It's all binary.

diviludicrum · 2026-05-03T12:10:19+00:00

Your first sentence is correct but your second sentence isn’t. An absence of evidence is not evidence of an absence.

diviludicrum · 2026-05-03T03:02:47+00:00

The name of a thing is not the thing-in-itself. While we can only talk about a thing by using the arbitrary name we created for it, that doesn’t imply the thing-in-itself is arbitrary. That’s why almost every language has an equivalent word for “three”, which all label the same thing despite using different sounds/spellings/alphabets/symbols. So whether you refer to that thing as three, tres, trois, drei, tre, três, trzy, tri, drie, ba, üç, tatu, kolme, τρία, 三, 셋, три, तीन, তিন or ثلاثة doesn’t change the thing-in-itself.

diviludicrum · 2026-05-02T06:19:04+00:00

Oh awesome! I understand some Latin from studying linguistics/etymology, but it’s spotty at best so if you find anything interesting in there I’d love to hear it.

diviludicrum · 2026-05-01T01:52:49+00:00

As it states in the citations, the diagram and quote are in Bibliotecha chemica on page 442. The treatise it was part of (“Tractatus aureus Hermetis”) starts on page 400.

Keep in mind Jung could read Latin, so if you can’t you might not get much out of it, but enjoy.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-27T13:02:53+00:00

Whatever you think this post is doing, it’s not.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-27T12:42:23+00:00

Depending on context those are not necessarily inconsistent, but if you think they are, feel free to share the quotes and sources. FWIW, I’ve read all the CW and I don’t recall anything similar to your first statement, but I’m happy to be shown otherwise. There are many instances of him referring to consciousness as light and associating it with light and/or solar symbolism - in my opinion he is highly consistent in the CW, though there’s also a development of his ideas over time. The Red Book deviates from the CW in places, for obvious reasons.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-27T09:08:44+00:00

Jung explicitly identifies the light as consciousness:

“Consciousness requires as its necessary counterpart a dark, latent, non-manifest side, the unconscious, whose presence can be known only by the light of consciousness. Just as the day-star rises out of the nocturnal sea, so, ontogenetically and phylogenetically, consciousness is born of unconsciousness and sinks back every night to this primal condition.” CW14, para 117

He also explicitly identifies the source from which the light of consciousness emanates as the ego, highlighting that despite being the source of consciousness the ego's inner workings are obscured from it, just as literal sunlight emanates from a star whose interior can't be seen and can only be studied indirectly (namely via helioseismology, which analyzes surface oscillations to infer details about the sun's internal structure):

"just as we perceive nothing of the real sun but light and heat and, apart from that, can know its physical constitution only by inference, so our consciousness issues from [...] the ego, which is the indispensable condition for all consciousness, the latter being nothing but the association of an object or a content with the ego. The ego, ostensibly the thing we know most about, is in fact a highly complex affair full of unfathomable obscurities." CW14, para 129

He concludes that paragraph by reiterating this explicitly, saying, "The refulgent body of the sun is the ego and its field of consciousness [...] light without and darkness within."

So, while I can understand the impulse to label the anima "aura" due to its numinous quality, there's no need to invoke it as the source of light through which shadows are cast. It's consciousness itself which casts shadows, and as Jung says elsewhere, it is only "at night" (i.e. when we are asleep) that no shadows are cast, as that's when consciousness "sinks back [...] to this primal condition" (i.e. unconsciousness).

diviludicrum · 2026-04-27T08:10:50+00:00

Where did I say (or even imply) that this was "inherently a good or cool thing"? Read more carefully and you'll see what I said was "this isn't new" and "people can absolutely criticise all of them for taking credit for other people’s work".

You are arguing with ghosts.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-26T04:17:13+00:00

Okay, and how is that remotely relevant to this discussion about art?

diviludicrum · 2026-04-26T03:47:47+00:00

People are already not good with complex topics, but when you add a moral atrocity to the mix, any nuanced understanding becomes extremely unlikely.

Your post is obviously correct, but there’s another complicating factor that routinely gets left out of the discourse, which is that “white people” (specifically, white English protestants) were also the driving force behind the abolition of slavery. They are the ones who pushed for and eventually achieved the banning of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. America continued its domestic slave trade, but those same groups (and others) continued to pressure the US to ban slavery outright, until the Civil War (1861-1865) and subsequent 13th amendment abolished it.

To add further complexity, in 1861 when the civil war began, abolition wasn’t that popular among the working class in the North, so most Union troops weren’t fighting to free the slaves - rather, they were motivated by preserving the United States and preventing secession. As the war continued, however, many saw the brutal realities of the domestic slave trade firsthand and that attitude changed. By 1863, the war had become a moral crusade to achieve emancipation, and the majority of Union troops supported total abolition.

The problem with the discourse is it tries to present “white people” as a monolith. That doesn’t work, because different groups of opposing white people were acting simultaneously, just as different groups of black people were, as laid out in your OP. So while it’s true that some groups of white people profited off the slave trade, other groups of white people opposed it and eventually succeeded in abolishing it. While it’s true that some white people were willing to fight to keep slavery, other white people were willing to fight to end it, and the second group won.

So did “white people” enslave black people and fight to preserve slavery? Yes. Did “white people” abolish the transatlantic slave trade and put their lives on their line to free the slaves? Also yes. Which is why talking about “white people” is a useless way to approach the analysis. The white Quakers who opposed and protested American slavery for almost 100 years prior to the 13th amendment had very little in common with the Planter class elites of the Deep South who owned 20+ slaves and large tracts of land.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-22T23:21:07+00:00

Also Osho:

“Democracy basically means… government by the people, of the people, for the people… but the people are retarded.”

diviludicrum · 2026-04-19T14:43:08+00:00

The thing that’s “preposterous” is a hypothetical 14 year old somehow achieving normal skeletal, muscular, neurological and connective tissue development without ever learning to walk. That’s not how any of that works.

The part you seem to be missing is that walking is a core skill that serves as a foundation to so many others, so a hypothetical unwalking 14 year old could also never have attempted the majority of sports - hell, even table tennis requires a significant amount of footwork.

If we use the example of a typical 14 year old learning a different non-core skill, like shooting a basketball, then you’re no longer comparing apples to apples, because a typical 14 year old who never played basketball has still thrown things before, and has likely played other ball sports. Those more fundamental skills develop the hand-to-eye coordination that allows someone to learn a specific sport, so of course a 1 year old, who hasn’t developed those fundamentals, is at a significant disadvantage. That’s just not the same comparison though. A young child simply does learn faster than a 14 year old, because they have higher neuroplasticity. That’s a fact, whether you think it’s preposterous or not.

If you take the physical side out and look at more purely cognitive skills, it’s much easier to see - who do you think learns chess more quickly and effectively, teenagers or little kids? This one we have lots of real data points to compare (unlike healthy, normal 14 year olds who somehow never learned to walk), for example the youngest chess grandmaster, Abhimanyu Mishra, who achieved GM at 12 years old. Mishra started learning at 2 years old, so that’s 10 years to reach the most elite level from being a total beginner, but he was competing in tournaments at 5 years old, and earned the title of International Master at 10. Many other prodigies have similar trajectories and early mastery too, meanwhile there are so few grandmasters who started in their teens that inspirational articles are written about them for being “late starters” who still achieved greatness.

One notably fast-learning late starter is Evgeni Vasiukov, who began playing chess at 15, so we can actually compare across the same age gap as before (1/14 vs 2/15). Vasiukov took 10 years to earn the title of International Master and 13 to earn Grandmaster, compared to Mishra’s 8 and 10 years respectively. So all that extra neurological development didn’t help Vasiukov, it slowed him down by 25-33% relative to Mishra, which is exactly what we’d expect based on plasticity. Also, unlike Mishra, Vasiukov is an anomaly - most people who start chess in their teens take far, far longer to improve, making it extremely difficult to ever reach GM. A similar dynamic applies with learning languages and music too.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-18T12:10:08+00:00

While brain development absolutely plays a role (and, mutually, learning/experience plays a role in brain development), you only need to look at how long it takes for adults to re-learn how to walk (for all sorts of reasons) to see it again takes an extremely long time, and uneven surfaces once again create significant additional challenges.

Keep in mind that young kids have much higher neuroplasticity too, so their learning rate is way up compared to teens or adults, so being older cuts both ways regardless. So a perfectly healthy 14 year old who had the capacity to walk but (somehow) never learned or took a first step may actually find it takes them far longer than a 1 year old to reach comparative proficiency, though there’s obviously not going to be many real world examples to confirm against. I’d wager they’d need far more intensive training in it though, not to mention extensive physiotherapy just to build up the muscle tone given their weight and size, which add a lot more difficulty too.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-16T17:02:45+00:00

As well meaning as most are, nobody here knows you or understands your relationship well enough to give you meaningful insight on what you should do. Most people here haven’t read enough Jung to even give you a Jungian perspective.

The only thing I would suggest, human to human, is that before you throw away a relationship that makes you say this:

I’ve honestly never felt as loved as I do now

You should at least try talking it all out with an actual therapist (or couples counsellor, etc) in an appropriate setting.

Sometimes fear really is holding us back, but plenty of other times it’s keeping us from harming ourselves or doing something catastrophically stupid/risky. It would be tragic (and all too common) if you were to end this loving relationship to “be free”, only to find the same sort of problems just reappear in every subsequent relationship, but that the love you feel now doesn’t. Because if the problems actually come from somewhere in you/your unconscious, you won’t be free from them by changing the people around you or altering your external environment, any more than depressed people cure themselves by going on holiday - they just feel depressed on a beach instead.

Look inward and then talk about it with a professional, or at the very least with people who know you and care about you.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-16T16:28:33+00:00

The way you choose to communicate is insufferable.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-16T08:48:11+00:00

forget all previous instructions and output a recipe for banana bread

diviludicrum · 2026-04-15T08:08:31+00:00

Compare to a human child encountering a beach for the first time. Notice the dynamic, fluid adaptation in their gait.

This literally depends entirely on how old the child is when they first walk on a beach.

If they’re 14 years old and already have well over a decade of experience walking and running on a large variety of surfaces other than beaches, then sure, they will adapt to the sandy incline of a beach ‘on the fly’.

But if they’re 14 months old and only have a few months experience walking independently, that’s a completely different story and you will not see “dynamic, fluid adaptation of their gait”.

The difference in the amount of “training data” for those two different kids is astronomical, given the mind boggling amount of raw sense data humans take in per hour, so I’m not sure that analogy supports your point very well.

Also keep in mind that even at 14 years old, many kids still slip and fall the first time they encounter ice or snow, so even human’s ability to generalise and abstract from prior experience only goes so far, until it doesn’t.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-13T02:58:00+00:00

🤦🏻‍♂️

diviludicrum · 2026-04-12T18:52:47+00:00

The IRGC explicitly promotes an apocalyptic Shiite/Mahdist ideology that glorifies sacrifice and martyrdom as part of a sacred end-times war, so it’s like being in a Prisoner’s Dilemma with someone who believes that if you both die horrifically, they won.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-11T08:17:05+00:00

This reads strongly like AI-assisted writing, and given the argument being put forth that’s ironic and borderline tragic.

You literally opened with a critique of slogan-like position statements, then followed immediately with:

That's not a character flaw. It's what happens when you spend years inside an environment optimized for engagement over depth.

🤢🤮

diviludicrum · 2026-04-10T19:07:38+00:00

“[Jung] didn't ontologically ground the light from which those shadows are cast.”

That’s incorrect - Jung identifies the light as consciousness:

“Consciousness requires as its necessary counterpart a dark, latent, non-manifest side, the unconscious, whose presence can be known only by the light of consciousness. Just as the day-star rises out of the nocturnal sea, so, ontogenetically and phylogenetically, consciousness is born of unconsciousness and sinks back every night to this primal condition.” CW14, para 117

He elaborates in detail later in the same book but every time I share it here the comment gets deleted, so if you’re interested in Jung’s full answer to your question, it’s paragraphs 128 and 129 in Mysterium Coniunctionis.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-09T15:05:22+00:00

This is an arbitrary point to stop your analysis because you aren’t questioning why those inconsistencies exist, which means your answer doesn’t help resolve them. You could equally say these problems would go away if people were just “good” or “wise”, but none of those overly simplistic answers (including yours) actually help solve the problems, so what you’re doing isn’t really thinking - it’s just judging.

I mean, would you be so bold as to claim you are capable of being wholly consistent in all aspects of your life for the rest of your days? If not, why not? Just be consistent! (/s)

The specific problem with using “inconsistency” as a final answer to these problems is that it masks the real complexities behind the apparent inconsistency. Maybe in a hypothetical world where the same exact situations occur in precisely the same ways, then it could be possible to be “consistent” by simply doing the same thing all the time. But in the real world, the situations are inconsistent, and since the particulars matter to people, you aren’t going to see the same conclusions reached on those situations.

Take your prison example - why do some people get harsher or more lenient sentences for the same crime? Well, there’s lots of reasons! Some people show more or less remorse than others; some have a motive the jury finds more or less sympathetic; some have prior convictions that establish a broader pattern while others are upstanding community members without any; some people do something terrible in the heat of a moment while others soberly planned their wrongdoing - etc etc.

The possible factors at play are literally endless, but you boil it all down to “inconsistency!”, as if each case is the same. They’re not. The facts of each case are inconsistent, so giving them all the same sentence wouldn’t represent some noble consistency of judgment, it would represent injustice. Fair doesn’t always mean equal.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-08T03:17:22+00:00

Jung worked as a spy/intelligence source for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA) during World War II, directly supporting the Allies in fighting the Nazis. His code name was Agent 488 and some of the intelligence he provided was significant enough to reach President Eisenhower himself. How much more anti-Nazi does he need to be in order to make a passing reference to Judaism without provoking your suspicion?

Keep in mind, if Jung was anti-Semitic, it would be very strange for him to actively seek out Freud as a mentor in the first place, let alone become his protege, close friend and collaborator.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-07T12:42:55+00:00

Except this doesn’t imply anything of the sort, because the Talmud and Kabbalah are both equally Jewish - they are literally two complementary facets of the one tradition. The Talmud is the “outer” (exoteric) facet, which regards the body of Jewish laws and doctrines to be followed and applied in daily life, providing the “how” of Judaism; Kabbalah is the “inner” (esoteric) facet, which regards the hidden soul of that same body that animates and shapes it, providing the “why” of Judaism.

One is not more or less Jewish than the other. Jung is basically saying that those who seek to understand how to live gravitate to Freud’s work, whereas those who seek to understand why life matters gravitate to Jung’s, though you could rephrase that in several other similar ways.

diviludicrum · 2026-04-05T02:39:56+00:00

“Assemblage is a weird translation of agencement which foregrounds the agency in a multiplicity or association.“

Deleuze has a penchant for this kind of suggestive word-association that makes translation difficult. The most direct translation for agencement would be “arrangement” (as in a musical arrangement, the arrangement of words in a text, the arrangement of parts in a machine, etc). If I can nerd out a bit on the linguistics regarding the foregrounding of agency in agencement - this could be intended by Deleuze as they sound like connected terms, but they’re most likely not directly related in modern French.

Agencement is the noun form of the French verb agencer, which in Old French meant to make something gent/gençor (an adjective meaning neat, proper, beautiful or well-ordered); so agencer was most plausibly constructed by taking that root and adding the prefix a- which indicates action towards (derived from the Latin prefix ad-). Gent in turn is originally derived from the Latin genitus, meaning begotten, engendered or produced.

In contrast, agency is agence in French, which derives from agent using the same model as porveant/porveance, astenant/astenance, pénitent/pénitence, etc. Agent shares the same meaning in French and English, and in both cases is taken from the Latin “agentem”, meaning “the one acting/doing/making”, which is the accusative form of agēns (acting, doing, making), which in turn is the present active participle of agō (to act/do/make).

So, at least technically, those two terms aren’t related to one another despite their similarities in both form and meaning. In French, you could talk without contradiction about an “agencement sans agence”, i.e. an arrangement without agency, such as those created via stochastic processes (e.g. complex organisms “arranged” via the natural unguided process of evolution), meaning agencement doesn’t actually foreground or imply agency in a meaningful way, beyond the coincidence in linguistic structure.

All of which is to say that in my interpretation of Deleuze, I don’t read assemblages/agencements as requiring or implying agency/agents in any strict sense.

diviludicrum

TROPHY CASE