What is the difference between mysticism and a belief in magic?
November 7, 2020
One famous and dangerous blur
07November
October 31, 2020
On the acts of the golfing gods
31October
In the final round of the 2010 Masters golf tournament, two commentators were surprised, for a brief moment, about a mysteriously unsuccessful putting stroke. And then the replay revealed what really had happened.
October 24, 2020
Mirrors, self-knowledge, and running away from the party
24October
We might read the whole of Abenteuer as a gradual realization, on the part of the protagonist, of the consequences of running away from the party, i.e. losing the social connections that provide a route of self-knowledge (by way of others “holding up a mirror”).
October 17, 2020
The joys of Eigenbrötlertum
17October
The workings of our social environment are so close before our eyes that we often don’t even notice them; but many of them profoundly shape what we perceive as “reality”. It has proved fruitful to understand this along the lines of an analogy: social interactions share many characteristics with theatrical performances. Thus social interactions are enacted, as if on a stage, and “reality” is of...
October 10, 2020
The mirror and the mask
10October
What we see, when looking into the symbolic mirror, are those parts of ourselves which we would normally avoid to look at, and which we carefully also hide from others. These are part of the personal unconscious and make up, in Jungian terminology, our “shadow”. The false face that we show ourselves and the outside worlds (as long as we ignore the shadow), is called the “persona” (in the ancient...
October 3, 2020
Mirrors: psychoanalysis & two routes of self-knowledge
03October
Mirrors, when they appear in a story, can symbolize something very interesting: namely, a special way of knowing something about a person. What makes it special is that others can know this about us, whereas we ourselves may not know it. Let’s see if we can explicate the idea in a non-symbolic manner: can we give an account of this special type of self-knowledge without recourse to a story (where...
September 26, 2020
Synchronistic climates
26September
Part of the job, when researching an interesting phenomenon, is to build up a phenomenological pool: collect typical examples, interesting special cases, and fringe phenomena that may or may not be relevant in conjunction with our focus of interest. With synchronicities, there is an additional category in that pool to which we might pay some attention.
September 19, 2020
Meaningfulness, accident, and absurdity
19September
It is a bitter truth that a single sentence, spoken rashly and without really meaning it, can destroy the whole of your life as you have envisaged to live it.
September 12, 2020
Mirrors: magic, projected technology, and narrative function
12September
There is a school of thought that interprets magical devices in fairy tales, not as depicting magic, but as a kind of futuristic technology. One might think the same about magical mirrors. But although the analogy is certainly suggestive, I think it leads us in the wrong direction.
September 5, 2020
Causal agents, their stand-ins, and the impression of meaningfulness
05September
In the literature on synchronicities, that phenomenon is usually defined as a coincidence of two or more events which invokes a “sense of meaningfulness”, and where the events in question — crucially for the point I want to focus on — are not causally linked. In one respect, that last clause is a sensible requirement. For if there were a causal link between those events, that would suffice as...
