I once had to treat a woman of sixty-two. She was still hearty, and moderately intelligent. It was not for want of brains that she was unable to understand her dreams. It was unfortunately only too clear that she did not want to understand them. Her dreams were very plain, but also very disagreeable. She had got it fixed in her head that she was a faultless mother to her children, but the children did not share this view at all, and the dreams too displayed a conviction very much to the contrary. I was obliged to break off the treatment after some weeks of fruitless effort because I had to leave for military service (it was during the war). In the meantime the patient was smitten with an incurable disease, leading after a few months to a moribund condition which might bring about the end at any moment. Most of the time she was in a sort of delirious or somnambulistic state, and in this curious mental condition she spontaneously resumed the analytical work. She spoke of her dreams again and acknowledged to herself everything that she had previously denied to me with the greatest vehemence, and a lot more besides. This self-analytic work continued daily for several hours, for about six weeks. At the end of this period she had calmed herself, just like a patient during normal treatment, and then she died.

810 From this and numerous other experiences of the kind I must conclude that our psyche is at least not indifferent to the dying of the individual. The urge, so often seen in those who are dying, to set to rights whatever is still wrong might point in the same direction.

811 How these experiences are ultimately to be interpreted is a problem that exceeds the competence of an empirical science and goes beyond our intellectual capacities, for in order to reach a final conclusion one must necessarily have had the actual experience of death. This event unfortunately puts the observer in a position that makes it impossible for him to give an objective account of his experiences and of the conclusions resulting therefrom.

812 Consciousness moves within narrow confines, within the brief span of time between its beginning and its end, and shortened by about a third by periods of sleep. The life of the body lasts somewhat longer; it always begins earlier and, very often, it ceases later than consciousness. Beginning and end are unavoidable aspects of all processes. Yet on closer examination it is extremely difficult to see where one process ends and another begins, since events and processes, beginnings and endings, merge into each other and form, strictly speaking, an indivisible continuum. We divide the processes from one another for the sake of discrimination and understanding, knowing full well that at bottom every division is arbitrary and conventional. This procedure in no way infringes the continuum of the world process, for "beginning" and "end" are primarily necessities of conscious cognition. We may establish with reasonable certainty that an individual consciousness as it relates to ourselves has come to an end. But whether this means that the continuity of the psychic process is also interrupted remains doubtful, since the psyche's attachment to the brain can be affirmed with far less certitude today than it could fifty years ago. Psychology must first digest certain parapsychological facts, which it has hardly begun to do as yet.

813 The unconscious psyche appears to possess qualities which throw a most peculiar light on its relation to space and time. I am thinking of those spatial and temporal telepathic phenomena which, as we know, are much easier to ignore than to explain. In this regard science, with a few praiseworthy exceptions, has so far taken the easier path of ignoring them. I must confess, however, that the so-called telepathic faculties of the psyche have caused me many a headache, for the catchword "telepathy" is very far from explaining anything. The limitation of consciousness in space and time is such an overwhelming reality that every occasion when this fundamental truth is broken through must rank as an event of the highest theoretical significance, for it would prove that the space-time barrier can be annulled. The annulling factor would then be the psyche, since space-time would attach to it at most as a relative and conditioned quality. Under certain conditions it could even break through the barriers of space and time precisely because of a quality essential to it, that is, its relatively trans-spatial and trans-temporal nature. This possible transcendence of space-time, for which it seems to me there is a good deal of evidence, is of such incalculable import that it should spur the spirit of research to the greatest effort. Our present development of consciousness is, however, so backward that in general we still lack the scientific and intellectual equipment for adequately evaluating the facts of telepathy so far as they have bearing on the nature of the psyche. I have referred to this group of phenomena merely in order to point out that the psyche's attachment to the brain, i.e., its space-time limitation, is no longer as self-evident and incontrovertible as we have hitherto been led to believe.

814 Anyone who has the least knowledge of the parapsychological material which already exists and has been thoroughly verified will know that so-called telepathic phenomena are undeniable facts. An objective and critical survey of the available data would establish that perceptions occur as if in part there were no space, in part no time. Naturally, one cannot draw from this the metaphysical conclusion that in the world of things as they are "in themselves" there is neither space nor time, and that the space-time category is therefore a web into which the human mind has woven itself as into a nebulous illusion. Space and time are not only the most immediate certainties for us, they are also obvious empirically, since everything observable happens as though it occurred in space and time. In the face of this overwhelming certainty it is understandable that reason should have the greatest difficulty in granting validity to the peculiar nature of telepathic phenomena. But anyone who does justice to the facts cannot but admit that their apparent space-timelessness is their most essential quality. In the last analysis, our naive perception and immediate certainty are, strictly speaking, no more than evidence of a psychological a priori form of perception which simply rules out any other form. The fact that we are totally unable to imagine a form of existence without space and time by no means proves that such an existence is in itself impossible. And therefore, just as we cannot draw, from an appearance of space-timelessness, any absolute conclusion about a space-timeless form of existence, so we are not entitled to conclude from the apparent space-time quality of our perception that there is no form of existence without space and time. It is not only permissible to doubt the absolute validity of space- time perception; it is, in view of the available facts, even imperative to do so. The hypothetical possibility that the psyche touches on a form of existence outside space and rime presents a scientific question-mark that merits serious consideration for a long time to come. The ideas and doubts of theoretical physicists in our own day should prompt a cautious mood in psychologists too; for, philosophically considered, what do we mean by the "limitedness of space" if not a relativization of the space category? Something similar might easily happen to the category of time (and to that of causality as well). Doubts about these matters are more warranted today than ever before (142-145).
...

On reflection I am not sure what I expected to read before I began reading JoS&tP, but it turned out to be a far, far better read than I'd anticipated. Perhaps it was the inclusion of so many letters and extracts from letters, which I'd not read before except in tiny citations.

Also, my prejudice regarding the word 'paranormal' lead me to anticipate something other than what Jung explored, which is a very scientific, coherent, and sound argument that our scientific foundation in causal biased rationalism is not just misguided, but inadequate to explain the full range of what happens within the so-called bounds of life.

I highly recommend this book.

2012.03.13 — Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Review by Justin Leiber

Justin Leiber.
Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Overview.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975, 0312576102. (Out of Print.)

Began: 2011.10.01; Finished 2012.01.14
★★★★★

This book is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it for those who have become ideologically fixated on empirical / behavioural science in the humanities. Not only is this a book for people interested in how language works, it is far more importantly a powerful book for those who have come to believe that much of what passes for science in the behaviour / humanistic fields has been plagued with a false science that has managed to turn empiricism into a mind numbing ideology. For many readers, NC:APO is likely to be a transformational book in that it provides the solid analysis that supports making the leap from the flaccid so-called truths that behaviourism has provided us with to a resurgence of the scientific attitude of 18th & 19th century rationalism. That rationalism, unlike today's mask of rationalism, does not pretend that their philosophy can explain things beyond what it can.

Skinner

Chomsky's argument applies to other fields, such as economics and psychology. For example, the behaviourist B.F. Skinner's is mentioned several times in unflattering terms. (In the book of his interviews with Mitsou Ronat, Language and Responsibility, Chomsky goes so far as to say,

Mitsou Ronat

paraphrased, that as far as he knows behaviourism has contributed nothing of meaningful scientific value.)


Empiricism, perhaps especially in fields like linguistics, economics and psychology, act as if all behaviours and characteristics of the human species and the individuals within it, can be explained by stimulus/response theories. The book begins with Leiber succinctly recapping the history of how Chomsky, with the ease of a knife cutting through water, revolutionized linguistics and proved irrevocably that empirical behaviourism is completely inadequate to explain not only the acquisition of language but also its comprehension. Leiber describes Chomsky's argument that, since the sentences of a language that can be created are infinite, that the behavioural linguistic practice of cataloguing them so as to fully describe a language is fruitless. Chomsky extends that argument by pointing out that most sentences that human's comprehend in their lives they will not have ever seen or heard before. He then convincingly argues that the rules of grammar allow for sentences to be constructed that are incomprehensible, whereas sentences are easily created that don't properly follow the rules of grammar but which can be perfectly comprehensible. All of these are extremely strong indictments of some of behaviourism's fundamental tenets of human understanding of language and understanding.

Chomsky's pragmatic rationalism may be most pointedly observed when he describes the real world experience that children learn language before they know the so-called rules of grammar. That repeatedly observed behaviour, from a behavioural model of language acquisition, would ostensibly be unheard of. Chomsky also observes with pragmatic rationalism, that children's language acquisition is largely independent of the oftentimes horrible language usage and training that parents provide. He also suggests with pragmatic rationalism that one might even be able to argue that in extreme cases the acquisition of language skills would appear to be independent of any significant language training because the training skills or environment are so poor that that the child's language acquisition would seem to occur despite their language training behaviour.

The final nail in the behaviourist's coffin, as it pertains to linguistics anyway, is that when the rationale of the behaviourists' practices were questioned vigorously, it was revealed that behavioural linguistic practices were largely preconfigured by the human behaviour and/or psychological bias and preconceptions of those formulating the 'science.'

Rationalistically, as opposed to empirically, Chomsky posits that there is something in the human being that promotes language acquisition independent of race and strict behaviourism. He called it universal grammar.

And this gave me one of the greatest of finds, discoveries, epiphanies, joys I have experienced from reading a book in long time: in exactly the same way, with a nearly identical conceptualization, Chomsky proposes a description of language that is nearly identical to the methods and rational behind Jung's formulation of the Collective Unconscious.

YES! My intuitive prompt, from several years ago, that there was something similar in the philosophy of these two ostensibly disparate thinkers has been beautifully, elegantly, and delightfully affirmed. I wonder, is it just a coincidence that these two thinkers that I highly respect are both ignored or denigrated by our society's political and education leaders?

Jung

This commonality is even more strongly affirmed with the idea of a 'deep structure,' which Chomsky posits as providing the pre-language fundamentals of language acquisition. His description reminds me of Jung's descriptions of the common imagery and symbolism of myth, dreams as an expression of the collective unconscious. And when the problem of how to constrain a universal grammar to create only meaningful sentences was discussed, I am again reminded of Jung's theories about the problem of constraining

(not Jung's word) the symbols to being meaningful. A very amusing formulation of that problem is the anecdote attributed to Sigmund Freud: sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.

Freud

This is a brilliant and very important book. That I came across it by accident — I extend a heartfelt Thank you to J&L @ Renaissance Books for catching this one for me without my asking!

Now for some extended citations:

What Chomsky came to show by asking his questions was that structuralist "methods" actually were, in effect, theories about the general nature of human language and about how language could be described adequately. Once the questions were pressed far enough, it became clear that the methods in question could not achieve adequate descriptions and that the tacit theory about human language was false. It is perhaps a measure of Chomsky's success that present editions of Harris's book are titled just Structural Linguistics, the word "Methods" having been dropped; and that linguists now write books and teach courses about language without the —s, about "theoretical linguistics," "the abstract theory of language," "universal grammar," and "universal phonetic theory."

The questions of projection, formulation, and adequacy led to the suggestion that procedure be changed; and, more abstractly, that the presuppositions—behaviourism and empiricism— that underlay structuralist procedure be changed. So let us begin by asking again the first of our questions. Why not simply ask the game players (or speakers of a corpus) what the alphabet and vocabulary are, and what instances of letters and words (or phonemes and morphemes) are the same or different?

The general answer of the structuralist is that he is concerned with what people are doing and not with what people think they are doing. This general answer, of course, emphasizes the structuralist's commitment to empiricism and, more specifically, to behaviourism, that is, he is committed to the view that science should be concerned only with what is observable, and thus that the human sciences should deal with observed human behaviour rather than with "subjective" thoughts and feelings. More specifically, the structuralist would say that people's judgments about what they are doing are in principle essentially irrelevant. The linguist is describing objective noise, a physical phenomenon which does, in the cases that interest the linguist, happen to exhibit certain regularities, that is, certain species, genera, and families of noises that regularly appear in certain patterns. Admittedly, speaker-hearers of the language are aware of some of these regularities and may be able to give the linguist revealing hints about them, but the structuralist insists that since what he is describing has objective existence quite apart from what people may think, quite apart from psychology, he ought to be able to describe it without asking what people think. There is another, less theoretical, reason why the structuralist wants to discover the grammar of a language without asking the native speakers questions, namely, they will very likely give misleading or false answers.

The native speaker is not a linguist and so cannot be expected to understand or answer accurately questions about what are the minimal sound units (phonemes) and minimal grammatical units (morphemes) of his language. Many studies have shown that ordinary language users are likely to 'hear' distinctions in sound that are not there in fact or to mistake variant pronunciations of a phoneme for more significant differences. If we do teach the native speaker structural linguistics, he will then become more accurate but he will be in no better position than the normative linguist. Indeed, he may be in a worse position because his cultural attitudes—about status, etiquette, meaning, and so on—may bias his descriptions. After all, we would be hesitant about accepting conclusions reached by a psychologist examining his own psychology, by a doctor diagnosing his own illness, and so on.

Of course, there are limits to this skepticism. Aside from accepting the corpus itself as a largely regular set of sentences, the linguist may use his ingenuity in "eliciting" new sentences. The corpus may lead the linguist to wonder whether or not a certain sentence is regular, or grammatical. The difficulty then is to see if one can put the native speaker in such a position that he will say the sentence (or indicate that it is regular) only if it is regular. The real problem of "elicitation" is that of ensuring that one does not prejudice the issue: there is a risk that the native speaker will say something irregular to please the linguist, or from confusion, and so on; equally there is a … (38-9).

And, below, Chomsky makes the identical argument about understanding language as Jung makes about understanding human psychology:

As Chomsky puts it in Syntactic Structures, given a corpus of utterances belonging to a natural language, there is neither a discovery nor a decision procedure. That is, given a particular corpus (or set of assumptions) belonging to a natural language, there is no mechanical, step-by-step procedure for discovering the grammar of the language. If there were such a discovery procedure, structuralism would be vindicated, because this would mean that each corpus of noise could be adequately and determinately described. Even if there were a decision procedure this implication would hold, though it would require creativity for the linguist to arrive at the grammar.

Chomsky's claim that there is no discovery or decision procedure for arriving at the grammar of a language, although grammars may be given comparative evaluations, is a way of pointing out that it is impossible to write the grammars of human languages without a very substantial theory of the human mind and its language acquiring, and processing, software. Presumably, Chomsky would accept the claim that adequate and determinate grammars are possible only if such a substantial theory is part of the input for arriving at such grammars. There must be a number of universal features common to the grammars of all natural languages, and these must derive from innate features of man's language-acquisition device, in order for there to be adequately determinate grammars (that is, by rough analogy, for completeness to obtain, regarding the grammar of each language as what may be "proved" from sentences of that language plus the "axioms" of a more substantial theory of language and language acquisition than we now have).

Linguists can only go about determining the universal characteristics of human language in an indirect and conjectural way, of course: there is no direct way of looking into the "black box" of language processing and acquisition. As linguists proceed, in painstaking and piecemeal fashion, to construct and evaluate general, explicit, and formal grammars, or partial grammars, of particular languages, it may be hoped that they will find universal features and thus that they will approach explanatory adequacy. For an analogy, imagine that we wanted to know about the internal structure of some kind of computer found on Mars: the rules of the game are that we cannot look inside at the hardware but can only try to infer the inner structure through observing the inputs and outputs. What we note is that when one of these machines is exposed to a small number of strings (drawn, apparently, from a particular infinite set of strings, a "language") its output is, more or less, the infinite set. We can see that it is impossible, using just logic principles, to arrive at the infinite output by taking a typical input (i.e., no discovery or decision procedure exists). All we can say is that, given a particular input, such and such an output (as generated by a grammar) is more likely than some other sort. As we write partial grammars of outputs A through Z, for inputs A through Z, we would expect various uniformities, and we would reformulate our grammars in terms of these uniformities. The internal software of these Martian computers will be, in particular, the assumptions that must be made in order to get in a regular fashion from these various inputs to their respective outputs (66-7).

And below we see Chomksy's idea of a 'deep structure.' In both imagery and functional description there is very little difference between it and Jung's idea of the collective unconscious:

… (G) English is not a finite-state language.

Note that while this argument is a specific realization of Chomsky's principle that the linguist must show how the infinity of sentences that compose a natural language can be generated through finite means, the argument shows more than that a natural language consists of an infinite number of sentences. … [I]t follows that a natural language cannot be specified except through specifying a generative device, a device that employs recursion. But from the present argument it also follows that the device must be more powerful than a finite-state device with recursive loops, even though such a device does have the capacity of generating an infinite number of sentences.

I have devoted a great deal more space to this argument than Chomsky did in Syntactic Structures. My reason is twofold. First, my experience has been that people who have little or no familiarity with this general sort of argument may fail to grasp the argument in its entirety, to appreciate its force and limits, if the argument is not explained at length and with some repetitions. People have been confused about it even in print. Secondly, the argument already contains, at least in miniature, the most basic elements in Chomsky's approach to language. The basic philosophic and psychological issues, and Chomsky's way of reasoning about theory, are on the table, at least in embryo.

Of course, from the point of view of a practicing linguist particularly interested in some approximation of part of the grammar of English, absolutely nothing of any importance or interest has been said. But as Chomsky's reasoning about the nature of grammar proceeds—in the argument of Syntactic Structures that English is a transformational-generative grammar with particular sorts of rules, in the further developments found in the "standard theory" of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, and in the "extended standard theory" of his most recent papers —the basic principles of this argument are employed again and again, though the applications are much more complicated, and the results of course much closer to an adequate simulation of our grammatical knowledge than this extremely elementary initial step. The argument that an adequate description of a natural language can only be given through specification of a generative device (whose software the competent speaker of the language must minimally internalize) remains constant, though the specification of the requirements that characterize the device has become much more detailed. Equally constant is the claim that natural language sentences have an abstract or deep structure that cannot be explicated by a physical description of such sentences (as noise) and that is not present in a simple sensory, or observational, characterization of such sequences of noise "bounded by silence" (though deep structure has become ever more abstract and complex as the theory has developed, leading in the past few years to a split between transformational-generative linguists on precisely how abstract deep structure must be) (93-4).

And, also in line with Jung, Chomsky argues that the so-called flakily subjective quality of meaning enters the picture in order for language acquisition, understanding and usage to be possible:

In summary, the grammar sketched in Syntactic Structures consists of three sorts of rules, which operate in sequence in generating the sentences of English and in providing them with phonological realizations in speech.

1. Phrase-structure rules which rewrite single, non-terminal symbols into, eventually, terminal symbols or words, in this manner creating a tree diagram or phrase-structure bracketing.

2. Transformational rules, which operate upon the phrase structures produced by (1), deleting, reshuffling, and joining portions of such structures. Singulary [sic] transformations, whose input is single phrase-structure (kernel) strings, are either obligatory or optional, optional transformations including passive, negative, and question transformations. Generalized transformations, which are always optional, join two or more kernel strings. As opposed to the phrase-structure rules, transformations are ordered, in that some must be applied after others—the passive transformation, for example, must apply before the transformation that makes the verb plural or singular, and so on, because it is the noun that is put into subject position by the passive transformation that determines the form of the verb.

3. Morphophonemic rules, which convert the output of (2), the sentences of the language from a syntactical viewpoint, into the actual sounds of speech. (These rules, of which no account has been given here, are similar to the phrase-structure rules. But they allow the rewriting of more than one symbol, and they are "context-sensitive" in that they may indicate that a symbol is to be rewritten in a particular way only if certain symbols precede or follow that symbol. For example, the purely syntactical rules (1) and (2) will generate strings such as take + past-tense; the rule that will convert that segment into the sounds that we write as "took" is a morphophonemic rule.)

If one has grasped the nature of these rules, and the general structure of the grammar that is summarized here, one will not find it difficult to follow the changes that are brought in with the "standard theory" of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), and in still more recent work. I mention this because the reader may feel that he has been burdened with enough of a technical apparatus, and so he has. Perhaps the major change that takes place is that meaning becomes a respectable and central part of linguistics: to the syntactical and phonological components that may be found in the first version of the theory. Aspects adds a third semantic component. The formulation of this component, and its relationship to the others, will be seen as a major theatre of controversy. The phonological component undergoes radical changes in The Sound Pattern of English (1968), which Chomsky coauthored with his MIT colleague Morris Halle. In that book considerable evidence is marshalled for the view that the input… (107-8).

A further statement that parallels Jung. In this case the problem of everything having the possibility of symbolizing or alluding to everything and having no meaning at all. Meaningfulness is what makes the distinction. Leiber does not cite Chomsky connecting the constraint, here, to meaningfulness, but it seems obvious that meaningfulness is in the end the singular constraint. In an odd way, I see Chomsky struggling with a similar problem to Jung's examination of the meaning of dreams as an expression of the unconscious: for Chomsky, it is the struggle to see how a 'deep structure' can express language meaningfully.

… the constraint would be universal. Universal constraints have seemed particularly important to transformational grammarians because, as Chomsky has often emphasized, transformational rules are so powerful that unless such constraints are established there will be by far too many ways of writing the grammars of particular languages. It has been established that, given a few powerful and unnatural transformational rules, one can write a perhaps highly unnatural, but nonetheless observationally adequate, grammar for any possible human language. The existence for universal constraints would be one of the most powerful ways of eliminating such excesses and reducing the range of solutions in establishing grammars: to put it another way, if one wants to determine the internal structure of a generative device of considerable power, it is likely to be more helpful to find what the device cannot do than what it can.

But the drive toward universality (and reactions toward its excesses) has extended beyond the standard theory of Aspects, and it has led to conflict and reformulation, particularly in controversy between generative semantics and interpretive semantics.


The general thrust of the generative-semanticist proposal for improving transformational grammar is very simple; if some semantic features of sentences can be specified in their syntactical deep structure why can not all such features be specified? Why split the syntactic and semantic components at all? Why not equate ultimate syntactic deep structure with semantic representation? Or, more speculatively, one can ask, why not take the system of semantic representation to be something like the familiar predicate logic (with perhaps a few additions), and the base to be such a system supplemented with a relatively small number of "atomic predicates," or semantic primitives, universal to human thought?

I am going to interrupt this paragraph to propose a Taoist / Jungian answer to these questions: because the foundations of language, like dreams, is pre- and/or non-verbal. Philosophically the problem of words struggling to represent non-verbal meaning has been wrestled for a very long time, most especially by artists and poets and philosophers. And there is a very interesting East/West split when it comes to the approach to wrestling with that 'problem'. In the east, they write koans such as "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?"; but in the west they write tomes like Being and Time — (or even Jung, with his 20 volumes!). Now back to Leiber:

The words of particular languages, Just as their surface syntactical structures, would decompose into extremely abstract and complex syntactic-semantical deep structures; the features constituting the lexical-syntactical peculiarities of a language would be given as a series of transformations relating the syntactic-semantical deep structures (or "natural logic formulas") of the "universal base" to their particular realizations in the language in question, similarly for the peculiarities of other human languages (122).

And now for Chomsky's unequivocally argument that linguistics belongs to a branch of psychology and not behavioural science.

Chomsky has said, both in the paper quoted above and in other recent papers, that the crucial problem of present transformational-generative grammatical work is that transformational grammars are too powerful. There is not a sufficient number of restrictions on the construction of such grammars, and thus such grammars are not testable against each other (though, of course, they are selected by the evidence, over other sorts of grammars—for example, the transformational grammars of Aspects and Syntactic Structures are inadequate on the evidence, and, of course, phrase-structure and finite-state grammars are certainly inadequate). Many critics, who are quite convinced of the general validity of the transformational-generative approach to language, have made this point; it is a point on which much work must be done. But it is wrong to think of this as a criticism of any stage in Chomsky's development of transformational-generative grammar. Chomsky has always maintained that this was the crucial area for work in linguistic theory. The fundamental problem of linguistic theory is to describe the essential, as against purely happenstance, features of natural (human) language in as circumscribed a way as possible. In other words, to approach explanatory adequacy by accounting for the choice of a particular grammar on the part of a human language-learner given the data about the particular human language that he is exposed to is to specify the software of man's language acquisition device.


The problem is not how a universal thinking machine, programmed with nothing more specific or contentious than the "universal notation" of, say, predicate logic, would determine the grammar of a particular human language, on exposure to a limited number of its sentences. Such a device, which simulates, in that it makes use of no species-specific, "innate" principles for limiting its choice of grammars, the seventeenth-century empiricist view of man as learning essentially everything from experience, would produce countless numbers of "wrong" solutions, "wrong" meaning, "a 'solution' which a normal human language-learner would not, essentially could not, think up." For that reason, of course, Chomsky found structural linguistics wrong, and for that reason Chomsky has maintained that linguistics is a branch of psychology and part of the study of the human mind. It is also for that reason that Chomsky has found behaviourism and radical empiricism wrong, at least in their stronger forms—those forms that propose to make serious theoretical and empirical claims as opposed to essentially terminological stipulations (such as, for example, the arguments of those who define their ]'argon in such a way that no discovery about human beings, or anything else, could ever constitute the slightest evidence against behaviourism and empiricism). What is the problem is to discover the principles, particularly specific to man in being much narrower and circumscribed than those of a generalized calculating device, that operate in language learning and are the basis for the universal features of human language.

It is particularly clear that Chomsky thinks that this is quite a problem. He has been much more reluctant than some transformational-generative linguists in making confident claims about which features of natural languages are universal and still more as to what universal features of language acquisition give rise to this universality. Chomsky has maintained that all natural languages are transformational and have rules that operate on abstract, as opposed to explicit surface, structures;

that all human languages make use of cycles of transformations working on successively more inclusive structures within sentences; and he has suggested that nouns, verbs, and adjectives are likely to prove universal deep-syntactic categories of human languages, and that at least one constraint on grammatical rules, which prohibits transformations that move material in or out of various conjunctive structures, is probably universal. But he has emphasized, particularly in his most recent papers, that the confident identification of particular universals is not possible at this point (132-4).

Now for one of Chomsky's pet peeves: the failure of university professors to honour the integrity of learning and become courtiers to the halls of wealth and power.

CHAPTER 3 Psychology, Philosophy, Politics

OF course, we have been talking about these three topics all along; for Chomskyan linguistics is above all an attempt to characterize a significant portion of human psychology (as, substantially, the study of the software of human nature), and this sort of characterization can be seen as establishing some of the claims of traditional rationalism. The view of man that results might be thought to have political significance.

In this final chapter I want to talk about what Chomsky's work may mean for psychology, philosophy, and politics; about his views of these subjects, particularly as ramifications and interpretations of his work in linguistics; about the work in these fields that is convergent with his approach; and about various criticisms and misunderstandings that have been made respecting his general rationalist view of man. Psychology, philosophy, and politics are not strange bedfellows, in Chomsky's view, and this attitude makes many people find Chomsky's work exciting and important (or infuriatingly pretentious and misguided). If anything has been characteristic of analytic philosophy, or the rather more traditional (and perhaps less subtle) empiricism, and behaviourism, that has been very common among social and psychological scientists of all sorts, it is the hardly questioned conviction that no psychological discovery, no psychological fact, can establish, or refute, any philosophic claim (and the reverse), and that neither can properly determine the answer to any political question (at least in Aristotle's sense of politics as the practical job of deciding, and achieving, what is good for man, within and between nation states).

In part, of course, this subconscious positivism has been a result of the increasing professionalization of knowledge; our century has seen the concentration of all theoretical scientific and intellectual activity in the university, which is divided into professional departments (or unions), each zealously insisting on its independence and importance. The professional academic is institutionally pressed to believe both that the claims and suppositions of each discipline are independent of the others and that generalizations which are not professional, in that they are interdisciplinary, are not really "scientific" or "objective." But, equally, this century has been dominated by a rather skeptical empiricism (often expressed in analytic terms) that insists that the truths of reason (the logical software) are quite independent of those of (or about) human nature, and that neither sort, properly considered, can tell us what we ought to decide to do politically or morally.

Skepticism, empiricism and behaviourism, the professionalization and departmentalization of knowledge—these can seem a worthy commitment to slow, "solid," painstaking progress in detail, shorn of grandiose mysticism, "moralistic ranting," and "ideology." A familiar metaphor can be inverted aptly by those sympathetic to analytic empiricism or to straightforward behaviourism: it is that of the careful, humble "hedgehog" against the wild and dubious "fox." The understood moral is that the attempt to make general rational claims about man's condition, with psychological, philosophical, and political implications—"ideology"—is inevitably a "foxy" affair: charlatanism is the only refuge of the generalist. An obvious implication of the metaphor that is not often stressed by the radical empiricist-behaviourist is that if one hires a university faculty of hedgehogs, they will defend the status quo. At least they will defend the status quo in the sense that they will firmly maintain that no attack on it can be rational and objective: rationality and objectivity come into politics only in that the hedgehogs can tell the government (any government with any goals) the specific techniques of "behavioural reinforcement" that will achieve the goals which are themselves beyond the judgment of the poor, short-sighted hedgehog.

For that is the other, darker side of the radical empiricist's skepticism: as an organized social phenomenon it is little more than a rationalization of the economic subservience of the university to the political and economic power of the status quo; for though, from the hedgehogian point of view, he can do research in behavioural reinforcement, and so on, for the capitalist-imperialists or commissar-imperialists, he in fact will do the research that boards of trustees and governmental granting institutions find proper. Thus, though the faculty and staff of Michigan State University who trained Diem's secret police could equally have undertaken research and instruction helpful to Diem's opponents, or to the American peace movement, they would not be paid for it (or even allowed to do it at all as American citizens). Seen in this light, the short-sighted hedgehog would seem to be—as Martin Luther once wrote of reason— a whore: he works for whoever pays and he does not question his employer's tastes, except as to practicality. And—strangely enough—he is likely to call any attempt to make the university an independent general critic of society and government, "politicization" or "ideologizing." How convenient a philosophy that allows the hedgehog to believe that any research that might lead to a quarrel with the basic character of the established political and economic order is necessarily unscientific and bogus foxiness! The hedgehog is very likely to be a self-satisfied hedgehog; his philosophy teaches him that the fox—since there is no real scientific and objective knowledge beyond what hedgehogs can get while being dutiful and doughty hedgehogs—is really an irresponsible rogue hedgehog, stumbling about and presumably suffering from psychiatric problems and an inflated ego, while pretending to see truths beyond the resolution of vision proper to hedgehogs (132-7).

A brilliant book in many, many ways. I have directed my local used bookstore proprietors to keep their open for Chomsky's books on linguistics.

Finally, it was a complete delight that in this summary of Chomsky my intuitive thought that there was something Jungian in Chomsky has been confirmed so tangibly.