Is Giegerichโs psychological analysis of Jungโs โflight into the unconsciousโ helping to initiate me into spiritual-philosophical ๐๐๐โ๐๐๐? Have I been desperately, if unconsciously, hanging onto the obsolete, no longer valid logic of pre-modern thinking, feeling, and hoping โ the very response that Jung had when, as a 12-year-old, he was psychologically confronted with the โdeath (and debasement) of Godโ? Have I been leaning on Jungโs promises of a kind of solace through individuation all this time?
What was happening to me back in 1997 when I was faced with perhaps the starkest and most challenging depiction, to date, of our shared existential predicament as moderns? I was reading Laurence Lampertโs ๐๐๐๐ก๐ง๐ ๐โ๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ . The book managed somehow to โconnect the dotsโ for me in a way that even reading Nietzsche himself had not succeeded in doing. I guess the timing was right. At any event, Lampertโs very โmodernโ book brought home to me the โunsponsored,โ bereft condition of contemporary mankind. I was 40 years old. Instead of allowing the disturbing truth about our modern existential condition to fully sink in and rip away all the crutches and buffers I had been relying on for spiritual-psychological comfort and support, I escaped โ or partially escaped โ that crisis by redirecting my attention to Miss M. โ namely, to romance, sex, and drama. I couldnโt have picked a more effective distraction from the abyss that had been opened up and set before me by Lampertโs book.
And after that intoxicating involvement fizzled out, I set off for exotic-magical Bali and other romantic misadventures of an intensely personal nature. It wasnโt until 2010, after I had returned from Argentina and another highly distracting romantic โwrong turn,โ that I seriously began to dive into the transpersonal inner experiences that would eventually prepare me for this new opportunity to face the dark facts about modern culture as they deserve or demand to be experienced.
Do I genuinely believe that my present spiritual resources, such as they are, are entirely worthless, bankrupt, and illusory? No, I do not, but I most definitely believe these resources need to be seriously reevaluated and purged of all spurious and insubstantial additives and โfillers.โ But before I conduct an inventory of my own spiritual and philosophical resources, I would like to speak up in defense of Jungโs. I have been reading and thinking about Jungโs works for over four decades. I think itโs fair to say that I have internalized many of his central ideas, values, and perspectives. And while many of Giegerichโs philosophical and psychological criticisms of Jung hit home for me, I would never go so far as to suspect this commanding figure of spiritual cowardice or escapism. If, as Giegerich suggests, Jungโs strong resistances to the loss of childlike innocence and the paradisiacal sense of containment within a living myth led him towards an โanti-philosophicalโ invention of a โrealityโ called the unconscious (complete with โarchetypesโ), we must ask, โWhat lay behind such powerful resistances?โ
In the late 1950s, Existentialism and the Theater of the Absurd were soon to be superseded by the active nihilism we see today. When Jung was born in 1875, almost 100 years earlier than me, Nietzsche was just about to publish ๐ป๐ข๐๐๐, ๐ด๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ป๐ข๐๐๐. I was born into the ๐๐๐ ๐ก๐ ๐ฟ๐๐๐, even if the yokels in Shreveport had no clue that God was dead. I would argue that Jung, even as a 12-year-old kid, was preternaturally aware of much more that was threatened with certain death by the paralyzing tentacles of modern nihilism than I โ or Giegerich โ could have been, given when we were born. The doomed culture had reached a much more advanced state of decrepitude by the time Giegerich and I were born. And ๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ก๐๐ฃ๐๐ก๐ฆ should always be included as a factor when dealing with questions pertaining to โthe meaning of life.โ Jung, like Nietzsche and T.S. Eliot, strikes me as having been naturally endowed with such sensitivity โ to such an extent that ordinary specimens of humanity almost invariably look like louts and boors when compared with such relentless meaning-questers.
And while we have Nietzsche before us, letโs note a significant difference between him and Jung. Nietzsche appears to have recognized and come to terms with the โfactโ that culture (with its humanly constructed contents) is the necessary and untranscendable ๐๐ก๐๐๐ ๐โ๐๐๐ of all such religious, moral, and philosophical meaning. Take that atmosphere away or poison it and we perish. To use a different but familiar trope, for Nietzsche there is no exiting the cave โ or series of enclosing-containing caves โ that Plato employed as a symbol for collective, conventional beliefs and opinions. But Plato taught that such caves (โPersia,โ โEgypt,โ โScythia,โ โGreeceโ) could be exited by the dedicated truth-seeking philosopher. Did Jung, with his theories of archetypes and a collective unconscious, leave a cave-door open for โtranscendentโ meaning โ by which I mean natural, as opposed to culturally constructed, meaning? Jung, it seems, needed to believe that we humans are not the โwhole kit and caboodle,โ as Nietzsche and most modern philosophers inform us. Did he need to believe that, despite all damning evidence to the contrary, certain (earnest and disciplined) individuals can glimpse the beyond and even help to develop and construct a bridge for others to set foot upon and traverse โ as far as it goes?
Giegerich โ less anti-democratic and perhaps more outer-directed in his thinking than Plato, Nietzsche, and Jung โ locates the โsoul,โ so far as I can tell, in the culture at large, the era, the Zeitgeist. The aforementioned โaristocraticโ thinkers found more to criticize and condemn in their own eras than to dignifyโby regarding them as examples of the ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ข๐๐๐. No, their eras were something to ๐ ๐๐ ๐กโ๐๐๐ข๐โ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ก ๐๐๐ฆ๐๐๐. For Plato, this beyond was the realm of Ideas; for Nietzsche, it was the ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐โ and ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ก๐; for Jung, it was reached by the individuation of a handful of exceptional souls. Giegerich โ following one of his teachers, Hegel, thinks on a broader scale โ in collective terms. We are all in this together and what we do โ or donโt do โ together will make all the difference between regression and stagnation, on the one hand, and the collective โbirth of man,โ on the other. By this he means the birth of humanity into conscious adulthood from out of the uterine state of mythic containment. There is no going back for mankind and the way ahead most certainly entails great dangers.
There has perhaps never been a time when the burden of responsibility for humanityโs survival and future development have weighed so heavily upon our human, all too human shoulders. If, as a whole, we accept and exercise this terrible and terrifying responsibility, a kind of dignity (such as has never been seen on a collective scale) will be attained as we โgraduateโ from childhood to spiritual self-responsibility. If we fail, it is unlikely that there will be anyone (of substance) around in 500 years to malign us for our refusal to grow up.
