An Epistemological Perspective of Individuation

For the ancient Romans, "Terminus" was the god of boundaries, represented as large stones used to divide and delimit fields. Festivals were held, called Terminalia, in which the stones that "generated" human space were sanctified. Our word "term" is the heir of that god, or better, it is that god incorporated into an everyday space, in our Lebenswelt or world of life. A philosophical term, whatever its semantic content, is the conceptual mark that we make by establishing a referential sign, it is the action of determining, of generating a reference in a mental space, a reference with which we make a sign correspond, or if we deal with a physical space, the correspondence with an object, be it a milestone, a stone, or an indicator sign. Since its beginnings, philosophy has used binary semantic terms as thinking tools, something that analytical psychology has also made good use of.
One of the longest-running binary semantic terms for psychology in general is still today the one that establishes the Conscious/Unconscious (C/I) opposition. Furthermore, the different psychoanalytic buildings that the Western psychological tradition has built stand on this opposition. The term or operator C/I, as used by Carl Jung, determines the psychic space from a direct intuition of the vital experience of the adult: the unit of apperception of the environment and of basic cognitive continuity that designates the pronoun "I", or "ego."
For Jung, the ego is the complex factor that functions as a referent for both physical and psychic content. Ego and C/I are understood together: consciousness is the function or activity that maintains the relationship of psychic content with respect to the ego. . In this sense, the egoic function gives its shape to the psychic contents of consciousness. According to Jung, the ego is at the center of conscious activity, although the fact that the specific difference between Consciousness and Unconscious is the ego would imply that the ego occupies a rather liminal position between both concepts: the ego is a indexing frontier of psychic activities that have reached a certain formal coherence in relation to memory, it is a psychic function that sinks its roots in its border with the unconscious. But let us leave aside for the moment memory, Mnemosyne, the function that acts as a substrate for the unit of intuitive apperception from which the egoic function arises, in order to establish the basic topology of psychic space. The psychic space is made explicit in Jungian terms as in the graph: the dotted lines define the egoic function in a liminal way.

 

 

 According to the given definition of consciousness, the unconscious would be the psychic activity whose contents do not have the term of the ego as a referent. But this is not so, since a semantic term like the one used C/I, is built on a semantic opposition that implies a mutual determination. The Unconscious remains captured as meaning in its determination as non-ego, it then appears to us as a direct non-apperception of ourselves that acts contiguously with consciousness, and whose nature presents continuity with consciousness. The Unconscious then reveals itself to us as a place of relative ignorance, and the conscious as the place of relative knowledge. Since we started from the fact that the ego centers the physical contents as well as the psychic ones, cognitive relativity also extends to the knowledge of the physis, and invalidates any absolute value of the representations of science, since they are always those of an ego that is unknown. and its references cannot but be contingent and conditioned to such self-knowledge.
In this way, the unit of direct and intuitive apperception of the Ego that knows its limitation (although it does not know its limits), becomes the basis of all vital human experience, as well as the motor for its development. The ignorant ego is a dissatisfied ego that seeks its perfection in an asymptotic expansion of its liminal border with the Unconscious, a dynamic unity that appears to it as an integration that does not seem like a process that it can direct from its own cognitive precariousness. Thus, we see that the foundation of Jungian psychology -like that of so many psychologies that have emerged from the perennial philosophy- is epistemological, and that an ontology of cognitive action is derived from it: "what is" is revealed in a process of self-knowledge, or said with a metaphor, in a journey of luminous self-manifestation.