EGOSYSTEM

A Model of Wholeness Amidst Environmental Uncertainty and

Fragmentation

The Archetype of Wholeness: Fragmentation or Egosystem as a Unity of Parts

Notwithstanding Rosen's ambiguous attempt at modelling wholeness in a

fragmented world1 ― symbolized by the enigmatic form of the Klein

bottle ― the ongoing conflict between postmodern purveyors of

fragmentation, and both Jungian and Eriksonian adherents to wholeness has

been given a new perspective by Professor Michael Bryson, Associate

professor of English, California State University. He argues that the

post-modern view of the impossibility or irrelevancy of centrality and

wholeness in a complex and infinite world derives from the, “notion of

humans as incomplete, as fragmented, frustrated, alienated, determined

by, and at the mercy of, forces beyond their control.” Indeed, he

suggests that this philosophical stand is “not modern ― much less

postmodern ― in the least”.2 I agree. Furthermore, the notion of human

beings living in a complex world ruled by uncertainty, is (indeed) an

observational experience recorded in literature, history, and

philosophy at least since classical times. Post-modernists cannot make

any special claim to fragmentation of the human spiritual, moral,

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psychological milieu. Sorry. Nor can they make any claim against

wholeness amidst fragmentation. These things are historically self-

evident. The only thing that is new is the proposed egosystem (Figure

1) as a model of the interconnectedness of component parts forming a

whole Self, components that remain (of course) sources of

fragmentation.3 At the same time, they are components that may

possess their own strengths, thus tending towards wholeness (by degrees,

as Darwin would say). 4

Now, there is a long and enduring history of thought in literature

regarding the inseparable connection between fragmentation and wholeness.

Let me begin with Heraclitus: “Things taken together are whole and not

whole, something which is being brought together and brought apart,

which is in tune and out of tune; out of all things there comes a

unity, and out of unity all things.” 5 Elsewhere, Wheelwright

translates Fragment 112 in this way: “The bones connected by joints

are at once a unitary whole and not a unitary whole. To be in

agreement is to differ; the concordant is discordant. From out of all

the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness come all the

many particulars.”6 (90). There are a number of key word concepts that

2

are relevant to this discussion: from Fragment 10, whole, in tune, out of

tune, unity, all things [as part of a whole or unity]; and from Fragment

112, unitary whole, concordant, discordant, and, from many particulars oneness.

The very idea of wholeness or oneness is connected by specific

realities to the metaphor of a musical instrument in tune or out of

tune, in harmony and concordant, or disharmonious and discordant, just

like an individual with respect to their environmental milieu.

Heraclitus understood that harmony between the parts and the whole

necessarily leads to an enduring reality: “People do not understand

how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself. There is

harmony in the bending back, as in the case of the bow and the lyre.”7

He understood that a whole and its parts are not mutually exclusive.

“The name of the bow is life, but its work is death.”8 Therefore, a

healthy bow is well strung. It is used to obtain food for life, and to

protect life. However, in so doing it must first kill. Similarly, a

lyre that is well strung and in tune allows the lyricist to play

music. Unhealthy strings ruin the health of the whole lyre and make

discordant sounds only.

Continuing with the metaphor of a musical instrument, if a lyre

represents wholeness of human body, mind and spirit, then all the

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various component parts of the lyre ― turning keys, sound chamber,

sound holes, heel ― must function concordantly and well. Healthy,

functioning parts make up a healthy functioning whole. The simple

beauty of egosystem is that it offers a model of the ego none can deny.

Egosystem, prophetically represented in Marc Chagall's I and My Village

(Figure 2) is the ego embedded within the milieu of spiritual, psychological,

physiological, intellectual, neurological experiences of a direct and personal

nature with other egos (micro-systems), and with ecological, educational,

meteorological, cultural and chthonic experiences, as well as with the social,

institutional and technological realities of its own and other

civilisations (macro-systems, Figure 1). Now, the contemporary

egosystem has been given almost unbridled access to these other realities

via the world wide web. Clearly, this kind of complexity comes with so

much uncertainty and circumstance to which an egosystem is subjected.

Even Herodotus did not deny that individual reality is subject to a

kind of earthly stew: “Men are at the mercy of circumstance, and not

their master.” 9 Hobbes predicted the notion of egosystem in his

model of the Body Politique. He famously characterized the governments of

cities, nations and the world as a Leviathan, a huge semi-human, sea-

going monster. He likens the “Commonwealth State” to a kind of

4

“artificial man” although of gigantic stature.10 He understood the

essential linkages between man, his body and soul, between wholeness

and fragmentation, between a segmented world and the metaphorical Body

Politique:

5

S

P I

N

E

E

EM C

CC

P

MiCRO-SYSTEMS

Figure 1, The Egosystem with Invisible Tendons connecting it to its Environmental Milieu.

. . . an Artificiall Man; . . . in which the Soveraignty is

an Artificial Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole

body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and

Execution, artificiall Jounts; Reward and Punishment . . .

are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body

Naturall; . . . Counsellors, by whom all things needfull

for it to know, . . . Memory; Equity and Lawes, . . .

artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition,

Sicknesse; and Civill war, Death. Lastly, the Pacts and

Covenants by which . . . this Body Politique were at first

made, . . . resemble . . . man. 11

Consequently, we may say that egosystems are either immersed in

positive influences (Figure 2), or in negative influences (Figure 3).

Chagall's experience and memories growing up as a Russian Jew carried

with them an idyllic pastoral setting. In contrast, August Natterer,

featured in the Prinzhorn Collection as an influential “outsider”

artist, paints a dark self-portrait of a dominating figure, fiercely

glaring across a people-less, bleak townscape. Often, such

impenetrable mind-landscapes require a psychological key to decipher

6

MACRO-SYSTEMS

the mental anguish therein.

Figure 2. Chagall, I and My Village (1911) Figure 3. August

Natterer, Witch's Head (1915)

Interestingly, Hobbes concludes the introduction to his treatise by

intimating that, if this connection between man and the social-

political sea in which he swims is not made, it is “to decypher

without a key.”12 Likewise, to “decipher” the ego of conventional

psychology and philosophy without examining it clearly within the

milieu of its own reality, the local world in which it is embedded, is

to decipher the ego without a key. There exists (then) a balance between

egosystem and its component parts, and each part's health. Wholeness

and possible fragmentation of that wholeness are thus interconnected

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in a profound way. Schopenhauer recognized this in his great work The

World as Will and Representation:

Divisibility implies merely the possibility of splitting the

whole into parts; it by no means implies that the whole was

compounded out of parts, and thus came into existence.

Divisibility merely asserts that . . . [parts and whole] . . .

condition each other reciprocally, and to this extent they are

always simultaneous. 13

Egosystem: I, You the Earth and the World

The notion of the Self as a hypersensitive dynamical system embedded in

a complex and hypersensitive world is embodied in the term egosystem.

Egosystem (E or script-E), as a multivariable function of micro- and

macro-systems (again see Figure 1), is subject to four key function

groups: a self-repair, self-healing entity (epsilon, ) to oversee and

to rule all, especially at night during luxurious sleep and redemptive

dream; potentially dissipative, entropic forces (S, like natural

disasters); the worldsystem (omega, that I have characterized as the

FACE model, consisting of floral-, faunal-, artefactual-,

architectural-, chthonic-, cosmic-, ego-systems (cultural groupings),

and ektos-systems (“outside” or the “other”); and (finally), the

existential, individual Self (S, the Kantian- and Jungian-I). 14 Thus,

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E = (S S)

(1)

Expression (1) literally reads as e-sos, possessing a metaphorical

undercurrent, a signal of sustained distress ― S. O. S. ― like a

foundering ship on a stormy sea. Interestingly, the anagram esos also

recalls the Greek word eso(s), meaning within, inside or interior (from the

Greek word esoterikos, meaning hidden within). Egosystem (then) is

represented as a kind of Hamiltonian function that defines the entire

history of an individual and its world line. 15,16 The idea that the

true nature of a student is 'hidden within' perfectly characterizes

the emergent aspect of individual learning behaviour, especially among

high school students. Swirling about the egosystem, then, are internal

and external (sometimes invisible) systems. It must be reiterated

that there is no strict mathematical implication behind the

algorithmic expression (1). It is derived solely as a visual modelling

device illustrating possible fragmentation and recovery of disparate

parts of the egosystem. Erik Erikson, writing on childhood psychosis

and schizophrenia, refers to psychological recovery, in terms of the

ego, as a process of “recovering its own organs . . . [organs of the

senses] . . . to perceive the social environment and to make contact

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with it more trustingly.”17 In fact, Arthur Jersild, writing in the

Manual of Child Psychology, suggests there is tangible evidence of a self-

repair, self-healing mechanism in young children: “A change from

helplessness to a greatly increased capacity for self-help, with a

consequent progressive freedom ... [and] ... an increased ability to

take a panoramic view of things” whenever a child's “self-system involved

in his accustomed way of life” is threatened. 18

The expression (S S) therefore constitutes all of the organs of

perception, interpretation, understanding and imagination: an ego-

Hamiltonian system (if you will) immersed in time, space, substance,

and governed by all events and uncertainties of life on Earth. The

fragmented ego is referenced in Jung’s concept of Weltanschauung19, 20 as

it is in Paul Klee’s much earlier image I, you, the Earth and the World (Figure

4), in which he expresses the existence of an intimate link between the

Earth (its history) and human evolution and endeavour. Weltanschauung

is the embedding principle that immerses the Western civilised Self ―

Promethean sapian ― in scientific and rationalistic endeavours, albeit

often with negative unintended consequences, akin to the cold

motivation of Ayn Rand's existential, Promethean architect, Howard

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Roark in The Fountainhead. (I introduce the neologism sapian, from the

Latin sapiens meaning wise, as a philosophical euphemism to include both

man and woman.) It is this same rationalistic portrait of sapian that

Klee captures in his Senecio (Figure 5). The graphic links between these

images is clear: the forehead, eyes and mouth of Senecio link with

“Welt” (world, on the forehead), “Metaphysischer Weg” (metaphysical path,

across the right temple), “Auge” (eye, over the right eye), “Du” (you,

over the left eye) and “Erde” and “centrum” (earth and centre, over the

mouth). Consequently, the idea of an I-formation, or ego-function and

its connection with egosystem reaches back into our historical-

intellectual-artistic past, and is difficult to deny.

Figure 4. Paul Klee, I, you, the Figure 5. Paul Klee. Senecio (1922) Figure 6.Mandala of Dancing Earth and the World (1927) Shiva

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In spite of the intended irony behind the title, I, you, the Earth and the

world, wherein sapian assumes a kind of spiritual-intellectual equality

with the universe, Klee's image on one level represents the circle of

the Self, and on another it speaks to sapian's unbridled creative

spirit. To that end, I am reminded of Ernst Cassirer's proclamation:

“Man cannot live his life, without expressing his life.”21 Fine.

However, the will to create must be tempered with a will to reflect on

possible consequences. So, we are left with the typical student (is

there such a being?) wanting to express his or her life, and to

monitor his or her life. There is the real ambiguity and contradiction

of an objective reality to which teachers attempt to expose students

in order to re-integrate them with their true Self, and a subjective

reality of personal consequence. To a large extent, Jung attributes

the disintegration of the circle of the Self to Weltanschauung,

precisely because the Self is rooted in the authenticity of childhood,

whereas Weltanschauung represents the shadow, existential behaviour of

people living in the modern and civilized now without fear or concerns

for consequences. Artistic expression and Weltanschauung represent

cyclical forces of human nature and intellectual life, the renewal of

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the creative, authentic spirit, and the classical Protagorean (and

Renaissance) affirmation that man is the measure of all things. Jung, however,

also looks to the Eastern mandala as a concept of wholeness ― the

constant creation and re-creation of the universe and all souls, yin-

yang, the infinite male principle, and the finite female principle,

the cycle of life and death, birth and rebirth, the dancing Shiva

(Figure 6) and his female counterpart, Shakti, intertwined as eternal

virgins, yet mysteriously creating and destroying all things and souls

forever in an endless cycle. 22 Elsewhere, Jung interprets the mandala

symbol in dreams as a “vision of the integration of the self,” 23 just

as Erikson spoke of “re-integration of organs of the senses:” that is,

fragmentation and re-integration of parts of the Self into a

recognizable whole Self. 24 This is the Jungian archetype of wholeness

(teleiosis), embodied by the neologism egosystem, and it represents a new

paradigm of psychology and learning.

We are confronted (then) with the essential goal of education, namely:

to make whole the fragmented intellectual and historical-emotion experience

(as Bloom would say) 25 of our students, and at the same time, to

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recognize that they are intimately and forever tethered to a much

larger, complex and uncertain world. (again, Figure 1) Within this

framework, art education must proceed, and must focus on challenging

design problems that address some version of Professor David

Christian’s Big History (2004) incorporating the progress of human

development, the arts, literature, philosophy, and (generally) the

history of ideas as a contextual approach to art and design.26 In his

prophetic little book, The Undiscovered Self, Jung speaks of the modern

individual bound to the idea of Weltanschauung, that becomes a

philosophy of life immersed in scientific and rationalistic aims,

almost without regard to consequences. The characteristic common to

this modern individual is a “materialistic and collectivist goal.”

Nevertheless, this goal lacks, suggests Jung, “the very thing that

expresses and grips the whole man, namely, an idea which places the

individual human being in the centre as the measure of all things.”27

The idea of fragmentation may derive from edicts of the State that (for

political gain) drives individuals from “understanding [to]

atomization . . . [and] isolation.”28 Jung ends his wonderful essay

with an insight that is a restatement of his archetype of wholeness,

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both in terms of a modern, post World War II era, and in terms of

modern art movements:

. . . the prophetic spirit of art has turned away from the old

object relationship and towards the . . . dark chaos of

subjectivisms. Certainly art . . . has not yet discovered in

this darkness what it is that holds all men together and gives

expression to their psychic wholeness. . . . The development

of modern art with its seemingly nihilistic trend towards

disintegration must be understood as the symptom and symbol of

a mood of [both] world destruction and world renewal . . . 29

Oddly, Jung was right in his analysis of the symptomatic reality

behind much of the modern art movement, yet he seems to have

misinterpreted the narrative literary, philosophical and historical

value in modern art. Yes, there has always been a progressive campaign

towards psychic wholeness. I would argue that modern art (per se) is not

a symptom of political, moral, intellectual disintegration, so much as it

is a clarion call for a renewed consciousness of this complex and

hypersensitive world in which we are embedded. It is a clarion call

against the military-industrial complex. It is a clarion call against

modern science and technology that create weapons of mass destruction

and industries that support it. It is a clarion call against the

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madness of a nation's economic dialectic that directs most of its

budget towards the very things that have killed, are killing and will

kill its people: the machinations of greed and war.

We have succumbed, East and West, to what anthropologists call

habituation: growing used to a toxic environment to which a species

becomes accustomed little by little, leading ultimately to that

species’ demise. For the metaphorical East and West, habituation

involves the toxic environment of arms, weaponry and the paranoia that

hegemonic technological superiority demands. The greatest source of

fragmentation within the State and within the individual is the

external threat of hostile brethren, another Jungian archetype,

whether these hostile brethren be human or non-human environmental

threats. We see this hostility playing out most recently in Syria and

Iraq (the East and ISIS), and the Crimean Peninsula and Eastern

Ukraine where East (Russia) faces West (America) on an ideological

battlefield. Modern sapian’s romance with science and technology of

weaponry is a form of madness, pure and simple. It has been an ongoing

narrative, especially in Twentieth Century art. Look no further than If

not, not by Kitaj (Figure 7), with the gates of Auschwitz looming in the

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background, and In the Land of the German’s by Franz Radziwill (Figure 8),

clearly a land decimated by an ideology steeped in madness. Thus,

Foucault closes Madness and Civilization with this thought:

Figure 7. If not, not by Kitaj (1975) Figure 8. In

the land of the Germans by Franz Radziwill (1947)

This does not mean that madness is the only language

common to the work of art and the modern world . . .

[however] through madness, a work that seems to drown in the

world, to reveal itself there its non-sense, and to

transfigure itself with the features of pathology

17

alone, . . . engages within itself the world's time,

masters it, and leads it; by the madness which interrupts it,

a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question

without answer, . . . The madness in which the work is

engulfed is the space of our enterprise, it is the endless path to

fulfilment, . . . 30

The question we must ask is this: is our romance with science and

technology at odds with making a healthy egosystem? Is it hubris? The

fragmented world of post World War Two Germany illustrated in both the

Kitaj and Radziwill paintings, represent the madness in which an

egosystem may be engulfed, and it is this madness that represents, in

Foucault's words, the space of our enterprise. Egosystem is defined by this

madness, and succumbs to it, and is shaped by it during waking hours,

just as it is reshaped by it during sleep and dream. From an

historical point of view, the German experience of the first half of

the Twentieth Century is an essay on misdirected hindsight and failed

foresight, a common human failing. However, it is also an essay on

human endurance, self-repair, self-healing and redemption.

Sapian's greatest attribute and greatest failing is the contradiction

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between foresight and hindsight. The role of the educator, for

instance, especially in art and design ― because artists and designers

build societies and cultures ― is to minimize the surrounding gulf

between what is perceived and what is real; between what is conceived

and what is designed; between what is proposed and what is done;

between what is designed and what is built. It is our nature to set as

a goal wholeness, and it is our nature (in the end) to accept

partially achieved wholeness. However, this in no way diminishes the

target goal of wholeness. Take for example the visual arts teacher who

sets as a goal becoming a world class artist, yet settles for teaching

art and design, instead, and becomes a beloved and determined mentor

(and mender) of human souls. Arguably, in this scenario there is a

certain completion within incompletion. The end result is not a life

choice that is necessarily either bad or diminished. Rather, the

choice rests upon a series of circumstances that select one or a few

attainable aspects of the ego over the seemingly unattainable whole,

with remaining unsatisfied aspects of the egosystem left to fend for

themselves, and attempt self-repair, self-healing and self-renewal.

All of which depends on the strength of each self-healing entity ( ).

Therefore, the role of the art teacher is to strengthen through

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challenging design problems attainable aspects of students' egos. It

is this contradiction between attainability and unattainability that

seems to be a part of a culture of student failure in general, yet

still part of every student's psychological makeup to succeed (by

degrees).

Egosystem: “I” as a Quantum Symbolical Ark in a Sign-Filled World

In Essay on Man Cassirer writes, “Contradiction is the very element of

human existence. Man has no 'nature' ― no simple or homogeneous

being.” 31 In this Cassirer echoes Ortega y Gasset's notion that “man

has not nature, what he has is . . . history.” 32 Sapian's very

essence and being are wrapped in the symbolic universe through which

he moves, wrapped in his personal historical-emotion experience,33 wrapped in

political, social, psychological environmental events, and (more

poignantly) wrapped in choice. Sapian certainly cannot be encapsulated

within a simple homogeneous being to be sure. An individual is as

complex as the world in which he or she is embedded. Nevertheless, the

very idea of a complex, multi-functional and multidimensional being

suggests that in the worst of times this complex being is fragmented ―

leading to some measure of psychological, emotional and intellectual

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disorder ― and in the best of times the components of this complex

being are integrated into a healthy whole (by degrees). Dadas like

Hartfield, Picasso, Duchamp, André Breton, and Man Ray, created

artforms celebrating the fragmentation of man and society. Arguably

modern artistic sentiment began with the Dada movement of post World

War I, as well as with the discovery of the quantum world of subatomic

particles. Uncertainty in subatomic physics, brought forth by Bohr,

Einstein and Heisenberg, ruled the day, and seemed to rule the

universe as well. Causality and determinism were discarded in favour

of probability and uncertainty in complex systems. Lindley recounts

these volatile times in his book Uncertainty:

It's striking that so much of quantum mechanics arose in

Germany during so strange and fraught a phase of that

country's history. . . . Germany's collapse in the First World

War led to profound disillusion with the past, . . . There

arose . . . a sort of romantic revivalism, embracing nature

over the machine, passion over reason, chaos over logic. If

history, like science, was deterministic, and if that

determinism had resulted in Germany's downfall, then . . .

some other kind of history was urgently required. Therefore,

scientists, . . . abandoned determinism and marched under the

banner of chance, probability and uncertainty. 34

21

Postmodernists, on the other hand, may view human experience of

wholeness as fantasy, mere smoke and mirrors, but they cannot deny

that their romance with fragmentation springs from the new scientific

reality of uncertainty, and (for the last eighty years) a physical

world defined by stochastic systems. However, the idea of

fragmentation is not necessarily at odds with the concept of

wholeness. Indeed, I argue that wholeness and fragmentation are

integral aspects of both the human condition and the human psyche. The

very motivation for the Global Oneness Project, its primary author being

Hilary Hart ― setting aside for the moment scientific validation for

this study ― was the belief in a universal concept of emotional,

intellectual, spiritual and philosophical wholeness in a fragmented

world with its fragmented nations, and its fragmented cultures

populated by fragmented people of wounded and fragmented souls.35

Hillary Hart argued that in this fragmented world, one commonality

unites all nations and all people: maintenance of the whole Self, and

survival. It is a thesis difficult to argue against in this snapshot,

cell phone, world wide web global reality.

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What postmodernists call fragmentation (then) is, in fact, the reality

of the human condition. It does not exclusively countermand wholeness.

Rather, fragmentation is a precursor to wholeness, just as wholeness

begs for fragmentation in a process physicists call entropy. Education

essentially guides and nurtures fragmented intellectual, emotional and

spiritual conditions of students towards a state of wholeness ― by

degrees. Therefore, cognitive science does not need to be an Oedipal

process, ignoring historical and philosophical perspective, whereby we

cast away old family portraits when we clean house. Everything is

relevant. Everything applies. “We live in a symbolic universe,” writes

Ernst Cassirer in Essay on Man. “Everything has meaning. Every feature

of human experience has a claim to reality.” 36 The experience of an

individual ego (in fact) is connected to its total environment through

invisible tendons (shown dotted, Figure 1). These invisible tendons

typically cause anxiety and stress among students. Their organs of the

senses being pulled apart, they become fragmented, and prey to various

systems of this uncertain world.

Fragmentation is a consequence of moral, spiritual, psychological,

intellectual and physical entropy in as much as it is a process

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towards moral, spiritual, psychological, intellectual, physiological

and physical wholeness, and it is a consequence of familial,

educational, social and cultural happenstance. Transcending the

reality of uncertainty and fragmentation to achieve a state of

wholeness (no matter how temporary this state of wholeness) is not an

outdated concept, nor is it an exclusive principle. This duality has

always been under the purview of psychology and learning, whereby each

respective practitioner attempts to re-assemble fragmented organs of

the ego into a healthy egosystem.

Egosystem is proposed merely to provide a tangible, visual model of a

familiar, complex environment in which the ego is embedded. Egosystem

― without equivocation ― points to various relevant micro- and macro-

systems that are likely sources of individual fragmentation. Egosystem

is a multi-variable function. Egosystem is a model for fragmentation,

self-awareness, self-repair, self-healing and self-renewal, as much as

it is a model for wholeness. Egosystem is immersed in stochastic

environments, and is subjected continuously to biosocioecological

stresses and pressures that both attempt to fragment various aspects

of the Self and (at the same time) to encourage intelligent behaviour

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for survival in shape-shifting landscapes, and to encourage the

inevitable pursuit of wholeness and completion our genus has striven

for since it first descended from the trees of marginal forests, and

stepped foot onto the great African savannahs.

Egosystem as a Symbolical Ark: Frames of Reference, Frames of Experience, orjust Frames of Mind ?

Arguably, early great advances in hominid intelligence were a direct

consequence of pressures initiated by survival strategies gained (by

degrees) in negotiating volatile, shape-shifting landscapes.

Throughout history biosocioecological pressures had both negative and

positive consequences, the descent of intelligence being the foremost

positive consequence, and inability to solve the ultimate challenging

environmental design problem being the foremost negative consequence.

Among such early challenging environmental design problems are things

like killing at a distance, fording rapids, specialised tool-making,

and various social pressures involved with survival and continuance of

the tribe, creative thinking to counteract those environmental

pressures, and to ensure continuance and competitive advantage by

developing new technologies that addressed efficiently (and quickly)

those immediate needs to survive shape-shifting landscapes.

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The modern classroom is a kind of shape-shifting landscape, too.

Challenging environmental design problems re-presented (to use a

Heideggerean hyphen) in modern classroom design strategies to survive

in modern volatile environments include, social negotiation and

diplomacy, design strategies to survive a hostile or problematic

teacher, to deal with (say) a class bully, time management strategies

and workload management directed towards creating both process work

and product. Although problem-solving has a different focus now than

it did for our Palaeolithic ancestors, still the essential goal

remains fourfold: safety, survival, continuance and wholeness.

Consciousness and awareness of our environment are what make us human,

and they are what makes human beings (ancient or modern) able to

perceive the I as an existential animate object, and able to perceive

that this same I is connected to everything surrounding it, in a most

profound way. Students are I-centred. It is the same consciousness

that connects us to our surroundings and requires us to feel and to

know everything, every object, event and emotion that touches us. This

is true certainly throughout high school, and to a certain extent in

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college and university. In part, that is why Kant in Critique of Pure Reason

recognised that understanding this I-formation is the fundamental

component of psychology. 37 The Kantian I is populated with so many

aspects of the Self, it seems like a symbolical ark of related species

all vying for control: the conscious I, me, myself, numero uno, the

man, the woman, ego, super-ego, libido, id, persona, animus, anima, the

unconscious, the sub-conscious, temenos (the sanctuary of the eternal

child within), the soul, the shadow, so uniquely fundamental as the

dark side of the Self, that it is included among Jung's archetypes.

These represent a very real connection with our mythical past,

especially as they form psychic linkages with biosocioecological

pressures and stresses that attempt to fragment the individual in both

dream and waking life. Simultaneously, they embrace individuals with a

feeling of belonging to the greater whole, if only through common

beliefs and dreams. A Neolithic stone-based society like Natufian Ain

Mallaha38 (Figure 9) with its individual family hut (likely domed), and

a modern Bushman domed hut (Figure 10), each celebrates the individual

dwelling as a functioning family unit within a loosely organized

settlement, the primary goal of which is safety, survival, continuance

and wholeness. However, the safety, survival, continuance and identity

27

of each settlement depends on the strength of each family unit. The

good of the individual is directly linked to the good of the

community. Individual strength links to community strength. Individual

belief and community belief ― the industrious individual working for

the common good of the settlement ― speaks to this pre-existent, a prior

psychic condition not acquired by experience, but rather identified as

a core of our existence: wholeness. Thus, Jung talks about 'universal

dispositions of the mind' that transcend culture, race, individual and

family beliefs. “They are analogous,” continues Jung, “to Plato's

forms . . . [whereof] . . . we are not dealing with categories of

reason, but categories of the imagination.” 39

Figure 9. A family hut. Ain Mallaha (12,000 to 8,000 BCE). Figure 10.

Bushman hut.

Because they originate in the imagination, Jung characterises these

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forms as visual typical images, archaic remnants, primordial images, or archaic types

― and so, Jung coined the word archetypes to represent 'autonomous

spirits.”40 of the unconscious associated with individual imagination,

individual dreams and community beliefs, forming a kind of pre-

existent mythology, perhaps the origins of Campbell’s monomyth. 41

Accept Jung’s 'categories of imagination' with this proviso: that

imagination be regarded, not merely as a gift of genetics, so much as

an acquired expertise ― a repertory of knowledge ― in solving

challenging environmental design problems that represent our first

encounters with this complex and uncertain world, whether it is H.

habilis attempting to cross a fast-flowing river, or an infant

encountering an accordion gate blocking its way to the kitchen or

stairs. Regardless, Jungian archetypes are both an essay on

fragmentation, and a treatise on wholeness: fragmentation, because

each archetype (whether it is hostile brethren, the hero myth, animus,

anima, the God image, the dream of self-sacrifice) all represent

sources of historical-emotion fragmentation; and wholeness, because

they possess an underlying narrative of victory, heroism, overcoming

ones demons, spirituality, self-healing and self-renewal.

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This discussion puts into perspective the application of Gardner's

multiple intelligences and frames of mind ,42 when (in fact) we need to examine

student behaviour, not in a compartmentalized mode, but rather as

subjects of (and to) a complex, uncertain and shape-shifting world.

Ideally, students must reflect on their personal repertory of

knowledge, and (yes) this may extend into a personal learning style,

or intelligence, as their personal frame of reference expands. We must

understand that Gardner's fames of mind are embedded in a stochastic

world. Gardner's frames of mind seem to misdirect understanding of how

people learn and how they move through shape-shifting,

biosocioecological landscapes. Gardner is not wrong. Rather, frames of

mind as an idea just skims the surface of reality. As a counter

proposition, it seems to me that we are not really dealing with

“frames of mind” so much as frames of reference, frames of experience,

and egosystems. Student egosystems are more linked to their frames of

reference and frames of experience, than to any one, or several

intelligences.

We cannot deny our origins: that we are all Africans: that we are all

subconscious witnesses to one historical movement ― Diaspora ― out of

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Africa, albeit scattered and divergent: that we tend to worship one

great spirit: that we have one beginning and 'one mythology' (as Joseph

Campbell often reminds us)43: and that we have one common set of

archaic memory links or archetypes. Herein resides the fundamental

connection with students within the framework of multi-cultural modern

classrooms. The connection is as deep as it is authentic. In fact,

Jungian archetypes provide a poignant measure of common human

linkages: the good mother Earth; the male and female devouring

monsters (animus and anima, respectively, like the spectre of a Jodi

Arias or a Ted Bundy; the dream of a golden age or Paradise (Eden,

Valhalla, Avalon); the dream of flying; the Great Spirit (thunder and

lightning); the God-image (Buddha); the sacred precinct, temenos, or

sanctuary of the primordial child, the eternal child within; the wise

old man; the union of opposites (heaven-hell, good-evil, male-female,

infinite-finite; day-night); hostile brethren (Gilgamesh-Enkidu,

Lancelot-Arthur, Jekyll-Hyde, Jehovah-Lucifer; Cain-Abel); the hero

myth (Superman, the Flash, Batman, Agent Carter, Prometheus); the

dream of self-sacrifice (giving up one's life for a family member or

friend, or simply bearing the cross of one's own existence); the

archetype of wholeness (or teleiosis); the shadow, the dark side of the

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Self; the Prince of Darkness; and, the existential, Kantian I.

All of these visual typical images unite students around the world.

Schopenhauer's “inner constitution of the world” ― the world of “all

possible perceived things” ― is understood by us subjectively through

the intellect. It is the rational world, often spoken and written

about, yet seldom realized. 44 Archetypes are part of our, inner

constitution of the world. Writes Schopenhauer, they represent categories of

“contiguity”, (derived from Aristotle’s Law of Contiguity, that different

objects occupying the same time and space are associated by

proximity),44 categories of “successiveness,” by which our field of

vision is impaired by all the stuff that fills it, and categories of

“interdependence,” everything connected to the whole and the “long

chain of causes and effects that preceded it.”45, 46 Thus, we cannot

think in terms of the independence of ourselves and things in the

world, but rather the interdependence of ourselves and the

interconnectedness of all things, as physicist David Bohm reminds us.47 The

interdependence of this symbolical ark moving through shape-shifting

landscapes continually re-shaping and transforming us as individuals,

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is evidentiary. The neologism egosystem (then) is proposed to

accommodate the ego embedded in this uncertain and shape-shifting

world.

Egosystem: Wholeness and Meaning in a World tending towards

Fragmentation

Our symbolical ark drifts through a subjective world of signification

and interpretation, stimulated by the objective world of signs. In the

language of semeiology, objects, events and feelings refer to signals,

symptoms, symbols, icons, indexes and names that make up our environmental

milieu.48 These signs constitute (as well) the ancestral, individual

repertory of mythical-, emotion-, historical-based experience. In this

sign-filled world, the whole universe seems to be poking at the “I” of

self-preservation ― the Symbolical Ark ― while the egosystem remains

uniquely bound to the archetype of wholeness, as well as to

fundamental human needs of safety, survival, physical and mental

health, and continuance.

Identifying the Jungian archetype of wholeness in our students is

difficult using Gardner’s frames of mind model, because it assumes a

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kind of completeness without resolution. Authenticity in human

behaviour is discovered through understanding and recognition of the

existence of egosystem in all its complexity. At the same time, it

requires cognitive scientists, psychologists and educators to accept

that identifying uncertainty and the stochastic nature of egosystem is

fundamental to learning. Why? Examining history, the world of ideas,

visual culture as well as the classical canon of art, all within the

field of art and design education, is cast against the background of

psychological, familial, social, societal boundaries in a world

subjected to ecological, meteorological, cultural, chthonic and

ideological uncertainties. The embedded ego strives for connection,

meaning and survival within its respective egosystem. It seems

egosystem is intimately tied to the human condition.

In fact, Jung looks to the psychic phenomenon of human affairs, that

he interprets as a quest for anthropomorphic meaning in the history of

events. He argues that meaning may be elusive and unknowable and

indefinable, precisely because it is an irrational construct in place of

authentic values and truth. Still, authenticity does not fall under

the rationalistic method of the West we have seen Jung refer to as

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Weltanschauung. The idea of authenticity generates a true integration

and mirror of cultural types in the classroom. Nevertheless, the

mirror is cloudy, and people, cultures and belief systems themselves

are multi-variable functions of cultural origins and historical

circumstance.

We cannot pretend to ourselves, or to our students, that the universe

is understandable, accessible or assessable, completely. Of course,

our mathematics and science colleagues will say that the universe is

indeed understandable, accessible and assessable. However,

philosophers and visual arts teachers will say that the universe is

understandable, accessible or assessable (yes), but only as we know it

to be now. Schopenhauer alludes to the unknowable universe when he

writes that, “nature is at once appearance and thing in itself.”49 In so

doing, he predicts Heidegger’s understanding of what we are, and what

we appear to be. We appear to be anthropomorphic (Figure 11), yet our

dark soul is primal ape. The instinctual beast too often overrides the

creative human spirit. Heidegger describes the duality of things as

being ― the thing and the category it denotes ― and Being, its Presence ―

the connotation of the thing signified to an individual.50 Likewise, if

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ego is the being, egosystem is the Being and its Presence. For example,

the gorilla (Figure 11) denotes a higher primate with distinctly human

features. Yet, its Presence (its Being) in Heideggerean terms possibly

re-presents the dark, primitive, ancestral side of human behaviour.

For Schopenhauer, as for Jung and Heidegger, it is the appearance of a

thing that is at once accessible and assessable through our senses

(and intellect), while our attempts to attach rational (subjective)

meaning to what we observe remain elusive. Especially for developing

minds of students, reality and meaning remain elusive. That is

precisely why we cannot know the objective world absolutely.

Magritte's image (Figure 12), as an example, illustrates the

uncertainty of what is presented to the senses by the natural and

artefactual world, and what is perceived. Is it a canvas of a painted

landscape, or is it a transparent canvas of a natural landscape? This

becomes a good device in the classroom for students to explore, in the

language of Paulo Freire, a personal reading of the world.51 There remains

(then) one person's reality, one student's reality, and then there is

a mirror of another reality, perhaps not as authentic as the first.

This is often the source of clashes between what students perceive,

and what teachers want them to perceive. “The understanding,” writes

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Kant “can never go beyond the limits of our sensibility, within which

alone objects are given to us . . . [and knowing them is] . . .

limited by the understanding itself that it should not refer to things

themselves, but only to the mode in which things appear to us, in

accordance with our subjective qualification.”52 This subjective

qualification is egosystem at work.

Figure 11. Gorilla Figure12. Magritte, TheHuman Figure 13. Georgia O'Keeffe, Jack- Condition (1933) in- the-Pulpit No. IV (1930)

Four people happen upon a flowering plant in the middle of a path.

(Figure 13) One says it is a weed and must be destroyed. The second

maintains it is a rare flower and should be unearthed, protected from

destruction and nurtured. The third proclaims it is a common household

plant that is (frankly) filled with latent violence and memories of

his departed mother. The fourth says that it represents petals of a

vagina (which, in fact, O'Keeffe vehemently denied). Each describes

the bloom as greenish-blue to blue-black. None would deny it is a

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flowering plant, except (perhaps) for the fourth observer. However,

four subjective realities ― four independent, yet dependent,

egosystems ― intrude on a single objective reality, and render the

objective sign of a flower with four symbolic significations.

I submit that, in the realm of human experience and endeavour, the ego

is appearance, while the thing itself is egosystem. Consequently, educators

and psychologists accept mere appearance, ignoring ignore the thing

itself ― egosystem ― and misdiagnose an important advancement in

psychology and education. [6946]

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