2016 Personality Lecture 03: Mythological Elements of the Life Story -- and Initiation

So, a couple of things I want to tell you about today. Many things I want to tell you about. I want to tell you. Uhm, I want to give you a schema that is going to enable you to understand. I think it will enable you to understand stories.

Like the one I told you last time, you remember Jonah and the whale? I want to provide you with the schema so you can understand stories like that, but many, many more stories like that. Partly what I am telling you about today, in some sense, are archetypes.

And an archetype, it is an idea that was made most popular over the last 100 years by Carl Jung. But it's a much older idea than that. It's really a Platonic idea in some ways. And it means something like fundamental pattern.

And so an archetype manifests itself in different ways. It could be a pattern of emotional response. Like it can be something you are feeling. It could be the way that emotional response displays itself on your body, on your face. It could be the way that emotion feels and displays itself on your face and plays itself out as a drama in your local environment.

So, like an angry argument is an archetypical phenomenon. And the reason it's archetypical is because, well, you have them, you have them, you have them, you have them, everyone has them. And so you can't really think about them as individual; you have to think about them as universal. You can't think about something that you created in a sense, although in a sense you do. But it's also something that happens to you.

Now, when you read about Jung and archetype, it's quite confusing because you can never be sure whether it's talking about an instinct, an emotion, a motivational system, or a sub-personality in which these things manifest itself, or even the social drama that's being played out in time and space in the social world.

But a real archetype, I would say, is all of those things at the same time. Now, we use archetypal means of expression to represent how we act. And that's not the same thing as we think representing what the world is made out of. It's a very different thing.

So, you could say in some sense we tell stories and understand stories so that we can figure out how people act and how they should act. And then we conduct science so that we can figure out what the world's like from a material, objective perspective. The two things coexist uneasily.

I think the more primary form of knowledge is actually how to act, with a scientific model nested inside. Because the most important question you have to solve as a living organism isn't what the world is made out of; it's how you should act in the world, say from a Darwinian perspective, even so that you can live long enough to reproduce.

That's basically, from a strict biological perspective, in some sense, what you have to do in order to be successful. It's kind of obvious, first of all, 'cause you are not very successful if you just go and die. And then, of course, death from a genetic perspective and failing to leave offspring are much the same thing.

Now, one of the questions might be how is it that we conceive of the world as a place to act in? And that's partly, I'm gonna tell on the hypothesis for you and then explain the significance of that hypothesis.

The hypothesis involves the description of what you might consider constituent elements and also transformation processes. As far as I can tell, the constituent elements of the stories that we tell about how people act and should act are characters.

Now, that makes sense, right? Because you really can't have a drama or story without characters. Now, the thing is that characters have to be understandable, and so, for them to be understandable, they sort of have to be like you or they have to be like someone you know. But they have to be human.

But then again, it's not exactly that they're human. Because even when you're telling a story about what happened to you today, it's interesting to think about what you do. So someone might say, "Well, how is your day?" And you say, "Fine."

I mean, maybe it's the lowest level, lowest resolution, highest abstract story: "My day was fine." It's a pretty boring story; it's better than terrible, I suppose. It's not interesting; it's not detailed. But a person gets the notion that things went according to plan or, more specifically, that things unfolded the way you wanted them to.