Archetypes & Our Cognition

This is the third piece in the series. Part 1 laid out the underlying method of judgement — generalising and specifying at once. Part 2 applied that method to a cluster of Quranic verses and arrived at Solomon: a man handed a throne he never expected, marked by God with a single word, "Awab." Here, we ask what it actually means for the Quran to use a story like that as a formula.

What an Archetype Actually Is

Solomon's story demonstrates this quality — call it resignful submission — in its most extreme, most "abject" form. And that's exactly why it makes every other example we'll look at easier to understand. But why do we need an extreme case at all? What does "abject" mean here?

This gets at something essential about what an archetype actually is. An archetype is an example of something — a general rule. Kant makes a similar point in the Critique of Pure Reason about the concept of a triangle: no drawn or imagined triangle could ever be fully adequate to the concept itself, because the concept exists only in thought.

What we encounter in experience is always just a limit-case — one instance of a plan so general, so universal, that it can never be directly represented without that representation falling short of it.

The plan remains a formula capable of qualifying any instance of it. A triangle on paper retains its Euclidean properties as a plan of construction; when we look at it and "recognize" a triangle, we're really reconstructing something we already know to be identical with that underlying formula — even though the particular drawing contains more than the formula itself. Maybe it's a specific type of triangle. Maybe it isn't even a rigid shape at all, but a pattern of motion we've recognized as triangular — a relationship pattern, a "triad."

This is exactly how an archetype works. Like the triangle, it's too general to be fully captured by any single instance — but that generality is precisely what makes it usable, a formula, a plan of construction whose purpose is to thematize a situation. Once thematized, the situation becomes predictable; we can understand its function in advance, a priori.

Kant makes a related point here that's worth dwelling on: laws, he argues, aren't derived from experience by slow trial and error — rather, "the understanding does not derive its laws from nature, but prescribes them to nature." What lets him say this with such confidence is a distinction he draws between truth and representability.

"True" can mean popular agreement, contextual significance, statistical likelihood — any number of things up for debate. But reason, properly understood, isn't a matter of settling that debate. It's a measure of how representable an idea is — the "bootstrap" by which an idea becomes graspable before it's handed over to the messier business of popular discussion. Understanding this distinction lets Kant confidently ask of any phenomenon, what is this, in itself? — and trust that the answer comes from the same productive faculty that represented the idea in the first place.

As he might put it: it's no coincidence that the mind represents an idea this effectively. The mind built the idea — the way a wall is built, brick by brick, or a house that's simply the sum of its walls.

Extending this from natural law to the broader character of human judgement is straightforward. Extending it to what we call archetypes is just as straightforward. The criterion shifts slightly: instead of asking what's necessarily true, we ask — is there a case, a near-perfect example, that can be cited to make sense of some given situation? This perfect example isn't arbitrary. It's "perfect" because it contains all the right ingredients, in the right proportions. In machine learning, the cosine-similarity function works on exactly this principle — finding the precise angle between two vectors. Our minds do something structurally similar when sizing up a case, so that the idea that "just comes to us" is actually the output of this same complex machinery.

The comfort we feel in a pure, immediate idea can be extended to the mechanism that generated it.

Think of it this way: you recall a particular instance while discussing something seemingly unrelated, because that recollected instance is 'apt', 'fitting, 'relevant', when in fact its import is owing to a 'structural similarity' between the recollection and the case that drew it, i.e that the same 'rule' underlies both - it's an automorphism. This is exactly what Solomon's story shows. He behaved accordingly 'ثُمَّ أَنَابَ' (38:34), Because the situation's deontic 'desideratum' compelled him to act this way, i.e the situation 'called for one to be Awab' as its highest moral response - this is where I put the word 'abject'. This is the same way in which your brain mechanically chooses to associate certain ideas; the underlying 'rule' or 'principle' makes the association.

It demonstrates, in its most extreme form, a quality woven into the basic meaning of "Islam" itself. So you might ask — in response to witnessing someone display this kind of peaceful acceptance in the face of hardship — who has demonstrated this ability most fully? Which is the same as asking: who demonstrated it under the most difficult conceivable circumstances? You're now thinking of someone specific. A specific situation — objectively the most imposing one imaginable for a human being to face. Do it as a thought experiment, think of a very difficult case, scale the difficulty to within a reasonable limit (this is only determinable by God), and right at that point where you're confounded and taken aback by the resilience of the equally imagined 'proper response', assign an imaginary subject (person x); if you've done this in a scenario involving the concepts 'throne', 'kingdom', 'heir', 'dominion', then you have 'lived' or 'embodied' the Solomonic archetype.

This thought-experiment approach is a science, and a real one. It falls under what we shall call 'The science of Archetypes' or 'Archetypology', whose axioms, categories and principles we are now examining.

This is the kind of eureka moment the Quran is built around: citing one case that, by its sheer aptness, dispenses with the need to cite an infinite series of similar ones. This, properly speaking, is the archetype. The perfect example. The perfect expression. God cites it in the Quran the same way you reach for the perfect word when trying to convey an idea — and in citing it, you feel you've finally done the idea justice.

The Lag Before the Word Arrives

You want to warn, inspire, clarify, influence. You reach for a situation from your own life, a story you read, something you were told — because that's the most fitting piece you can think of to express the idea you're carrying. You know it's there, the right words, the right way to put it. And yet you stall. A lag sets in, a difficulty calling it forth — what people call writer's block. The effort behind that search is no different from a mathematician working through a difficult equation, or an engineer fitting components together for a highly specific case. It's not a passive wait for inspiration. It's labor.

George Steiner gets at the same idea from a different angle. He describes what he calls the dual structure of discourse: "our outward speech always has, behind it, a concurrent flow of articulate consciousness" (Afterbabel, chp1, p46) — we reveal exactly as much as we leave out. We know, in some sense, what we want to say, but we're "occluded" by the limits of language. Language, though, is only the vehicle, only the messenger. The real work — constructing the idea, the concept, the thing to be conveyed — is already done by the time language gets involved.

Finding the words to express an idea perfectly only accomplishes that work in a relative sense, because I'm still bound to the language of my environment: whatever I grew up speaking, whatever I learned. That language is the store I draw from — the stories, the literature, the archetypes I have access to. My mind, already knowing what it wants to say, searches within those confines for the right material. It's limited to what I know, or to what this particular language lets me know.

Which is why two people — say, one Chinese, the other Roman, each unaware the other exists — can arrive at the exact same thought. Their minds take the same shape; the same 'articulate consciousness' flows through both. And yet one reaches for a line of Virgil. The other reaches for a passage from the Book of Rites. Quranic speech concerns that 'articulate consciousness' as such. Think of it as a transcription of it, it must be, if it's to be the 'quintessential', or, the 'compendium' of all books, as its divine status connotes.