"We can chain together some other related ideas like anthropomorphism, Jungian projection, and human-centrism and get a broadly applicable principle: We see the world as we are, not as it is."
I am in the midst of another course from the guys at "Weird Studies" right now, and I am noticing you seem to taking a bit of a different direction on the topic of what could loosely be called "animism / pan-psychism" or to make it more specific the basic question of whether or not there are forces out there which have their own "objectivity" aside from being simply a construction/projection of the human psyche... I can see you are maybe implying a bit of a cybernetic feedback loop happening? I notice you often tend to go in the solipsistic direction or at least toy with it? I've been listening to JF Martel talk about "The Radical Alterity of Being". Each thing has it's own unique individuality, it's own "suchness", as if God created each daisy, each little pebble one by one because he loved each one so much.
I do like the way you handled the Demon stuff, some good points were made about how Daemons have been "demonized" over time. Maybe in ancient times, if a person was feeling horny they were "possessed by a spirit of lust", anthropomorphizing something which today we might just say "oh it must have been hormones", we don't need the anthropomorphic spiritism because we have the scientific law of causation.
However you could go a bit of a different direction, you could see these kinds of spirits as being kind of like "animal urges" and then see the kind of man/animal duality represented in mythic figures like the Satyr or Pan, and the whole myth about Pan and Nymphs.. How that Goat symbol has been turned into something Satanic, but the Satanic is just a code for Pagan ie) pre-Christian.
In James Hillman's Pan and the Nightmare he talks about this idea of that Nightmare creatures are often hairy/animal like, or there is this association between fear and sex, like the classic horror movie tropes of make out scene interrupted by the monster/killer... and there is something there that comes out of what the Jungian's call the "unconscious" as the symbol of something a bit like a man, but maybe it has goat like horns, or hooves... and then we call this thing charged with fear or repressed sexual energy "demonic".
Reminded me of the Machiavelli quote saying something like that there are three types of minds, 1 can understand on its own and is most excellent, 2 can understand if given examples and explanations and is also excellent, 3 does not understand even with explanations and examples and is useless.
"We can chain together some other related ideas like anthropomorphism, Jungian projection, and human-centrism and get a broadly applicable principle: We see the world as we are, not as it is."
I am in the midst of another course from the guys at "Weird Studies" right now, and I am noticing you seem to taking a bit of a different direction on the topic of what could loosely be called "animism / pan-psychism" or to make it more specific the basic question of whether or not there are forces out there which have their own "objectivity" aside from being simply a construction/projection of the human psyche... I can see you are maybe implying a bit of a cybernetic feedback loop happening? I notice you often tend to go in the solipsistic direction or at least toy with it? I've been listening to JF Martel talk about "The Radical Alterity of Being". Each thing has it's own unique individuality, it's own "suchness", as if God created each daisy, each little pebble one by one because he loved each one so much.
I do like the way you handled the Demon stuff, some good points were made about how Daemons have been "demonized" over time. Maybe in ancient times, if a person was feeling horny they were "possessed by a spirit of lust", anthropomorphizing something which today we might just say "oh it must have been hormones", we don't need the anthropomorphic spiritism because we have the scientific law of causation.
However you could go a bit of a different direction, you could see these kinds of spirits as being kind of like "animal urges" and then see the kind of man/animal duality represented in mythic figures like the Satyr or Pan, and the whole myth about Pan and Nymphs.. How that Goat symbol has been turned into something Satanic, but the Satanic is just a code for Pagan ie) pre-Christian.
In James Hillman's Pan and the Nightmare he talks about this idea of that Nightmare creatures are often hairy/animal like, or there is this association between fear and sex, like the classic horror movie tropes of make out scene interrupted by the monster/killer... and there is something there that comes out of what the Jungian's call the "unconscious" as the symbol of something a bit like a man, but maybe it has goat like horns, or hooves... and then we call this thing charged with fear or repressed sexual energy "demonic".
Reminded me of the Machiavelli quote saying something like that there are three types of minds, 1 can understand on its own and is most excellent, 2 can understand if given examples and explanations and is also excellent, 3 does not understand even with explanations and examples and is useless.