Pythagoras understood and promulgated the reality and power of truths that seemed independent of physical reality. A small demonstration of this mathematical power was the aqueduct Polycrates had Eupalinos build through a mountain to supply water to the town.
Plato, a neo-Pythagorean of sorts, took these ideas and speculated on the existence of intelligible four dimensional forms.
Asynchronically speaking, Baudrillard, showed how language and human culture can remove us from the contemplation of nature and how human created simulacra soon replace what pristine and real. He explains how humans hollow out reality, reform it and assign their own functions to it.
But Freud has offered us the unconscious and started psychiatry, (very unfashionable in these days of brain science). The unconscious manifests itself in the iconography of dreams and through our concealed or transformed drives and intentions - through Thanatos and Eros In a way the unconscious is the last battleground, the last refuge and the last route of escape from the manufactured prison that is our current "reality".
Human culture in the UK in 2009 is claustrophobic, aliernating, isolating and egocentric. It is disconnected. Egocentric in the meaning of the old Russian proverb that goes like this: an egoist is someone who has fallen down a well and in whatever direction he shouts his own voice echoes back, distorted in different ways.
Miyazaki takes these dreams and fleshes them out so that we can actually look at them in his animation.
Joyce shows how the unconscious flows like a river under consciousness and he exposes the unconscious joins in our conscious thought.
Jung harks back to Plato and invests these unconscious images with universal significance. They are, in fact intelligible universal forms. Jung's ideas of archetypes are Platos.
Then Giordano Bruno takes it further. He says that if we can apprehend these forms and be mindful of them, then we are actually back to the stage the natural philosophers were at around 600BCE and in a position to understand something deep and real about our existence. In fact, that the language of these symbols was a way to get tin in touch with the Logos.
The Logos here is understood as a metaphor. In other words the Logos is the product of a huge chain of cause and effect. Our faith in this method is similar to the scientists assumption of the Principle of Sufficient Reason when they build something like the Large Hadron Collider and seek for Higgs-Boson particles.
But this is not abstract in the least. Shakespeare demonstrates this through his plays. Take the character of Iago for example. "I am not what I am." Black is white, white is black. Iago is omnipresent. Look around you. There will be a couple of Iagos about. Hanna Arendt is right.
Dreams are important and so is Joycean awareness - Desmond Swords at work - but the route to freedom and to living a life outside the simulated reality of modern life is by the construction of bridges between the unconscious and the conscious. By doing this we help make the distinction between what is real and what is fabricated, clear, because what is real has a meaning in itself, in the same way that a "Higgs-Boson" particle might. Werner Herzog and Alan Moore are two of the best architect-builders of some of these bridges.
Two of the easiest routes to the unconscious are sex and death. The battleground for freedom takes place in the unconscious. People who live by fabricating our reality, the spiritual sons of Bernays, are now very excited by the new possibilities for manipulating human behaviour, are dedicated to the trivialisation and defilement of the unconscious in a million ways. Hollywood horror, and Call of Duty 2 is a good example.
Heidegger understood being and he understood that being becomes aware of itself through language. The biggest bridge between being and reality and our awareness of it is poetry and language. It is the articulation of the unconscious that gives us freedom and authenticity and independence from the alienating simulated lives we are supposed to lead.
Proust shows this power. His book the remembrance of things past is a brilliant articulation of being and makes us aware of being. Proust wanted to know all the details about making brown wholemeal toast step by step. And food writing can articulate the experience of eating in such a way that that Madeleine dipped in herb tea will live forever in the logos.
Hofstader echoes this in ideas about figure and ground and how language itself can bootstrap the putative soul into greatness.
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