Hegel spoke to the Absolute Spirit. Jung spoke to the Spirit of Depth.
Did Hegel speak for the spirit of his times? Jung spoke against the spirit of his times.
Books have been devoted to the discussion of the "Absolute Spirit," what can be said of the Absolute Spirit is that it awaits the fullest authorship.
What can be said of the Spirit of Depth is that it contests us and our ability to be as we believe ourselves to be. It is the heart of the spirit that says the Work is not yet complete and we are not the completed image. I believe this message very deeply.
Hegel is accused of being a colonialist of ideas: that he is colonizing the mind with the Euro-phallogo-anthropo-centric Christ. (Christ, and more specifically formal "Christianity," being the synthesis of Judaic religion, as the making of the mask, and Roman religion as the making of the Beast.) The Idea is just as easily the mark of the Beast, Caesar, and the Empire, no matter how we coat it with Christian "Love," "Agape," (As Jung will call Sentiment, wedded with Brutality, "Symbols of Transformation" cw vol. 6, p. 428). I will hammer against this Hubris of the Christian Faith: the presumption is that our condition is fundamentally kind, that "humanity" is somehow fundamentally kind, with a kind of freezing chill: we do not know what the universe holds for us. We do not know if we are simply victims devised for torment, or if we are unfolding and developing souls who take part in the manifest grace we call "Evolution of Consciousness-Planet." To all of this "Sense" we have Nietzsche's condemnation: "Blödsinn!" (Jensits, aphorism 35)
-To the accusation of "nonsense," we paraphrase Jung's admonition: "Things so easily dismissed by day cannot be denied in the Dark" (Psychology of the Transference). In such a darkness we cannot deny our persistent nagging doubts, or escape being harangued and humiliated by our cacophonous, revolting, ugly desires. In the pitch and pulse of literal-images of the night there lurks the chase by our tormentors.
In the face of dealing with the fact that we cannot know our position, we prefer motion to the frozen eternity of understanding our peril. (Might go right or left!) That is to say, I will tell you what I make is a move to the Anima: the soul that causes us to have --motion. It is the move to prefer the illusion, to the equal illusion of Satanic dominion over this earth. It is a move to choose, once again, to pick up the Christian hubris of sentiment, preferring also a kind of eternal punishment (that we see written all through the work of Franz Kafka), to the static acceptance that we do not know what the universe gives us.
(Jung wins with the nightmare. It arrests our attention. We go back to our work, dismissing them as nonsense.)
The mistake with these thinkers, and the relevancy or irrelevancy of the universe, per-se, is to utterly dismiss them.
I don't see the ideas I spoke of leading to the creation of gas chambers. I see that these ideas acknowledge something other than our sense or our definitions of "nonsense." I should hope that keeping the fire of knowledge and contention, and living views, alive does exactly what it does. It keeps the flame.
I am deeply concerned by all thinkers who first make the mistake of expressing intolerant ideas. Hegel can be condemned for being out-dated, but I believe he does not have a chance to defend himself. I am even more concerned that Jung and Heidegger did not make every move they could to integrate their philosophy after the war (The Second World War) with Jewish philosophers: that they did not make right their Germanic affront in the ultimate and most public sense of "restitution." They did not make sufficient effort to think outside their own ethnicity, they dismissed the world (Heidegger, more problematically, as the direct descendant from Hegel). Jung's work is relevant because he thinks in global archetypal issues: he welcomes the images and symbols of all nations with a profound equanimity. One could almost say that anything Jung sees he believes. That is why his books are so over-filled with archetypal images from every color and strain: it is a true attempt at post-colonialism. Hegel at least speaks of a world and tries to "incorporate" the world. Here the essence is not the system, or the connection between "incorporation" and fascism: one head. The essence is one where there is a peering outside of the finite colonial world that says that "sense=sense" a tautological prison predicament in the shape of the lamia of horrific sameness: Euro-centric, Phallogo-centric.... The essence here remains that there was at least a move to see outside the one for a moment....
Perhaps the determining factor here is choice: where there actually is choice or freedom, then choose as best you can for the good. When there is no choice then the way is clear.
ReplyDeleteThe way is never clear because we ourselves are clouded, as Jung realized in his old age. Furthermore, the liberating sensation one gets when declaring everything to be Blödsinn (which means more than non-sense: a kind of stupidity is inscribed in the accusation...blödsinning is never silly or playful, always just bovinely stupid...but, of course, Kaufmann and the other translators shied away from the word "bullshit.") In general, however, we must confess (with joy) that Ayres has returned to his old brilliance, and yet must be admonished with respect to his excessive optimism concerning the internationalism of Jung (which is a kind of Swiss faux consumptive and business-like internationalism).
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