Metaphorics - Mythology, Metaphysics, and Metaphor
This essay was sparked by a quote on Mythos and mythology as things which give access to a reality that lies deeper than reason, taking us to invisible and intangible themes and patterns that are the truest realities of all. How can we know such reality? By metaphor. Metaphor is the way of the human mind; it is, indeed, the primary way by which human beings make sense of the world. When it comes to sense experience, the human mind proceeds by way of analogy, comparing external sense data to what it already knows and can picture and imagine, describing what is sees, smells, hears, or touches as 'like' something. We see here the damage that has been caused by epistemology coming to be elevated over ontology and metaphysics as the one and only true basis for reason. As a result, an arid rationalism replaces reason and in turn cuts human beings adrift from the world. Human beings know the world metaphorically, not epistemologically, for the reason that we cannot know what reality is in itself, only what reality is like. Immanual Kant argued that "we, as humans, do not possess the capacity to fully comprehend reality" (cited in Ernest F. Pecci, Foreword to "Science and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality, and Consciousness" by William A. Tiller 1997, p.xix). Goethe expresses this view concisely when he writes that "All phenomena are merely metaphorical." (cited in Ralph Metzner, The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience: Introduction: From Caterpillar to Butterfly).
The human mind is metaphorical, a pattern that connects that accesses universal themes and patterns by way of analogy. Marcel Proust writes that 'the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.'
Or, in truth, cleansing our vision of our new eyes blinded by the filters of an arid rationalism.
If - as I argue elsewhere (references below) - science needs metaphysics in order to be possible, a view of reality that science alone cannot give, then it depends also on analogy. As physicist Brian Arthur says, "Non-scientists tend to think that science works by deduction. But actually science works mainly by metaphor. And what’s happening is that the kinds of metaphor people have in mind are changing.” (cited in Waldrop 1992, p.327)
“Science likes to think its goal is to make objective representations of nature, but it seems to me that all such representations, visualizations, or models merely isolate a few select parameters, a few aspects of the object and say, what happens if we just look at these? Each different approach gives you a slightly different result.”
- Peter Openheimer
Physicist Robert Shaw concures: "You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it."
Which begs the question that if all phenomena really are 'merely metaphorical,' then how do we know what the 'right metaphor' is? If we know only by experience, then rightness can only be self-validating in a circular argument, to the extent that we only see that which we have looked for in the first place. Why start with this metaphor and not that? What is our starting point? But maybe this is to look at the question the wrong way, as outsiders looking at a reality 'out there,' rather than as insiders who are a part of everything we see.
The metaphoric nature of the scientific endeavour is implied in the word 'model,' which means "likeness" and entails a likeness to reality, not reality itself. In effect, science is also a narrativity, weaving sense data together to tell a plausible story about the world in which we live, for all that plausibility and narrativity must also meet certain canons of accuracy by way of the scientific method. Science therefore entails a search for the 'right' metaphors in the sense of making the best sense of reality. Human knowledge and understanding thus entails a process of accessing reality by way of metaphor, using analogy to apprehend what we do not yet know by way of what we already already know.
Such metaphors build a grand image of reality which, in turn, becomes the grand narrative or paradigm of the age. This view contradicts an empiricism which holds that we build the picture upwards in piecemeal fashion from discrete 'things' and happenings. Instead, we survey all that exists from within a dominant worldview. This paradigm influences the choice of metaphors and hence the process by which we come know and understand reality all the way down. Against the atomist and empiricist view, we do not know reality by way of sense data; on the contrary, our innate mental capacities order our senses in how the world is seen and presented to the senses. As Einstein noted, "It is the theory which decides what we can observe." But, to repeat, why this theory and not that? Why this metaphor and not that? Why this standpoint and not that? The key point, however, is Plato's point: that mind is ever the ruler of matter, and that matter is, ultimately, immaterial - we live in a mind-infused world.
To those who would dismiss such talk as having all the imprecision of poetry, Aristotle made it clear that we can only have such precision as the subject-matter allows. The simpler the matter, the greater the precision, the more complex the area, the less precise our rational tools and techniques become. “The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.” Metaphor brings reality and the language describing that reality to life, giving it existential meaning. Metaphors enable us to perceive, organize, and make sense of reality, as scientists, story-tellers, and poets: "we are by necessity rough-and-ready poets: we construct a coherent world out of metaphorical images, but we do so haphazardly and unconsciously instead of self-consciously like writers and artists." (Julian Jaynes).
This indicates an utter dependence on metaphor, to go alongside a dependence on Mythos, mythology properly understood, and metaphysics. All of which undermines the arid rationalism which seeks to know reality by way of observation and logic. Human beings have evolved to understand life by way of story, not method. In the words of poet Muriel Rukeyser: "The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms." The human mind is 'wired' to construct coherent narratives out the sense data it receives. (And I'm looking for a much better term than 'wired,' with all its behaviouralist and technocratic connotations of engineers busying themselves with the re-wiring).
Human beings crave to hear and tell stories of the world around them. It is significant that the data and information we assimilate and store to memory, and which inspire and motivate us to action, come to us less by way of dry, deracinated exposition but by image, sound, and story.
Forget the behavioral engineers and technocrats. Those trained in the 'things' of the 'hard' sciences are at a loss when it comes to the much harder stuff of human beings, confounded by their internal 'yeses' and 'noes.' Managerialists continue to entertain very excited dreams about creating an order in which there is no dissent and no answering, still less questioning, back. Such shallow planners of the benign state believe that with just enough engineering and tinkering we shall one day attain the perfectly rational order of remote automaton control. They have zero understanding of human nature and have no interest in acquiring one. They prefer to see human beings as blank sheets upon which their each and every dream can be projected, mere clay to be moulded and manipulated whichever why they, the potters, like. It is the poets, the artists, the musicians, the tragedians, the novelists, the dramatists, and the dancers who reveal the truth about the human condition, in both its depths and its heights, and who best guide us in meeting its challenges and fulfilling its needs. They are, in the words of Konner, 'artists of the soul.' For they know that human beings are spiritual beings in possession of a soul.
Such people may be properly described as scientists of the qualitative, shedding light on those realms of life and experience that lie beyond the merely quantitative. Whilst those realms are beyond the reach of those scientists whose gaze is fixed on quantity, many of those scientists make the attempt to grasp them anyway, in the attempt to make the qualitative measure up to quantitative standards. Therein lies the dangers of re-unification on the basis of imbalance.
Metaphor, music, art, and literature are ways by which fact and logic become existentially meaningful and motivational. Lose those things and you have lost everything that makes life worth living and gets human beings moving and acting. We remember the image (Hobbes' 'state of nature' has been referred to throughout this piece, and in conclusion we are returning to Plato's metaphor of the cave).
The cognitive experience thus never proceeds in a dry rationalistic desert of fact and logic alone. As poet-scientists, the cognitive and the affective are bound together, with emotion, instinct, intuition, and feeling accompanying reason and comprehension. To pay tribute to the genius of Rousseau once more, the scandalously neglected and even more scandalously abused and misunderstood Genevan urged us to see human beings as rational, sensing, feeling, intuiting beings at one and the same time. The cognitive is so emotionally attuned to the need for symbolic meaning that an exposition of reality that sticks to dry and discrete facts and logic either not be heard, assimilated, and understood or, even if it is, will fail to inspire and motivate appropriate response by way of action and change of behaviour.
I like to quote a line from singer and songwriter Serge Gainsbourg here:
"A quoi servent de beaux wagons quand on n'a pas de locomotive?"
(What use/good are beautiful wagons when you don't have a locomotive?).
This is not a justification for human autarchy and autonomy vis the 'beautiful wagons' of nature. To the contrary, it is a call for human beings to see that nature is not dead and inanimate, as the dominant mechanist paradigm or narrative of the age insisted, but is alive and animate, a locomotive power indeed. It insists, however, that dry expositions of the universe in which we live lack motivational force in themselves and, in leaving human beings 'dead', will reinforce human dread of and distance from the world around us. If the solution to our civilisational travails is for human beings to attune themselves to our Earthly home, that still implies conscious human agency and hence is a message and a story that requires human locomotive force. A dry and abstract exposition that sticks to fact and logic lacks such force and is tantamount to issuing a command on the basis of necessity. The effect is not only demotivating, it reinforces the very existential dread of a hostile nature 'out there' that is the source of civilisation's colonising imperatives. The human heart, mind, body, and soul crave myth, meaning, and spiritual satisfaction. Even if diehard rationalists persist in dismissing the reality of metaphysics, metaphors, and myths, there can be no denying the longing for these things on the part of human beings, and that their psychological, indeed spiritual. function is no less real for that. The point was easily enough understood in the past, but came to be lost in the aftermath of the acidic rationalism of the Enlightenment. "Science investigates, religion interprets . . . Religion and science are two hemispheres of human thought." (Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Luther King and Susan Carson, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr, Advocate of the Social Gospel: September 1948 - March 1963, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007, p. 108). Science deals with explanation, religion with meaning. This is not an either/or, and those that turn it into such a thing divide human experience unnecessarily, to debilitating effect. To dismiss the quest for meaning as meaningless, idle, literally non-sensical will never stop human beings from seeking meaning. As Viktor Frankl argued at length, human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. We may honour the quest for meaning on the part of human beings whilst remaining sceptical with respect to the particular places they may come to locate that meaning.
Science can inform but not answer the questions human beings ask with respect to meaning. It is not a scientific question (if it is a meaningful question at all). Neither can science put an end to the cosmic longing for meaning that characterises the human species. Human beings need to make sense of their lives and hence of the world in which they live. Science cannot provide satisfactory answers for the pain and suffering attendant upon the ordinary vicissitudes and ultimate finitude of life. It can explain that that's just the way it is and urge acceptance in face of an indifferent nature. But that has more the quality of an inhumanism - and an evasion - than a satisfactory answer.
"For this reason a higher culture must give to a man a double-brain, as it were two brain-ventricles, one for the perceptions of science, the other for those of non-science: lying beside one another, not confused together, separable, capable of being shut off: this is a demand of health."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 251.
Ludwig Wittgenstein pushed the arid rationalism of logical positivism as far as they could go, and found that most of what makes life worthwhile and meaningful was left unaddressed. "We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all." Once we enter the realm of value, meaning, and significance, science has nothing to say. —"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Beyond scientific explanation lies a vast realm of silence, but the non-sensical also contains all that is most important to human beings living truly human lives.
"To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.
To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914-16, 2nd ed., trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1979, p. 74e.
"To know an answer to the question, 'What is the meaning of human life?' means to be religious." (Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, New York, Dell Publishers, 1954, p. ii).
The views of Wittgenstein and Einstein on religion were hardly orthodox, and quite contrary to doctrines and dogmas of organised religion. There's an issue as to whether their views opened up the path to a purely privatised 'New Age' 'I'm spiritual but not religious' solipsism that scotomizes completely the social dimensions of the religious experience. But neither dismissed the religious sensibility and the quest for meaning as chimerical and childish.
Without an existentially meaningful and emotionally satisfying story, human beings will find their cosmic longing to make sense of their existence thwarted and denied. Far from settling for an 'acceptance' of the hard dry facts of a meaningless life (and death), human beings as meaning-seeking creatures will fall into a state of spiritual disorientation, causing them to seek meaning - and belonging - in any number of surrogate spiritualities. The proliferation of ideologies throughout the modern age, and their hold on the mind of adherents, stems in large part from the void that has opened up as a result of the orgy of metaphysical carnage attendent upon the 'death of God.' Lacking a coherent, cogent, and plausible myth to live by, many have refused to accept that their accident is mere, meaningless accident and that they are living to no end, and have set about finding meaning by which to make sense of their meaningless lives. These ideologies are really secular monotheisms which see their god everywhere as the key to everything. Allied to a cause, these ideologies easily become crusades against infidels (all non-believers). This secular religiosity is a substitute religion. It is precisely the idolatrous humanism and war being rival self-created gods that both Nietzsche and Max Weber cautioned against, but suspected would be humanity's first response in being deprived of God. It may be difficult first steps, with human beings embarking on a steep learning curve as they learn to become truly human (that would be the optimistic view of a Marx or a Nietzsche); it may be that human beings cannot do without God, and will tear themselves apart in the attempt to go it alone as gods in themselves. That tends to be the problem with gods, not least of the self-created variety - their goods and truths tend to be non-negotiable, demanding complete acceptance and obedience. Human beings possess a tendency to fixate on the one and true answer to everything, the one and true way of doing things, the one and only true story that explains everything, dividing the world into good and bad, right and wrong, saints and sinners, gods and devils. I have long since learned to be cautious of people who think their pet concern is everything, as in 'politics is everything' and 'science is everything.' Since politics is dissensus, then if politics is everything we are in for a very disagreeable existence - we do indeed live in Hobbes' world. If science is everything, what becomes of meaning, value, and significance? We now have an environmentalism which insists that 'climate change is everything.' This is not true ecology but merely a continuation of the metaphysical malaise adumbrated in this essay. Freud seemed to think that 'sex is everything,' leading to libertarians like Reich thinking that liberation from sexual repression would bring freedom for all. It's a delusion - there is nothing that chains you more to natural necessity than sex.
Life is never so simple as those with singular explanations believe. The rationalists who consign myth, metaphysics, and meaning to the dustbin of history fall prey to the return of the repressed. The human mind is not purely cognitive but craves a story. Lewis Mumford somewhere wrote that even a false picture of the world is better than none at all. A scientific 'picture' may or may not be the best of all, as far as a description and explanation of physical processes goes. But that still leaves the question of value, meaning, and significance. The evidence is that human beings will entertain any picture, no matter how evil and absurd, rather than go without one at all. The dogmatic refusal on the part of rationalists to see that which falls outside of the remit of reason is non-rational and arational rather than 'irrational' as such is the very reason why reason generates its antithesis, pushing the world into irrationalism. Far from dissolving superstition, limiting the remit of reason to the factual and the logical alone, dismissing all that lies outside its narrow ambit, leaves the major part of human life and experience unaddressed and, worse, repressed, inviting return with a vengeange, unmoored from reason and the check it offers. The lesson is plain: the non-rational and arational dimensions of human life and experience require constructive expression or else they will rampage through the psychic and social fabric as an irrationalism characterized by collective hysteria, mass delusion, missionary zeal, and religious fury.
Essentialism
Which brings me to another contentious issue - essentialism. Limitations of space means that I can but sketch here. Essentialism, like myth and meaning, has been repudiated by the liveliest minds of the age, ejected from the rationalized social order. And it shows. This opens up a chasmic gap between the experience of the complex world and the human capacity for cognitive and affective assimilation. Hobbes and Locke were plain wrong: the human being is not a simple machine responding automatically to external stimuli nor a tabula rasa or blank sheet filled by sense impressions. The liberalism forged in the image of Hobbes and Locke is atomist and individualist - and mechanical. That view has eclipsed the essentialist view, as mechanical order has extinguished the organic view of life. The liberal view holds that human beings are discrete pre-social rational automatons driven by stimulus and response. That view fits the view of nature as a dead and inanimate machine, something that overthrows the ancient view of economics as the household in favour of the market mechanism and overthrows the ancient view of politics as concerned with the best regimen for the human good in favour of the state machine, the Leviathan. The essentialist view holds that the world is alive and filled with purpose and potentiality and that human beings are living, breathing animals with innate predispositions and potentialities embedded in deep structures, often invisible and intangible - the nature of potentiality is such that a thing is always in a state of becoming and hence cannot be seen for what it is whilst in process. The crucial point of essentialism is that human beings are simultaneously constrained and empowered by way of their innate potentialities. The view is anathema to rationalists and progressives, hell-bent as they are on a future 'Year Zero' created by the new man and woman or whatever. But far from being restrictive, still less repressive, essentialism is humanity's best defence against the tyranny of those who seek to be potters getting their hands on human clay.
I argue this at length here, with respect to the innatism and essentialism of Noam Chomsky
https://www.academia.edu/3203399/Immanence_Transcendence_and_Essence
There has been no social system more transgressive of nature and boundaries than the capitalism that has been ushered in by liberal modernity, and 'progressives' who continue to decry essentialism are a continuation of that transgression, however much they present themselves as offering a coherent response to the crises of the age.
Essentialism is grounded in human nature and human capacities and advances a fundamentalist realist ontology. Again, this forms a stark contrast to the anti-realism of the age. Anti-realism and anti-essentialism are of the same stripe. The view I present has been dismissed as conservative and reactionary. It is not. Marx himself adhered to fundamentally essentialist categories of form, potentiality, and lines of development. It would have been impossible for Marx to have criticised the capital system as a dehumanisation unless he possessed a view of what it was to be truly human. Whilst Marx focused on human potentialities, a rounded view of human nature must also address limitations and constraints. The alternative is to see human beings as their own self-creation - which is the fashionable transgression of the capitalist age of transgression. To continue with the fiction and delusion that human beings can become whatever they want to be, on the assumption that they are better and more capable than they essentially are, does not issue in progress at all, only the regress that inevitably follows the transgression of limits, natural laws, and boundaries. Social and moral breakdown will continue, with governing institutions being captured and hollowed out from within. Human beings need to be cultivated rather than created. That's a somewhat clumsy way of saying that human beings are born with certain potentials which need to be nurtured, encouraged, taught, and guided, if not directed, if they are to become free and reasonable social beings. The virtues, the mores, the habits of the heart are essential in this paideia. The good news is that this educative process is something that proceeds from the inside rather than by way of external imposition and engineering. Human beings are equipped with the very "tools" they need in order to flourish as human beings, and do not to that extent require the need of external tutors and potters.
In a key passage on the formation of the political community in the Politics, Aristotle writes:
Therefore the impulse to form a partnership of this kind is present in all men by nature; but the man who first united people in such a partnership was the greatest of benefactors. For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice. For unrighteousness is most pernicious when possessed of weapons, and man is born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue, which it is possible to employ entirely for the opposite ends. Hence when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals, and the worst in regard to sexual indulgence and gluttony. Justice on the other hand is an element of the state; for judicial procedure, which means the decision of what is just, is the regulation of the political partnership.
Aristotle Politics 1.1253a
Human beings are thus equipped innately with "weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue," and it is these we use to transcend our limits and constraints and nurture our healthy potentials. Morality is therefore intrinsic and does not have to be introduced from the outside. Ethics is as natural to us as is language and sociality. From this it follows that the moral sentiments crucial to a flourishing life are innate and require only cultivation within a supportive and internally educative habitus.
As Alasdair MacIntyre writes in respect of Kant:
"Virtues are dispositions only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues."
That puts the point in a nutshell. That is the way to a deeper and richer freedom, which Aristotle called eudaimonia, happiness as flourishing in a public life. There is nothing wrong with the purely private freedom of the individual except that, for a social being, it is an incomplete freedom. Complete freedom comes only in public life. It is now apparent that that public life is also a commonwealth of life, understanding that our own happiness and well-being are inextricably connected to other social beings but also to other beings and bodies in the more-than-human world. The commonwealth of life therefore embeds human beings within a biophysical reality that is all interrelationship. A genuinely rational freedom is therefore a relational freedom in this most expansive and deep of senses. Our own flourishing is predicated on our participation in a greater community of being, as diverse beings flowing in a continuous stream of life. The world is neither fixed nor static but fluid, relational, and dynamic. A mechanistic picture of a dead and inanimate world has given us a dead and inanimate and exploitative politics and economics. A new politics and economics are in order, premised on the understanding that the limitations of the discrete, self-maximising, self-interested individual are transcended when we come to realize that we share certain innate and essential structures, powers, needs, and functions, that we participate in a common life and are therefore profoundly interrelated, indeed united, at the deepest levels of existence.
To return to myth, Carl Gustav Jung surpassed Freud, who remained embedded in Enlightenment rationalism and its mechanism. Jung saw the extent to which the new developments in biology and physics rejected the mechanical worldview and that much of the material world was in fact immaterial. Jung came to reinstate the essential functions of myth and religion in human life. Freud wrote of 'the future of an illusion,' but the illusion in this regard was less the religious sensibility that was Freud's target than the rationalism which was Freud's principle weapon. The rational colonisation of the instincts and emotions is neither possible nor desirable, generating the very irrationalism it seeks to avert.
I have neither time nor space to write on Jung and the archetypes. Suffice to say, with respect to the essentialist metaphysics which underpins my own work on rational freedom that there are universal themes and patterns which not only govern the psyche but human life as a whole. Essentialism basically refers to the "universal grammar" underlying human culture and development in all its multiplicity in time and place. Essentialism holds that there is a universal pattern for human life which underlies the diverse ways in which this is played out in time and place. For the essentialist, human history is a set of variations on universal themes. The view holds that such is the essential template of human potentiality that should there ever be a new Adam and Eve, "they would eventually produce a society that would replicate ours in all essential features" (Robin Fox). I would sharply qualify that statement by Fox, for the implication of fate and determinism. The statement is true in the broadest of senses, referring to general features of human socialised existence, the 'essential features' of sociability, governance, etc. It is the particular forms of these things that is at issue, to the extent that they correspond to or contradict healthy human potentials.
Such talk may well strike unreconstructed and unreconstructable rationalists as hopelessly "mythological." But that's my point - human beings are ancient, indeed archaic, beings at heart. And myth and metaphor come naturally to those seeking understanding - symbol and story are our mother tongue.
The human mind is essentially mythological and metaphorical in the way it sees and apprehends the world. Reason may well offer a better explanation of reality, but not necessarily the most comprehensible and motivational. When it comes to bridging the gap between theoretical reason (our knowledge of the 'external' world) and practical reason (our action in light of that knowledge), indeed when it comes to understanding that the world is not 'external' and 'out there' at all, myth and metaphor are indispensable 'weapons,' innate abilities that bring inner and outer realities together as one. Myths are not illusions born of a childish stage of development, but are allegorical attempts on the part of human beings to give expression to the view that reality is not 'out there' but 'in here,' that reality exists in the interrelationship of the natural, the cultural, and the psychic and that human beings share a commonality of kinship with other beings and bodies in the more-than-human world.
If that is myth-making and story-telling, it is no less so than the image presented by a disenchanting science of the world as an inanimate, purposeless, machine. That master narrative of the universe gave us a mechanistic politics and economics, too, and is so embedded in the psyche that those seeking to avert environmental collapse seem more likely to enclose the commons, ourselves included, in the global Megamachine.
If we want to avert this final colonisation, uniting the inner and outer in pathological forms, Logos needs to be re-united with Mythos. There is a need to re-mythologize our relation to the world. Health and sanity depends on our nurturing a good relationship with the essential patterns and themes underlying our lives. The failure to develop constructive connection with the depths of our natures, psychic as well as physical, addressing the cosmic longing for meaning and belonging, leads to a return of the repressed in vengeaful and irrational forms. Jung insisted that, for all that they are dismissed for being mythological, the archetypes are real and must receive their due. Invisible and intangible, these archetypes mediate and control our conscious thoughts, emotions, and actions from the sphere of the unconscious. Denial here is a disaster, having us respond to crises in ways guaranteed to make them worse, acting in such neurotic ways as to harm ourselves and others.
We may re-affirm the old humanist goal of bringing the unconscious to the level of consciousness. That was the view of Spinoza, Marx, and Freud presented by Erich Fromm in The Chains of Illusion for instance. Jung's solution is spiritual rather than solely rational:
"The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for some thing only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of bound lessness is expressed in the relationship.
The feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. The greatest limitation for man is the "self"; it is manifested in the experience: "I am only that!" Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious."
CG Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections 1995 ch 11
The goal of Jung's therapy was to initiate a process of "individuation" so that the individual came to activate his or her greater, transcendent Self, descending into the dark with the conscious aim of harmonizing spirit and instinct, so that human beings cease to be torn between the seemingly contrary demands of nature and culture. In contrast to Freud, for whom nature was an object of existential dread to be subordinated to rational will, Jung argued that human beings were sick precisely because an excessively rational civilization had systematically uprooted human beings from the soil of instinct, thwarting archetypal needs that stood in need of positive expression:
"In the final analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us."
Modernity is predicated upon a systematic dispossession which separated individuals from their communities, traditions, customs, and commons. They have also been dispossessed of their ancient folkways.
"Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperized."
.
An excessively and aridly rational approach explicitly repudiates not merely Mythos, the force that brings meaning to life, but also Eros, the force that creates, sustains, and ultimately unites life in all its diverse forms. Eros is the inspirational force that lies behind most of those things that make life worth living — friendship, love, creativity, joy, and beauty. Eros stands outside of the realm of reason. However, to reject Eros as 'irrational' is to impoverish one's own life and self and, further, to incite Thanatos, Eros' opposing force, into exacting revenge, killing all that makes life worthwhile and ultimately life itself.
Jung put it:
"Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so. . . . He belongs on one side to man's primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony. If one or the other aspect is lacking . . . the result is injury or at least a lopsidedness that may easily veer towards the pathological. Too much of the animal distorts the civilized man, too much civilization makes sick animals.'
Carl Gustav Jung, CW 7, Para 32
Scorning Eros thus has troubling consequences, bringing about the very irrationalism its repudiation sought to guard against. Rationalist fears notwithstanding, it is not the animal, the natural, and the erotic as such that constitute threats to civilization so much as their denial by way of the repression of our instinctual nature. It is this repression that causes human beings to become sick and frustrated. Denied positive outlet, repressed drives and needs come to be expressed pathologically in both individual and collective forms through the "return of the repressed." As Erich Neumann writes, the "splitting off of the unconscious" activates dangerous and destructive impulses that "devastate the autocratic world of the ego with transpersonal invasions, collective epidemics, and mass psychoses."
In sum, civilization is threatened not by our animal instincts, nor by our longing for meaning, our religious sensibility, our need for stories, our mythological apparatus, but by their denial and repression by way of an excessive rationalism that creates a population of neurotics (and no few psychotics) demanding satisfaction of long buried desires and drives.
This is the secret of man's 'Divine Discontent.' So much more is planned for all of us than we can ever hope to realize by way of conscious activity: our lives are teeming with missed and lost opportunities. Yet, for those with ears to hear 'the voice of God within,' the call to individuate is being constantly transmitted to the ego by the Self. But such is the extraverted concern with the things of the material world that those who heed the inner incitements to greater self-fulfilment are few and far between. But it remains a path open to all on account of our common and innate qualities.
"What we seem to be - to ourselves and to others - is only a fraction of what there is in us to be. And as a result the Self is never satisfied: it knows that the ego could do better if it tried. For this reason it never stops prompting and advising; it is forever tugging in new directions, always seeking to expand and readapt the habits and cliches of consciousness, sending us bad dreams and disturbing thoughts, making us question the value of things we hold dear, mocking our complacent pretensions to have 'arrived'".
Anthony Stevens, Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self pp. 173-174
The transcendent Self is achieved by restoring the devalued instincts to their true place. In re-integrating the instincts, the individual dissolve the ego's hard shell by reconnecting to the something that lives on and endures beyond external vicissitudes. Individuals thus find a way of overcoming egoism without thereby losing their autonomy. The result is that human beings come to be willing and able to live virtuously in relation to others in a truly human communuty:
"The natural process of individuation brings to birth a consciousness of human community precisely because it makes us aware of the unconscious, which unites and is common to all mankind. Individuation is an at-one-ment with oneself and at the same time with humanity, since oneself is a part of humanity. Once the individual is thus secured in himself, there is some guarantee that the organized accumulation of individuals in the State, even in one wielding greater authority, will result in the formation no longer of an anonymous mass but of a conscious community. The indispensable condition for this is conscious freedom of choice and individual decision. Without this freedom and self-determination there is no true community, and, it must be said, without such community even the free and self-secured individual cannot in the long run prosper.”
– Jung CW16 ¶ 227
It follows
"Since the individual is not only a single entity, but also, by his very existence, presupposes a collective relationship, the process of individuation does not lead to isolation, but to an intenser and more universal collective solidarity."
Individuation is thus the antithesis of individualism, realizing the fullest measure of individuality as a result of giving due recognition to sociality as an essential aspect of human nature. Individuation is thus more than living out of one's natural lifespan but living consciously and ethically. Jung thus distinguishes individuation from the biological unfolding of the life-cycle, however much the two processes are interdependent:
"The life-cycle is the indispensable condition of individuation; but individuation is not blindly living out the life-cycle: it is living it consciously and responsibly, and is ultimately a matter of ethics. Individuation is a conscious attempt to bring the universal programme of human existence to its fullest possible expression in the life of the individual."
Individuation thus realizes autonomy in a socialised context, making us both civilized and truly human. It is therefore to be sharply distinguished from the libertarianism and licence of an individualism that is no more than the amoral pursuit of instinctual drives - the ego liberated from inhibitions and restraints which is the central figure of the liberal tradition, and which Hobbes felt required the absolute power of the Leviathan to hold in check. The fatal conceit of the liberal thinkers ushering in the modern age was to imagine that the passions could be liberated from inhibition nand constraint without causing harm. Such thinkers sought to liberate the individual from the bondage of various feudal authorities - the church, the monarchy, the overweening state, tradition, custom. They thought, optimistically, that once the old thrones and corrupt institutions fell, the natural sympathy of human beings would suffice to hold self-interested individuals together in civil society. Failing that, the case was made for an enlightened self-interest in which human beings could come to see that cooperating with others in pursuit of their interests could benefit all. That many progressives still argue in these terms shows just how reactionary progressivism has become, with its adherents arguing as though we were still in the eighteenth century and liberalism hasn't been the dominant political and cultural tradition for the past couple of centuries. The problems, indeed crises, of the modern world are self-authored and liberals need to be made to own them rather than parent them on obstructions standing in the way of the full realisation of the liberal order. Progressive? Are we there yet? We are here!
If liberation of the passions is a fatal error, then so is their repression, leading to a build up of thwarted need and desire that sets the scene for a return of the repressed with a vengeance. The solution is not repression but a restraint that is both a self-restraint by way of character and virtue and an ethico-social-institutional restraint, thus canalising the passions to ends greater than the ego. Rational restraint is not in itself repression, just as liberation from restraint is not necessarily freedom. On the contrary, just as restraint can make possible a deeper, richer freedom, so liberation can result in a greater enslavement via the immediacy of appetite and its collective consequences. Rousseau understood this perfectly when he argued for expanding being outwards towards society and polity (The Social Contract), God (The Savoyard Vicar), and Nature (Reveries).
For all the scepticism of collectivities as surrogate gods and communities, the solution ultimately is to embedd the individual in relation to others in a social context. This thus presumes the existence of an overarching moral and institutional framework a social habitus, and public community capable of positively embodying, articulating, and canalising impulses of diverse individuals for their mutual benefit—in fine, a rich and cohesive culture which satsifies the profound human longing for meaning and belonging and situates the individual within a habitus that is devoted to this end. Individuation thus implies the restoration of politics to its originary form as concerned with creative human flourishing.
The basis for such a politics lies in those essentialist and universalist patterns and themes adumbrated above, which is to say, away from self-created values and gods and divisive ideological delusions back to immanent potentials and lines of development embedded in the way things are. That forms a sound basis for a new natural law which affirms our intimate connection to all of life, indeed our participation within the commonwealth of life. There is no division. Nor is there a division between mind and the reality it seeks to access and understand. In examining nature, we are in truth examining ourselves, given that it is our mind 'in here' that decides what we observe 'out there.' The templates for organizing our sense experience exist within the human brain and mind. William James thus concludes that "Reality is apperception itself."
We are back to Plato. The guiding light to truth is to be found in the sun that lies outside of the cave of the ego; the task of the individual is to make the effort to escape this psychic prison by going further than an arid rationalism to access the primordial intelligence that underlies and animates both the phenomenal and psychic worlds. The function of polity and society is to help and support human beings in the ineliminably social aspects of this endeavor.
It remains only to savour the sweet irony of the conclusion. The hard-headed rationalist concern to reveal a material reality disinfected of all unseen forces has brought us to the conclusion that it's all immaterial after all, and that we are still charged with looking beyond the shadows on the wall to grasp the light outside. The high hopes of the Enlightenment, liberal modernity, and scientific rationalism have been fulfilled in so many ways in terms of quantitative development, so much so as to threaten social and ecological capacity. It is in the qualitative dimension where we have been impoverished and increasingly feel that the price to be paid for such largesse is not worth it. From this follows a restatement of the ancient truth that there is more to life than material possession, and that the greatest possessions we have when it comes to flourishing well are Aristotle's "weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue." This is the only way that "the passions" can be restrained without being repressed, and given such constructive expression as to convert egoistic beings into truly social beings. And natural and spiritual beings, too, understanding that nature and spirit are not antithetical but integral. Jung used the word "rhizome" to accent the invisible and underground nature of life:
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemegal apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections 1995, Prologue
Related Essays on Being and Place
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/2019/07/12/the-quest-for-community-meaning-and-belonging
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/reason-freedom-and-god-1
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/passing-on-the-virtues
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/posthumanism-as-a-housing-for-the-new-serfdom
Why science needs metaphysics
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/the-loss-of-deep-problems
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/the-emptiness-and-transience-of-life
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/habituation-vs-homelessness
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/2019/07/19/the-blight-of-essentialism-hunting
Comments