A Jungian Notebook

2009-03-05T15:56:00.006-05:00

The Appeal of Indian Goddesses

It is true, as Jung said, that we cannot help but view foreign cultures through our own Western eyes. It is always “they” in contrast to “us.” This is why he was opposed to Western adaptation to Eastern religions and practices. At best we turn the practices into “techniques” which bear little if any relation to the true sources of those religious practices. Jung refers to the Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola as comparable although different. However, for many seekers today to meditate on the life of Christ would be meaningless. Eastern meditation practices on the other hand have proved eminently adaptable.

Ten years ago I became acquainted with the India goddess Devi, unfortunately not in India, but secondhand, first having read a review of the spectacular exhibit “The Great Goddess” at the Smithsonian, and later through studying many illustrated works about her. Devi, I learned, came in thousands of guises, such as Durga, Ma, Kali, Shakti. Kumari, Lhamo. Every village in which she was honored gave her a different name. Her lineage is traced to pre-historic times and she is to this day widely worshipped throughout India, Nepal and Tibet.

We Catholics had Mary, Virgin and the Mother of God. After Mary’s death she was taken up bodily into heaven where she now reigns side by side with Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Jung referred often to Mary. When her Assumption became dogma in 1950 he was elated for to him it meant that the Holy Trinity had now achieved the perfection of a Quarternity. Catholic women I knew of my generation had no special devotion to Mary, nor did I. ( An old nun I knew once said to me: “It’s the men who need Mary.” ) The insipid statues and pictures of her and those dreary Perpetual Novenas to her did nothing to incite our devotion. At that time her great “Magnificat” was sung or said only in Latin so we were not able to appreciate her jubilant response to having been called to become the Mother of God. We Catholics were to turn to Mary to help us in our need and she would intercede for us, but otherwise her role was a passive one. “Be it done unto me according to they word.”

India’s religious imagery alone caught me, not its history, religions or spiritual practices. I was captivated, nearly exclusively, by the paintings and sculptures of Devi in her myriad manifestations, but particularly in her Durga aspect. No doubt I was drawn to her because my ideas about women had been transformed by the feminist movement of the sixties and seventies. Also, I had by then rejected the model of women as submissive and sacrificial victim, an ideal that had been fostered by such great Catholic luminaries as Paul Claudel, Leon Bloy, Georges Bernanos, Charles Peguy as well as T.S. Eliot (The Cocktail Party) and Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited) and that had sentimental appeal to me in my fervent years as a Catholic.

The shifting forms of Durga, whether that of a many-armed fierce warrior or a full breasted, smiling and benign figure, I found delightful and stirring. Whether at rest or in full battle regalia, in her fullness and many-sidedness, she was a dynamic embodiment of the feminine. The Devi were worshipped as either greater than the male gods or their equals, a cosmic force, shakti, out of which life itself came forth. With the help of Jung’s method of active imagination, this magnificent fantastic imagery offered revelations of the feminine, that I don’t believe would have been possible in my own Western, Christian culture.

The Polish poet and indomitable traveler, Zbigniew Herbert, found that in his encounters with a strange cultures he experienced “fresh perceptions and a feeling of awe,” to which the natives had become inured. Although the Westerner may not understand the full depth of another culture, even its strangest elements may have a compelling attraction that need not be refused.

2009-03-02T15:03:00.004-05:00

Jung’s Quest for the Grail in India

Jung’s account of his experience in India illuminates how much the subjective factor enters into our observations and judgments—how much baggage we bring with us when encountering individuals or entire peoples who are foreign to us. He called this subjective factor “the personal equation.” Jung applied the concept of the personal equation to the psychologist who must be knowledgeable about his own personality in order to evaluate as objectively as possible the psyches of others. To do that he had to be free from collective opinions and have “ a clear conception of his own individuality.” And for Jung his individuality was distinctly a European one.

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung describes his impressions of India which he visited in 1938 as the guest of the British government. He had read widely in Indian philosophy and religion, and his travels in India would enable him to make his own judgments about what he had learned through his readings. Before going to India, however, he had been deeply immersed in his studies on alchemy. So much so that he brought with him a 1602 volume of the writings of the philosopher alchemist Gerhard Dorn which absorbed much of his time during the voyage. Everything he witnessed in that continent was to serve as a counterpoint to this “fundamental strata of European thought.” Throughout his journey “[I] remained within myself like a homunculus in the retort. India affected me like a dream, for I was and remained in search of myself, of the truth peculiar to myself.”

Jung’s meetings with many learned Indians gave him the opportunity to compare their culture, religions and philosophy with Europe’s. What Jung deliberately did not do, was to avoid meeting any of India’s “so called holy men.” His more urgent need was to determine for himself what his own truth was. “Neither in Europe can I make any borrowings from the East, but must shape my life out of myself—out of what my inner being tells me, or what nature brings to me.” One gets the impression that by reading Dorn on the voyage he was forearming himself against the threat that India seemed to pose to his own European identity.

Jung admired certain features of India’s culture and religions, how, for instance, Indians seemed to have been able to assimilate the problem of evil in their religious experience. But he was clearly uncomfortable with much of what he observed, such as the religious imagery in the temples, those “exquisitely obscene sculptures” and, as he wrote later in an essay on India, those “sentimental , grotesque, obscene, monstrous, blood-curdling gods.” For Jung, India’s history, unlike that of Europe, was hidden in an ancient past beyond recall, its religions, its philosophies, as well as its people, seemed to him too “dreamlike.” Buddhism and Islam, in contrast, seemed to him eminently superior—purer.

While in India, Jung became quite ill and spent some time in a hospital in Calcutta. Shortly after he had a dream in which he had been given the task to find the Grail and bring it to a castle. Jung interpreted the dream as thoroughly European. “Imperiously, the dream wiped away all the intense impressions of India and swept me back to the too-long neglected concerns of the Occident, which had formerly been expressed in the quest for the Holy Grail as well as in the search for the philosopher’s stone. I was taken out of the world of India, and reminded that India was not my task, but only a part of the way—admittedly a significant one—which should carry be closer to my goal. It was as though the dream were asking me, ‘What are you doing in India? Rather than seek for yourself and your fellows the healing vessel, the servator mundi, which you urgently need. For your state is perilous; you are all in imminent danger of destroying all that centuries have built up.’”

When he left India to return home, he decided not to leave the ship to see Bombay (Mumbai) but once again devoted himself to his alchemical studies. “But India did not pass me by without a trace; it left tracks which lead from one infinity into another infinity.” However, his two short essays on India subsequently published have little to say about those traces.

Jung’s candid account of his experience in India shows us how hard it is to arrive at a true understanding of our own individuality especially when it is, or feels threatened by other individuals or by cultures foreign to us. Jung saw himself not just an individual but as a European. This was not an aberration for Jung, an emotional response to a culture with which he was ill-at ease. It was his conviction that however much we can and should learn from the East, we of the West must remain rooted in our own culture. What we adopt from the East we will surely turn into a “technique” without understanding the spiritual and philosophical sources from which it came. That has has surely happened with regard to Eastern meditation practices which have been adapted to suit the Western individual. But this may not be a bad thing and obviously fills a need, even if they retain only a tenuous link with its Eastern sources.

2009-02-16T12:48:00.003-05:00

A SUPERORDINATE PSYCHOLOGY

The book published last year in honor of James Hillman is entitled "Archetypal Psychologies.” In explaining the choice of this title, editor Stan Marlan quoted Hillman: “I am not the only founder of this school. There is no one single Archetypal Psychology, but many Archetypal Psychologies.” This is another, relatively recent example of the inability of psychology to become that “unitary discipline” its adherents, Jung notably among them, struggled to achieve during the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Shamdasani traces the history of this effort which was seen as central to psychology being accepted as a science. As it turned out this effort proved futile. No single psychology emerged to which all could agree upon.

What distinguishes Jung’s psychology from other psychologies—Shamdasani refers to it as “its singular trait”—was that “it attempted to ground other disciplines and knowledges [sic] through psychology.” “In his view, it was the only discipline which could grasp the subjective factor that underlay other sciences.” [Italics added]

His signature concepts contained many different ideas which attempted to resolve major debates in philosophy, psychology, sociology, biology, anthropology, comparative religion and other fields, and enable the formation of a distinct discipline of psychology. It is precisely this combinatory operation that gives his psychology its distinctive style and substance.

Jung’s envisioned psychology as “encyclopedic,” embracing all of human experience. An encyclopedic psychology should not be limited by a particular system —the soul cannot be contained within a system or specialization. “This was psychology on a grand scale.” This was, as Shamdasani concludes, an impossible task as Jung himself later acknowledged.

Perhaps in and of itself the psychology Jung envisioned was unlikely to succeed because it demanded too much on the part of the human egos involved. It is certain that specialization in the sciences and even in the humanities had already become so entrenched that this wider, all embracing vision was doomed from the beginning.

Still, I wonder. As the archival material on Jung and his psychology is published and made more widely available, we can expect new efforts to understand Jung’s psychology as he intended it. Perhaps these efforts will not result in the formulation of a psychology that sees itself as “superordinate” to all disciplines and other fields of knowledge and human experience—but certainly a psychology that is deeply and essentially engaged with them. If it will be superordinate, it is in the sense that it brings to them all, as Jung understood, “the subjective factor that underlay all other sciences” but which now remains elusive, ignored, or manipulated to accommodate ends external to it.

2009-02-15T13:15:00.003-05:00

REDISCOVERING JUNG

There is a prodigious work underway that will result in a radical revision of what we think we know about Jung and his psychology. In my reckoning it began in 2003 with the publication of Sonu Shamdasani’s groundbreaking book Jung and the Making Of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science. A historian of psychology and psychiatry, Shamdasani had access to a wealth of unpublished documents, including letters (some 30,000 apparently), lectures, lecture and seminar notes. In that same year the Philemon Foundation, with Shamdasani as General Editor, was established with the task of publishing this vast archival material. Already published by the Foundation are Children’s Dreams by Jung and the Jung-White Letters. Due out in the Fall of this year is Jung’s famous Red Book, a facsimile edition, edited by Shamdasani. In addition, The Foundation has undertaken another important project, a much needed, new translation of The Complete Works (obviously,no longer “complete.”) (For more information about the Philomen Foundation see Philemon Foundation

Shamdasani has demonstrated with his masterful study, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology, that much of what is accepted today as “Jungian psychology” does not represent how Jung himself conceived and developed it. The discipline that goes by the name of Jungian psychology is “a school of psychotherapy” that despite its claim to have originated with Jung, shouldn’t be identified with the psychology Jung worked to achieve. Instead his terms and concepts have been given other meanings than he intended while many of the issues that he was concerned with have been forgotten or ignored. “To refer to Jungian psychology in the singular—even divided into schools—has become an anachronism,” Shamdasani asserts. Jung never sought to found a particular school of psychotherapy. Instead, his intentions were focused on developing a general psychology, an aspiration in keeping with the 19th century conception of psychology as a unitary science.

With meticulous scholarship applied to a rich lode of new material Shamdasani has shown that many of Jung’s concepts were not original with him, but were being offered, discussed and debated by many others during his time. By actively engaging with them in thinking through these concepts and the problems associated with them, Jung was able to shape and refine his own ideas.

What this history also makes clear but has not been given much attention by his followers, is how wide Jung cast his net. He strove after universality. “No special theory or special subject,” wrote Jung, “should be propounded, but psychology should be taught in its biological, ethnological, medical, philosophical, cultural-historical and religious aspects.” His aim, says Shamdasani, was nothing less than “to free the teaching of human soul from the ‘constriction of compartments.’ “ But Jungian psychology as it was formulated by his followers resulted in “a radical and unacknowledged diminution of Jung’s goal.”

But given the impetus provided by Shamdasani’s Jung and the Origins of Modern Psychology and the endeavors of the Philemon Foundation and the Jungian-based societies associated with it, there is good reason to expect that we are at the beginning of a promising era in Jungian studies. Jung was certainly a man of his time, as Shamdasani convincingly shows us, but his vision of the task of psychology, once understood and applied, makes him a necessary man for our time as well.

2009-01-29T14:38:00.002-05:00

Jung and Giegerich on the Individual:
Jung

Giegerich believes the individual is psychologically obsolete, meaning that the individual is no longer the concern of psychology, which now must function on a higher level of consciousness, among those forces that science and technology have unleashed. He admits that the soul finds its expression in individuals, but remains the driving force irrespective of the individual will and intention.

In contrast, Jung believed that these historical events (such for example, the rise of science and technology) take place nowhere else but in the hidden, subjective experience of the individual psyche. Jung makes this radical claim on behalf of the individual:

The great events of world history, are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch. ( “The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man,” CW 10, para. 315. )

Far from viewing them as insignificant, Jung saw the problems of the individual, as fundamentally related to the problems of the time, that “practically every subjective difficulty has to be viewed from the standpoint of the human situation as a whole.” (para. 323) I take this to mean that consciously or unconsciously, the individual self experiences the problems present in the culture as a whole. As individuals we are the carriers or agents of these situations and the problems that may result. We are not, for example, a post-racial society, now that we have elected our first African-American president. Racism is still a powerful negative force, despite the strides that have been made to overcome it. Racism exists because it exists in individuals, acting as individuals or through the groups that individuals generate to further their aims. Can we treat “racism”as an abstraction, as a thing in itself, apart from the racism of individuals? What existence of its own does it really have?

The persistence of racism has been analyzed from many perspectives. So too is this financial mess under intense scrutiny. Human beings created this financial monster and brought it down as well, but the human equation in all of this has not yet been seriously addressed. To do so from a strictly moralistic point of view—“it’s just a matter of greed”—just won’t do. Facile moral judgments do not begin to approach the deeper and elusive causes and consequences. Meanwhile, the focus of psychology, unfortunately, has been exclusively on the individual, as if there were no vital connection with the larger world. As James Hillman and Michael Ventura noted several years ago, “We’ve had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy-and the World’s Getting Worse.”

Empowered by the soul, these events, according to Giegerich, are forces, having their own purpose and direction. What responsibility we have is to “listen” to them, to understand what their purpose and direction might be. There is truth to this, but it is not clear how this approach keeps itself free of human intervention or can be indifferent to the search for meaning from the human perspective.

2009-01-25T11:57:00.003-05:00

Jung & Giegerich on the Individual:
Jung

In “The Development of Personality” Jung draws, from the New Testament account of the Temptation of Christ by the Devil, an illuminating example of the “opposition” between the objective psyche and the individual. I quote it in part:

The story of the Temptation clearly reveals the nature of the psychic power with which Jesus came into collision: it was the power-intoxicated devil of the prevailing Caesarean psychology that led him into dire temptation in the wilderness. This devil was the objective psyche that held all the peoples of the Roman Empire under its sway, and that is why it promised Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth, as if it were trying to make a Caesar of him. Obeying the inner call of his vocation, Jesus voluntarily exposed himself to the assaults of the imperialistic madness that filled everyone, conqueror and conquered alike. In this way he recognized the nature of the objective psyche which had plunged the whole world into misery and had begotten a yearning for salvation that found expression even in the pagan poets. Far from suppressing or allowing himself to be suppressed by this psychic onslaught, he let it act on him consciously, and assimilated it. Thus was the world-conquering Caesarism transformed into spiritual kingship, and the Roman Empire into the universal kingdom of God that was not of this world.
(CW 17, para. 309)

For Jung, Christ is a shining exemplar of the meaning of personality. “Personality,” according to Jung, is “the complete realization of our whole being” and is “an unattainable ideal.” That it is unattainable is no reason not to strive after it. “Ideals are only signposts, never the goal.” What is required is trust, or to apply the more accurate Greek translation, “trustful loyalty” to one’s own being.

In fidelity to the inner call of his vocation, Jung writes, Christ willingly let himself be exposed to the Devil’s temptations. In allowing himself to be subjected to the Devil, Christ recognized the true nature of the objective psyche. Going still further, Christ let the objective psyche act on him consciously and assimilated it. [My italics.] Jung, unfortunately, stops there without any further explanation. It does however suggest to me that the relation of the individual to the objective psyche is not one of opposition, as it is commonly understood. Yet Christ resisted the temptations. What then was at work in this encounter? One explanation may be that from the outset, Christ was fully conscious of the nature of the devil’s intentions and false promises. It was this consciousness, as well as fidelity to his vocation, that protected him from the devil’s wiles. But how did he and why did he, as Jung states, consciously let the Devil “act on him” and enable him to assimilate those temptations? I am inclined to accept as a partial explanation Jung’s view that the personal, subjective psyche together with the objective, collective unconscious are both aspects of the human psyche, rather than Giegerich’s objective psyche as an absolutely autonomous force with a will and direction of its own. In which case, an encounter with the objective psyche is at bottom an encounter with oneself, a relationship with oneself.

I wished that Jung had developed further what he meant by Christ’s consciously letting the objective psyche act upon it and by assimilating it. But, he did give an idea of what he meant in an earlier paragraph.

So although the objective psyche can only be conceived as a universal and uniform datum, which means that all men share the same primary, psychic condition, this objective psyche must nevertheless individuate itself if it is to become actualized, for there is no other way in which it could express itself except through the individual human being. ( para 307)

There is one exception to this and that is when the objective psyche completely takes hold of a group, in which case, the result will be disastrous. That is because the objective psyche can of itself only function unconsciously and has not been “assimilated into any consciousness or assigned its place among the existing conditions of life.” This suggests to me that far from being obsolete, metaphysically or otherwise, the individual alone, in contrast to the collective, has the ability and responsibility to answer to the objective psyche.

2009-01-21T15:04:00.004-05:00

Last Afterthought:
A possible alternative?

George Steiner’s comments on the thought and style of the German philosopher Heidegger ("In Place of a Foreword," Martin Heidegger, University of California Press, 1987) suggest another way of approaching Giegerich’s thought and style. Steiner has this to say about Heidegger:

“I am not convinced that Heidegger wanted to be ‘understood’ in the customary sense of that word; that he wanted an understanding which would entail the possibility of restating his views by means of a more or less close paraphrase.” An ancient epigram on Heraclitus . . . admonishes the reader: ‘Do not be in too great a hurry to get to the end of Heraclitus the Ephesian’s book; the path is hard to travel. Gloom is there and darkness devoid of light. But if an initiate be your guide, the path shines brighter than sunlight.” p.11

Steiner notes that “initiation” should not be taken to mean what it ordinarily means. “Heidegger conceives of his ontology, of his poetics of thought, to be such that they cannot, finally, be reconciled to the manner of ratiocinations and linear argument that has governed Western official consciousness after Plato. To ‘understand’ Heidegger is to accept entry into an alternative order or space of meaning and of being. If we grasped him readily or were able to communicate his intent in other words than his own, we would already have made the leap out of Western metaphysics. . . . We would, in a very strong sense, no longer have any need of Heidegger. It is not ‘understanding’ that Heidegger’s discourse solicits primarily. It is ‘experiencing,’ an acceptance of felt strangeness. We are asked to suspend in ourselves the conventions of common logic and unexamined grammar in order to ‘hear,’ to ‘stand in the light of’—all these are radical Heideggerian notions—the nearing of elemental truths and possibilities, of apprehension long buried under the frozen crust of habitual, analytically credible saying."p. 11

“Even if put in this clumsy way, Heidegger’s demand seems to be a sort of mystical bullying.” p. 12

These observations could be applied to Giegerich. To Greg Mogenson’s criticism about the individual being obsolete, Giegerich retorted: “My thesis is that the obsolescence of the individual is on a different level, . . . which can be seen in the last passage [in parentheses] from my article …(’even though it [the life of the psyche] lives through us and needs us to give expression to it.’) The parentheses are to indicate that . . . I have left the otherwise psychological level of my discourse [Italics added] and shifted to another, the extrapsychological discourse of common sense or everyday consciousness. . . . I am not speaking from the point of view of ordinary reality.” We are being asked, as in Steiner’s comment on Heidegger, to “suspend” our thinking from conventional thought in order to “apprehend,” to get hold of, the truth “buried under the frozen crust “of rational, logical thought.

Then there is the problem of language. Even Germans, writes Steiner, who are philosophically literate, find Heidegger impenetrable. To write in German about Heidegger is difficult enough says Steiner, but to try to do so in English, “a language that is natively hostile to certain orders of abstruseness and metaphoric abstraction, is well nigh impossible.”

Heidegger may be a “mystical bully” in the demands he makes on his readers, but Steiner says, despite that much of Heidegger “does get through, though in ways not readily identifiable with the usual modes of understanding and ‘re-statabilty’ (already, and this is part of the dilemma, one finds oneself groping for new words)." This must be said of Giegerich as well. Why does he continue to fascinate as well as frustrate? Perhaps, as Steiner suggests regarding Heidegger, we should look for enlightenment to poetry where paraphrasing and analysis are useless, or to music which conveys its meaning in its own language.

2009-01-20T08:52:00.004-05:00

Jung & Giegerich
Afterthoughts

Earlier I commented on Giegerich’s style which is a significant inhibitor for anyone seriously interested in his thinking. Ginette Paris expresses well what I am sure is a common complaint:

But courage and determination are also needed from the reader, to cut through Giegerich’s heavy Hegelian language. He seems to intentionally wrap his ideas in layers and layers of impossible language and Germanic heaviness to protect them from uninitiated frivolous French amateurs like myself. To this I answer . . .that obtuse academic style creates a problem similar to that of pharmaceutical companies who produce unaffordable medicines for deadly diseases. Those of us, psychologists, who are most hungry for philosophy cannot all afford the time and training it takes to dig for gold in scholarly journals or in Hegel. (“Giegerich/Hillman: What is Going On? Psychology at the Threshold” www.rubedo.psc.br)

In suspecting that Giegerich’s style is deliberate, Paris may be right. He is certainly capable of writing with clarity when he wants to, for example, with his essay “Islamic Terrorism,” included, however, in a book intended I assume for a general audience and not exclusively for Jungian professionals. (Jungian Reflections on September 11: A Global Nightmare, eds., Luigi Zoya and Donald Williams). When it comes to the temenos of psychology, Giegerich draws the line, beyond which the uninitiated dare not go.

Giegerich devotes the entire first chapter of The Soul's Logical Life to separating the wheat from the chaff, or— to use his elaborate metaphor of the wedding feast from the New Testament—who is invited to the wedding and who is not. Only those who are wearing the wedding garment may enter to do psychology, meaning those who are capable of shedding the every day clothing of the ego personality for the wedding garment of the new personality of the Self. In short, Giegerich argues for “an elitist and esoteric” psychology—esoteric, he notes, in the authentic meaning of the word. In the Oxford dictionary it is defined as “intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest.”

Giegerich has just grounds for the severe criticisms he makes in this book and elsewhere in his writings. It is also understandable that, as with the sciences, psychology as a discipline requires adepts who have been thoroughly trained for it. No one will argue otherwise, especially today when psychology and the sciences interact with one another.

However Giegerich himself defines the term “esoteric,” his psychology is, or appears to be, yet another variation of gnosticism—psychology as a secret body of knowledge known only to those who are initiated (who have the proper wedding garment) or enlightened (have demonstrated they have shed their old ego personality for the new Self.) His writing style certainly is a significant contributing factor to this perception.

I believe that Giegerich is one of the very few whom Jung would call a truly modern man, whom he described has having achieved a fuller consciousness than most humans are capable of. It is puzzling to me that such a modern man offers a psychology that is deliberately arcane and accessible only to the initiated. It stands in such stark contrast to the capaciousness, the openness to the world, its past, present and future, of Jung and his psychology. One is reluctantly forced to ask, ultimately of what value will it be, except to the chosen few?

2009-01-19T13:07:00.001-05:00

Jung & Giegerich on the Individual:
Giegerich (2)

As Giegerich reminds us, Jung never intended his psychology to be focused one-sidedly on the individual. As conceptualized and practiced, Jungian psychology centers chiefly on the psychological concerns of the individual, to the neglect of the larger world distinct from the individual. Psyche, however, as Jung claimed, is not in us, but rather, we are in psyche. If this is true then psychology is fundamentally not about the individual self, but about the soul, psyche in itself. The soul is the all, into which the individual is subsumed.

At this moment in time, the soul has migrated into the universe of science and technology, into which Giegerich would undoubtedly include all those impersonal, collective forces at work in our contemporary world, such as finance. But what then of the individual? In this world the human has become a secondary factor, “dethroned” as it were. Financial activity is not about achieving human well-being (except for the very few perhaps) but for profit maximization. Accumulation of money is now the magnum opus of the soul. The human individual is now “metaphysically redundant,” The soul pursues, like “an elementary force of nature,” its own objectives in which the individual serves, at best, as a passive instrument of the soul’s will. Or so Giegerich tells us.

Giegerich attached a Coda to Volume II of his Collected Papers that comes, as close as we can hope for, to being a summary of the main thrust of his thinking. In that Coda he writes that Jung left us two gifts—a concept of soul and a concept of individuality. Jung believed in the existence in the soul and in doing so “breaks through” what he considers to the “anthropological, biologistic, personalistic prejudice that permeates all of our psychology today. Jung understood that “man is in soul, not the other way around.” For this very reason, if paradoxically, Jung gave us a concept of individuality that frees the individual person from being defined, “imprisoned” in these categories. Only in the soul, however, can we discover “our true universal humanness.”

In ending this Coda, Giegerich does not offer any kind of “lofty program for the illumination of the world, but a little light to be carried, in the silence and unseenness of what we as individuals do, through the night of our present.” So, he is not giving up on the individual but more than that he has not a great deal to say. Perhaps that task will be taken up by others. There is reason to hope, thanks to the Philemon Foundation, that there will be a re-visioning of Jung’s psychology now that all of his copious writings are finally to be published, well as a new translation of the Collected Works.

In the meantime, if the soul is now where the action is, in sciences and technology, are we being faithful to soul, if we do not engage with them, as Jung did during his time, by permitting ourselves to be defined by, or as Giegerich says, “imprisoned” by them?

2009-01-17T14:50:00.005-05:00

Jung & Giegerich on the Individual:
Giegerich (1)

One of the most disturbing features of Giegerich’s thought is that the individual has been removed from the center of psychology. What is psychology, after all, but the study of the human mind or psyche? If the individual is no longer at the center what has replaced it? It is the soul. Psychology is not about what is going on inside people, it is about the logical life of the soul, and as such is a “discipline of thought proper.” It is “thought” because the soul “cannot be perceived with the senses, it cannot be imagined, it can only be perceived in thought.” With this understanding of psychology we enter an entire different level of reality, that of the abstract. But that is as it should be, because the world with its institutions and processes has already shifted to the reality of the abstract. (Just think, to give only one example, how money has shifted from the barter of goods, to precious metals, to paper, and now to the transmission of electronic information where it can be said it no longer physically exists.)

With extraordinary prescience Giegerich wrote in 1996:

Our life is governed by absolutely uncanny, abstract and irrational forces or processes that nobody comprehends and that other ages have not known: the large-scale processes in both the entire economy and large business organizations and even in politics, even though still man-made in a certain sense tend to become more and more subject-less, ‘anonymous’ processes high and above the heads and will of people, processes following their own internal but known laws, which makes them largely unpredictable and made the development of chaos theory necessary. The new developments in the stock markets are especially uncanny and irrational. The trade with derivatives involves thousands of billions of dollars; it is a trade with abstract ‘options’ or ‘futures’ that are not backed up by, or have a solid relation to any real economic value. If anything went seriously wrong in this area, it could have disastrous consequences for everyone in the world. (The Soul’s Logical Life, p. 28)

In a dozen years what Giegerich describes has come to pass. Here is a psychologist who forsaw well enough what was happening, while most of our most esteemed economists and financiers did not. Giegerich goes on to warn that given this altered state in which we now exist, conventional ways of thinking having to do with human motives and desires are no longer adequate. Our problems, he says, are of a “fundamentally different order of abstraction.” While they are man-made, they function autonomously and beyond human comprehension, must less control. This is why psychology, if it is to be found adequate to its task, must itself function at a greater level of consciousness. The old, conventional ways of thinking just won’t do and by this he includes conventional Jungian psychology with its emphasis on individual therapy. No longer can psychology cannot limit itself to what concerns the individual’s personal psyche. But to move beyond this nearly exclusive focus on the individual, psychology must be able to comprehend this abstract reality on its own terms, meaning it must develop “ a truly psychological mode of conceptual, abstract thought.”

It is important and only fair to Giegerich to understand the context in which he writes about the displacement of the individual. He does so not because he finds this seismic transition to abstraction desirable or has some kind of animus against the individual or even Jungian psychotherapy. (He is himself a practicing analyst.) He does so because it is the reality of this time which we have not yet come to grips with. It is important and only fair to Giegerich to understand the context in which he writes about the displacement of the individual. He does so not because he finds this seismic transition to abstraction desirable or has some kind of animus against the individual or even Jungian psychotherapy. (He is himself a practicing analyst.) He does so because it is the reality of this time which we have not yet come to grips with. It also explains why he claims that we cannot do so using “ancient tools” such as “myths, symbols, divine images, rituals, oracles, visions and the like nor the modern tools (empathy, hermeneutic understanding, subjective confession, free association, dream interpretation, analysis of transference, etc.)” None of these can be of use to us in understanding the situation of the soul in our time. An entirely new psychology is required, more of the intellect, less of the emotions, and above all “most stringent abstract thought.” It is to the concept of this new psychology that Giegerich is dedicated. How it is in fact to be realized is not at all clear.

Among the many questions Giegerich’s psychology raises, is the place of the individual, now that he or she has been displaced.

2009-01-14T15:01:00.003-05:00

Giegerich & Jung on the Objective Psyche: Giegerich

Jung repeatedly, throughout his works, described what he meant by the objective psyche or collective unconscious. Giegerich has not been so forthcoming. In his magnum opus The Soul’s Logical Life, he identifies the objective psyche with the soul, which he defines as “at bottom logical life and thought” and that “logical life is thought.” He redefines psychology itself as “a discipline of thought proper.” In the introduction to Technology and the Soul, he writes “Psychology, to the extent that it is committed to the notion of the objective psyche, studies what the psychic phenomena themselves think; it thinks the thoughts whose thinking they are.”

I am not about to attempt to interpret what that might mean, but suggest that Giegerich is giving his own spin to the objective psyche which may or may not have anything much to do with Jung’s notion of it. He elevates his objective psyche to an abstraction, in contrast to Jung’s which is, as has been noted, “embedded” in the very structure of the human brain and nervous system and is the accumulation of human experience over the aeons. Jung describes the objective psyche as an aspect or a level of the psyche, along with consciousness and the personal unconscious. With Giegerich the objective psyche appears disconnected, a free floating force to which the human psyche has only a tenuous, subordinate relationship. Jung also refers at times to the psyche as “the soul” but implied is the whole of the psyche and not one aspect of it. It has autonomy, but not an absolute one as seems to be the case with Giegerich’s objective psyche.

Because thought is the real for Giegerich, and since the Soul is thought, is the Soul alone real? Is Giegerich proposing a philosophy of psychology which may have had its origin with Jung, but which has taken off in a radically different direction? There is a rich lode to be found in Geigerich but there are huge obstacles to hurdle before getting to it. To begin with Giegerich does not bother much to explain what he means by his terms. He assumes the reader knows or should know. He asserts the truth of his statements, leaving them to be accepted as is. Where do these ideas originate? In what context? Shamdasani demonstrates how Jung’s thinking, in contrast, was both enriched and challenged by the intellectual movements of his time. Despite occasional references to other thinkers, Giegerich’s work appears sui generis—too much so. His dogmatism eventually leads to doubts about some of his most interesting and provocative ideas—concerning the objective psyche for instance. His convoluted style is of course a problem, as Ginette Paris and James Hillman have conceded. I was reminded of this in reading Sonu Shamdasani’s comment about the ethologist Adolf Bastian whose work had an important influence on Jung— Bastian’s work was eventually forgotten “not the least of the reasons for this lay in the impenetrability of his style of writing.” I am afraid this will be Giegerich’s fate unless Jungians with the necessary background (e.g. Hegel) are willing to engage and challenge him.

There remains the question of how Jung and Giegerich view the role of the individual in relation to the objective psyche. . . .

2009-01-13T15:47:00.004-05:00

Jung and Giegerich on the Objective Psyche:
Jung

There are significant differences between Jung and Giegerich in what each means by the “objective psyche.” For Jung it is the collective unconscious, that aspect of the psyche common to all humans: it is inherited, impersonal, universal and the foundation of both consciousness and the personal unconscious. It possesses an energy of its own, independent of consciousness, but must be restrained by consciousness. For Giegerich, the objective psyche is the Soul which has its own logic or structure. He attributes to it, as does Jung, a powerful energy and autonomy particular to itself. It is not clear what relation consciousness and the personal or subjective unconscious have to it, although they are apparently subordinate to the Soul. Humans cannot prevail against the Soul’s implacable will. Jung, in contrast, places responsibility on the individual to restrain its destructive energies.

Jung.

Jung’s objective psyche has a history and continues to evolve. “[T]he collective unconscious is in no sense an obscure corner of the mind, but the mighty deposit of ancestral experience accumulated over millions of years, the echo of prehistoric happenings to which each century adds an infinitesimally small amount of variations and differentiation. . . . [It is] a deposit of world-processes embedded in the structure of the brain and the sympathetic nervous system. “ (CW 8, “The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,” 376)

Jung’s concept of the objective psyche has explanatory value, not the least because it is organic, connecting us not only with our ancestral past but with our bodies and minds. If rightly understood, it enables an engagement of Jungian thought, sorely lacking until now, with current developments in psychology and the biological sciences particularly with what concerns the problem of consciousness. Jungians fret about Jung’s marginal status, but as Anthony Stevens points out, (Archetype Revisited) perhaps at no other time has Jung’s psychology been so relevant. As the behavioral and biological sciences continue to develop, he notes, so too is there increasing evidence that supports Jung’s psychology, in particular the concept of the collective unconscious.

But more importantly, Jung’s objective psyche offers a conceptual tool with which to come to some understanding of the psychological forces underlying such world-wide phenomena as our current financial catastrophe and the unending bloody wars plaguing so much of the world. There is no dearth of analyses of these events—historical, economic, behavioral, political—all of which are necessary, but the psychological is almost entirely ignored, as if it had nothing to offer. Yet it is precisely this which is missing from the discussions and debates—a willingness to face up to the psychological dynamic at work, conscious or unconscious, personal or collective, responsible for the making and the perpetuating of this morass we find ourselves in.

As Sonu Shamdasani has shown in his masterful study, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology, Jung envisioned psychology as having a“supraordinate” (superior to, of higher value or rank) relation to all other fields of human endeavor, each of which had its own “psychic structure,” or foundation. Jung’s psychology was never intended to be limited to the concerns of the individual or personal psyche, but embraced the entirety of human experience.

2008-12-22T15:42:00.002-05:00

Jung on the Collective Psyche

Despite his severe criticisms of Jung and his psychology, Wolfgang Giegerich acknowledges his indebtedness to Jung as “. . . ’the thinker of the soul’. Jung looked at everything, without exception . . . through this one lens, one might say. In everything he experienced he was able to hold his place in the Notion ‘soul.’ This one thought was binding for all his psychological work….” (The Soul’s Logical Life, p. 43). Jung was, according to Giegerich, an implicit rather than explicit thinker, an intuitive thinker, not a logical or systematic one. But when it came to the soul Jung was truly “gripped by it,” and understood that it has its own independence, it behaves as a kind of objectivity of its own.” Jung also grasped that the soul as Notion or concept cannot be reduced to a kind of substance or entity, or a “mystical entity” out there somewhere. As a concept, the soul is a “property of the mind.” (pp. 42, 43.)

Jung does not refer to the soul or psyche (a term he more frequently used) in a religious or metaphysical sense. He was interested in the psyche as a psychological reality. Thus he proposed “the possibility of a ‘psychology with the psyche’—that is, a theory of the psyche ultimately based on the postulate of an autonomous spiritual principle.” Having ventured Giegerich’s response, we might ask then how Jung would understand this current financial crisis, based on what we know of his concept of the psyche.

The action which Giegerich attributes to the “soul,” Jung attributes to the “collective unconscious.” Both speak of the “objective psyche.” For Geigerich it is the soul. For Jung the objective psyche is another name for the collective unconscious. Jung recognized three aspects to the psyche: consciousness, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious contains everything the individual has forgotten, or repressed along with subliminal sense-perceptions which never reach consciousness. Jung chose the term “the collective” because “this part of the unconscious is not individual, but impersonal and universal. In contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.” (CW9i, 3-4)

The collective unconscious is the “true basis “ of the psyche because both consciousness and the personal unconscious rest on this “inherited and common psychic disposition.” It is a “deposit of world-processes embedded in the structure of the brain and the sympathetic nervous system.” [Italics added. More on this later]

Jung further describes the collective unconscious as a power that is as “hard and immitigable as granite, immovable, inaccessible, yet ready at any time to come crashing down upon us at the behest of unseen powers.” He goes on to say that the huge catastrophes that we are subject to today are not primarily acts of nature but are “psychic events.”

At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. This is the World Power that vastly exceeds all other powers on earth. . .

This power, which is greater than all earthly powers, is “the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul. If anywhere fear of God is justified in the face of the overwhelming supremacy of the psychic.” Our global economic crisis manifests every sign of being a “new madness,” come upon us through the force of the collective psyche as described by Jung.

It may seem then that Jung and Giegerich are in accord in regard to the autonomy of the psyche, acting as it will in pursuit of its own ends, which are not always benign. But there are significant differences between Giegerich’s response to this psychic force and Jung’s and that is what I would like to take up in subsequent postings.

2008-12-20T15:48:00.002-05:00

The Soul of the Financial Crisis

Economists and other adepts in the arcane world of money exchange have given numerous reasons for the global financial disaster now upon us. But given its immensity and near universality, something deeper, more elusive, seems to have been at work. But what is it? It’s tempting to resort to a moral judgment: it’s greed, of course. “Greed is good,” after all. Greed undoubtedly drove those who had made a great deal of money, but wanted more and still more. But was greed the motivation for those who wanted financial security in their retirement years or those who wanted to buy a house for their family? Greed is a huge factor, but it seems too simple, too easy to account for the depth and range of this debacle. If this is the case, what then is going on in our collective psyche that might account for it? Which leads me back to Wolfgang Giegerich and to his much discussed “Reflections on Today’s Magnum Opus of the Soul.”

Giegerich would put it bluntly: it is the magnum opus of the soul that has led us to this predicament. “The supreme value of today” is “the maximizing of profit.” “It is the only, exclusive value prevailing today; it has no other values, no other suns, before or beside it. It is an end, nay, the end in itself. It is our real God, our real Self. This Copernican Revolution is not bloody, but what is happening because of it is terrifying. It’s violence is logical or psychological, we could also say metaphysical.” In 1996 when this essay was published, Giegerich was not predicting the present catastrophe which certainly can be said to be “terrifying” and also “violent,” if we consider the extraordinary damage it has done. What is terrifying, as Giegerich sees it, is that the maximizing of profit represents a radical and irreversible direction for the psyche. What we must not do is judge it to be the wrong direction.

It is psyche that has brought us to this moment, and however disastrous it may seem and indeed, be, it is only “a phase of that ongoing opus” of the psyche. This world-wide breakdown of the economy is no one’s fault, not even the greediest pursuers of profit. The entire process is “more like an elementary force of nature than . . .a deliberate human act” For Giegerich this force is the soul. Where the soul is there “the action is,” in the movement towards the “great abstract goal of profit maximization.” He goes so far as to say it is a mystery, and suggests that it could be “a highly numinous process.”

The hint of the mystical aside, there is something compelling about Giegerich’s argument, that this world-wide crisis we are now experiencing cannot be attributed to human failures or sins. It is too vast, too all embracing. There is also something so inevitable about it, that one could conclude there must be forces other than the human driving it, forces over which we humans have no control. Giegerich calls this force, the soul. But what does he mean by it?

Quoting Jung, Giegerich tells us that “the greater part of the soul is outside the body.” It is a “Universal, and a concrete Universal at that.” Elsewere he wrote that the soul has its own definition, and we should not bring to it our subjective meaning to it, or any definite meanings, or “timeless categories”, such as “the gods.” “The soul itself decides what and how it is at each historical time, not we. The soul is alive and it is Life. It is free, time and again to re-invent itself in the course of history . . . .The soul is always the soul of and in the real. . .”

The term the “objective psyche” was used by Jung in his later writings, to refer to the “collective unconscious.” It is objective because it is impersonal in contrast to the personal or subjective unconscious. But Giegerich does not identify the objective psyche with the collective unconscious as Jung did. In “The Magnum Opus of the Soul,” Giegerich states that although the soul may manifest or “express” itself in individuals and in the collective, it is neither the one nor the other. Rather, the soul has its own life, its own end, even though it expresses itself through the individual or the collective. For Giegerich the soul, as the objective psyche, transcends not only the individual but Jung’s “collective unconscious.” The soul moves on a entirely different level than that of the merely human, whether individual or collective, and contrary to what we would like to believe, serves its own, rather than human needs or interests.

If this is so, where does that leave us as we struggle to come to grips with this global crisis? How are we to understand, can we understand this movement of the soul in this moment of history? He does not merely absolve us from moral responsibility, he concludes the soul’s action has made us redundant. Is it sufficient—or even possible— as Giegerich advises us, not to judge or condemn the soul’s action but accept and seek to understand it psychologically?

2008-10-07T09:19:00.002-04:00

In closing off my reflections on Wolfgang Giegerich’s,
“Reflections on Today’s Magnum Opus of the Soul,”
I leave the last word to Jung.

It is indeed a major effort—the magnum opus in fact —to escape in time from the narrowness of its embrace and to liberate our mind to the vision of the immensity of the world, of which we form an infinitesimal part. In spite of the enormity of our scientific cognition we are yet hardly at the bottom of the ladder, but we are at least so far that we are able to recognize the smallness of our knowledge.

The older I grow the more impressed I am by the frailty and uncertainty of our understanding, and all the more I take recourse
to the simplicity of immediate experience so as not to lose contact with the essentials, namely the dominants that rule human existence throughout the millenniums.

There are two sciences in our days which are at immediate grips with basic problems: nuclear physics and the psychology of the unconscious. There things begin to look really tough, as those who have an inkling of understanding of the one thing are singularly incapable of grasping the other thing; and here, so it looks, the great confusion of languages begins, which once already has destroyed a tower of Babel.

I am trying to hold these two worlds together as long as my machinery allows the effort, but it seems to be a condition which is desperately similar to that of the political world, the solution of which nobody can yet foresee. It is quite possible that we look at the world from the wrong side and that we might find the right answer by changing our point of view and looking at it from the other side, i.e., not from outside, but from inside.

Letter to the Earl of Sandwich, August 10, 1960
(Letters II, p. 580)

2008-10-06T15:04:00.004-04:00

Revisiting Magnum Opus (6)
A New Level of Consciousness

Giegerich concludes his paper “On Today’s Magnum Opus” with a cri de coeur. Is it not we, he asks, who are responsible for the seemingly “meaninglessness” of our situation, because we have refused to recognize it as “an authentic movement of the soul?” “By turning a deaf ear to what is happening and by withholding our appreciation from it, we deprive it of the possibility of being connected to consciousness.”

“The situation” in which we find ourselves is not an abstraction, but our present world-wide crisis which began with the failure of major financial institutions, that will have disastrous effects on all levels of society and in all economies around the globe. It is a crisis of the magnum opus of the Soul— “the maximization of profit.” But in what respect is it “an authentic movement of the soul” which we must “appreciate?” By connecting it to consciousness? What does this mean?

Giegerich advises us to begin by not turning away from it. Not likely we can do this, even if we would like to. Few will escape its effects as the crisis deepens. More important and urgently, we must see it as a “process” that “needs us, needs our heart, our feeling, our imaginative attention and rigorous thinking effort so as to have a chance to become instilled with mind, with feeling, with soul. It must not be left as something that happens totally outside of us and apart from our consciousness.” We have to open up ourselves to it—not sentimentally, but with intelligence—and allow it “to work on us”—not just subjectively or personally, but objectively and factually.

To truly comprehend what this crisis means, as fact and as a “movement of the soul,” requires our striving toward a new level of consciousness, by turning outwards, away from self-preoccupation, and towards the larger reality. Giegerich cautions us that we are far from ready and that it may take not just years, but generations, before “this process comes home to consciousness.”

We have to begin now, however, entering into the process at this moment in time, and as Jung reminds us, we do so “not only [as] the passive witness of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers.” [My emphasis]

2008-10-04T15:06:00.003-04:00

Revisiting Magnum Opus (5)
The natural world de-souled

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber, the first to use the phrase “the disenchantment of the world,”—the ridding of the world of magic— traced its origins back to the Hebrew prophets and as reaching its culmination with the Protestant Reformation. Weber saw it as one of the unique features of Western civilization. In this essay under discussion, Wolfgang Giegerich also sees the 2000 years transition from paganism to Christianity as stripping the natural world of its sacred character. He takes to task the archetypal psychologists, Hillman and others, for “trying again to ensoul the world.”

They are not alone in this attempt, of course. The concern over the exploitation of nature for human purposes, which has evolved into near catastrophic proportions, has further encouraged this desire to “ensoul” or at the very least, to preserve or protect what is left of the natural world. As was noted in previous postings David Abram advises a “going back,” to recover what our ancestors experienced —that soul or spirit which permeated all of nature, including humans. For Giegerich this is no longer possible, the psyche is elsewhere today. To want it to be so is merely nostalgia which “makes us feel good.” This sentiment belongs to “historical psychology.”

Psyche has departed the natural world (meaning a world inhabited by gods and spirits ) and is now found, according to Giegerich, in the sciences and technology. With this transition psyche takes us onto another level of consciousness. Psyche then, as Giegerich sees it, is a process. Jung wrote frequently of “the psychic processes.” In his “Definitions” he defined psyche as “the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious.” (CW 6, 797) While Giegerich suggests the psyche is a process, or that it evolves, it is not clear toward what end. It cannot be, for him, personal individuation. Although he does not say so explicitly, it seems that psyche/soul is evolving towards its own “self-realization.” The individual may be included, I presume, but only as having been subsumed into the great unknown “whole”? This notion, at least, avoids Giegerich’s anthropological fallacy,” that psychology has to do with human beings rather than the soul.

To describe the nature of the psyche, Jung drew on the physics of his time which focused on developing a theory of the laws of energy. [See Murray Stein on this, in his Jung’s Map of the Soul. ] Giegerich likewise draws on the physics of our time, not to provide an analogy with the psyche, however, but to locate the psyche within the physics. This may not be so evident in this particular essay, but is more explicit in an article written some years earlier: “The Nuclear Bomb as a Psychological Reality” (in Technology and The Soul). The fact of the nuclear bomb has put us in “an unheard of situation and into a fundamentally new human condition.” “It is that the objective psyche has long emigrated from the macrophysical world of things perceivable with our unarmed senses, and has settled on the level of nuclear particles and subcellular biology.” He goes on to say that this situation has shattered the natural world as we have known it. . . . .Today the real world is as it is shown to us by nuclear physics.”

But as in the case of earlier analogies, they sooner or later, become less convincing or seen as limited, while new theories develop and take their place. Physics, as Giegerich seems to understand it, is being challenged by physicists and biologists, among others, as reductive— that is, an effort to explain everything in terms of a final, unified theory. One such alternative view is that of “emergence” that is based on the idea that not only organic life, but the entire universe continues to evolve and in ways that cannot be predicted and even seem to have partially escaped the “laws” of nature itself. (It is interesting that there are a number of Jungians currently exploring the theory of emergence and its significance for psychology.) In any event, it appears that psyche cannot be pinned down to a particular paradigm, but continues itself to move on.

One last observation. To recognize psyche as acting in the sciences and technology, does not necessarily mean that the “natural world” of our ancestors is abandoned. We may not look for gods and spirits in nature, as they did, but we are discovering that psyche/soul is still present there, only we understand this presence differently. A new level of consciousness is emerging too that seems far less anthropocentric. With the near universal acceptance of evolution and continuing discoveries in genetics, among other factors, we are recognizing and acknowledging that we ourselves are of nature, related in continually surprising ways to the whole of organic life. Admittedly, this is dawning on us only slowly and will take time to do its transforming work.

2008-09-29T16:04:00.016-04:00

Revisiting Magnum Opus (4)
The obsolescent individual

The soul/psyche, according to Giegerich. is no longer located in the individuation process, but has moved “somewhere else,” that is, into the sciences, technology and the economy. “Not individuation, but globalization” is the magnum opus of the psyche today. In this process we human beings are mere instruments, subservient to its intention, which is the maximization of profits. This is, we are told, “the logic inherent in the powerful ‘autonomous’ movement of the soul. . . It is a development that engulfs us with compelling necessity. . . “ [Italics added] In effect, “we humans are being made metaphysically redundant.” Psychologically this renders the individuation process, so central to Jungian psychology, null and void. It belongs to “historical psychology,” its logical status is that it is “psychologically obsolete, a thing of the past,” because the psyche is now at another level. We cannot judge this as being either good or bad, only accept that “it is real.”

Giegerich’s criticisms are intended for an individuation process as commonly developed in Jungian analysis and therapy which has been almost entirely preoccupied with a psyche, privatized, so to speak, within the individual without reference to the social milieu (e.g. cultural, political, economics, global, etc. ) in which that person is situated. It is against this state of affairs that he forcibly argues. But individuation, as understood and practiced by conventional Jungian psychology, is not what Jung understood individuation to mean. Giegerich acknowledges Jung was not advocating “a one-sided individualism.”

“Individuation” described in A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (eds. Andrew Samuels, et al) lists several attributes of individuation which Jung himself outlined in CW 6, para. 757-762. "(1) the goal of the process is the development of the personality; (2) it presupposes and includes collective relationships, i.e. it does not occur in a state of isolation; (3) individuation involves a degree of opposition to social norms which have no absolute validity; 'The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality.'" Note that two of these three attributes have to do, not with the individual per se, but with its relationship to society as a whole, to the “collective”.

Giegerich is narrowly focused on his understanding of how Jungian psychology is taught and practiced, and on that basis concludes not that it has to be changed, or reach a new level of consciousness, but that is has become mere history. Moreover, in his denial of the individual’s participation in psyche’s “magnum opus” he does not accept that critical world events (let’s take this financial meltdown as an example) reverberate in the individual. Apparently he disagrees with Jung, who wrote: “[E]very individual problem is somehow connected with the problem of the age, so that practically every subjective difficulty has to be viewed from the standpoint of the human situation as a whole.” (CW10, para 324.) Or with Jung’s statement that “In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers.” (para. 315.)

But in the course of the Seminar, in a reply to a critique by Jungian analyst Greg Mogenson, on just this issue of the role of the individual, Giegerich does not dismiss the individual, but rather inverts the individual’s relationship to psyche, and to the “magnum opus,” to the working of psyche in the world. It is not our own “cure” we look for, but rather opening up oneself to what is happening, to “what is going on, to both comprehend it and to be comprehended by it.” He quotes Jung that we should “try to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is . . .We do not cure it, it cures us.” (CW 10, para. 361.) He goes on to say that “It is for us to get their psychological message, to comprehend them and, through our comprehension of them, be transformed by them.” Although how this is to be done is far from clear, Giegerich is proposing not to sideline the individual, but to reverse is relationshop with psyche. If worked at this could lead, I believe, perhaps naively, in our reaching that new level of consciousness where we are told psyche awaits.

2008-09-27T15:22:00.005-04:00

Revisiting the Magnum Opus (3)
Rescuing the World

In the beginning of his paper, Giegerich rejects the—to him— hubristic idea that human beings are capable of rescuing anything, not even themselves, and certainly not the world. Salvation is too great a task which only a Savior can accomplish. Rescue is not what psychology is about. It is not meant to save anything, nor to solve problems, nor to correct errors. At best, if a situation is saved, problems solved, and errors corrected for the individual, it is a mere side effect. The role of psychology is not to take up the cause of the distressed individual, but rather “to enter ever deeper into the predicament, to the very heart of the matter . . . to keep with the alchemical insight that the mess we find ourselves in to being with is the prima materia to whom the psychological eros and the entire Work are dedicated.” It is not we nor the world that needs to be rescued from the predicament, rather it is “the predicament or the pathology itself that needs to be rescued or saved.”

As I write this, we are in such a mess, a financial meltdown of global proportions. Does such a phenomenon qualify for Giegerich as a process for which no one is to blame? Or would he say that “It is a development that engulfs us with compelling necessity and has to be likened more to an elementary force of nature [my italics] than to a deliberate human act.” What exactly this “force of nature” is Giegerich does not tell us. But is it not psyche? The psyche, he tells us, is present “where the action is” —in science and technology and above all, in “the logical subjugation of everything individual under one great abstract goal of profit maximization: profit my increase, but I must decrease.” Surely, it is psyche at work in our global economic catastrophe?

Psychology’s task here is evident: to take on psyche itself, descending with it, into its massa confusa in which this crisis originated, with the intention not to judge, not to condemn, but to analyze and to understand the “predicament.” This is an audacious project, saved only from hubris in that it does not claim to “save the phenomenon,” to rescue us from our predicament. Because this “going through” the predicament, in the sense that Giegerich means, has so seldom, if ever been done, except perhaps superficially and after the fact, such human -made catastrophes tend to recur again.

Giegerich is right in that Jungian psychology must shift from its almost exclusive focus on the individual to that of the wider world and its processes. Yet it is not clear how this is to be done. The discipline of psychology, after all, is a human-made construct resulting from human thought, reflection and experience. Although Giegerich rejects anthropocentrism, the reality is that human beings are intrinsic to where “the action is.” It is all well and good to view about our present situation as the result of psyche, but we cannot avoid human instrumentality. He himself says that psyche works through the situation and expresses itself through us, but has little more to say about human responsibility.

As he has done with the phenomenon of the nuclear bomb, Giegerich may very well advise us that it is necessary to pay attention to, to listen what the debacle itself has to tell us. Apart, however, from the byzantine web of deals made in the interest of the maximation of profits, what, we may wonder, will it reveal other than motivations of greed and pride, two of the "seven deadly sins" which medieval psychology identified centuries ago.

2008-09-23T13:26:00.002-04:00

Revisiting Magnum Opus (2)
The Soul

In The Soul’s Logical Life, Giegerich answers this question in the chapter headed “Why Jung?”— why was it that wherever his own thinking led him, he had to start with Jung? Because, he tells us, Jung was firmly committed to the soul. Jung’s distinction, among all other psychologists, was that he had “a real Notion or Concept of ‘soul.’” The Soul’s Logical Life is devoted to working out his idea of the Notion and concept of the soul. It is a difficult, but rich work and essential reading, for anyone seriously interested in Giegerich’s thinking. Unfortunately a copy of the book is not easily found.*

Giegerich refers to both “soul” and “psyche” although soul more frequently, but they are apparently interchangeable. What does he mean by the soul when he celebrates Jung’s real understanding the “Concept” and “Notion” of the soul? As he explains in The Logical Life of the Soul, it is not an abstract concept, rather it is an independent, “living” concept”, with a subjectivity of its own. It was this that “gripped” Jung— the idea of “psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche.” Giegerich points out that Jung’s having been grasped by the concept of soul was not an irrational, or emotional experience but a rational comprehension of the soul’s reality.

As I pointed out in the previous posting, to understand Giegerich’s own thinking about the soul’s logic, it is necessary to understand something of Hegel’s Idealism. In his paper on “Hegel’s Idealism: the Logic of Conceptuality” (in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel), Thomas Wattenberg argues that Hegel is an Idealist because “he believes concepts determine the structure of reality.” Concepts for Hegel are “the most basic objects in reality and things have reality only in so far as they reflect the structure of their concepts.” Moreover, Hegel dismisses the idea of “subjective idealism” having its origin in the human subject, but posits instead an “Absolute Idealism.” This seems to me close to Giegerich’s view of the soul/psyche as the “living concept.”

As Giegerich describes the soul or psyche, the curious thing is that it is not only that which permeates everything ("Psyche is not in us, but we who are in psyche") or in which everything finite has its existence, but that it is also a process. Thus it can move, as he describes it, out of nature and into the sciences, technology, and the economy. When Giegerich tells us, however, that “the psyche is no longer at the niveau of antiquity and of pagan psychology” we may ask towards what end has it moved? Here Wattenberg’s reading of Hegel is helpful. According to Hegel the Concept seeks its self-development, its self-actualization. Giegerich does not elaborate on this, but certainly suggests this in claiming that the logical life of the soul is “a life that is its own end.”

I will not go any further with this, my intent having been only to suggest the affinity of Giegerich’s thinking with Hegel’s as a subject for further exploring—especially with what concerns his concept of the soul/psyche.

2008-09-20T13:09:00.004-04:00

Revisiting The Magnum Opus (1)

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of that extraordinary Jung Seminar in 1998 on Wolfgang Giegerich’s “Opposition of ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’—Psychology’s Basic Fault: Reflections on The Magnum Opus of the Soul” it is an appropriate time to do some reflecting on that influential paper. (It can be found at The Jung Page and here, a summary of the main points by clicking under “Links,” “Today’s magnum Opus of the Soul.") As I mentioned in an earlier posting (2/26/08), this paper is as salient and relevant today as it was then. In the previous posting (9/9/08) I also acknowledged that, in the intervening years, doubts and questions have also surfaced, and it is these I would like to address in this and additional postings.

Concerning Giegerich’s Psychology

At the beginning of his paper, Giegerich establishes his position regarding psychology. It is not intended, in his view, to serve as a cure for troubled souls nor to save the world. The purpose of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis is to enter into the predicament or pathology to analyze it, to comprehend it cognitively. If individuals are cured or at least helped by these means that is all to the good, but it is not psychology’s primary task. This position has to be kept in mind while reading the rest of the paper and indeed, in order to grasp Giegerich's entire opus.

Giegerich finds grandiose the notion that rescuing the soul implies rescuing the world, but is not his concept of the purpose of psychology also grandiose? Is he not proposing a philosophy of psychology. But what kind of philosophy? What is his conceptual framework? Although Giegerich says he is not a Hegelian, he has made it clear that Hegel’s thinking very much informs his own as is evident in his reliance on Hegelian terms, such “logic,” “sublation”, “negation.” But I think it goes deeper than that. Is not Giegerich postulating a psychology/philosophy which in many respects is analogous to the Absolute Idealism of Hegel? I will not pursue this further, but bring it up as a question, because, as far as I know, the conceptual structure of Giegerich’s work has not been seriously examined by Jungians who are familiar not only with Giegerich’s work, but also with Hegel’s. It needs to be brought forth and defined and so also, its implications for Jungian psychology and its practice.

I don’t think it is possible to truly understand Giegerich’s work, to do justice to it or to challenge it, without at the same time knowing the conceptual framework—the Idea, or Notion—that underlies it.

2008-09-09T14:35:00.004-04:00

A need for clarity

I leave to Michael the last word on the subject of abstraction. We’ve been at it quite awhile, beginning more or less with the postings from February 26 through April 7, followed by a long digression beginning with the posting for April 14. on the not unrelated subject of technology, and then picking it up again on June 11. (All of these postings can be found in the Archives.)

For a decade now I have been drawn to the writings of Jungian analyst Wolfgang Giegerich. As I have mentioned before, my first encounter with his work was the article with the clumsy title: “Opposition of ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’—Psychology’s Basic Fault: Reflections on Today’s Magnum Opus of the Soul,” which appeared in 1996. In that article were to be found the basic components of Giegerich’s thinking: that the task of psychology is not to give answers to problems, but to enter deeply into them; that the individuation process is not what psychology is about, but rather, the psyche is present and at work in the historical situation of the present—this is the soul’s magnum opus of our time, not personal individuation which is, at best, the soul’s opus parvum; finally, the psyche is at a different level requiring a new form of consciousness. These assertions struck a deep chord in me and they still do. Still, I have some doubts and further clarification is needed.

To begin with there is a problem with Giegerich’s terms. Although he claims he is not a Hegelian, he has been profoundly influenced by that great philosopher. This would not necessarily be a problem had Giegerich not assumed that his readers would and even should know why he means by these terms. When occasionally he does do so, it still requires work—fair enough— on the reader’s part and sometimes more definitions within the definition, but the effort is rewarded, with having moved a little closer to his meaning.

“Logic” is a term absolutely basic to Giegerich’s thought, and is derived from Hegel’s logic. During the 1998 Jung Seminar —see posting for Tuesday, 2/26/08—Giegerich was asked if he would “say a word” about what he means by the words “logic” and ”logical.” Although exhausted from the give and take of the Seminar which lasted over four days, Giegerich generously did so. He first made an important distinction: that he was not talking about formal or mathematical language. Then he went on to say, that just as one can speak of the psychology of a situation or a myth, so we can speak of the logic of a situation, or myth. The former draws upon the “constellation and relation” of all the psychological force, the emotions, prejudices, motivations, defenses, etc., operative within it.” To explain the logic of a situation, Giegerich gives an example of Jung’s subtitle to the Mysterium Coniunctionis — “the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites.” The difference between the two situations is that the psychological refers to specific information, while the logical uses abstract and relational terms that could be applied to anything. In the book itself. Jung then describes the opposites in imaginal terms such as Rex and Regina, Adam and Eve, etc and the synthesis of the opposites in terms of marriage. “The logical level is thus one where we speak of forms of relations, not of contents (on the the logical level what used to be the contents has been freed from their sensual and imaginal coagulations.” In the case of the soul, its “self-relation and the interplay of its opposites”— is implicit in the imagery, partly displayed by that imagery and partly hidden.

What is gained by reaching this logical level? Not only do we have a more refined and “subtle” language to describe these situations, but it reveals even more relationships than one otherwise would have noted if we had only imaginal or literal contents to work with. Moreover, we can learn to read psychological situations logically, just as we can learn to recognize archetypal material in dreams. To learn to think logically is to think in terms of the “relation between the psychic opposites,” and to recognize when these relations manifest themselves in emotions, in behavior and the like.

I had come to think of Giegerich’s use of the term as the inner structure or framework of a phenomenon, or a situation. This may not be entirely wrong, but I did not understand that this “structure” was one of relationship. (In the case of the “soul’s logical life” its relation to itself and to its opposite.) But how does this apply to other phenomenon or “situations"? Not only do Giegerich’s essential terms need more clarification, but so do some of his fundamental ideas.

2008-08-25T18:30:00.004-04:00

Response to Michael

Are you are saying, Michael, that we humans are capable of conceptualizing, and that this conceptualizing is itself an act of negation or abstraction distinguishing us from the rest of nature?

If so, then I would agree with you. We are capable, we humans, of reflective consciousness and that does make us distinct from other beings. I suppose you could call it a "negation" following Giegerich, following Hegel, but how useful is that term? I think how it is meant requires more explanation than you (or Giegerich) give it.

And is it true that negation represents a "death" separating us from the natural? I found it helpful to turn to what Jung had to say about this subject. As Jung tells it, unio naturalis is "the original, half-animal state of unconsciousness . . . the chaos, the massa confusa, an inextricable weaving of the soul with the body, which together form a dark unity . . . ." (Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 488.)

He describes this as a state of "enchantment" from which the alchemist had to free himself. The way to do this was by the separatio, thereby "establish[ing] a spiritual-psychic counter-position—conscious and rational insight—which would prove immune to the influences of the body." He goes on to say that this can be achieved only if we withdraw our "delusory projections that veil the true reality of things" —that is, through consciousness. [And isn't abstraction a mean to help us do just this?] Only in this way can our "unconscious identity" with nature come to an end and the soul is freed "in the things of the sense." It is a process that sets in place "a rational, spiritual-psychic position over against the turbulence of the emotions."

As for the unio mentalis, it does mean living on a "radically new level" but not, I think, in the sense Giegerich means. In a passage on the alchemist Gerhard Dorn, Jung observes that the unio mentalis

involves not one, but three stages. The first is, as I described above: an establishing of consciousness and rational thought in contradistinction to the unconsciousness and "the influences of the body." The second stage, however, is reached only when "the unity of spirit, soul, and body is made one with the original unus mundus." (the third stage) —when reason and intellect are united with Eros (the emotions) and validated further by "a union with the physical world of the body." Jung writes in that same chapter that there is an underlying unity and not two different worlds existing parallel to each other nor "mingling" with each other.

Rather, everything divided and different belongs to one and the same world, which is not the world of sense but a postulate whose probability is vouched for by the fact that until now, no one has been able to discover a world in which the known laws of nature are invalid. that even the psychic world, which is so extraordinarily different from the physical world, does not have its roots outside the one cosmos is evident from the undeniable fact that causal connections exist between the psyche and the body which point to their underlying unitary nature. (pp. 537ff.)

Everything we have learned, especially about the evolutionary process, regarding this planet, about "nature," about ourselves, confirms that we cannot exist for long contra natura because we too are nature, including that reasoning, reflecting power of ours.

My point is not to deny what Giegerich or you are saying, but only to say that I find it incomplete. It cannot be the whole story. It is likely that you may agree with this, and for this reason you intend to continue developing your thinking on this. It would help if such terms as contra naturam, etc.

were further explained before we plunge ahead into a mass confusa of our own making.

An attempted clarification: thought as abstraction

2008-08-23T13:12:00.020-04:00

Hi Dolores. I will be (for me!) brief, because I fear that the point I'm trying to make may be getting lost in all my words. I still stand by what I wrote previously, but it may be overwhelming my central point instead of, as I had hoped, supporting it. Yet stated baldly, my point seems so ... what, dogmatic? gross? disputable? regressively dualistic? foolhardy? Fine, let it be.

I have been trying to get at a "degree zero" definition of the "essence" of thinking, of its very nature. Furthermore, of the kind of thinking that all humans do, of human thought as such, of the uniquely human realm of thought (by which I mean symbolization, the sign, reflection, human language – though I certainly don't mean that animals or even natural processes themselves cannot be said to "think"). And I'm referring to this purported "essence of thinking" rather than to any particular kind of thinking (say, "abstract" or "non-abstract" thinking), or to the thinking done by any particular kind of person (a philosopher, say, or a psychologist).

What I have proposed (and I'm certainly not original or unique in doing so) is that human thought itself is abstraction; that a fundamental abstraction from the so-called natural life-world is necessary for the human to exist as human; that a primal, irrevocable dissociation from the rest of being is required for the being of the human qua human.

There. That's it.

It is not that abstraction is "all there is to 'thinking'", or that there aren't better or worse forms of thinking, or that aren't more or less abstract ways of thinking. There is much more to thinking than abstraction, there are better and worse examples of thinking, and there is a kind of "mere abstraction" as opposed to a fully realized abstraction. But these all come on top of or after the one fundamental, core, essential characteristic of thinking: that it is abstraction.

To repeat: I am saying that thinking is, at base, abstraction, and so I am indeed, and very deliberately, "confusing thinking with abstract thinking". I propose that human being grows out of and rest always upon the disconnection from the rest of being that thought IS.

This is precisely Giegerich's point in his response to Tougas, as I understand him:

Thinking, reflection owe their existence to negation. Alchemically speaking, they are an opus contra naturam. They presuppose a 'death': the dissolution of the unio naturalis, and take place on the radically new level of the unio mentalis.

So once more, just to be clear about it (and borrowing Giegerich's words): human thought is an opus contra naturam, and in that we are human, we are thus forever separated from the unio naturalis – separated by the very thing that makes us human.

From this starting point, this basic assumption, the rest of what I want to articulate will proceed (and it is not so bleak or simplistically dualistic as it may seem from the last sentence above). But I can't go further with this articulation until this one bald, unadorned point has been clearly made.

Thanks, Dolores.

– Michael

2008-08-23T11:18:00.003-04:00

"More Thought Not Less Feeling"

Mary Midgley

The British philosopher Mary Midgley offers her own idea as to why abstract thought is necessary.* When Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living,” he didn’t mean just that we human beings have a thirst for knowledge and understanding and therefore, a predisposition to philosophize. No, there must be more to it than that. He was suggesting that we live in a continuous conceptual “mess, ” a “chronic confusion” but there are limits to our living in this mess and need to do something about it. He also knew that we don’t really want to think or do much about it, because it shows us that we human beings are characteristically in a continual state of confusion. Our ordinary way of thinking doesn’t provide us with a “clear, coherent system.” We have to begin, therefore, with the confusion itself, where our problems are and not from some grand and noble “abstract processes going on in ivory towers.”

According to Midgley that is what Socrates himself did. He started with the political, social, religious and other problems of his time and went from there to the more abstract process that was needed as way of sorting through this confusion. This is why we have to engage in abstract thought, as difficult as it is and not because it represents for us some higher and therefore more exalted level of life. It gives us method to help us work our way through this confusion of ours.

At the same time, Midgley urges us to avoid the dualism we can easily fall into, believing that we have to choose between abstract thought or our feelings. “We have to do justice to both feeling and thought. This means considering them together, and as aspects of the same process.” Often it happens that our fault lies in too little thought and too much emotion which is unsuitable to the thought.

Does this contradict what I quoted from Giegerich in my last posting? (August 20) “Thought has everything it needs in itself. It needs nothing that would have to be supplied from the outside to make it compete or to give it life?” My reading of Giegerich is that he is saying or implying that thought in its abstract, analytic aspect is not separated out from emotion or imagination. What troubled him about Tougas’s paper, I believe, was not that the emotional aspect of her issue was present, but that it was unsuitable to the thought. She approached her subject without being able to detach herself from her own subjectivity. She wanted, he writes, “to hold thought down in the familiar sphere of the ego-personality and its commonplace, human, all-too-human experience.” As Giegerich sees it, in order to think there has to be a willingness to forgo identifying yourself with your ideas, feelings, and images in order to approach your subject with awareness that it is another autonomous, non-I. Only in that way can you begin to see your subject or issue clearly and objectively enough. If your ego is con-fused with your subject matter, you thinking leads only to a bigger mess.

*See The Essential Mary Midgley, ed. David Midgley, (Routledge, 2005)

2008-08-20T10:16:00.004-04:00

The inner life of thought

Michael, I wonder if we are not confusing thinking with abstract thinking which may be an aspect or style of thinking which strips away irrelevant or non-essential attributes in order to arrived at the essential core of an idea or concept. Or to put it another way, it aims at the formulation of an idea or concept which contains only what is absolutely essential to that idea or concept. But is this all there is to “thinking?”

Some years ago I read an article in Harvest Journal (1996, V. 42, No. 2), “Taking Women Philosophers Seriously,” written by Cecile Tougas, who argued on behalf of women philosophers (and Jungian psychologists) who, she claimed, bring to thinking what is now lacking, that is, the personal experience, feeling, and “the erotic.” She complained especially that male philosophers shun everything subjective in their thinking and assume that they have no obligation to connect their thinking to real life. I thought Tougas’s article was poorly written and left the reader (this one at least) with the impression that she had unfortunately only reinforced the stereotype that women showed little capacity for “rigorous” thought.

I was not surprised when in the following issue (1997 V. 43, No. 1) Wolfgang Giegerich answered Tougas with his “The Dignity of Thought: In Defence of the Phenomenon of Philosophical Thought.” I won’t go into his entire case against Tougas’s position, but point out one of his arguments relevant to the question I posed in the beginning: Is abstract thinking only an aspect or style of thinking?

Giegerich takes umbrage at what he sees is Tougas’s confusion of thinking with abstract thinking. He sees her as working from “an abstract, impoverished idea of thought,” thought as ‘nothing but’, thought. For Giegerich, however, this a “deficient” idea of thought and recognizing this Tougas has to look outside of thought to make up for what she thinks is lacking, namely, the details of everyday life, one’s feelings, experiences and relationships with others. But he concludes “ . . . this impoverishment of thought is not thought’s fault, but the fault of one’s own abstract conception and one’s ignorance about what thought is.”

Thought has everything it needs in itself. It needs nothing that would have to be supplied to it from outside to make it complete or to give it life. All it needs to come to life (and also unfold the wealth of feeling and eros invested in it, is a thinking reader, someone who has access to that level of thought.

Tougas’s thinking, on the contrary, dissociates abstract thought from emotion and eros, as if thought had two separate halves which must be joined together. (Tougas sees this joining of the two halves as the special mission of women philosophers, but that is another subject). For Giegerich her approach violates the very integrity and inherent wholeness of thought. If, he protests, you don’t perceive the passion and the sheer intensity of life in the seemingly “cold and abstract thought” of philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes or Kant to mention only three of “truly rigorous thinkers,” you just don’t understand what philosophy is about.

Giegerich makes a distinction between two different meanings to abstract thought, which, he says, have to be kept apart. Abstract thought in the first meaning is indeed “abstraction” or separation from ordinary life, personal feelings and common sense, but thought requires precisely that—the negation of what is comes to us “naturally” in order for it to be true to its “own internal logical life.” The second meaning of abstract thought is flawed in that it is thought which has been dissociated from its own logical life and therefore seeks to compensate for that loss by finding it in one’s own personal, ordinary life. The great philosophers, he contends, were always concrete in their thought, but only in that first sense or meaning.

As I read Giegerich, thought has its own experience and its own reality and that is what we must engage with, rather than our own personal, subjective experience or feelings. A genuine thinker surrenders to “the inner necessities of thought” so that its ‘objective’, autonomous reality may shine forth.” To think in that first meaning is a work, is public and not private and is impersonal. It is not the place to bring one’s personal baggage.

I believe Giegerich's position is justified. Jungian psychology, as only one example, as it is sometimes taught and too often practiced, fosters a self-centeredness which makes such thinking difficult if not impossible. It becomes too easy to say "Oh! It is too abstract and I can’t relate to it and what does it have to do anyway with my concerns?"

For his part, Giegerich has made it clear in his writings (as he does in this particular essay) that “rigorous” thinking is not for everyone. It requires dedication and training and is the task, therefore, of the specialist. This is true as far as it goes, but it is rather too disdainful of the non-specialist who engages in such thinking independently, to the best of his or her abilities, not to solve personal problems but in search of truth and meaning which, after all, is not the exclusive prerogative of the specialist.

Another thinker, Hannah Arendt, sees in differently. In The Life of the Mind she writes that the great intellectual, cultural, scientific, psychological, and religious upheavals characteristic of our time are not just the concern of an “intellectual elite.” They have affected all our lives too profoundly. Citing Plato’s notion of the philosopher as “the friend of the god,“ who is assured of immortality, Arendt writes:

This age-old distinction between the man and the ‘professional thinkers’ specializing in what was supposedly the highest activity human beings could attain to. . . has lost its plausibility. . . . If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant—in this respect almost alone among the philosophers—was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications. . . . In any event, the matter can no longer be left to ‘specialists’ as though thinking, like higher mathematics, were the monopoly of a specialized discipline.”

I’ll stop here—it's way too long as it is— but to be continued.

Psyche Lost and Found – a few comments ...

2008-08-07T00:25:00.013-04:00

Hi Dolores. Thanks for your response — batting things back and forth can only help.

***

Regarding “reductionism”: yes, I think this is indeed like the kind of “bad abstraction” I’m talking about, as long as the word “reductionism” isn’t itself taken reductionistically, simplistically (another related word). This would mean that anti-reductive (or “good abstract”) thinking is allowed to comprehend not only complexity-as-richness, the multitude of positions, the endless diversity of phenomena and of aspects of phenomena, but also — explicitly — to comprehend contradiction. And you do say just that, when you write that thought “must include ... its inherent contradictions, its many-sidedness”. It’s only now occurring to me, though, thanks to what you wrote, that the “bad abstraction” which always endangers thought has no exact synonyms (though a number of words, including reductionism, can contribute to a grasp of its sense). This is somewhat unfortunate, because it means that it always has to be defined. But I guess that must be part of the challenge posed to us in and by our times.

***

Thank you for amplifying your original statement to more clearly spell out that “abstract thought which has not yet been thought through has failed us”. This is definitely what I mean, too.

***

To say that “the right kind of abstraction is thinking” is certainly not wrong, if we mean “thinking” in its fullest, most qualified, dialectical sense, which is to say in a “technical” more than a conventional sense. Giegerich often speaks of “thought” in just this way (and Heidegger is famous for it — though I haven’t really read his work, and suspect that he meant something very different from Giegerich!). I intended simply to convey a not unrelated but not identical idea: that “thinking is abstraction”.

***

Again, yes, we are definitely charged, in our times, with the task of reconceiving “nature”. And along with “nature”, we are obliged to rethink “artifice”, artificiality, art. (Of course, this is where the rethinking of “techné” — technique, technology — comes in, too.) These are some of the very subjects I’m planning to turn to in part three of “Necessary Abstraction?”.

***

Now to the most important thing I want to try to articulate more precisely.

For me, it’s again not quite that, as you put it, “We don’t have psyche/soul unless we lose it or believe ourselves to have lost it”. I think the main problem I have with that sentence is with the word “unless”. It’s a tiny but crucial point.

“Unless” is, I suppose, technically, grammatically correct, but it suggests or connotes that there are alternatives, or that soul is somehow “there” for us to have or not have. As if there were any other option than “losing soul”; as if we might conceivably be able to not “lose it”. Or as if it were a challenge to us that we might somehow take up or not: “if you want soul, you must lose it”; as if it were a “religious” proposition, a parabola or paradox (e.g., “in order to achieve the Kingdom of God you must first lose it”, or something along those lines). But this is not a religious proposition, for I mean soul again in a “technical” sense, a Jungian, archetypalist, dialectical, psyche-logical sense. This is not to deny that religious questions and experiences are nevertheless implicated, but I’m speaking in a more “philosophical” way and making a statement about soul’s/psyche’s “ontology”. (Sorry for all the scare quotes, but it’s kind of mad to dare talk about the soul’s ontology in this day and age, “knowing what we know”.)

My secondary issue with your sentence is the second part, that we might “believe ourselves to have lost [soul]”. This allows for the possibility of a different belief, but with the (“technical”) notion of soul I’m using, it doesn’t matter whether we believe we have soul or have lost it, or even whether there “is” soul or not. Belief doesn’t enter into the question (though, like religion itself, it’s not an unrelated topic). I mean “soul” or “psyche” in a way that presumes it as a factor in all human existence, further, as the determinative factor.

The difference in what I’m saying from the sense that comes across to me in your phrasing is that, in my notion, “soul” only comes into being with our very sense of “losing it”, of being “disconnected from it”. In other words, the “it” from which we sense ourselves to be disconnected doesn’t “exist” unless and until we sense ourselves to be disconnected from it. The sense of disconnection constitutes it, “creates” it, for us. (But despite all I’m saying here, please take my point “dialectically”, contradictorily, that is, do not assume that I deny the soul of the other-than-human. I agree fully that we are, as you quote Jung, “in psyche”.)

So there is no other option for the human than “losing soul” — i.e., being disconnected at an existential level from the rest of existence. Soul cannot not be lost. Not because it somehow obliges us to lose it, but because it “is” not without the loss. “Losing soul” is not (only) a challenge that may face us, but a “fact” constitutive of human existence, one that paradoxically generates soul for us in the first place, that creates our existence as human. This is indeed highly abstract. It’s a thinking that goes in two directions at once (as I’ve been trying to learn from Giegerich).

It seems to me that this disconnection that is soul’s engendering feature has, with the modern, come fully (and destructively) into its own. Whereas it once just “was”, that is, functioned “in itself” as a baseline dimension of human existence, it has now become “for itself”. Just as we have neared or reached the “zero degree” of the physical universe (atoms and sub-atomic particles), of biological existence (the genetic code), and of information itself (zeroes and ones), so find ourselves facing the equally uncompromising, impossible-but-real “essence” of psyche/soul. (This too I will try to tackle in part three.)

Thus it is not only, as you put it, that “in the loss itself ... the psyche is to be found”. Yes, this is true: psyche today is particularly to be found in the loss, for loss presents itself to the contemporary psyche as perhaps the challenge to be faced. Instead or in addition, however, I want to insist that this loss, which presents itself to us today so forcefully, can only fulfill its soul function if it teaches us something fundamental, something definitive about psyche. It’s not a matter of “doing” but of “learning”. (This is precisely why our thinking must become psychologically abstract: we have intellectual discoveries to make, as psyche tries to teach us about itself.) We don’t only have to look to the loss to find psyche, in some poetic or mythologically-tinged sense (like a dark night of the soul); but rather, if we look to the loss to find psyche correctly (I will dare put it so), the loss may initiate us into the truth of what psyche “is”: it is this loss. The loss may not be all that psyche “is”, but psyche IS not without this loss, this disconnection.

The loss of the primal bond, occasioned by the Fall which is human thinking (which itself is abstraction), created the (sense of a) primal bond that was (then experienced as) lost. But these things didn’t “happen” chronologically. They came-to-be in one and the same evolutionary (or what have you) development, the same gesture of being — contradictorily, paradoxically, dialectically. We thought, therefore we were human, therefore there was soul, therefore we were lost; therefore, we thought. Not sequentially — all at once.

***

None of this should be taken for a moment to diminish or discount that our very common, very real “sense of loss is immense and experienced deeply not only in respect to nature, but in every aspect of modern life”, as you wrote. One might even liken the increasing abstraction/disconnection that characterizes modern life as a kind of cancer, for its effects are pervasive, painfully destructive, even fatal. One might so characterize it, if one could also allow oneself to acknowledge — in the spirit of what we’re trying to accomplish here and against all common sense, all natural horror, all apparent morality — that the cancer, in this case, had a telos, a reason for being, an initiatory purpose, an educational intentionality, a psychological and spiritual task to accomplish, a “meaning” (pace Giegerich), a “soul”. (The analogy is apt, too, because with cancer, one fundamental dimension, one constitutive “property” of life itself — that is, growth — goes wild, takes off on its own, tries to take over, becomes entirely “for itself”. Similarly, with what we’ve been discussing, one constitutive “property” of soul — that is, disconnection/abstraction — runs rampant, becomes entirely “for itself”.)

So finally, in response to just that thought, I’m simply going to quote your entire last paragraph, because it captures so beautifully the unprecedented difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of the contemporary challenge to consciousness and to humanity itself, and therefore bears repeating (with my sad but complete agreement):

“Living with loss means, I think, looking in a new way at everything that is happening around us, from the most distressful to the most hopeful, and ask what are these ‘happenings’ telling us, what is the psyche asking us to listen to. This seems like a nearly impossible task, because we have been formed in a particular culture which, whether we like it not, determines much of how we view the world. It requires an asceticism of the mind, we are definitely not used to and don’t like, or we could think of it as practicing abstract thinking.”

Thanks, Dolores, for what to my mind is a healing attempt to practice abstract thinking.

- Michael

2008-08-06T11:55:00.003-04:00

Psyche Lost and Found
A Response to Michael's "Necessary Abstraction?" Part 2.

If I’ve understood you correctly, Michael, you are saying the following: That at this moment in time when psyche/soul has been routed by secularism, is the very moment when psyche/soul can be most clearly articulated. We don’t have psyche/soul unless we lose it or believe ourselves to have lost it. Losing soul is what soul is all about.

To grasp this notion, we have to understand better what is meant by abstract thinking of which there are two kinds (citing philosophers Hegel, Zizek, and Giegerich)— the wrong kind and the right kind. The wrong kind is abstraction which focuses on one thing, or a feature of one thing, but without “its context of interconnections with other things.” Wouldn’t another term for this kind of thinking be reductionism, a “nothing but,” only that and nothing more? The right kind of abstraction, on the other hand, is thinking, and here I quote Giegerich, which “has everything it needs in itself,” including its contradictions. To say that this kind of abstract thought does not relate to life is to say that it has not been thought through, has not gone far enough. To do this it must include not only its inherent contradictions, its many-sidedness, as well as what connects it to other phenomena. Only in this way can the phenomenon being thought about be grasped as a “whole.”

Now, if, as I wrote, abstract thought has severed our primal bond with nature, we could consider it a loss. We are disconnected, separated from, as you put it, “the rest of reality.” If this is the case, then it is that kind of thinking, as you also wrote, “that must somehow lead us through or beyond this impasse.” Citing Giegerich, you say further that there is no other recourse, for this is where psyche has led us. This is where psyche is now to be found. You quote from Richard Tarnas, that we are no longer embedded in nature, but have “differentiated ourselves further from the world.”

Let me pause here and backtrack a little. You point out that when I wrote that abstract thought has failed us in our connection to life, it was wrongly stated. I should have said abstract thought which has not yet been thought through has failed us and failed to fulfill itself as well. Nevertheless, there is an experience of loss, to mention only the most evident one—of our accustomed relationship to nature, made all the more distressing because it has resulted in a looming threat to the very existence of our planet. But you say it is in the loss itself that psyche is to be found. I agree because it is through the experience of loss of this “primal” bond that thought is compelled to think through anew, not only what that relationship with nature is here and now , but what nature itself is. Giegerich claims that “nature” is obsolete for now we know that everything is just a matter of atomic particles. But is this true and isn’t there the possibility that we are also being compelled to re-think, think through, what nature is and our connection to it? I suggested this in a previous posting (August 2) in writing about what some scientists today are doing with their theory of emergence.

But the sense of loss is immense and experienced deeply not only in respect to nature, but in every aspect of modern life. The values we have taken for granted in our private, familial and public life as foundational to our stability and integrity as a society, have been subject to a devastating process of desacralization. We are at a loss, indeed, to understand it, much less do anything about it. What efforts are made to both interpret what is going on and to propose some way out of it prove insufficient. If nature is obsolete, as Giegerich says, so too are most of the religious, cultural, and political institutions which give us cohesiveness to our society. I mean “obsolete” as being inadequate and needing to be thought through. And to do so within the context of loss, as the working of the psyche/soul in our time. It is useful to remember here Jung’s dictum: “The psyche is not in us, but we are in psyche.”

Living with loss means, I think, looking in a new way at everything that is happening around us, from the most distressful to the most hopeful, and ask what are these “happenings” telling us, what is the psyche asking us to listen to. This seems like a nearly impossible task, because we have been formed in a particular culture which, whether we like it not, determines much of how we view the world. It requires an asceticism of the mind, we are definitely not used to and don’t like, or we could think of it as practicing abstract thinking.

Enough for now. To be continued….

Necessary Abstraction? Part 2

2008-08-03T15:05:00.005-04:00

In your post, “Where has psyche gone?”, Dolores, you paraphrased Giegerich’s idea that “we are in the throes of being born again, this time as adults, on our own”. I, too, am interested in this “birth of man”. But what could it possibly be, what might it mean for us? What kind of humans do we become once we’re “adults”?

I had planned to write a single piece in response to “Where has psyche gone?” (an impossible question that nonetheless seems to demand asking). But after I wrote “Necessary Abstraction?” in June, the response grew into two parts (this second one is already so huge), and is now projected as three (and look how long it has taken me to get this far!). Part two, this current posting, takes on the questions “What is abstraction?” and, as you put it, “Where has psyche gone?”. Part three will ask, “Where is psyche going?” (all impossible questions, of course).

Here, I am trying to follow a hunch that connects Giegerich’s “end of meaning and birth of man” with the “abstraction” discussed in the last few posts. I’m trying to trace the contours of a counter-intuitive intuition that finds, in modernity’s seeming loss of soul, soul’s first potentially full emergence, soul’s finally becoming “for itself”. That is to say, it is in this most extreme and unlikely of times that I believe soul demands and is capable of achieving its clearest articulation yet, its true definition. Ours is a time when soul has been ejected completely from official discourse; when the culture’s practice and theory both mount assault after assault upon the notion and expression of soul (in the full, the truly soulful sense of the word “soul”); when the language of secularity has banned soul except as that one remaining of intangible factors, soul as the “psych-” in conventional psychology or as the “cog-” in cognitive science – ultimately intractable and endlessly problematic, yet still manipulable with interventions of more or less direct approach (psychopharmacology, electrodes, etc.). And yet these very developments, this very situation, provide for the first time a glimpse of what soul “is”, and hence provide the opportunity for its self-realization.

Will this “happen”? Is this utopian prospect immanent? I’ll leave that amusing little question for part three. For now, I just want to try to articulate my “intuition”. It’s really just a twist on a familiar idea, the idea that we don’t know what we have until we lose it. The twist: when it comes to soul, we don’t have it at all until we lose it. Our “losing it” (or rather, our sense of “having lost it”) CONSTITUTES IT in the first place. But even before any attempt to unpack that notion, comes “abstraction”.

In your first “Interstice”, you wrote:

There is a dilemma we must not overlook — that the increasing dependence on abstract thought has led to the loss of our primal bond with nature, or as David Abram puts it, “to the sensuous”, our connection to the reality of life and all living things. Here abstract thought fails us.

Although the dilemma is not at all wrongly stated, I fear that your conclusion may be an example of precisely the trap our current “common sense” gets us into. Slavoj Zizek points toward the opposite conclusion, as represented by Hegel, that great champion of abstraction’s necessity:

For Hegel, as a radical idealist, the surplus of “life” over its notional determinations always signals an inherent insufficiency of the determinations themselves: when we experience “reality” as something infinitely more complex and rich than our abstract conceptual network, this does not mean that we have dwelt too much in theory and should deal more with “life itself” – it means, on the contrary, that we did not think enough, that our thought remained too “abstract”. [The Indivisible Remainder, 175]

With Hegel and Giegerich in mind, we should recall that there are two senses of “abstract”, one inevitable and intrinsic to thinking, the other an evitable error of thinking. Giegerich writes that “the problem of thought is thus not that it is abstract in sense one, but if it is abstract, in sense two” [“The Dignity of Thought”]. The first sense of abstraction is nothing other than the very founding gesture of thought, thought’s genesis and its nature wrapped up in a single definition: movement away from the flow of life (“Abstract: from L. abstractus ‘drawn away,’ ... from ab(s)- ‘away’ + trahere ‘draw’” [Online Etymological Dictionary]). Thought IS abstraction.

Jung, Hillman and many others from entirely divergent theoretical schools have pointed out this quality of thought (of language, of reflection, of the sign) – which, stated in the strongest terms, “kills natural, unreflected life” [Hillman, “The Elephant in the Garden of Eden”, 111]. Giegerich: “In thought, ... the cut with the natural and sensible has really and fully happened” [“‘The Unassimilable Remainder’ – What is at Stake?”, 204]. Such is the very “being” of thought. The other sense of the word, in which “to ‘abstract’ is to single out just one aspect of a thing from its context of interconnections with other things” [Hegel Hints, Hegel-by-hypertext, marxists.org], is what Hegel criticized as merely abstract thinking (Giegerich’s “sense two”).

Thus while we may not be “radical idealists”, like Hegel, and while Zizek’s/Hegel’s conclusion – that “we did not think enough” – may or may not ultimately be sufficient, we still shouldn’t assume the conclusion of the common sense attitude – that abstract thought must necessarily fail us – without trying to take on, as fully as possible, the challenge to “think enough”.

A bit of an excursus on Hegel (drawn from my utterly insufficient knowledge!): Hegel associated the “merely abstract thinking” under discussion with a level of awareness he called “the Understanding”. The Understanding doesn’t really “understand” as we usually define the word – i.e., “perceive and comprehend the nature and significance of” [American Heritage Dictionary online]. In fact, despite its best intentions, it cannot help but do the opposite. It is a thinking (dominant today!) in which the world is conceived as made up of “separate, unchanging things” [Hegel Hints]. Further, it presumes that these things may be arrayed in dualistic opposition or pluralistic indifference, but dare not be imagined as interdependent and mutually defining (i.e, dialectical), as “embedded in each other’s truth”, in Richard Tarnas’ compact and elegant phrase. “They underlie and inform each other”, he continues, “implicate each other, make each other possible” [Cosmos and Psyche, 14].

The Understanding can operate at more or less sophisticated levels. A gross contemporary example might dualistically consider the Bush administration’s (so-called) anti-terrorism policy as a valid response and true alternative to terrorism itself, where a little further thought reveals the conceptual, even archetypal (if not actual) complicity of the two sides – how they reflect, constellate, and enable one another. A true alternative would answer them both, would transform or transcend them (what Giegerich in The Soul’s Logical Life calls “the double negation” [67]), would reconfigure the very categories in which the question is posed, releasing us from our hold as hostages to “the clash of fundamentalisms” (Tariq Ali). Despite their sophistication, I would presume that those unsatisfying but not unintelligent latter-day religion debunkers, like Dawkins, are functioning at the level of the Understanding, too, in their dualistic grasp of religion and secularity. And maybe as an example of a more pluralistic though no less satisfactory Understanding, one could point to the excesses of “political correctness”, whose purveyors are accused by their conservative critics of promoting “cultural relativism”. Again, neither the position or its refutation is adequate; both betray the same poverty of thought.

In Hegel’s system, the Understanding is a necessary moment in the development of thought, but its own internal inconsistencies ultimately undermine it. If, however, these self-underminings of thought are faithfully and rigourously followed, if the self-undermining is allowed to progress and is not warded off, if one “think[s] enough”, the Understanding will eventually give way to the less simplistic, less “merely abstract” but even more highly conceptual Reason, marked by dialectic. As Adrian Johnson puts in the recent book, Zizek’s Ontology:

... for Hegel, truth is reached not by avoiding error, but rather precisely by passing through error; the key insights of dialectics require that certain mistakes must be made before these insights disclose themselves. [231]

Now Hegel’s Reason is, clearly, very different from our typical sense of reason as “mere rationalism”, which would be akin to “mere abstraction” – Giegerich’s “abstract, in sense two”. (Hegel’s sense of “Reason” also parallels the way Giegerich’s “logic” is not the non-contradictory logic of positivism.) Hegel’s Reason is “the dialectical approach in which the world is conceived as interconnected, self-contradictory, mutable things and processes” [Hegel Hints]. As Allen Hance puts it in his article, “The Art of Nature”:

Generally stated, the task of reason is to resituate the abstractly posited findings of common sense, understanding, and the empirical sciences within increasingly amplified categorial contexts. This activity of reason ... Hegel calls dialectic ...

In Hegel’s view (as encapsulated by Zizek in the quote from The Indivisible Remainder, above), thought will always be “too ‘abstract’” if it has not gone far enough, if it has not followed its own concrete logic – that is, the logic of all its “interconnected, self-contradictory, mutable” facets, all the “posited findings of common sense, understanding, and the empirical sciences” – to a grasping of the phenomenon as a “whole”. The truth, said Hegel, is the whole. (That nothing is ultimately ever “whole” in our usual, common sense “Understanding” of wholeness is a further dialectical twist that we can’t approach yet.)

To return to the main point of discussion: Abstract thought has indeed “led to the loss of our primal bond”. If, however, “like cures like”, then it is abstract thought itself that must somehow lead us through or beyond this impasse. (More accurately: that must reconfigure the issue, must show us that the way we pose the question – merely abstractly! – is the very problem.) We must “pay the full debt”, “drink the poison to the dregs”, as Giegerich would say. Why? Primarily, because we have no choice: we cannot turn back. Psyche has deposited us “here”, in this “now”, and we must deal with the realities of here-and-now before we can move anywhere else, psychologically speaking. (But that point about psychology, mentioned in my first post and key to the whole argument, must be postponed to part three.)

How can abstract thought, having occasioned it, redress what you described as “the loss of our primal bond”?

If thought is inherently abstract, as outlined above, if it’s very nature – irrespective of who is doing the thinking – is contra naturam, then it has always been so. The dimension of thought – of reflection, of speculation, of the sign, of language – is thus itself “the loss of our primal bond”. This is our “Fall”, for it is thoroughly and essentially related to our awareness of finitude and thus to self-consciousness. We are no longer in the same world as our animal kin. We seem to be disconnected at a fundamental and determinative level from nature, indeed from the rest of reality. Kant’s opposition between the phenomenal realm which we inhabit and the noumenal realm – the “things in themselves” – forever out of reach to us seems the emblematic philosophical formulation of this sense; imaginations of Paradise or a Dreamtime, when humans walked with animals, when there was peace, are obvious religious and mythological expressions.

It is only after this “loss”, however, that we are human at all; it is with this “loss” that we BECOME human. Adam and Eve were not, until the apple, truly human. And the Dreamtime, however proximate and accessible, is not the time of everyday life; however real the Dream may be, it is not the same as the waking world. There is, whether conceived as permeable or impassable, a rupture fundamental to human existence. Zizek writes that the

... ontological necessity of ‘madness’ lies in the fact that it is not possible to pass directly from the purely ‘animal soul’ immersed in its natural life-world to ‘normal’ subjectivity dwelling in its symbolic universe. The ‘vanishing mediator’ between the two is the ‘mad’ gesture of radical withdrawal from reality which opens up the space for its symbolic (re)constitution. [The Metastases of Enjoyment, 35]

(Giegerich’s speculation on ritual killing as a kind of realization and formalization of this disconnection from the rest of being belongs here, too, but there isn’t room to get into it.) “Madness”, utter disconnection, comes between animal immersion in natural life and human existence as inescapably mediated by symbolic structures – by thought, language, the sign, what Hillman calls “fantasy”. Richard Tarnas, as divergent a thinker from Zizek as one could want, also views this disconnection as constitutive of the human, though he couches his evaluation in much gentler language:

Not just modernity but the entire human project can be seen as impelling the gradual differentiation between self and world. An emergent distinction between subject and object seems to have been present already at the very birth of Homo sapiens, with its novel capacity and impulse to consciously plan rather than act automatically on instinct, to rely on one’s own wits and will to make one’s way in the world, to manipulate and control nature rather than be so embedded in it as to be its passive subject. As soon as our species first developed linguistic symbolization, we began to differentiate ourselves further from the world, objectifying our experience in ways that could articulate the world’s acting on us and our acting on the world. [Cosmos and Psyche, 19-20]

Yet despite this constitutive disconnection or differentiation, this defining feature of the human remarked by very different thinkers, there does seem to be the strong sense of some sort of “primal bond” counter to it, evinced most powerfully by the documentary records, traditional teachings and living representatives of aboriginal (ritual, tribal, elder) cultures. Tarnas suggests that “... the primal mind engages the world more as a subject embedded in a world of subjects, with no absolute boundaries between or among them. In the primal perspective, the world is full of subjects” [Cosmos and Psyche, 17-18]. In this explanation, the bond consists of a shared subjecthood, a sense that there is animation on both sides (hence animism). But despite this sharing (and despite even the centrality that this “animation on both sides” will have for the conclusion of my argument in part three), I believe that the rupture I mentioned above remains decisive, that it has always-already occurred. I believe that “primal man” knew he was “fallen”, if not in the implacable terms of Christianity, yet still in a fundamental, all-pervading way. Art and ritual are testament to the sense of essential rupture. They answer the urgent and ever-present question of connection, for they are activities designed to re-connect, to “bind us back” (religare, one of the proposed etymologies of religion).

Thus the “primal bond” is based on an internal sense, a profound feeling (of shared subjecthood), and on cultural forms that accord authoritative centrality to this sense. The primal experience, I would dare to venture (however imprudent such claims may be), is at once an experience of genuine rupture, of definitive disconnection, of not belonging, of being out of joint, as well as of equally genuine “kinship” with the rest of being. In an exact parallel: much as we know ourselves to be truly, often painfully separate from our fellow humans, we also know that our shared subjecthood not only makes us fundamentally similar, it also (mysteriously) allows for the possibility of authentic connection, for the lived truth of intangible, transcendent, profound, and formative bonds between us. The primal perspective senses and formalizes the subjecthood not only of fellow humans, but of the non-human world.

Yet this sense is not unassailable, and its formalizations are certainly not indestructible. Indeed, both have proven not only shockingly fragile but downright finite. That is to say, we now live in the knowledge (accept or deny it as we might) that even the sense of our deepest bond with the rest of being, and even our most enduring institutions for the maintenance of this bond, can simply pass away. Undermined first by the skeptical advances of Greek rationalism and the anti-mythological truth-claims of Abrahamic monotheism, or perhaps before that by the simple fact of dawning human self-consciousness, and later of course by materialism and commercialism, by the cultural relativism occasioned by (not just contemporary but even ancient) globalization, and by the ascent of science, the “primal bond” – which was upheld and celebrated for tens of thousands of years – has shown itself to be ontologically insubstantial (in a way that brute material reality, say, is not). It is not NECESSARY. It is, rather, assumed. And that assumption can be dropped. Indeed, as Tarnas said, “the entire human project can be seen as impelling the gradual differentiation between self and world”. What has happened in “our time”, which one could count as beginning with the Axial Age and culminating with modernity, is that this differentiation, this abstraction-as-essence-of-thought, has moved from “in-itself” to “for-itself” (to borrow two more terms from Hegel). The “birth of man” began in the Axial Age with the “gestation” of the human as such, of the human qua human, and our “nine months” has lasted some 2,500 years.

We are approaching the territory of part three of this response (“where is psyche going?”), but there remains the main point of this part still to articulate. The relation of abstraction with disconnection has been outlined, but what about my thesis, my “counter-intuitive intuition”, that abstraction itself is our way into soul?

One of the issues plaguing the question of soul is whether it is an exclusively human concern. Of course, as mentioned above, traditional cultures sense soul elsewhere than the human (a “world ... full of subjects”, as Tarnas says), and there is even a long and distinguished tradition of philosophical “panpsychism”. But if soul as subjectivity, intelligence and intentionality resides (also) outside the human, what does it mean to say – as I did at the top – that soul is only constituted by its loss? Surely, if humans weren’t here, say traditionalists and panpsychists, the universe would still be “ensouled”. My contrarian point, however, is that this means nothing at all, or rather, that it is not a sufficiently paradoxical point of view (i.e., that in its dualism it remains on the level of Hegel’s Understanding, and therefore does not do justice to the phenomenon it attempts to address). As Heidegger put it, “‘There is’ truth only in so far as Dasein [human being] is and as long as Dasein is” [Being and Time, 269, quoted in Nicolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 34]. The ensouledness or not of the cosmos is a non-issue without the involvement of the human, because the cosmos wouldn’t CARE about such questions, wouldn’t pose such questions (or any questions) without the human. I myself, like the traditionalists and panpsychists, function with a conviction in the ensouledness of the cosmos – in the intelligence and intentionality of the other-than-human – but also with the understanding that this ensouledness comes-into-being (I mean that phrase most precisely) only with the human. And the human only comes-into-being with that rupture I have been calling “abstraction” (thought, language, sign, symbolization, fantasy), with the emergence of that “other” realm which renders us fundamentally disconnected from the rest of being. Zizek speaks in terms of Hegel’s notion of “the ‘self-alienation’ of Spirit” – that is, Spirit’s coming into its own, out of the “natural immediacy” where it is buried – but the process I’m talking about in terms of “soul” is just the same:

... the notion of the “self-alienation” of Spirit ... should be read together with Hegel’s assertion of the thoroughly non-substantial character of Spirit: there is no res cogitans, no thing which (as its property) also thinks, spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming natural immediacy ... The paradox is thus that there is no Self that precedes the Spirit’s “self-alienation”: the very process of alienation creates/generates the “Self” from which Spirit is alienated and to which it then returns. ... Spirit’s self-alienation is the same as, fully coincides with, its alienation from its Other (nature), because it constitutes itself through its “return-to-itself” from its immersion into natural Otherness. In other words, Spirit’s return-to-itself creates the very dimension to which it returns. [“Christ, Hegel, Wagner”, 7]

It is only in the terrible, terrifying sense of rupture, of alienation, that there emerges for the first time the contrary (and seemingly but not really precedent) sense of wholeness. It is only with a sense of disconnection that a sense of connection becomes possible. The assumption of a prior wholeness from which we have “fallen” is generated by disconnection, which actually comes first. The “primal bond” comes broken, always-already broken, and it is only truly realized, made real, comprehended in its reality, AS broken:

... once we are in negativity, we never quit it and regain the lost innocence of Origins; it is, on the contrary, only in “negation of negation” that the Origins are truly lost, that their very loss is lost, that they are deprived of the substantial status of that which was lost. The Spirit heals its wound not by directly healing it, but by getting rid of the very full and sane Body into which the wound was cut. [Zizek, “Christ, Hegel, Wagner”, 8]

Zizek’s “very full and sane Body” is the notion of wholeness, the illusion of a Dreamtime or a Garden, which itself must be sacrificed in order to heal the wound of our alienation. (To say that it must be sacrificed is, in my opinion, NOT to say that it must be simply rejected, but rather returned to its place as “sacred”, to its proper status as DREAM-time. Only a degradation of the notion – common enough in our time – itself posits wholeness as somehow “achievable”. Indeed, on a simple logical level, there can be no wholeness, because the perception of something as whole cannot come from within the whole, where perception is limited by one’s place or location, but from OUTSIDE the whole, thus immediately rendering it not-whole!)

So “where has psyche gone?” It is where it always was: in disconnection, in abstraction. Abstraction provided the gift of a sense of soul at the same time, in the same gesture, and by the very same means that occasioned the sense of its loss. If it is to recovered, in some authentic sense, then it is just here that it must be sought. With Hillman (and in less abstract language!), one might say:

To stand one’s ground, in the soul and for the soul, helps make the very ground one stands on. [“Silver and the White Earth II,” 40-41]

- Michael Caplan

2008-08-02T15:39:00.002-04:00

A continuing emergent "real" world

In an earlier posting (see “Where has psyche gone?,”June 11) I referred to what seemed to be Wolfgang Giegerich’s acceptance of the reductive view in nuclear physics that all phenomena in the natural world are made up fundamentally of interacting particles, rather than of solid matter. A frequently quoted remark by the Nobel laureate physicist Stephen Weinberg describes the reductionist position this way: “All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.” He further says that “The more we know of the universe, the more meaningless is appears.”

Giegerich thinks we all know this, but don’t want to face up to its truth. Instead we separate what we know from science as belonging to the world out there as distinct from our own subjectivity, how we actually feel, our attitudes and what we value, “in short, with the psyche.” But as I also pointed out in that posting, Geigerich himself seems to be conflicted about this. In another paper, he complains that science with its “ever tighter web of abstraction” is disconnecting us more and more from the “concrete world.” Psychologically, it has set up a barrier between ourselves and the world so that we come to believe that there is nothing there. “We cannot see it as a fog hiding the actual world.”

As Giegerich rightly reminds us, we do know that all of matter is composed of particles at its most elementary level. But it is mistaken to conclude from this we have been given an ultimate explanation of “the real world.” Reductionism as a methodology has resulted in great advances in science not only in physics, but in chemistry and biology. But there are limitations to it as there are in every methodology. Scientists such as Nobel laureate Robert B. Laughlin and Stanley A. Kauffman, notably among many others, find it insufficient because it does not take into account emergence, a process that occurs as a result of the interaction of simple entities, which collectively organize themselves into more complex entities. According to Kauffman emergence is “a major part of the new scientific worldview.” It violates none of the laws of physics but explains that “life in the biosphere, the evolution of the biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday world as real, are not reducible to physics nor explicable from it, and are central to our lives.” As others, have pointed out, the notion that evolution occurred primarily through competition or “the survival of the fittest” is belied by emergence which indicates instead that it occurred as well through cooperation and interdependence. The idea of emergence allows for unpredictability and, to cite Kauffman, “creativity” and as such is “inherently beyond prediction.”

I’ve not just reached my limits but have gone beyond them in describing what I know about emergence. My point in citing it is mainly to propose that, pace Giegerich, the world has “not fallen apart into its nuclear particles.” Nor has the natural world become “obsolete.” There is plenty of information available about emergence which, as you will discover, is a way of viewing much else in this world of ours, besides physics. I’ve cited below those I am familiar with.

Stanley A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. (Basic Books, 2008). I have also drawn on his paper, “Breaking the Galilean Spell,” because it offers a good summary of his thinking on this subject. You can download it at http://edge.org/documents/archive/edge243.html#sk; Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (Basic Books, 2005); Humberto R. Maturana & Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Shambhala, 1998); Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (Scribner, 2001); Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The new Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (Addison-Wesley, 1994)

2008-07-15T12:25:00.002-04:00

Interstice Two

In his posting ("Necessary Abstraction?" June 19, 2008) Michael Caplan referred to James Elkins’s “Six Stories . . .” (1) in which the author discusses how certain artists and photographers as well as scientists working in the fields of astronomy, microscopy, particle physics, and quantum mechanics, have pushed the limits of what can be imagistically expressed. They have reached, according to Elkins, the “sublime.” By this he means not what you would expect in the ordinary understanding of this term.

The word sublime means ‘up to the threshold’—sub is ‘up to’ and limen is ‘lintel’ or ‘threshold.’ Up to it, and no further: the sublime is the encounter between what can be thought and what cannot. In images, it is the point where the picture gives way to what is taken to be unrepresentable.

Scientists express the unrepresentable in the language of mathematics, but, especially if they are addressing the non-scientist, they will construct computerized images which simulate what appears to be the reality of the phenomenon they are researching. But these simulations do not truly replicate it, as Elkins repeatedly demonstrates.

Elkins gives particular attention to the artist Agnes Martin who claims her paintings are really about nothing. “My paintings have neither objects, nor space, nor time, not anything, no forms.” But apparently contradicting herself, she goes on to say that “They are about light, lightness, they are about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form.”

There are, it seems, limits to what can be imagined, imaged. Elkins goes further than this by claiming that there are limits as well to what can be “thought.” Is he right? Does what cannot be thought exist? How do we know? How do we find out? The scientist relies on the logic of mathematics. The artist works with material stuff and however imageless the result, there is still an image (of sorts). ( See examples of Agnes Martin's paintings.) We might perhaps think of them as . . . what? suggesting psychic space, or the unknowable Godhead as have religious thinkers and mystics, or Being as have the philosophers? Or is it the Void? It is about nothing, it is just itself, nothing?

There is an innate compulsion is us human beings to seek out the ineffable, to encounter it, to want to grasp it. as if that were possible. We are drawn to the edge, to the threshold, none more so in our time than the scientists, but not only they. There are those who are drawn to whatever it is that lies beyond the merely temporal, human, and physical. We will go there, to the edge, we want to go there, will return again, but cannot stay for long. At some instant, we must leave it and return to the familiar, (if also not entirely knowable), to our place on this earth, this planet. We are limited, there are boundaries. Thought and image can bring us close to the threshold, but will not take us across it. We need to come home and find what we are looking for here at this time, in this place.

(1) James Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980-2000. (Stanford University Press, 2008).

2008-07-03T10:16:00.005-04:00

An Interstice—an intervening space, especially a very small one (Oxford Dictionary)

This discussion about abstraction reminds me of Wolfgang Giegerich’s fierce defense of philosophical thought as being complete in itself, with its own dignity, with its own logic, because “founded in itself, in the thought experience.” Eros is not absent from thought, rather it has its own eros, an ‘erotic relation’ to the matter of thought.” Thought’s passion is for its own “internal life of concepts . . . not an ordinary life passion for other things or people.” What is interesting to me is that, in Giegerich’s view, thought in its very abstractness and negation is a phenomenon in itself. We find, says Giegerich, that the thought of the great philosophers is concrete “because it contains the fullness of life and comprises reality within itself.” Note that he refers to it as “the thought experience.” (1)

James Hillman is in accord. “Viable ideas have their own innate heat and their own vitality. They are living things too. But first they have to move your furniture, else it is the same old you, with your same old habits, trying to apply a new idea in the same old way.” (2)

It’s important to remember this because those of us, who are neither philosophers nor scientists, much prefer to grapple with ideas in terms of images, examples, metaphors, anything that will make the sheer difficulty of thought more easily transparent to us. We find abstractions bloodless, lifeless, remote from what we think of as common sense “reality.” We fail to respond to the passion of the thinker for the thought, and thereby fail to be warmed by its heat and vitality.

Much of this may be due to sheer laziness. Thinking is hard work, requires concentration which is increasingly difficult in an environment which places a higher value on multitasking and surrounds us with infinite excuses for distraction. But the fact is that abstract thought of any kind is difficult, and getting only more so, especially in the disciplines of philosophy and science, but also in the humanities and social sciences, all of which have their own specialized languages. Michael Caplan (see previous posting) quotes from Theodor Adorno, about the “increasingly independent language of physical-mathematical formulas, a language that has long since ceased to be retrievable into visuality or any other categories directly commensurable to the consciousness of man.”

This is a serious and perhaps insurmountable problem for the lay person who understands that there is, as Michael observes in that same posting, “the psychic necessity of a high degree of abstract thinking, and that a failure to own this challenge leaves consciousness self-divided and inadequate.”

When we think of science and technology today and how in explaining, indeed, defining our world for us, it is profoundly changing it—and largely without our awareness— the effort to understand what is going becomes an urgent responsibility. But how do we do this in a culture which wallows in images and to which the word is subordinated? How do we learn to think beyond ‘visuality?' Obviously, we could use reliable intermediaries, those trained in the disciplines, who can “translate” for us, hopefully without bias or condescending simplification. I can’t help wishing, for instance, that Jungians who follow the thought of Giegerich would not engage with him in language that is often more opaque than Giegerich’s is purported to be. In fact, that charge is somewhat exaggerated. After sticking with Giegerich for more than a decade now, I’ve learned that every word and turn of phrase has been carefully chosen and demands close attention. Undoubtedly, I still miss a great deal or misinterpret. Yet I return to him repeatedly discovering new depths each time. Part of it may be the passion I sense in the logic of his thought. He is not “academic” as that word is often pejoratively taken to mean.

Giegerich is right about the need for a heightened consciousness to meet the challenge of our time. At the end of his commentary, Michael notes that all the disciplines including psychology need to find its own appropriate thought, the abstraction of logical thinking (and will pick up on this idea in his next entry.)

There is a dilemma we must not overlook—that the increasing dependence on abstract thought has led to the loss of our primal bond with nature, or as David Abram puts it, “to the sensuous”, our connection to the reality of life and all living things. Here abstract thought fails us. But is it a real loss, or do we need to bring to nature, and our relationship to it, a different consciousness given what we are learning about the cosmos, evolution, our own bodies, and the lifeworld and all the mysteries still out there —dark energy, dark matter, black holes? Is nature being “sublated” in some way into that new consciousness? Can we hold the tension between the opposites, and are they true opposites?

I repeat to myself Beckett’s “I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

(1) Wolfgang Giegerich, “The Dignity of Thought: In Defence of the Phenomenon of Philosophical Thought,” (Harvest: Journal of Jungian Studies, 1997, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp 45-54.)

(2) James Hillman & Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—and the World’s Getting Worse. (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993, pp 140ff.)

Necessary abstraction?

2008-06-19T10:05:00.004-04:00

I would like to address the two issues mentioned in your last entry, Dolores, taking up your kind invitation to post here freely. The first, which I'll deal with in this posting, is what you identified as the apparent self-contradiction of Giegerich's attempt to grasp the changes that have befallen consciousness in the modern era. My reference to a fall is deliberate, and I will return to it when I address the second of the two issues in another posting very soon.

As both a great defender of necessary abstraction ("the soul's logical life"! Hegel!) and as one in the long, esteemed line of thinkers promoting a "return to the things themselves", Giegerich is in an awkward position. It might not, ultimately, be untenable, but to make such a case would require much more examination and explanation than he has yet provided. I agree with you that he has left the question begging, so let me respond a little bit. The following doesn't really attempt an answer, but only really amplifies on what you've already written.

On the one hand, Giegerich insists that consciousness doesn't yet "admit" the truths revealed to it by its own probings, that it is "deaf to the message of its own scientific knowledge", behind its own times, as it were - and furthermore that in a Jung-inspired approach such a condition represents a neurotic, untenable state of affairs in which psyche will continue trying to educate/initiate ego by any means necessary, including the most extreme. In short, he believes that "the message of ... scientific knowledge" is a recognition of the psychic necessity of a high degree of abstract thinking, and that a failure to own this challenge leaves consciousness self-divided and inadequate. On the other hand, as you say, he promotes a kind of phenomenology that intends to combat the ever-widening gap between us and "the actual world" that is so characteristic of the modern age, our entrapment in "an ever tighter web of abstract constructs". And such a position would seem to run counter to "the message of ... scientific knowledge".

We are, of course, engaged today in a deep and desperate struggle about the very constitution of reality: about the endurance of "solidity" versus the revelation (or so it seems) that "all that is solid melts into air"; about monism and dualism and pluralism, and how we can possibly understand let alone negotiate their relations; about what one might call a "figurative" sense of science, art and religion as being somehow representational, as addressing realities of conceivable, human dimension (see James Elkins' book Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980-2000), as opposed to the increasing "abstraction" of, e.g., the advanced mathematics of higher physics, which shows that in order to understand reality we must think further than the conceivable itself, must pass beyond the imaginable to the truth of that which the human mind cannot imagine at all, but only calculate (ten-dimensionality, anyone?). Adorno summarizes this last issue and its import for our self-understanding in uncompromising terms:

Extravagant syntheses between developments in philosophy and innatural sciences are odious, of course; they ignore the increasingly independent language of physical-mathematical formulas, a language that has long since ceased to be retrievable into visuality or any other categories directly commensurable to the consciousness of man. [Negative Dialectics, p. 67]

I'm not necessarily convinced Adorno is right, but the point bears serious consideration. What gets lost in too-quick, New Agey appropriations of "complementarity", "uncertainty", "chaos" and so on? Do we thereby evade the science's fundamental subversion of our ability to formulate realistic cosmological ideas that are "directly commensurable to the consciousness of man"? Are we therefore doomed to live with a revolutionized notion of truth as something we cannot by definition understand, that remains forever and utterly out of reach? (Is that really so revolutionary, after all?) Or has "the consciousness of man" yet to realize its fuller potential, specifically, its ability to think beyond "visuality"? This is, I think, something that motivates Giegerich's whole project – but before grappling with that, let's return for a moment to Giegerich's Jung-inspired idea of phenomenology (from the little I know, I don't think his use of the term is consistent with conventional philosophical usage, but it makes good sense to me). In "The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of God", he writes:

Ultimately, the question is whether we grant, along with C.G. Jung, that phenomenological experience possesses ontological binding power or whether from a suspended spiritual position we de-realize our psychological experience as "merely" psychological, "merely" subjective. Jung grounded "psychological truth" in the "reality of the psyche." He said an idea "is psychologically true inasmuch as it exists," and similarly he said about physical reality, by way of example, that "an elephant is true because it exists." Jung thus brought down the notion of truth from transcendent heaven onto phenomenological earth. "Higher" truth is no longer literally above the world, but it is the depth and essence of the real world itself. [p. 23-24]

Giegerich's version of phenomenology has allowed him, for example, to discern the very metaphysical "structure" of the Abrahamic god in the physical construction of our technologies ("the nuclear bomb is God"), both in process and in product. And it lead him, in another instance, to recognize that for all its rationalism, the supposedly intellectual attempt to "prove/disprove the existence of God" is not only itself a form of devotion, but one that is exceptionally appropriate and indeed necessary to an inherently abstract god, revealing something of that god's nature which other, more obvious forms of devotion do not. In addition to such speculations, Giegerich's phenomenology has, among many other rich and creative insights, yielded profound readings of the Actaion/Artemis myth, of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" and of the psychological "shadow", as well as providing him with his theoretical touchstone: soul as (Jung's) "objective psyche". (Not "postive" but rather "logically negative", though nonetheless "objective" for all that!)

If such a phenomenology - one which allows us to perceive/conceive "the depth and essence of the real world itself", in all its imaginal psycho-logic, i.e., in its "truth" - belongs to a distant otherness from which we are separated by the rupture that is Western consciousness (the Greeks, Abrahamic monotheism, science and secularism), then either it is lost forever, or it is recoverable at a dialectically "higher" level, one which comprehends the high degree of abstraction Giegerich recommends.

By following psyche's movement faithfully, we are lead today into the realm of increasing abstraction, of "the end of representation". But perhaps where we are fooled is in assuming this applies only to the truths of science, or that it means that only the truths of science are logically tenable at all. So maybe it is not that philosophy/psychology should simplistically try to copy its (misunderstood) notions of, say, quantum physics (although Adorno may be wrong about the value of even this venture); but rather that it must find the kind of abstraction that is proper to it. If we are to believe Giegerich, this is at least in part the abstraction of logical thinking, the achievement of "the logical level":

… a logical formulation … uses abstract relational terms that do not give any concrete, sensual information … [for example] separation and synthesis are terms that could be applied to anything … The logical level is thus one where we speak of forms of relations, not of contents (on the logical level what used to be the contents has been freed from their sensual or imaginal coagulations). [cgjungpage seminar, Wed, 7 Oct 1998 8:44:29]

That this is a primary task of our age he asserts in many places, for example:

Especially in our situation of an incredible abstractness of technology, science and economic processes, it seems to me to be vital that the soul or consciousness has acquired for itself ... "pure spirit", highly abstract thought, for how else could it be up to what is going on? Similia similibus. [cgjungpage seminar, Tue, 6 Oct 1998 07:53:46]

I have some ideas about where all this might lead, and I'll try to articulate them in my next posting on this topic, where I'll speak more directly to your question, "where has psyche gone?"

2008-06-11T08:52:00.002-04:00

Where has psyche gone?

At the conclusion of Wolfgang Giegerich’s essay “The Nuclear Bomb as a Psychological Reality” (Technology and the Soul, p. 53), he challenges his readers to come out of our medieval way of seeing the world. We can no longer cling to the myths, religion, and symbols which have provided us with Meaning, because they have already passed into history. Our task now must be to acknowledge a world that has already changed fundamentally, having moved from nature to science and technology. The evidence for this transition is obvious. We are surrounded on all sides with the products of science and technology. Our daily lives are immersed and dependent on them. Our relationship to nature is now one of caretaker. But Giegerich goes even further than this by claiming that psyche itself has moved into science and technology.

There is a passage in the conclusion I will quote at some length, because in it Giegerich takes his idea of psyche’s transition to its most extreme expression. We have entered, he tells us, into a hitherto “unheard of situation.” into something “fundamentally new” in the human condition.

It is that the objective psyche has long migrated from the metaphysical world of things perceivable with our unarmed senses, and has settled on the level of nuclear particles and subcellular biology. The world as we have known it has fallen apart into its nuclear particles. Its very foundations have cracked. The natural world has once and for all become obsolete, it now has only the same degree of reality that a façade has. Today the real world is as its is shown to us by nuclear physics. The chairs on which you are sitting are not what they seem to be: solid matter. For the most part they are empty space, hardly interspersed with minute particles in cosmic distances from each other. We know this, but we do not admit it. Our consciousness wants to cling to the ‘medieval’ mode of perceiving the world as consisting of formed things, bodies. It is deaf to the message of its own scientific knowledge, and succeeds in pretending to be deaf by declaring the results of science as belonging to one compartment, that of the material external world which allegedly has nothing to do with our subjective experiencing, our feelings, views and values, in short with the psyche.

Giegerich goes on to say that we think we must fight on behalf of these old values “as an inner possession against the objective facts established by science. But the results of science do have to do with our psyche. . . .This change is such a fundamental event in the history of the soul that it must no longer be kept from our consciousness.”

This passage still puzzles me. Partly, I think, because it seemed to be an interjection of a new and startling idea for which as a reader I had not been sufficiently prepared—not quite an afterthought on Geigerich’s part, but perhaps driven by his desire to arouse us from our psychological complacency. But is there where psyche ends up? How are we to think then abut our experiences, feelings, views and values?

What was surprising to me is that Giegerich seems, with this passage, to contradict himself. He has stated elsewhere that he is a phenomenologist: ”My primary commitment is to the phenomena in their eachness themselves.” I take him at his word. In this view, the chair, phenomenologically speaking, is not just particles and waves, but “solid matter,” a real thing.

In the next essay in Technology and the Soul on the “The Significance of our Nuclear Predicament” Giegerich seems to take an entirely opposite approach.

The sciences construct an ever tighter web of abstract constructs, and by passing their results off for the actual world, they cocoon us more and more into a Platonic sphere of atemporal essences (general laws) and divorce us even more from the concrete world than we were divorced from the outset. The clarity of scientific findings and the fact that they allow us successfully to manipulate nature does not alter the fact that psychologically they keep us away from, and unconscious of the actual. They put a fog between ourselves and the cosmos. The fog is so dense that we are led to think nothing is there. We cannot see it as a fog hiding the actual world. (p. 60)

In his writings on the Nuclear Bomb, Giegerich attributes to the Bomb its own reality, indeed, its own “personality,” a phenomenon in its own right and that therefore has to be treated accordingly as a real Other.

But whether we accept that reality is a matter of particles and waves or that there is an objective real world that is more than the particles and waves of which it is composed, it is there the psyche is to be found. Science and technology, therefore, cannot be compartmentalized because they have everything to do with our values, feelings and experiences. What we are undergoing, Giegerich tells us, is so profound a change to which we must bring our full consciousness without clinging to what is already past. As he wrote in his most seminal work, “The End of Meaning” we are in the throes of being born again, this time as adults, on our own.

2008-05-24T13:01:00.003-04:00

Afterthought

The invention of writing transformed human consciousness and in the process permanently changed our relationship to nature. We have gone, as Morris Berman put it (The Reenchantment of the World), from a participating consciousness to a non-participating consciousness. Or as Wolfgang Giegerich would put it, we are no longer contained in nature. Today our relationship with nature is largely that of observers and manipulators for our own purposes, as well as its caretaker responsible for protecting and conserving it.

And yet, as we tend to forget, we are kin to all living things. We are a part of the biodiversity of this planet. Biologist E.O. Wilson called this innate affinity with living species, biophilia. We may be an exceptional species, but a species of nature all the same. We do in fact participate in nature or rather we too are nature in a most fundamental sense. At the same time, through our science and technology, we can approach nature at a “distance.” Other living species, from those invisible to the eye to the largest on earth in the world have been studied, measured, categorized. (Take a look at “Encyclopedia of Life,” the website for an amazing and ambitious project initiated by Wilson, to provide a global biodiversity database of all living things, many of them still unknown.)

It is doubtful we can, as David Abram proposes, recover that bodily and sensory experience of nature shared by everyone in pre-literate cultures. Today it may likely be enjoyed only by the fortunate few. For our part, however, we know so much more about life on this planet—and the cosmos— than they could possibly have known. This knowledge confirms our solidarity with nature although differently than the way ancestral peoples experienced it. This knowledge also has its own numinosity, inspiring reverence and awe.

2008-05-17T15:08:00.004-04:00

Afterthought: the Merging of
Writing with Visuals and Sound

Ong frequently warns that technologies can be detrimental to the individual and society, especially if they are made without conscious thought about what the probable or possible consequences might be, the bad with the good. But Ong is at heart a technophile, with a positive, appreciative understanding of technology. While others find technology alienating to the human spirit, dehumanizing and depersonalizing, he believes “Technology, if properly interiorized, does not degrade human life, but on the contrary enhances it. . . .The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life.”

When Ong writes about technology he is thinking primarily about writing, and its evolution from printing to electronic devices in which he includes radio, television and the computer. He writes little, however, of the latter, and writing in the late seventies and early eighties, he could not have forseen the Internet, much less Google which alone has enabled accessed to information (as distinct from knowledge) that could scarcely be imagined during his time. With the newer products of communication technology such as iPods, cell phones, email, video games, YouTube and FaceBook, writing (as text) is merged with visuals and sound. Although writing remains indispensable, it has lost its preeminence as a means of communication. The image and music, certainly with the young, are equally important. This convergence of the word with image and music was pioneered by the movies, TV, and advertising, but the new technologies have brought about other significant changes. The reader or viewer, for instance, is no longer relegated to a passive role, as is the case with written text but is now an active participant, a “contributor” to a networking “process.”

The impact of these newer technologies is already shaking things up in many of our traditional institutions, e.g. in education (the predicted obsolescence of the lecture and maybe even the lecturer*), political life (witness the current presidential campaign), social relations (websites providing virtual social networking with people you’ve never met) and psychology (using virtual reality war games to help in the recovery of traumatized Iraqi veterans).

The old don’t even try to understand these rapidly changing technologies. The Baby Boomer generation has left it to their children to cope with. Coming of age in the 21st century, these children (recently labeled the Millennialists) have no problem with technology. They are immersed in it as if it were their natural element, and maybe it is. It is much too soon know with any certainty how they have psychologically “interiorized” this experience, and at what point reflective consciousness will kick in, if it does.

*Take a look at "A Vision of Students Today" on the YouTube .

2008-05-14T10:06:00.002-04:00

Technology, Knowledge
and Interior Freedom

Picking up from the last posting: Technology can be a personalizing force because it gives us access to greater knowledge and the ability to organize that knowledge. Knowing, for Ong, is an interior act, intimately related to freedom. In a given situation, we cannot act as free persons, unless we have knowledge of that situation, what our choices might be regarding it, and are aware of our motives when it comes to making a choice. While our motivations are often unconscious, nevertheless, we can become aware of them enough so that they become “decently conscious” to us. Knowing why we do things is a distinctly human experience. By expanding the knowledge of the situations in which we have to make choices technology makes us more free.

Since a free act is the most interior of all the acts of human beings—the product of the deeply interior will, “the selfless self of self, mot strange, most still,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it’—technology’s implications with this act show how deep within man technology can penetrate.

Technology can help us make more informed and therefore freer choices. This knowledge will, however, not make it easier for us because with more knowledge about a situation the more difficult it will be to make choices.

Those who are antagonistic towards technology, Ong contends, are alienated not simply from technology as an external reality, but also from their own interior, because that external world is interior to us as well. Whether this is a just observation or not, whatever our attitude (or lack of it) towards technology, it is true, as Ong says, “We have not been sufficiently aware of the depths to which technology has penetrated the psyche.”

2008-05-12T09:14:00.002-04:00

Technology versus
The Great Mother

Just because we have interiorized technology, Walter Ong warns, doesn’t mean that it cannot dehumanize. It certainly can, but he finds no evidence that technology is more damaging to our humanity than any other of our activities. Each can dehumanize in its own way. In the 1967 film The Graduate, he finds a powerful example of how pre-technological dehumanization can be just as effective as the latest technology.

The story centers on a college graduate who is famously advised about what to do with his life—“Go into plastics.” In other words, his life’s goal should be to make profits. This is a technological kind of depersonalization—life is about things, not people. Then comes along Mrs. Robinson, the mother of the girl he loves, but who tries to seduce the young man for her own sexual gratification. Mrs. Robinson represents the archetypal Great Mother, which he describes as “the primitive, dehumanizing female figure of earthly mythologies whose relationship to masculinity—and indeed to femininity as well—is totally impersonal, or better, pre-personal, for the Great Mother belongs to the stages of psychic life before the emergence of fully personal consciousness.” The young graduate is caught between the threat of “ultramodern technological” depersonalizaton or “the ultraprimitive” depersonalization of the Great Mother. “She is, at the very least, quite as dehumanizing as technology, and in fact much more so—for technology bears the mark of reflection, which is a very human activity.”

Of course, technology can dehumanize, but it need not do so. For Ong, the ability to reflect on what we are doing with our technology makes all the difference. Providing we are sufficiently reflective, technology can also be a personalizing force because it enlarges our mental activities, gives us more access to knowledge and the ability to effectively organize that knowledge.

2008-05-10T15:41:00.003-04:00

Mind changing technologies
Writing, Print, Electronics

Technology makes it possible for us not only to manage the external world but, according to Walter Ong, to manage knowledge itself. The written word, print and electronic devices such as the computer, radio, television, telephones, have made this possible. Because these technologies deal in one way or another with words, they reach more deeply into our interior than any other technology. “Indeed, in a curious way they enter into man’s interior itself, directly affecting the way in which his consciousness and unconsciousness, manage knowledge, the management of his thought processes, and even his personal awareness.” In effect these are mind-changing technologies, making it possible for the mind to do things it could not otherwise do.

To organize their thinking oral cultures depended on formulaic devices, such as antitheses, repetitions, proverbs and other sayings. The Hippocratic Aphorisms, an early work on medicine which in style was derived from oral culture, consists of a collection of sayings or aphorisms,( "Art is long, life is short"). Ong compares this work with Aristotle’s Physics in which writing has become a means of thinking out matters, something oral culture cannot do. “Without writing the mind cannot get its thought together this way, which is to say that it cannot consciously know such things.”

Printing had an even more radical effect in altering the way we think about and organize knowledge. With the text before the reader, knowledge assumed a kind of "body." Not only did print dissociate knowledge from oral speech, it could be stored, retrieved when necessary and could be produced in quantities, unlike manuscripts. Printing made knowledge into a commodity. But it also made it possible for knowledge “to interact more intensely with itself, to feed on itself, as knowledge has a way of doing.” Although this happened only very slowly, Ong believes that with the publication of the Encyclopedia in the eighteenth century, “a new stage of consciousness had been entered in the West and new kinds of thinking has emerged." Today with electronic technologies that makes knowledge almost immediately retrievable and interactive, we have entered a further stage of consciousness.

These technologies of print and electronics have changed not only the external world, but the interior of the human mind, how we experience ourselves and the world that surrounds us. “In this sense, the technologies of writing, print, and electronics are operative within us than outside us. And in fact, other technologies are, too, for they all affect out interior sense of the way we are present to the world and to ourselves.”

2008-05-06T15:28:00.002-04:00

Afterthoughts

Before moving on to more of Walter Ong’s ideas on the inside/outside and technology:

Collective Unconscious

In the same footnote on consciousness and the unconsciousness mentioned in the previous posting, Ong refers to Jung’s “myth” of the collective unconscious. Despite the disparaging tone, Ong admits that there is a certain truth in the existence of a collective unconscious and offers his own idea of what it might mean. There is a collective unconscious inasmuch as each individual is shaped by what comes to him or her from outside, especially from society, without, however, it having been “processed interiorly” by a reflective consciousness. As Ong sees it, the unconscious can only exist in the individual. “It is ‘collective’ in the sense that it exists in me as coming from or interchanged with others.” It becomes fully my own by means of an act of a reflecting consciousness, in which case what was unconscious becomes conscious.

Consciousness and distancing

Ong’s interpretation does not take away from the affinities we experience with things outside ourselves, whether they are those of nature or those of our own making. Ong’s idea of consciousness, just as Berger’s, implies a distancing. A reflecting consciousness cannot help but see those things as “other” with their own reality, distinct from the individual. Once again we return to the notion of holding or sustaining a tension between what is inside and outside. Both the intimacy with and difference from have to be experienced simultaneously. In discussing, for example, the computer and its mesmerizing influence, Steve Talbott advises us to see it as our enemy as well as our friend. I don’t know if we have to polarize our relationship with our technologies in such a way, but I understand his intent. Affinity with out technologies enables us to use them competently and often with pleasure. Without consciousness, however, of what we are doing and of that affinity, we succumb to what Langdon Winner calls a “technological determinism” —accepting these immense technological changes as if there were nothing to be done, that we have no other choice.

2008-05-03T12:50:00.003-04:00

Technophilia
The inside is consciousness

Now Walter Ong,

Like Peter Berger, Walter Ong describes how we humans internalize or take inside us the world “outside” or external to us. For both thinkers “inside” is consciousness, more precisely reflective consciousness. While Berger develops his model principally with religion (and other social constructions) in mind, Ong does so in the context of technology.

In a 1978 article “Technology outside and inside us,"* Ong begins by broadening our conventional thinking about technology. It is not simply a matter of making tools, which even some animals are known to do, albeit in a limited way. Technology is first of all “a human product” defined “as the body of knowledge available to a culture for making use of materials to serve human life and comfort.” It has a long history and so complicated that is difficult if not impossible to fully grasp. In our common understanding of technology it has to do with things out there, “in front of us and apart from us, belonging to and affecting the world outside consciousness.” Just think of all the technologies we come in contact with during the course of an ordinary day at home, or work, or on the street— the car, the bus, the factory, the washing machine, telephone or cell phone, the computer, and so on and on. No end to them. We are surrounded by and immersed in our technologies.

But, says Ong, don’t forget these other things in our life which are also technologies but aren’t usually thought of as being so. Musical instruments, for example, all are technologies, machines for making music—the piano and violin no less than the synthesizer or other electronic musical instruments. Whatever the musical instrument, it is “humanized” by becoming in a sense a part of the musician. Many of us have a similar relationship with our cars, our computers, or cell phones.

“Technology exercises its most significant effects and its most real presence not in the external world but within the mind, within consciousness. The external product designed by consciousness somehow reenters consciousness, to affect the way we think, to make possible new kinds of noetic processes, included those of philosophy itself, which are unrealizable until technology is deeply interiorized in the human psyche.

Ong says that we are a mix of inside and outside. If you kick me, I don’t say you are kicking my body. I say you are kicking me. And the same time, I feel as if I am inside my body. Anything we have to do with the outside world is a transaction between that world and my own interior, which is my consciousness. Also involved is the unconscious “out of which consciousness grows.” In a footnote, Ong notes that consciousness is more interior than the unconscious because it is reflective and reflectiveness is “full interiority”. The unconscious, on the other hand, cannot reflect about itself. It is consciousness which draws into itself the unconscious that is being reflected on.

The transactions we have with the exterior world transform it, which in turn transforms our interior selves. The more highly technologized a culture the more deeply it penetrates and profoundly shapes “the evolution of human consciousness.” Human consciousness is not a static given; over time it grows and continually enlarges its scope. This occurs in the individual and in the culture as a whole. Cultures with more developed technology are more influenced by consciousness than those cultures in which technology is less developed. (There are no cultures without any technology). In a highly developed culture everything in the surroundings is the result of conscious activity such as homes, schools, factories, hospitals, office buildings, roads, cars. Likewise in our homes we have electric lights, running water, heat, stoves for cooking, phones, a TV, and more recently computers. Even our farms are technologized with fertilized soil, machines for planting and reaping and for milking cows.

Writing at the end of the seventies, Ong observed that with the growing concern for the environment, consciousness was entering a new stage. “Evironmentalism or ecological planning is consciousness telling itself that it must take over still more: now even the heretofore unintentional side-effects of conscious planning must be attended to consciously. Everything possible must be attended to consciously: the entire globe and even outer space. The more consciousness is at work, the more it drives us to still greater consciousness.”

By letting whatever is in the unconscious move into consciousness, consciousness itself grows. The unconscious is in no sense depleted by this, but continues as the “substratum” of all our thought and activity.
“As consciousness grows, the unconscious seems to deepen itself still more—even when we are reflectively aware of the fact that it does so.”

* Communio 5, No. 2, 100-121.

2008-04-26T16:22:00.002-04:00

Technophilia and
Consciousness

As we internalize our particular social reality, we also internalize our objectified self or socially given identity. (What Jung calls the persona.) As individuals, however, we are not merely products of society. Inevitably then there exists an inherent tension between society and the individual or, as Berger puts it, the "personal consciousness." The internalization process results in a sense of “otherness” which is both outside the world and inside us. Possessing a reflective consciousness, we can think about what we have assimilated and as we do so we are distancing ourselves from it, even though we have internalized it. This ability to distance ourselves through reflective consciousness, makes room for choice, over against fate, the decision to go with the process, or to change, directly, or modify its flow.

Berger applied his theory to religion, but it can be applied usefully to our relationship to technology. From our human perspective we have to consider what the right relationship should be with this technology which seems to have a life of its own. If we do not like what we find, we cannot make it disappear. Technology will be with us as long as we inhabit this planet and in truth is rapidly growing ever more complex and more intrusive in our lives. Yet we still have the ability to modify or redirect what stands in the way of a right relationship to technology. If the made-world cannot be wished away, neither can our capacity to transform it.

Our technology expresses who we are as human beings. At the same time it acts as if it were independent of us. To this dilemma Steve Talbott responds:

I am convinced there is no hope for understanding the role of technology in today’s world without our first learning to hold both side of the truth in our minds, flexibly and simultaneously. The relationship between human being and machine has become something like a complex symbiosis. . . .We and our mechanical offspring are bound together in an increasingly tight weave. To substantially modify the larger pattern—rather than simply be carried along by it—requires profound analysis of things not immediately evident, and a difficult effort to change things not easily changed. It is only through self-awareness and inner adjustment that I can restrict the hammer in my hand to its proper role. I must multiply the effort a millionfold when dealing with a vastly more complex technology—one expressing in a much more insistent manner its own urgencies. (The Future Does Not Compute, pp. 34-35.)

It is this holding of the tension between technology and ourselves that I call technophilia. First of all, technophilia is the recognition of our indissoluble bond with technology. Beyond this, technophilia also requires us to hold in tension “both sides of the truth”—that on the one side technology is an extension and expression of our humanity and on the other, that it can function as an autonomous force. The tension cannot be sustained without a consciousness fully awake to the dilemma we have created with our technology. Cultivating Technophilia is a psychological task demanding a persevering struggle to uncover, acknowledge and deal with the all-powerful, unconscious drives which are as much responsible (if not more so) for our present condition as are our overt, rational intentions.

Our present, urgent effort to understand and cope with our global environmental crisis is, in a sense, the practice of technophilia. As we bring increasing consciousness to the devastation of nature through the use of our technologies, we are also asking how do we modify or invent new technologies to repair, salvage or less likely, to turn around completely the damage we have done.

It's important to recognize, however, that technophilia, at least as it has been described here, is limited in a fundamental way in that it does not include nature as a participant but as the subject of the dialectic between technology and humanity with its fate to be decided between them.

2008-04-25T15:30:00.002-04:00

Our technologies:
Inside and Outside

The idea that technology is a great deal more than the things we make for our own purposes is not a new one, but most of us take it simply for granted that it is something outside of, separate and external to us. On the contrary, as David Rothenberg points out, technologies, fabricated to satisfy our needs and desires, become extensions of ourselves—mirror images, reflecting us back to ourselves. Moreover, we humans and our technologies evolved together over thousands of years. (See previous posting.) During this long history they not only changed, becoming more complex, but in the process changed us as well. How did this come about?

As Steve Talbott observed “Every cultural artifact approaching us from the outside also has an ‘inside’ and this ‘inside’ is at the same time our ‘inside.’” He goes on to say that there is no technology which can be separated from ”the interior which we share with it.” This idea too is not a new one. The alchemists believed that we humans are a small cosmos governed by the same laws as the great cosmos. Paracelsus wrote: “For what is outside is also inside; what is not outside man is not inside. The outer and the inner are one thing, one constellation, one influence, one concordance, one duration, one will.”

What exactly is meant by inside and outside, and how does it happen?
Two eminent scholars, Peter Berger and Walter J. Ong offer ways in which we might understand just what is meant by “inside/ outside.” Berger is a sociologist of religion. Ong was a theologian and professor of literature who made major contributions in the field of language and communication.

First, Berger

We human beings make our world, by which Berger means “culture” which he defines as the totality of everything made by human beings, not only material things (technologies,) but non-material (languages, social institutions) Society too is made by us; its purpose is to organize the relationships within a culture. It does so through our actions, both physical and mental, and through consciousness. We too are part of this process and hence, “products” of society from which we receive an identity and within which we have a role to play.

Berger thinks of this process as a dialectic or a “conversation” that consists of three “moments:” externalization, objectification, and internalization. Externalization is the extension of human beings into the world by means of our actions our deeds. This outward thrust is a biological necessity. As humans we are born ”without specialized and undirected instincts” into an “open world” rather than a “species-specific” environment as is the case with other mammals. In other words, our world is not given to us, but must be made for us and by us, that is, through “externalization.”

But once we extend ourselves into the world, we discover that the world and all its products take on their own reality and confront us with their actuality, that they are “other” than us. They become objectified as a reality apart our subjectivity as individuals. A farmer makes a plow which then becomes another object in the world with its own reality and its own logic making it necessary for the farmer to re-arrange his other work on the farm or other aspects of his life in ways he did not and probably could not forsee. This is true also of our non-physical activities. We invent languages but only then do we discover that not only our speech but also our thoughts are dominated by their grammar. To illustrate what he means, Berger cites the story of the Sorcerer’s apprentice. “The mighty buckets, magically called out of nothingness by human fiat, are set in motion. From that point on they go about drawing water in accordance with an inherent logic of their own being that, at the very least, is less than completely controlled by their creator.”

Having constructed a world “outside” which takes on its own actuality and logic we actively internalize it. By this Berger means that this world outside, becomes, at the same time, internal to our consciousness. That is, we identify with the phenomena of that world and are shaped by them. The individual “becomes not only one who possesses these meanings, but one who represents and expresses them.” Berger emphasizes that in this process of internalization the individual is not passive. On the contrary,the outside world is internalized in his or her consciousness only through an ongoing “conversation” or dialectic with others. In that give and take between society and the individual, our values and beliefs are given form. At the same time we contribute to making and modifying them.

Technological inventions give ample evidence of how we assimilate the phenomena in the world into our consciousness. The computer is only our most current example. This most successful, powerful, versatile and amazing human invention is now looked upon as a model for among other things, the working of the human mind. We create computers in which we recognize ourselves. Before the computer, there was the mechanical clock suggesting the order and mathematical precision of the universe. Murray Stein notes how physics, in Jung’s time, with its theories of energy, entropy, conservation of energy and transformation, provided Jung with a metaphor for his theory of psychic energy.

What enables us to assimilate aspects of the world outside ourselves is
consciousness, about which Berger has more to say. . .

2008-04-24T15:02:00.001-04:00

Technophilia
Excerpts (with some slight editing)
from Techne & Psyche

“Technology can dehumanize,” says Walter Ong, but “so can the lack of technology.” It isn’t easy, but there is no other way than to embrace, in full awareness, its inherent paradox. This is what I would call technophilia, a true love of technology. Technophilia understands that our relation to technology is not just rational or instrumental but is also deeply non-rational, instinctive. It is not a matter of judging one as preferable to the other, but of uneasily containing both simultaneously. Heracleitus—and Jung after him—had a word for it enantiodromia—the play of opposites.”

“I think technophilia can be usefully compared to what biologist E.O. Wilson calls “biophilia,” ”that innately emotional affiliation of human beings to living organisms. Although there is no absolute evidence for biophilia, he claims it can be deduced from the logic of evolution. Since human beings first appeared hundreds of thousands of years ago, they have been intimately involved, as a matter of survival, with other living things. Biophilia, according to Wilson, is not a single instinct, but a “complex of learning rules” which in turn arouse feelings “that fall along several emotional spectra from attraction to aversion” and find expression in cultural symbols. He gives snakes as an example. Like all animals, humans are genetically repelled by them because they can lead to terrible suffering and death. At the same time, we are attracted to them because they represent a mysterious life force. For this reason, snakes figure prominently in the myths and religions of the world.

Biologist Madhav Gadgil thinks our affiliation with technology also corresponds to evolutionary logic. Hominids populated the earth fro some 2 million years and homo sapiens some 200,000 years—more than enough time for artifacts to have “acted as a selective force in their own right.” He also points out that just as biological organisms became increasingly complex over time, so too have our technologies. Efforts to improve transportation resulted in increasingly complex means—logs on water, then canoes, rafts of reeds, bullock cart, chariots, and so on up to the present with, for instance, nuclear submarines, motor boats, bicycles, jets, satellites, cars. This impulse towards complexity may come out of “the exploratory drive” in human beings and might be the common root which could explain our attraction or aversion to other living organisms.”

. . . .

“To compare technophilia with biophilia is useful, but only to a point. Our affiliation with living organisms and to our technologies developed together over millions of years. Technology, however, continues to evolve (at least most visibly and at an ever accelerating rate.) It is, according to Ray Kurzweil’s famous definition, “evolution by other means. . . .”

“Complex tool making evolved over some 300,000 years ago, along with hands, brains, and grammatical language, each stimulating change and development in the other. Technology then is as much a part of he human make up as is language. Our affiliation with technology is as ancient as our affiliation with nature, but different. Technology made it possible for us to overcome nature, to manipulate, later and transform it. Although we are a part of nature, it has been, at least in the development of Western culture, the other. Technology, however, is us, the extension of ourselves into the physical world. Organisms have a life of their own, while our technologies do not exist without our having created them. One they exist, however, they also take on a life of their own, but a life which remains a consequence of human intention, will, and desires. “

2008-04-22T14:11:00.001-04:00

Technophilia
The Proper Love of technology

Our bond with technology is deeper, older, more alive and dynamic than that view of technology considered merely as “a complex of contrivances and technical skills, put forth by human activity and as a means to our end.” Rather, it is a dialogical relationship between things made and ourselves the makers, a circular process, a feedback circuit in perpetual movement from maker to made and from made to maker. Having constructed a world “out there” —and technology in its immensity, diversity and pervasiveness can be thought of as a “world”— this world is also internalized by us. We assimilate this objectified world which in a sense then “makes” us. Technology is not only an objectified reality but one with which we identify and by which we are shaped.

Technology actualizes our ideas, fantasies, ambitions and desires and in doing so extends us outward into that still greater world beyond which, without our technology, we could not have gone. Our relation to the technologies we create represents a kind of self-love urging us towards our fulfillment as human beings. It would be wrong (and useless) to consider this as pathology. Technophilia, as the proper love of technology, acknowledges this relationship as an essential part of our being. Failure to recognize this intimate connection between technology and ourselves undermines the effectiveness of even the most thoughtful critique of technology and its excesses. A moralistic or condemnatory attitude, however justified and persuasive, may in the short run arouse a reaction, but will in the long run be ignored or fail, unless it acknowledges this affiliation between maker and made.

2008-04-17T13:23:00.003-04:00

Technology as humanity extended

Indeed, to begin with Adam, the first father of humankind: every method and effort which he used to secure the earthly necessities by building stubble-covered huts and raising tight shelters to protect himself from the inclemency of the sky. . .all this derived from the mechanical art. From “The Various and Ingenious Machines of Agostino Ramelli "(1588) quoted in Hand’s End.

When we hear or read the word “technology” we think of today’s technologies. We forget that technology, as the sixteenth century engineer Ramelli reminds us, came into existence pretty much at the beginning of our existence on earth. Without it, our survival much less evolution, would have been unlikely. Yet when Rothenberg defines technology as the extension of our humanity, this may come as something of a revelation. As with nature, we view technology as being other than ourselves. Well, it is and it isn’t. The computer I am using to write these words is certainly a separate entity. Yet the computer would not have come into existence had it not served human desires and needs. Rothenberg reminds us that all technologies from the most primitive to the most sophisticated and complex are the fulfillment in one way or another of our purposes. “Technology does not exist without the human intent that drives it. . . . ” Technology enables us to “manipulate the world to fit our purposes” It “stretches human presence outward, making the world tangible by enveloping it in the web of our actions.”

Technology is also a way of knowing. We discover in the things we make a certain order, a logos, (techne+logos) a rationality of its own, which in turn gives expression to the order in nature itself. There seems to be inherent in technologies a ”yearning towards nature itself, some meaning inherent in things themselves beyond our own special use of them. . . . a hidden logic of order in the world as a whole, beyond the pragmatics of human application.” Although he expresses it differently, in terms of the soul of technology, it seems to me that Wolfgang Giegerich says very much the same thing. (See Michael Caplan’s commentary posted on Monday, September 17, 2007)

Technology is transformative. Directed towards the fulfillment of our intentions, our wants and needs, it changes nature. It also alters us. Every technology modifies our experience of what it is to be human. I am reminded here of David Abram’s account of the transformative power of phonetic writing as it developed through the ages, the role it played in removing us of our sense of being embedded in nature.

Hand’s End is not entirely satisfying, its themes too often submerged in rather than clarified by ancillary ideas. But the overriding idea is certain: nature, technology, and humanity are in a dynamic relationship, the one acting and acted upon by the other, and in the process each is transformed.

2008-04-14T15:57:00.003-04:00

The Doubt of a Deep Ecologist

David Rothenberg studied and worked with the Norwegian philosopher and ecologist, Arne Naess, who coined the phrase “deep ecology” and is considered to be the first to outline its principles. Is it Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess is a record of that seminal period. Rothenberg is an associate professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, a musician who improvises with the sounds of birds and whales, a writer whose most recent book is on Sudden Music: Improvisation, Art, Nature. He is editor of Terra Nova, a series of anthologies about the relationship of the environment and nature. With irreproachable credentials as a deep ecologist, he continues to explore humanity’s relationship with nature through the medium of music and literature.

But he also has doubts about some of the premises of deep ecology which he defines as “a philosophy of the relationship between human and natural which urges us to fit into an enveloping, moral sense of nature which is larger than any human purpose and which stands for the Earth or this approach for life as a whole.” He became skeptical of this approach, however, finding it too narrow because it tended to view nature as everything that remained untouched by human influence.

My intuition is that nature is far more important to humanity than this—a context which we discover when we touch, use, and change it. Hence, I turned to the study of technology, the way we delineate the world according to our purposes. We are always involved in reconceiving nature, whether we know it or not. This nature is more tangible than any imagined wilderness empty of the human gaze.

Thinking through that initial intuition resulted in a 1992 book Hands End: Technology and the Limits of Nature. Rothenberg confronts two opposing attitudes towards technology, the one which sees in it a threat to “our humane being,” the other which views technology as having an inner logic of its own, which, if we do not stand in its way, will not only enable us to conquer nature but will also fulfill our own, human purposes. Both views, for Rothenberg, are gross generalizations which prevents the possibility that there might be other ways of understanding technology in relation to nature. He proposes instead an alternative view in which nature, technology, and humanity are not immutable givens, but fluid, constantly in a process of transformation as a consequence of the interaction of each upon the other.

More later . . .

2008-04-07T14:49:00.002-04:00

Afterthoughts: Arendt

After forty years, work is underway at NASA to return men to the Moon—the newest and most ambitious venture to “conquer space.” The Ares rockets designed for this second trip are due to be ready by 2015. “What’s impossible? What can’t we do it if we want to do it badly enough?” wonders Gene Cenan, the last man to go to the Moon. But this time the Moon will serve as a stage on the way to the ultimate goal, Mars. Since Mars is several million miles away, chances are, that should things go wrong, the astronauts could not return to the earth. The atmosphere on Mars is lethal with its solar flares and sixty degree below zero temperature. Moreover, the astronauts will have to stay on Mars for an unheard of eighteen months until Mars and Earth can realign properly for the return home.

The flight to the Moon is crucial to the success of the proposed flight to Mars. Months will be spent on the moon, so that the systems can be tested to be sure they work properly, such as the life-support system, the space suits, and all else required for this, the longest voyage into space so far. The men will not have to wear their space suits all the time, because “habitats” will be built to give them “short-sleeve environments.” New robots are also being built which will allow the astronauts to explore a much larger terrain than was possible during the first flight. But the Moon isn’t being used just to make the Mars trip possible. Meanwhile, the lunar surface is scheduled to be blasted next year, in the hope to find hydrogen which might, one day, provide fuel for trips back to earth. In effect, the moon is being colonized. NASA’s director, Mike Griffin, believes it will not only “figure prominently in the future of the human race. Well, I think Mars, in the distant future, is another home for human beings.”

Hannah Arendt would not have been surprised at this new thrust into outer space. Aware of the enormity of the enterprise, she knew that no objections, even practical ones, would deter it. There was no use in arguing that the immense sums of money it required, could be spent for better ends, such as education or to eliminate poverty and disease. She found such arguments “slightly absurd, out of tune with the things that are at stake and whose consequences today appear still quite unpredictable.” Not only the integrity of science demanded it not yield to utilitarian purposes, but more startling, even shocking, is that even “the reflection about the stature of man as well be left in abeyance.” (Emphasis added.) She notes that nothing stopped the physicists from splitting the atom even though they were cognizant of its destructive capabilities. In truth, “the scientist qua scientist does not even care about the survival of the human race or, for that matter, about the survival of the planet itself.” Those issues have nothing and should have nothing to do with science.

The only possible deterrent against the conquest of space is if it could be shown that the entire project would be “self-defeating in its own terms.” Arendt thought there were indications that this could be the case. She points out that even if we could extend our life span and even if man became capable of traveling with the speed of light, we humans will never be able to go beyond the limits of our own planetary system. “[T]he modern search for ‘true reality’ behind mere appearances, Arendt writes, citing Heisenberg, has led into a situation in the sciences in which man has lost the very objectivity of the natural world, so that man in his hunt for ‘objective reality’ suddenly discovered that he always ‘confronts himself alone.’”

Think of our present day technology which engulfs our ordinary life never mind the complex instruments that will get us to the moon. We are well on our way to the day, wrote Arendt, “that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not man-made and hence is not, in the last analysis, he himself in disguise. [Emphasis added]

The astronaut, shot into outer space and imprisoned in his instrument-ridden capsule where each actual physical encounter with his surroundings would spell immediate death, might well be taken as the symbolic incarnation of Heisenberg’s man—the man who will be the less likely ever to meet anything but himself and man-made things the more ardently he wishes to eliminate all anthropocentric considerations with the non-human world around him.

Perhaps, suggests Arendt, if humankind did come to accept its limitations—that it cannot conquer space, but at best, make some discoveries within the solar system, then what might be possible is a new view of man and his true place in the universe. The outlook for such change does not look very good, she thought. But she offers the possibility of what that different vision of humankind and of the earth might be like—a new humanism which is geocentric in that the earth and not the universe is the center for man and anthropocentric, “in the sense that man would count his own factual mortality among the elementary conditions under which his scientific efforts are possible at all.“ Following Arendt’s thinking, anthropocentricism is not to be renounced as Abrams and Giegerich would have it, but rather re-defined in terms of humanity’s “stature” in the only place it can matter, at home on this earth.

2008-04-07T09:18:00.005-04:00

Afterthoughts: Questions for Giegerich

If I understand Giegerich correctly, it is psyche/soul which directs the course of the world through time. If we human beings have a decisive role in that trajectory, it is only to the extent that psyche/soul manifests itself through us. So, whatever the condition of the world in which we now find ourselves, it is psyche at work. If things are not going well, there is no use blaming humans for it, for it is psyche that is responsible and for what purpose, if there is one, we can never be sure. I‘ve expressed this crudely with a good chance that I have misinterpreted Giegerich but my intention is to suggest that there are questions underlying his claims that to my knowledge have not yet been raised, much less addressed. In his fervor to dethrone human beings as sole possessors of the psyche, where that leaves us is not at all clear. One directive is certain: we must engage with the products of our own making —technology, which is a defining characteristic of our global society. So, somehow we are still agents, but to what degree and in what manner we do not know.

We are far, of course, from having renounced anthropocentrism. But is it really possible to do so? Or do we need a new definition of what it means to be human, which locates our place in the scheme of things while acknowledging we are not the center from which and to which all else flows?

And how are we to understand soul as Geigerich interprets it? If I read him correctly psyche or soul is an immaterial, pervasive force that simply is. It does not seem to be concerned with issues of morality, of right and wrong, of good and bad. Are these issues then left up to human beings endowed with reflective consciousness? Can we replace anthropocentrism with a new humanism which responds to the conditions of our particular moment in history?

Perhaps providing answers to these questions is not Giegerich’s task or certainly not his alone, but also of those in whom he has evoked troubling thoughts and to whom he offers exhilarating possibilities. If others do take up his challenge, it is my hope they will be able to articulate their ideas in a language which faithfully expresses the depth and seriousness of their thought but is addressed to a needy public outside the walls.

2008-04-05T15:27:00.003-04:00

Afterthoughts: Giegerich

For Giegerich psychology is about the psyche, the soul. It is not about the psychology of the individual human being. Psychology is about “psychic life” which although it manifests itself in the individual, is not about “what goes on inside the human person.” The individual, contrary to Jung’s claim, is “not the measure of all things.” Nor therefore can the aim of psychology be to enable the individual to attain personal ‘wholeness’. Drawing on Jung’s concept of the “objective psyche,” Giegerich conceives the psyche as having an objective existence that manifests itself not only in the individual but in all phenomena. This standpoint, Giegerich tells us, clears “the way for the idea of a psychological investigation of our technological civilization.”

Giegerich breaks new ground here in two ways. First, in his radical approach to psychology moving it away from its traditional focus on the individual towards the psychic reality of all phenomena. Secondly, He moves it in the direction of the present day reality of our technological society. It will do no good to denounce technology; we must understand it, connect with it, let it speak for itself. Disdained as soulless, technology “belongs to the alchemy of history and is part of the soul’s opus magnum. In it we sense the heartbeat of the soul.”

As for nature, Giegerich sees a reversal of roles. Nature, once viewed as the matrix of our existence is now our “problem child” who needs to be taken care of. Nature is dependent on us for its conservation and survival. Whatever our relationship to it now, it can no longer be what it once was; there can be no going back to that which no longer exists. We have reached another place and that place is technology, not nature. Giegerich’s judgment is a harsh one and as unwelcome as it might be, it seems to me closer to our current situation than that proposed by Abram, as attractive as that might be. These ideas which Giegerich has been working at for many years seem to me to be crucial to the understanding of the world we now live.

Sadly, I do not see that these ideas are having much of an impact within, much less without, the various Jungian circles. It is discouraging that the few Jungians who engage with him do so in the context of (rhetoric included) of the academy. The fault is largely Giegerich’s for as he stated in no uncertain terms in his book The Soul’s Logical Life, psychology is the work of an elite, those few who are seriously and deeply trained in the discipline. He detests the very notion that psychology is something that the layman or laywoman might understand. Anything written for the lay person he indiscriminately labels “pop psychology.” He decries the very idea that psychology “must be understandable for Everyman.” He refuses to consider the possibility that many “everyman “—now there’s an abstraction for you! — not only share his concerns, but have, or could have, a part to play in the working out of these ideas (reality testing, for one thing) and in transmitting them beyond the inbred world of Jungian psychology.

Jungians could take a clue from the many scientists who, despite the difficulty and (as Hannah Arendt points out) the sometimes incomprehensibility of their work, have made great efforts to inform the lay person. It is not easy, granted, to articulate uncommon ideas in a way that will be understood by the common person, who may not be as “common” as is all too easily assumed. It would be a very sad outcome, nevertheless, if Giegerich’s ideas—so immediate and relevant to our time— should remain cloistered, safe, untouched, speaking its private language—and unchallenged—by the lowly laymen outside the walls.

2008-04-03T19:02:00.002-04:00

A city as a work of art?
Abstraction versus real life

A relevant commentary on the entirely artificial city being built by the architect Rem Koolhaas in Dubai, that concludes a city cannot be a work of art, something created by one person because “it abstracts from the complexity of life to achieve a particular end. “ A city, on the contrary, ”is something that emerges over time from mostly unplanned interactions of those who live in it, creating complex inter-relating patterns . . . that defy deliberate construction.” Read it at Delirious Dubai

2008-04-02T10:00:00.004-04:00

Afterthoughts: Abram

Although I grew up in Brooklyn NY and have lived mostly in cities or suburbs, I now live on the boundary of a large state park, through which a lovely creek makes its way and which is unspoiled by anything more than inconspicuous picnic tables. The park itself borders an arboretum, with a splendid collection of ancient trees. For some thirty years or more my husband and I have walked the roads and trails in the park and the arboretum both of which have been an unfailing source of pleasure to us whatever the season. Perhaps for this reason, Abram’s book was personally attractive. I began to think about and to connect with this relatively small natural world not only for the pleasure it gave me, but also for what it is in itself and for itself. At the same time, what is left of the old farm land and woods surrounding the park and the arboretum is rapidly disappearing, sold off to developers.

As appealing and well-reasoned as Abram’s vision is, I doubt it can take us very far. There is not much of nature left to connect to. Whether we like it or not, we live in mostly urbanized and technologized societies from which the sensorial world of nature is largely absent. “Nature” is confined to our parks, conservancies, and to nature programs on television. Nature as we know it today has the status of a museum, where we keep and preserve our great treasures.

Abram knows we cannot “go back” to a primordial relationship with nature, but encourages the notion that we can “come full circle.” By this I understand that we can still learn from the insights of the ancient people and assimilate some of those insights in our efforts to confront the damage we have already done to our environment. It suggests to me a kind of “sublation” that Giegerich writes about: a process by which a reality, after it has lost its original power, can nevertheless be transformed into another, higher reality (why it is necessarily always “higher” I don’t understand). It remains present as “an ingredient” therefore in that new (if not higher) reality. Whether this can actually happen, I do not know, but would hope so.

Abram’s effort to remind us of our primary connections to the sensory world reminds me, in a way, of Jung’s re-envisioning the work of the alchemists, who had been dismissed at best as charlatans. Jung himself has been dismissed as well for his interest in alchemy. Yet, it is this very generosity of spirit in embracing what others cast off that hugely enriched his psychology (and endeared Jung to me .) Nothing human, it seems to him, was lost on him. Why should it be then that we no longer have any use for what the ancient peoples thought and experienced?

Abram’s approach, however, ignores the all too obvious fact that the nature he eloquently describes has been replaced with the products of technocience, a process which is still ongoing and of which most of us remain ignorant. Just yesterday I was reminded of this by a report on the Pentagon’s project to create cyborg moths and flying beetles that can be remotely controlled. Their purpose is to conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions in battle zones, in caves, or cities, and to transmit the data back to U.S. Military bases. These cyborgs insects—real insects with genetically modified or robotic parts—would also be used for biological warfare. This project may sound like science-fiction, but it (and hundreds more) is supported by DARPA, (Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon) which, we are told, has resulted in “some of the most lethal weaponry in the U.S. arsenal. (Read the report at Tom Dispatch)

Abram’s view helps us to understand what it is we have lost by our alienation from nature, but for all his wonderful and inspiring insights, does not shed much light on what it is we must do to confront the realities of our time.

2008-04-01T13:31:00.002-04:00

An Old or New Anthropocentrism?

Hannah Arendt, Stephen Talbott, Wolfgang Giegerich and David Abram share a common concern: the modern world’s preference for abstraction—the means (analysis, quantification, experimentation) by which all phenomena are stripped of their particularizing qualities in order to reach their underlying “true” reality. The problem is that the method of abstraction has resulted in a loss of a living connection with the physical, natural, earthy, and the sensory, that, with all its particularizing qualities, eludes abstraction. Arendt discusses it in the context of science, especially physics. Talbott gives us a chilling example from computational biology. By tracing the history of writing as a process of increasing abstraction, Abram shows how (among many other factors, of course) it led to the loss of our sense of grounding in the physical world of nature. For Giegerich it dominates not only the sciences, but all the prevailing forces in modern culture.

Another common concern is the question of anthropocentrism— the view that humankind is at the very center of existence or, to put it another way, that everything that exists does so for the sake of humanity. Abram and Giegerich deplore the anthropocentrism endemic in psychology as if the psyche or soul is confined to the individual human being.

As a deep ecologist, Abram calls for a return to the insights of ancient peoples regarding the psyche. For the Navajo, he points out, psyche is the medium in which all beings are immersed and through which they communicate; it is “a property of the encompassing world, in which we humans—like all other beings—participate.”

“Psyche is not in us, but we are in psyche,” Jung wrote. Geigerich is nevertheless critical of Jungian psychology, which despite Jung ‘s belief that the psyche encompasses the world, his psychology as practiced to this day, is still centered on the individual, “human” psyche. He labels it a “fantasy” which creates a division between the individual human being and the world—“a divided whole.”

Geigerich’s approach to the psyche is that it is not limited to living beings, or even to organic and inorganic beings (“mountains also have their thoughts”) as is the case with Abram. Giegerich would include all things, including the technological products of man’s making, e.g. the nuclear bomb. The psyche also inhabits everything that constitutes the cultural, economic, political, scientific, and social organizations and movements of our era. It is nature that psyche seems to have abandoned. “As far as the natural world is concerned, all the passion of the soul seems to go into physics and technology. This is where the real action is.” This claim some find shocking, not only because it seems to leave no room for the individual, but apparently suggests that the psyche is beyond good or evil. Otherwise, how can we say that it is present, inhabits, acts upon and through these agents of power in our time?

According to Arendt, science today has already overcome anthropocentrism. In the quest for true reality beyond the appearances, the scientist is compelled to ignore “an explanation of life in the ordinary sense.” The successes he has had cannot even be described in ordinary language; it can only be expressed mathematically. Man as scientist, moreover, does not even care about his “stature” or place in the universe, “does not even care about the survival of the human race on earth or, for that matter, about the survival of the planet itself.” If he should speak out against the nuclear bomb, he does so not as a scientist, but as a citizen.

Arendt finds it “alarming” that scientific theories can be incomprehensible even to the scientist and that although they cannot be expressed except in mathematical terms may have “practical use.” If these are pursued, “. . . one is tempted to say that it is much more likely that the planet we inhabit will go up in smoke as a consequence of theories that are entirely unrelated to the world of the senses, and defy all description in human language . . . .”

The only thing that will save us, Arendt thought, is the acceptance of human limits in the search for knowledge and that this limit is reached when scientific enterprises are undertaken which scientists themselves fail to understand. What is needed is not the old anthropocentrism in which man is the center of the universe, but a new “world view” which would, first of all, be geocentric “in the sense that the earth, and not the universe, is the center and home of mortal men, and it would be anthropomorphic in the sense that man would count his own factual mortality among the elementary conditions under which his scientific efforts are possible at all.” Failing that the “stature” of man would not only decline, but “by all standards we know of, have been destroyed.”

2008-03-28T12:55:00.002-04:00

Hannah Arendt on
The Scientist and the Humanist
Two Views of Reality (2)

Whatever response the layman and the humanist give to science’s claim that reality is to be found beyond sense perception are, of necessity, Arendt tells us, “pre-scientific.” Its validity cannot be scientifically tested. Answers about the nature of man, of life, of science itself, have come from the discourse among philosophers from ancient times to the present, but whatever the truth arrived at will never be universally agreed upon. Nevertheless, “it frequently outlasts the compellingly and demonstrably true statements of the sciences which, especially in recent times, have the uncomfortable inclination never to stay put, although at any given moment they are, and must be, valid for all.”

But is it the case that we now live in a world that can be understood only by scientists? Or does their highly specialized knowledge entitle them to rule over the layman, the humanist, or the philosopher who "naively" continue to ask pre-scientific questions? Remember, says Arendt, the scientist is also human and shares with his fellow human beings the “same world of sense perception, of common sense and everyday language.” In leaving behind the concerns of the non-scientist, he leaves behind as well “a part of himself and his own power of understanding, which is still human understanding.” (Emphasis added)

But in the laboratory and through the language of mathematics, the scientist deliberately strips himself of everything anthropocentric, because, as Arendt tells us, the scientist’s “data refuse to be ordered by any of the natural mental categories of the human brain.” A troubling problem follows, however—the scientist successfully accomplishes what he, being human, “cannot comprehend, and cannot express in everyday human language.” Noting that scientists are aware of this dilemma, Arendt cites the physicist Niels Bohr who stated that scientists themselves must endeavor to get beyond “our necessarily prejudiced conceptual frame” by “widening” that conceptual frame” which if achieved, “would remove all present paradoxes and ‘apparent disharmonies." Arendt doubts this will happen, however:

The categories and ideas of human reason have their ultimate source in human sense experience, and all terms describing our mental abilities as well as a good deal of our conceptual language derive from the world of the senses and are used metaphorically. Moreover, the human brain which supposedly does our thinking is as terrestrial, earthbound, as any other part of the human body. It was precisely by abstracting from these terrestrial conditions, by appealing to a power of imagination and abstraction that would, as it were, lift the human mind out of the gravitational field of the earth and look down upon it from some point in the universe, that modern science reached its most glorious and, at the same time, most baffling achievements.

It is not as if the scientists themselves were motivated by a desire for power. They were led to the conquest of space by their search for “true reality,” which in turn led them to distrust “the phenomena as they reveal themselves of their own accord to human sense and reason.” It is a “sad truth,” says Arendt, that the connection between the world of the senses and the scientist’s view of reality has been accomplished not by the scientists, but by the “plumbers,” the technologists who have “brought the results of the scientists down to earth.” That technology was able to do this was a more convincing demonstration of the scientist’s theories than any experiment or observation could be. What was achieved through imagination and abstraction was finally achieved by means of the human “power of fabrication.”

2008-03-19T18:34:00.003-04:00

Hannah Arendt on
The Scientist & the Humanist—
Two Views of Reality (1)

Following Steve Talbott’s article in that same issue of The New Atlantis, there is a reprint of a 1963 article by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man.” While the two articles may seem to deal with two entirely different subjects—evolutionary biology and space exploration—both articles are about a shared concern, the preference of science for abstraction, (what Talbott describes as “the mathematization of reality”) over concrete, physical reality (what Arendt calls “the common sense” view of reality).

Written six years after the launching of Sputnik but before we sent men to the moon, Arendt raises the question no one thought to ask in the rush to conquer space: What will be its effect on “the stature” of man? The term “stature” is ill-chosen perhaps, but Arendt is asking: How does conquest of space affect our humanity? How does it change how we see ourselves in relation to the cosmos? It is the humanist who must ask the question, according to Arendt, because her concern is humankind itself. Whatever the answer, it must be articulated in terms of common sense and the everyday language of the layman.

The concern of the scientist, on the other hand, is that of the physical world, which requires the rejection of a humanistic, anthropocentric stance. For the scientist, man is just a particular case of organic life, “a special borderline case of absolute universal laws, that is, laws that rule the immensity of the universe.” Given this view, it is understandable that the scientist does not feel called upon to even raise a question about “the stature” of man in the universe.

The answer, coming from the humanist perspective, will not satisfy the scientist, because his aim is to discover what is behind the appearances or phenomena. Of necessity, therefore, he rejects the perceptions of the senses and “common sense”, from whence comes our understanding of reality. The scientist has also to reject ordinary language and for the same reason, because it is contaminated with sense perceptions and from common sense. If he allowed himself to ask the question “What is the nature of man and what should be his stature?” Arendt tells us, there would be no science as we know it, because the answers would in effect place a limitation on his endeavors. She quotes the physicist Niels Bohr, ”Only by renouncing an explanation of life in the ordinary sense do we gain a possibility of taking into account its characteristics.” In other words, the “appearances” of things, how they sensorily present themselves to us only hide their real properties. Recall the comment of the researcher quoted in Steve Talbott’s article: “We must learn to free ourselves from seeing things the way they are . . . “ And “the way they are are nothing more than “accidental details.”

As modern science continues in radically changing and restructuring the world, are not the humanist and the layman out of touch with reality? Moreover, how could anyone doubt that the “stature” of man is increased now that man is about to conquer space and go to the moon? The question, however, that is meaningless to the scientist, must be answered by the humanist and the layman. For what science does concerns all of us, including the scientist, who is also a fellow human being and citizen.

Unfortunately, Hannah Arendt’s article is not available for downloading. It is included in Arendt’s Between Past and Future (Viking Penguin) and in The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society, Fall 2007, pp. 42-55.

2008-03-14T16:37:00.003-04:00

“Digital Organisms”
Abstraction in the Extreme

Recall one of Jacque Barzun’s definitions of abstraction: “. . . the urge to disregard the features that lie on the surface of things, in hopes of finding the kernel within that does not change and is therefore felt to be the reality.” This urge is behind much, if not all of our science today, — to find the overall law or principle by which everything can be explained by disregarding the appearances, the concreteness, the unpredictability in things themselves.

In a recent article, “The Ghost in the Evolutionary Machinery” (New Atlantis, Fall, 2007) Steve Talbott, provides a striking example from the field of computational biology. In case you wonder, as I did, what is computational biology, here is a definition adapted from the website of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California in Santa Cruz, one of several laboratories exploring the creation of “digital organisms.” “Computational biology researchers . . . discover and implement algorithms that facilitate the understanding of biological processes through the application of statistical and machine learning techniques.”

“Digital organisms” are said to be “live” organisms when they prove capable of mutating, replicating and competing, the essential conditions for evolution to occur. Talbott cites Robert Pennock, a philosopher and co-author of a paper on digital organisms in the science journal Nature, who states that “More and more of the features that biologists have said were necessary for life we can check off.” Pennock admits they are not quite there yet, “but getting pretty close.”

What is questionable about this project, says Talbott, if the organism is mutating, replicating and competing, as the researchers claim, why they cannot point to “the creature doing these things—or at least that something physical exists whose evolution they are investigating.” In fact a digital organism is a compilation of “data structures,” that are immaterial and ideal constructs. The researchers do not even seem to have anything physical in mind in constructing these “organisms.”

The fact that digital creatures are bereft of any tissues or organs—or even silicon, plastic, or copper—about which to raise questions of evolutionary development does not seem to worry anyone, or even to have been much noticed. For the authors of the article in Nature, the digital organism’s phenotype—its observable physical qualities—has remarkably become nothing but a set of relations between mathematical formulae such as ‘replication efficiency’ and ‘computational metabolism”. There is no material thing actually reproducing or whose metabolism is hard at work.

What these authors have done, according to Talbott, is to reify “into dim, vaguely imagined physical objects” what are no more than “computations and data structures.” They want to come up with a formula that can be applied to any system that is evolving. The hope is that if such a formula is found, it will then be possible to study evolutionary biology “ in a form of life that shares no ancestry with carbon-based forms, and hence to distinguish general principles of evolution from historical accidents that are particular to biochemical life.” Another researcher, also cited by Talbott, claims that a “general theory of life cannot have any specific reference to actual species.” Furthermore, he wrote “We must learn to free ourselves from seeing things the way they are!. . . A theory of life is likely to be a theory of process, not a detailed account of utterly accidental details of that process, such as the emergence of humans.” [Emphasis mine.]

The problem, says Talbott, is that “Digital evolution, where nothing, no thing, is evolving; a physics that is not a physics of anything, that tries to ‘free itself from seeing the way things are—there is in all this a strange recoiling from the actual manifestation of the world with its insistent character, as if the investigators do not want to meet whatever is there, as if they prefer the clarity and the narcissistic pleasures of their own cleanly articulated, one-dimensional thoughts—so easily reflected by the computer— to the vocal, full-bodied self-presentation of cloud, ocean, stone, and sparrow.”

Talbott attributes this approach to “the habit of inattention to the world, “( a point that David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous makes repeatedly.) [see previous postings]. It amounts to a repudiation of the world in preference “ to abstract mental models and above all the miracle of condensed logic, the computer.”

I highly recommend reading all of Steve Talbott‘s article, “Ghosts in the Evolutionary Machinery.” It can be downloaded at http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/18/talbott.htm. Also recommended is his widely read and highly regarded, on-line newsletter NetFuture on Technology and Human Responsibility.
http://www.netfuture.org.

2008-03-10T15:36:00.004-04:00

What is meant by “Abstraction?”

We normally associate the term “abstract” with a painting of Picasso, or with a graph of economic trends, or when a book we are reading proves to be “too abstract” to satisfy our needs for specific, concrete information. But Abram and Giegerich consider abstraction as a dominant characteristic of our modern world. And they are not the only ones to do so. But what do they mean?

In From Dawn to Decadence, his masterful history of Western culture from 1500 to the present, Jacques Barzun explains just how it became one of the West’s distinguishing features which led not only to our alienation from nature, but to the devaluing of human experience over against scientific “reality.”

The rapid evolution of science from the 16th century brought about a new concept of nature and human knowledge which in turn profoundly changed the culture as a whole. An essential factor in this process, according to Barzun, was the acceptance of “a strange idea” —“the idea of body as such, the purely physical, devoid of qualities so as to be capable of quantity.” By abstracting the surface features of things which were subject to change, it would then be possible to arrive at their most basic or “real” level. Abstraction, says Barzun, has a twin—analysis—which is a form of abstraction, “in that it takes every object of study as being fundamentally a clock, made up of parts and identical with every other object of its kind. . . . Analysis by abstraction has turned into an ordinary habit of thought.” Things are categorized by features they have in common. What is abstracted—removed— from things are their differentiating qualities. Our time, Barzun observes, is more given to abstractions than any other culture known to history and he skillfully traces it throughout the centuries to our own present day.

Below are samplings of Barzun on abstraction:

Abstraction is a calculated departure from experience, from what is seen and felt as the real, which goes by the opposite name of concrete.

For the moment, consider abstraction as the urge to disregard the features that lie on the surface of things, in hopes of finding the kernel within that does not change and is therefore felt to be the reality.”

From early childhood, abstraction serves to organize the world: from this red apple we learn to think of all red apples in general, then of apples regardless of color, then come fruit, things, and finally the largest, the thinnest category: Being.

One may posit as a generality that “the machine abstracts.” It puts a middleman—a middle thing—between experience and perception, it yields only a derived and artificial experience and perception. For example, the voice on the telephone or in the movie theater is not the human voice; it is the distorted residue required to make out what is said. To call this and all other transformations by machine Abstraction is warranted by the fact that machines are designed to capture or modify one part of reality in order to gain some advantage. The loss of other parts seems fair exchange.

Barzun is not opposed to science and its methods, but to “scientism” which he calls a fallacy which contends that all experience should be subject to the scientific method. Scientism has affected not only the natural sciences, but such disciplines as history, sociology, psychology, archaeology, linguistics “and oher more or less short-lived ologies.”

Abram clearly would be in full accord with Barzun’s point of view. I suspect that Giegerich would agree for the most part. For Abram, however, to overcome the damage of abstraction and scientism, we need to recover not only the sensuous, perceivable world in all its diversity and particularity but also our connectedness with it, our participation in it. For Giegerich, such a recovery is no longer possible. Our only possibility is to acknowledge that technology, the product of science, has also been split off from the psyche conceived as an “exclusively internal reality.” Leaving us with an abstraction of an other order, he argues that technology, not nature, must be seen for what it is, a “process of thinking itself out.”

2008-03-09T15:56:00.003-04:00

Abram’s View:
Psyche as Air
A Return to “old consciousness”

Giegerich finds the soul or psyche in Thought. David Abram finds it in the natural world. Giegerich’s notion of psyche responds to the global domination of science and technology which requires “a new level of consciousness.” Abram’s idea of psyche is a response to what has been lost as a result of that domination—the immediate, sensual world of perception—and calls for a renewed connectedness with that world.

To describe his understanding of the psyche, Abram draws upon what Giegerich would call the old or “historical” consciousness, the worldview of the Navajo Indians. For the Navajo, Air (or what we may call Psyche, Soul, or Mind) is not the possession of the individual; it is not a solely human possession, but an attribute of the whole world, in which we humans participate together with all other non human life.

One’s individual awareness, the sense of a relatively personal self or psyche, is simply that part of the enveloping Air that circulates within, through, and around one’s particular body; hence, one’s own intelligence is assumed from the start, to be entirely participant with the swirling psyche of the land.

Whatever harms the land therefore, is keenly felt by all who live on it
because the health and well-being of each person depends on the health and well-being of the land. For the Navajo, the psyche is not an immaterial power which is throned inside us, but is the invisible, yet perceptible medium in which we belong, with all other things animate and inanimate.

If this notion of psyche as Air should seem strange to us, Abram points out that the notion is not in the least alien to our own Western culture. The word psyche comes from the Greek word psychê which denoted “breath” or “wind,” as well as “soul” or “mind.” Moreover, psyche is itself derived from the verb psychein, meaning “to breathe” or “to blow.” There is also the word pneuma which signifies spirit meaning vital, creative soul.

Abram further points out that psyche is related to the word “respiration.” Both have their source in spiritus, which meant both “breath and wind.” Then there is the Latin word anima or soul and the word animus meaning “that which thinks in us.” Abram reminds us as well that there are similar associations of psyche with breath or air in many ancient languages and in Sanskrit (atman).

For Abram this long etymological history more than suggests that what we now call spirit, soul, mind, psyche, signifying that which is spiritual and immaterial, originated in the notion of breath or air as “the very substance of its mystery.” “As the experiential source of both psyche and spirit, it would seem that the air was once felt to be the very matter of awareness, the subtle body of the mind.” Moreover, that experience did not separate human beings from the rest of nature but was the very source of their being connected with all that exists. “For it was the unseen but common medium of their presence.”

Rooted in this “unseen but common medium”, Abram’s understanding of psyche is certainly more accessible to us, than the notion of Soul or psyche as Thought. Without being reified, psyche is present in the very surroundings of our everyday life, while psyche as Thought brings us into a realm we find abstruse, without any sensory relation.

Yet, I don’t see that there should be any conflict as to which approach to the psyche is correct and which is in error. The psyche itself is beyond description or definition whether we call it Thought, Air, Soul, Spirit, Being. Nor is it a matter of preference, the one approach more persuasive or agreeable than another. Both thinkers Geigerich and Abram are describing —with a sense of urgency— an understanding of the psyche from a particular perspective: Giegerich in the context of a pervasive, global technocratic civilization and Abram in the context of that same civilization not only alienated from its earthly foundation, but on course to bring about its destruction.

2008-03-06T16:11:00.005-05:00

Giegerich’s view:
Psyche as Concept
A New Kind of Consciousness

Jungians understand individuation as a process by which the individual achieves personal “wholeness.” But it may be, says Giegerich, Jung intended “becoming whole” to mean that point when the individual is ready to “face the whole, and to place oneself in its center." What is this “whole” then but existence itself in which nothing is excluded. Jung’s psychology was intended, by his own words, to confront the great issues of the time, or as he put it “the burden of the human mind.” Jung, says Giegerich, was not thinking vaguely here, but as one dedicated to “the specific, culturally and historically determined present. He does not escape to an abstract universal idea of ‘present.’ The “burden of the human mind” receives “its particular articulation [W.G.’s emphasis] from the concrete historical and cultural situation of each time.” The place of soul or psyche then is “at the forefront of historical life, on the battleground, as it were, where past and future clash."

But this tells us only where psyche is to be found. What more can be said of the soul which is after all undefinable? With this Giegerich takes us into the realm of the abstract. Although nature still is a force to be reckoned with (e.g. our ecological catastrophe), we now live in a world characterized by “an abstract level of reality” which, in effect, has supplanted the “level of natural things and processes, “the level of what can be perceived and imagined in terms of perception and sensory intuition.” Our sciences, for example, along with the world of finance and the communications industry function according to processes unknown in previous times and which are so complex, no one, not even the so-called experts, fully understands. Writing in 1998 when the Internet was still in its incipient stage, Giegerich observed that life is moving out of “natural reality” and “establishing itself in virtual reality.” A decade later the evidence is overwhelming.

This world of ours, this historical moment, where past, present and future converge is so radically different from anything humankind has known, that we cannot begin to cope with it, as Giegerich sees it, unless we engage with it from an entirely new level of consciousness. The “old” consciousness with its dependence on the sensorial and the imaginal simply won’t do any more. It does not need all those things that we have been led to believe psychology deals with—“feelings, emotions, body work.” Nor do myths, symbols, and rituals drawing upon the past suffice any longer. What is required is a consciousness that has also moved to “the abstract level of thought proper.” Unless psychology also attains a conceptual and abstract mode of thinking, it cannot understand this world of ours. The soul today demands “abstract psychological thought.”

What are we to make of this demand? How are we to understand it? Should we even try? After all, in The Soul’s Logical Life Giegerich makes it clear that the psychology he is discussing is of the rigorous and demanding sort, and not meant in the least to be “popular;” it is not for Everyman, “the man [or the woman] in the street." However, if what Giegerich intends is of such singular importance, as I believe it is, it is worth a try.

Helpfully, Giegerich turns to Jung to explain what he means. Jung, he says, “had a real Notion or Concept of the soul.” This is precisely the reason that drew him to Jung. For despite the usual contradictions and backtracking one may expect to find in his thinking, Jung was totally committed to the soul (or psyche, as he used both words interchangeably).

Although he devotes many pages of dense explication about Jung’s Concept of Soul, Giegerich’s first commentary is the best place to begin. (I am going to use the word “Concept” because it is better understood than the Hegelian “Notion,”) He begins with an apparent contradiction. He does not mean by Concept, anything abstract which is what we might have expected. No, the Concept of soul is something “real,” it is something “living.” Jung didn’t arrive at the Concept of the soul by reasoning about it. Rather, he was “gripped” by it. Nor was he just in touch with the Soul or psyche as many are; he was in touch with the Concept of soul itself. Nor was it an emotional event, but rather a logical one: Jung grasped and was grasped by the concept of soul in all its psychic objectivity. “The fact that the rational notion of ‘soul,’ of the ‘reality of the soul,’ dawned on him and became the inalienable insight within which he experienced and thought from then on.” For Jung this Concept of Soul, was the originating principle from which his psychology came. “It had become the center and the circumference of his vision and reflection.”

Although this is not easy to grasp, I believe Giegerich makes it clear at the very least how fundamental Jung’s Concept—his Thought— of the soul was and why he would say his Thought of the Soul was real. But being Thought, it is only from this standpoint that the abstractions of our modern world can be understood and confronted. Geiegerich describes it as “a new mode of consciousness,” which, it is all too true, we are far from having achieved.

2008-03-04T15:40:00.003-05:00

Geigerich and Deep Ecology

In his paper, (see previous posting) Giegerich claims that the full life of the psyche is not to be found in the individual, nor in the natural world. Although for ancient peoples nature was “ensouled, or “animated,” such has not been the case for centuries. To believe that nature still is so “is wishful thinking, an expression of nostalgia.” Given the revolution in modern consciousness that he describes, we can no longer hold to the notion that it represents or is a part of the “the real life of the psyche.” ( The Soul’s Logical Life. 1998)

Giegerich’s position is untenable for many, none more so than for activists in the deep ecology movement. They would agree with Giegerich that nature has become only a resource for our purposes, but this is not sufficient cause to conclude that it no longer speaks to us. They argue, what else is this global environmental catastrophe but nature not just speaking but crying aloud? Nature is not something we can view as detachable from us or from the culture at large. It is not something out there, external to us. We remain part of nature and entirely dependent on it. We cannot solve our environmental disaster solely with more technology, but only by becoming conscious of this reality and by recovering our solidarity with the non human world around us. We must give up our anthropocentrism and come to recognize ourselves as a part of what Abram calls “the intricate web of life.”

None is more eloquent in articulating the perspective of deep ecology than David Abram. ( The Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage. 1996) Although his understanding of nature and our relation to it differs from Giegerich’s, in other ways both thinkers are in accord although with significant differences. Like Giegerich, Abram believes that “the journeying into the personal psyche” has resulted in this severance from nature. In working with shamans in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, he observed they did not see it as their responsibility to heal the individual who came to them for help, but rather to heal the dis-ease by restoring the fractured relationship of the individual with the community and the natural world. They did so, not by appealing to supernatural powers, as has been mistakenly understood, but to the power they recognized in the natural world. Present day psychology fails to understand that the individual is cured only by moving away from preoccupation with the self and moving “into the depths of a landscape both sensuous and psychological.”

Giegerich would agree with this and indeed, it is a paramount concern evident throughout his work: to overcome anthropocentrism or in his preferred term, "the anthropological fallacy." For him, however, moving into the depths of the landscape would not be defined by nature, but by global capitalism and technology. Today this is where the psyche is to be found and not in nature, however powerful it remains. To cling to this “historical” consciousness prevents us from facing up to the new reality which requires new approaches.

Along with their divergent views about nature which I have only suggested so far, there are other features of Abram’s and Giegerich’s thought where they partially converge but then go their separate ways. One of these has to do with abstraction which characterizes our modern society to a degree never known before. The other is about psyche or soul.

It is not at all a question of which perspective is right or wrong, but that one thinker illuminates the other.

More to come...

2008-02-26T08:22:00.005-05:00

Beginning Again . . .

After a hiatus of several months I did not want to begin again with Wolfgang Giegerich. I had wrestled with his Nuclear Papers to the point of exhaustion (and, at times, exasperation). I turned my attention elsewhere to readings that had been neglected. (More about that later.) And yet Giegerich was always a presence in my mind’s horizon, because wherever I went with my reading and thinking he had, in a way, led me there. The first essay of his I recall reading was his “Opposition of ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’ —Psychology’s Basic Fault: Reflections on Today’s Magnum Opus of the Soul.” (Harvest, V. 42, No. 2, 1996).

In 1998 this paper was the subject of an On-Line Jung Seminar, initiated by Don Williams, the founder and then editor of the C.G. Jung Page and myself. The seminar, which began October 4 and ran through October 8, offered the complete text of the paper (with the permission of Harvest) followed by a critique by Jungian analyst Greg Mogenson. Then came the responses, thick and fast, with only a few, however, from Jungian analysts (four by my count). On the whole, the participants had in common only a sincere interest in Jungian psychology. Because Giegerich’s ideas called into question certain conventional Jungian concepts such as “the individuation process,” they struggled earnestly with Giegerich’s paper which—often simultaneously—challenged, provoked and inspired them. For his part, Giegerich overlooked no one and delivered some twenty-five responses, many at length, over that four day, grueling and yet exhilarating, memorable event.

Rereading the paper “…Psychology’s Basic Fault,” a decade later, together with Giegerich’s remarkable explications from the Seminar, I experience the same frisson now, ten years later. I had been disappointed, not with Jung, but with much of Jungian conventional wisdom at that time. The “individuation process” which seemed to be the heart of Jungian psychology no longer interested me, not because I thought for a second I had achieved individuation or that it was unimportant. It was simply that I had been through my mid-life crisis and had come out at the other end with a greater interest in the world around me. I was concerned, for instance, about technology and its impact on our culture. Although we as individuals and as a society were immersed in technology, conventional Jungian thought had little to tell me, for example, about the psychological consequences of this immersion. Jungians seemed caught up in their own world and not in touch with much outside of it. (There were many fine exceptions, of course, Don Williams most notably.)

Reading “Psychology’s Basic Fault” the first time was a eureka event. It spoke directly to my own unfocused thought and intuitions giving them an expressive form which I myself had not been capable of. I mention here only a few of the insights from that paper which proved to have a long-lasting influence on my own thinking.

Psychology is not a way out of a problem, but a way through it. “The soul’s longing is for consciousness to enter ever deeper into the predicament, to the very heart of the matter….”

Jung never intended to promote a one-sided individualism, but “to encompass both at once, the individual and the world as the collective, as well as the individual and the world as nature or cosmos.” (In 1998 it was obvious in that Seminar that our thinking was by and large still entrapped in one-sidedness.)

Given the development of the Christian West, however, there is no going back, no return to the “anima mundi”, or to the “ ensouling of the world.” A “revolution of consciousness, a real change, a real severing has taken place.”

The psyche is now at a different level. There is a change in the meaning of soul. “As far as the natural world is concerned, all the passion of the soul seems to go into physics and technology. This is where the real action is.”

The psyche is not about the individuation process. “The logical status of individuation is that it is psychologically obsolete. (The claim, understandably, which was the most disturbing to the Seminar participants, although Giegerich took great pains to explain that this did not mean that individuation does not occur any longer.)

Globalization is the soul’s magnum opus. What has taken place is “the logical subjugation of everything individual under the one great abstract goal of profit maximization: profit must increase, but I [the individual] must decrease.”

We need to move from our present form of consciousness (e.g. the emphasis in psychology on the personal, the individual) and move into a new form of consciousness, which recognizes, quoting Jung, that, “We are in the psyche, the psyche is not in us.”

The above are not in anyway complete, but although abridged and selective, they suggest why reading this paper was felt to be so subversive of cherished notions about Jungian psychology. For some, if not all, it served as a necessary goad to shake us out of our conventional thinking that no longer is adequate for this moment in our history. It was much more than this, of course. Not only is it a profound, original critique of psychology, but it courageously, passionately, urges us to open the doors of our mind and from thence to venture forth into the world around us in all its stark reality.

(For the full text of "Opposition of 'Individual' and 'Collective' —Psychology's Basic Fault: Reflections on Today's Magnum Opus of the Soul" see C.G. Jung Page. For a summary see link on the right of this page "Today's Magnum Opus of the Soul.")

2007-10-18T08:27:00.000-04:00

A Brief and Inconclusive Conclusion
To the Nuclear Papers

This reading of the Nuclear Papers took place over several months. I am bringing it to a conclusion that is really no conclusion at all. The last essays have not been covered as I would have liked. There are many questions —and doubts—that surfaced during the readings that cannot be answered here. The essays are also so densely packed that no one reading will ever do them justice. I want simply, as a conclusion of sorts, to pull out what seem to me to be some of the fundamental propositions upon which Giegerich builds his arguments.

To follow Giegerich’s ideas, there are two factors to begin with. First, Giegerich is a phenomenologist. “My primary commitment is to the phenomena in their eachness, themselves.” Secondly, underpinning this commitment is another, deeper and more fundamental one, and that is to the soul. Giegerich is a “Jungian” because Jung’s “entire thinking” was rooted in “the reality of the soul.” For Giegerich, psychology is not about the individual, but about the soul, its objective existence. Like Jung, he views the soul (psyche) as being not in us, but rather we who are in psyche. From these two fundamentals, Giegerich’s “methodological principle” or “style” is logically derived: all phenomena is considered as having soul.

Each existing thing has to be seen for and in itself. Each has a life of its own to which attention must be paid without our imposing on it our own biases. Traditionally, Jungians have privileged certain phenomena, such as fairy tales, myths, and dreams, as worthy of being listened to because of what they reveal to us. But Giegerich would include all aspects of our cultural, social, economic, and political life, as worthy of psychological study, but one which approaches all these phenomena as being “uroboic”, that is, self-contained, as “talking about itself.” Technology is such a phenomenon that must be considered for itself and within itself as sufficient unto itself. It too is a “thinking process” with its own history. As such it is part of the opus magnum of the soul.

As a technology, the Nuclear Bomb cannot be approached merely from the outside, as an external reality, but rather from within itself, as having “soul.” It is therefore a “self” for what is essential to it makes it distinct from ever other phenomenon. The Nuclear Bomb is not so much a problem to be solved (how to dispose of it), but of asking “What is its role?” To learn that we have to “listen to it.” What does it have to say to us?

In earlier times we humans had to face the terrors of nature as wilderness, but that wilderness has since has been tamed. The Nuclear Bomb remains as our wilderness in which we come face to face with the “dark side of God.” As such it is indestructible but its explosive power can annihilate the world as we know it. If we want to find meaning in human life, Giegerich exhorts us, go to “our reality, try the real thing: try the Nuclear Bomb.” In the Bomb we will find the terror but also all the imaginal riches we have lost, “waiting there to be redeemed.”

Redeeming the Bomb, “saving” it, is to both “bind and integrate” its destructive capabiiity in such a way that it is independent of our moral responsibility which is unreliable. This cannot be accomplished, however, unless we overcome the split in Western consciousness that separates out external reality from subjective reality. The Bomb has been compartmentalized in consciousness as a physical thing, “out there,” while at the same time we internalize our fear of it. We have to find a way to overcome this split so that the explosive nature of the Bomb is no longer cut off from our inner religious and moral values and that those values are not themselves cut off from the reality of the Bomb. For this to happen the Bomb has first to be acknowledged for what it is: a vessel containing the collective unconscious of the West, holding, as it were, “the tremendous collective psychological energies apparently unleashed in modern man.”

The role of the Bomb is to mirror back to us the highly explosive condition of our modern Western soul and thus forcing us to give up our illusions and face reality. As such it is our psychopomp meant to lead us into the underworld of our collective unconscious. There we will undergo an initiation into a new stage of consciousness, in which we forgo our psychological preoccupation with our private, individual experiences to embrace the concerns of the larger world. The Bomb explodes “psychology’s prison of the interior and opens our eyes to all else there is outside of us as the real Other, the real unconscious, the real world.”

As Wolfgang Giegerich makes clear in his Introduction, the papers on the Nuclear Bomb are, at heart, a hermeneutic with Jungian psychology as its text. It is from that vantage point that he approaches the Nuclear Bomb which to him is the culmination of the propulsive, explosive power of Western Christian civilization. However extreme, even shocking a position it may be, however debatable in many of its claims, it behooves us at this critical moment in that history, to take heed and listen.

2007-10-10T12:13:00.000-04:00

Take a look at two thoughtful comments I just received. Both refer to postings made last year. The first posting (October 10, 2006) concerns Islam and refers to Giegerich’s essay “Islam and Terrorism.” The second, “Intolerable Reality.” (January 19, 2006) has to do with the last part of Giegerich’s paper on “The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man.” You can find these postings by going to the “Blog Archives” on the right side and clicking on 2006. After you find them, click on Comments found at the end of each of the postings.

2007-10-07T13:36:00.000-04:00

The Rocket and the Launching Base:
“Uncle Sam Wants You.”

Making one of his imaginal leaps, Giegerich holds up to us the famous World War I poster, “Uncle Sam Wants You,” as “offering a simple and precise way to understand Christianity’s singular achievement.” Look at it, he says, and you will see something remarkable. With “his pointed finger and piercing look,” Uncle Sam appears to be breaking out of the picture into the “literal and external reality where the flesh-and blood viewers live.” See it, we are told, as “Jesus Christ wants YOU.” This is Christianity bursting forth from the mythical imaginal reality into the literal, external reality. A reality, he points out, which itself was created by “this very act of an archetypal, primordial leap.”

Giegerich see in this image an “attack” on the individual, and “at gunpoint.” Although adopting belligerent rhetoric, he is not describing the aggressive proselytizing of fundamentalist Christians but rather “the (ontological) attack on the individual inherent in the very logic of the Christian message.” As Giegerich views it, Christianity claims every soul as its own. If we refuse we are “metaphysically” damned. “We do not really exist. We have no Life. We are a corpse.” Referring still to the Uncle Sam posterthe “YOU” is all of mankind. That is the “audience,” the “target”, the “aim” of “indeed, a kind of attack.” There is no consideration of the individual here, no courtesy towards the dignity of “the Other,” but only a crude attack. “. . . Christianity is the express will for an intrusion and penetration into the inner sanctum of a personality.”

The “target audience” familiar to us in advertising, takes on an ontological meaning. The audience which has to be reached is all of mankind upon which Christianity makes a total claim. Jesus Christ himself has his own target which is to die “for His unknown anonymous spectators—mankind at large for their redemption.” This outward direction of Christianity is what gives it its “missile nature.”

Giegerich continues in this vein, resorting to other metaphors and increasingly tortuous explications to further convince us of this “missile nature” of Christianity. As he has done throughout the papers on the Nuclear bomb, Giegerich contrasts this with the “imaginal” world of mythological civilizations. He describes this imaginal world as containing everything in itself’ it could not imagine anything outside of that world. Christianity proved to be “revolutionary” because it destroyed this imaginal world. With “the Jesus Christ wants You” we are not drawn to its message by its spell, its “shine” as was the case with the mythic gods, nor by its own imaginal truth, but are confronted by, hit by it. It comes from elsewhere. Mankind is now “set apart from and over against” this imaginal world. “We are thereby thrust into an outside world, into isolated individuals, egos, having to decide for or against Christ.”

I have only given some of the highlights of this paper and in doing so, I have not done full justice to it, of course, but will leave that to others who are better able to decipher Giegerich’s painstaking, convoluted arguments.

The moment has come for me to bring to a close the reading of the Nuclear Bomb papers. The last paper in Part One, “The Fabrication of Time,” seems to me relevant to the Nuclear Bomb papers but beyond their scope as well. In the next post or postings I would like to draw together some of the recurring themes found throughout these papers.

2007-10-07T13:32:00.000-04:00

The Rocket and Launching Base

If it has not been entirely clear in the previous papers, it is now starkly so in this last one under consideration, “The Rocket and the Launching Base.” Giegerich has launched his own metaphorical missile aimed at two thousand years of Christian theology and tradition. Christianity is his target not merely as the religion of Western civilization but rather, as the psychological driving force which produced our unique technological culture and ultimately, the Nuclear Bomb as archetype of its potentially destructive power. An understanding of Giegerich’s claim depends shifting from “natural” consciousness” to “imaginal” consciousness.

On one level the rocket flight to the moon is both psychologically and historically important, because it renders obsolete what once seemed to be an indisputable truth, that there is a distinct separation between the our planet and the heavens. Nevertheless, with what Giegerich calls our “natural consciousness,” we tend to think of the rocket solely as a physical object. But there is another consciousness that is more genuinely imaginal—a consciousness that understands the rocket not as a “thing,” but rather, as the “form” of “Western man’s consciousness, ‘containing’ in itself everything that constitutes the world as a whole, including the literal rockets.”

Natural or ordinary consciousness fears a nuclear attack as something that could possibly happen at some future time, and as something that must be prevented. For two millennia we have viewed the events in the world with this kind of consciousness. Imaginal consciousness, in contrast, views this “attack” as having happened a long time ago, the result of “a violent, ‘artificial’ event in the soul’s history: the launching of a rocket.” Psychologically we need to move from our habitual, ordinary consciousness to the imaginal and in order to do that Giegerich attempts to get us into that rocket, into its imagination, to enter into this reality which in fact, he tells us, has always been our true abode.

With our natural consciousness we understand the rocket as a physical object, being sent off from a launching pad or base that is another but physical object, distinct from the rocket, from which the rocket will be set off and to which it presumably will return. In Giegerich’s imaginal awareness, however, the launching base is created by the (archetypal) rocket itself; moreover, the rocket, target and base are all one.

In the mythological stage of civilization, a single base from which a rocket could be launched would be an impossibility, because there was no absolute, fixed center to lift off from. On the contrary, there were many “centers” which were too moveable and ambiguous to be taken literally and to qualify as the center of a fixed, determined location. Christianity alone provided that “absolutely firm ground” that a rocket required for launching. Giegerich cites several passages from the New Testament as evidence, such as: “Upon this rock I will build by church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The church is described as “the pillar and ground of truth.” And “For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

Giegerich sees in these and similar texts as expressing “a longing for something absolutely solid . . . for a literal, positive fixed point that could outlast the change of times.” He sees it as altering the meaning of ground or base, from what was once conceived as a bottomless depth to a “ground that is laid. “Christianity provided the solution to Archimedes’ wishful fantasy for a ‘point on which to stand,’ which would allow him to unhinge the universe.”

In the realm of myth there was no one to be found who would seek to “unhinge the universe.” Even Hercules who bore the vault of heaven for Atlas, returned it to him, without disrupting the order of the universe. In Jesus Christ alone, in he who came “to conquer the world,” Giegerich finds that Archimedean point. This is a reality, not a matter of belief. “Christianity in fact laid the very ground that it preaches. More, it established the ontological nature of ‘ground’ as rock, after it had previously been the essence of ground to be unfathomable depth.”

2007-09-24T11:50:00.000-04:00

The genie in the bottle
And the “invention” of evil

On the face of it, there may seem to be something disproportionate in associating two thousand years of Christian morality and theology with a fairy tale. For Jung, however, the contents of fairy tales, originating as they do in the folk wisdom of our ancient past, deal with archetypal themes and provide us with symbols which open up a path to greater awareness. Although symbols can be interpreted in many ways, it is no great stretch of the imagination to recognize the Nuclear Bomb in the daemonic power of Mercurius sealed in the bottle.

Mercurius escapes, but where to in the story we do not know. In reality, we know all too well; he is abroad in the world as the devil “seeking whom he may devour.” In 1945 Mercurius was let out of the bottle with the purpose of defeating a hated enemy. Cities were destroyed and thousands of human beings died terrible deaths or suffered horrible wounds. The genie was then sealed again in the bottle, but for how long? Its explosive power still threatens this planet while nation states seek to possess it for their own purposes. It is a self-evident symbol of the potential power of the Nuclear Bomb, but Giegerich takes us deeper into its significance.

In Giegerich’s reading of the tale, the genie imprisoned in the bottle represents Christianity’s splitting off of evil from good, creating or to use Giegerich’s term, “inventing” evil as the opposite of the good. In the experience of humankind this dichotomy between good and evil had never been so absolute and therein is the danger. Giegerich cites the Chinese yang and yin in which dark and light, male and female, evil and goodness are distinct, but each incorporates in itself something of the other. But in the Christian West, this polarization of extreme and potentially explosive intensity is a power engine fueled by mutual enmity or in other words, an “absolute incompatibility or more than that: the fixed will on the part of the one opposite to altogether destroy the other.” Hatred is the fuel that drives the engine.

In his earlier essays, Giegerich asked: must we see the Nuclear bomb as an enemy, containing in itself all that is hateful, which signifies evil itself? But if we are open to the notion, as proposed by Giegerich, that in our Western consciousness, absolute evil emerged from an enforced, “artificial” split from the good resulting in the positioning of good and evil in extreme opposition to one another, could it not change our attitude towards the Bomb from enemy to psychopomp, as Giegerich also suggested it was? It is not that evil and hatred do not exist. Certainly, no one is suggesting that it would be a good thing that the Nuclear Bomb be released, because it remains a constantly present threat. What is in question is that it exists in total, distinct and permanent antipathy toward the good (and the good toward evil). As Giegerich views it, this is not universally the case. Both good and evil can also be understood as co-existences, as opposites held together by a “cosmogonic eros “allowing for a free flux between them(Yin and Yang). If we engage our imaginations in this way, our enemy, the Nuclear Bomb, can also become our guide into the realm of the Underworld where we will find mirrored the soul of our Western civilization. (See the posting for August 7 on this subject, ”Technology, the Mirror of our Soul.”)

In the last sections of “The Invention of Explosive Power and the Bomb” (pp. 106-115), Giegerich pursues further his theme of the isolation and absolutizing of evil in Western Christian culture and the consequences. The metaphor he chooses this time is that of the scapegoat, particularly as it was exemplified in Jesus Christ, as “the Lamb of God.” From this he derives his “blueprint of the Bomb.” He presents an argument that, as always with Giegerich, is original and challenging to our conventional thinking but in this instance, is convoluted in the extreme. I find it so perplexing that I am unable to take it on within the limitations of a posting. And so I will leave it at that, for now.

2007-09-22T10:27:00.000-04:00

The Invention of Explosive Power
& the Blueprint of the Bomb

The last part of the title to this chapter is “A Chapter in the Imaginal Pre-History of our Nuclear Predicament.” The two words “Imaginal” and “Pre-History” are keys to understanding what this essay is about. Giegerich is reminding us that his method is “imaginal,” that is, it must be understood not literally, but metaphorically. (See previous posting). For this reason, he turns to its pre-historical, symbolic origins in biblical scripture and in fairy tale fantasy, rather than to the “factual” history of the manufacturing and use of the first nuclear bomb.

The explosive mind of the West

It is well known that the Chinese invented gunpowder long before it was re-invented in Europe, but very little use was made of it, except for firecrackers and crude bamboo rockets. When, at the end of the Middle Ages, Europe began manufacturing is own guns and cannons, “The mind of the West . . . lifted off like a rocket, starting slowly to raise itself above the ground, then picking up speed exponentially. . . . this momentum has never decreased.” This “self-propelling explosive development” is not found in any other civilization. Only in the West could the Bomb be invented because the West itself was “formed in the Bomb’s archetypal image and likeness.” The Bomb could never have been made if it had not already been built, so to speak, in the psyche of Western man. “Ours is a bomb soul, an explosive mind, a missile consciousness.”

The genie in the bottle

At an Eranos conference in Switzerland, Jung devoted two lectures to the Grimm brothers' fairy tale “The Genie in the Bottle,” interpreting it primarily in the context of the individuation process. Giegerich reads it an archetypal image of the Bomb.

A summary of this often-told tale:

The son of a poor woodcutter was helping his father in the forest when he heard a voice calling “Let me out! Let me out!” The voice seemed to be coming from the ground and so the boy began digging around the roots of a huge oak tree. There he discovered a sealed bottle hidden among the roots. The boy opened the bottle and immediately a genie came out, crying: “I have had my punishment and I will be revenged! I am the great and mighty spirit Mercurius.” He promised to give the boy a reward for having released him from the bottle but the “reward” meant that he would be strangled to death by the genie. The quick witted boy said to the genie, “First, I must be sure you are the spirit that was sealed in the bottle.” To prove that he was indeed the right spirit, Mercurius went back into the bottle which the boy immediately sealed. This time the spirit promised rich rewards if he boy would release him, after which the boy let him out. For his reward, Mercurius gave the boy a small rag, the one end of which, if spread over a wound, would heal it. If the other end were rubbed on iron or steel it would turn into silver. The boy took that end and rubbed his axe with it and the axe turned to silver. He sold the axe and with the money he received he and his father no longer had to fear being poor. The boy finished school and with the help of his rag, became a famous doctor.

The genie is named Mercurius suggesting that the tale originated in alchemical legend and folklore. He is described in alchemical texts as hard to pin down, slippery, liable to pop up anywhere. The god Mercurius knew no boundaries, “crossed all borders, was inside and outside, above and below.” Jung had asked a very good question: how did Mercurius get trapped inside the bottle in the first place? This could not have happened without some external force capable of imprisoning him as an evil spirit. Whoever did it must have been a magician or “ruler of souls” who had a good purpose in doing so. Jung concludes that the imprisonment of Mercurius was a necessity because a distinction had to be made between good and evil. Evil bore the burden of guilt and without guilt, no moral consciousness could develop. This “strange intervention” that resulted in the bottling of the genie as evil spirit was “absolutely necessary for the development of any kind of consciousness and in this sense was for the good. . . . A merely instinctual existence and a naïve unconsciousness untroubled by guilt would have prevailed. We would have remained mere-nature. . . .”

Giegerich finds this to be “a shocking insight” on Jung’s part. “Up until Jung, evil had been seen as “an a priori metaphysical truth, timeless, eternal,” a co- existing factor with good in the natural world. Now, however, through an historical event, namely the incursion of Christianity into the pagan, natural world, an alchemical separatio is performed on what was heretofore not separated. The result is “the invention of evil.”

In what sense is evil invented? According to Giegerich, it is humanly impossible to do evil for evil’s sake, because whatever we humans do, even if it should be a criminal act, it is motivated by a perceived good. Even a murderer will kill to achieve some value and not for evil’s sake. Evil as such was not part of our earliest ancestors experience, nor was it present in archaic times as some eternal principle only waiting to be discovered. It had, therefore, to be “invented.” Jung himself was aware of this, finding the imprisonment of the genie in the bottle a “strange intervention” that produced an “artificial” distinction. But Jung was nevertheless persuaded that in order for consciousness to develop, this intervention had to happen. Furthermore, now that there was an unambiguous distinction between good and evil, a more accurate perception of reality was possible.

Giegerich argues against Jung’s point of view. The fairy tale “reflects the historical fate that hit the pagan Gods in the Christian world. They were demonized, subsumed under the image of the devil and bottled—repressed, as we say today.” Certainly, this separation of good and evil brought about change, but not, as Jung thought, “a more differentiated consciousness.” On the contrary, this distinction resulted in a simplification of consciousness, in which good and evil become extreme opposites. Giegerich cites the “good” and “bad guys” of our Westerns as an example of that crude level of consciousness in which everything is either black or white, positive or negative, God or the Devil. What is not acknowledged is the subtle, complex, ambiguous relation between good and evil that one finds, for example, in great novels and dramas.

The consequence of this separation was not, as Jung thought, a more developed consciousness but rather the opposite. “[C]onsciousness was enormously radicalized and intensified. Manifold and subtle differentiations were now concentrated under one single distinction. Being was electrified, brought into the utmost tension of a plus and minus pole. Qualitative differentiations had all to be subsumed under and utilized for one super-distinction, the moral distinction.”

The “invention” of good and evil became, as symbolized in the Nuclear Bomb, "a psychological engine, the invention of a world-transformer.” With good and evil now split into moral opposites, Western consciousness produces more and more reserves of (potentially destructive) energy while it continues to gain control over "mere-nature."

2007-09-18T08:13:00.000-04:00

Introducing Michael Caplan

The author of the posting below is my friend Michael Caplan, who is widely and deeply read in the thought of both James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich (and other interesting thinkers as well). Having learned so much from Michael myself, I asked him to share his insights on this website from time to time.

Technology as prosthetics and as alchemy

2007-09-17T22:09:00.000-04:00

Dolores, you've given us a series of excellent postings (IMHO!) in which you've encapsulated Giegerich's difficult positions in very few words, and captured the driving force of his logic with real elegance. I hope he finds his way to reading it... And I'd be very curious to see what other people might say (though I'm a little frightened of getting what I ask for -- arguments on the web can be horrible).

The following isn't a criticism (it’s pretty long, though). I only want to make explicit an idea I'm sure you've considered, but which you didn't directly address: that technology is not just a tool, nor even (just!) what one might call a place of soul (as you've shown Giegerich to be saying), but that technology helps constitute the very fabric of our being. It is our "nature", as humans.

I've just started reading Marshall McLuhan. He's someone I missed in my eclectic education, and he's a Great Canadian to boot, so I picked up my copy of THE GUTENBERG GALAXY: THE MAKING OF TYPOGRAPHIC MAN, figuring that if one is interested in this subject then his work is an obvious resource.

There was, in fact, one specific idea I was after, which I wanted to offer in response to your description (in an older post) of technology as the product of "our own intelligence and ingenuity". I feel that your wording here draws the line between "us" and "technology" rather too cleanly. I vaguely remembered a notion I'd heard at some point about McLuhan's considering technology not only as the totality of our tools, but as a kind of prosthetics.

I found one statement to that effect very early in the Prologue, where he writes: "Man the tool-making animal, whether in speech or in writing or in radio, has long been engaged in extending one or another of his sense organs ..." [p. 12]. But on page 13 I also found this longer quotation from Edward T. Hall's THE SILENT LANGUAGE, cited with obvious approval:

"Today man has developed extensions for practically everything he used to do with his body. The evolution of weapons begins with the teeth and the fist and ends with the atom bomb. Clothes and houses are extensions of man's biological temperature-control mechanisms. Furniture takes the place of squatting and sitting on the ground. Power tools, glasses, TV, telephones, and books which carry the voice across both time and space are examples of material extensions. Money is away of extending and storing labor. Our transportation networks now do what we used to do with our feet and backs. In fact, all man-made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of his body."

I've long thought that we humans are very little without our technologies. It's not just that this is today's situation, though successive technological revolutions have taken us to the very heart of creation (the atom, DNA, the binary code ...), but that it is constitutive of humanity. Technologies are the benefit and curse of our innate physical weakness -- and either its evolutionary result, or cause, or concomitant (I won't get into that question).

In any case, I just wanted to bring out this more problematic notion of technology. We tend to think of it as essentially different from us -- which in one sense, of course, it is; but in another, it is indeed us, writ concrete. Or, more in keeping with Giegerich and the psychological approach, one should say that it is, as we are, soul writ concrete.

What this might mean about the bomb is another matter ...

In Hall's notion above, the bomb is an extension of our meagre inborn physical weaponry – the obvious emblem of which being the opening of Kubrick's "2001", in which the Pleistocene man discovers the use of a bone as a tool, then as a weapon, and then in a famous 4 million year jump-cut, the bone becomes a spaceship. There is no denying the pragmatic causes of the bomb's existence. But aware as we may also be of the extra-pragmatic effects of technology (e.g., McLuhan), we are resolutely pragmatic and "secular" in our conception of the forces driving it. If man's goal is imagined as "extending one or another of his sense organs" through technology (or more generally, one or another of his physical abilities), this is a profoundly materialist conception. It is not untrue, but it is to my mind insufficient. (I know that McLuhan also wrote about religion proper, but I haven't read that material so I don't know how materialist or otherwise his own position is, finally.)

Giegerich brings out technology's psychological causes, indeed its religious, sacred, divine, spiritual causes. He shows how it is part of the story of "God", of humanity and culture, of consciousness, of soul. Its existence transcends its pragmatic purposes. Or, again more in keeping with Giegerich's psyche-ology, its existence is occasioned in the first place by more-than-pragmatic ends, i.e., the soul's.

In the bomb, the soul reveals something of reality to itself/to us. Simply put, it reveals what Michael Perlman described as "an awful power in the makeup of the world" ["When Heaven and Earth Collapse," in FACING APOCALYPSE, p. 172]. This is a power of godly proportion, as Giegerich has shown (and as the bomb's phenomenology also makes explicit: Oppenheimer's references to the Bhagavad-Gita, for example, and even the name "Trinity"), implicating the fundamental components of physical existence. Moreover, it reveals this power "in the flesh", "for real", where such power had previously been accessible (only!) through religious doctrine, mystical vision or poetic intuition. Thus does the soul "bring home" reality to itself. (Which is its quest, I think.)

As Kevin Hart, in his book THE DARK GAZE, summarizes Georges Bataille's position: the sacred "is more than communication between human beings, it is communication between reality and us" [p. 4]. Perhaps our technologies are ways of mediating such "communication between reality and us". Science would agree with such a mediating role for technology in terms of physical reality, if clearly not religious reality, because through it we are enabled to comprehend the physical world better. And a more-than-secular view might allow the actual spiritual point of Bataille's notion, in that the technologies of religion (fasting, prayer, music, trance, etc.) make available to us dimensions of existence that we would otherwise achieve haphazardly or not at all. But the most radical stance -- in which soul is seen as attempting to "bring home" reality to itself -- would see "reality" and "us" struggling toward each other in order to transform each other, as if the soul were using us to discover and to realize itself in matter, while we, following soul's every prompting, frantically build, experiment, construct... (Looking at it this way assumes that you are first capable -- after a good education from Giegerich or some other equally radical approach -- of seeing soul behind/within such positive realities as the bomb and other technologies.)

But mediation seems not quite the right word, suggesting as it does that there is "reality" on one side and "us" on the other, with technology carrying messages between. Technology is both part of "us" and part of the world outside "us", as was my point about "prosthetics", above. So perhaps it is better to say that technologies create sites and situations in which certain aspects or dimensions of reality are able to manifest themselves.

This quality of "bringing something into reality" is what makes technology more than just a tool, though it may be our hand that guides it; and more than just a mediation, though experience tells us there is indeed some sort of phenomenological division between "reality" and "us" that must be mediated. Maybe technology is truly, from the first, alchemical. In its dual modification of "reality" and "us" there is surely an alchemy at work, transforming both known and knower. One difference is that the alchemists carried on their experiments with a deliberately double intention, while we perceive technology's transformations of us only with difficulty, and at best secularly. And while some, such as McLuhan, can begin to comprehend at least the psychological implications of technology, it seems the only viewpoint that recognizes technology’s truly extra-secular -- i.e., spiritual, sacred -- dimension is that of apocalyptic end-time fundamentalists, who see our technological innovations as definite steps on their road to Rapture (enabling a One World Government, bar-coding us, incinerating everything).

It is therefore most significant that Giegerich is not so far from the fundamentalists on this. He is asking that we acknowledge, against all common conception -- that of secularists and progressives, that of the mainstream, even that of non-fundamentalist religious believers -- that there is an intentionality at work in technology, a teleological development that is authentically spiritual (because all things to do with soul are also spiritual). He differs, of course, from both the common conception and the fundamentalist fringe in essential ways. Where the fundamentalist may take technological manifestation as the work of God or Satan, Giegerich takes God and Satan themselves as works of the soul; and where scientific convention may assume a materialism dismissive of all soul/spirit, Giegerich takes the convention itself as a moment in soul's development. Giegerich always asks: what does this -- whatever it is -- mean about and for soul, psyche, "consciousness"?

So: what does the bomb tell us? In what knowledge does it instruct us? It is, as Giegerich has vividly shown, numinous in its self-display, and thus demands -- indeed precipitates -- language which allows for numinosity (even if "only" metaphorically, as in the Oppenheimer example). Its destructive power confronts us with our mortality, our finitude, and also with our real oneness in this mortality, and thus it starkly reminds of our corporeal vulnerability while perhaps facilitating the most sublime of monotheistic injunctions, human unification, "love thy neighbour". Its very possibility necessitates the manipulation of fundamental universal forces, and thus demonstrates humanity's achievement of "god-like" knowledge. And it is the very fire of creation which we now handle, and thus it shows us entrusted with "god-like" power. As Giegerich has suggested: Is this not the Incarnation, "for real"?

Is this, therefore, what the soul is attempting to teach us/itself about reality/itself, what it is attempting to initiate us/itself into?

Technology as alchemy: If, as Giegerich says, history is the psyche's retort, the alchemical vessel in which the soul puts itself through the tortures of the opus, transforming itself in accordance with what it discovers and undergoes, then technology is the very ritual structure -- with all attendant implements and protocols -- of our current spiritual quest, and the very “course content” of the soul’s (self-)instruction. (At least in this course -- it is also taking some others...)

Thanks,
Michael

2007-09-08T09:04:00.000-04:00

A PSYCHOLOGY OF THE IMAGINAL

The next chapter (5) in “The Nuclear Bomb Papers” goes by the drawn out title: “The Invention of Explosive Power and The Blueprint of the Bomb: A Chapter on the Imaginal Pre-history of Our Nuclear Predicament.” (From now on I will refer to it as “The Invention of Explosive Power and the Bomb”.) If anything, it is more demanding and likely more controversial than any of the chapters that preceded it. To approach it requires a better idea of the term “imaginal” referred to in the earlier chapters, but which remains elusive. For this reason I would like to pause here and say a little more about it before plunging into the complexities of this chapter.

Although he is, to my mind, a psychologist and thinker sui generis, Wolfgang Giegerich’s affiliation as a Jungian analyst is with the school of archetypal psychology developed by James Hillman. Just as he has never hesitated to dispute what he views to be the misdirections of traditional Jungian psychology, so too he has been a critic of archetypal psychology for its misdirections. Nevertheless, even if it takes off in its own direction, his psychological approach begins with certain fundamental tenets of archetypal psychology, such as its emphasis on psyche or soul which reveals itself through fantasies, myths, and dreams, in a word, through the “imaginal.”

James Hillman acknowledges, among many others, the influence of Henri Corbin, a renowned scholar in Islamic Studies, who wrote of the mundus imaginalis, the world of the image, which is a real a world as real as that of the senses and of the mind and most importantly, it is a way of knowing what concerns the soul. So when Giegerich writes of “the imaginal substance of the soul” or the “soul-image” or the Bomb as a work of an “imaginal nature” or that the Bomb stores within itself “the riches of the imaginal”—it is this sense of the imaginal that they are meant to be understood. An imaginal approach to the soul is to understand that the soul can never be explained but is a recognition that all reality is, to use Jung’s phrase for it, esse in anima, “to be in soul.”

The imaginal as “the third reality” is the world of the creative imagination, finding its expression in our emotions, as well as myth, fantasy, and dreams as metaphors and symbols of the soul. Although the soul can never be explained, it can be, as Hillman tells us, “the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation [thought then is also imaginal?] dream, image and fantasy —that mode that recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.” He also wrote:

To live psychologically is to imagine things. . . .to be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy. . . . In the beginning is the image; first imagination, then perception; first fantasy then reality. . . .Man is primarily an image -maker and our psychic substance consists of our images; our experience is imagination.

Archetypal psychology stays close to the ancient Greeks, their philosophies and myths. But the creative imagination is at work today in the events and circumstances of our own time. It is no anomaly that Giegerich should direct us to the imaginal nature of the Nuclear Bomb and its metaphorical and symbolic meaning, for instance that he should say the Nuclear Bomb is a symbol of God. It is the only way, as he has written repeatedly, to enter into its depths in which the underworld of our Judaeo-Christian consciousness is manifested. Giegerich should not then be read literally but imaginally.

2007-09-05T15:08:00.000-04:00

The Nuclear Bomb
And the Fate of God

In the posting for Saturday, August 25, on the “Nuclear Bomb as Symptom and Symbol”, Giegerich was quoted as claiming that the Bomb is the symptom and symbol of the “highest aspirations of Western man.” Furthermore, the Bomb was not just a singular event but the consequence of the driving force on our entire Christian culture. “We can now see with our own eyes that our Christian tradition has not been as harmless and innocent as people like to think. Now there can be no denying. . . . .You shall know them by their fruits.” This was a long process beginning with the destruction of the natural gods, the overcoming of nature itself, which culminated in the Nuclear Bomb, bringing to an end one stage of consciousness in the Christian West.

In the next chapter (4), “The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of god: On the First Nuclear Fission,” Giegerich writes “I would like to read the story of the Golden Calf as the psychological real image which was implanted, like a seed, into the receptive psyches of the peoples of the beginning of the Christian West and, after a period of incubation lasting for several centuries—usually called the "Middle Ages"—started to sprout until it finally bore mature fruit in our century.” He tells the story as a psychologist and a phenomenologist, not as a metaphysician, theologian or biblical exegete, viewing it as a method, a way of thinking that will go into the very depths of things and events, so that they will reveal themselves. He deals with the God images themselves because they make visible to us the psychological history of the West. The ‘fate of God’ as this relates to the nuclear bomb, Giegerich believes to have been decided a long time ago, as far back as the event of the Golden Calf in the Old Testament.

I have written about this Chapter (when it was published earlier and elsewhere) in an article called “Dancing Around the Bomb.” It can be accessed on the C.G. Jung Page at Dancing Around the Bomb
or on the Jungian Notebook blog in the “Links” column on the right.

The article itself “The Nuclear Bomb and The Fate of God: On the First Nuclear Fission” by Wolfgang Giegerich, can be found at
Nuclear Bomb & Fate of God

2007-09-03T11:05:00.000-04:00

Afterthoughts:
Our Nuclear Predicament

Reading Giegerich in sequence like this, chapter by chapter, reveals an underlying, almost fierce passion which is not immediately evident to the reader. This is due partly to his dense, sometimes tortuous prose style but I think mainly to the originality of his thought that demands our whole attention. This passion makes itself felt when he is writing about certain subjects of deep concern to him, such as how Jungian psychology is taught and practiced. For more than twenty-five years at least, Giegerich has dedicated himself to opening up Jungian psychology to the world outside the consulting room and beyond the personal psychological needs of the individual.

With “Our Nuclear Predicament” Giegerich presents the greatest challenge so far in this book: our nuclear predicament demands a transformation of consciousness which commits us to going into the “underworld.” This word “underworld” is starker, more frightening than “shadow” —a term Jungians are more familiar with and which is commonly associated with the individual. “Me and my shadow.” Seldom does Giegerich mention the shadow. Instead, he pulls us away from this interiorized, personalized shadow and directs us into the underworld that is not so much “out there” as down there” in the depths of Hades, the dwelling of the spirits of the dead. Jung used “underworld” seldom, most often in relation to alchemy and myth and almost always in connection with individuation. But in the following passage (1961) he writes of the “psychic underworld” of the collective unconscious:

Our times have demonstrated what it means when the gates of the psychic underworld are thrown open. Things whose enormity nobody would have imagined in the idyllic first decade of our century have happened and have turned the world upside down. Ever since the world has remained in a state of schizophrenia. Not only has the great civilized Germany disgorged its primitivity, but Russia also is ruled by it, and Africa has been set on fire. No wonder the Western world is uneasy, for it does not know how much it plays into the hands of the uproarious underworld and what has been lost through the destruction of its numinosities.

Giegerich directs us to the underworld, but then turns us over to the Nuclear Bomb to take us down into it. Hermes and Charon were psychopomps in Greek mythology. Dante was led in the Inferno by the Roman poet Virgil. Many myths and religions had their pyschopomps who served as guides into the underworld. Shamans frequently fulfilled that role. Christians might claim that by his Death and Resurrection Jesus Christ is their psychopomp. But the Nuclear Bomb? It is a thing, a technological product of our own making. How do we connect or relate to it? Giegerich, in directing us to the Bomb as our psychopomp, did not leave us without clues. If we go back over this article, the previous ones, and the Introduction, he reiterates what our approach or method must be. Below is a brief summary of what seem to me to be its key components.

Recognizing the reality of the objective psyche

To come to an understanding that psychology has to do, first of all, with the psyche or soul and not the cure of our personal neuroses. The psyche is not to be thought of as having to do exclusively with what is human and personal. The soul is transpersonal; it has a cosmic dimension and an objective reality. If we acknowledge this then we must acknowledge that the Nuclear Bomb is also ensouled.

Overcoming the split

Our problem is that we are habituated to the notion that the psyche is concerned solely with what is personal and subjective and everything else that is “not me” is external and without soul. Our responsibility is to overcome this split. Recall the metaphor of the sandtray in which order and chaos are separated by a wall. We will have to take down that wall and “integrate and bind together” that which we have kept apart. Another of Giegerich’s metaphors for this is the alchemical vessel in which all ingredients, the worst (such as the Nuclear Bomb) and the best (as we see it), are “cooked together” thereby undergoing a transformation which results in a new and different consciousness. Still another metaphor is “the wilderness” in which we humans were once embedded, but now believe we have conquered. Today our true “wilderness” is symbolized by the Nuclear Bomb. (I believe it is also experienced today in the fear of terrorism which has increased and spread throughout our globe.) Integrating and binding this wilderness with and to us means giving up the idea that we must be “embedded in security and salvation” and in its place, begin to listen to, (trusting that it has something to say to us) and learning how to live with it.

Welcoming the Guest

Jung said that a neurosis can be either our friend or our enemy. If we want it to be a friend, we must welcome it as a Guest. The Nuclear Bomb, our collective neurosis, waits to be taken into ourselves as such a Guest. This is what “saving the Bomb” means. We get to know it only by living with it. And by letting it guide us into the underworld of our collective unconscious.

This healing of the psychic split is guaranteed to be wrenching one, because it means giving up not only an ego-centered psychology, but a human-centered one.

The way of the imaginal

This is what we must do, but how we go about doing it? What can we do so that all these profound challenges do not remain words only, stirring for a time, but then forgotten? How do we begin to put them into practice. Giegerich does not tell us. This is not his task perhaps, but it is ours. He does suggest one way, however, that may lead to the beginning of such a practice—the way of the imaginal, the cultivation of what Hillman called “the poetic basis of mind.” Insight does not come only through rational thought, but also through our emotions as well as fantasies, dreams, and imaginings.

Giegerich writes of our need to know “the imaginal substance of the Bomb,” or that things being “our soul-image” serve as mirrors to us. In commenting on the objective psyche, Giegerich also stressed that things, being ensouled, also have “personality” (individuality?) Here, the Jungian practice of active imagination offers an entry into the “imaginal”—a conversation, perhaps, with the Bomb, so that it can speak for itself.

Obviously, these are scattershot suggestions, and not very satisfying. The what and the how still remained to be probed, reflected upon, but also experimented with, and imagined.

2007-08-28T10:15:00.000-04:00

Going Into the Underworld
& A New Kind of Consciousness
Concluding “Our Nuclear Predicament”

The understanding Jungian psychology can bring to our nuclear predicament, is not enough. We have to go beyond understanding, beyond being “knowers” and learn how the Bomb, by its very existence, can psychologically transform us.For this to happen, we must allow the Bomb— despite it being an ever present threat to us—to be our psychopomp, to guide us into the underworld where we must undergo an initiation. The Bomb can lead us there now and not only if it should finally explode and thereby bring about the destruction of our world. “Already now, as the constant threat of such destruction, the Bomb necessitates our going under, the going under of mankind.” The initiation rite by which we go under culminates in a lifelong dedication of consciousness to the underworld. All our talk of psyche or of the underworld [or the shadow], without our facing up to the Bomb renders it inauthentic. We can never escape psychologically or ontologically the threat of annihilation which surrounds us from every side.

Until the invention of the Nuclear Bomb, we lived solely in the knowledge of our individual deaths, but now the possibility of the annihilation of the entire habitable world hangs over us. The Bomb is the symbol of the end of the world itself, that is, of the prevailing “level or constitution of consciousness as a whole. As such the Bomb is our only real chance for a true future.”

A true future? The only possible future for us is one that that provides a new stage of consciousness. If we remain within the framework of our present consciousness, we only consign ourselves to that “sterile death” which Nietzsche described as the life of the Last Man. “The earth becomes small and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. . . . ‘We have invented happiness’ say the last men.”

We are already living like the last men and, claims Giegerich, not even Jungian psychology is innocent. He harshly criticizes the trend in recent years to “invent happiness” by both sentimentalizing and exploiting everything, even the most sacred, whether it be “Gods, meaning, symbols, dreams, creativity, individuation, archetypes.” He labels it a phony psychology. “But into this phoniness, which is the last man’s happiness, the Bomb strikes like a thunderbolt.” Only the “awe-inspiring Bomb” can shock us out of it, out of our false “happiness” which is only “a slow death, a “mummification during life.”

Paradoxically, the Bomb is our only route to the future, just because it locks us into the present, into the here and now, “and thus returns to life its sting by returning death to life.” Because of the Bomb it is futile to seek other ways of escaping, because we cannot escape its ever present threat. For this very reason “it can bring, as a gift to psychology, the very actuality that Jung sought through the process of individuation.”

Using the shopping mall as a paradigm, Giegerich tells us that we want to enclose ourselves off from what he calls the “autonomous, objective life of our technological civilization, in order to pursue the fantasies and desires of the subjective world of the human ego. Psychologically he[we] withdraw[s] into the innocence and harmlessness of a human-all-too-human isle of the blessed, of which the pedestrian mall is the eternal symbol.” He sees this as the dominant fantasy of our time which has also affected much of psychology with “its autistic concern with introspection, self-realization, self-development, encounter groups, peak experiences, etc.” He calls it a “cozy idea” that the unconscious has to do primarily with our instincts, sexual desires, fantasies, and symptoms. Countervailing this self-satisfying “humanism, The Bomb is the Bringer of the Collective Unconscious, the real unconscious which is outside and all around us all the time. Today the collective unconscious is most notably to be found in technology and the global economy.

Not for the first time, but here most passionately, Giegerich charges psychology, and Jungian psychology in particular, for having excluded the world, despite the fact that Jung always insisted that his psychology includes the world.

Psychology is blind and dumb with respect to the grand issues of our age. It has nothing to say to money, banking, economics; to the new discoveries of science; to industrialization; to unemployment and the distribution of labor. All that remains outside the comfortable premises of psychology. If “modern man (is)in search of a soul,” then the soul here means the privatized interior of the individual cut off from the mainstream of events.

What can change the course of psychology, moving it from the emphasis on the private experience of the individual to a concern for the larger world? Our only hope, says Giegerich, is the ever present Bomb that “cuts in and forces our attention to what is outside. . ..The Bomb explodes psychology’s prison of the interior and opens up our eyes to what else there is outside of us as the real Other, the real unconscious, the real world.”

Recalling that Jung said that it is not we who treat the neurosis but that the neurosis treats us, “treats the inappropriate constitution of consciousness,” in the same way, Giegerich concludes, so does the Bomb treat our neurosis.
It is our indispensable “true therapist, because it authenticates all those concerns Jung tried to bring back through his psychology.”

2007-08-25T12:49:00.000-04:00

The Bomb as Symptom and Symbol:
Our Nuclear Predicament

The Bomb as the symptom and symbol
of the highest aspirations of Western man
spells it out, makes it explicit.

“The highest aspiration of Western man?” Giegerich prepares us for this shocking claim by tracing, in one dense paragraph, the trajectory of the West that led to the Bomb. It began with “killing of the natural Gods” which, in effect, discredited nature itself.* As a result time itself underwent a change, reduced to linear progression as opposed to the circular experience of time characteristic of ancient people. As time became a mode of “succession,” the universals of logic, metaphysics and science replaced the “pregnant moment,” the Now.† Nature was further denigrated during the Enlightenment and with the development of science, both of which systematically set out to destroy the natural and traditional view of things by labeling them superstitions, illusions, and imaginary substitutions for genuine knowledge. Technology also contributed to the metaphysical and intellectual demolishing of nature or as Giegerich also puts it to “the gradual undoing of the natural world.” To this he adds the spoilation of the environment: the destruction of the forests, the drying up of huge land masses, the pollution of water, air and atmosphere. Through colonial expansion, indigenous cultures were decimated and their cultures destroyed. “What was done to them, was not only done to them. It was also done to us, to the natural man in ourselves.

From the beginning, the intention, the telos of destroying the natural world was unwittingly present both in our consciousness and in our deeds, but remained in the background. With the Nuclear Bomb, however, what was hidden now confronts us as a visible, material presence, bringing to completion a period in the West’s history. With it a stage of consciousness is also coming to an end. The Nuclear Bomb having made it unavoidably explicit, we now have to acknowledge what the Christian West was really about.

The reality of the Bomb makes evident that destructive actions such as occurred throughout history were not isolated events but were the consequence of the driving force of our entire Christian Western culture. “We can now see with our own eyes that our Christian tradition has not been as harmless and innocent as people liked to think. Now there can be no denying.“ The Bomb as a literal fact speaks for itself. ‘You shall know them by their fruits.” With the Bomb, the unconscious force that drove our collective actions throughout history became “embodied and objectified self-reflection.” A reversal has taken place. “Now we have become the victims instead of the doers, but in such a way that it becomes apparent that in our doings we had all along been the victims of what was driving us.” We have to suffer the Bomb as a constant threat, to live with it as the Other whose mere existence demolishes the arrogance of the human ego which is no longer the only and supreme subject. Threatening us with destruction, the Bomb as Other is itself “an all-too-real subject whose object we are.” Giegerich notes that Jung once asked the question about this other (in a letter to Sir Herbert Read):

Who is the awe-inspiring guest who knocks at our door portentously? Fear precedes him and indicates that the highest values already flow toward him.

This too is the question we must ask. Who is this Guest, this Bomb who knocks at our door and what does it bring to us? “What would it mean for consciousness if [it] had a place in it?”

*His interpretation of this event is discussed in the next chapter, “The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of the Gods.”

†Giegerich discusses this in Chapter 7, “The Fabrication of Time.”

2007-08-20T15:04:00.000-04:00

Motives and Moves:
The Transpersonal Psyche &
The Self-Reflecton of Psychology

With (4) and (5) Giegerich concludes his interpretation of fundamental ideas in Jung’s psychology that contribute to understanding our nuclear predicament.

(4) Towards a transpersonal psyche.

Jung’s psychology did not see individuation merely as a private affair, but as a “concern for the soul of the world.” It has a cosmic dimension which has to be understood in the context of the here and now of our contemporary existence as well as in "the millennia of our tradition.” Unlike science with its specialties, psychology is not confined to one aspect of reality, i.e. “the interior of man.” Psychology represents a new level of consciousness that overcomes such compartmentalization. “Psychology implies a very different and fresh position vis-à-vis the world as a whole, leaving the scientific and religious positions behind, but taking their contents, as its sublated moments, along.”

(5) Critical self-reflection

Jung saw the need for psychology to “turn back on itself” (“urobic”) in order to be aware of its own biases. Psychology does not simply respond to the psychological problems of the individual person (although it does do that), but because it too is “a product of the psyche, it has psychological problems of its own.” Jung’s theory of psychological types as well as his archetypal theory can be seen as tools that would expose the unconscious biases in varying psychological approaches.

******

From Jung’s psychology, asks Giegerich, what can we bring to our predicament about the Nuclear Bomb? To begin with, we have to realize the magnitude of the problem that the Bomb presents to us. Because it threatens our very existence on this earth, it is a problem that cannot be dealt with in the consulting room, or resolved by technical, political or ethical means. The question is not how to get rid of the Bomb or prevent it from being used. Moreover, to even think in terms of it being our “moral responsibility” is nothing more than a defense mechanism. What then do we do? Giegerich returns to the theme of his first essay on the Bomb. (See posting for Tuesday, July 24) We need to save the Bomb, to save “the phenomenon it is.” Just as Jung always wanted to know the content of a neurosis or psychosis, we have to ask what is the content or “imaginal substance” of the Bomb because we need to know the Bomb and not only to deal with it by practical means. But in order to know the Bomb, it is a psychological necessity that we live with it. Only living with the Bomb will bring into the open the “motor” behind the entire history of the West and the potentially fatal consequence of that history, the destruction of life on this planet.

In the this last section, Giegerich takes up the theme so central to his work: the “undoing of the natural world” by the West of which the Bomb is the most monstrous symbol.

2007-08-19T14:22:00.000-04:00

Motives and Moves: Individuation
Our Nuclear Predicament

This reading of Wolfgang Giegerich’s “The Significance of Our Nuclear Predicament” began in the previous posting for Wednesday, August 15. It includes summaries of (1) Jung’s synthetic orientation and (2) Neurosis as psychologically legitimate and therapeutic.

(3) Individuation

“Individuation” is a key concept familiar to anyone with some knowledge of Jungian psychology. Because of this familiarity we would expect this section to be the most accessible. On the contrary, it is difficult to grasp and will take some patience. I have focused on what I think are the basic ideas but only a reading of the actual text will do full justice to it.

Jung defined it this way: “I use the term ‘individuation’ to denote the process by which a person becomes ‘in-dividual’, that is a separate indivisible unity or ‘whole’. (CW9i, para. 490). Jung also stated emphatically what was not individuation. “The self is relatedness.” “Only when the self mirrors itself in so many mirrors does it really exist. . . You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation. . . .” (January 29, 1936, p. 795)

Giegerich has been a consistent and severe critic of the common practice among Jungians to focus on the psychological development of the individual while avoiding the relationship with the Other. Once again, In this paper he addresses the need to free Jung’s idea of individuation from confusion with modern individualism, in which the individual becomes the “me” in contrast to, or in opposition to “them.” But he also presents an original approach to understanding what Jung intended with individuation in which Jung’s interest in archetypes and symbols are linked with what Giegerich calls Jung’s “concern for individuation.”

To remain with the “me” versus “them” paradigm is to move on a “horizontal plane,” but contrariwise, Jung’s individuation moves vertically, from the heights to the depths. The idea (or “fantasy” as Giegerich calls it, to mean, I take it, “as imaged” by Jung) behind this, is that our psychological life begins “up in the clouds, in the superterrestrial realm of abstract generalities or archetypal idealizations.” [An example might be the archetype of the Mother as one of those inherited “idealizations”?] As far as our actual, physical birth is concerned, we are of this earth, “earthlings”, but psychologically, we do not at all begin our life in “concrete actuality.” From birth onward our life’s work is to get ourselves down from that high idealism and to ground ourselves in “singular realness.” Being born does not make us “real,” rather, we must become “real.” For Giegerich, individuation or self-realization is a coming-down-to earth, “the grounding of our psychological or ontological existence in the unique, the weighing down of our bright idealism through the reality of the dark shadow.” I understand his use of his terms “singular realness” and “the unique” to refer to the phenomenon or “the thing itself.” In this context, the individual is the phenomenon or “thing” itself, therefore singular and unique—or to put it another way, “the thingness” of the individual.

The emphasis, however, in Jungian psychology on archetypes and symbols presents an obstacle in moving away from the heights to the depths, from the ideal to the real in the individuation process. Understanding archetypes and symbols requires a reverse movement from the actual to the abstract “essences.” But this “Platonistic or essentialist mode of looking into the world,” will never achieve for the individual the actual, real world. Giegerich believes Jung understood this and set up his individuation process as a “counter program to save the actual phenomenon.” He is not saying that Jung explicitly expressed this, but he does claim that Jung’s “concern for individuation was an indispensable ingredient in his psychology as a counter-weight to the likewise indispensable emphasis on the archetypal.” Citing Heraclitus’s “the way up is the way down, Giegerich explains it as an ongoing dialectical tension moving in opposite directions, from the atemporal, general archetypal to the concrete individual.

Individuation need not refer to the personal individuality of the human being, “my me-ness” but to an “ontological individuality.” Jung wanted, Giegerich believes, “to rescue individuality in the sense of the uniqueness of the sensible, inexchangeable experience as the ultimate constituent of actuality. But this individuality is not the ‘merely individual, cut off from the archetypal depth or height of the psyche . . . . Here individuality can be understood only as he existing contradiction of the archetypal and the sensible unique.”

Admittedly, the connection Giegerich makes between the archetypes and individuation may seem to be an awkward stretch. Remember, however, that he makes his comments on individuation (as well as on the other four Motives and Moves” ) only because of their direct relevance to the psychology of the Bomb which he takes up in the last part of this paper. In that context, the relationship between individuation and the archetypes should be made clearer.

2007-08-15T14:24:00.000-04:00

The Significance of
Our Nuclear Predicament

The full title of Chapter 3 is “The Significance of Our Nuclear Predicament for Analytical Psychology and of Analytical Psychology for Our Nuclear Predicament.” It was delivered as a lecture in 1988 and published here for the first time in English. In this paper, Giegerich once more addresses the urgent need for psychology to move away from its preoccupation with the individual psyche and open itself up to the world, to “external reality.” He returns to this theme in each of his essays, but each time carries it forward and towards even greater depth, by looking at it from still another perspective. “Our Nuclear Predicament” is divided into two parts. In the first and longest, Giegerich examnes the approach of Jung's psychology which helps us understand our nuclear predicament. In the last part, he asks what is it that the Bomb can bring to psychology to affect and transform it as we enter a new stage of consciousness brought about by the Bomb's very existence.

Giegerich begins by reminding us that after more than eighty years of Jungian psychology, we have the benefit of being able to look back on it objectively without getting ourselves entangled in the dogmatism and the controversies of the past. We have the freedom now to dig deeper than ever before into Jung’s thought and ask ourselves again “by what vision was the origin and development of Jung’s Analytical Psychology” driven?” He proposes five main themes that he believes drove Jung’s psychological thinking. Giegerich then explains each of them to the extent that they have a bearing on the psychology of the bomb. I will do my best to distill from each what seems to me to be the key points.

(1) The final or synthetic point of view

Giegerich contrasts Jung’s analytic approach to the “causal-reductive” approach of Freud. True, the causal-reductive method explains how things came about and is a useful technique in helping patients free themselves from their symptoms. But Jung sought —Giegerich thinks more or less instinctively—“to reach the phenomenon in its own right, that is, its true essence.” The causal-reductive method deals only with the human ego and its desires, leaving “the suffering psyche” as merely an object of concern to the ego. Jung, however, wanted to know not just what the ego wants of the patient, but also what the pathology wants? As Giegerich sees it, Jung’s synthetic point of view confirms the reality of the objective psyche by according it “its own subjectivity, its own personality.” “Jung approached the patient with the idea that through the patient’s neurosis “something of ontological dignity wants to emerge.” Jung’s “method” then can be thought of as dialogical or maieutic— a “Socratic mode of inquiry, which aims to bring a person’s latent ideas into clear consciousness.” It is also exploratory and experimental leading not to a completion in any temporal sense, but into the “depth or height of the hidden essence or essential content of the present.”

(2) The revaluation of neurosis as psychologically legitimate and therapeutic

This theme follows from Jung’s synthetic approach which, in according a neurosis its own subjectivity, its own “personality,” means that it is not just a disorder which has to be gotten rid of. Rather, neurosis is accepted not only as legitimate but “productive,” “forcing the ego-consciousness beyond itself.” A neurosis, Jung said, is either our best enemy or best friend. At first it may seem like our enemy, but if the neurosis is welcomed as “a guest” it can show itself be a friend and becomes “a true personality.” This is a reversal of the usual way of thinking about neurosis, but it is more than a reversal. A revolutionary transformation takes place in which ordinary consciousness is “reconstituted on an entirely new level.” It can be thought of as a death —an entering the underworld— “that is in itself a resurrection or way up.” Only by means of this reversal, that is, by recognizing neurosis as a guest, can there be a movement toward a new condition which releases us from our isolation and gives us an authentic sense of the reality of the Other. “Only then can we also hope to leave the mode of manipulating the phenomena as our exclusive attitude to the world and regain a sense of our being in the world as a conversation, a speaking with the Other.”

To be continued. . . .

2007-08-12T14:39:00.000-04:00

The Star in Man or
What is Inside is Outside and
What is Outside is Inside

Jung’s thinking on technology provides an intriguing counterpoint to Giegerich’s. I wrote about this at some length in “The Star in Man: Jung and Technology” It is too long to summarize in a blog but is available for reading in the CGJungPage. Click on the link "The Star in Man" found under "Links" on the right side of this page.

In the paper I describe a fantasy Jung had as a boy in which a mysterious substance is drawn down from the air into a cellar and then into a secret laboratory (described as a huge machine) where he transforms it into gold coins. Jung interpreted this as a symbol of the self as “receiver, spectator and transmitter”—technological procedures. Although he found it strange and disturbing that a machine should be a symbol of the self, he concluded it was a microcosm, what Paracelsus called, “the star in man” and that it touched on “the great secrets, the magnalia Dei.” Paracelsus wrote:

[Man] can be understood only as an image of the macrocosm, of the Great Creature. Only then does it become manifest what is in him. For what is outside is also inside; and what is not outside man is not inside. The outer and the inner are one thing, one constellation, one influence, one concordance, one duration, one fruit.”

Man carries the stars within himself . . . . he is the microcosm, and thus carries in him the whole firmament and all its influences. Nothing can be in man unless it has been given to him by the Light of Nature, ‘and what is in the Light of Nature has been brought by the stars.”

Jung saw in medieval alchemy “the dawn of the scientific age, when the “daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to extent never known before. “ For Jung here were to be found the “true roots, the preparatory processes deep in the psyche, which unleashed the forces at work in the world today. . . .”

In the The Soul’s Logical Life,” Wolfgang Giegerich adds to Jung’s insight into the profound and permanent transition initiated by the alchemists. The ancient power of myth, Giegerich writes, in which knowledge is reserved to the gods, is subverted with the advent of alchemy. Knowledge is no longer something received but acquired through experiment and invention. Ever since the alchemists man is no longer a passive recipient of knowledge, but “acts on his own responsibility.” From this change in attitude towards God and nature, science and technology evolved.

Jung returned frequently to Paracelsus’s claim that what is inside is also outside, and conversely, what is outside is also inside. Technology exists for us “out there” as Giegerich has emphasized. Whatever it is, it surely cannot be us. But is this really the case? Is technology, as the art (or science now) of making, crafting (in the original meaning of the word technê?) external to us? “Who,” asked Jung, “has invented this machine?” After all, this machine has been “thought up” and created by man. It was inside him in some sense before it was produced, that is, also found on the outside. This suggests that there may be a deeper relationship between we humans and our technology than has been realized so far.

Jung’s thinking on technology is not developed, but, as is so often the case with Jung, seminal, richly evocative. Alchemy is arcane, but technology today is just as arcane even to the adepts of technology, never mind the rest of us.

2007-08-11T14:09:00.000-04:00

One More Afterthought

“Biophilia, a term made popular by the eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson, refers to the innate affinity we experience with other living things, other species, other life systems, because of our common biological origin. But alongside biophilia, we human beings also experience technophilia— a deep connection between ourselves and our technologies. Although we are often ambivalent about our technologies, we are nonetheless attached to them. And why not? They are the products of our own intelligence, and ingenuity and have served us well. This attachment has a long history, beginning with the rough tools of prehistoric man.

I thought of this in reading Giegerich’s moving plea to “see the image” in our technical external reality: “image” meaning its “soul-image as mythical figure and anima(l)-like creature.” Because, he asks, how otherwise “can feeling, how can love flow into so-called external reality and animate it if we do not see the image hidden in it." Giegerich brings a new dimension into this age-old bond between humans and their technologies when he refers to their “soul-image,” as mirrors in which we recognize ourselves. Much more than mere tools, as soul-image they achieve a mythical, (imaginal?) and—I find this especially intriguing—an anima/animal like status, with soul as well as material body. Maybe the scientists currently attempting to create robots which have consciousness may be inspired by an intuition of this?

In our technologies we always encounter nature. Unlike God, we have not yet been able to make anything out of nothing. There is nothing we make, no technology which is not taken from, or is not a re-working of nature, whether we are thinking of materials such as wood, stone, metal, chemicals, or electricity and radio waves, or the invisible particles which make up the bomb.

I don’t know where these thoughts are leading, but I believe Giegerich about the need for a flow of feeling and love towards all that is outside of our individual psyches—our technologies and nature.

2007-08-09T10:10:00.000-04:00

Afterthoughts
The Nuclear Bomb as Psychological Reality

Wolfgang Giegerich is given to extreme judgments: “Meaning” has come to an end, so have “myths” and institutional religions, likewise “nature” and the “individual.” The “unconscious” is “an old wives’ tale,” there being no such thing. Such judgments can be upsetting for sure. When our sacrosanct beliefs are thrown into doubt so peremptorily like this, we become anxious. An unwelcome thought intrudes upon us. Maybe the solid ground of certain valued ideas or principles on which we believed we securely stood have begun to shift and crack up? Giegerich does not make these categorical judgments in order to shock us into a new awareness, although that is one of their effects and may even be necessary if we are to begin to grapple with his thinking.

Consider that Giegerich’s concern, his absolutely fundamental concern, is the reality of the soul. This is why, for him, Jung is “the starting point and basis” of his own rigorous approach to psychology. Jung believed in “psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche.” He was “a thinker of the soul.” (See The Soul’s Logical Life, pp. 39ff.) And so too is Giegerich. As he sees it, the soul is not recognized for itself, for its “logical life,” but has been confined to the “inner self,” “the interior life” of the individual. The soul has become the property of we humans, to fulfill our spiritual needs, our highest aspirations. A fateful consequence of the triumph of Judaeo-Christianity in the West, has been the division of reality into what is spiritual, the soul-full, and what is secular, the soul-less. But to compartmentalize the soul in this way is to delude ourselves, and has proved dangerous to our very existence. The nuclear bomb is a result of this split. Giegerich’s intent is to overcome this split, by urging upon us the recognition that the soul exists in external reality, and has, indeed, “migrated” there, leaving behind “nature” which once was the home of the gods. For modern man, the soul is now found in science and technology.

I have no problem in acknowledging the soul in either science and technology, which after all, are grounded in, are the products of, “nature,” much of which, however, is invisible and non-sensory. I can believe that soul/ psyche permeates all of existence and cannot be confined to any one aspect of it. This insight is what drew me to Giegerich’s work, having long been interested in technology and its impact. But to say that the soul has departed “nature” how does that overcome the split? It seems to me to perpetuate and widen it. While it is true that “nature” is now our “problem” and much of the “wilderness” is, indeed, relegated to parks, preserves and zoos, nature is still soul-full. If you need confirmation of this read David Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Nature encompasses much more, that which is all around us, but which we simply take for granted—such as the air we breathe. In global climate change we have overwhelming evidence that nature's power is still formidable.

I don’t think Giegerich would deny this, but he sets ups extreme positions which appear to fall into opposites in which the one is rejected for the other. His notion that the soul “migrated” from nature to technology is an example. If I follow Giegerich correctly, these opposites are the “negation” of one another and can undergo a process of “sublation.” I quote here Giegerich’s own definition of what he means by sublation:

Sublated (in German aufgehoben) is a Hegelian term. A reality is sublated when it is negated or canceled as the reality that it was, but when as this negated reality it is also preserved and transformed into a logically higher reality, in which the negated original reality is now only a subordinate moment or ingredient.”

(The Neurosis of Psychology, V. I, page 172)

“Nature” is not discarded, but transformed into “a higher reality.” What is this higher reality? If it is not the soul, what is it? So many questions and doubts remain. This is to be expected. It was Jung who said that psyche is not in us, but we are in psyche. Following Jung, Giegerich confirms this claim and extends it by pointing to its consequences. If we are persuaded by this idea, we have to give up our attachment not only to an ego–centered, but a human-centered psychology. Are we up to it? Even if we are willing what this would mean and where it would take us? How do we go about it? How can we imagine it?

2007-08-08T13:24:00.003-04:00

Conclusion: The Challenge of the Nuclear Bomb
Our New Human Condition

In the concluding two paragraphs of “The Nuclear Bomb as a Psychological Reality” Giegerich asks is it possible to believe that we can meet the challenge of the nuclear bomb by expecting that its reality adapt to “the ideals of our ego.” By ideals I believe he refers not only to those mentioned in the paper, (freedom, democracy, human rights, etc..) but all those values we cherish in our Western Christian tradition. The link between “ideals” and “ego” may seem somewhat puzzling. Are not our ideals inherited by us as an indelible part of our shared culture? Of course, they are, but they bespeak a culture which is derived from, centered on, answering to and expressing humanity’s needs and aspirations first and foremost. (Just think, for instance, of our appropriation and exploitation of nature for our own use and benefit.) But is it not we, asks Giegerich, who have “to adapt to the unheard of situation out there by summoning all our strength and faculties and by sacrificing long-cherished moral and religious ideas as painful as this may be?”

What is meant by this “unheard of situation” which demands “a fundamentally new human condition?” asks Giegerich.” In response he makes one of his disconcerting “leaps” for which his discourse up till now had not prepared us. He inserts a factor that takes us to the very depths of the bomb itself. Today the real world is the world of nuclear physics. A long time ago, the objective psyche quit the “macrophysical” world in which things could be perceived by the senses and migrated to the world of nuclear particles and microbiology. What we have taken to be the real, the natural world, is obsolete and whatever impression of reality remains is only a façade. “The chairs on which you are sitting are not what they seem to be: solid matter. For the most part they are empty space, hardly interspersed with minute particles in cosmic distances from each other.” We, of course, know this, but, we cannot bring ourselves to acknowledge it. Instead, our consciousness stubbornly holds onto what is now “a medieval” mode of perceiving the world as consisting of sensate forms, bodies. We confine the results of science— material, external reality— in a compartment, keeping it in isolation as if it had nothing to do with “our subjective experiencing, our feelings, views and values, in short with the psyche.” Moreover, we are adamant that we must fight against
the objective facts of science in order to protect “the old views and values as an inner possession.”

But the results of science do belong to psyche. We belong as well to this change. That is our hidden truth. It is so fundamental a change that we can no longer keep it from our consciousness. Rather, we must focus our attention on bringing “this mode of existence” into correspondence with the “whole truth” depicted in our sandplay scene, but which, as of now, is still being denied. “This is the task of the future. And on our mastering this task will also depend whether we will be able or not to do justice to the main symbol of the new nuclear level of reality, the nuclear bomb.”

2007-08-07T09:23:00.000-04:00

Technology: Mirror of our Soul

The cathedrals built in the Middle Ages were technological wonders, but were never thought of as merely technical objects. They were religious symbols and expressions of the medieval soul. So too we should think of the bomb. It is a technical object, but it is far more than that. We have a problem recognizing this because, unlike the cathedrals, it is not visible to us and moreover, it seems to us a terrible, even repellent thing. The religious purpose of the cathedral is obvious, but the religious and symbolic character of the bomb is not; it is hidden. But like the cathedral it is first of all a work of “an imaginal and psychological nature” and only beyond that, a technical object. The soul of modern man is expressed not by cathedrals, but in his technologies—“in the shape of stylish cars, jets, moon rockets, of sophisticated microchips and.” radar screens.” (Today we would add so many more such as the iPod, high definition TV, and above all, the Internet.) Our materials too are have changed—from marble and bronze to fiberglass, silicon, uranium, etc. which indicate a profound difference in our psychological reality as compared to that of the Middle Ages.

Technology is not a reality out there somewhere, and soul-less, but a psychological reality” in its own right, mirroring back to us our soul, the collective unconscious of Western humankind. This unconscious is in the external world just as it is in us. The question for us is what attitude we ought to take to technology as our “soul picture.” However we react to the bomb, however, much we may detest it, we cannot eliminate it or make a lie of our reality. Think of the sand picture, a wall separating chaos on the one side, order on the other. On the one hand we see ourselves as humanists, advocating the dignity of man and democratic freedom and on the other, we are responsible for the bomb and many other ills that beset our world—pollution, poverty, and totalitarian regimes. “Truth, says Giegerich quoting Hegel, “lies in the whole.” Our true soul picture is not the one or the other, but the both together. Our humanism is true only inasmuch as the bomb is true for us as well. We can’t eliminate this shameful part of ourselves, however we try. To seek to do so in utopian visions of reformed or new societies, or in going “back to nature” are illusory.

It is not that we cannot want or work for change, but how we do it matters. Giegerich gives the alchemical vessel as an example. In it the worst and the best are “cooked together and permeate one another." All the ingredients would still remain, the bad [those of the nuclear bomb, for instance] and the good, but there would be a “new shape” because there would be a transformation from within. The split in us between our idealistic and our terrible self is more pathological than the nuclear bomb. The pathology consists in our keeping our humanitarian consciousness and the bomb apart in different compartments, “instead of letting them clash as the ingredients of one alchemical vessel, the components of our own mental reality, so that they could dissolve each other.”

How are the external power structures materialized in the institutions of society and its objective realities such as armament to be lastingly softened if we ourselves meet them only with a power and conflict oriented frame of mind and deprive them of feeling qualities? But how can feeling, how can love flow into so-called reality and animate it if we do not see the image hidden in it?

The sophistication and professionalism of the physicists, mathematicians and engineers who built the bomb, is countered with the all too simplistic condemnations of those who oppose the bomb. It is as if we expected a craftsman from the Middle Ages to repair a computer! Moral issues cannot be resolved by resorting to such categories as “good and evil” or psychological issues by “repressed aggression” or “projection of enemy imagoes.” What is required is the same level of ethical and psychological differentiation as has been reached in science. This is not the case, however, because of the split between two realities: the “objective nature” studied by scientists and the subjective approach by psychologists and ethicists. This dissociation amounts to a refusal to accept or be affected by the irrevocable transformation which has taken place in the objective psyche because of science and technology. “This is our main problem.” besides which the nuclear bomb is “comparatively harmless.”

The next posting: Conclusion

Read a new comment by Michael regarding the previous posting. Click on "Comment" at the bottom of the post.

2007-08-04T10:22:00.000-04:00

The Nuclear Bomb as a Vessel
of the Western Collective Unconscious

In this last section Giegerich draws an elaborate analogy between sandplay therapy and how civilizations, from the primitive to the modern, find their expression in certain objects. Sandplay is a therapeutic method in which an analytic patient is asked to build, in a large tray of sand, whatever scene he wishes using small toy figures. The patient is not given any particular idea or theme with which to work, but has only to follow his own imagination and “inner needs.” Sandplay therapy results in a diversity of images and scenes, which uncannily reveal the psychological state of the players. (For more information on Sandplay therapy link to Institute of Sandplay Therapy)

Giegerich’s motive in using this analogy is to help us overcome that split in us which views the soul as an inner reality but everything in external reality as being soul-less. Imagine, Giegerich asks, a sand tray as large as the world itself and that players are all of mankind. He gives examples of what a sandplay scene of a primitive people, the Greeks, or the Christians of the Middle Ages, might look like in all their variety. What would the scene look like for us modern Western people? It would be filled with technological objects, not, however, manifesting the personal, psychological needs of the scientists and industrialists who produced them, but a scene “in which the collective unconscious of the objective psyche of Western mankind tried to express itself.” Writing in the late eighties Giegerich gives a few examples: factories, conveyor belts, paperbacks, computers, nuclear bombs, etc. (Somewhat confusingly he also includes in his list social security and human rights, suggesting we are not to take the word “object” literally as a material thing, but to include any dominant aspect in our societies as “objectified.”) We could easily update and expand the list ad infinitum with objects from our own time.

In one example, Giegerich describes a sandplay scene in which the patient builds a high wall down the middle of the sandtray. On one side he smoothes out the sand and places on it objects in geometric order. On the other side, he creates a scene of utter chaos. From this scene we can detect “a neurotic dissociation, that is, of a psychological condition where there is no connection between the two poles of order and chaos, no give and take, but where both are absolutely separated from one another, here sheer chaos, there absolute order.” There is neither a right or a wrong to it, nor does it require the intervention of the therapist. The scene or picture is “therapeutic in itself.”

For by creating such a sand picture the patient produces for himself a visible vessel into which his whole soul, precisely with its split, can flow, a house into which the energies of his unconscious psyche can stream. Thus the split no longer remains locked into the imprisonment of his own interior, but presents itself and creates for itself something real outside into which it can move and in which it can feel at home. This alone gets things moving in him.

Now imagine the sandplay scene constructed by modern Western man. You will not find Greek temples or the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. What you will discover is that Western “psychic energy” has “flowed into the production of factories, machines, computers, weapons and also of the nuclear bomb.” This scene appears threatening, fraught with danger, potentially explosive, but it is not “wrong” if we look at it psychologically and not just from a political or moral point of view. Rather, psychologically we need to recognize in the nuclear bomb the dominant symbol of the Western psyche, of our collective unconscious. “With the bomb, the objective psyche tries to create for itself that visible vessel that would be capable of containing and holding the tremendous collective psychological energies apparently unleashed in modern man.” We need the bomb because it mirrors back to us the highly explosive condition of our modern Western soul forcing us to give up our illusions and face reality.

2007-08-02T15:29:00.000-04:00

Technology and the Feminine
The Nuclear Bomb as a Psychological Reality

Here Giegerich resorts to what he himself calls a cliché—the masculine/feminine or patriarchal/matriarchal dualism. He does say that we ought to be suspicious of this dichotomy from a psychological perspective because it assumes that such an archetypal pattern controls our consciousness, preventing us from observing a phenomenon in an unfettered way. He accordingly warns us to be wary of the power that such archetypal patterns can have over us. But he is not about to reject them either. Instead, he encourages us to see through the patriarchal/matriarchal archetype in deeper and less conventional ways. Take technology, for instance, and see in it “a new form of the feminine,” that is, in “a mythic-psychological way.”

Think, he tells us, of patriarchy as that which has given us science and technology, but technology itself as “the guise in which the mythical idea of dark, feminine Matter is given to us today.” Technology is considered “materialistic,” not only because it provides us with those infinite number of gadgets, such as television, computers, etc. which are themselves symbols of materialism, but because it is also entrenched in the capitalist system with its single-minded goal of more and more profits. But, if it is materialistic, technology belongs to “the realm of mater, the Great Mother.” But the Great Mother no longer rules over Nature as we think of it. “She has long moved out of nature and the bodily realm. Today the Great Mother rules in technology and over economic growth.” Giegerich refers to the similarity of terms: “plants” as factories, “produce” as products. In this archetypal fantasy, as he calls it, the industrialized world belongs psychologically in the “the sphere of the vegetation goddess, the mistress of the Earth.” Having assumed the feminine—earthy, bodily, sensually— as its modern form, technology also carries the stigma of the feminine corrupt and evil (pollution, poisonous wastes, etc.) Giegerich sees this as the objectification of “black sin which was once given only in the mode of a spiritual or mythical reality.” It is as if we needed technology as a concrete, visible symbol on which to project this “evil .”

One has to view this feminization of technology not only as a mythic image, but a poetic one as well. Giegerich cites the writer Huysmans who in an 1884 novel described two locomotives in France in extravagantly sensual, feminine terms. Here’s a sample: “The other, the Engerth, a massively built, dark-browed brunette, of harsh, hoarse-toned utterance, with thick-set loins, panoplied in armour-plating of sheet iron, a giantess with disheveled maine of black eddying smoke, etc.” You get the point.

Huysmans’ description of the locomotives, according to Giegerich, was not “merely” metaphorical, but an exact observation, which saw through to the “inner image its psychological nature, i.e., how it appears if it is seen by the heart or by the soul and if our thinking is not caught in a disparaging myth.”

Giegerich concludes this section by citing Jung who in recognition of this shift in the symbolism of the unconscious , wrote:

Nowadays animals, dragons, and other living creatures are readily replaced in dreams by railways, locomotives, motorcycles, aeroplanes, and suchlike artificial products. . . . This expresses the remoteness of the modern mind from nature; animals have lost their numinosity; they have become apparently harmless; instead we people the world with hooting, booming, chattering monsters. . . .(Letters 2, April 23, 1949, pp. xlvi.f.)

The transition from nature to technology, the consequences of which we are barely beginning to grasp, cannot be doubted. Whether it is helpful to describe it in terms of matriarchy and patriarchy does seem doubtful to me. Giegerich himself, as I pointed out, says we must approach doing this with caution. This essay was published in the late eighties, when, in Jungian and some feminist circles, patriarchy and matriarchy were much in vogue, but which eventually came under substantial criticism. Today, in large part due to the influence of feminist scholars but particularly the actual cultural changes which have since evolved in the relation between the sexes, this way of thinking appears outdated. Not that matriarchy and patriarchy have entirely lost their relevancy, but they are no longer compelling as they once were.

Moreover, our attitude toward technology is more ambivalent than this: we are drawn to its supposed benefits and at the same time, fear its power to change and transform us. For this reason it surprises me that Giegerich, who in this very same essay writes about the split in our reality and the need to overcome it, seems to perpetuate that split by identifying technology with the feminine.

But at this point in his essay Giegerich moves on to another image and another approach to his theme.

2007-08-01T14:52:00.000-04:00

Technology & Soul: A Manichean Split
The Nuclear Bomb a Psychological Reality

In our Judeo-Christian Western tradition, we are still subject to a Manichean dualism in which reality is viewed as being split into opposites: male and female; good and evil; spirit and matter. But how these opposites manifest themselves has altered over time. In the early Christian era, for example, it was debated whether woman had a soul or not. Although today such a question would be thought ridiculous, we nevertheless continue to think in these terms: what has or has not “soul.” The opposition of Spirit and Matter still shapes much of our thinking and attitudes, but is expressed in a form we may not immediately recognize.

No longer do we associate Mater with Matter. Nature which was once thought of as “Mother Earth,” with the power to both give and destroy life, is become Spirit, having come from the hand of God, who is himself pure spirit. We also have a sentimental feeling toward nature. We are moved by its beauty and grandeur, and endow it with soulfulness, because “the soul” for we modern people has to do with what we feel, with our emotions. Where then has Matter gone? If Nature is now a spiritual nature, what is its opposite? Technology (the nuclear bomb especially) now bears the “stigma of the corrupt, evil world of matter, of the body, of darkness and the feminine.” The nuclear bomb embodies our “sin.” It is “evil incorporated.”

Technology, says Giegerich, has become the feminine in the matriarchal/patriarchal dualism. This is not a new idea for Giegerich. In his paper “Ontogeny=Phylogeny? (See The Neurosis of Psychology, V. I, of the Collected Papers, pp 22-23), published more than a decade before, he wrote that although the medieval church was highly influenced by the feminine archetype (Mater Ecclesia) it was patriarchal in character but that this was “replaced by the natural sciences of our time, which by virtue of their subject matter (Mother Nature) and their ‘materialistic’ mode of thinking. . . prove to be in the service of the Great Mother (and are not, as is commonly held, evidence of a patriarchal consciousness.”) One can argue that instead of being in the service of the Great Mother, the sciences have exploited her for its own purposes. What else is technology but the manipulation of nature for human benefit? But Giegerich’s intention with the above quote is primarily to show that the opposites do not occur in history according to any fixed law, but will change according to the time.

In this present paper, apparently referring to the emergence, in the ensuing decade, of both the feminist movement and the “New Age,” Giegerich challenges the notion that 1) the feminine was freed from its fallen position and matriarchy restored to former status and 2) that patriarchy became “relativized” and demoted to a lower position. It does not really change matters, he claims, because the dualism remains, even if the positions are reversed. “Today as before, Spirit or Mind is what is good, and Matter is what is evil. . . . “ The only distinction is that the Spirit is now to be found in what is “natural,” or in the Edenic innocence of the primitive, or in “feminine values” such as affinity to nature, a new appreciation for the body and for the emotions. But the patriarchal is responsible for science and technology and technology is “the guise in which the mythical idea of dark, feminine Matter is given to us today.”

This section is difficult and not only because it requires us to do more upside down, tortuous thinking. The paper was written in the late eighties, nearly two decades ago when “patriarchy” and “matriarchy” were much discussed, particularly in feminist and Jungian circles. While they are not irrelevant, they do not have the same conceptual power as they in the seventies and eighties. There is a certain caution now in how we understand or use those terms. Nevertheless, in the next posting I will continue, as best I can, to work through Giegerich’s use of patriarchy and matriarchy in the context of his paper.

Before I end this posting, I would like to recommend that you read a comment by my friend Michael, in response to a question (“Who is this God?”) posed in “Afterthoughts” on Saturday, July 28. Michael thinks it is all three versions, but that I miss the mark somewhat on each of them. Go to the end of that posting and click on “Comments.”

2007-07-30T15:15:00.000-04:00

“The Nuclear Bomb as a Psychological Reality”
An impossibility?

In the next paper (Chapter 2), “The Nuclear Bomb as a Psychological Necessity,” Geigerich proposes to “save” the bomb, to rescue it “for the soul” even though he admits it will seem an impossibility because “soul” and “bomb” appear to be absolute contradictions. But the bomb exists and no disarmament agreements will ever manage to do away with it. Even if the nuclear bomb (and there are thousands of them!) was defused, it could be reassembled without much difficulty and be deployed for evil purposes. The question is how do we “bind and integrate” the bomb’s potential destructive power in a way that is not dependent on the uncertainties and fluctuations our own goodwill and moral responsibility. Unfortunately we are as yet unable to answer that question because there is one formidable obstacle standing in the way: we exist in two separate realities.

In one “reality” the bomb is a technical, physical object and therefore falls in the domain of the scientists and technicians who know how to construct the bomb and how to deploy it, of the financial experts who propose how it can be financed and maintained, and of states and stateless organizations who see it as the ultimate weapon with which to gain and control power. The other reality is psychological. The bomb is an external thing which triggers in us reactions of fear and other disturbing emotions, including a troubled sense of ethical responsibility. “Only my fear of it is psychological, not the bomb itself. It remains outside of my inner reality as an external physical reality.”

As Giegerich sees it, living in two realities amounts to a neurotic split in consciousness. In one “compartment” we locate the bomb as a physical, technical thing and in another “compartment” we try to deal with our fears and moral obligations about it. We may flit from one compartment to the next, but meanwhile, there remains no real connection between them. My fear of the bomb and its physical reality are kept entirely separate.

Now you may argue, says Giegerich, that in fact these are two distinct entities. Fear is a subjective reality in me, while the bomb is a technical reality and out there. True, but this is so only in the modern Christian West.
Nowhere else do we find these two realities split apart, not, for example, among the earliest humans, not in China, not in ancient Greece, to cite just three examples. The Greeks, for instance, did not separate physics from psychology.

Psychological phenomena such as love and anger belonged with all others to the one nature and were also subjects of physics, however physics not in the modern mathematical or even mechanistic sense, but in a ‘poetic’ sense, precisely because soul and divine matters were a part of it.

The compartmentalizing of psyche and technology into two different realities does not occur in nature, but is a historical development and as such is “subject to the conditions of the history of our soul.” Perhaps, Giegerich suggests, it is our having lived with for so long with this split that led to such an extreme consequence as the bomb. Once the soul is split off from external reality, that external reality could advance without any limits or restraints.

As long as these two realities are not allowed to join together, efforts to constrain the potential threat of the bomb will be futile. Attempting to apply moral pressure from without will not stand in the way of those who have no compunction about using it. As Giegerich sees it, our only chance is to overcome this split between physical and psychic reality so that a condition is achieved “in which the explosive nature outside is no longer cut off from the inner values, and the inner ethical and religious values are no longer split off from external reality.”

In what follows Giegerich explores more deeply the nature of this split and how the psychological and physical realities can be joined.

Saving the Nuclear Bomb: Afterthoughts

2007-07-28T15:31:00.000-04:00

One hardly knows what to think as Giegerich concludes “Saving the Nuclear Bomb.” That the nuclear bomb, as he says, is the result of “modern [Western] man’s” quest for the “ultimate forces of being,” is not deniable.
Whether in it he seeks salvation is not immediately evident. When he says the soul of modern man is invested in the nuclear bomb, he means “an entire world,” its “essence, substance and worth.” Men will be the instruments by which the bomb is enabled to carry out its destruction, but it could not happen unless it were an act of God. “Nothing can destroy the world but God himself.”

Who is this God? Giegerich has already identified him (see the previous posting) as the dark God who will strike us with his terror. Is he referring here to the Judeo-Christian God of our western civilization whose wrath, when provoked, knows no bounds? Or is he a God whom we have ourselves brought into existence through our egoistic quest for “the ultimate forces of being? Or maybe this God is the one whom Jung called “the shadow” —the dark side of the personality, the personal unconscious which is subject to the domination of the archetypal collective unconscious (e.g. the nuclear bomb). The word “shadow,” in this context, seems too feeble a word to adequately express his meaning, but perhaps that is due to the inclination is to think of the shadow too personally, as merely one’s unpleasant side, and not, as Jung has referred to the shadow, as the Other, who cannot be overcome or destroyed and with whom, therefore, we have to come to terms.

I do not know. Perhaps in some strange way this God is all of the above. Whoever this God is, Giegerich tells us, it is our reality with which we must live, and in which we must make our home! That home is none other than the terrifying “wilderness” of technology, which we ourselves have created and must now live with and deal with. On the face of it, this seems an overwhelming and dispiriting task. It may be, however, that something entirely new and promising will emerge from the effort. What other options do we have?