Long-term readers would know that the approach I have taken to this blog over the last several years has been exploratory in nature, which is a fancy way of saying that I’ve written about whatever I wanted without any overarching theme beyond what interested me at the time.
Curiously, this seemingly unstructured approach has eventually led to a set of ideas that have a fairly fixed structure, which I have recently started calling the Archetypal Human. In the last several months, I’ve been trying to figure out where this set of ideas fits in the larger scheme of things. Originally, I thought that the holism of Jan Smuts or the integral theory of Ken Wilber were candidates. I still think that’s broadly true. However, the direction that both holism and integral theory have taken in the wider culture is not one that I find compelling.
Recently, I got around to reading the main work of the Canadian literary theorist, Northrop Frye. From his book, The Anatomy of Criticism, I could see immediately that the Archetypal Human concept is a natural progression from Frye’s archetypal literary criticism. Importantly, Frye believed that the archetypal approach could provide a kind of unification of the humanities and that’s how I see the Archetypal Human concept since it aims to incorporate literature, psychology, history, anthropology and biology.
In any case, I have inadvertently found myself with a set of ideas and a name. The question has become what to do with it all. I don’t know what the right answer is, but my experience in these matters is try a few new things and see if any of them work.
One of the things I’m going to try is a new blog project focused on the Archetypal Human concept. I’ve decided to host that on substack just to see if that opens up any interesting new possibilities. Interested readers can find it here – https://simonsheridan.substack.com/ The first post entitled “Why we should care about stories” is already up.
The blog will be free to read and you can subscribe to receive notifications by email when a post goes live.
While I’m trying the substack experiment, I won’t be posting to this blog except in the event that something newsworthy occurs. I’ll give it until the end of the year to evaluate whether the experiment has yielded any results.
So, I’ll either see you on substack or see you next year!
Looking forward to your substack. This seems to be the place where interesting writers are currently gathering (already have subscribed to so many that I am overwhelmed).
Secretface – thanks!