It's uncanny. It really gets him! Haha?

Christiane, I appreciate your comment, and Harald for bringing these matters up in the first place. I think the reason there's been no follow-up is, simply and starkly, that nothing could be more difficult today than to address such phenomena soulfully, from the perspective of soul. This would require an extraordinarily disciplined detachment from "ego", from the overpowering (and entirely understandable) need to ask, "How does this phenomenon affect ME? How is it related to my survival, my needs, my desires?" To wonder what "soul" is doing by means of worldly events while those events are still unfolding is risky on many levels, although nonetheless compelling (indeed even more so than to wonder about past historical developments, for obvious reasons). I think we might have inklings about the unique potential of this form of psychology in this regard, but the emotional and conceptual waters are treacherous indeed. Because political questions are involved, at the deepest level, political differences will inevitably arise. And the times being what they are, the temperature of these conflicts is bound to rise quickly, too. As Hillman's archetypal psychology demonstrated, the subject matter influences the form of the discussion, so speculating about conflict will itself generate conflict. The theorizing participates in the phenomenon, is another embodiment of the phenomenon. The only way through or beyond this involves both acknowledgement of the attendant danger (ritual propitiation of the implicated god, to use Hillman language) and that perspective you speak of, which dares to consider what soul is doing by means of our lives, what "project" soul might be enacting (to use Giegerich language). As I just argued, this is not at all easy. On the other hand, it's just words - just discourse, mere speculation. Why fear the discussion itself? I think there are legitimate reasons, if not sufficient ones. Emotional wounding is one reason, of course. Under the sway of the martial imagination these days, to take any position is to risk attack. To be singled out negatively for a controversial statement is no fun at all, although Giegerich himself provides a model of risking controversy for the sake of truth. How careful need we be – or could we even be – of one another's feelings, yet still manage to tackle these topics? Another reason for the silence is, I'd suggest, nothing less than the fear of truth itself, which Giegerich has spoken of, too. But we don't know how to think about the very notion anymore, so how would we proceed? We'd have to tackle that very issue along the way. And the Owl of Minerva would have to fly so high to take in the whole picture of what's happening today, disturbing and elusive and interconnected as it all is.! Setting the parameters of any discussion would itself be a daunting challenge. That's my attempt to address your incredibly important but incredibly difficult question. Perhaps a discussion of such matters would best suit a private group chat, rather than a more public or official forum. People could agree to some terms beforehand, or at least affirm a willingness to talk about difficult, divisive subjects in terms of soul, rather than only taking sides. I hate to say that I am skeptical, but I'm also passionately interested and remain (perhaps foolishly) open to it. For the reasons I mentioned and others beside, the possibility of sharing speculations this way is both enticing and frightening. Very best wishes to you!

Hi Harald! Thanks for your reply. Let me see ... First, you write, that "we could perform philosophy understood as looking at such things from the Archimedean point of view. But this is exactly what we don’t want. We are not doing philosophy but psychology. The Human is part of the phenomenon." Well, a big YES to that! I've been thinking a lot about the essential difference between philosophy and psychology, and of course it is clearly (true) psychology's commitment to "Archimedeanlessness". Philosophy, in common with any natural science and despite its own inner struggles with this very fact, is committed to understanding reality "as it is", in its is-ness. And this has the inescapable tendency to turn "being" into an object for a subject – despite Hegel's unparalleled lesson in the inadequacy of such a formulation, and despite Heidegger and others who have since worked (with mixed success, I'd say) to complicate the notion of "being" itself. Here we're faced with another interesting relationship that can profitably be theorized in dialectical terms, although in practice it requires a commitment to one side or the other: philosophy or psychology. (As Giegerich has specified, this doesn't apply to empirical persons, who may obviously be interested in both fields, but only comes into play in the actual practice of each respective discipline.) This is not so self-evident in our own efforts in pdi, though, because following Giegerich, we use philosophical terms quite freely. But I think it's essential in working with his ideas to wrestle with this very slippery task, and he himself doesn't make it much easier. There's a lot of discussion to be had on this question! Now, I myself would suggest that even a clear distinction between philosophy and psychology isn't quite the last word, either. I don't know of any philosopher who has proposed as much, but I can't help but think that a truly complete phenomenology would represent, in legitimately philosophical terms, the position of psychology – because only in psychology is the phenomenon ("that which appears") conceived in its wholeness as that which appears to us and that which appears as us. This is the kind of staggering insight that a book like The Historical Emergence of the "I" articulates. This is the total Archimedeanlessness of psychology, but its implications for philosophy are unexplored. As you say, all cultural phenomena (including us doing this) require the existence of human beings. So yes indeed, as you end your post, dialectical thinking is ALWAYS necessary when we're trying to comprehend the structure of any such phenomenon in its wholeness. Giegerich wouldn't disagree with this, either. His point about certain phenomena and not others being "soul phenomena" or having "soul dignity" is about something different, but it presumes the former point, which is that we're always "in" what he calls "general soul" or consciousness, mindedness. Specific soul phenomena emerge out of and happen "on top of" this underlying reality, as it were. It's like general soul is the ocean and specific soul refers to the particular currents (and furthermore, the former only exists in the form of the latter). Regarding dreams, I concur with all your points. To me, the phenomenon of the dream is paradigmatic for psychology for a number of reasons: because of the pure internal dialectic of the dream itself (the dream "I" and the dream's events constitute each other absolutely); because the dream's recall adds still another level of dialectical complexity (the remembered dream in relation to its waking articulation); and because the interpretation of the dream adds still another layer (the articulated dream in relation to the empirical person of the dreamer). There's still another dimension, too, which is the interpretation of the interpretation, that is, the critical analysis of the underlying theory of one's practice of dream interpretation itself (as in Giegerich's analyses of "the neurosis of psychology"). It's like a Russian nesting doll of dialectical relationships! And that surely does necessitate a dialectical approach, an approach "in motion" but one that nevertheless demands an exceedingly precise delineation of the specific matter "in the vessel". As Hillman wrote: "If dreams are the teachers of the waking-ego, this duplicity is the essential instruction they impart" (The Dream and the Underworld, 127). I appreciate your comments and hope this speaks to them a bit. I'm always open to these discussions! Best!

I can't seem to let it go ... "Negation and preservation" is the meaning of "sublation" as such. Anything successfully "sublated" will have been both "negated" in some sense and "preserved" in some sense. Within Hegel's definition of the term "sublation", the achievement of "negation-AND-preservation" IS "elevation". The successful negation-and-preservation is nothing but this elevation, and the successful elevation will have achieved precisely negation-and-preservation. "Negation-AND-preservation" and "elevation" are two ways of expressing the same thing. N&P = E. Thus, again, the notion of sublation is composed of actual sublation, of the overcoming of the opposition "negation/preservation" by a movement of "elevation", a movement itself defined as the overcoming of the opposition "negation/preservation".

One more little stab at it: If we think of sublation as containing three moments, "negate" and "preserve" and "elevate", as our "natural" consciousness is wont to do, we risk missing that it's structurally just two moments, as is any process of sublation: there's the immediate moment of opposition in its apparent givenness, and then there's the achievement of a mediated moment of sublation which raises the opposition itself to a higher level. Thus the term sublation itself begins with "negate-vs-preserve" in their opposition, while the recognition of their unity is represented by "elevate". The first two terms both exist as opposites on the same level at the beginning, which is why they would simply cancel each other out if we didn't move to a higher level that comprehends them both together. Hegel's notion of sublation itself contains a sublation; it demonstrates itself.

This was a first attempt to articulate something that occurred to me recently. It was triggered by a comment in a book on Hegel, but I don't believe I've ever seen it spelled out quite this way. What I'm trying to get at is that within the very notion of sublation as Hegel conceives it is contained an actual sublation, an actual dialectical movement of thinking. By understanding how the term works, you can understand what the idea is. If "sublation" in general means "raising a phenomenon to a higher level" and can potentially transform any phenomenon divided by inner conflict, an analysis of the very notion of sublation reveals that its third term, "elevation", in fact refers to the sublation of the first two opposed terms, "negation" and "preservation"! That is, the notion of sublation itself, just like any proposed sublation of any phenomenon whatsoever, is comprised of two moments: a moment of opposition (in the notion of "sublation", this is when "negation" and "preservation" are conceived as mutually negating) and a moment of sublation, which represents the achievement of the new conceptual level (again, in the notion of "sublation" itself, this is the moment of "elevation", which both negates and preserves the opposition between negation and preservation). The negation of the opposition between the two sides of the notion of Aufhebung itself ("negate" vs, "preserve") and their sublation in a new ("elevated") conceptual level is the same as in the case of any apparent opposition in any phenomenon. The "elevated" position allows us to conceive of the phenomenon as an internally differentiated whole, which means at once negating the initial opposition on its own level while preserving it on the higher, sublated level. (And, as I said above, thereby forming a new position destined to find itself "opposed" to another and thus requiring further "sublation".)