The Seba library treats Positivism in 8 passages, across 1 author (including Giegerich, Wolfgang).
The problem is the mindless positivistic idea we ordinarily have about truth (‘scientific truth,’ ‘dogma,’ etc.).
Giegerich identifies positivism not as an external threat but as an internalized conceptual deformation that prevents psychology from developing a genuinely negative, non-positive notion of truth.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
The soul and its life is invisible, intangible, and, as long as there is a positive (positivistic) conception of knowing, also unknowable, therefore unspeakable.
Giegerich argues that positivism as an epistemological framework renders the soul categorically inaccessible, making any genuine psychological discourse impossible under its regime.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
Ourselves as people, domesticated, positivized: narcissistic self-observation and introspection. This is a way to escape the soul, to cheat it.
Giegerich diagnoses the positivization of self-knowledge — introspective self-observation — as a evasion of genuine soul-cognition, substituting a comfortable empirical object for the soul’s demand for dialectical self-encounter.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
positivism, positivity 174, 189, 195, 215, 226, 232, 234
The index entry for Giegerich’s text reveals that positivism and positivity are recurrent, systematically deployed concepts throughout the argument, appearing at nearly every major structural juncture.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
‘Events,’ of course, not within the logic of science and positivism, but within a logic that grants events the capability of being in themselves (as facts) meaningful, in themselves speaking events.
Giegerich contrasts the positivist logic of science — which renders events mute data — with a mythological logic in which events carry intrinsic meaning, arguing that psychology requires the latter.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Chemistry resulted from the radical exclusion of the ‘world serpent’… from the definition of all substances, so that it could exclusively focus on what is logically positive or ‘cat, nothing but cat’ about the substances.
Giegerich uses the historical divergence of alchemy and chemistry to illustrate how positivism operates by excising interiority and dialectical depth from its objects, leaving only their logically positive surface.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
God is not a positivity. But is ‘imagining Gods’ an improvement? Or is it not much rather inferior to taking God literally by believing in him?
Giegerich invokes the concept of positivity to critique archetypal psychology’s imaginal Gods, arguing that reducing the divine to mere ‘as-if’ fictions does not escape positivism but rather produces a weaker, more dishonest form of it.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
We are not in a kind of ‘imaginary museum’… having all the images, Gods, and forms of thinking of all ages as atemporal options or Platonistic Forms available to us.
While not using the term directly, Giegerich implies that treating archetypes as ahistorical menu items reflects a positivistic domestication of the soul’s temporal and historical situatedness.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside