Comments

  • Evolution and Speciation
    Cichlid fish in Lakes Malawi may provide convincing evidence in favour of speciation: "Mate choice trials carried out in research aquaria showed that the Malawi and Chilingali forms preferred to mate with their own kind, showing that they were well on the way to evolving into distinct species."
  • Separating The Art From The Artist
    Jung would argue that the inability to separate art from the artist itself might be likened to a Freudian view that certain types of art is in itself is a product of the ego and formed as a result of complexes. Intimate personal experiences that may be incompatible with the personality or conscious mind, get translated into cover figures in a bid to make it unrecognizable and is presented as art. A so-called attempt to replace reality by fiction and in so doing bringing into action an arsenal pathological fantasy.

    On the other hand a Jung argues that certain artistic products are borne of visionary, primordial experiences that are expressed by the artist, yet completely independent from the human artist himself. These are symbolic expressions that exist in their own right and in bringing forth these visions from the collective unconscious to our consciousness minds in the form of art, these artists fulfill the roles of seers of prophets. Art then serves as compensatory adjustment for the biases and physic ailments of a specific generation and is brought about by the unexpressed desires of the specific epoch. Jung even warned against taking too serious the all too human interpretation that the creator of a work might put forward in relation to the work itself.

    "There may be some validity in the idea held by the Freudian school that artists without exception are narcissistic - by which is meant that they are undeveloped persons with infantile and auto-erotic traits. The statement is only valid, however, for the artist as person and has nothing to do with the man as an artist. In his capacity of artist he is neither auto-erotic, nor hetero-erotic, nor erotic in any sense. He is objective and impersonal - even inhuman - for as an artist he is his work, and not a human being." (Jung Modern Man in Search of a Soul 172).

    As to whether Weinstein was the latter type of artist is debatable.