Technology and the Soul: From the Nuclear Bomb to the World Wide Web 9780367485320, 9780367485337, 9781003041511

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TECHNOLOGY AND

THE SOUL

The Collected English Papers of Wolfgang Giegerich The Collected English Papers of Wolfgang Giegerich makes the work of one of archetypal psychology’s most brilliant theorists available in one place. A practicing Jungian analyst and a long-time contributor to the field, Giegerich is renowned for his dedication to the substance of Jungian thought and for his unparalleled ability to think it through with both rigor and speculative strength. The product of over three decades of critical reflection, Giegerich’s English papers are collected in six volumes: The Neurosis of Psychology (Vol. I). Technology and the Soul (Vol. 2), Soul-Violence (Vol. 3), and The Soul Always Thinks (Vol. 4), The Flight into the Unconscious (Vol. 5), and Dreaming the Myth Onwards (Vol. 6). For a full list of titles in this series, please visit XXXSPVUMFEHFDPN5IF $PMMFDUFE
&OHMJTI1BQFSTPG8PMGHBOH(JFHFSJDICPPLTFSJFT$&18(

Titles in this series: The Neurosis of Psychology: Primary Papers Towards a Critical Psychology (Volume 1) Technology and the Soul: From the Nuclear Bomb to the World Wide Web

(Volume 2)

Soul-Violence (Volume 3)

The Soul Always Thinks (Volume 4)

The Flight into the Unconscious: An Analysis of C. G. Jung’s Psychology Project

(Volume 5) “Dreaming the Myth Onwards”: C. G. Jung on Christianity and on Hegel (Volume 6)

TECHNOLOGY

AND THE SOUL

FROM THE NUCLEAR BOMB TO


THE WORLD WIDE WEB

COLLECTED ENGLISH PAPERS

VOLUME TWO

WOLFGANG GIEGERICH

First published 2007 by Spring Journal Books Published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Wolfgang Giegerich The right of Wolfgang Giegerich to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-48532-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-48533-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-04151-1 (ebk)

Contents

Acknowledgments ........................................................................... vii Sources and Abbreviations ..............................................................

ix

Introduction: The Object of Psychology ......................................................

1

PART I: THE NUCLEAR BOMB PAPERS CHAPTER ONE: Saving the Nuclear Bomb ............................. 25 CHAPTER TWO: The Nuclear Bomb as a Psychological Reality .................................................................................... 37 CHAPTER THREE: The Significance of Our Nuclear Predicament for Analytical Psychology and of Analytical Psychology for Our Nuclear Predicament............................... 55 CHAPTER FOUR: The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of God: On the First Nuclear Fission ......................................... 69 CHAPTER FIVE: The Invention of Explosive Power and the Blueprint of the Bomb: A Chapter in the Imaginal Pre-History of Our Nuclear Predicament ............................... 101

CHAPTER SIX: The Rocket and the Launching Base, or The Leap from the Imaginal into the Outer Space Named “Reality” .................................................................... 117

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Fabrication of Time ............................. 137

vi

CONTENTS

PART II: TECHNOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION AND “MEDIAL” MODERNITY CHAPTER EIGHT: The Burial of the Soul in Technological

Civilization ............................................................................ 155

CHAPTER NINE: The Occidental Soul’s Self-Immurement

in Plato’s Cave ........................................................................ 213

CHAPTER TEN: The Function of Television and the

Soul’s Predicament ................................................................. 281

CHAPTER ELEVEN: The World Wide Web From the

Point of View of the Soul’s Logical Life .................................. 309

Coda:

A Little Light, to Be Carried through Night and Storm:

Comments on the State of Jungian Psychology Today............ 333

Index ............................................................................................. 337

Acknowledgments

Versions of the following chapters have previously been published elsewhere: Chapter 1, “Saving the Nuclear Bomb,” was written and presented in 1983 at the 1st “Facing Apocalypse” Conference held at Salve Regina College, Newport, RI, and appeared in V. Andrews, R. Bosnak, K. W. Goodwin, eds., Facing Apocalypse (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1987), pp. 96–108. Chapter 2, “The Nuclear Bomb as a Psychological Reality,” appeared in K. Porter, D. Rinzler, P. Olsen, eds., Heal or Die: Psychotherapists Confront Nuclear Annihilation (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1987), pp. 84–98. Chapter 3 was a lecture presented to AIPA, Italy, at the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome in 1988 and appears here in English for the first time. An Italian translation was published as “La psicologia analitica e il pericolo nucleare” in Itinerari del pensiero junghiano, ed. Paolo Aite & Aldo Carotenuto (Milan, Italy: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 1989), pp. 159–172. Chapter 4, “The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of God,” appeared in Spring (1985): 1–27.

Chapter 5, “The Invention of Explosive Power and the Blueprint of the Bomb— A Chapter in the Imaginal Pre-History of Our Nuclear Predicament,” appeared in Spring (1988): 1–14. Chapter 6, “The Rocket and the Launching Base, or The Leap from the Imaginal Into the Outer Space Named ‘Reality’,” in Sulfur 28 (Spring 1991): 62–78. Chapter 7, “The Fabrication of Time,” in Sulfur 30 (Spring 1992): 46–58. Chapter 8 is a translation of my Eranos-Lecture “Das Begräbnis der Seele in die technische Zivilisation,” which appeared in Eranos 52-1983 (Frankfurt: Insel, 1985), pp. 211–276. Roberts Avens published an extensive précis of this article under the title “Reflections on Wolfgang Giegerich’s ‘The Burial of the Soul in Technological Civilization’” in Sulfur 20 (Fall 1987): 34–54. Chapter 9, “The Occidental Soul’s Self-Immuration in Plato’s Cave,” appears here in English for the first time. A short oral version in German was delivered

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

in 1994 at the VIII Convegno Nazionale of CIPA in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut of Rome and published in Italian translation as “L’insediarsi dell’anima occidentale nella caverna di Platone” in La Pratica Analytica 10/11 (1995): 25–34. A version of Chapter 10 , “The Function of Television and the Soul’s Predicament,” first appeared in Japanese translation in Wolfgang Giegerich, Shinwa to Ishiki (Yungu Shinrigaku no Tenkai [Gîgerihhi Ronshû], vol. 3), translated and edited by Toshio Kawai (Tokyo: Nihon Hyôron-sha, 2001). The English text appears here for the first time. Chapter 11, “The World Wide Web From the Point of View of the Soul’s Logical Life,” first appeared in a bilingual edition (English and Italian) in l’imaginale 30, (April 2001): 4–43. The Coda, “A Little Light, to Be Carried Through Night and Storm: Comments on the State of Jungian Psychology Today,” first appeared in a bilingual edition (German and English) in Dieter Klein, Henning Weyerstraß, eds., Auf den Spuren von C.G. Jung / In Search of C.G. Jung (No place [Köln]: Verlag dieterklein.com, 2004), pp. 33–36. I would like to express my deep-felt gratitude to the following persons: ROBERT BOSNAK for inviting me to the “Facing Apocalypse” Conferences, which he organized, thereby stimulating my work (ongoing at that time) on the psychoanalysis of the atom bomb. JAMES HILLMAN and CLAYTON ESHLEMAN for providing room in their journals, Spring and Sulfur respectively, and for generous editorial support. ROBERTS AVENS for his interest in my work on the psychology of the bomb and for reporting about it in Sulfur (as well as in Latvian publications). RUDOLF RITSEMA for the invitation to present my ideas at the Eranos conferences. BIANCA GARUFI (Rome) and LUIGI ZOJA (Milan) for their invitations to present papers before AIPA and CIPA, respectively, and for their hospitality. TOSHIO KAWAI (Kyoto) for his intelligent translation work both during my oral presentations in Japan and in print. GREG MOGENSON, as editor, colleague, and friend, who accompanied the preparation of this volume in a most competent, helpful, and inspiring way. W. G.

Sources and Abbreviations

For frequently cited sources, the following abbreviations have been used: CW:

Jung, C. G. Collected Works. 20 vols. Ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and WIlliam McGuire. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957-1979. Cited by volume and, unless otherwise noted, by paragraph number.

GW:

Jung, C. G. Gesammelte Werke. Zürich and Stuttgart (Rascher) now Olten and Freiburg i:Br: Walter-Verlag, 1958 ff.

Letters: Jung, C. G. Letters. 2 vols. Ed. Gerhard Adler. Bollingen Series XCV: 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. MDR: Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Rev. ed. Ed. Aniela Jaffé. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1965. Cited by page number.

INTRODUCTION

The Object of Psychology

T

he title of this book “Technology and the Soul” conjoins two terms that are like chalk and cheese. Is technology not the very opposite of soul, namely absolutely soulless, cold, abstract, the result of ego machinations? Since this book can hardly have the purpose of bringing about a complexio oppositorum, something that cannot be done through theoretical reflection and a collection of essays, the “and” between the two terms requires some explanation. Volume 1 of this collection of papers was concerned mainly with the constitution and critical self-reflection of psychology, so to speak, with psychology as a “subject.” The present volume gathers papers that are devoted to the psychological interpretation of certain phenomena in the world (things technological), so we could say that, instead of focusing on psychology itself and thereby reflecting (looking backwards), our predominant orientation now goes forward and we concentrate specifically on the object (or subject matter) of psychology. But what is the object of psychology? The simple answer might be that “psychology means the science of the soul. Depth psychology therefore cannot mean anything else but the science of the deep layers of the soul.”1 This is of course correct, but does not tell us much. All we have gained over and above the term “object” is a name for this object. But what this object concretely is and where to look for it is 1 Alfred Brauchle, Von der Macht des Unbewußten. Tiefenpsychologie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1949), p. 5 (my translation).

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still in the dark. If we do not content ourselves with this very general and more or less tautological bit of information and insist on a concrete, descriptive answer, we run into a great difficulty that is due to a historical prejudice. This prejudice might be called the anthropological fallacy. I will explain what this means by looking at different messages one can get from C. G. Jung’s psychology.

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL FALLACY One conception of the psyche that one can get from studying Jung’s work, above all the work of early Jung, is that the psyche has a clearcut orderly structure that can be presented in the geometric forms of concentric circles (the ego as the center, surrounded first by the realm of consciousness, then of the personal unconscious and finally of the collective unconscious) or of a cone (with different layers, the deepest of which would be that of the collective unconscious whereas the tip would represent the ego) as well as in the imaginal form of personified figures (ego, persona, shadow, anima/animus, self ). To this conception, Jung’s psychological typology with its compass-like representation of the four orientation functions fits very neatly. The crux of this conception is that it starts out from the human person. The human being is here the container or vessel of the soul and accordingly also the horizon of psychology. A psychology based on this fantasy clearly operates with the division between man and world, subject and object, inner and outer, psychology and physics and feels competent for only half of this divided whole. Psychology’s belonging to one side manifests for example in the concept of “extraversion” and in the “object-level” method of dream interpretation. Psychology is here what goes on inside the human person, which is why I speak of the anthropological fallacy. This fallacy is of course by no means a specialty of (the early) C. G. Jung. It is, and has been, the generally accepted, conventional idea about psychology ever since there has been a scientific discipline by this name, an idea that seemed so natural, so self-evident that it was not felt to be in need of any argumentative justification. In depth psychology the anthropological fallacy had the practical consequence that the individual was urged to turn inwards and, in the case of Jungian analysis, to develop his or her self and to strive for his or her wholeness. Not only the “individuation process,” but Jung’s adamant emphasis on the individual as “the measure of all things” (CW

INTRODUCTION: THE OBJECT OF PSYCHOLOGY

3

10 § 523) and “the makeweight that tips the scales” (§ 586) affirmed

and highlighted this concentration on the person. It is true, Jung repeatedly insisted that “individuation” and his psychological stance in general do not exclude, but include, the world. But such a semantic statement does not undo the underlying structure or syntax of this thinking, namely that it irrevocably starts out from a human being who has the world (“external reality”) outside and vis-à-vis himself. Even synchronicity as the meaningful coincidence of an inner and an outer event still has the anthropological conception of psychology as its background, and precisely by trying to overcome the opposition of psychology and physics in the direction of the idea of unus mundus once more confirms the anthropological stance. A serious consequence of this methodological standpoint is that the soul is logically relegated to second rank, as much as it may be prioritized, semantically and emotionally. The human being is here the substrate or actual substance and the psyche is merely one of the attributes of this substrate. But the human being as the substrate personality is not itself the topic of psychology. It lies outside psychology’s field of vision. Psychology’s topic is the soul, is psychic life (which, however, often manifests in people). The moment psychic life is defined as being the life of the substrate personality, psychology has the task of exploring something (namely, psychic life) whose actual substantial reality (namely, the human being) is pre-supposed as lying outside (“pre-”) its own precincts of competence and responsibility. This is a type of logic that shows most clearly when Freud, for example, refers to the “bedrock of the biological” at which according to his view the activity of the psychologist has to come to its natural end. It is a little bit like the situation of physicians in traditional China when treating a lady of high society. They were supposed to heal her without being allowed to personally examine her (they had to work through her maid as an in-between). But no, this example is still too harmless. Inasmuch as the doctors had this in-between, they still had a real, even though indirect, access to the actual patient. The situation of psychology in the spirit of the anthropological prejudice has therefore to be compared much rather to that of doctors who have to treat the plague at a time when one only saw its symptoms and effects (“attributes”) without knowing, and having any access to, the pathogen (“substance”).

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TECHNOLOGY AND THE SOUL

THE OBJECTIVE PSYCHE Fortunately this personalistic way of thinking is only one strand in Jung’s psychology. There is also a second and very different way of thinking in his work that has left the anthropological or personalistic fallacy simply behind. Theoretically it is expressed above all in the idea of the objective psyche. With the described conventional idea of “psyche” in the back of our mind, we have to say that “the objective psyche” is a contradiction in terms. The very thing that according to that conception (according to the anthropological fallacy) was defined as belonging to the subjective side of the subject-object split is now defined as being objective. This does of course not mean that it merely switched sides so that the structural division into subject and object would remain intact, now only inversely. No, what this idea suggests is a kind of union of opposites, truly a dialectical self-contradiction. The logic of the clear-cut opposition of subject and object, human being and world, has been overcome. Now it is true that in Jung one can find passages where this actually revolutionary conception has somehow been subsumed under and integrated back into the former scheme, above all the scheme of the individuating individual, so that it is deprived of the very revolutionary character that was its distinction, and the anthropological fallacy prevails after all. The notion of projection in particular was instrumental in watering down the idea of the objective psyche and tying back the contents of psychic processes to the human subject and his “unconscious.” This is seen in Jung’s interpretion of the alchemists’ experiencing certain soul contents in the chemical substances “as if they were qualities of matter” as the alchemists’ unconscious projection of contents from their unconscious into chemical reality; such an interpretation reconfirmed the inner-outer, subject-object division. True, it is clear that those contents cannot be conceived of as qualities of matter in the sense of factual positivity. But this does not in any way require us to take refuge in the concept of a projection from inside us to what is outside. It would be equally possible to say that the contents were indeed the properties of matter, but of matter poetically conceived, where both those qualities and the matter itself are absolutenegative or symbolic, much as they are in sandplay therapy. “Projection” tends to cement the modern interpretation of the material

INTRODUCTION: THE OBJECT OF PSYCHOLOGY

5

world as positive fact as well as the view that this positivity is the one and only form of truth whose opposite is merely-subjective imaginings: physics vs. psychology. But although the fight between the two so different positions was not brought to a definite settlement by Jung, we find enough examples where it is obvious that the revolutionary understanding of the soul as “objective” in fact informed Jung’s actual approach to psychological phenomena. Already the title of his early main work, Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, suggests that intuitively the idea of the objective psyche was operative in it. The human subject does not play any role in the fantasy underlying this title, it simply drops out from consideration. This title promises a discussion of the self-unfolding of an objective psychic reality, the so-called libido, apart from any reference to a human subject as its substrate personality. It is the “libido” as such that goes through the process of its transformations and expresses itself in symbolizations corresponding to the respective statuses reached in this process. The “libido” is here itself the selfsufficient subject or “substance” whose self-unfolding and selfrepresentation we are promised to find portrayed in this book. In fact, we can even go back behind this early work to Jung’s still earlier psychiatric studies, namely to “The Content of Psychosis” (a wording that by the way was later paralleled by his referring to “the content of neurosis”) in order to see an early form of this interest in an “objective” conception of psychic illness at work. According to this wording, psychosis is not conceived in terms of the person who suffers from it and with the question how psychoses come about causally in the context of life events. Interest in the “content of psychosis” proceeds from the view that psychosis is a self-sufficient phenomenon that, we might say, has something to say. It speaks. It is about something. It has a concern. And as such it is its own subject, not merely the possible condition (“attribute”) of a poor patient (“substance”).

THE THOUGHT THAT THINKS ITSELF Similarly, when Jung discusses the motif of dismemberment in the visions of Zosimos, the point is to see what “dismemberment” is about, what its “content” or statement is. Jung is not interested in what it means in the context of the life of Zosimos, why this motif emerged

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in the latter, and what he thought and felt about it. Jung’s psychological concern is with the self-explication of the content of this phenomenon as its own substantial reality or subject. In the same vein, Jung’s study of the psychology of the Trinity (and quaternity) manage well without reference to people who might have been interested in the Trinity. Not what people think or feel about the Trinity, not why they come up with such an idea counts. The only thing of real psychological interest in this connection is what the (idea or motif of the) Trinity itself thinks. 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. In symbols and symptoms thoughts are thought out. Psychological illnesses, for example, are the thinking-out of particular thoughts, be it their thinking-out in the mental attitudes, or in the behavior, or even in the body, of a person. But the point is that the thoughts in question are not the person’s thoughts. He or she is not doing this thinking. It is the thoughts that think themselves, a kind of noêsis noêseôs, and that use the human being as the place or stage where this, their thinking themselves out, can take place in reality and as a reality. If it were otherwise, if the person were doing this thinking, there would not be a psychological illness, but, in the bad variety of this possibility, only something like a person’s foolishness or stupidity (in the good variety it would be some insight or discovery). Other examples for this idea of the objective psyche in action are Jung’s study of the Catholic Mass (where we could again say that the question is what does the Mass think, what is the thought that thinks itself out in the ritual of the Mass?) and his study of the “psychology of transference.” Jung’s non-personalistic conception of transference is of course particularly significant inasmuch as transference seems to invite a personalistic approach that concentrates on the interaction, thoughts, emotions of the two people in the consulting room. But an objective psychology in the sense indicated is not interested in what the persons think or feel. It studies what the objective phenomenon of the transference itself thinks. This Jung tries to develop with the help of the alchemical picture series. (But of course—this I do not want to pass over in silence—one sees in this particular piece of Jung’s that despite his truly objectivepsychological approach he time and again feels the need to return in

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his discussion to the consulting room where his thinking inevitably lapses into a more personalistic style.) The examples given so far were examples where one could see the idea of the objective psyche in action. But Jung also gave explicit expression to the principle of the approach of an objective psychology. For example, he stated that “we can treat fairytales as fantasy products, like dreams, conceiving them to be spontaneous statements of the unconscious about itself ” (CW 13 § 240). Similarly we read in CW 9i § 400 (trans. modified), “In myths and fairytales, as in dreams, the soul speaks about itself, and the archetypes reveal themselves in their natural interplay, as ‘formation, transformation, the eternal Mind’s eternal recreation.’” The soul speaks about itself. Not about us, nor we about our ideas and feelings. The human being in whom such a speaking occurs and surfaces (manifests) simply drops out of this equation. Of course, when Jung in the one sentence speaks of the “statements of the unconscious about itself ” and in the other of the “soul” that “speaks about itself,” one could still try to rescue the idea of a subject or substrate behind this speaking, the mysterious unconscious or the soul as an agent or mastermind behind the scene. But already the next phrase in the second quotation makes such an interpretation impossible. Because now we hear that it is “the archetypes” that reveal themselves in their natural interplay, that is to say, the always particular contents of each concrete speaking or, in my parlance, the thoughts that in each concrete case “think themselves out” are themselves that which displays and unfolds itself, spells itself out. We do not have to read a sentence like the one about the soul that speaks about itself as a kind of “meta-physical” or ontological assertion. We can, and I think we should, read it as a methodological principle, in accordance with the formulation in the first of the two Jung quotes, “we can treat fairytales as …, conceiving them to be ….” This is how we must treat and conceive psychic phenomena if we want to approach them in a truly psychological style, i.e., from the point of view of a psychology “with soul.” If this is our goal, we cannot afford to entertain the idea of the substrate personality. Each psychic phenomenon has to be viewed instead as talking about itself, that is to say we have to return it to or enclose it within itself methodologically so that it becomes a uroboros for us, a “tail-eater, which is said to beget, kill,

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TECHNOLOGY AND THE SOUL

and devour itself ” (CW 16 § 454). We have to conceive it as sufficient unto itself and self-contained. The psychological phenomenon has the circular structure of self-reflection and self-expression rather than the linear structure of something that has an external referent or an other (such as the substrate personality) whose expression it would be. As long as we would explicitly or unwittingly posit a substrate personality as the ground of a phenomenon, the psychic phenomenon would logically have its own ground outside of itself, that is to say, it would be in the status of externality. Only that methodological approach that grants the phenomenon uroboric self-sufficiency and views it as having even its ground in itself guarantees that the approach belongs to a psychology that is truly defined as the discipline of interiority.

THE VIA REGIA With our professing ourselves to the notion of the objective psyche in the sense of this uroboric conception of the psychological phenomenon and with our rejecting a psychology based on the anthropological prejudice, we have resolved the great difficulty that at the beginning I had said emerged for us. But now another dilemma comes up. The methodological approach of conceiving each phenomenon as uroborically self-contained is one thing. A very different question is in the case of which phenomena does such an approach make sense and is legitimate. Are there particular features that a phenomenon must have to be eligible in the first place for a psychological approach? What characteristics turns a phenomenon into a psychic phenomenon? Are there phenomena that are set apart from others as being psychic ones over against not psychic ones? When Jung says, “we can treat fairytales as fantasy products, like dreams …,” and, “In myths and fairytales, as in dreams, the soul speaks about itself …,” the idea might come up that “the soul speaks” only in certain phenomena or in certain privileged areas of life, namely particularly in the myths, fairy tales and dreams of Jung’s list, to which might have to be added symbols, archetypal images, rituals, religious dogma, visions, reveries, fantasies and instances of active imagination, sandplay pictures, paintings from the unconscious, and the like. This privileging of a certain group of phenomena or areas of phenomena is certainly what determines the thinking as well as the actual practice of conventional depth psychology in the Jungian tradition.

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9

And it goes hand in hand with the exclusion of other areas and phenomena of cultural life as on principle not being eligible for psychological study. The list of those areas includes economic life (such as the development of capitalism, the rise of the stock market, big business), technology and industry, political and military history, the organization of society and changes in social life, and stringent philosophical thought. The reasons for this exclusion are not all the same, but have a common basis. Philosophical theorizing is considered to be the work of the abstract intellect and not of the soul. Economic and social life as well as much of politics is viewed as belonging to the sphere of collective consciousness. Technology and industry seem even further removed from the soul inasmuch as they appear as hard positive facts of material reality. If the economic sphere receives psychological attention at all, it is, with rare exceptions, only by means of subjectivist or moralistic concepts such as that of people’s hubris (e.g., ignoring the limits of Earth’s resources, the megalomania of globalization) or from the point of view of personal pathology (e.g., the phenomenon of compulsive buying). Similarly, politics is apperceived in psychology, if at all, only naïvely and usually moralistically with concepts taken from personal psychology, in cases where such personalistic concepts seem to lend themselves to transference to the collective sphere, such as “shadow projection” on other nations or political blocs with the result that they are allegedly blown up out of proportion into imagoes of an evil, absolutely threatening enemy. What clearly emerges at this point is that in this split between areas in which the soul expresses itself and others which are seen as devoid of soul, if not downright soulless, our earlier opposition of subject and object, inner and outer reappears. It is still at work. This opposition is the criterion by which a distinction is made between what is psychologically relevant and what not. Despite our clear commitment to a psychology based on the idea of the objective psyche, this opposition is obviously still in a position to inform the decision about the subject-matter of psychology. When, for example, the dream is considered by (Freud as well as by) Jung and most of those who follow him to be the via regia to “the unconscious,” i.e., to the soul, we witness the strange fact that in the very area of an objective psychology a subjective, private, “inner” phenomenon is privileged— one is almost tempted to say: as “the return of the repressed,” although

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“repressed” is the wrong word. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. This (in a colloquial sense) schizophrenic situation of a decidedly “objective” stance when it is a question, on the one hand, of the basic conception of the psyche and of general method and, on the other hand, of an unmitigated subjectivism and individualism when it is the question, on the semantic level, of the choice of real phenomena to be considered of prime relevance for psychology has not received the attention it deserves. In accordance with ideas about dreams he found in other cultures, Jung distinguished between “great dreams” and “small dreams,” where the former type might, for example, be the dreams of the medicine man of a tribe, dreams that did not deal with his personal life and inner experience, but were concerned with the fate of his whole people. The small dreams, by contrast, were only of personal significance. This distinction overcomes the lump-sum glorification of dreams as the privileged access to the soul. A totally different perspective might open up on the basis of it because this is a fundamental distinction within the one notion of dreams. What is it that is distinguished? Not two literal “sizes” of dreams, like we have different shoe sizes, but two fundamentally different levels. Whereas, except for the size, there is no intrinsic difference between large and small shoes, the great dream and the small dreams are not comparable; they are phenomena of truly different orders. But what do we hear about the great dream from Jung, as late as 1960? “What is the great Dream? It consists of the many small dreams and the many acts of humility and submission to their hints.”2 The great, i.e., the totally different level that was introduced by the distinction between the two types of dreams, is reduced to the old level of ordinary dreams. The opportunity to differentiate between the opus magnum of the soul and the opus parvum was missed. As much as I enjoy working with dreams in my therapeutic practice or in seminars, I cannot accept the idea that the dream is the via regia to the unconscious (let alone the old wives’ tale of there being such a thing as “the unconscious” in the first place). Commitment to the objective psyche or no, the privileging of dreams and the idea of “the unconscious” inevitably tie psychology’s thinking back to the individual person and thus to personalistic psychology and to the 2

C. G. Jung, Letters 2, p. 591, to Sir Herbert Read, 2 September 1960.

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anthropological fallacy. They support the fantasy that the soul is inside people and the prime avenue to it introspection. Just as in the beginning we found that one can get different messages from Jung’s psychology about the same issues, we have to note here that in Jung there is also a strong tendency opposite to the one described so far, the privileging of any particular area or phenomenon of life, such as dreams. When Jung established a Psychology Fund at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Technical University) in Zürich, he stipulated that “The treatment of psychology should in general be characterized by the principle of universality. No special theory or special subject should be propounded.” The aim was to free the teaching of the human soul from the “constriction of compartments.”3 In Jung’s published works, we find the same idea expressed. He criticizes the limitation of psychology that, as he says, had fifty years ago (Jung wrote this in 1936) been “very welcome to the materialistic outlook of that time,” and “it still is in large measure today.” He evaluates this as “an excellent excuse not to bother with what goes on in a wider world.” Psychology in his view does not have “the advantage of a ‘delimited field of work’” (CW 9i § 112). Clearly, the investigation of these patterns and their properties must lead us into fields that seem to lie infinitely far from medicine. That is the fate—the distinction as well as misfortune—of empirical psychology: to fall between all the academic stools. And this comes precisely from the fact that the human psyche has a share in all the sciences, because it forms at least half the precondition of the existence of them all (CW 16 § 209, trans. modified).

The difference between all the sciences rests on the division of the whole of reality or the whole of human experience into compartments. Each science has then the job of studying one of these compartments as its own “delimited field of work” and sphere of competence, and the section of reality assigned to it conversely defines it as this particular science. The point of Jung’s views expressed here is not the harmless 3 Quoted from Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 15. Shamdasani in turn is citing C. A. Meier, The Psychology of Jung, Vol. 1: The Unconscious in its Empirical Manifestations (Boston: Sigo Press, 1984), p. x.

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one that there should be collaboration between the different sciences. This would be the nowadays customary demand for “interdisciplinary studies.” “Interdisciplinary collaboration” precisely leaves the delimited fields of work intact and confirms their division; there is no objective unity (in the definition of the field), but only a subjective and practical one (through the collaboration of the human researchers). Jung’s thesis is much more radical. If the psyche has a share in all the sciences and is half the precondition of them all, and if psychology is that “special science” whose field of competence has to be precisely that factor that is common to all the sciences (and of course not only to the sciences but to all aspects of cultural life at large), we have to realize that psychology is not on the same level with all the other sciences; it is logically above or beneath them. There cannot be a kind of simple “collegiality” and collaboration on an equal footing between psychology and the sciences because psychology is not defined by a particular section (“field,” “specialty”) of reality as its subject-matter. The unity or universality demanded by Jung for psychology is objective, based on the fact that its “specialty” is the common psychological factor in all special aspects of reality: “Although we are specialists par excellence, our specialized field, oddly enough, drives us to universality and to the complete overcoming of the specialist attitude …” (CW 16 § 190). It is clear that once one has, with a clear methodological awareness, established oneself on the ground of this conception, one can no longer uphold the privileging of particular phenomena or range of phenomena. The via regia to the soul cannot be defined in terms of special experiences like dreams or visions as the object of study, a fact that should actually have been self-evident from the outset. Because objects, things, phenomena are not viae (roads, ways, paths) at all. The via regia has to be a real via: a ‘method’ (which contains Greek hodós, way, road), an approach, a style of thinking, with which one can study the objects of one’s study, in the case of psychology all sorts of phenomena: dreams, myths, symbols, psychological symptoms just as well as, e.g., our modern technological civilization. What this real via regia is has already been stated. It is that methodological approach that construes any phenomenon to be studied by it as uroborically self-contained, as having everything it needs within itself. It is the method of absolute interiority. From here I have to revise my statement in the previous paragraph that the unity or universality of psychology

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is objective, based on the common factor in all special aspects of reality. I do not claim that there is such a common factor in all phenomena in an objective, ontological sense. What is common to all these different phenomena otherwise studied by the various specialty sciences is that they all can be viewed with this psychological method, from the standpoint of interiority. If one indeed perceives them as such, then, and only then, do they have this common “factor.” Jung certainly advanced to the view that the specialist attitude is truly overcome and any privileging of particular phenomena does not make sense any more. And yet he does not really go all the way to its logical end with his insight, where psychology would be completely emancipated from all ontological fetters, from mooring itself in some positive objective reality, and where instead it would have become fully interiorized into itself so as to be nothing else but the very standpoint or method of interiority. Time and again Jung speaks of “the human psyche,” even in passages where he precisely tries to point out that psychology falls between all academic stools, thereby making it easy to return not only to an anthropological basis of psychology, after all, but also to an understanding of psychology as a science devoted to a particular compartment of reality, the human being. This is all the more obvious in a statement which closes the paragraph from which I cited above the sentence, “… our specialized field, oddly enough, drives us to universality and to the complete overcoming of the specialist attitude …” ( CW 16 § 190 ). The statement reads, “The important thing is not the neurosis, but the man who has the neurosis. We have to set to work on the human being, and we must be able to do him justice as a human being.” Psychologically a fatal view. I agree, of course, that it is an advance over the conception of neurosis as an illness in the medical sense (where illness means an isolatable phenomenon, a foreign body as an “enemy” to be eliminated, “cut out” by means of surgery, “killed” by means of antibiotics, chemotherapy, or radiation) to move to neurosis as an integral part of the whole picture. But this move of Jung’s moves in the wrong direction, the direction of positivity, of the concretistically understood human being as the actual reality, as the carrier or substrate of neurosis and, by extension, of soul, and thus into externality. But for the psychologist, psychotherapist the human being is taboo, both in an ethical sense (I have no right to, as we might say, “domestic

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interference,” the interference in the internal affairs of another human being) and theoretically. As a psychologist I have to treat the patient’s neurosis as a self-contained psychological phenomenon that has everything it needs within itself. The soul, not the person, is what I have to focus on. The notion of “the human being” is not a psychological notion at all. Inasmuch as I am a psychologist the human being falls without the precinct of my vision, just as for the chemist, inasmuch as he is a chemist, there is no “human being,” no “flower,” no “Napoleon,” no “mind,” no “God”—not because he as person would not have access to such notions, but because his field systematically excludes them and exists only to the extent that this exclusion is total. The psychological phenomenon is psychological only to the extent that psychology has rid itself of the notion of a substrate altogether and therefore views phenomena in their absolute negativity, in the baselessness of their self-sufficiency. Instead of the move back to the safe anchor of “the human being” (which is the exit out of psychology), psychology needs the absolute-negative inwardization of a phenomenon (e.g., neurosis) into itself. By rejecting the anthropological prejudice and by canceling the idea of a delimited field of study and privileged psychological phenomena, I have shoveled the way clear for the idea of a psychological investigation of our technological civilization. Technological civilization is just as valid an object of psychology as are dreams, or rather more so, because most dreams belong to the opus parvum of personal, private experience and development, whereas in technological civilization the soul’s opus magnum continues.

THE SOUL IN THE REAL Having done away with the distinction between “the inner” and “the outer” as well as with the notion of any privileged object of study, I now find myself faced with the question whether there is any distinction or criterion left for psychology, or if we have to say that “anything goes,” so to speak. How is a psychological discussion of technological civilization different from one on the same subject from a general cultural-critical point of view? The main criterion we have already mentioned. It is the absolute-negative interiorization into itself of each phenomenon in question, through which interiorization it is construed as self-sufficient, uroboric. Since psychology cannot avail

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itself of any anchor in positive reality, since it has only come about through emancipating itself (and the phenomena it studies) from any external substrate, it cannot come to technological civilization from outside. “From outside” would mean to approach it the way we approach, for example, animals in a zoo, where we see each animal in the context of, first, our own human situation and, secondly, in comparison with all the other animals. We conceive them as particular things in the world. Psychologically I would call this approach an approach from the point of view of “the ego.” The psychological approach, the approach from the point of view of “the soul,” views phenomena from within. Owing to the absolute-negative inwardization of the phenomenon into itself, there is no outer reality any more that could provide the context for the discussion of the phenomenon. The latter, being construed as having everything within itself, even its own context, has become a world unto itself. It provides its own horizon within which it is to be apperceived. Using alchemical imagery, we could say that (in our case) technological civilization has been placed into the alchemical retort, which, as we know, is hermetically sealed: everything external is rigorously excluded. In this way having become our prime matter, it is for us, for the duration of our psychological investigation, the whole world. Nothing else exists. No other, nothing external. The psychological object is a true self.4 As one can see from my diction in the previous paragraphs, the inner-outer opposition that I tried to rid psychology of is still alive: “from outside” vs. “from within,” “externality” and “interiority” are the categories with which I work here. It emerges that psychology cannot do without this opposition. But this does not invalidate altogether our earlier efforts of overcoming this opposition, because “the inner” has itself become inwardized into itself and thus psychologized. It is no longer seen from without: in contrast to its own other. As that which is hermetically sealed in the retort, where the retort is the image of interiority, it has to be understood exclusively on its own terms, from within itself. It has lost its opposite (the external) as that in contrast to which it would be the inner. 4 Jung literalized, substantiated, and monopolized the general “self ” character of all psychological phenomena for the Self, the self in and of the human individual. He made out of a logical status a particular numinous content. This is a great handicap for us, because we now always have to reckon with these false associations when using the word “self.”

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But even in the retort, on the level of absolute-negative interiority, the inner-outer distinction returns once more. In alchemical parlance, our job as psychologists is to free from its imprisonment the spirit Mercurius imprisoned in the matter; in psychological language it is to detect the soul in the real. In other words, technological civilization is not to be viewed as fact, but as a place in which the Mercurius, the soul stirs, that Mercurius that is imprisoned by the empirical-factual apperception of the prime matter as a positivity, a thing in the world. The place of the distinction between different compartments is taken by the distinction between the matter and its inherent Mercurius, between the “from without” and the “from within” apperception of any given phenomenon. This alchemical imagery, however, still ensnares us in a picture thinking and thus in an external conception of true interiority. Images, despite being poetic, metaphorical, etc., nevertheless uphold the intactness of the medium of exteriority: spatial conception. The idea of the spirit Mercurius imprisoned in the matter and needing to be freed is a beautiful image, but what it could actually mean remains in the dark. We do not believe in Mercurius as a literally existing spirit, an entity. Paradoxically, the imaginal conception of the Mercurius imprisoned in matter holds the Mercurius, even if he should be released from his imprisonment, imprisoned within himself; the whole procedure of freeing him would be like opening a Russian doll only to find within it another one and so on. It will not be enough to try to free the spirit from matter, because he would still be imprisoned, only now in his own name and image. To really free Mercurius from matter, we have to free it from the obfuscating, inevitably reifying imaginal form in which it first appears, and that is to say we have to spell out what “spirit Mercurius” or “the soul of things, the soul of the real,” and what “freeing” mean.

THOUGHT The soul of the matter is the thought that animates it, the thought as whose external manifestation or embodiment the alchemical matter or the psychological phenomenon exists. As a self, the soul of the psychological phenomenon is a thought that thinks itself; it is, if I may once more repurpose the already cited Aristotelian concept, noêsis noêseôs, a self-thinking thought. Just as an animal or a human being

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from outside appears to be an entity, whereas from inside it is a process, the activity of life, so the psychological phenomenon may from outside appear as an empirical fact or a substance in the sense of alchemy, but in truth, from the point of view of soul, it is the thinking of a particular thought. Just as the animal stays alive only as long as it is strong enough to keep living, so the psychological phenomenon lasts only as long as the thought that it is keeps thinking itself. The moment when this thought has been completely thought out (exhausted), both up to its utmost logical conclusion and in all its ramifications, the phenomenon as which it manifested is over, has become obsolete. Its soul has gone out of it. There is nothing in it any more; it has lost its raison d’être, and what remains is at best its corpse, its lifeless material form. What else could “the spirit Mercurius imprisoned in matter” mean but the thought as whose actual thinking the prima materia (whatever it may be in each concrete case) is? And small wonder that the alchemists were absolutely frustrated by the evasiveness of ille fugax Mercurius, because through their imaginal style they themselves mystified him and kept him mystified, held him imprisoned in the occluding image form, the form of reification (a substance, an entity). To really free Mercurius from its imprisonment in matter can only mean to start oneself thinking the thought as whose thinking the phenomena are. This is what the papers collected in this volume try to do with respect to technology. Now the question can be answered what the “and” between the seemingly incompatible terms technology and soul in the title of this book could possibly mean. Inasmuch as every existing reality exists as and by virtue of the inherent real thought whose embodiment it is, technology, too, is an existing thought. “Technology and the soul,” rather than trying to bring two separate realities together, refers to the mercurial spirit or the soul a priori in technology, to the thought animating and driving it. Technology seen from within is a thought, but not a thought as a static idea, as something that could be stated in one sentence. We always have to keep in mind that the thought in the real is selfthinking, ongoing thought, i.e., the process of its thinking itself out. This inevitably involves our reflections in a historical thinking, and it becomes clear here, too, how right Jung was to state “that without history there can be no psychology” (MDR, p. 205). Our technological

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civilization is not just the isolated contemporary phenomenon as which it immediately appears. The contemporary phenomenon is the late result and form of manifestation of a thinking that had its origin millennia ago. To think this thought on our part, we have to go far back and retrace its inner logical genesis, i.e., its history. Geology can teach us a lesson. Mountains appear to us as having a solid, permanent being. But the geologist knows that they are in the status of becoming and disappearing, of constant flux, and that for example the Himalayas, now the mountain range with the highest mountain tops, were once an ocean floor that over millions of years was slowly pushed up by immense forces. The momentary appearance must not be isolated. Their genesis is an indispensable aspect of psychic phenomena. To do psychology one must have a great staying power.

THE DISDAINED Technology belongs to the alchemy of history and is part of the soul’s opus magnum. In it above all, we sense the heartbeat of the soul. The unlikely candidate is always the true locus of the soul. The lapis is by definition in via ejectus. It and the soul are not in where the vulgus psychologicus looks for them, namely in one’s “inner,” one’s dreams, in one’s self-realization, in numinous archetypal images, in the search for meaning and wholeness. All that is by no means disdainfully in via ejectus. It is very much “in,” and as such it is part of the ego’s longing for self-realization, self-gratification, and self-stabilization amidst the pressures of the modern world. It has the value of ideological programs, and the so-called unconscious is—of course absolutely unconsciously—all too readily doing the ego’s bidding. “And as Elijah stood there, the LORD passed by, and a mighty windstorm hit the mountain. It was such a terrible blast that the rocks were torn loose, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake there was a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire there was the sound of a gentle whisper” (1 Kings 19:10­ 12). It is not the emotionally impressive and spectacular where the soul resides. One needs a differentiated feeling function to be able to distinguish the petty and the great, the small dream and the great “dream,” the opus parvum and the opus magnum—between what serves the

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gratification “by the unconscious” of ego needs on the one hand and the mercurial spirit of the truly objective psyche on the other. One has to learn to hear the gentle whisper of the wind of history. All too often, having strong, vivid emotions is confused with the feeling function being in action. But as Jung rightly stressed, the feeling function is a sober, rational function and as such incompatible with emotions and wishes. “If you are adapted you need no emotion; an emotion is only an instinctive explosion which denotes that you have not been up to your task.” 5 To do psychology, you have to have abstracted from your own emotions, desires, programs, and even from your own thinking, to become able to dispassionately hear what the phenomena are saying and to let the thoughts as which they exist think themselves out,6 no matter where they will take you and without your butting in with your personal valuations and interests. This is a requirement of the ethics of psychology. Even in view of the atom bomb the psychologist cannot afford to react out of fright. He has to hold his place in front of whatever face “the soul in the real” may show him. He must be able to bear the truth. The popular reaction to possible insights according to the (usually unspoken) motto, “That cannot be true because if it were true it would be horrible,” has no place in a psychology that deserves its name. “The soul” is not only something nice, and harmless, as a romanticizing anima might have it. Especially vis-à-vis the nuclear bomb it would be very easy to lapse back into the mind-set rejected above, the one that privileges certain areas of life as relevant for the soul and excludes other areas or phenomena as absolutely inimical to soul. Here we can, however, be mindful of what Jung once said about psychotherapy. “One must no longer know, or believe to know, what is right and what is not right, in order not to exclude the richness of life, but one must turn one’s attention exclusively to what is real” (CW 11 § 530, trans. modified). Whether the nuclear bomb or other developments in our technological civilization are right or wrong (in whatever sense of these words, morally, politically, socially, etc.) is psychologically neither here nor there. The only thing that counts for the psychologist is that, for 5 C. G. Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934–1939, ed. James L. Jarrett, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 1497. 6 “… [T]he cold march of necessity in the thing itself ”—Hegel, Phenomonology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977), Preface ¶ 8.

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example, the bomb is real. Another time Jung warned against “the artificial sundering of true and false wisdom,” against “succumb[ing] to the saving delusion that this wisdom was good and that was bad” (CW 9i § 31). Again, the subjective valuations “true” and “false” are no criteria. Psychological truth, the psychologically true “wisdom” consists precisely in its real phenomenality. And Heidegger stated that “The turn into the open is one’s abstention from reading negatively that which is.”7 Inasmuch as the soul’s opus magnum always entails the highest soul values, it is clear that any psychological study of our technological civilization inevitably involves us in questions of the historically real religion of the Western world, Christianity. The thoughts in the real, this much should have become clear from the foregoing remarks, are never the thoughts of human persons. They are the self-thinking thoughts of the respective phenomena themselves, thoughts thought by an “objective thinking” that traditionally became explicit in the logical form of religious conceptions. The papers collected in this volumes reflect the status of my thinking reached at the time when they were written. I still stand by the basic arguments presented in them, although if I had to write them now they would not come out the same way. Occasionally there is a tone or diction or tendency in them that I cannot fully support any more. For example, in the paper on the Golden Calf story (“The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of God …,” Chapter 5) I sense an affect and a certain partisanship (for the image, for polytheism), the trace of a rather naive belief in an “original state” and of a to some extent still nostalgic attitude that is revealed in the discussion of the revolutionary changes described almost as a wish for some kind of return to earlier situations. During the early times when this paper and related ones were written, I obviously was still under the influence of the Jungian myth-cult and the imaginal and polytheistic bias of archetypal psychology. Also, I now feel that the somewhat utopian ending of this paper is out of place. I had obviously not fully achieved in those instances the abstraction from my own feelings and needs that I 7 Martin Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter?” in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Klostermann,1972), p. 279 (my translation).

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demanded above. Another point, the text presents the opposition between “the finite” and “the infinite,” “polytheism” and “monotheism” in rather undialectical terms. For such flaws I ask the reader’s forbearance. On the other hand, many ideas propounded even in the earlier papers included here already point clearly forward to positions central to my more recent work. Above all, despite my frequently semantically siding with the ancient mythic world and with “the image,” the syntactic style of the papers usually documents an unswerving concentration upon the thinking of the thoughts contained in the respective phenomena discussed. I divided the book into two parts. Part I contains papers revolving around the topic of the psychology of the nuclear bomb. During the 1980s I wrote a two-volume book in German on the psychoanalysis of the nuclear bomb and the mind of the Christian West, which presents one extended interpretation and analysis of this real object in the light of the whole history of Christianity and of Christianity in the light of the bomb, both against the backdrop of the earlier mythological and ritualistic mode of being-in-the-world. Most of the papers in Part I are chapters from this book adapted to paper or lecture form; others present more freely ideas from the general sphere of this book. Together, all the papers of this part make up only a fraction of the whole German book. And while they present major points made in it, they nevertheless do not give an adequate impression of the whole argument developed in it. The Part I papers discuss their respective topics mainly in the light of the first rupture in the development of our civilization, the rupture from “mythos” to “logos.” For the essays presented in Part II, all written at separate occasions, the elaboration of the psychological background and implications of this rupture is still important, but they also advance to a discussion of aspects of the newest stage of consciousness or civilization, the age of mediality (“the media”), which can be comprehended as the second phase of modernity, in which modernity, as it were, comes home to itself after the first phase of modernity (“industrial modernity”). In this first phase, modernity had still fundamentally misunderstood itself, trying to compensate for the deeply felt losses brought about by the second great rupture (the end of metaphysics and, concomitantly, the industrial revolution) by

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resorting to all sorts of utopian schemes (Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche) or, after the utopian hopes had been shattered by reality, especially World War I, by withdrawing to a scientific stance (e.g., Husserl) or a bit later to existentialism, if not to the literalism of totalitarian political schemes. To close this volume I add a small paper written in 2004. Because it comes from an entirely different context, it gives me the opportunity to leave behind the great, heavy topic of our technological civilization that this book is devoted to and, by way of a coda and mindful of the psychological difference, to return us to ourselves and the modest sphere of our personal lives. It contains at least a hint concerning the question how we as private individuals, with the psychology in the tradition of C. G. Jung in the back of our mind, can perhaps find an attitude with which to settle in the world at a time when the soul’s opus magnum seems to overturn most of our traditional values and expectations. May the ideas presented in this collection of essays stimulate further thought on these important matters in the reader! Wolfgang Giegerich July 2006

PART I

The Nuclear Bomb Papers

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CHAPTER ONE

Saving the Nuclear Bomb

L

et me admit right at the outset: “Saving the Nuclear Bomb” sounds perverse. For, after all, is it the nuclear bomb that is threatened and needs to be saved, or is it not much rather we, who have to be saved from its threat? To want to save the nuclear bomb means turning things upside down. This is how it looks at first glance. But let us not be too hasty. Perhaps there is a sense in which it is indeed the bomb that is threatened, so that it would be legitimate to try to rescue, preserve, and redeem it. Then, of course, “saving” could not stand for the unscrupulous production of nuclear weapons and for protecting them against any word of warning or call for moderation and reflection. “Saving” would have to mean something altogether different. That which threatens the bomb is our general frame of mind, the way we meet reality, especially when it is undesirable. It seems Western man has only two approaches to reality, two ways to deal with predicaments. The one approach is the call for the expert who, with his knowledge of the facts and his technological know-how has to find a way out, a method of how to get rid of the problem—how to cut the tumor out or bombard it with rays, how to dump poisonous waste safely, how to free us from crime, to exterminate insect pests or human enemy forces. The other approach besides the expert knowledge is the personal feeling reaction and the call for political action. We are for or against armament, abortion, evolution, or what have you; we demonstrate on the streets, sign petitions, protest with

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clenched fists, demand that this (or the opposite) be done. In neither case is the phenomenon that is causing us concern seen for what it is. The mind of the expert, to be sure, looks objectively at the facts, but only with a view to ridding us of the problem, to doing away with it. It is an exterminating, dumping frame of mind: pesticides, antibiotics, and the like are its trademark. But I want to stress: I am not just talking of the actual physical ridding us of problems, but much rather of the prior and more subtle extermination in our way of thinking about them, in the sense that unwelcome things are looked at exclusively as problems to be done away with. The same applies to the second, the pro-or-con approach to reality. Paradoxically, when we demonstrate let’s say for or against the bomb, the bomb itself is not the important thing, but what really counts and what we really demonstrate is our personal feelings about it, our wishes. We are displaying ourselves, talking more or less autistically about us, whereas the bomb, as a real phenomenon in its own right, is not much more than a peg for the manifestation of our emotions or opinions, our pro or con. So here too the real phenomenon is discarded, dumped. In fairy tales, when the hero or heroine is in distress, he or she often comes across a brook which murmurs something to them, a tree, a bird, the wind which gives some important piece of advice, a frog, a horse, a snake which demands some service. Animals and things were able to speak. Why do animals, trees, things not speak to us? Is it because such speaking belongs solely in the world of fairy tales, but not in the real world, solely in the age once upon a time, but not in the here and now? I do not think so. Nature speaking is not, or would not have to be, a mere fairytale motif, a miracle, an utterly unreal fiction. Things do speak even today, only with our problem-solving mentality, we do not hear, we refuse to listen. And of all things, it is particularly the nuclear bomb that is speaking to us today. Indeed, it is not merely murmuring like the fairytale brook or whispering like the wind, it is yelling, shrieking, louder and louder, becoming ever more extreme, so that we need more and more noise, 24-hour TV, disco music, the loudness of high feelings or, on the other hand, perhaps something like the deafening silence of meditation to block out the voice of reality. Because there is no ear to listen to the message the real things have to impart, reality may well have to work itself up to its last resort, to the din of a nuclear explosion— to at least make itself felt, if not heard.

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We really do not hear. We do not even know what hearing could possibly mean in this context. It is absolutely out of the question for us that such a thing as the bomb might have a message for us, could be a source of insight or even of wisdom. We know that things do not speak. They are dumb. Only man speaks and has an intelligence. Things, plants, animals are there to be used, to be disposed of. But the nuclear bomb is something so utterly incredible and terrible, that disposing of it one way or other just won’t do. You can’t get rid of something real. You could at best exchange one evil for another, usually worse evil. No matter whether we build more and better bombs, or, conversely, eliminate them all—the bomb itself as a reality, as a powerful idea would remain, and remain unseen. So saving the nuclear bomb has nothing to do with defending it against the peace movement, but it means a third way beyond the entire alternative of pro or con, war or peace. It means listening to its voice, seeing its face, acknowledging its reality, and releasing it into its own essence. It means saving it from our habitual throw-away mentality. The question is not how to dispose of the bomb, but where to pose it, where to find its legitimate place. I am here transferring the depth-psychological attitude toward the individual person’s symptom to the way of looking at the symptom of the body politic. C. G. Jung once said that in our “neurosis is hidden our best friend or enemy.”1 He did not just say “friend.” He said, “friend or enemy.” Put this way, friend and enemy cancel each other out like plus and minus, showing that the entire category of friend or enemy, pro or con, the perspective of our human likes and dislikes becomes irrelevant. What remains is “our best (friend or enemy),” our best, that is to say, the dignity of the real phenomenon itself, independent of, and prior to, our subjective valuation, a dignity even if the phenomenon is as painful as a neurotic symptom or as dangerous if not as evil as the nuclear bomb. “Saving” means restoring the dignity of things. Because of our centuries-long training in quelling the voice of reality, we are not right away in a position from where we could hear the nuclear bomb speak or see its face. We have to overcome long distances to get there. And all I can hope to do at this time is to move 1 I am quoting directly from the German original (GW 10 § 359) in my own translation, since the official translation in the Collected Works, by making the statements sound more ‘logical,’ loses the subtlety of the paradox expressed by Jung.

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us to a point where—if we are not too much out of breath—we can at least have a glimpse of its countenance, an inkling of its message. I will approach this point in a roundabout way, by leaving the bomb aside for the time being and turning first to another subject: nature. In former times, nature was a wilderness, surrounding man on all sides, infinitely superior and inexhaustible. Human settlement, by contrast, was merely a tiny island within it. Nowadays this relationship is increasingly being reversed. It is nature that is about to become insular and to withdraw into the “zoo” or into that expanded version of the zoo we call nature reserve, wildlife sanctuary or national park, whereas the world of civilized mankind is more and more becoming the all-encompassing framework. This is not merely a quantitative change, the spreading of habitation and civilization and the corresponding diminishment of virginal nature. It is something much more radical than that wilderness is merely being pushed back to a few remnants. This is only the measurable aspect of what has taken place. But along with this quantitative reduction of wild nature to a few islands, a less noticeable but nevertheless world-shaking qualitative change is going on: a reversal in the relationship of nature and man, and thus a fundamental transformation in the very notion of nature, in its ontological essence, in what “nature” means. It used to be inherent in the notion of nature that it is that which encompasses and bears our existence. Nature, that was Mother Earth, who brings forth and nourishes man and also takes him in again at his death. But what is nature today? She is no longer Mother, but rather man’s problem child. Now man is called upon to accept responsibility for nature, indeed to guarantee her survival: wildlife conservation, environmental protection. It is as if nature had become senile and helpless and now were utterly dependent on the care of her grown up children, or as if she were on welfare requiring our planning and support. Strictly speaking, wildlife conservation or nature protection is a contradiction in terms. For in the very moment that nature needs to be protected, it is no longer nature in the true sense, and thus it is precisely by way of the protection of nature that its ontological annihilation is taking place, nature’s denaturation. The change from the Great Mother to the problem child strikingly reveals the reversal that has taken place. Of course, you might say,

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nature needs protection only because we ruthlessly exploited the wilderness in the first place. But that we were able to do this is the very point: in former times, man could have committed the worst sin against nature without doing her any real harm, she would always have remained infinitely superior to him. But now the fate of nature herself is given into the hands of man. In this sense, it is now we who are superior to her and surround her from all sides. We can express this change also as a movement from one place or topos to another. In earlier times, the place of nature was the open expanse surrounding man. My word for nature when it is at this topos is “wilderness.” The other topos I term “zoo.” In the zoo, the animals that used to belong to the wild are now locked into cages, so that they cannot threaten us from without. Rather, we can now in all safety walk around them. If “zoo” is here understood not as an empirical locality, but rather as an ontological topos, a place in the imagination, then “zoo” means that topos at which wild nature is encircled by and embedded in the civilized world; zoo means that ontological place at which nature—quite unnaturally—has its essence in being the object of human care-taking, planning, and research. Thus we find the zoo in this sense even where there is no literal zoological garden, not even a nature reserve, but where animals can still be seen in the wild. For even these animals have long ago become the objects of the curiosity of television viewers or of the cameras of safari tourists and therefore they at bottom are once and for all animals of the zoo, fenced in by the bars of an imaginal cage that modern man carries with him in his mind even when he ventures into the last remains of virginal nature. And his camera is the outward token and replica of the imaginal chamber (“camera”) into which all nature is placed today. With every photograph we prove our power to capture nature in a box that we can carry around with us, the power to freeze it onto film. The same world-shaking change that happened to nature can also be observed with respect to history. Here too there is a reversal from a wide expanse or “wilderness” in which man found himself, to a tame interior, into which history is fenced. This interior is the museum, history’s equivalent of the zoo of nature. More and more the museum is becoming the place of history. Everything historical moves into the museum and turns into an antique. It is torn out of the “wilderness,” that is out of its living tradition and customary use, and is imprisoned

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in showcases, where we can safely walk around it. I say safely, for in former times the objects that we now find in the museum might, as it were, have “assaulted” us much as did certain wild animals. Let us take an altar piece as an example. In the museum, the painting is the dead object of the tourist’s aesthetic contemplation or curiosity. The same painting in its original place in the church a few hundred years ago would have “assaulted” the believer with its demand to bend his knees before it and cross himself in devotion. There, the picture was alive, it had a will of its own. Of course, just as with the “zoo,” the “museum” does not refer solely to the literal building or institution of that name, but is the term of an imaginal topos. For even cathedrals and entire medieval cities that on account of their size would not fit into a museum are nonetheless huge open air museums, and historical personages, events or movements, which, since they are immaterial, could not be shown in a museum, are being viewed with a museum frame of mind. Just as nature is to be protected, so the relics of history, when seen from the museum point of view, must be preserved and restored: protection of historical monuments. History too has been ontologically annihilated and denatured because it is deprived of its innermost nature, which was to be the wind of time. It has been reduced to a mass of antiques and factual knowledge about the past, a mass that has to be collected and protected by us. Here, too, man has taken over the responsibility for the historical and stands no longer in history, exposed to its wind. History has likewise become insular, so to speak, captured and contained in the museum, the history book, or in the documentary, not to mention in Disneyland. Fortunately, we can observe a little more closely the actual historical moment of the radical reversal from man’s embeddedness in something expansive surrounding him to a state where that which used to surround him has shrunk to a limited object now encircled by man. I want to show this in one small example, in the change from the fear exuding for 17th-century man from the terrors of the night, of thunderstorms, and of high mountains, to 18 th century man’s beginning fascination with the horrible. Way into the 17th century it was generally customary that every night before going to bed the head of the house would gather the entire household around him to say prayers for the night. Single people would sing their evening hymn

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in their bed chamber. We still have copies of the prayer and hymn books that people used then and that were produced and reprinted in millions of copies. They were true bestsellers of their age, which shows that they expressed and responded to the actual feelings of the vast majority of people. Now, the fact is that the texts of these evening prayers abound in descriptions of the horrors of the night. Some of them refer to actual, even if rather unlikely, dangers that might befall the innocent sleeper such as fire, theft, murder, or the violation of the virgin during her sleep. For the most part, however, they are monotonous clichés about totally unspecific dangers, the terror, awe and fear coming with the night, “black, sinister night.” As Richard Alewyn, who wrote about these fears, said, it is precisely the monotony of these cliché descriptions that is evidence of their authenticity. 2 Obviously these are fears of intangible dangers of the night that cannot be pinned down to anything empirical, fears of the imaginal or mythical horrors of the night. Similarly, the rugged mountains of the Alps caused sheer terror in the people of that age. The very same sights that today attract millions of tourists were then experienced as horrifying. Even courageous men would not venture into the “desolate and wayless wilderness of forests and mountains” without necessity. In the reports of travelers to Italy who had to cross the Alps, we read how horrorstricken they were at the sight of gorges and cliffs. A hundred years later the situation began to change as a result of the Enlightenment. I confine myself to one example, that I also owe to the paper by Alewyn. Jean Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher, describes in his autobiography that he loved to walk to his favorite place in the Savoyan Alps, a path at the edge of a ravine, where, secured by a railing, he could look down into the gorge in order “de gagner des vertiges tout à mon aise,” in order to procure the feeling of dizziness for himself at his ease, and he adds, “I love this whirling, provided that I am in safety.”3 Let us dwell for a moment on this image of Rousseau leaning on a railing and looking down into the gorge. What does this image tell 2 Richard Alewyn, “Die Lust an der Angst,” in Probleme und Gestalten: Essays (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1974), pp. 307-34. 3 “J’aime beaucoup ce tournoiement, pourvu que je sois en sûrety”—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvre Complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Bibliothèque de Pleiade, Librairie Gallimard, 1959), p. 173 (near the end of Book 4).

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us? What change has taken place here so that the same gorge that might have struck 17th century man with horror could now become thrilling? I said, the same gorge. Indeed, the Alps out there did not change. What changed was the ontological framework within which the same sight is seen and from which it receives its nature, its ontological quality and status. In the one case, in the earlier century, the ravine was, to be sure, just as limited as at the time of Rousseau. But obviously, it was not confined to being merely this one particular thing. Rather, it opened up and allowed you to see the abyss of being as such, the primordial void, the yawning chasm prior to all creation, cosmological Chaos. The one individual gorge was like a window through which all-encompassing wilderness was glaring at you and into your life, threatening to intrude into the insular human world of day, hope, and safety. You looked at this particular thing, the one ravine there, but what you saw in it was all around you, also behind your back and even in your own heart. And thus you were in it, your safety was only the borrowed security of a small boat on the ocean of being. It would have been impossible during that age to put a fence around the ravine, because despite its limited quantitative size, it was immense, endless, bottomless. Rousseau, on the other hand, is truly safe. As he is looking down into the gorge, he knows that the danger is only in front of him right there, whereas from all other sides he is secure. The gorge is not threatening him from behind, as it would have been in the earlier age. Rousseau lives in the state of salvation, we might say. And it is only because he is backed up by the fundamental security of the civilized world that he can without terror look at this particular instance of danger and even enjoy the thrill of it. If we imagine that Rousseau’s favorite place had been a round crater instead of a narrow ravine, he might have walked all round it. Or, if we transpose this scene into our time, we might imagine, on a nice summer Sunday, hundreds of tourists, each having the total safety of human civilization and rationality at their backs, standing all around and staring down into the spectacular depth. Rousseau was looking into the gorge all alone, but potentially it is mankind at large that now has surrounded the danger, and Rousseau is here just its one exchangeable representative. Here we can actually see the new ontological situation. The wild is no longer the open expanse all around us, but it is a small spot

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encircled by and embedded in human civilization. Now there is a railing. Now chaos can be fenced in, enclosed, captured behind the bars of a cage, bottled and encapsulated; and as such it can be used in small calculated doses within, and for the benefit of, the human world of ego-consciousness and rational civilization, as a stimulant and source of tourist excitement or spare time entertainment. The once infinite bottomless expanse of the wild, to which human existence was exposed and in which it was completely contained, has been shoved, as it were, from “out there” over Rousseau’s railing into the fenced-in area to be confined there. It is now within, incorporated and interiorized by man. The ravine has been narrowed down to a finite positive thing, an empirical object, a particular (a το′ δε τι , in Aristotelean terminology), when once it had been a topos, a world, the world of terror. And this terror has been taken away from the real ravine; it has ceased being an objective quality of reality—ontological, cosmological, or mythical—and turned into a mere human feeling, a subjective state in man, the dizziness or thrill in Rousseau or the pathological fear in the neurotic. Here we can witness the transition from an existence grounded in the imagination to an existence in positivism, in a world pieced together from things each locked into themselves, firmly encircled by the fence of the human, all-too-human. I spoke of the 17 th -century evening prayers. Night after night millions of people repeated the same statements of terror. We might think that this was a kind of collective anxiety neurosis or that these people were uncommonly fearful. But the opposite is the case. First, they were not talking about their own fears, but about the horrors of the night. Secondly, they were not running away in fear and trembling from any dangers, imagined or real, but on the contrary felt the need to daily evoke the terrors of night and to give to them a real presence in their lives. Their prayers actually were a devoted incantation, a conjuring up of images of horror. And with these images they went to bed. So what actually happened was that they bedded themselves in the terror of night. And precisely because of this, I think, they presumably had a sound sleep—as incredible as it may sound to our modern ears. For we have turned things outside in. We think that the beginning and foundation of existence must be safety, secure rationality, primal trust, love and peace and that all anxiety or feeling of insecurity or irrationality must certainly be due to some accident

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or mistake, a mother who did not love enough (or who loved too much), or some such thing. Terror, irrational chaos, bottomless depth cannot be the ground and the source of existence, they must certainly, we think, originate merely in some malfunction, error or sin within the already created world, within ourselves, our family constellation or the structure of human society. But, I submit, there is an immediate connection between the oftcited alienation and uprootedness of modern man and his belief that he must be embedded in security and salvation and not in the terrors of night. For here, human existence is burdened, and overburdened, with the task of being its own ground and thus is deprived of some Other in which it could be rooted. And conversely, I submit, it is when existence is embedded in terror, in the irrational bottomless depth of being, that man is made to feel at home on the earth. From here I would like to return to the nuclear bomb. When it was acknowledged that terror and wilderness surround us on all sides, this had the advantage that one could let go of one’s anxieties, fears, and insecurity. Certainly, they were there, but they were also released into the immense open expanse of the wild and did not have to be personally ours. When, however, we insist that the imaginal terror or the terror of the imaginal be confined in particular things and be fenced in within the all-surrounding security of the rational human world, then this has two consequences. On the one hand, all subjective feelings of anxiety will be locked into the personality, causing all kinds of neurotic conditions there. And on the other hand, the truly, objectively terrible will have to appear as an empirical, literal reality. In order to establish a truly safe and rational world as the foundation of existence, that is, in order to bring salvation to the world and to man, everything irrational had to be shoved one by one from the endless wilderness around us to an interior encircled by us. The labor and process of this moving the irrational from “out there” around us to “in here” is called science, scientific progress. It is the move from the imaginal to our positivistic reality. For just this could be the definition of the imaginal: to be the state of being “out there around us,” all over the place, and the definition of the positively real: to be the state of being “in here,” this one thing only, this problem. The more that irrational terror is captured in the safe container of some interior, behind a fence or in a shell or in a clearly defined “problem,” the more concentrated and

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literal, that is physical, the terror will become. More and more terror has to be packed into concrete things that we can handle according to our schemes, if the realm of freedom from the terror surrounding us is to be enlarged. The utmost result to date of this endeavor to create a world of salvation no longer embedded in and thus exposed to terror is the nuclear bomb, into the shell and behind the shell of which has been collected and concentrated all the terror that previously had been spread out all over the world. But in the nuclear bomb the reversal reverses itself and the repressed returns. For so much terror, so much irrationality has been crammed into the nuclear bomb that it is full to the bursting point. And even though it is a relatively small and safe thing at our disposal, it nevertheless threatens us again as if from without, inasmuch as it puts human existence as such, and indeed the existence of our entire planet, on the razor’s edge. It was the counterphobic crusade against the imaginal terror that itself produced the first literally existing terror— the very real possibility of an actual and total apocalypse. What is the bomb? It is the wild in its modern guise, our 20th­ century version of all-encompassing wilderness, its last remnant. Encapsulated, to be sure, into a tiny manageable shell, and tangible indeed, it is nonetheless the very wilderness of old in a different shape—not any more out there, i.e., in nature, but in here, i.e., in technology. Thus it is the only place left today where we can authentically house and deposit our anxiety. It is our last genuine and real connection to something bigger and more powerful than we. And what is the face staring at us from within the bomb? Ultimately, it is the face of the dark God, deus absconditus, mysterium tremendum, described in Exodus 23:27 and elsewhere as the true terrorist: terrorem meum mittam in praecursum tuum, I will send my terror before you. So, should we ban the bomb, get rid of it? Or make use of it as a weapon? In either case we would miss our chance. I think we should save it and neither try to destroy it nor to waste it in a one-time explosion, through which it would go up in smoke, and we along with it. I would suggest that we ground our existence in it, dwell near it, make our home in it. For in fact, it already is our home; our existence already is bedded on thousands of warheads. Therefore my suggestion to ground ourselves in the nuclear bomb is not as outrageous as it may sound. It merely amounts to tuning in to our reality, to acknowledging

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the embeddedness that already is, to putting our heart into what we (as mankind) have been and are doing anyway, whether we personally like it or not. We must stop fooling ourselves by thinking we could be against a thing, while at the same time producing it. And there must be an end to the counterphobic move, which brings forth precisely that from which it would free us. We have to realize that the nuclear bomb is not just a fluke of history, an unfortunate by-product of science, but that it is the epitome and culmination of science, the product of modern man’s highest and most sacred aspirations, his search for the ultimate forces of being, and for salvation. In the nuclear bomb is invested the soul of modern man, in it habemus animam nostram. An entire world, the most supreme, the utmost in the way of essence, substance, and worth has been packed into it. And only for this reason does the nuclear bomb have the power to annihilate the world. For if what is in it were vain and idle, it would not possess any reality, and thus could not do much harm. To modify a Latin saying: Nemo contra mundum nisi deus ipse. Nothing can destroy the world but God himself. I say this of course not to deny the destructive power of the seemingly man-made nuclear bomb, but to help us recognize what this destructive power of the bomb actually is. Are you suffering from the loss of meaning? Searching for a spiritual dimension? Wanting to reconnect to the imagination? Longing for a God, a fate, an unprogrammed future? Don’t go to India, nor back to classical or primitive mythology, nor off into drugs nor into yourself. Go to our reality, try the real thing: try the nuclear bomb. All the riches of the imaginal that we think we have lost are there, stuffed away and buried and hidden, but also preserved in its terror, waiting to be redeemed.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Nuclear Bomb as a

Psychological Reality

I

f we do not thoughtlessly repeat the phrase “The Nuclear Bomb as a Psychological Reality,” but allow what it says to come home to us, then it is somehow “impossible.” The nuclear bomb and the soul seem to be almost contradictions. The bomb on the one hand and psychological reality on the other may each independently be an acceptable topic, but the connecting “as” between them makes this title intolerable. Nevertheless, it is precisely this “as” which shall be our theme here. The at first undoubtedly disconcerting purpose of this paper is to contribute to the rescue of the nuclear bomb for the soul and to opening the soul for the nuclear bomb. I begin with a sad fact: The nuclear bomb exists, and we are stuck with it. No matter whether disarmament negotiations will succeed or not, we will never be able to return from our knowledge of the bomb and of our power to destroy the whole world back to a state of innocence, and therefore we can never be sure whether or not some crazy or evil person or state will sooner or later succumb to the temptation to put our knowledge of the bomb to use. So it is vital that the destructive potential be in some way defused, whereby it is of course not sufficient to defuse the actual bombs. Much more important would be to defuse our dangerous knowledge about the explosive potential of nature by somehow binding, integrating it. For the trouble with defused or dismantled bombs is that they can at any time be refused and newly constructed, and thus we would always be

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in the most precarious situation of having to hope that man’s soundness of reason, his goodwill and sense of moral responsibility will not break down. It is relatively easy to defuse the bombs technically. But how to bind their destructive power in such a way that the existence of mankind is not dependent on the contingencies and vicissitudes of our reasonable and peace-loving behavior is an unanswered question. There is one fundamental obstacle that makes it impossible for the time being to find an answer. This obstacle is that we live not in one reality, but in two separate ones. The nuclear bomb, e.g., is, to begin with, a physical, technical object for us. How to construct, repair, defuse or ignite it, how to finance it, where to position it and what diplomatic and strategic plans to formulate for its use is the domain of the technicians in the widest sense of the word including economists, politicians, military men. When psychologists, on the other hand, view the bomb they deal solely with questions such as which repressed complexes made it possible in the first place to invent such an absolutely crazy thing as the bomb, which threatens not only the enemy, but us all. Or the questions of how to deal with our fears of the bomb and with our projected enemy imagoes. The technical object thus may be caused by psychological factors in us, and may in return affect the soul by giving it nightmares, but it is not itself anything psychological. Only my fear of it is psychological, not the bomb itself. It remains outside of my inner reality as an external physical reality. So we can say that the psyche, the field of our human motivations, emotions, imaginings and behavior, has the bomb outside of itself as does the bomb have the soul outside of itself. This condition of a split of reality into two realities—one physical and technical and irrevocably non-psychological, one psychological and having the physical object irrevocably outside of itself—can itself be subjected to psychological reflection. It then appears as a most critical condition, as a split of consciousness, as a neurotic dissociation. In view of one and the same object, modern man has, as it were, two separate compartments at his disposal to organize his view of its reality as a whole. The one aspect of phenomena (the fears and hopes they cause, the moral obligation they impose on us and the like) is always placed in one compartment, and the other “external” aspect of the same

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phenomena into the other, so that the two aspects can never truly meet. To be sure, our worldview allows causal connections to run back and forth between the contents of the two compartments, but my fear of the nuclear bomb and the physical reality of this bomb nevertheless remain each in its own compartment. Here you might immediately object that we can hardly speak of two compartments that we keep apart, but that there indeed exist two separate realities. It is a simple fact that fear is something internal, psychological, subjective in me, and the bomb something technical out there. To this I reply, surely, this is indeed true, but, and now comes the crucial point, it is only true for the Christian West, and even there only for the modern age. At no time before and in no other part of the world has reality been split apart in this manner. Not in China, not with the so-called Primitives, not in ancient Greece, to mention just three quite different examples. If the primitive looked at his carved fetish, then this was not an exclusively man-made physical object for him that may have had certain effects on his soul, and, on the other hand, this effect was not a mere intrapsychic emotion. Rather, the real, “external” fetish was itself animated and alive. For the Greeks there was no juxtaposition of physics and 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. Thus if we say that psyche and the objective external world are indeed two separate realities, this does not mean that the separation is a fact of nature, but that it is a product of history and is subject to the conditions of the history of our soul. The historical relativity of this seemingly absolute truth must be made conscious by means of critical reflection. For us it is true that there are indeed two realities, because our consciousness has, long prior to our own thinking and perceiving, been split into those two compartments and because we, that is to say Western mankind, are residing within a neurosis. And perhaps there has only been this extreme technological development toward the nuclear bomb because technology has been split from the soul, and the soul, as the exclusively internal reality, had been split off from external reality so that the external world could undergo a development without any inherent restrictions or constraints.

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As long as the two worlds are juxtaposed, we remain fundamentally threatened because all constraints have to be imposed from outside, by us, by our morality and well-meaning. But such imposed constraints will never be able to reach and affect the inner nature of the bomb and the explosive potential itself. The bomb, whether as factual object or as an idea, will remain untamed and a constant temptation to finally try it out, a temptation requiring tremendous efforts of the will to withstand. This most unsatisfactory condition can only be hoped to change if first the split dividing the psychological from the physical can be eliminated and if a state is reached 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. To allow us to understand this split more deeply and to move us a little closer to such a fusion of the psychological and the external is the purpose of the following reflections. During the early Christian centuries, one tradition of thought held that woman did not have a soul. Mulier non habet animam. Nobody today would seriously deny woman’s soul. We find this idea preposterous. And in fact, it is frequently thought today that if there is indeed a difference between the sexes regarding soul, then the greater affinity to soul must be ascribed to women, just as soulfulness tends to be understood as a feminine rather than a masculine quality. But it would be a mistake to assume that because we think this way we had overcome the ancient tradition that declared woman devoid of soul. We overlook that we use the same thought pattern, with the only difference that there has been a shift from woman to external reality as a whole. Of course, we do not say, woman has no soul. But we say, external reality non habet animam, technology has no soul, technical objects are soulless. Only people have souls, only humans can be ensouled. The parallelism between the thesis, “woman has no soul,” and the thesis, “the technical world has no soul” is not a merely accidental and formal one, but reveals a genuine connection. Both are an expression of the same stance, the same intellectual tradition. Both are informed by an archetypal fantasy, i.e., a pattern of thought that prior to any particular act of thinking and prior to any particular contents has long laid out the general course and structure that our

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thought must follow or comply with. The archetypal fantasy at work in the ideas at hand can be called “Manichean,” in a loose sense. It is the vision of the world as being torn apart by a fundamental, inevitable opposition. On the one hand the ‘upper’ world of spirit, of light and the good, on the other the ‘lower’ totally corrupted, totally evil world of matter, of the body, the feminine. This thought pattern still prevails undiminished today, even though it exerts its influence in a completely new shape. We no longer project the opposites onto the great mythical-metaphysical powers Spirit and Matter. Metaphysical ideas generally do not capture our imagination any more, they seem unreal and do not touch or move us, whereas there was a time when metaphysical differences even led to wars. Our thinking prefers ‘concrete’ and ‘practical’ problems. But this does by no means imply that the metaphysical opposites Spirit and Matter had just disappeared. Today, they are simply immersed into the medium of the earthly or concrete. The place of Spirit and Matter is now taken by nature on the one hand and technology on the other. The “natural” is the present-day representative of what once was the principle of Spirit, for the natural is—no matter whether we are conscious of it or not—regarded as original purity, ultimately as God’s unadulterated creation, pervaded by his spirit. Nature is, from the point of view of the objective psyche, no longer Mother Earth, female deity, mud and blood, giving birth and devouring. In truth, but in secret, it today has logos character and is of a spiritual nature, idea and ideal of the primal, the pure and true, the world before the Fall, as it was conceived in God’s infinite intelligence. Nature had to have this quality ever since it was turned into the creation of the Christian God, who is absolute mind. Likewise, nature means a warm sentiment for the countryside and deep emotions at the sight of its grandeur for us, so it is regarded as soulful, since soul implies first of all feeling for modern man. Technology (above all the nuclear bomb), by contrast, is that realm that in our time fulfills the other half of this archetypal pattern and must carry for us the stigma of the corrupt, evil world of matter, of the body, of darkness and of the feminine. After all, technology is what is responsible for the destruction of the environment and the rationalization of life, and the nuclear bomb in particular is thought of as the expression of our sin, as evil incorporated. Between

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nature and the invention of technology there is for our feeling a fundamental Fall. Oddly, the archetypal fantasy of the corrupted world and the world of light today employs the idea of the opposition of the patriarchal and the matriarchal, of one-sided male rationality versus feminine values. Since this idea after all aims for a revaluation of the feminine, it looks at first glance as if all that was condemned in Manicheism—the lower fallen world of the body and the feminine— were freed here from this very condemnation, whereas the formerly upper world of one-sided male rationality were relativized and lowered. But today’s popular contrast of the patriarchal and the matriarchal can easily be seen through as a new version of Manichean thinking— a new version which additionally has the advantage of being disguised as the opposite of itself, and thus can more easily be kept unconscious. For if we are for nature, for biologically grown food products, spontaneity, body work and against the patriarchal, achievementoriented mindset, then this seems proof enough for our having renounced the Manichean emphasis on the pure realm of spirit and contempt for the earth. But this is only what it looks like. For first of all it does not matter which of the two poles of the dualism is on top and which one below. It suffices that even if the contrast were turned upside down, the same dualistic pattern would still prevail, including the condemnation of the one pole and the praise for the other. Secondly, however, the dualism has not been turned upside down, but only renamed. Today as before, Spirit or Mind is what is good, and Matter is what is evil, the only difference being that unexpectedly Spirit is today supposed to be found in the “unspoiled” world of the “primitives,” in the “feminine” values of closeness to nature and spontaneity, of emotionality and body sensitivity, whereas the evil world of matter and of the feminine paradoxically takes on the trade name of the “patriarchal.” For it is the “patriarchal” that gave rise to science and technology, and as we said, technology is the guise in which the mythical idea of dark, feminine Matter is given to us today. Technology is “materialistic,” because according to general consensus it is materialistic and soulless to set one’s heart on television sets, refrigerators, cars, computers and all the other technical gadgets. Technology is materialistic because as part of the capitalistic system

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with its advertising and its hunger for growth rates it serves the greed for profit and is under the charge of Mammon. But if it is materialistic, then it belongs archetypally into the realm of mater, the Great Mother, as much as it may empirically have been produced by men, may require rational thinking, and may lead to the rationalization of the production process in factories. The truly “matriarchal”—the world under the control of the Great Mother—simply is no longer the world of green earth, of plant growth, even if we still act as if it were, and the Great Mother herself is no longer the mistress of the animals (in a biological sense). She has long moved out of nature and the bodily realm. Today the Great Mother rules in technology and over economic “growth.” It is not without significance that factories and other industrial works are termed “plants,” just as there is hardly a difference between the words “produce” for fruits and vegetables and “products” for what is manufactured in industries. The archetypal fantasy that prevails here and that informs us about the psychological place of the entire world of industry is evident: it is the sphere of the vegetation goddess, the mistress of the Earth. That the sphere of technology is truly the modern form of the feminine, earthly, bodily, becomes fully apparent when we realize that it gets its full share of the Manichean condemnation of the body as the corrupt and evil. Just as woman was once blamed for the bodily existence and sensuality was projected upon her and she was regarded as vas iniquitatum, as vessel of sin, so technology is for us the source of a black substantiality and of an absolute evil: of pollutants, smog, poisonous waste, atomic rays and all kinds of contamination. These are the literal realization of black sin, which was once given only in the mode of a spiritual or mythical reality. It is as if the idea of corrupt matter could not rest until the absolutely harmful had factually and literally received an objective, concrete presence in our world so that the position of evil matter would be occupied by a visible and obvious symbol. Of course, if generally in our age technology is ascribed to patriarchal thinking; if today the idea of the hypertrophic patriarchal and the dreadfully neglected matriarchal is common talk and arouses the feelings of the public, then one might on the basis of this general consensus assume that with this idea a simple truth must have been discovered. But for an archetypal, i.e., for a critical psychology, this looks very

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different. The fact that the cliché of the male-female or patriarchalmatriarchal contrast is that common and widespread is, from a psychological point of view, suspicious in itself. It gives the impression that an archetypal collective thought pattern, a mythical idea—the Manichean vision of the world that we have been talking about—has taken hold of consciousness and obscures the free, unprejudiced perception of the phenomena themselves. Our thinking is, so it seems, occupied and put into service by this mythical pattern so that we are compelled to measure all kinds of historical and present-day phenomena time and again with the same old yardstick and to take them prisoner for this modern myth of ours. It is important to be conscious of the power that this archetypal thought pattern has over us. As so often, it takes the eye of the poet to see through the superficial aspect to the mythic image and by the same token to recognize in technology the new form of the feminine (in a mythicpsychological, not a biological sense!), to recognize that in the technical products the modern version of the anima has taken shape. I will present one example for this. The Flemish-French writer Huysmans has the hero of his 1884 novel A rebours (“Against the Grain”) say that nature has been superseded and is in her dotage. Why, take the one of all her works which is held to be the most exquisite, the one of all her creations whose beauty is by general consent deemed the most original and most perfect,—woman to wit, have not men, by their own unaided effort, manufactured a living, yet artificial organism that is every whit her match from the point of view of plastic beauty? Does there exist in this world of ours a being, conceived in the joys of fornication and brought to birth amid the pangs of motherhood, the model, the type of which is more dazzlingly, more superbly beautiful than that of the two locomotives lately adopted for service on the Northern Railroad of France? One, the Crampton, an adorable blonde, shrill-voiced, slender-waisted, with her glittering corset of polished brass, her supple, catlike grace, a fair and fascinating blonde, the perfection of whose charms is almost terrifying when, stiffening her muscles of steel, pouring the sweat of steam down her hot flanks, she sets revolving the puissant circle of her elegant wheels and darts forth a living thing at the head of the fast express or racing seaside special!

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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 dishevelled mane of black eddying smoke, with her six pairs of low, coupled wheels, what overwhelming power when shaking the very earth, she takes in tow, slowly, deliberately, the ponderous train of goods waggons. Of a certainty, among women, frail, fairskinned beauties or majestic, brown-locked charmers, no such consummate types of dainty slimness and of terrifying force are to be found ….”1

Huysmans does not merely perceive in technology the patriarchal and the rational. Nay, for his poetic and phenomenological eye technology is woman, wild beast, and he is far from disparaging this female and to deny her soul according to the old motto, mulier non habet animam or according to the version prevalant today, “technology is soulless.” Quite to the contrary. What he presents is an image of the anima herself in two of her numerous possible shapes. Neither does he speak for or against technology; he merely shows its 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. This is not “merely” a “literary figure,” a “metaphor,” originating from “poetic licence.” It is a very strict observation accurately reflecting reality. The only difference to the customary external view of technology is that here it is seen from within, our glance penetrating to the psychological image. C. G. Jung also saw that there has indeed been a shift on the part of the anima from nature to technology. 2 He says that the alchemical Christ-lapis parallel had had the effect of “channelling the religious numen into physical nature and ultimately into matter itself, which in its turn had the chance to become a selfsubsistent ‘metaphysical’ principle” (CW 14 § 150). I would say: to become the place and carrier of the objective psyche. Jung also points to a decisive change in unconscious symbolism: “Nowadays animals, dragons, and other living creatures are readily replaced in dreams by 1 J. K. Huysmans, Against the Grain, with an Introduction by Havelock Ellis (New York: Illustrated Editions Company, 1931), p. 104f. I am indebted to James Hillman who kindly pointed out this passage to me. 2 Wolfgang Giegerich, “Das Begräbnis der Seele in die technische Zivilisation,” Eranos 52-1983 (now as “The Burial of the Soul in Technological Civilization,” Chapter 8 in the present volume).

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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, clattering monsters ….”3 You may have heard of a psychotherpeutic method called sandplay, developed by Dora Kalff. In a sandtray of a certain size the patient in the analytic hour has to form a scene by shaping the sand in any way he pleases and by placing toy figures into it. He will not have been given a theme to create, but is told to follow the promptings of his imaginings and inner needs. In this way the most variegated sand pictures are produced. One person will perhaps fill the entire sandtray with water until only a small cone-shaped island rises above the surface. On this island he places a small boy. This picture might, e.g., display the psychological condition of an ego-consciousness threatened by the waves of the unconscious and barely capable of maintaining itself. Another person may construct a high wall down the middle of the sandtray, and to the right of this wall he meticuously levels the sand and places a few objects on it in geometric order, whereas to the left he creates a thoroughly chaotic situation. In this we might recognize an obvious self-manifestation of 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. These two examples are to give you at least a rough idea of the therapeutic sandplay. I would like to use the idea of the sandplay as an analogy that is to help us to overcome that thought pattern which forces us to juxtapose the soul as the inner reality against an external reality conceived as soul-less. I suggest that we try to look at the world of technical objects, of industry and of the economy as if they were a gigantic sandplay picture, a sand picture that has not been created by the individual scientists, technicians and industrial managers of history out of their personal inner needs, but one in which the collective 3

Letters 2, April 23, 1949, to Christian Stamm, pp. xlvi f. My italics.

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unconscious or the objective psyche of Western mankind tried to express itself. The sandtray in which this sandplay takes place would not have the dimensions of 50 by 30 inches, and the figures to be introduced into the play would not be toy figures on a shelf. Rather, this would be a play in which the “sand” is the whole wide world and in which the figures are real, living people, we ourselves and mankind at large. All of modern history would then be, as it were, one single therapy session in which Western man has worked and is still working on the collective sand picture. Correspondingly, one could see the worlds of other civilizations and other ages as their differing sand pictures. If, e.g., you look at the picture created by the primitives, then you find a social system of marriage classes with strict taboos and complex rules, you will find houses for the men’s gatherings, masks and totem poles, bull-roarers, tattooing, animal sacrifices and what not. If you look at the sand picture of the Greeks, you find splendid temples, the poetry of Homer, the Greek Tragedy, the difference between free men and slaves, the institution of pederasty, the polis as the form of political unity, whereas, quite different again, the medieval sand picture is characterized by the division of power between emperor and pope, by knighthood, monasticism, trade guilds, by Gothic cathedrals and so forth. If however you look at our sand picture you find in it factories, conveyor belts, computers, paperbacks, quartz watches, nuclear bombs, social security, human rights and so on. No sandplay, whether in psychotherapy or in history can be called “wrong” as long as those playing do not betray the inner necessities of their picture, i.e., as long as they do not cheat. It is not “wrong” to depict the worlds of order and chaos in pure concentration and separated by a wall, even though it may be problematic or neurotic. The therapist could not be “against” such a picture and should not try to intervene and by way of setting things “right” advise the patient to tear down the wall separating the two realms. To the contrary, this picture is quite right and 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

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it can move and in which it can feel at home. This alone will get things moving in him. The same applies to our collective sand picture too. In it, modern man has not built temples like the Greeks nor cathedrals like in the Middle Ages—it is obvious that such would be inconceivable in the psychological situation of modernity. Rather, Western man’s psychic energy flowed into the production of factories, machines, computers, weapons and also of the nuclear bomb. The scene depicted in this way is, to be sure, most dangerous, highly explosive, but this does not at all mean that this picture, including the bomb, would be “wrong,” as long as we are willing to look at it not only politically and morally, but truly psychologically. No, psychologically and therapeutically the nuclear bomb obviously is a central symbol of our, the modern 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. Certainly, the nuclear bomb is a terrible threat, but it is also a container, a receptacle for the dangerous condition of the modern collective unconscious. And it would be unimaginable what would happen psychologically if we did not have at least this container, as insufficient as it may be, for the explosives in the collective psyche. As this duality of threat and containing vessel the bomb is, just as C. G. Jung once said of the neurosis, “our best enemy or friend” and something eminently therapeutic, perhaps even our only chance. For by mirroring our unconscious, i.e. hidden, condition, it alone can help us to an awareness of what tremendous energies must have been unleashed in the collective psyche and how charged the latter must be. Without the bomb we could continue for good to stay in our illusions and would not have to wake up to our reality. Just as the religious fervor of the Middle Ages demanded cathedrals so that there would be a vessel into which it could flow, so too, it seems, does the unconscious psyche of modern man demand something like the nuclear bomb in order to have a visible equivalent and containment for a soul condition that is obviously highly explosive. The sand picture of the psychotherapeutic session is an external, material reality, and yet it is not anything merely external. It is also, even primarily, something psychological. The medieval cathedral is

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a technical work, but nobody would think to say that it is nothing but a technical object. We all know that it is much rather something essentially religious and symbolic and the expression of the medieval soul. The same is true for the nuclear bomb. It is constructed by technicians, but this does not at all mean that it is something exclusively technical. Maybe it is so difficult for us to see this only because we do not see it from the distance of centuries as with the cathedral, secondly because it is a terrible, not an inviting symbol, and thirdly because it does not openly reveal its religious and symbolic character. In the case of the cathedral, the religious purpose is obvious and explicit. In the case of the bomb it is present just the same, but concealed. Like the cathedral, it is first of an imaginal and psychological nature and only then also a technical object. It is a work of the poetry (poiesis) of the soul. The only difference is that our soul does no longer flow into the beauty of Greek statues of gods or into the deep, intensive devotion of Gothic representations of the Virgin Mary, but it takes the shape of stylish cars, jets, moon rockets, of sophisticated microchips and radar screens, and instead of marble, bronze or oil paints, it makes use of glass fibers, nylon, silicon and uranium as its medium, in order to correspond to a fundamentally changed psychological reality. Thus the world of technology does not have to be understood as a soulless external reality that at best is interacting with the psychological inner world. It could rather be a psychological phenomenon in its own right: the picture of the soul of modern man and his collective unconscious. The actual unconscious would then not only be in us, in man’s interior, it would also be in our real world out there as it has been depicted in our “sandplay” in accordance with the inner needs and promptings of our soul. And the only question would be what attitude to take towards our soul picture, how to deal with it. It can be that if we have created a sand picture or have had a dream we do not at all like the whole picture or one element of it. It could, e.g., be most embarrassing. In this situation there are several alternative ways of reacting. We can eliminate the embarrassing element from the picture or in therapy suppress the objectional dream scene when reporting the dream and act as if the picture or the dream were complete without this part. The disturbing half of the sand picture is declared

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as not belonging. Only the harmless right half of the picture, e.g., is now considered to be the actual picture. Of course this is cheating. We would just be fooling ourselves without changing the real situation in the least. But in the same manner one could also react to the bomb. Because it is so inhuman you could say, it does not belong to our sand picture. It is not the gloomy element in our picture that is just as much part of it as the light touches, but it is a mistake, an error in the construction of the picture. Our actual picture only includes the dignity of man, democratic freedom, prosperity and education for all, etc., but of course not poisonous waste, smog, nuclear bombs, slums and totalitarian regimes. However, could it not be that the picture truly created by us is the togetherness of “love of thy neighbor” and the nuclear bomb, the togetherness of democratic freedom and armament, of humanism and exploitation, in other words that in this picture the nuclear bomb would be just as “right” as our humanism, and that the latter would only be true to the extent that the bomb is true too? The philosopher Hegel said that truth lies in the whole, and this is correct at least in the case of a picture or a work of art. If one element, the nuclear bomb, is wished away from our sand picture, then inevitably all other elements too, indeed this picture as a whole, will no longer be true. If in a picture you cannot have the desirable aspects without the painful ones and the latter not without the former, you might perhaps get the idea that it would be best to wipe out the entire sand picture and start all over again from scratch, creating a fundamentally new picture in which there is no need for an embarrassing or terrible element to begin with. But the perhaps much more harmonious second picture would not change the fact that the first picture was exactly as it was, including the embarrassing element. The psychological reality of the first picture is not really undone by wiping it out and creating a new one. It would only have become invisible to us, without however becoming any less real. We know this approach as utopian thinking, the wish for a total reform of society, for a return to nature or to any other new beginning, history to date in its entirety being condemned as a wrong development. As a psychotherapist I am not happy with either possibility, for both amount to a denial and repression. As a therapist, I do not have

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any knowledge about what a particular sand picture ought to look like. I rather try to see how it is and to work with what it actually contains, be it beautiful or ugly, delightful or terrible. The work of therapy can perhaps be best imagined in terms of the alchemical opus. Alchemy means work on the transformation of whatever substances are given. In this sense, what I mean is not a mere conservation or mending of an existing bad situation. It is certainly important that things change. But the question is how. If we follow alchemical thinking, everything that is part of our picture must be put into one alchemical vessel, as it were, so that the outrage of the nuclear bomb does no longer remain beside our noble ideals such as human dignity, freedom of personal development and purity of the air, etc., but so that the outrageous and the noble touch each other, are cooked together and permeate one another. From this a new picture might originate, but this would not be, as in the case of utopian thinking, an absolute new beginning. It would be the same old picture, only in a new shape. All its ingredients would still be there, even those that the nuclear bomb is made of. It would be a transformation of the picture from within. We cannot escape from the sand picture of our history, nor can we eliminate within our sand picture the terrible element. But it seems to me that the nuclear bomb is by no means itself the actual pathological problem. Much more pathological than the bomb is the splitting off of the idealistic half of our sand picture from the terrible half. In order to bring it down to a rather crude formula, the actual pathology consists in our keeping our humanitarian Christian consciousness and the nuclear bomb apart from each other in two separate compartments instead of letting them clash as the ingredients of one alchemical vessel, the components of our one mental reality, so that they could dissolve each other. What is most precarious is that we disown one aspect of the sand picture built by us as if it were an illegitimate child and disparage it as a bastard, in other words that we do not recognize it as our picture that makes the unconscious truth about ourselves visible for us. We are working at this picture, but then we contemptuously turn our backs on it and do not want to know about it, whereas it is the very purpose of sand pictures to tell us something about our hidden psychological condition, so that we can allow the new contents pushing to the fore from within the sand picture to become part of our conscious life.

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That we disown our sand picture is revealed in our conceiving the nuclear bomb only as a technical external reality to which we have to react politically, morally and humanistically as to a literal armament and power problem. It shows in our refusing to also see it psychologically, i.e. as a soul image, as mythical figure and anima(l)­ like creature. This of course has the counter-productive result that our own attitude remains hardened by being fixated in the power complex and that technical reality will continue to remain deprived of the influx of heart and imagination that it so urgently needs. How are the external power structures materialized in the institutions of society and in 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 external reality and animate it if we do not see the image hidden in it? He who wants to have an expert understanding of the technical side of the nuclear bomb has to undergo a lengthy training in higher mathematics, in nuclear physics and engineering. But whoever wants to have his say in the matter of the psychological and moral aspect of the bomb only seems to need his conscience and a few categories such as “good and evil,” “patriarchal and matriarchal,” “repressed aggressions” and “projection of enemy imagoes.” On the one, the technical side, the highest differentiation and professionalism, on the other, the psychological or ethical side, a cocktail party conversation level and a decided amateur status. Is it not frightening that such an extremely complex and sophisticated reality, in which the labor and ingenuity of centuries are invested, is met by such a simplistic frame of mind in us? It is as if we had a craftsman of the Middle Ages with his crude tools repair a computer, or a child be the pilot of an airplane. Something is obviously wrong here. The level of psychological and moral understanding surely should correspond to the level of differentiation reached in science and technology. The right to have a say in the psychological or moral evaluation of our situation would have to be acquired through just as differentiated a training in this area and by just as serious a concentration of the mind as is the right to a say in modern physics. Why is this not the case? In this disconnection of the mental attitude from technical reality, the split of the one world into two

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realities (on the one hand objective nature studied by the sciences, and on the other hand our subjective attitudes and behavior studied in the fields of psychology and ethics) shows especially painfully. Because of this dissociation, our consciousness can obstinately insist on staying at a naïve “medieval” level and on approaching this absolutely incredible, unheard of reality of the nuclear bomb with such ridiculously incommensurable categories as good and evil, war and peace, enemy imago and sorcerer’s apprentice. It can refuse to go along with the changes in the objective psyche, i.e., with the technological changes, and to be truly affected and transformed by the fundamental explosion of all our traditional views and expectations during modernity. This is our main problem. The nuclear bomb by itself is comparatively harmless. Can we really think that the challenge posed by the nuclear bomb can be met by our burdening reality with the task of adapting to the ideals of our ego? Or is it not we, today’s mankind, who have to step by step 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 this unheard of situation necessitating our transformation 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. 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 it 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. Indeed, we feel

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that our well-meaning consciousness must militantly defend the old views and values as an inner possession against the objective facts established by science. But the results of science do have to do with our psyche. We belong to this change as to our sand picture, to our hidden truth. This change is such a fundamental event in the history of the soul that it must no longer be kept from our consciousness. All our faculties must concentrate on slowly bringing our mode of existence more and more into correspondence with the sand picture which has long been before our eyes, but has been rejected and denied by us, its builders. 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.

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CHAPTER THREE

The Significance of Our Nuclear

Predicament for Analytical Psychology

and of Analytical Psychology for

Our Nuclear Predicament

J

ung’s psychological ideas have been with us for more than eighty years. The greater our distance in time to his Analytical Psychology is becoming, the more it becomes truly historical for us. This entails the great advantage over against first generation Jungians that we are perhaps a little freer both from the narrowly partisan involvement in the controversies of the early depth-psychological movement and from a dogmatic approach to Jung’s statements. A dogmatic reading gets stuck in the literal message of a given statement and in the question of whether it is true or false. The dogmatic mind wants something safe and reliable, a doctrine to cling to. Dogmatism ultimately derives from a “biological” need of the soul, the need for the self-preservation (or survival) of the ego in its present constitution. As we gain historical distance from Jung, however, we no longer need to invest our ego needs in, or project them on, Jung’s teachings to the same extent that this necessarily happens as long as a new theory is in the stage of its first development and thus to some extent revolutionary with respect to the prevailing mind of the age. Such is the gift of historicity to us. Historicity allows us to view our own intellectual tradition more dispassionately and, what is more important, by doing so it frees us at the same time to apply a psychological approach to Analytical Psychology itself.

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Thus, when we look at Jung’s work now, our first concern no longer has to be the question what exactly Jung taught and what he actually meant with his theses and how they can be proven. We now can ask what inspired Jung’s thought, regardless of whether it is “true” or not (in whatever sense the word “true” may have to be understood here). By what vision was the origin and development of Jung’s Analytical Psychology driven, what were the psyche’s archetypal fantasies or imaginal needs that made him propose the central ideas and arguments of his theory that he did? In order to get some idea about the intellectual needs Analytical Psychology is driven by, we have to look, within the limits of the theme of this paper, at five main motives or moves that give Jung’s psychological thinking its thrust: (a) the “final” or synthetic orientation, (b) the revaluation of neurosis as psychologically legitimate and therapeutic, (c) the interest in individuation, (d) the transcendence of the personalistic limitations of psychology towards the idea of a transpersonal psyche, and (e) the critical self-reflection of psychology. I will say a few words on each of these points, but only inasmuch as they have a bearing on my later remarks on the psychology of the Bomb. We have to see these five points dynamically as moves made by Jung, rather than as static theses, for only then does the imaginal impulse behind or in them become visible. The final or synthetic point-of-view was emphasized by Jung in contradistinction to the causal-reductive and analytic approach which Jung attributed mainly to Freudian psychoanalysis. In keeping with our interest in the vision that inspired Jung, I do not ask the question of whether Jung’s interpretation of Freud’s views does in all respects do justice to Freud. Be that as it may, the Freudian causal-reductive mode of interpretation provided the take-off board for Jung from which he could push off to come into his own. What was the problem underlying Jung’s dissatisfaction with the causal-reductive approach? I think Jung understood, more instinctively than explicitly, that a strictly causal-reductive analysis of the past, such as in all scientific attempts to explain how things come about, does not do justice to the phenomena the way they are and cannot really be considered knowledge in the old sense of an adaequatio rei et intellectus. Rather they are “interpretations” or, better, constructs guided by the sole point of view of “what makes things tick,” i.e., how they can be manipulated.

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They are a technique and have the technical purpose, for example, to allow us to free the patient from his symptoms. In Jung’s final-synthetic approach we can sense a commitment to knowing and to truth in the sense of a desire to reach the phenomenon in its own right, that is, its true essence. A technical approach to reality recognizes only the human ego as a subject and the ego’s wishes as a real purpose. The suffering psyche is reduced to a function that is in itself meaningless or to an object of our purposive action. The final-synthetic approach granted the phenomenon, too, subjectivity and intentionality. Jung wanted to find out what it, the pathology, wants or is heading for, over against what I, the analyst, or he, the ego of the patient, wants. The final approach entails the idea of the reality of the psyche and the idea of the objective psyche, which can be called real and objective precisely because it is granted its own subjectivity, even personality. All reductive-analytic thinking by contrast must have denied the realness of the real to begin with. It does not want to know the phenomenon in its true essence. It wants to know only how we can deal with it. The modern sciences at bottom are autoerotic. Jung looked at the patient with the idea in mind that in or through his neurosis something of ontological dignity wants to emerge. To it, the phenomenon, and its finality did his main therapeutic attention and loyalty go. His attitude could therefore be called maieutic and, in a deeper sense of the words, experimental or exploratory. Since the “finis” here is not so much to be understood as a “temporal” end lying ahead of us in the future in the sense of the linear conception of time as succession, but rather extends into the depth or height of the hidden essence or essential content of the present, the final-synthetic approach led directly to Jung’s interest in archetypes, symbols—general atemporal essences transcending the here and now, and to the predominantly hermeneutic nature of his method. Jung’s second move, the one concerning the evaluation of neurosis, is more or less already inherent in the final-synthetic view of the psyche. If neurosis is the first, even though distorted, sign of the emergence of a new intentionality or meaning, it is, as it were, the emergence of a new, hitherto unrealized personality, and no longer a mere disorder to be abolished. Neurosis is legitimate, even necessary, indeed truly productive. Hidden in it is the Bringer of the New,

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forcing ego-consciousness beyond itself, and as such serving as the true psychopomp. The true therapist is not the analyst, but the disease. This is why Jung could even go so far as to state that in neurosis is hidden our best enemy or friend. With this metaphor, the subjectivity and intentionality of the phenomenon discussed under the first move of Jung’s is given definitive expression. The phenomenon is seen as a true personality. Ultimately, even if not at first, we have to look to the pathology as our best friend. The disorder is the advent of a (certainly unwanted) stranger or enemy (hostis) to be received into our house as a guest (hospes), on account of which hospitable reception he can reveal himself as the friend that he had been all along. This amounts to a reversal of the ordinary attitude toward neurosis. Here Jung pushed off from the “natural” mind in the sense of the alchemical opus contra naturam. Reversal here does not mean a simple turning upside down on the same level, an exchange of plus for minus or of pro for contra—it would be absurd to be for neurosis in this undialectical way. Rather, this is a case of a dialectical sublation (Aufhebung) through which the entire level of the “natural” mind is overcome and a completely new level of reflection is reached. The basic theoretical attitude towards the neurotic condition thus prefigures the goal aimed for in the practice of therapy, the goal of a transformation again in the sense of alchemy. Transformation, too, is more than a mere change. It is a true revolution, the destruction of the present constitution of consciousness as a whole and its reconstitution on an entirely new level. It is that death or katastrophê (turning down into the underworld) that is in itself a resurrection or a way up, as Heraclitus knew. The new level reached through a destruction that is a building up is here envisioned only in the context of the attitude toward neurosis and of personal therapy. It may however be the equivalent to what in a wider collective or cultural context it seems fashionable today to refer to as “post-modern.” Is not the goal of therapy ultimately the overcoming of “modern” consciousness in the individual? What is the psychological impulse necessitating this move of Jung’s? Only through the idea of neurosis as a guest is there an opening towards a true future, some truly new state. Without it therapy would serve the ends of restoration, which, as we know from political life, means a sterile, even deadly condition. Only through the idea of the pathology as our enemy or friend would man no longer have to be

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alone in his autistic isolation and acquire an authentic sense of some Other out there. Only if there is something like our best enemy assaulting us, or best friend visiting us, can there be a real sense of being affected, of encounter and contact. 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. Psychology then would no longer be under the rule of the hand (manipulation, Behandlung, treatment), but under the supreme rule of the ear and the tongue, in other words, of language, listening and speaking. Jung’s third move refers to his idea of the “individuation process.” The intent or function of the idea of individuation is obscured by our 20 th-century existentialist and sociological bias, which makes us interpret this notion primarily in terms of modern individualism and of the contrast between society and the individual. We have to clear away this existentialist misunderstanding before we can see the indispensible concern that wanted to come to the fore through Jung’s notion of individuation, a term that Jung inherited from the philosophical tradition and that was transmitted to him primarily through Schopenhauer. As long as individuation is understood as the opposite of socialization or adaptation and in terms of the contrast me vs. them, we could say that we move on a horizontal plane, the plane of the subject-object-relation or introversion vs. extraversion. By contrast, Jung’s notion of individuation has a vertical direction. Its dynamic is downwards into the depths. The fantasy behind this notion is that human life as psychological existence begins up in the clouds, in the supraterrestial realm of abstract generalities or archetypal idealizations. Even though the natural mind calls us Erdenbürger (inhabitants of the earth, earthlings) from the moment we are born (and rightly so as far as our literal existence is concerned), Jung understood that psychologically this earthling does not start out living on the earth and in concrete actuality at all. Rather it is our task during our entire life to slowly come down from lofty heights to be grounded in singular realness for the first time. We are not “real” in the sense of concreteness, we have to become real. Self-realization in Jung’s sense of individuation thus is a long shot away from what this term ordinarily suggests: a kind of sublime self-indulgence, self-expansion, a dwelling on, and

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developing, one’s own private feelings, thoughts, inclinations, skills, etc. Rather, self-realization is basically the movement 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. Beyond the immediate meaning for the individual, the idea of individuation has to be seen in the large context of the collective situation of modern man. We live in the abstractness of the Platonism of our Western tradition and this Platonism is above all supported by, and celebrated in, the modern sciences. Here it comes into full bloom. 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 Platonistic sphere of atemporal essences (general laws) and divorce us even more from the concrete world than we are 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. Closer to home we find in Jungian Psychology itself something that lends itself to a Platonistic understanding. I mean the emphasis on archetypes and symbols. By always amplifying images with a view to arrive at the archetypal meaning, one would of course move away from the actual toward atemporal, abstract essences. Even if much in Jung has been interpreted as supporting this Platonistic tendency, as we might call it, and even though Jung does not always seem to have been the best interpreter of his own vision, Jung basically understood that with the Platonistic or essentialist mode of looking into the world the actual world and the actual reality of the human being cannot be reached; indeed, they are not only missed, but actively obliterated. And this is why Jung put up his idea of individuation as a kind of counter-program to save the actual phenomenon, which is always an individuum ineffabile in a concrete moment. This, the ineffable individual below the infima species of Aristotle as the true actuality, is what Jung’s idea of individuation was aiming for. I am not claiming that Jung saw it this way or expressed it explicitly, but I do claim that the concern for individuation was an

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indispensible ingredient in his psychology as a counter-weight to the likewise indispensible emphasis on the archetypal. We have to see and hold our ground amidst the absolute tension of the dialectics prevailing in Jung’s definition of psychological existence. This definition moves at the same time in opposite directions, the direction of an epistrophê up into the atemporal, general archetypal, and a katastrophê beneath the lowest species to the concrete individual, in accordance with Heraclitus’ insight that the road up is the way down. In conventional Jungian psychology, the dialectical junction between the archetypal and individuation became obscured through the personalistic interpretation of individuation on the one hand and the Platonistic interpretation of the archetype as archetype in itself on the other. In Archetypal Psychology the dialectics has become apparent. It was the same move that forced Hillman to emphasize the “archetypal” over the “analytical” or “complex” in the name of this psychology that later made him stress, as “imagistic psychology,” the aesthetic response to the face or image of my concrete situation presenting itself here and now. Individuation does not have to refer to the personalistic individuality of the human being, my me-ness. It goes beyond that to an ontological individuality. We can see that behind Jung’s idea of individuation is the impulse 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, as are all empiricist and existentialist interpretations of individuality. Here individuality can be understood only as the existing contradiction of the archetypal and the sensibly unique. With this we unwittingly have already come to Jung’s fourth move: the move out of the personalistic constraints of conventional psychology into the open expanse of the world and history. Just as the work of individual therapy always involves us in the transpersonal archetypal dimension, so the concern for my soul is in itself also a concern for the soul of the world. Jung’s idea of the individuation of mankind and works of his like Aion show how Jung views the psychology of the individual in the context of our age and of the millennia of our tradition. As intimate and individual as therapy may be, it is, as such, an intimate undertaking, more than a private affair. Psychology extends into a cosmogonic and cosmic dimension. It can

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do this because it is no longer the scientific Fach (compartmentalized field of study, specialty) dealing with the one compartment of reality called “the interior of man” next to other disciplines of science dealing with all the others compartments, but has reached a totally new level of consciousness in which all compartmental thinking has been overcome. Psychology implies a very different and fresh position visà-vis the world as a whole, leaving the scientific and religious positions behind, but taking their contents, as its sublated moment, along . Jung’s fifth concern was the critical self-reflection of psychology. Beyond the insight, common to all analytic schools of psychology, that the analyst as person has to undergo an analysis himself and has to constantly reflect his own countertransference reactions, Jung felt the need for psychology as a discipline or body of theory to be turned back on itself, in order for it to become aware of its own bias. Psychology is not simply the answer to the psychological problems of man (it is that too), but it is also itself a product of the psyche and as such a psychological problem of its own. Jung first invented his theory of psychological types and later his archetypal theory as tools for the reflection of the unconscious bias in the various psychological points of view. The way forward out of scientific autoeroticism to a true knowing of the phenomenon in its own right, i.e., in its archetypal essence; our keeping our ground while being affected and transformed by the phenomenon as a guest; the way down into the actuality as the uniqueness of the concrete situation; the way out of the prison of the interior into the real world around us; and the uroboric way back to ourselves—these are the main motives of Jung’s thought. It is relatively easy to work in the spirit of analytical psychology when one is in the consulting-room. There we are confronted only with the “small” problems of the patient. I say “small” not because I would want to belittle what my patients suffer from. No, I mean “small” in an ontological sense: they are always the problems of the person before me; they are small enough to fit into the consultingroom. The Bomb, by contrast, is a problem of an altogether different magnitude. It is a problem that is all around us. The Bomb threatens not only the patient, not even merely him and myself, it threatens mankind and the very basis of our existence, the earth. To hold our ground as psychologists vis-à-vis such a monstrous phenomenon is

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much more difficult. But while contemplating the Bomb we will have to keep the very same attitudes that we bring to the symptoms of the patient, because we cannot neurotically afford the luxury of making use of two different sets of psychological answers, one when we are with a patient, the other when we are in for it ourselves. If we bring to the Bomb what we learned from Jung, we can no longer psychologically dismiss the Bomb as a “problem” to be dealt with technically—through science, politics, and morality. All this would be mere acting out. How we can get rid of the existing nuclear weapons or how we can avoid that they will be used or how we can protect mankind from them, is not our question. Above all, the idea of our moral responsibility is a defense mechanism against the phenomenon. What is really needed is to save the phenomenon that the Bomb is. We have to ask with Jung (who asked about the content of neurosis, the content of psychosis) what the essential content or imaginal substance of the Bomb is. Even with respect to what would destroy us we must not forsake the psychological interest in knowing and in “theoretical” truth in the sense of Greek theôría. The Bomb needs to be known, and not only to be practically dealt with. Analytical psychology’s attitude toward the neurotic symptom can help us see that the Bomb as the collective symptom is legitimate. The ordinary idea about the nuclear bomb is that it is a kind of mishap or mistake. But it is psychologically completely appropriate that we have to live with the Bomb. As that which would bring total destruction to the natural world and turn the earth into a wasteland, it brings out into the open what the motor of our entire history in the Occident has been all along. It brings home to us what the final cause of Western man’s doings has been: the destruction of nature. At the beginning of the Occident’s history is the killing of the natural Gods. They were ontologically discredited and thus nature’s ontological backbone was broken. Time was reduced to what is only one of its modes, succession. The experience of the pregnant moment was transcended in favor of logical, metaphysical, and scientific universals. Later, the sciences and the Enlightenment systematically began the intellectual destruction of the natural view of things and of all tradition, by declaring them to be superstitions, primitive illusions, imaginary substitutes for real knowledge, or means for the oppression of the people by some ruling class. Technology added the practical

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destruction of the natural world to the ontological and intellectual annihilation. Artificial light, artificial energy and machines, artificial substances like plastics, even artificial organs and artificial insemination, to mention only a few examples, together amount to a radical undoing of the natural world. This undoing becomes even more obvious in the literal destruction of the rain forests, the desertification of many lands, the pollution of the waters, the earth and the atmosphere. And of course politically, the colonial conquest of the Americas, Africa, Australia meant the destruction of the “Naturvölker” through their literal decimation and the overrunning of their indigenous cultures. What was done to them, was not only done to them. It was also done to us, to the natural man in ourselves. The overall telos of the annihilation of the natural world that once informed our consciousness and doings unwittingly from behind now appears in pure form and as a material presence from without and in front of us, as it always does when the “task” of an entire epoch nears its completion and along with it a stage of consciousness draws towards its end. Now the time is ripe for us to know what the entire undertaking called the history of the Christian Occident was about. The Bomb as the symptom and symbol of the highest aspirations of Western man spells it out, makes it explicit. Before, we could only see individual destructive actions or events that could possibly have been explained as mere mistakes or mishaps on an otherwise “harmless” path. The Bomb crystalizes for us the spiritus rector of the Occident in toto. We now can 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. “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” If the Bomb brings home to us and before us visibly the unconscious force that drove our collective doings in history from behind, then the Bomb is its embodied and objectified self-reflection. With the explicit appearance from outside of the inner telos of our collective doings, and with the Bomb’s throwing us back onto ourselves, a reversal takes place, similar to the one occurring with the appearance of the neurotic symptom in the individual. 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. The Bomb is a constant threat, and thus we

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have to suffer it. It affects us as a real Other. With respect to it, we have come into a state of utmost páthos. The mere existence of the Bomb vanquishes the conceit of the human ego, once believed to be the exclusive and supreme subject. Inasmuch as the Bomb threatens us with total destruction, it proves itself to be an all-too-real subject whose object we are. Analytical psychology can help us to see the Bomb as more than a mere subject. It can make us see it as the guest who would be received by us. Jung once raised the question 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.”1 In the threat of the Bomb we can hear one of the loudest and most portentous knocks at our door. The question to be asked is indeed, “Who is it? Who wants to be let in?” “Who” also in the sense of “What does this guest bring? What would it mean for consciousness if he had a place in it?” So far I have been trying to answer the question: What can the fundamental points of view of Jung’s Analytical Psychology contribute to our approach to and understanding of our nuclear predicament? But the moment this psychology makes us see that there is a guest in the Bomb, the process of answering leads, from within itself, to a reversal of the very question that it was answering. The new question, as we have just seen, is, “What does the Bomb bring to Analytical Psychology? How is Analytical Psychology affected, transformed, enriched by the existence of the Bomb?” Psychology is no longer in the position of the knower who applies his knowledge to any given situation such as our nuclear one. It is in the position of the student to be taught or the initiate to undergo an initiation, with the Bomb as the psychopomp. As always, the psychopomp leads down, into the underworld, and not only if the Bomb should actually explode and bring total destruction does it take us into the underworld. Already now, as the constant threat of such destruction, the Bomb necessitates our going under, the going under of mankind. It is the real devotio of consciousness. By virtue of the Bomb, we have already been consecrated to the underworld and we live all our life under this dedication. In fact, would all the talk in Jungian psychology about psyche and 1

Letters 2, September 2, 1960, to Read, p. 590.

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underworld not be empty words if it were not for the Bomb which authenticates such talk? Our existence in peace and luxury is ‘grounded’ on and ‘overshadowed’ by the ‘impending’ threat of total annihilation. Thus we are psychologically or ontologically surrounded by destruction on all sides. Our situation is very different from that of earlier man. He had to live only with the knowledge of his personal death. Our Bomb, by contrast, holds the promise of the annihilation of the total habitable world. As such it is a symbol, not of the decline of this or that content of consciousness or this or that bearer of consiousness, but the symbol of the decline of the entire “world,” i.e., 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 implies an opening to an entirely new level of consciousness. Without the decline of the present consciousness we would ontologically be living in the past. Of course, all kinds of changes and additions might be made within the old house of consciousness, but we would nevertheless remain encased in the old framework to die that other, sterile kind of death that was described by Nietzsche as the life of the Last Man: The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the fleabeetle; the last man lives longest. “We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they blink ….

Jungian psychology is not exempt from the presence of the last man. We just have to look at the flood of psychological publications which have come forth during the last several years to get an overwhelming taste of the embarrassing self-complacency of the last man. All these books seem to say, “We have invented happiness, we know the answers,” and they blink, too. They make everything, even the most sacred, small and cheap by inflating it: Gods, meaning, symbols, dreams, creativity, individuation, archetypes. They would encase us in the sentimentalism and nostalgia of a consumerism availing itself of the spiritual treasures of the past as of drugs to create some sort of psychological “high.” It is painful to see how much of psychology is phony. But into this phoniness, which is the last man’s happiness, the Bomb strikes like a thunderbolt. What else but the awe­

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inspiring Bomb could break through the shell into which the last man has settled and bring home to him the fact that what he thinks to be his happiness is actually a slow death, his mummification during life? The Bomb is our (only?) avenue to a future and into the open precisely because its impending threat says to us constantly, if translated into language: “no exit, no future.” It locks us ontologically into the present, into the concrete situation and thus returns to life its sting by returning death to life. The actual moment receives its sensible sharpness again, if there is no escape any more into a beyond, no hope for a better future. There is no alternative to this actual life here and now. “This is it!” The Bomb has already cut off all logical and metaphysical escape-routes from the concrete present by reducing to absurdity any hopes in that direction. And thus it can bring, as a gift to psychology, the very actuality that Jung sought through the process of individuation. In most Western cities pedestrian malls have been established over the last ten to twenty years. This is paradigmatic. What is the unconscious fantasy or desire expressing itself in the need for this change? In pedestrian malls, the difference between the sidewalk and the roadway has been leveled and the traffic of cars and trucks has been banished. The pedestrians want to be among themselves, undisturbed by the flow of the autonomous, objective life of our technological civilization. There is to be only the one self-contained subjective world of the human egos. As Jung saw it, technological machines, cars, airplanes, etc. are the modern psychological equivalent of the monsters, dragons, and other soul-animals of ancient mythology. Now man wants to be insulated from the poisonous fumes of our dragons, the noise and stench of traffic. Psychologically he withdraws into the innocence and harmlessness of a human-all-too-human isle of the blessed, of which the pedestrian mall is the external symbol. This is more than a mere allegory. It reveals the ruling fantasy of today, the ruling fantasy probably also behind much of psychology with its autistic concern with introspection, self-realization, self-development, encounter groups, peak experiences, etc. Over against this self-complacent humanism the Bomb is the Bringer of the Unconscious in Jung’s sense of the collective unconscious. It is a cozy idea that the unconscious manifests itself primarily in us as our instinctual, sexual wishes, our fantasies and symptoms. The real unconscious is, as always, outside,

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all around us. Today it is in our technology and in the economic condition of the world. Even though Jung said that the individuation process as he conceived it does not exclude but includes the world, psychology today still has the world outside itself. 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 in the sciences; 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 soul here means the privatized interior of the individual, cut off from the mainstream of events. Here, too, the Bomb cuts in and forces our attention to what is outside. It radically questions the significance of our work in the consulting-room. In view of the Bomb, can we honestly say that psychotherapy is more than either a kind of repair job or a hobby for the rich, maybe something like the 18th-century movements for the liberation of the American slaves among the nobility of France prior to the French Revolution? The Bomb explodes psychology’s prison of the interior and opens our eyes to what else there is outside of us as the real Other, the real unconscious, the real world. It reveals the undertaking of introspection—at a time of incredible revolutionary events in science, a time of millions of starving people and refugees— to be a crazy self-indulgence, a withdrawal into the post-natural form of the Epicurean garden: into a shopping mall for images, symbols, myths, meanings. Jung said that it is not we who have to treat the neurosis, but that neurosis treats us, treats the inappropriate constitution of consciousness. In the same way, we can say that the Bomb is more than legitimate. It is indispensable, inasmuch as it is our true therapist, because it authenticates all those concerns that Jung tried to bring back through his psychology.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of

God: On the First Nuclear

Fission

I

f you look at a medieval painting, such as of the Dutch school, you have to step up to it very closely in order to appreciate its details. Each hair in a fur collar, each blade of grass, seems to be painted separately. If, however, you were to stand just as close in front of the painting of a French Impressionist, you would only see spots of paint, but no picture. Every picture thus prescribes to the viewer the distance appropriate to it. This is not only true for paintings, but for all subjects of contemplation, including those of theoretical reflection. For this reason, very much depends on whether we find the “correct” distance to our theme, the nuclear bomb. For if we step up to it too close and view it merely from within our immediate present, only within the context of today’s power blocks and disarmament negotiations, only within the context of our personal fears of survival, then we will have only an essentially reduced perception of the bomb.

FINDING THE APPROPRIATE STANDPOINT The nuclear bomb threatens life in its entirety. This means we must find a standpoint that grants the bomb the widest possible horizon within which alone it can unfold its full essence. For whatever has the power to put our world as a whole at stake must be a kind of

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equivalent of this world in a nutshell and as such be thoroughly interwoven with and deeply rooted in the history and reality of our Western world at large. The context of today’s survival problems and power politics allows only for a very limited perception of the bomb. Our picture of it would be just as reduced if we were to understand it merely personalistically—as the expression of our repressed aggressions, our “hypertrophic patriarchal tradition,” our hubris and our sorcerer’s­ apprentice attitude, to mention just a few of the commonest clichés. The nuclear bomb in its phenomenology is so immense and so inhuman that, although a man-made object, it nevertheless extends far beyond the merely human into the dimension of the ontological and theological, into the dimension of Being and of the gods. Only on this plane can we hope to do some justice to its dreadfulness. Yet, I do not speak as a theologian, but as psychologist and phenomenologist. As such, I am convinced that whenever it is a question of fateful turning points, be it in history or in our personal lives, we have to look round at the gods and their fate. The gods and what happens to them are quite simply and naturally the articulation of that background in the collective psyche in which the great decisions of historical import take place, decisions which in turn are the framework within which the life and thought of each historical period go on. I do not postulate gods in a metaphysical manner, and much less do I propagate them as objects of faith. I merely stay with the phenomenology of the God-images as they actually occur. These I consider to be the point at which something of the hidden background of the historical-psychological existence of man becomes visible to us in concrete shapes or faces, so that we are not merely conditioned by this background from behind like dull objects, but can, as is fitting for conscious humans, relate to them face to face. Thus we can establish and cultivate a psychological connection which without God-images would not be possible: psychological culture and cult, therapeía, religio—as the careful observation (relegere) of the archetypal dominants binding (religare) our perceptions, thinking, and behavior. The fate of God that we have to consider in connection with our theme seems to me to take place in the events that we are told

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about in the Old Testament1 story of the worship of the Golden Calf (Ex. 32).

THE STORY OF THE GOLDEN CALF AS PSYCHOLOGICAL

DOMINANT

I do not want to read this story as an historical document, not with the question in mind, What actually happened and what did it mean within the context of its own age and for the religious life of the Jews? Neither will I be concerned with questions of textual criticism, sources, authorship and of the revisions the text may have undergone. With such an approach, the tale would be turned into a mere object of inquiry and would be displaced into the distance of a remote and exotic past that is basically indifferent to us. Paradoxically, the search for the “original” meaning of the story and the “original” intentions of its authors does not take us back to the true origins; it rather produces an artifact, the reconstruction of a bygone past made possible only by means of ingenious scientific methods. It is not that I mean to doubt the correctness of historical reconstructions. I merely think that they can never lead us to the origin, but only to something essentially derived: abstract history. The origin is not found in the critical “original language” edition of a text, nor by way of exact knowledge about the historical facts 1 As David Miller kindly pointed out to me, the conventional English name “Old Testament” is no longer used in Religious Studies. The term “Hebrew Scriptures” is preferred instead. My not changing this phrase now (in 2006) is not only due to my dislike of “political correctness” and of the kind of name-changing without the change of one’s thinking. Language is too precious a good to be subjected to the violence of deliberate manipulation; it does not need disciplining from above either, because one can trust that any true change in the attitudes of a people will sooner or later be reflected in language of its own accord, and only then is a change of diction authentic. My main reason for not going along with this linguistic equivalent of the political purges familiar from totalitarian systems is psychological. “Old Testament” is rooted in the tradition from within which I speak. It is rich with feeling tones and saturated with centuries-old associations and cultural experiences. Any new name would psychologically be abstract, sterilized, cut off from its roots. We have to be concerned, so already Jung felt (Letters 2, January 5, 1952, to Erich Neumann, p. 33), with religion inasmuch as it is “specific” and “locally valid,” “barbaric,” and “abysmally unscientific.” If from what is called a “Post-Colonial” standpoint the name “Old Testament” may appear to be indicative of the shadow of Christendom, I must remind the reader that, in general, the job of the psychologist is not to skip over or eliminate the shadow and one’s possible prejudices, but to stay in touch with, take responsibility for, and integrate them. We should not, out of an in-advance fear of possibly offending other people’s feelings, betray our own tradition. The feelings of others are their problem and their job. Psychology does not have the task of cultivating people’s narcissism and oversensitivity.

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surrounding the text; rather, the origin is the Bible story as it may have been told to us in childhood in our mother tongue—in a, theologically speaking, possibly quite untenable form—and especially as it has likewise for centuries been told to our forefathers, who certainly were untouched by historical-critical concerns. Only as such is the story alive in the Western psyche. All critical scholarship comes too late, it follows along behind the actual image rooted in the depth of our being and of our tradition. All scientific research presupposes this image and is of course, in the last analysis, only undertaken for its sake and because it excited the scholars’ curiosity in the first place. It is the tragic error of the Christian Occident to have taken the historically or theologically “correct” for the real, and thus to have thought that true Christianity could be found in the most sophisticated and purest interpretation of the Christian doctrine. This fiction made us blind to the actual effects of our religion by allowing us to rest content with our better judgment and to think that on account of the scholarly correction of our ideas the primitive images were over and done with. But the simple image was not pushed into non-existence by the corrected view, it merely disappeared from our field of vision, so that it could be in action all the more undisturbed. It retains its own “will,” which is not necessarily in accordance with the best theological exegesis, and wants to materialize itself (rather than the “true intention”). Even under the surface of the most learned theology, it is the simple image that is really believed and has motive power. Our better judgment, precisely because it is better, higher, merely conscious is not and has never been of psychological and historical importance, having no transformative power—as long as it has not seeped down to become, after a long time, a new image in the psyche in its own right. Only the primitive image is historically potent, in the individual as well as with peoples. Therefore I would like to read the story of the Golden Calf as the psychologically real image as which it has been implanted, like a seed, into the receptive psyche of the peoples of the beginning 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. I try to listen to it as a part of that “myth” in which we live and which sustains the ontological constitution of the Western world.

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This story is, so to speak, a story of the collision of two worlds. The one world is situated in the low-lands and is characterized by an animal-shaped image of God cast from metal to whom the worshiping people bring offerings and in whose honor they celebrate a holiday, releasing themselves playfully to this celebration. The other world is one of a mountain peak 2 and is characterized by an invisible, transcendent God in the heights, by a code of moral laws engraved in stone tables, and, on the part of God as well as on the part of Moses, by a fierce wrath against the celebrating people. Moses, hot with anger, the Word of God in his mind and the tables of the law in his hands, smashes the stone in his wrath. Bursting as an outsider into the playful crowd, he disrupts the sacred celebration and pulverizes the animal image. To Aaron, who until now had guilelessly entered into the innocent enactment of the ritual, he gives a bad conscience, so that Aaron is now embarrassed and feels the need to justify himself. And finally he forces everyone into a decision: “Who is on the Lord’s side? Let him come unto me.” He commands his followers to take their swords and to go throughout the camp from gate to gate and to slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor. “And there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.” It always makes a crucial difference by which “mythical” images we are collectively informed. We have been brought up with this story; this image of a massacre executed upon the worshipers of the Golden Calf out of a zeal for the true God has been implanted into the soul of Western man for two thousand years. It has grown deep roots there and has stamped traumatic fears upon us. We all live under the spell of this massacre. The shock goes deep. Ever since the call “Who is on the Lord’s side? let him come unto me” rang out, it time and again reverberates afresh in the depth of our being. And since then an incurable rift goes through the “people” in our soul, infecting all our thoughts and experiences and molding them according to its image. As far as our more noble aspirations are concerned, we have since then been placed a priori on the one side, on the side of the true God, regardless of whether we know it and like it or not, and we must, whether we be believers or not, fear nothing more than to slip to the 2 On the psychological meaning of peaks and lowlands cf. James Hillman, “Peaks and Vales,” in Puer Papers (Irving, TX: Spring Publications, 1979), pp. 54-74.

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other side, that of the worshipers of the Golden Calf, the side of the slain ones. We have no choice as long as we do not consciously work through the trauma of this split. But simultaneously with the upholding of the one side (that of the Lord), the other side, that of idolatry, is constellated, too, and our split-off, more primitive instincts succumb by necessity more and more to the ever-increasing fascination that the earthly image, now decried as an idol, holds for us. For that rift splitting the world apart exists only as the opposition, i.e., the separated unity, of both sides. Without idols, no “true” God, and without this God, no “false” gods.

UNCOVERING THE STORY’S UNSPOKEN ISSUE If we follow the perspective of the narrator, then this is a story of the children of Israel’s unfaithful falling away from their true God who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and of their subsequent punishment. If, however, we see through the didactic intent of the narrative report to its latent content, we obtain an entirely different picture. Old Testament scholarship informs us that the Hebrew word translated as “calf ” is not actually intended to refer to a calf in this story, but is meant as a disparaging term for the image of a bull that in fact was the object of worship. Even more important is the fact that Yahweh himself originally had a bull nature, in accordance with all of ancient Semitic religion. This shows through even in later times, as in Amos 1:2: “The Lord will roar.”3 The tribal God of the Israelites, the God of trust, was, to be sure, a youthful God, but with him the Israelites went back to the most ancient religious tradition of the Near East, back to the highest God of the ancient Semites, El elion (Gen. 14), the Lord of Heaven and God of the World.4 This God is constantly apostrophized in the Ugaritic texts as “Bull El.” This means that the image of the bull worshiped by the Children of Israel in our story and known to us under 3 Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie 9 (1901), pp. 704-13. We may also remember here that Jesus on the cross, in the hour of utter despair, quotes Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”) in which we also find images of being cornered by brutal animals (“Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls … have beset me round”—Ps. 22:13). Cf. James Hillman, “Betrayal,” in Loose Ends (Zürich: Spring Publications, 1975), p. 69f. In the moment when the image of the God of trust is shattered, the bull returns. 4 Ulrich Mann, “Ikone und Engel als Gestalten geistleiblicher Mittlerschaft,” in Eranos 52-1983, pp. 1-53.

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the name of the Golden Calf was not a different, alien God in opposition to the high God, but it was this very God himself! From this point of view, our story is not merely one of rebellion and infidelity. Rather this story narrates a fateful event in the history of this God himself. This scene dramatically announces a change within God. God separates himself from an aspect of himself. God’s nature splits. The celebrating people were by no means disloyal; on the contrary, they did what had up to now always been well pleasing to God. But now they are surprised, even descended upon out of the blue, by this change in God, which for the first time progressive Moses seems to have envisioned. And as always when there are changes in the divine sphere for which human consciousness is not prepared, they have to pay dearly. In the ancient Near East there do not seem to have been strictly theriomorphic gods such as there were in Egypt (e.g., the bull Apis). Rather, you typically find the connection of anthropomorphic gods with animals as their attendants, i.e., a deity in human shape is shown sitting on a throne while his feet rest on bulls. The bull provides the pedestal for the godhead. Also, there is a widespread cult continuing way into late antiquity whereby the empty throne of the deity was erected in order to invite the deity, who in this case was considered essentially invisible, to come down. In the story of the Golden Calf we might understand the image of the bull as a pedestal erected for the purpose of inviting the invisible high God to descend and manifest himself. The animal as symbol or pedestal of an anthropomorphic or invisible deity already suggests an inner differentiation in the nature of God. The animal aspect as pedestal has become a literally lower aspect of this God; the bull has turned into a mere attendant who accompanies the God, even if he still remains his foundation, whereas the God himself is obviously set off from the animal by way of his human shape, or even more so as an essentially invisible God—he who once himself carried the title Bull. But even this removed and raised deity nevertheless remained essentially connected to his animal. This was he himself in his visible aspect, and the bull image possessed the power to draw the invisible aspect down. However, what happens in our story is that God pushes off, as it were, from the bulls, from his animal base, and takes off for the highest

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heights. Moses’ sword thus does not merely separate the people into two halves, it does not only slay the three thousand faithful to the Calf; but that sword cuts the last threads binding God to his former divine shape as bull. Thus, this is a tale of the birth of God as we know him through a splitting of Being as such, a tale of the birth of the notion of God dominant still today and informing the ontological constitution of our world.

THE NEW GOD What is the notion of God resulting from the dissociation in God’s nature? First, God casts off his visibility once and for all and becomes a totally invisible God. The real bull was at once also an epiphany of the God. Even the invisible God of the ancient Near East was “based” on his visible pedestal. God needed a visible animal image in order to become present. For, to speak with Thomas Mann, “How would you behold the God, if not in the animal?” 5 Now there can be no epiphanies any more. God is only present in faith and in the preaching of his word. Secondly, God ceases to be a world-immanent power and rises to the height of a completely supernatural, transcendent, extramundane God. Only as such is it possible for God to turn into the creator in the Biblical sense, i.e., into the creator from naught. The mythical gods were natural phenomena, thunder, grain, sun, ocean, death, and as such not extramundane creators of the world, but parts or aspects of the world. Even the essentially invisible god of Asia Minor did not break out of the world, but was the phenomenon of an immanent invisible force in the world. Thirdly, this God grows into the absolute monotheistic God. As long as God was bull-shaped, there could not be just one God, as sure as there were, in addition to the bull, also sun, sea, lightning and thunder, etc. As a visible shape he by necessity had to be particular, one God beside or perhaps also above many others, but even if above them, then nevertheless only as primus inter pares. Fourth, along with the bull shape, God rejects his animal nature and defines himself from now on as spirit, pure spirit. 5 Thomas Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder (No place: S. Fischer, 1976), p. 512, (Chapter “Nachtgespräch” in “Joseph in Ägypten”), my translation.

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Fifth, he loses his bodily concrete reality, gradually turning into an idealized idea. I say gradually, for only with the New Testament is the process of the thorough idealization of God as pure love completed and God totally identified with this ideal of himself. The place of epiphany, i.e., of his manifesting himself in earthly reality as he happens to be at each instance, is now taken by revelation, i.e., the verbal statement about his true nature. Because epiphany is no longer a possibility for God, he must require faith, belief in his statements. Epiphanies spoke for themselves. They were God’s unreflected and uncensored self-representation through his actual behavior in the world. You did not have to, indeed you could not, believe in Baal, the storm God, or in Astarte, the Goddess of love and war, because you had them in war and storm before your eyes and were exposed to their workings. By contrast, a self-commentary that is no longer confirmed in sensory reality depends on belief and faith and requires an unbroken stream of professing witnesses. As the sixth and last characteristic of the new notion of God that resulted from the splitting of God, I mention literalism. The original worship was directed at the image, the phenomenon, to the phenomenal manifestation. The worshipers of the Golden Calf did not by any means, we may presume, mistake for god the Golden Calf as object in the positivistic sense, because in a ritualistic culture such an object did not yet exist. No, god was the visible sight of the golden luster and the powerful bull shape, the sight of the image shining forth from that which we today would call a dead object. And the worshipers of the Golden Calf did not by way of mystification “believe” in the image as if it were anything different from what it actually was: an image, nothing more. For everybody knew of course that it had just been cast from their own jewelry. But anybody could immediately see from the bull’s radiating imaginal quality that this was God. The essence of God was originally precisely in the radiation and in the numinosity inherent in this metaphoric shine. By pushing off from his image as bull, God also casts off from himself all shine and appearance,6 and establishes himself as a literal 6 It is interesting to note that the shine was transferred from God to Moses (“And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him”—Ex. 34:30).

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God. This means not only a God of worded, inscribed commandments, but also a God who is unambiguously and unquestionably, exclusively God. Because he has rid himself of anything sensory and earthly, he can declare himself “the true God” behind sensory reality, and can be posited in a metaphysical sense as literally, I would almost like to say positivistically, existing. Faith is the mode of that relation to the godhead in which the latter is taken literally and as absolute, in the last analysis as the highest entity. Faith and its counterpart, doubt, are primarily concerned with the existence of God (“for he that cometh to God must believe that he is”—Heb. 11:6 ). Accordingly, the question of the existence of God has for centuries been in the center of the thinking about God, the greatest minds wrestled with the problem of the proofs and disproofs of his existence. The question of the existence of mythical gods never cropped up, could not crop up. In the mythical situation, the only important question is the Who? (Which one?) and the How? of the manifestation of them who shine into our lives as self-evidently and unquestionably as the sun. We must bear in mind the dialectics of this process of dissociation. Through the split in his nature, God rose above himself and ascended to previously unsuspected heights. He was able to aquire a literal existence. He turned into the pure and true God, the absolute. But all this is not simply a gain, but also a loss. The rise to the absolute is as an absolvere (a detaching) at the same time a deprivation: God suffered a considerable loss in substance and is, as the infinite, only an infinitely diluted remainder of what he once was, having exchanged the status of a phenomenal reality for the impoverished status of an assertion that is dependent on being believed in order to obtain the conviction of reality. This is in complete contrast to the saturated and imperturbable existence that is the property of the mythical gods from the very beginning. Their being-in-the-world, however, did not have the quality of a literal, positive-factual existence, but only that of epiphany, of phenomenal manifestation. In other words, God was only able to acquire his literal existence by paying the price of his substantiality, self-evidence, and worldly embodiment. Only by abandoning his sensory reality, only through his mystification, was he able to become absolute spirit and true God.

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THE INVENTION OF IDOLATRY AND THE DESTRUCTION

OF THE EARTH

Simultaneously with God’s self-exaltation, 7 sensory reality was pushed to a lower level. It is one and the same action—Moses’ sword stroke—that enthroned the true God and established idolatry “for the first time.” In this simultaneity of upwards and downwards movement, the degradation of the image to the status of a false God has an inner priority. Only because the narrative of the Golden Calf is the didactic story of the invention of idolatry can it also be the story of the establishment of the “true” God. The fight against idols is the mode in which both “Golden Calf ” (in the idolatrous sense of the term) and “true God” come into being. For without the idols and before any fight against them, there were no idols, but only mythical gods. God (in the sense of the true God) and idol—both equally distant from the mythical gods—are the same, though not alike, so that wherever you find actual idolatry you can suspect the “true God” in the background and in the environment of any worship of the true God you can count on idolatry in some way. Idolatry and service to the true God even if they be opposites, are twins. Moses’ pulverizing and melting down the Golden Calf is an assault on the imaginal quality of reality as such, an assault that receives its express theological foundation in the commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness” (Ex. 20:4), which also belongs into the context of our tale. Moses reduces the reality of God to “mere matter”: dust instead of divine image. Just as God becomes a literal God, so does matter in a positivistic sense originate here, if we extrapolate somewhat. It is this act which gives rise for the first time to the idea of something earthly that is “nothing but” earthly, for it is deprived of its imaginal shine. As God became worldless by his obtaining absoluteness, so earthly reality became God-less. It is crucial to see here that God’s abandoning the visible bull figure did not mean that the bull could remain as he had been before. For God pushed off from it as from his pedestal and by doing so pushed it into the depths. This treading down, made evident in our story by Moses’ grinding down of the Calf, means that the same de-imagization 7 On “self-exaltation” (“Selbst-über-hebung”) see Wolfgang Giegerich, “Beitrag zur Polytheismus-Diskussion,” GORGO 2 (1979): 61-69.

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that was God’s lot also happened to the things of this earth. God’s exodus from sensory reality into absolute spiritualization on the one hand and the destruction of the imaginal shape of things on the other are mutual reflections of each other, Moses’ sword being the mirror, as it were, holding the two mirror images apart. To be sure, it took centuries until the divine image was completely pulverized. Only with our present-day worldview has the program established in this story been fulfilled and all of reality dismantled into the “dust” of molecules, atoms and subatomic elementary particles, to which as to the ultimate and actual reality, all things having a visible shape can be, nay, must be reduced. At first, however, things retained their form for more than two thousand years. The destruction of their imaginal quality, which produced literalism, must not itself be understood literally. It is not so much the shape and image of things that is destroyed, but rather the imaginal nature of their shape, their divine radiance, their golden shine, their numinous brilliance: the moving power of the image. The imaginal nature that real things once had is now reduced to the mere form of matter (morphê, forma), so that now only a formal understanding of the image is left. This means that the imaginal is now understood literalistically and thus has been subsumed by its very opposite. The image deprived of its imaginal nature has of course been ground to powder much more radically than if all things formed had been literally pulverized.

THE NUCLEAR EXPLOSION AND THE PRIMARY UPRISING

OF THE WILL

So far, we have looked at the divine process only as a separation in two parts, into the animal (that has been reduced to a biological understanding and can therefore be idolized) and into the true God. But what happened comprises more than that. A split into two involves three aspects. The original unity that united the two and is concealed by that unity is released from the original whole as the Third of the Two along with the dissociation. For this dissociation into mere bull and pure God to become possible in the first place, their original imaginal nature, which held the two and gave to both God and bull their full essence, must first be taken away from both. The complete

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description of what happened in our story thus runs as follows: first, God’s rise into the heights of imageless spirit (transcendence), second, the bull’s or, more generally, earthly reality’s being pushed down into the non-imaginal state of mere matter (empirical positivity) and third the elimination altogether of the imaginal from the prevailing ontology. What happened here is an enormity. It is the First nuclear fission, the nuclear fission, namely the splitting of the nucleus of Being: the image. This first splitting was what made possible the nuclear explosions of modern physics. What we are dealing with here is not a matter only for students of religious history. It is an ontological explosion upsetting the foundations of existence, of Being as such. For Being in its inner-most nucleus is anchored in imaginality. If Hillman8 coined the phrase the “poetic basis of mind,” I would like to extend this idea and speak of the poetic basis or imaginal quality of Being. And if Jung said, image is psyche, we may now add that Being has image and soul quality. God-and-bull (world) were what they were only by virtue of their imaginal nature. In correspondence with the nuclear explosions of physics we can describe the three aspects of the First nuclear fission as follows. (1) God’s divine nature, which is the first component of the image, is raised to the heavens and becomes purely spiritual. It thus radiates with an unheard-of intensity. This is what physicists call the “star” in nuclear explosions. (2) The second component of the image, the earthly-sensible, is reduced to mere nature, to God’s creation, no longer divine in its own right. This is what is called “nuclear ash.” Nuclear ash is not only an empirical product of the nuclear explosions of the twentieth century; reality at large has ontologically been nuclear ash for more than two millennia. Stripped of its inherent divinity the world became accessible in its empirical nakedness to the scientific research and technical exploitation of a much later age. The gold of the Golden Calf could never have been subjected to a chemical analysis, the bull could never have been used for biological experiments: because the predicate “God” radiated forth from them. (3) The release of the Third of the Two, the imaginal quality, through the exploding apart of the image freed tremendous energy, just as do the nuclear fissions of physics. This released energy, first, 8

James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. xi.

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gave God the momentum for his takeoff into transcendence; second, supplied the world with the power for its demonization and for the immense increase in realness that it experienced—we will return to this later; and, third, produced, what we call in metaphysics and psychology, the Will. The age-old story of the Golden Calf is thus, in the context of the history of our Christian West, also the myth of the birth of the modern ego, whose innermost essence is the will. 9 Psychology considers the ego to be a certain central complex in the personality. But it is much more. Above all, it is also the mode in which this complex has interpreted and constituted itself to begin with. But even this is not all. As an archetypal power, the ego transcends the psychological in the personalistic-human sense of the word and is, in its comprehensive meaning, the modern mode of being of everything that is, the mode of being of God, the world, and man. It is not we who have an ego, the ego or the will has us and our world. Just as the nuclear explosions of physics are triggered by the bombardment of uranium with electrons, so the blow of the sword sets the ontological nuclear fission in motion. The blow of the sword, however, is the way in which the Will comes into being. It is the expression of the tremendous zeal that Moses is seized by and that is only the reflection in a human of that zeal to which, in the same story, God has just professed himself (“I the Lord thy God am a jealous God” Exod. 20:5). But the blow of the sword is not the result of a will (zeal) existing prior to it as its cause or motivation. Rather, by bursting the imaginal mode of Being apart, the blow of the sword is the primary uprising of the will, the act through which the will releases itself into existence for the “first” time. The will is born out of itself, out of the “sudden” exercise of willing. It is its own origin. Since this is the nature of the will, every act of willing will have the same violent character of a blow of the sword cutting Being apart and of a “first” breaking out of the imaginal world. It was an act of will that blasted God, earthly reality, and the nature of man, all three, out of the medium of the anima, i.e., of the 9 On the will and the original uprising of the will see especially Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2 vols. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961). The psychological connection between ego and will (and animus) is touched upon in James Hillman, “Anima (II),” Spring 1974, esp. p. 143.

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imaginal, and thus subjected them to itself—to the will or ego established by this very act of subjugation—as the new medium of existence as a whole. If Nietzsche defined the essence of the world as the “Will to Power,” he precisely characterized the innermost metaphysical quality of Being, without however realizing that this was only the quality of Being as it resulted from the ontological nuclear fission, not the quality of primal Being; and without realizing that by proclaiming the Will to Power as the supreme principle he, Nietzsche, was only the mouthpiece of the Christian Creator-God, an agent of enforcement in the history of the ontological nuclear fission, one of the final executors of the will of Moses.

THE WILL AS SUPREME ONTOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE As long as Being was immersed in the imaginal realm of the anima, the faces of the gods looked at man from within things. This means that things laid a claim on man. Things and situations demanded of themselves this or that treatment, they were binding. As images they directly affected, by virtue of their numinosity, the instinctual psyche, and thus led to that behavior that we call ritual. Ever since the decline of epiphany and the exodus of the gods from this world into transcendence, the binding force has gone out of things and situations themselves. This force has been released and now has a separate existence in the shape of absolute ethical norms. To these man has to bestow, by an act of will and by his own spiritual effort, any power and reality they may have, because they have no force of their own. The human ego and its moral attitude now carry the whole burden of responsibility since the divine glance coming forth from reality no longer quite naturally leads to the soul’s ritual activity at the instinctual level. The ethos of the ritualistic age was moored in external reality itself. Not only man’s actions, but the objective world was, so to speak, ethical in itself. Ethics encompassed both, man and reality. In the case of moralistic ethics, however, man stands all alone with his moral responsibility vis-à-vis the world of things, which is now without obligation, and subject to arbitrary decisions. Things have no will and claim of their own any more, they are, as one says, “ethically neutral.” In that moment when things are no longer the images of gods, but have their God as their extramundane creator outside of

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themselves, they have become fair game, mute objects for study and exploitation. Hence, a moral law imposed from above becomes a necessity in order to restrain the use of the now-outlawed reality. Thus the story of God’s splitting himself off from the Golden Calf inevitably also had to be the story of the Ten Commandments cut in stone tables, that is, the story of a change from the psychological and ritualistic relation to the world to a spiritual and moralistic one, and at the same time the story of the installation of man into his new mode-of-being as the willing one. This reification of reality, however, is not the work of men. Rather, to be exploitable dead matter is the actual nature of things ever since they ceased to be divine images and became created things, things made by God. For it is only secondarily and in a roundabout way, i.e., only if man believes in the extramundane creator with a precarious act of faith constantly subject to temptations, that a certain image quality can be supplied to them. But this will always remain a second-hand imaginal quality, an imago dei infinitely removed from God himself. The second component of the image, God, has also been immersed in and subjected to the element of the ego-will, just as was the case with earthly reality. God is now outside of the world so that he no longer speaks to the soul through visible epiphanies and no longer forces the overwhelming impression of his unquestionable reality upon it. God is nothing any more by himself; he is now only an idea, a flatus vocis, completely subject to the contingencies and vicissitudes of man’s faith. Only indirectly, only through a spiritual act of man (faith) can God be supplied with that power that gives him a secondary reality. Faith is the volitional affirmation that man bestows upon God. And without this boost from man, “God” remains an empty word, as the history of the modern world proves. Faith thus has a contradictory nature. By what it says as the content of its belief, it sets God up as the creator; but by what it does, by what the act of faith itself amounts to, it makes the reality of God dependent on man’s will. It is not God that creates man in his image, but Ego creates God.

“TRUE” GOD AND “FALSE” GODS: THE MORALIZATION OF BEING At this juncture, let us deepen our analysis of the dissociation of Being in the sense of an ontological nuclear fission. God’s split from

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his image as bull has consequences for the categories of Being as such. What is split here, are, in the last analysis, the true and the real. The God resulting from the split is the “true” God; what is left of the bull after the split is, to be sure, visible and tangible, in other words: real, but it is only an idol, a false God. Thus we can also say that this First nuclear fission parts God’s truth and his reality. Truth and reality are big words, with manifold meanings depending on the underlying philosophical framework. What is the philosophical basis of my use of these terms? None. I do not apply to our theme the terms truth and reality as prefabricated metaphysical constructs and as elements of my philosophical “system.” I do not claim that there is indeed such a thing as God’s truth or that I have knowledge of the truth of God. Rather, I take the word “truth” and its meaning from our tale. We see that in the story of the Golden Calf a God comes into being who claims to be “the true God.” “Truth” in this emphatic, absolute sense is posited here “for the first time,” so to speak. I am only concerned with that kind of truth that God claims for himself; whether it has any validity outside of the fantasy and terminology of this mythical tale is of no interest in this context. For “the absolute” or “per se” is, as we see, established by this very story, so that methodologically it would make no sense whatsoever to postulate as an a priori and a necessary category of thought what is only a product of a particular event in Western mythology, the splitting of the image. One can phenomenologically describe the event in our story as follows: All of God’s truth, i.e., God’s godhood (or the predicate God or also the pure idea of a God) is extracted from the God-images and is isolated as a purified distillate of godhood. On the one hand, God turns into the ideal of a God which lacks a convincing realness. On the other hand, an earthly reality of God arises whose numinosity becomes more and more insistent, but is denied the recognition as divine. The word idol is the resulting “compromise formation” (in Freud’s sense). In the word idol there lie both the acknowledgment of the real, numinous power that certain realities have over the soul, and at the same time the denial of the predicate God for this numinous impact that we feel. The enormity of what happened here may not have come home to us yet. Originally, truth and realness belonged together as a matter

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of course. The real was also the true and the true only true to the extent that it was real. The situation in which truth and reality are the same, even though not alike, has the character of phainesthai, appearance, shine. It is the situation of mythical or ritualistic reality. Most clearly the essential oneness of the true and the real that we find in the mythical world is illustrated in a conversation between C. G. Jung and a chief of the Pueblo Indians. For the chief and his people the sun was the divine Father. Jung asked the chief, whether he did not think that the sun was a ball of fire, shaped by an invisible God. Jung, in other words, used the argument of Augustine: “God is not the sun, but He who made the sun.” 10 For the Indian this was, Jung tells us, the most awful blasphemy. He merely answered, “The sun is God. Everyone can see that.” “This is the Father; there is no Father behind it.” 11 This Pueblo chief insisted that the numinous effects of real phenomena on the psyche be granted whole-hearted acknowledgment as God. There is nothing behind the phenomenon. And therefore also no mere “external reality.” What manifests itself and impresses the soul (including, above all, the primordial image of manifestation or shine itself: the sun) is true by virtue of its shining, and there is no other notion of truth here. For this reason reality had to be binding and committing in itself. It bore in itself Truth, i.e., God’s godhood, and thus the supreme soul value. The meaning of truth in this context is something that binds or even compels us and that is acknowledged by us without reserve. We must admit that 2 x 2 = 4. Today, however, truth in philosophical or religious contexts is a totally different category from reality. That the nuclear bomb is real inasmuch as it deeply fascinates and frightens us, does not at all mean that it is something unquestionably true in today’s sense of the word and that it has binding power over our attitude to it. On the contrary, we have to degrade it along with everything truly numinous into an idol, indeed into something satanic, since the usual subjectivist degradation of numinous factors as a mere illusion or delusion does not seem to succeed in the case of the bomb. 10 Augustinus, In Johannis Evangelium, XXXIV, 2, col. 2037, tom. III/2: Non est Dominus sol factus, sed per quem sol factus est. 11 I quote from the reports of this encounter in Jung, MDR, p. 250 f. as well as in Jung, CW 18 § 688.

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With the distinction between true and false gods, a fundamental confusion takes over. Ontological truth is confounded with logical truth, i.e., the truth of our statements or predicates. Actual Being and our recognition of this actuality as valid and binding are split apart. The recognition becomes something independent, similarly as with paper money, the value of things became a separate entity. It can now be granted to or withheld from any reality ad libitum. Actually of course, there can be no false gods. For either they are gods, then they are not false, or they are something else, then they are not false either. The real is simply what it is, and in this does the unshakeable truth of everything that exists lie. There is no true and false weather, are no true and false trees, but there are many kinds of weather and trees. “The true God” is about as meaningful as a statement like “Only sunshine is true weather; rain is false weather.” Opinions and statements can be false, but not realities. With the words “idol,” and “false gods,” however, one does not criticize a wrong opinion. Rather, a reality—the numinosity of the golden bull, of the sun, of the thunderstorm—is being degraded. The energy released by way of the destruction of the image quality has become an instrument of power with which certain aspects of reality can arbitrarily12 be condemned while others are exalted, in other words, with which the world could be manipulated in a certain direction— the direction frequently called development of consciousness, or evolutionary progress. Here we see again that the will has subjugated Being as such. The sword of Moses is the invention of the idea that there are false realities and that the true (or as one likes to say in psychology: the true self ) is not seen, is not allowed to be seen, in what really exists. As long as reality bore in itself the predicate truth, anything having that type of effect on the soul that by way of abbreviation I only want to indicate with the one word numinosity, was itself god or daimon. The actual effect was the only measure of truth. Now, however, the factual effect no longer counts. What and where God is is determined by a predecided definition laid down in dogma. We now know a priori that certain things, even if they are highly real and numinous, cannot be God, because they must not be God. In this way we get a new 12 This does not mean “as one likes it,” but according to the law inherent in the will. The will is not itself a matter of free choice.

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formulation for the paradox mentioned earlier: that God by having risen into the highest height of the absolute has in truth submitted to an ideal or standard, and that conversely he can be the “true God” only insofar as he subordinates himself to this norm. God now obeys a super-ego, as it were. He cannot simply be and appear as he is, he does not have free play for his nature, but must comply with a onceand-for-all fixed standard (summum bonum, pure love) which is immunized against his real behavior by dogma, doctrinal office and inquisition. It is this that gives the new nature of God the character of an ego-ideal. Our story demonstrates at the same time the archetypal foundation and genesis of the inferiority feeling and the striving for superiority in their oneness. It is apparent that what fired the ascension of God from a mythic, phenomenal god to “the true God” was a powerful striving for superiority. It is not only God who himself professes to his zeal or jealousy in this very place; Moses too, his human reflection, shows the same striving. What does this zeal mean? God wants to be superior to the visible image of the bull. Above all, he wants the opinion held of him to be higher than that of the bull image. For this purpose an instrument of power, the sword, is necessary, which shows that a claim of superiority having no power of conviction of its own is to be put through by force. God obviously is not satisfied to exist only as mythical epiphany, as phenomenal shine. He considers his primary form as being inferior. He wants to develop “his true self,” as it were, and have a literal existence. From this we see that the inferiority feeling is based on the striving for superiority and vice versa. For only because God takes his true idea (i.e., his ideal) for his absolute standard must he despise his own reality as false. The real natural world becomes inferior. What happened here has meanwhile—with the coming of the 20 th century—seeped down into the personal psychology of individuals. If many patients today feel inferior and think that they have to appear as “more” (more educated, more dignified, richer, morally better, or whatever), then this does not only have its reasons in the personal life history of these people. Rather it is also the late ritual re-enactment of this divine paradigm in the personal life of a human being.

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THE CHANGE IN THE NATURE OF THE IMAGE The destruction of the divine image has not done away with the imaginal quality altogether. It is not that formerly man lived in an imaginal world whereas today we do not. The image has only undergone a fundamental change in quality. The mode of being of the image has become different, but not diminished. In fact, the image underwent the same tremendous intensification into a distillate of image that we have seen occurring with respect to God’s truth. It is readily apparent that there has been an unheard of inflation of the image, so that we now live in an absurdly imagistic time. Never has the world been so swamped with images: posters, magazines, prints, art books, comics, television, advertising on almost every wrapping, huge collections of pictures in city museums, printed fabrics and wallpaper. … In addition, there is an inflationary increase of figurative use of language, puns and the like, again showing the dominance of the image. Once the image was the manifestation of something. In the image of the bull, e.g., the sharply defined inner essence of the bull—the bull God—showed itself. The image always conveyed a reality as a numinous Other distinct from the image itself; but in such a way that the numinous reality manifested itself immediately in the image, shining forth from it, though without being identical with it. The image had an irreducible substantial content, for the sake of which it was image and to which it surrendered itself. Thus the image was image by helping its substantial content to presence, to manifest in such a way that the image was subsumed by its activity of showing its subject. The image was ‘holy’ inasmuch as its reality served to show truth. The image presented in advertising or television shows has freed itself from any dependence on its content. It is the totally unleashed, purified image, showing only itself. It is no longer there for the purpose of showing something. The image in advertising is absolutely indifferent to what it shows or is an image of. In this indifference lies its complete freedom and thus its absoluteness. For one and the same product you could advertise by means of an image of the tough life of cowboys just as easily as with the opposite image of a refined society living a luxurious life. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can be the musical background to a soap commercial just as well as to a commercial for cognac or a political party. What matters is only that it is pure show

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and that it has brought its presence to the highest degree of forcibleness. The correlate in man of this kind of unleashed image is therefore the feeling experience such as in tourism (if the effect is conscious), or the “hidden persuasion” (if it is unconscious). Here we see again that the imaginal quality too has been subjugated to will. Only an image freed into indifference to its content can arbitrarily be used and exploited for any purpose; only by submitting wholly to the will can the image free itself from being bonded by its subject as a numinous reality of substance, and ascend into absoluteness. Therefore the purpose of financial profit that is intricately connected with advertising confirms the absoluteness of the image and is a condition for it. The financial exploitation of the image is the very guarantee that the image has indeed absolutely overcome its substantial content, and now is show solely for the purpose of show. When we hear of an exploitation of image, we tend to react with moral condemnation. Advertising and television are considered base and inferior. That is the general consensus, even if this consensus does not seem to detract from their reality and popularity. But, after what we discussed above, we can no longer think in this condemnatory fashion, because that thought pattern was the very cause of what we now, looking through its glasses, would be condemning. We therefore must try to appreciate advertising, television and today’s whole flood of images as the modern form of image worship: as the authentic and the only possible way to worship the image of the Christian God. For what is the image of the Christian God? This God, in his Old Testament form as Yahweh, has just now in our story issued a prohibition: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness ….” This prohibition is only directed against the natural deities, not against pictorial representations of Yahweh himself.13 What is rejected here is therefore the worship of the natural inasmuch as it claims to be substantial and divine of its own accord; and what is ipso facto demanded is a cult of a God-image that has left all traces of the natural behind and has no substantial content: in other words, is an imageless image. This exactly corresponds to the new nature of God who has shaken off his natural reality and purified himself into an idealized ‘unreal’ abstraction, into an image in the public relations 13

Ulrich Mann, “Ikone und Engel,” pp. 9f.

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sense of the word. The Christian God’s existence is not substantial, it lies solely in his prestige, the effect of his ‘public relations,’ in his being believed in by his ‘true believers,’ his ‘fans.’ In brief: he has his essence in the public opinion held of him. For the definition of his nature (“highest good,” “true word,” “all love”) does not contain particular substantial qualities. It only names, quite abstractly, the relation to his public (love, message, Father), or the reputation that he wants to be known to have (summum bonum). Thus he lives entirely for, and is reduced to, his public image, whereas the old gods only became present, only had their epiphany, in the image and as image, but what showed forth in the image was their qualitative substantiality and particular essence. Now, the image is empty, even if it portrays the richness of the whole world; it does not make anything manifest any more, positing itself as an end in itself—pure prestige. A main difference between the so-called pagan gods and the Christian God lies not in that the former are worshiped in images and the latter not, but in the transformation of the nature of the Godimage. We today worship the God-image of our God just as much as the ancients worshiped their God-images. The only difference is that our God-image does not have the sensual shape of a natural phenomenon or of a cast, painted or carved image, but rather the abstract and absolute shape of image per se: the image of public relations. The numinosity once invested in what the image manifested now belongs to the “image for the sake of image.” We need images, more and more images, no matter what of. The absolute God can only be a single one (monotheism: “that they might know thee the only true God”—John 17:3), and by the same token there is, and can only be, one single absolute image, no matter in how many different “versions” it occurs. It makes no difference whether it is the image of God, of a politician, of a business firm, of a product, or of a private person—it is always one and the same thing that is shown in the image (in the public relations sense of the word) thanks to its total indifference to any specific content: prestige as such, the praise of the name for the name’s sake; not of a particular name, for this would again be the name of something or somebody. Inasmuch as it is God’s qualitative nature to be image (public opinion as such), any activity cultivating the prestige of something (of one’s own image or of the image of a product or organization, or whatever) is an

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enactment of God’s nature and as such a sacred act—the cult or worship of our God-image. With every image in advertising or public relations, the absolute God celebrates his ever-new triumph of the absolute God over his substantial bull shape. In order for Christianity to overcome polytheism definitively, it had to become absolutely indifferent to any particular content of the image, indeed to the very idea of a content. Holy images were merely representations, functional aids, not in themselves holy. Thus Christianity also had to become indifferent to its own doctrinal contents, its own iconography and mythical substance. The literal theological substance of Christianity, as it is still preached today by the churches, is the last pagan remnant, as is were, in Christianity itself. Only where this remnant of the natural and substantial has been completely transformed into function, and only where the intended noetic contents are totally transmuted into objectively existing form, has Christianity reached its accomplished shape: advertising, entertainment, tourism, public relations, ego-psychology, theory of information and cybernetics—as shocking as this insight may at first seem. For behind every content that insisted on its remaining content, be it as Christian as can be, there would always be lurking one of the mythical gods, a segment of the autonomous divinity of the natural world: idols. To still today consider “actual” Christianity to be Christianity in its express theological form would mean to think that the Christian promise could be adhered to by the mere echoing of it instead of by making it good, and to think that the task set by the Christian vision could be fulfilled by the monotonous repetition of this task instead of by its execution. Theological discourse could only be a preliminary representation of the Christian religion because it was Christian only “accidentally,” only by virtue of the conscious intention of the speaking person. With advertising, to mention just one example, this is no longer the case. It is by virtue of the necessities of its essence and independently of the contingencies of human intentions that advertising is the constant proclamation of salvation and the constant confirmation in the belief in salvation. Here, Christianity (the preaching of the Gospel = the good news and the mission to convert) is no longer a subjective attitude: it has changed over into an objective existence, working its reality upon us even against our ‘wills.’

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THE DEMONIZATION OF REALITY As God’s truth was heightened more and more until it reached the absolute summit in the New Testament, his reality became inferior. However, the suppression of God’s reality into the status of idols or, later on, of the devil, does not mean that God’s reality remained frozen in its old condition. On the contrary, only God’s idealized person as pure spirit and pure love was frozen once it had reached its highest possible form with the New Testament. For how could the absolute still progress, how could a truth that has been split from its reality continue to develop? God’s truth had reached its end. Not so God’s reality, now having become inferior. In fact, active fermentation and development was reserved for it. As long as sensory reality bore the predicate God, it was securely moored in and bound by the name of God. On account of its divine nature, the mythical world bore a pleromatic fullness and gravity in itself which prevented things from striving beyond themselves into boundlessness (hubris, Titanism). This changed in that moment when reality was cut off from its inner mooring in the middle ground of the imaginal by a blow of the sword. From then on things did not have their ontological center, their center of gravity in themselves. That center had been transferred from within them into transcendence, so that the things of this world were brought into an ontological state of inevitable unrest since they now had to yearn for their center in a ceaseless striving. Since then, to use formulations by Nietzsche, the world is rolling from its center into the X, similar to a stream that wants to get to its end 14—a process that began imperceptibly and became clear to everyone only during the modern age. Just as God’s truth cut off from his reality had striven for the highest heights like a released balloon, so conversely reality, separated from the name of God and thus unleashed, could, and had to, strive to advance its earthly realness to unheard of degrees of intensity in order to correspond to the intensification reached by the predicate ‘God.’ The tremendous amount of energy, released by its separation from God’s truth, was now available for its completely autonomous development. The whole strength formerly invested in the ritual binding of reality 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht, comp. Peter Gast (Stuttgart: Kröners Taschenbuchausgabe Band 78, 1959), # 1.5 and “Vorrede” # 2.

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and thus in reality’s trueness, was now for the sole benefit of reality pure and simple. This means reality was charged enormously, it was demonized. Reality too was supposed to acquire a literal existence instead of an imaginal one. The latest result of this development is the nuclear bomb. With it, a degree of reality has been reached behind which the wildness and danger of the bull and all other former Godanimals, including Leviathan and Behemoth, fade to nothing. Natural reality has intensified into technological reality. God’s animal shape tied into the entire complex of life has been surpassed by the abstract and absolutely unleashed machine shape of God. As God’s truth underwent, with the God of pure love and true word, a stylization into the absolute ideal cleansed from all reality, so also reality, released from its bondage to God’s truth, intensified into the sheer distillate of realness. Nuclear energy is, as it were, realness as such, realness absolute, cleansed from all the “cinders” of the ideal that by necessity were originally incorporated in the real.

OUR REAL EXPERIENCE OF GOD With this situation, however, development is reversed. The nuclear bomb is so frighteningly real that it simply forces consciousness to recognize it as an undeniable truth—ugly, depraved, deadly, but still truth. The long degraded and repressed reality has caught up again with that consciousness that had been exclusively fixated on pure truth. In the shape of the bomb, God’s repudiated reality demands from us repayment, with compounded interest, of a gigantic debt, demands the name of God which was withheld from reality for more than two millennia, the unreserved recognition of reality as true God. Western mankind owes reality worship, having disparaged it as idol, false gods, Mammon, Moloch, Kingdom of Satan, the secular, and the like. Western man has praised God’s truth to the skies, indeed so highly that in the end it evaporated; but he disowned reality like a bastard, even though this reality powerfully attracted man’s greed (consumer goods), his curiosity (science) and his industry (big business), thereby proving its irresistible numinosity. Through faith, by believing, mankind abandoned itself blindly to God’s own idol of himself. Here, we must not forget that it was God himself who cut himself off from his reality and commanded that it be disparaged. With his

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zeal, God himself pursued his upward stylization to the absolutely true God and demanded faith in this image of himself. But as the psychotherapist would owe something to his patient if he were to believe blindly the latter’s self-representation instead of also perceiving his unconscious reality, so God, too, has been betrayed in a deeper sense precisely because mankind believed his self-representation and complied with the degrading of God’s reality pursued by God himself. It would seem to have been man’s task to be more perspicacious and to try the spirits with critical alertness. C. G. Jung repeatedly stressed that psychological hygiene requires that consciousness distinguish itself from those archetypal truths that might come over it. It is vital for us not to succumb to them. Above all in therapy, the analyst has to pay dearly for taking the neurotic conjectures of his patient literally. For the unconscious reality pushing to the fore from within the pathology insists on being seen as what it is despite all well-meaning intentions on the part of consciousness. Even the patient himself ultimately wants to be recognized in his reality, as strong as his defenses against such a recognition may be at first and as much as he may insist, in his conscious words, on his truth, i.e., his idealized self. Does not similarly God’s reality in the shape of the bomb insist on recognition without reserve—even against his conscious self-revelation as pure love and creative truth? Does not God, too, want to be seen in his reality? What in the shape of the nuclear bomb is knocking at our door and wants to be received into consciousness is nothing else but God’s own reality, that reality that he had centuries ago cast away in the form of the bull image and thereby unleashed. Therapeutically, it is an indispensable necessity that the unleashed be bound again, that what has been split off be united with its other half. It must not be said again: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). But the binding of the unleashed cannot take place in technology or by political techniques alone. It must also, even primarily, take place psychologically on the objective level of the psyche, i.e., in our ontology and theology. For only then is it not constantly threatened by a collapse of our goodwill, but is firmly grounded in a foundation that supports ourselves too. God’s reality must finally be given back its truth, withheld from it for so long. And for that reason I say: The nuclear bomb is God.

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It is not I who deifies the nuclear bomb. Objective phenomenology has long done so. In view of the bomb, must we not, to quote Schleiermacher, have the feeling of our absolute dependence? Is the nuclear bomb not, to speak with Tillich, our ultimate concern? In its face, must we not confess, to use Luther’s phrase, “Did we in our own strength confide, Our striving would be losing”? Is it not, to cite Rudolf Otto, the numinous power of our age? It is the supreme ruler over our existence or non-existence. It has the power to drive hundreds of thousands of people to public demonstrations, a modern variety of sacred processions. It causes boundless fears, shows itself to man in countless dreams. And, above all, according to its telos it is allpermeating radiation (radiance), blazing heat, burning fire, all-crushing pressure-wave. This is what we actually experience. Can we recognize this experience as binding for our thinking and speaking? Do we allow our experience to tell us what name to give to it—or will we be blind to it and situate our thinking and speaking in a cut-off realm of consciousness? Ultimately, the question is whether we grant, along with C. G. Jung, e.g., 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” (CW 11 § 4f.). 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. If therefore our real experience binds our thinking and speaking, then we must say the nuclear bomb is God, our true God, the God of the Christian West in his reality. If, on the other hand, we cling to a certain idea of God and immunize it against all actual experience, then we would be pretending to have an absolute knowledge about who and how God is and what and how he can by no means be. In order for us to have such a knowledge, in order for us to possess a transcendent standard by which to measure the divine or not-divine qualities of real phenomena, we would have to be transcendent ourselves or even be superior to God.

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If, however, our finite nature and the finite nature of our knowledge comes home to us, we must understand that we are irrevocably encompassed by our phenomenal world and are thus dependent on acquiring not only our knowledge about individual phenomena, but also the criteria by which to judge them, from phenomenological experience itself. We do not know “the true God” (as negative theology itself insists), and this is so even if God himself sets up a particular image of himself as the true one and demands faith in it. That God is the “true God” or the absolute is only his attribute or name, only the content of an archetypal structure. As such a content, the statement is true (psychological truth), but this of course does not mean that the archetype of the absolute is itself in fact absolute (just as Muhammed Ali by saying “I am the greatest” must not necessarily be the greatest). We could only think so if our consciousness were infected by the archetypal idea of the absolute or the “true God” as if by a virus and, in an unending attack of “feverish” megalomania, had forgotten its irrevocably finite nature. Is not the mere flirtation with the idea of the infinite a presumption for mortal man? For finite consciousness would not be truly finite if it could in any way have access to something infinite. Is it not time to awaken from this Western frenzy and to see that the idea of an absolute, infinite God is itself a most finite, human, and seasonable idea? That something as dreadful as the nuclear bomb is supposed to be God, is nothing strange as far as the history and phenomenology of religion is concerned. Even the Christian God was dreadful at the times of the Old Testament. Of course this is in sharpest contrast to his self-revelation as love. But maybe we can apply to our topic a differentiation that Kafka15 once used and say on the basis of our actual phenomenological experience: yes, truly, God is love, but still more truly is he the terror of Being or, as Jung once formulated it, the almighty shadow, the fear that fills heaven and earth.16 Yes, indeed, God is his truth, but still more truly is he his reality. Truly—still more truly: this is the relationship that prevails between consciousness and the unconscious, between idealized self and reality. 15 Franz Kafka, “Das Urteil,” in F. K., Das Urteil und andere Erzählungen, (Frankfurt und Hamburg: Fischer Bücherei, 1952), p. 21: “Ein unschuldiges Kind warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer Mensch!” 16 Letters 1, March 16, 1943, to Arnold Künzli, p. 333.

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THE NEW PRIMITIVITY The statement, “The nuclear bomb is God,” cannot be taken literally. It would be absurd. Rather, this statement explodes our customary literal notion of God as well as our literal understanding of the bomb as a merely technical object. I cannot “believe” in the bomb as God, for then I would have idolized it. But neither can I look for God behind it, behind reality, and attribute a literal existence above the whole world to him. Ultimately this would be an idolization as well, inasmuch as idolatry means that a split off, partial aspect is worshipped as God in its own right. Let us keep in mind what the Pueblo Indian said: “The sun is God. Everyone can see that. He is the Father, there is no father behind him.” This worshiped sun is of course not the reduced sun of physics or astronomy. It is the full-fledged original sun, the image that looks at the soul from within the sun’s depth. In the same vein, the nuclear bomb is not God as an object of physics, but as the real image of the absolute terror that it throws into the soul and that fills the soul with fear and awe, or it is the image of that inconceivable radiance before which we could not hide our face any more, but would have to retreat to fallout shelters. Here we do not have to mystify: Everyone can see that. We don’t have to look for anything behind the phenomenon. The real, unreduced sight of the nuclear bomb is God. Literalism, or the metaphysical relation to Being, has been overcome and Being is grounded again in the metaphorical image, in appearance, in the phenomenal shine. The notion of God that had been raised to the metaphysical heaven and, shelved there, has come back down to earth, so that reality can be credited again with the binding power of truth, i.e., with the attribute God, simply because it is so dreadfully real. Nature and spirit are no longer the ultimate components of the world, no longer absolute opposites. They are returned to the psyche, and the psyche in return is reinstated in its hereditary rank as that which surrounds us on all sides and has nothing outside of itself. We for our part return with this metaphorical, psychological, phenomenological position into a new primitivity; if you wish, into a kind of “animism,” which, as you know, comes from anima. As Jung once stated in a conversation with a man of the church, “I am a primitive; you are a civilized man.” When Jung reported this

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conversation, he added, “In a certain way, this man is much more wonderful than I am. He can [on account of the means of grace of the church] be a saint; I cannot be a saint—I can only be a nigger, very primitive, going by the next thing—quite superstitious” (CW 18 § 682). If we stick to the next best in this quite “naïve” way, then we will, I assume, go down on our knees in view of the dreadful terror and the unspeakable radiance looking at us from within the nuclear bomb. Then the worship of the Golden Calf, interrupted at that time, can be concluded, but on the completely new level of the absolute that we have meanwhile arrived at. Does not God’s reality, does not his dreadfulness, does not the nuclear bomb demand of us that we worship it? Is worship not the only real possibility of its propitiation? With worship I of course do not mean to approve of it, to be “for” it. I simply mean that we correspond to the actual experience in our soul by a conscious recognition of the substance of this experience. I mean that we expressly take our place in that which actually is. I mean, figuratively speaking, the dance around our Golden Calf. Can you imagine this? A mankind that dances around the bomb? A mankind whose hardening and contentiousness, whose power competition and protesting would be softened in the dance, a mankind that would swing into the “atomic” music of Being? And a bomb that would not have to be used any more, because it would be the center authorizing the dance? A bomb which as that center would bind man and by binding us would also be itself bound?

CHAPTER FIVE

The Invention of Explosive Power and the Blueprint of the Bomb: A Chapter in the Imaginal Pre-History of Our Nuclear Predicament

F

ive hundred years before gunpowder was invented in Europe around 1300 A.D., the Chinese had already known and used it for firecrackers and rockets. But this invention in China did not in any way revolutionize the spirit and the development of Chinese culture. Seen from outside, until 1912 Chinese culture basically remained the same that it had always been. By contrast, since the Middle Ages, the mind of the West has lifted off like a rocket, starting slowly to raise itself above the ground, then picking up speed exponentially, until now, to give only one example, it can be said that every eight years the total amount of scientific knowledge doubles. This is unparalleled. No other civilization shows this selfpropelling explosive development. Seen in this light, the atom bombs and missiles of this century do not look like accidental by-products of our culture, not just one invention among thousands of others, but more like the symbol of the West as a whole, symbol in the fullest sense of the word as embodiment of the inner meaning of our development. The physicists and engineers who invented the Bomb did not invent it out of the blue. The Bomb is not really their invention. It is rather the other way around. They were the exponents of the explosive

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mind of the Christian West. The Bomb invented them; it produced its own producers, much like Goethe said, “The poems created me, not I them.”1 The Bomb could be invented only by a civilization that was itself formed in the Bomb’s archetypal image and likeness. Only like discovers like. So the construction of the Bomb as a literal technical reality must have been preceded by the edification of the Bomb in the Western soul. I use the word “edification” deliberately, as it rings with religious meaning. For it was what in Christian parlance is called edification, that is, the building up of the soul in faith and moral steadfastness, which edified the Bomb not only in the soul of Western man, as I said before, but rather as the soul of Western man: ours is a bomb soul, an explosive mind, a missile consciousness. The archetypal image of the Bomb is familiar to all of us. It is expressed in the fairy tale of the bottle imp, the Spirit in the Glass, as told by the Brothers Grimm. A highly dangerous substance personified as a demon named Mercurius is enclosed in a bottle. A seal keeps the explosive in the bottle, but can be broken easily by anybody who is reached by the tempting call from within the bottle: “Let me out, let me out.” If let out, the spirit or the substance, which as long as it was contained in the bottle seemed small and harmless— the fairy tale compares it to a frog—will explode out of the bottle and take on tremendous proportions, threatening to kill its liberator. Jung devoted an Eranos lecture to this tale, the only fairy tale discussed by him at length. Jung raises also a puzzling point: how did the Spirit Mercurius get into the bottle in the first place? For we know of course that it is the very nature of the mercurial substance in alchemy to be extremely evasive and to show up anywhere, all around us, and that likewise it was the nature of the God Mercury or Hermes in Greek religion not to belong to one region, let alone to be confined. Rather as the messenger God he crossed all borders, was inside and outside, above and below. But in this tale he or what is left of him can be pin­ pointed. So between the natural state of Mercurius and the state the tale shows him to be in now, an intervention by some external force 1 “… wie mit Gedichten, ich machte sie nicht, sondern sie machten mich”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kampagne in Frankreich (under the date August 30, 1792).

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must have happened, by some powerful magician, as it were, disrupting his free unfolding and artificially imprisoning him like an evil spirit. The fairy tale thus indirectly 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. Jung evaluates this fate of Mercurius in the light of his well-known idea that without moral guilt feelings and without perceived distinctions there could not be consciousness at all. A merely instinctual existence and a naïve unconsciousness untroubled by guilt would have prevailed. We would have remained mere-nature, had the ‘master’ not put an end to this by disrupting the free unfolding of the natural being, introducing a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and ostracizing ‘evil.’ We must grant the master of souls—this is Jung’s evaluation—that his strange intervention was helpful for the development of any kind of consciousness, and in this sense something good. Jung’s statement contains a shocking insight. Good and evil are not primary factors given with the nature of the world. Rather, they are the product of a “strange intervention,” of an “artificially” introduced “distinction,” the result of a historical event, namely the incursion of Christianity into the pagan, natural world. Up until Jung, evil had been seen as an a priori metaphysical truth, timeless, eternal. But like the wheel or similar inventions that revolutionized human life, evil too was ‘invented’ in the course of history through an incisive act, a kind of alchemical operation of separatio performed on what of its own accord is precisely not separated. We get indirect support for this insight from philosophy. As both Kant and Nicolai Hartmann have shown, nobody can wish to do evil for evil’s sake. It is humanly impossible. In everything we do, even in a criminal act, we are motivated by some good. The murderer may be aiming for a relatively low value (e.g., to get rich) and violate a higher value (the life of others), but he is still motivated by a value and not by ‘evil.’ Thus evil in the strict sense does not occur in primordial human experience, and it is not an eternal factor of the world that in archaic times would merely not yet have been discovered. Jung sees through the artificiality of the distinction between good and evil and thereby makes us conscious of the moral opposites that previously had unconsciously been taken for granted, that is to say,

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had held our consciousness in their grip. And yet Jung himself seems still to be under the spell of the idea when he claims that the distinction between good and evil was necessary and helpful for the development of any kind of consciousness, and thus something good. Jung seems to believe that this distinction brought about a more precise, more adequate and more conscious perception of reality. But this is not a description of the effects of the moral opposites; it is an evaluation itself guided by the very distinction between good and evil that it is supposed to evaluate. This distinction brought about fundamental changes, but not in the direction of a ‘higher,’ more differentiated consciousness. On the contrary. The distinction between good and evil amounted to a fundamental reduction and simplification of consciousness. Just as in literature the black-and-white depiction of the Western novel with its ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ reflects a very crude level of consciousness as compared to the complex and subtle character descriptions in great novels or dramas, so the emphatic opposition of good and evil, God and devil, reduces the manifold differentiations of the mythical age to the single lump sum and abstract minimal distinction: positive vs. negative. Zeus, Artemis, Dionysus, Wotan cannot be done justice to by such a crude distinction, they are far too complex and many-colored. The invention of good and evil resulted in a loss of concreteness and precise differentiation. And this loss was the price for a gain, a gain however of a totally different nature from the one Jung had in mind: rather than becoming more differentiated thereby, consciousness 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 a minus pole. Qualitative differentiations had all to be subsumed under and utilized for one super-distinction, the moral distinction. Truly not a ‘higher’ consciousness, one coming nearer the ‘truth,’ as Jung seems to have thought, but a tenser, an electrified consciousness, this is what the invention of good and evil means. This invention is a metaphysical and psychological engine, the invention of a world-transformer. The idea of evil is a gigantic psychological power station. By means of the moral opposites consciousness was able to artificially produce more and more energy for itself by burning up the

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manifold polychrome imaginal qualities of the world and to exploit this energy to gain power over all nature. The power engine requires an extreme tension. To create this highvoltage tension in the soul, hatred becomes vital; not personal hatred, but hatred in an ontological sense. Cosmogonic eros holding the opposites together and allowing for the free flux, e.g., from Yin to Yang and vice versa—vanishes. Instead enmity between the opposites becomes the principle ruling over being at large. This is expressed in powerful images, such as the one of Satan. Satan is the adversary as such, the enemy who as enemy is the “prince of this world” (Matt. 13:39 and John 12:31). Or, “For every one that doeth evil hateth the light” (John 3:20, claiming something that, as we learned from Kant and Hartmann, is humanly impossible). Or, death is “the last enemy that shall be destroyed” (1 Cor. 15:26); enmity is put between the serpent and the woman (Gen. 3:15) and between the world and God (James 4:4; Rom. 8:7). Enmity here means absolute incompatibility, or more than that: the fixed will on the part of the one opposite to altogether destroy the other. What a different fantasy from the Chinese one of Yin and Yang! A consciousness that lives with the radical and irreconcilable antagonism of good and evil is continuously, because ontologically, put on the alert, requiring a total mobilization of all reserves. The polarization is such that there is constant danger. Ontologically we live in times of perpetual war. The situation is extremely inflammable. There must be no sleep, no rest, no free play for the impulses and images of the soul. “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Pet. 5:8). The idea of evil derives from a procedure of separation and purification similar to the procedures of modern chemistry by which natural raw materials are artificially separated into purified valuable substances on the one hand and poisonous waste on the other. Behind this idea is at work a will for pure poison, the will that sheer evil be. We see a little of this will for evil in the Sermon of the Mount, in Jesus’s carrying the Ten Commandments to extremes. It is, to take up only one example, no longer the committed act of adultery that is considered evil, but the mere looking “on a woman to lust after her”

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(Matt. 5:28). What motivates this carrying to extremes? Behind this radicalization is the will to give absolute authority to the idea of evil. Up to then, anyone who did not commit adultery, who did not kill, did not lie could justly be considered good (righteous). The difference between good and evil had a precise practical meaning. What the Sermon of the Mount wants to achieve, however, is that the difference between people who do commit such deeds and those who don’t is eliminated: they are all sinners. Jesus thus does not want to help people to live a better, more moral life, he wants to force the insight in the inescapability of evil (sin) on them to increase the authority of evil. Evil is declared to be the ruler over all, without exception. “There is none who doeth good, no, not one” (Ps. 14:3). Evil or Satan is even enthroned as the “God of this world.” This is not something recognized or discovered to be the case, it is something done to the world and man. Concerning evil, the great question moving the Christian world has always been póthen tò kakón? Where does evil come from? The corresponding question for archaic cultures was the opposite: What to do with evil? Whither put it? One method used by these cultures to deal with evil was the ritual of the scapegoat. One member of the tribe, or an animal, was chosen and ritually loaded with the entire blemish and then driven into the desert or cast down a chasm. Erich Neumann, Friedrich Seifert and others have criticized this as an early, literally performed, repression, whereas they advocate the integration of the evil. Their view projects a modern psychological or ontological condition back into earlier times. Heino Gehrts rightly rejected this theory of the scapegoat. He pointed out that archaic man lived in a world surrounded by infinity on all sides. The ordered, civilized human world was a small island embedded in a huge wilderness, in Chaos. So when the scapegoat was driven into the desert or some other representation of Chaos, it was not repressed, but on the contrary released into the open expanse, into which it dissolved. It truly disappeared. Repression means quite the opposite: encapsulating something in one’s interior prison so that it cannot immediately disturb our consciousness; but, because it is preserved unchanged inside, could break free again at any moment.

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In Christianity, too, deliverance from evil is imagined in the image of the scapegoat. Christ is the sacrificial lamb, upon whom we are told to cast all our care (1 Pet. 5:7). “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). But what a difference to the scapegoat rituals of archaic cultures! Here the sin of the whole world is abstractly and globally loaded onto the lamb; in ritualistic cultures it was always a question of particular blemishes, so that the ritual had to be performed time and again. The Christian ritual is a single superritual that is to rid us of all evil, past and future, forever. Moreover, this ritual takes place within an entirely new constitution of being. The mythical gods were gods of and in this world. They too had Chaos, Time, the Fates above and around them. The Christian God by contrast is the creator of the world who himself is expressly outside and above the entire world. He is the ultimate, the absolute. Now the world is completely surrounded by God; there is no open expanse, no frontier, no out, no naught. The world has become finite, merely secular. Humanity has no immediate access to infinity. Our world is inescapably enclosed, and the Christian God is nothing else but the primordial image and guarantor of its absolute encirclement and merely secular status. This is why the mystics and psychologists had to look within to find an ‘inner’ infinity, the God within (Jung). The situation is reversed. The stance in, and orientation to, the cosmos of archaic man is the opposite of ours; he looked outward into the cosmos, upward toward the upper or downward toward the lower Gods. For him this world had its own infinity in itself. Mercury or Hermes was all around him and all over the place, whereas now, as we have seen, he is enclosed in a glass bottle, reduced to a small object encircled in the focus of the human onlooker, just as the Christian God is the great onlooker for whom the world as a whole is like a small glass bottle in front of him. If indeed the world is enclosed and if at the same time the collected sin of the world is heaped onto Christ, the question “Whither? What to do with evil?” no longer arises, since there is no room for such a question, no room for any whither in an absolutely encircled world. Here the scapegoat cannot be sent into the nowhere, it cannot be let go off. Rather, what happens is that all evil is concentrated in one point, Christ, and preserved there—a veritable Endlagerung (final storage)—without any possibility of ever letting it disappear in some

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open nowhere. In an absolutely encircled world, the only way to deal with evil (just as with our nuclear waste) is repression, storage deep down inside, and the redeemer must paradoxically himself become the plêrôma tês kakías, the fullness of evil, to say it with a Gnostic expression. The concentrated charge of the world’s sin remains enclosed in the world, preserved forever. It can never get out: because there is no ‘out’ any more. But it also must not get out, for who in his right mind could still want to cast the scapegoat out if this scapegoat now happens to be Christ, the soul’s highest and central value, psychologically speaking the image of the Self? Christ is indispensable. But if he is indispensable and at the same time the scapegoat, this means that in Christianity the scapegoat and all the sin carried by him will have to stay with us too. He may take the sin away from us so that we are redeemed, but the evil he carries remains unredeemed, like our nuclear waste deposited deep down in the earth. Let me ask this as an aside: Can we expect to find a saving solution for nuclear waste as long as we believe to be living in a finite, merely secular world and to be ourselves finite creatures? Without a logic of infinity, i.e., without a capacity to actually think infinity here and now, our only option is repression, so-called Endlagerung. One may therefore well wonder whether the secret psychological purpose of redemption may not have been redemption in the innocent sense of that word, but rather the utmost concentration of evil—the production of a veritable explosive charge in the psyche of Western man by heaping all the individual blemishes hitherto spread all over the world and over time onto one place, and thus intensifying them into one absolute Evil in the, or as the, core of being (Christ). The entire sin of the world concentrated into sheer evil and irrevocably contained in the world—this is indeed an imaginal dynamite par excellence! But even this is not all. In Christianity the place onto which the collected evil of the world is deposited is no longer the scapegoat, but expressly the innocent and immaculate lamb (1 Pet. 1:19). In the Christian fantasy, a will is at work to think the unmitigated togetherness of absolute evil and pure innocence, a will to let the purified opposites coincide without however letting them fuse, a will for the utmost tension. “The Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” is a shocking fantasy. Should indeed the innocent lamb be suited to carry

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the world’s sin? Is this not like entrusting the control over an ammunition depot to small children? But by this fantasy, the soul of Western man has been informed. The togetherness of a truly innocent consciousness and of concentrated “sin,” this is the reality of the Western world: “Except ye become as little children” and the beast­ of-prey-like attack on nature; the “higher values” of idealism and naked materialism; “Love thy neighbor” and imperialism; “Peace on earth” and the atom bomb. Nietzsche spoke of the “humor of European culture: one considers one thing to be true, but does the other.”2 Christianity impells us to think absolute closeness and absolute distance at once. The lamb, even though it carries the collected sin of the world, is not affected by it, its immaculate innocence is retained. This is of course an open contradiction for which there is only one possible resolution, and this resolution is indeed the revolutionary discovery of Christianity: the “in one another.” I can carry the concentrated guilt and yet remain untouched by it in the innocence of my consciousness if I incorporate the sin into my interior (which by virtue of this act of incorporation is set off as a separate realm in me). This act creates for the first time the difference between conscious mind on the one hand and unconscious interior on the other. Christianity is not a genuinely dualistic religion in which God and Devil would be equal principles, God is also above the Devil, encompassing him completely. Similarly innocent lamb and sin have the structure of the in-one-another. Thus Christianity has, after all, a kind of answer to the question, “Whither with evil?” despite the fact that for Christianity there is no way out into the infinite expanse of chaos any more. Its answer is: within, swallowing into the interior, incorporation. Where else should evil—the type of evil which Christianity itself invented—be stowed away once the world is enclosed and totally encircled? The momentous discovery of interiorization is a discovery to which all modern psychology owes its existence. Without it Western man would not have a soul as his personal property and would not carry it inside of himself. Owing to 2000 years of Christian influence we simply take this as self-evident, even though the idea of interiority is truly revolutionary. The ancients, we already said, looked outwards or 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht, Ausgewählt von Peter Gast (Stuttgart: Kröner Taschenbuchausgabe Band 78, 1959), #241.

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upwards, not inside, not into themselves. Even the Delphic and Socratic “know thyself ” which sounds to modern ears like an invitation to introspection had a very different, more objective meaning. It was an invitation to man to know his place as a mortal in distinction to the Gods. Indeed the Greeks did not have an inside at all. Their soul was outside, in the world, in the sky, in the depths of the earth, for to them, this world had its own infinity. It was the mission of Christianity to turn man’s being-in-the-world inside out and to train him to be he who, locked within a finite secular world, locked within a positivistic empiricism, looks from without to the inside of things and of himself.3 Christianity was able to deliver from sin through the in-one­ another of concentrated sin and innocent lamb. This type of in-one­ another, however, is precisely the blueprint of the Bomb: outside a harmless shell, inside a concentrated diabolic terror. The greater the tension of opposites—i.e., the purer and the more concentrated they are, the closer innocence and aggressive power are joined, the more intimately one encapsulates the other—the stronger the explosive power. The explosive shell is not an incidental by-product of Christianity; it is essential to its central purpose. If Christianity wants really to overcome the world, it must have the power to explode the world, must itself be a bomb, and as such Christianity has indeed always understood itself, even if not by means of this metaphor. Repression or incorporation must remain unconscious, because the moment we would be conscious of it, the incorporated content would no longer be incorporated within, but be objectified before consciousness. Therefore the sacrificial lamb who carries the sin of the world remains only innocent. Christianity does not reveal that the sin is inside the lamb, is the lamb. Nevertheless, interiorization as a method of retaining innocence while concentrating evil finds ample expression in the New Testament by way of projection onto its opponents. Time and again the reproach of hypocrisy is raised against the representatives of the old Israelite piety, e.g., “But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” (Matt. 23:13). The great image of 3 See my “The Burial of the Soul in Technological Civilization,” Chapter 8 in the present volume.

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the internal structure of hypocrisy is given in the passage: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Matt. 7:15). We must see both images together, the one of the lamb taking away the world’s sin and the one of the ravening wolf within the innocent sheep. Together they make up one fantasy. The Biblical name for the invention of the in-one-another of good and evil is hypocrisy. The discovery of the interior occurs as the discovery or rather invention of hypocrisy. For hypocrisy did not exist at all times. Hypóchrisis in classical Greek did not have a negative meaning. Hypochrínomai referred above all to the acting of the actor in the theater. For Stoic philosophy, the capacity to play any role imposed by fate was the very distinction of the noble-minded man. Similarly there was no word in classical Greek for lying. Pseúdô meant “to say something that objectively was not true” without necessarily insinuating a secret subjective intention and without any derogatory valuation. We must also assume that the pious in Israel were not downright hypocrites. They certainly attempted to fulfill the law honestly, even if only within the limits of the human-all-too-human. To play a role deceptively or, conversely, to suspect secret intentions or pretenses in others is not a possibility for archaic man. Friedrich Georg Jünger said, “Where the type is intact, there is no need for psychology [i.e. for the personalistic, reductive psychology of distrust] for one knows one another, one knows who the other is.” Of course: one knows one another because within an infinite world, life was played out in the open. To live meant to display oneself. The suspicion of hidden thoughts differing from manifest behavior could not arise, because the gulf between inside and outside had not been torn open. Jesus does not uncover the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. He uses the Pharisees as his screen of projection to work out the new idea of hypocrisy. He invents the schema of hypocrisy, draws his audience out of the world in which one knows one another and forces them into the thought pattern of considering whatever can be seen in the open to be hiding sinister intentions within. He teaches suspicion of the manifest. And this suspicious glance creates the inward man. Without ravening wolves and without the idea of evil, no inwardness. “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness …” (Matt. 15:19). Only by means

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of the emotion-laden idea of evil could the heart become this crucial focus, forcing all attention within and reversing man’s ontological stance. Here one has to remember the very different understanding of crimes in the mythic cosmos where they come not from the heart of men, but from without, as the workings of the gods in human life, of Hermes the thief and trickster, Pan the rapist, Aphrodite the adultress, etc. The difference between inside and outside is brought into the sharpest contrast possible: wolf and lamb, evil and innocence, i.e. plus and minus. This electrified, violent mode of thinking, inaugurated in the New Testament and so different from the cosmologically harmonious thinking of mythic man, seized the mind of the Christian West producing the explosive dynamics of European cultural development. I want to give at least two examples from the beginning of the modern era, from the time when Western man, after having studiously learned the Christian lesson during the age of “Scholasticism,” was ready to apply this lesson to the entire world, setting out to conquer the world through literal explorations of travel and of science. My examples are from two contemporaries, Luther and Ignatius of Loyola. As to Luther, I would like to remind you of his formula “simul justus et peccator” (at once righteous and sinner) and of the two complementary sentences about the freedom of a Christian man: “A Christian man is a free lord over all things and nobody’s subject.” – “A Christian man is a subservient slave to all things and everybody’s subject.” Ignatius, in the “fundamentum” (No. 23) at the beginning of his book on the spiritual exercises,4 demands the attitude of indifference toward all created things, of course within the limits of the Commandments, because man, he says, is created to serve God and worship him, whereas all other things on earth are created for man’s sake. And in No. 365 of the same work he says (approximately): What I see to be white, I must believe to be black, if this corresponds to the doctrine of the Church. I give an example for what Ignatius means: I have to believe that precisely that which I see to be an absolute disaster, 4

Ignatius de Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia (1548), many editions and translations.

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namely the crucified Christ, is glory, is the triumphant Christ. Him whom we know to be the son of an ordinary carpenter from Nazareth, we have to believe to be God. We have to develop a feel for what happens here. One and the same thing at once: lord and slave, black and white, righteous and sinner, disaster and triumph—man at once infinitely guilty and infinitely redeemed. He is absolutely free and absolutely bonded. What for the eyes of the world appears one way, is for the eyes of faith (which do not see, but believe) the opposite. Ignatius and Luther obviously put the dialectical, “sharper than a two-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12) mode of thinking, first tried in the New Testament, actually into effect; from now on it becomes the whole mode of being-in-the-world of modern man and is slowly put into practice. Being is rendered explosive. The opposites are short-circuited. An enormous psychological power is set free here, a power that was capable of bursting asunder man’s original and normally irrevocable embeddedness in nature. Archaic man was encircled by the bond of Ananke, Necessity, and in mythology this ontological encirclement was expressed, e.g., in the image of a serpent coiled around the Earth disk, holding and forcing it together. This bond of Necessity around the Earth was broken by Christ the deliverer, and that it had been broken became manifest centuries later when man could leave the terra cognita, the known Earth, and start out for the unknown, first in search for other continents, today for outer space and the innermost structure of matter. Man is set loose.5 We can see this happen in Luther’s formula “at once righteous and sinner.” With this formula, man is catapulted away from that level on which the moral value of his specific actions mattered. Now he is, even if his conduct is almost perfect, nevertheless an absolute sinner, and conversely, even with the most horrendous crimes he is once and for all redeemed. This applies not only to the moral sphere. It applies to existence as such. That level on which concrete events and their specific qualities were metaphysically essential has been pulled out from under man. Whether he wills it or not and whether he knows it or not, man 5 I have explored the theme of the bond of Necessity and its breaking in my “Deliverance from the Stream of Events: Okeanos and the Circulation of the Blood,” in Sulfur 21 (Winter 1988): 118-40, now in Wolfgang Giegerich, The Neurosis of Psychology, Collected English Papers, Vol. 1 (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2005), pp. 233­ 255 .

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has metaphysically dropped from the level of natural events, the level of concrete things with a visible shape and color and a tangible substance, onto the fundamentally lower level of the absolute. Now we live metaphysically, that is to say: now truth resides, on the postnatural level of abstract “things” we can no longer see but have to believe, the level of electricity, radar, and television waves, of atoms, electrons, cells, genes, trace elements. … And by contrast, what we see to be things, we have to believe actually to be mostly empty space, with comparatively few atoms revolving in cosmic distance around each other. The world has indeed been overcome. Nature is rendered obsolete, preserved only in our nostalgia. To this bursting asunder of natural existence corresponds the fact that man on the new level of the absolute was put under a tremendous strain. He now had himself to be an absolute polarity of black and white, justus et peccator, to be an existing contradiction of purified opposites. This meant on the one hand an incredibly intensified existential condition, a (not emotional, but ontological) high­ vaultedness in his deepest essence, for now man was called to the highest task. On the other hand, precisely by virtue of his being called to the highest task, he was under extreme stress, driven, obsessed, constantly, i.e., ontologically, called to duty. The modern development of the sciences, technology, industry, politics and economics could only be realized by that type of humanity whose metaphysical core was put under such utmost tension. Luther’s formula tells us that man is now redeemed as the sinner that he is. Redemption is not a second, additional event which would annul his being a sinner. Rather, man is redeemed only by virtue of his fundamental and indelible sinfulness. He is redeemed if, and as long as, he holds himself on the level of absolute dialectics and sustains the tightrope walk that his being-as-a-polarity amounts to. For then he is lifted out of the natural condition, has overcome the world. His redemption as a sinner lies in the fact that if he is an absolute sinner anyway, regardless of his concrete conduct, simply on account of his being a human, then he is unassailable in his essence. He enjoys a metaphysical fool’s privilege.6 All concrete natural religious bonds that 6 Note: a metaphysical fool’s privilege, which must not be confused with a practicalmoral antinomianism! I am concerned here with level of “the soul,” not with that of the behavior of the ego-personality.

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used to bind his doings as well as his being have been exploded. He is absolutely free, released to, and even called forth to, the unlimited assault on nature, without the fear that the consequences of his actions could ever fall back on him, as far as his metaphysical essence is concerned. For his sinfulness is certain to begin with. The worst is already a fact, and that worst is already redeemed, so that metaphysically, nothing really terrible can happen any more. This is why an Ignatian rule, as worded by his disciple Balthasar Gracian, can run as follows: “Apply the human means as if there were no divine ones, and the divine ones as if there were no human ones.”7 Divine reality and secular reality checkmate and, being cut loose from each other, at the same time intensify each other to extremes. They are totally immunized from one another and absolutely reconciled with each other. Being has been charged, turned into a live shell.

7 Balthasar Gracian, Hand-Orakel und Kunst der Weltklugheit: Aus dessen Werken gezogen von D. Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa und aus dem Spanischen Original treu und sorgfältig übersetzt von Arthur Schopenhauer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1953), No. 251, my translation.

CHAPTER SIX

The Rocket and the Launching Base,

or The Leap from the Imaginal

into the Outer Space

Named “Reality”

W

hatever can be said about the insignificance of the flight to the moon and other outer space missions from a practical and humanistic point of view, psychologically and “metaphysically” the venture into space is an event of highest psycho-historical importance. It is the symbol signaling that a millennia-old, “eternal” truth has become obsolete: the distinction between the sublunar world and the heavens. In another sense, too, rockets can easily be seen as a symbol of this century; we just have to think of the skyrocketing development in the sciences and in industry. But just here we come up against difficulty. I refer here to the happenstance that what I call “natural consciousness,” the consciousness which imagines ‘things’ or rather in a thing-like style in analogy to visual perception, is in the way of and thus forestalls a truly symbolic and psychological understanding of the rocket as well as of our age. To “natural consciousness” rockets are particular objects in reality among millions of other objects. It is possible, however, to move beyond natural consciousness. In the Kena Upanishad, e.g., the move is made from “what the eyes can see” to “what opens the eyes.” Similarly, Archetypal Psychology moved from the literal to the imaginal,

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and Hegel has shown how the transition from the natural mind to Understanding transports us into a “second supersensible world,” which in contrast to the first supersensible world (the Platonic realm of timeless Forms), is not a realm above and beyond ordinary reality, but an inverted world, that is to say the selfsame world, but as seen when one stands on one’s head. We need to make such a move in order to be able to understand the rocket not as a thing in reality, but as the form of our (type of ) reality, the form of Western man’s consciousness, ‘containing’ in itself everything that constitutes the world as a whole, including the literal rockets. Another difference to natural consciousness is that whereas it tends to fear a nuclear missile attack as a possible future event to be prevented at all cost, I would propose that this event has happened long ago and is the very basis of the existence of Western man, indeed of ‘reality’ as such. In contrast to the usual assumption, ‘reality,’ as we in the Occident experience it, is not the word for what is naturally1 given and exists both prior to, and independent of, our thinking about it. Rather, it is the result of a violent, “artificial” event in the soul’s history: the launching of a rocket. The purpose of this paper is to get us into the rocket, into its imagination. Factually we have lived in this (type of ) reality for more than two thousand years. But not consciously and imaginally. It is a psychological necessity for us to finally move unreservedly also our awareness and imagination into what has been our factual abode all along. Rockets need bases, solid, unyielding foundations from which they can take off. A third difference to the natural view, which would hold that the launching base and the rocket are two separate things and that the once-launched rocket leaves the base behind, is that as far as the imaginal missile is concerned it is by launching the rocket that the launching base is established for the first time. The base is not merely the origin (the past) of the rocket and the target not only its (future) destination. The archetypal rocket creates its own launching base as it is flying and heading for its target. Rocket, target, and base are one and the same. 1 It is to be noted that the word “natural” is used here in two different, almost opposite senses: in connection with words like “mind” it is somewhat synonymous with “naturalistic fallacy” and in contradistinction to a deeper, imaginal understanding; in reference to Being or the world it denotes a state prior to, and undisturbed by, an artificial human intervention establishing a firm standpoint vis-à-vis the imagination.

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There could be no such base from which a literal rocket could be fired as long as, during the ritualistic, mythological stage of civilization,2 man lived embedded in the imaginal. The mythical imagination does not allow for the kind of fixation necessary to constitute a base. A base needs the reliability of positivity (positive fact) as the metaphysical equivalent of a thick layer of “concrete.” It must be an unyielding rock. And it must be on a geometrically determined exact position, or else the rocket could not be reliably brought into its calculated ballistic course. This kind of mathematical exactitude and positivistic reliability of a solid focal point is contrary to the world of myth and ritual. One might object here that the mythological imagination possessed the notion of an eminent focal point, too, in the idea of the center of the Earth, located in certain geographical locations, such as in Delphi. Nevertheless, this center point lacked the literal, positivistic properties required of a base; it was not a geographical, physical fact, not a center in the rigidly fixed sense of geometry, because there were many centers of the Earth. Each temple, each sanctuary, indeed each temporary location of a ritual ceremony was, for the duration of the ritual, the center of the Earth. Thus, despite being the center, it was not a literal reality and did not possess the unambiguous, unshifting self-identity required of a positive location. The center could potentially be anywhere because “center” here was not defined in terms of equal distance from the circumference (in which case there would be only one single spot that could be called center), but by virtue of its “metaphysical” quality: it was the point at which a vertical dimension broke through the horizontal surface of our everyday world, opening up for us the depth of the underworld and the height of heaven. So, just as horizontally the center could not be unequivocally identified, it neither could serve, in a vertical direction, as the unshakeable foundation providing the necessary resistance for rockets to push off from, inasmuch as its express meaning was to open up the solid ground under us to the dimension of depth (which by definition is bottomless). 2 In the sense of Heino Gehrts. Gehrts distinguishes four distinct successive cultural stages, the shamanistic, the ritualistic, the religious, and the scientific-technological cultures, a watershed separating the first two from the others. In other words, religion for Gehrts is not an all-comprehensive word also applying to shamanism and the ritualistic mode of being-in-the-world. Rather, the religious stage of culture is characterized by a very different, almost opposite stance of man in the cosmos, a different sense of time, etc., much closer to the scientific stance than to the earlier two.

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It was the achievement of Christianity to give mankind the idea of an absolutely firm ground. “Upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell [the former underworld] shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18), a church which in turn is described as “the pillar and ground of truth” (1 Tim. 4: 15). “Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock” (Matt. 7:24 ff.). “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11). In these quotations a longing for something absolutely solid expresses itself, for a literal, positive fixed point that could outlast the change of times. It is the will for a reversal in the very meaning of “ground”: base, bedrock, foundation to stand on, instead of bottomless depth (as in: the ground of the sea, of hell, etc.); and ground as that which is laid, instead of primordial ground whence all that is comes forth (as from a spring). Christianity provided the solution to Archimedes’ wishful fantasy for a “point on which to stand,” which would allow him to unhinge the universe. Christ is nothing else but this very Archimedean point, and at the same time Christ is he who indeed has unhinged the universe: “be of good cheer; I have overcome [neníkêka, conquered] the world” (John 16:33). In the sphere of myth, such a wish to unhinge the universe would have been unthinkable. The one hero who of all figures in Greek mythology might come closest to such a violent stance towards the world, Hercules, precisely did not make use of the opportunity given to him of doing something like unhinging the universe. He did, it is true, take over the vault of heaven from Atlas, but he dutifully carried it for him and later returned it to him without having upset the order of the cosmos. One could think that the message of the rock provided for us in Christ is just a bold allegation which, as mere allegation, is itself unfounded. This is how we generally think about religious statements: they are a matter of faith, i.e., it is up to us whether we believe in them or not. But I suggest that it is otherwise. Christianity is what it promises and teaches. It is not a matter of belief. By naïvely relegating the Christian message to the sphere of mere subjective beliefs we protect ourselves from realizing what we are up against. Christianity in fact

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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. A famous poster by James Montgomery Flagg, used to recruit volunteers for the U.S. Army during World War I, shows a man dressed as Uncle Sam who points with his index finger directly at the viewer saying, “I want YOU” (Fig. 1). Something extraordinary is happening here. The person drawn or painted on the poster bursts, as it were, with his pointed index finger and his piercing look through the plane of the picture; he breaks out of his containment within the fictional or imaginal world of the picture into the literal “external” reality where the flesh-and-blood viewers live. This poster provides a simple and precise way to understand the nature of Christianity’s singular achievement. Christianity too bursts through the “canvas” of the “painting,” the “screen” of the “movie” that it presents or the “text” of the “mythos” it has to tell. By exploding the plane of the “picture,” it leaps out of the sphere of imaginal reality and into the outer space of literal reality—a reality which however is originally created only by this very act of an archetypal, primordial leap. Christianity too focuses on the individual with a piercing look and points the index finger directly at him. It addresses him point-blank, demanding of him so to speak at gunpoint, “Jesus Christ wants YOU.” With the idea of the Christian attack on the individual (all individuals) “at gunpoint” I am not referring to the aggressive form of preaching and missionizing Fig. 1: James Montgomery Flagg, World found among certain radical War I recruiting poster. The poster, in fundamentalists. Their behavior which Flagg portrayed himself, was so might be considered, from the successful that it was reused during point of view of Christian theology World War II. Total distribution: 4 itself, as a deplorable aberration, as million copies.

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an empirical (ontic) mistake of the kinds that occur in the history of any movement due to the misunderstanding on the part of particular individuals practicing it. I am thinking rather of the (ontological) attack on the individual inherent in the very logic of the Christian message. From the onset, Christianity comes forward with an absolute claim on everyone. As much as factually Christianity must leave us free to decide, logically (in its ontological view of man) it does not give us any choice, for according to it we are metaphysically threatened, in case of our refusal, by eternal, absolute damnation. We simply must volunteer as recruits. There is no escape, no alternative, since the only alternative is defined as the very idea of a non-alternative: hell. And as long as we have not joined, we have already been metaphysically dumped by being labelled sinner (in the theological sense of sin). We do not really exist. We have no Life. We are a corpse. In the advertising business we find the idea of the “target audience.” It is based on the realization that the needs, tastes and the “language” of people are different so that what one sells and how one sells it to them has to differ accordingly. In the Christian context and in view of the Christian unrelenting grip on the individual we have to give this notion a much more radical, namely “metaphysical” meaning. Here it does not signify the selective ontic group at which the Christian message is aimed; it signifies that mankind as such is given the (onto-) logical status of “audience” as “target” for the first time, as “aim” of a point-blank address, indeed, of a kind of attack. Audience now is what needs to be reached, and reached out for with an absolute claim. Christianity does not use a polite form of address, by which a respect for the untouchable dignity of the Other would be shown and a possible trespassing into his private sphere would be avoided. Christianity addresses the Other in an almost unseemly bluntness: “Jesus Christ wants YOU”; indeed, Christianity is the express will for an intrusion and penetration into the inner sanctum of a personality. The target is already inherent in the core of the Christian drama itself and does not only arise with the selling of it. Whereas in other myths and dramas the protagonists interact only with the other “actors on stage” (with the Gods or mythic heroes in illo tempore), Christ’s life has from the onset a target outside his own sphere. His essential interaction is not with God, His Father, nor with His disciples, nor with other personages in His drama. It is the very point of the Christian

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play to destroy the ‘illusion’ of the play as a self-contained drama by directly relating to and directly involving the audience: the real direction is away from the stage, the only target of Christ’s life is to die for His unknown, anonymous spectators—mankind at large: for their redemption. A complete reversal. The audience no longer has to be seduced into the imagination of the play and thereby be drawn into a mimetic participation in the myth on a kind of visionary level in the depth of soul. The mythic hero, having become their servant (Matt. 20:38, Luke 22:27), steps out before the stage to address them directly, not only through a literal sermon, but also and more so by enacting the drama of his life so to speak in front of the now closed curtain, on the proscenium or even in the sober, commonplace reality of the “auditorium:” in the ordinary empirical-historical world.3 Christ wants to reach man precisely in his everyday reality. This directedness outward is what gives the Christian message the character of a missile. Because Christianity has a missile nature, it must see itself essentially vis-à-vis an audience defined as a target that absolutely must be hit. And conversely, because it has a target, it takes on the character of a missile that does not stay put in illo tempore, or on the stage or behind the glass covering a painting, but can and must traject through the “movie screen” and shoot out into the literal reality of hard facts, of the “real” audience “out there.” Due to this direction toward an external target, the differentiation of two kinds of reality becomes possible. One could also say their original separation, comparable to a cell division, is taking place: positive reality out there (which for us is reality proper) and reality within the image or story (which, because of the protagonist’s breaking out of the play, or rather redirecting the thrust of the play directly towards the audience, was degraded to a secondary reality and is for us no more than “mere fiction,” “imaginary,” an “illusion”). So it is the firing of the Christian rocket that originally opened up for itself an outer space (that previously simply had not existed) into which it could pass. This space owes its existence to the revolutionary idea of a message as missile and an audience as target, 3 The tendency in some modern theater to directly and literally involve the audience or to make the play immediately “relevant” for their social or political concerns can perhaps be seen as a ritual mimesis of the Christian need to undermine, within the play, the illusion of the play and to prevent thereby a “regression” to a deeper (mythical, imaginal: pagan) level of involvement.

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which idea is the bursting of the imaginal. We have lived in the (notion of ) reality conquered by Christianity for so long that it is hard for us to realize that this is a revolutionary invention and that there could have been, during the age of myth, a mode of being-in-the-world characterized by a fundamentally different constitution of reality, one in which everything was enveloped within the aura of the imaginal and which simply did not have anything “outside” itself. We can get an idea of this former constitution of reality by looking at a change to be observed in works of early Greek art. As B. Schweitzer and Bruno Snell4 have pointed out, in the case of early Greek statues the statue was, without hesitation, identified with the person portrayed. Thus the inscription on a statue read, e.g.: “I am Chares, ruler of Teichiussa.” Only in Athens would you find inscriptions like “I am the image of such and such …,” which is a way of putting it that corresponds to the modern view. For the Athenians the reality of the “real” person had obviously been separated from that of his image. The statue only referred or pointed to the ruler, it “signified” or “represented” or “reminded of ” him, but it was not identical with him. In the earlier situation, the statue itself spoke as an “I” and it was at once him whom it, as we must say from our modern point of view, “represented:” “I am Chares.” The image obviously radiated the authority of the ruler. The conviction of his kingly power must have descended upon the viewer from the mere sight of the statue. The aura of Chares was immediately and fully present in the image, so that the viewer was overcome with awe and enwrapped in the spell emanating from the statue. The image had the power to seduce the viewers into its own reality. And thus the viewers were indeed inside the picture’s imaginal world, surrounded as it were on all sides by its aura. In the capacity of the image to envelop the viewer in the spell of its archetypal depth lay its quiet, non-violent authority over him and the truth of its statement, “I am Chares, the ruler ….” It was an authority based not on empirical power in “outer” reality (weapons, army, police), but on the radiance from the imaginal (Sanskrit bharga, tejas, s′rî: shine, Fortuna, Königsheil, royalty, i.e. the “metaphysical” substance of light that a king must be filled with in order to be a true king). We can still today, amidst a thoroughly Christianized and 4 See Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes: Studien zur Entstehung des europäischen Denkens bei den Griechen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 41975), p. 101.

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democratic environment, have a remote intuition of the spellbinding force of the imaginal, when a novel or movie fascinates us so that we live for a while in its world, taken in and moved by its atmosphere, or when crowds of people line the streets on the occasion of the state visit of some royalty, to at least for a moment bathe in the royal s′ rî emanating from them. In archaic civilizations, man lived in this kind of imaginal reality. There was no other. The Christian message with its express and piercing YOU (“Jesus Christ wants YOU”) radically expels the viewer or listener out of his embeddedness in the imaginal. It no longer draws us into its spell, not even into that of its own imaginal truth, but confronts, hits us with it, irredeemably setting us apart from and over against it. The stage curtain to the imaginal is definitively closed. The YOU puts us back in our place on the auditorium side of the curtain and stops the desire of the soul’s passion and imagination to (imaginally) transgress5 to the other side of the curtain into the divine drama on stage. It thus thrusts us out into an “outside” world, turns us into isolated individuals, egos, standing naked vis-à-vis Christ. Only the existentially isolated individual relentlessly thrown back upon himself can decide for Christ; and in order to belong to Him, we must decide, and all by ourselves and from the core of our individual existence. An unambiguous and deliberate yes or no. It will not do to be simply attracted, charmed by the images of the Christian religion. Having decided for Him will be the ultimate affirmation for being an outcast from mythic reality and for being thrown back upon one’s isolated individuality—thrown back upon the principle of the One, the principle of isolation. For if Christ addresses us point-blank with his demand to belong to Him, this is only the consequence of the fact that this Christ is Himself such an express YOU, even more than that: He is the principle of the possibility to point at and “mean” things or people with that confrontational pointedness. Three characteristics of the penetration through the surface of the image into the outer space of literalistic reality can be distinguished. First: the direct, abstract pointing (the “This”), second: the One, and third: the All. 5 Cf. James Hillman, “A Psychology of Transgression Drawn from an Incest Dream,” Spring 1987, pp. 66-76.

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The following Biblical quotations point to the first: “This is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man which is preferred before me” (John 1:30). “And lo a voice from Heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). “This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ” (1 John 5:6). “Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). “… [I]t is he that talketh with thee” (John 9:37). The pointing and positing that penetrates the “canvas” of the image and enters literal reality expresses itself linguistically also in ways other than by use of the demonstrative pronoun. “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:21). “I that speak unto thee am he” (John 4:26). This, that same, I, thou, today (here and now): we are obviously within the world of the chapter on “Sense-certainty” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This chapter is, as it were, merely the philosophical explication of what in the New Testament had been conquered with the attitude which speaks from the above quotations. To better understand the nature of this conquest, I want to return to the inscription “I am Chares, ruler …” and compare it with the last of the cited biblical quotations, “I … am he” or with that other famous one, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). At first glance the early Greek and the Christian sentences seem to have an identical grammatical structure. But they are fundamentally different statements. What the statue says has the character of a selfintroduction; it provides information, communicating to the viewer the proper name and the “profession” of the person portrayed. Somebody shows himself and makes himself known. Christ’s “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” by contrast contains no factual information about the subject of the sentence; it is a formal identification, and this is why it can just as well be abbreviated “I am he.” Jesus’ statement does not tell us anything about him, about his “profession” or his particular nature. It does not, e.g., say, I am the way, as opposed to a place of repose. It only wants to assure us that He “is it.” All these propositions with a “this is,” “today,” “thou art,” “I am” serve the purpose of arresting someone or something and identifying him or it in an almost criminological sense. The question around which

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everything revolves from now on is, “Is it he, or is it not he?” It is the question of the crime novels, the whodunits, of detectives and judges— and it is the question of faith-and-doubt. This is why the identification can also be denied: It isn’t he! Thus we read, e.g., “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? how is it then that he saith, I came down from heaven?” (John 6:42). It is a matter of cornering, pinpointing, holding at bay, apprehending: This is him! He has done it! Whereas Chares reveals himself to us and imposes himself on us, the statement by Jesus turns against Himself and nails Him down in or on Himself. The “I am he” is actually a (self-)incrimination and as such synonymous with the “this is he” or “you are the one” by which the Christ is firmly imprisoned in the Jesus of Nazareth, or by which God is locked into the historical Jesus. Christ was not only nailed down at the time of his Crucifixion, but to be He who is nailed down to Himself, who is absolutely identified with Himself, indeed, to be the principle of pinpointedness and fixation is his very nature. The quasi-judicial situation also explains the decisive role of witnesses in Christianity. Every Christian has to be one more witness to “incriminate” Jesus anew. The innermost purpose of the Christian existence seems to be the act of confining the imaginal Christ in the empirical, historical Jesus and reaffirming His solitary confinement there time and again. In other religions, too, there were or are empirical persons really embodying gods, e.g., the Egyptian Pharaoh or the Dalai Lama. But here you could never say, “This is he,” because the “Pharaoh existence” or the “Dalai Lama existence” was not exclusively imprisoned in one single historical individual; it was disseminated into the whole series of Pharaohs or Dalai Lamas, comprising thousands of years and future embodiments as well. To be sure, it was indeed present in the particular human being who happened to be the present embodiment, but no Pharaoh, no Dalai Lama has his divinity as his personal property. On the contrary, he is, precisely because he is the incarnation of a divine person, de-emphasized as the empirical individual that he is and is instead reintegrated into the larger divine reality that he has to embody, and he is relativized by its manifold embodiments in previous and future persons. By virtue of the dissemination of the incarnation into each of its many manifestations, his presence is essentially gentle, whereas the entire divinity of Christ is concentrated in the single

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historical person Jesus of Nazareth as the exclusive focus of History as such, which endows the Christian incarnation with a violent acuteness. Every possible “here” of a theophany or epiphany has once and for all been stuffed into the exclusive historical Jesus so that no actual here and now before or after Him can be the place of a full-fledged epiphany any more. The “yonder” of that Jesus of Nazareth has swallowed up every possible “here and now.” It has deprived Time of its life and soul and seized it, so that Time can no longer have its life in the flux of ever new moments receiving their fullness through the epiphanic presence of diverse divine personages. Now there is only one single fulfilled moment (kairós) in all of history, leaving the entire remainder of time essentially (psycho-logically) empty. With these observations we have already entered the discussion of the second characteristic of the leap bursting through the imaginal nature of Being: the One. It is the theme of the absolute exclusiveness of the Christ. Jesus Christ is the One and Only. “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11). “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Jesus Christ is surrounded and protected on all sides by negations: no man, neither in any other, none other under heaven. The pointing (the positing of the “This is he”) obviously does not point to a positive, substantive, sensual content, but essentially serves the purpose of excluding and fending off all concrete names, concreteness as such. The “This is he” means the reduction to a space left blank, to a naked point in the geometrical sense: the Alpha and Omega; the axis mundi; the turning point of Time; the zero point of history. For the point is essentially zero point, because it has no extension, no diffusion into the breadth of the world. The ramming in of the holy rood on Golgotha is the planting (positing) of the zero point into Being, which previously had had a mythic, imaginal nature. The rood (= the cross on which Christ suffered) is the archetypal image of the idea that is expressly stated in the proposition, “This is he.” And the crucifix, as two intersecting coordinate axes, is the symbol of the zero point of Being and of the subordination of Being under a system of coordinates. Long before the number zero had been accepted in mathematics, Christianity had invented the zero as a metaphysical principle. And characteristically enough the mathematical recognition of zero as a

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number occurred during that age in which the actual realization of Christianity began,6 namely in the year 1629 (one year after Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood7) and again, only a few years later, by one of the great minds who decisively advanced the realization of Christianity: Descartes (1637). For Descartes provided modern man with the fundamentum inconcussum, the ego, that rock on which the modern period could build its house and from which it could unhinge the natural world (the world experienced mythically or imaginally). Just as in mathematics the zero concept made it possible to break out of the realm of natural (positive) numbers and conquer the worlds of negative, irrational, imaginary and transcendent numbers (for which reason the zero has been termed mathematics’ most momentous invention), so the metaphysical zero is the point at which, figuratively speaking, Uncle Sam breaks through the containment in natural (imaginal) reality and into positive reality “out there.” We miss the very meaning of the Christian message if we do not conceive the exclusiveness of Jesus Christ strictly as the “One” which is the zero or a point. One could of course start with the idea of a real, natural person whose name was Jesus of Nazareth and who had all kinds of particular traits, and then say that in this person, chosen by God from among all men, the Messiah revealed himself. But this view would fall short of the Christian idea. It would still be a pagan reception of Christianity, the translation of the specifically Christian back into a mythological version of it. It cannot be that God’s Son, so to speak by mere chance, happened to incarnate only in the single human person named Jesus and that therefore it would at least theoretically be feasible that the Christ could just as well have been born “in various other names under heaven” and at various other times. Jesus must from the outset and by necessity and unquestionably be the One and Only, 6 I consider the Middle Ages as a preliminary stage of Christianity. It was the age of Scholasticism, as it aptly termed itself, the age of an initial schooling of Western man in the inner structure of Christian thought, in other words a kind of Christian propaedeutics. With the beginning of the modern period (Neuzeit), man had “graduated” from this schooling, so that with the Christian thought pattern having become second nature for him, he no longer needed to express his thoughts in literally (dogmatically) Christian terms. Whatever he would think or study he would necessarily think in a thoroughly Christianized spirit. 7 See my “Deliverance from the Stream of Events: Okeanos and the Circulation of the Blood,” in Sulfur 21 (Winter 1988): 118-140, now in my The Neurosis of Psychology (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2005), Chapter 12, pp. 233-255.

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if He is to be the Jesus Christ. But if He is the One absolute, then He is from the outset the empty, extensionless point. Even His name cannot be a concrete name under Heaven; it must be the name for “no-name,” for the abstract “this.” An identification or equation is carried out with the formulations “This is he,” “Jesus, the Christ” and other versions of this idea. However, according to what was just said it is not that a known empirical person here and a known transcendental notion there are being taken up and then, by means of the copula, equated. “Jesus, the Christ” is not a phrase like “Einstein, the physicist” or “Napoleon, the Emperor of the French.” It is not a proposition at all. Rather, “Jesus (is) the Christ” is the daring act of equating, the event of the positing of the “this:” the leap out of the mythical or imaginal into the positive-factual (“positivistic”). If the phrase “Jesus, the Christ” were to connect and identify two known entities (two concrete contents) as in the case of “Einstein, the physicist” (we know who Einstein was, and we know what a physicist is), it would remain within the same old sphere of reality without bursting through it in a radical leap. This fundamental breakout could only be achieved if in the phrase “Jesus, the Christ” nothing is identified, nothing existing prior and independently of the act of identification. It could only be achieved if the phrase as act is no more and no less than the archetypal schema of identification, the original, first-time positing of the equal sign, and if the particular contents of subject and predicate, of “Jesus of Nazareth” and “Christ,” dissolve (as an empty “this” on the one hand and an empty “he” on the other) in the empty equal sign as the abstract exclusive One, i.e., the zero. If Jesus Christ is really supposed to have overcome the world and to redeem us from it, He cannot first be a concrete person with many attributes and then on top of it also the Incarnate. He must have His very nature in being the naked event of the “This is he,” and everything else that we are taught about Him must follow from, and be contained within, this equation. The graphic, vivid image of Jesus Christ to be found in Christian piety is the graphically embellished image of the zero established in the “This is he.” Otherwise salvation could not work. I said earlier that Christian teachings did not have the status of mere allegations, but that Christianity is what it claims to be. Now it has become clear why this has to be the case. Paul’s “For other

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foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” is in fact no mere assertion to be believed or not, just as little as the invention of the wheel or the recipe for mixing gunpowder or building the atomic bomb are mere matters of faith. No, Paul’s statement is the truth that it formulates, because, first, in identifying or equating Jesus as the Christ, it performs, by virtue of this act of nailing down, the positing of the “this,” which amounts to the leap out of the mythical sphere, and, second, because the solid foundation is nothing else but this act of an originary positing. The positing of the “This (is he)” is the condition of the a priori possibility of a positive (positivistic) reality, a reality that no longer owes its existence and constitution to the epiphanic manifestation of the Gods, but has been established by virtue of a leap and owes its existence to the act of a positing. And there is no other way than by means of the act of positing the zero established in “Jesus, the Christ” to get to a fixed Archimedean point outside the “abysmal” world of the mythical imagination. But where the act of identification and of establishing the zero point has truly occurred, there also the foundation has truly been laid: the origin (zero point) for an all-encompassing system of coordinates (the cross of the world) has been set up. There can indeed be no other foundation that could be laid, for the zero point exists only once. Even if its invention should occur repeatedly, it would be the invention of the same thing. Thus it is true too that, as holy writ states, our faith “is the victory that overcometh the world.” “Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?” “He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” ( 1 John 5:4f. and 12). These statements are not themselves mere matters of faith, as we innocently like to believe to avoid the insight that we are dealing here with hard facts governing our lives no matter whether we define ourselves as believers or not. This innocence is a luxury that we cannot afford any longer. He that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God has performed the act of identification, which is the only way to overcome the world, because in that act he once and for all breaks out of the natural (i.e., mythical, imaginal) world and has archetypally opened up for himself the literalness of Being, the positivity of reality (whose theological name is “Eternal Life”). The main statements of Christianity do not make any “mysterious” assertions. In Kantian

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terminology, one might indeed call them analytic (rather than synthetic) propositions: propositions whose predicate adds nothing new to the notion expressed in the subject, but only expressly unfolds what was contained in that notion to begin with, such as “he who jumps into water will get wet.” It is evident that the leap into water implies getting wet, and we all know that a leap into water is a real (practical) possibility. Likewise is it evident that he who performs the leap into the “This is he” has “eternal life.” And there can be no doubt that this leap is a practical possibility: because we all live in the Outer Space, in the reality established by this leap two thousand years ago. In the natural world everything is contained within the mythical shine. Christ would be a mythical image here, but so would the man Jesus of Nazareth, like every empirical event, be potentially enveloped in the mythical sphere. More fundamentally, the people of old even derived their descent (and thus ultimately their actual nature) from the gods. Despite their being mortals, they belonged to one and the same unbroken sphere with the gods. Divine and human, archetypal and empirical realities mirrored each other, and existence was completely enwrapped in this unending process of mutual reflection, without there being an outside, the fixed point of a positive-factual world. The Uncle Sam shown on our poster had an easy time breaking out of the imaginal because for the artist who painted him there had been, after 2,000 years of Christianity, two kinds of reality all along, the imaginary one on paper or canvas, and the one in which the artist himself lived. This was of course very different for the primordial leap out of the mythical constitution of Being, because “prior” to this leap there had not been any reality other than the mythical one. Here the leap had to originally create for itself out of nowhere, so to speak, the realm into which it would leap. The “This is he” or “Jesus, the Christ” could successfully bring about the breakthrough through the mythical and the initial establishment of positive reality in the following way. By absolutely singling out from amidst the whole extent of the manifold imaginal reality one point (which is only reduced to a point or zero by this act of singling out) as the One and Only and by establishing it as an unequivocal “this” to be focused at with one’s total force; and further, by absolutely equating this “this” with “Christ” (the likewise absolutized idea of every mythic or metaphysical worth),

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everything else in the world, all things and events, indeed nature as such was deprived of its autonomous mythic-metaphysical dignity: of the possibility to be “Christ,” i.e., to be divine or epiphanic. With the identification a duality of “worlds” entered the world: Jesus Christ here, secular reality there; or within “Jesus Christ:” the empirical individual here, the divine person there. In placing an equal sign between the “this” and the Christ, an irreconcilable division between the one and the other (this world and the beyond) has simultaneously been set up for the first time.8 It is the absolute separation and the simultaneous absolute identification of the sundered poles of this difference that laid the “firm foundation” for the first time: the literalness and positivity of Being as such. This is the foundation upon which the world of positive facts, radically excised from mythic imaginality, can be built just as literal faith in metaphysical “truths” could be based upon it: because both are rooted in the divided identity characteristic of Christianity properly understood. The positive factualness (literalness) however is based on the negation inherent in the “This is he” or “none other.” More precisely: the positivity of the positive-factual is based on the negativity of the zero. Without the absolute negation, without the radical withdrawal from the fullness and breadth of the mythic world to the empty zero point, there would be no positive reality, no Archimedean rock from which to launch the rockets called scientific, technological, and industrial revolution, rockets by which the universe has indeed already been unhinged. But the poster of Uncle Sam is and remains a poster, an image. The Uncle Sam represented there does not in fact step out of the picture to us, the audience. He only appears to do so as long as we for our part look at the poster naturally, imaginally: are seduced into its aura. The bursting of the image occurs in the image and as image. Keeping this in mind, it becomes evident that the “this is he” and the positive reality originating from the leap out of the mythic world does not in fact remove us from the mythical imagination into the Outer Space of the “real” world, but stays within the imaginal. The Outer Space is itself 8 “For the first time” in this paper should not be taken too literally. I am less concerned with literal first beginnings in historical time than with archetypal, (psycho-) logical roots and where they found their highest, most adequate formulation in historical time.

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a mythic fantasy which, however, in order to be “outside” the imaginal, while in fact being within it, has to conceal its imaginal nature and be in radical opposition to every other mythic image. The bursting of the imaginal merely amounts to a radical restriction and constriction of the selfsame mythic sphere to a single archetypal idea within it, the idea of the empty “this,” which by being exclusively zeroed in on now takes on the imaginal appearance of being the one and only true reality. The wealth of our scientific knowledge about the positive facts of reality is nothing else but the amplification or explication of this one archetypal “image,” the zero. We think that the black holes discovered by the astronomers are many light years away from us out there in outer space. We do not realize that ever since that leap out of the imaginal we have all along been living in an Outer Space that is itself the black hole. But the fact that the idea of black holes was discovered in this century in the astronomical universe only underlines once more the psychological insight that the first inkling (the first immediacy) of major realizations about ourselves (about our psychologic) always comes to us from without. That the black holes could be discovered in this century might indicate that the time has come for us to realize that we are, right here, sitting in the black hole and that our entire reality actually has the nature of such a black hole: it is the result of Western man’s having devotedly dug himself in into the ever more minute details of one single archetypal image (“Uncle Sam wants YOU” or “This is he”) on which he had monomaniacally (monotheistically) zeroed in, blowing this zero point up to a total universe and denying the existence of all the many other archetypal images around it as well as blinding himself to its own nature as image. Not much needs to be added about the third characteristic of the establishment of the launching base. The third aspect is the seeming opposite of the single zero point: the All, the whole, totality. The problem of the zero point is that it does not exist as long as there is something, something that besides the One can claim to be something in its own right. For next to it, the zero would be simply nothing. And the problem of the One absolute is that it is not the One as long as there are others (other names under heaven). For if it is not the One, then it, too, is just one of the many thousand things in the mythic world and does not turn into the foundation laid. This is why the zero

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has to become the principle of the whole, and its sole principle. It must have the status of an Hegelian Aufhebung (sublation, supercession) of the natural things altogether and thus inhabit a fundamentally higher level. Everything must be subjected to it, gathered up under its rule (which is what makes the zero point the black hole). This is what we find expressed in Ephesians 1:10, “That … he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him.” Jesus the Christ (or the empty point of “This is he”) as the Lord over the All. How can everything be subdued under the rule of the zero? How can the All be made to disappear in the irresistible suction of a black hole? The answer to this question is the cross, which is the archetypal idea of the system of coordinates as a grid for everything that is. This archetypal system of coordinates is indeed capable of swallowing up the entire natural (mythic) cosmos and of thereby turning the latter into the single point of the positivistic “universe.” And only with the cosmos as a whole having been transmuted into the positivistic literalness of “universe” does a firm imaginal basis for the launching of missiles exist, so that literal bases and rockets could be built, too. If it were not the whole world that is rendered unambiguously reliable by being subsumed under a single system, any particular base within it, be it in itself as solid as can be, would as a whole be unstable. In “universe” the One and the All are the same, because here everything that exists exists only by virtue of, and in terms of its relation to, the zero point. They are the same just as the trajectory of the missile heading for its target is identical with the absorbing power of the black hole or as the skyrocketing development of the sciences, of technology and industry is identical with the ever more solid cementation of the universe as the archetypal launching base.9 But they all are equally distant from the manifold eachness characteristic of natural actuality.

9 We could be fooled by modern trends toward a pluralism of theories and world models and take them as a sign for a move beyond the monolithic universe. But I believe that this (empirical, literal) pluralism of methods and models is in the service of the (psychological or ontological) monism of universe.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Fabrication of Time

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ime, the time in which we live, seems to be an a priori given, utterly out of reach for humans, who, because they are inescapably subject to it and limited by it, have been given the name “the mortals” by the Greeks, in contradistinction to the gods, who enjoy eternal youth. But of course, it is also well known that the idea and experience of time has changed in the course of human history. We distinguish, e.g., the circular sense of time experienced by most archaic peoples from the linear sense of time governing our modern being-in-the-world. In a certain sense, therefore, time must be just as much subject to human history as human history before seemed subject to, and embedded in, time. One could get out of this contradiction if one were to distinguish two kinds of time, actual time (time1) on the one hand, and the idea or experience of time (time2) on the other. Time2, as a human conception, would then be contained in, and subject to, time1, the almighty Time of history. Philosophically, however, the trick of separating two kinds of the same thing is never very convincing, and so here, too, a quick reflection will force us to realize that time1 must be just as much a human idea as time2, so the problem returns. Instead of trying to solve this dilemma in a philosophical way, I here want to demonstrate that, and in which concrete way, our time, linear historical time, the time in which the events of physics, the evolution of the species, the history of mankind, as well as our

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individual lives occur, is the product of an original invention and manufacturing. Of course, this manufacturing does not take place in factories, but in the primary industry of the soul’s imagination. We can turn to the Old Testament prophets in order to witness the process of the fabrication of historical time. Originally, the prophetic word was oral, addressed to the people of the prophet’s time and community. But then at one point prophecy came to be committed to writing; it became literature. Isaiah, after having been repelled by Jerusalem’s leading circles, resolves to “bind up the testimony, seal the law among [i.e. either: in the presence of, or: in] my disciples” (Is. 8:16).1 A freer rendering in a modern language translation2 of this verse reads, “I shall entrust God’s warnings and instructions to those who listen to me, so that they will be kept safe like money in a firmly tied purse.” Why does he want to store God’s word safely away? Because he counts on the future to confirm the truth of his prophecy. “And I will,” the following verse reads, “wait upon the Lord, that hideth his face from the house of Jacob, and I will [expectantly] look for him.” This passage is the document of a psychological occurrence of serious consequences. Here something extraordinary is happening in the reality of the soul’s life. The religious experience (the prophetic word) is not released into the world, not turned over to the prophet’s age so that it could be as effectual or ineffectual as it might happen to be of its own accord. It is fixed and kept in reserve. It is sealed and safeguarded like money in a tightly closed purse. To release always also implies to relinquish. The spoken word, as released, has escaped. It is no longer in the speaker’s control. The act of writing down, by contrast, keeps the word in the possession of the recipient of the revelation. Psychologically, the act of sealing has the effect of intensifying the word’s power, because it concentrates and holds it back. “And I will wait upon the Lord and will expectantly look for him.” Isaiah obviously is waiting for the moment when the prophetic word that he received in his revelatory experience and historical, social reality 1 According to the traditional Masoretic interpretation, the verb forms are understood as imperatives, God instructing the prophet to do what the verbs say. For grammatical as well as exegetical reasons, modern scholarship reads them as expressing something the prophet does from his own volition. 2 Die Bibel in heutigem Deutsch: Die gute Nachricht des Alten und Neuen Testaments (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1982), my translation.

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will be brought to coincidence. As we heard in the second verse, God has hidden his face from his people. The prophet answers this concealment on the part of God by concealing and sealing his prophecy. The absolute insistence upon the truth of God’s word, i.e., upon the exact congruence of personal religious experience and public reality, can in this way remain intact. It is simply unthinkable and unbearable—this seems to be Isaiah’s feeling—that an archetypal experience, a vision or an auditory revelation, does not coincide with the reality of the people. What I have seen in a vision, must be fulfilled in external reality. We see in Jeremiah how powerful the will to realization can be. Jeremiah “once accused his God outright of treachery”3: “wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar, and as waters that fail?” (15:18 ). The experienced discrepancy between the word and reality is not simply endured. There is no disappointment, disillusionment, or relativization, nor is there, as would have been characteristic of the mythical being-in-the-world, a distinction between archetypal and empirical truth, so that the one would merely be mirrored in the other without literally coinciding with it. Here there simply must be a coincidence. But because this demand for a coincidence is not fulfilled, it is displaced from the present into a distant future as the sole place where this coincidence might still have a chance: What is not true, can, nay shall, indeed must become true. Conversely, we could say that it is the invention of the future that is the way in which the will to an absolute hold on reality edifies itself. We are witnessing here the birth of the future (futurum) out of the will to a literal realization of the content of a spiritual vision or archetypal experience. This future, as the place of wishing, or rather of the will and demand for power, did not always exist. It was invented: fabricated through a clearly definable procedure. The method of this invention is that the spiritual experience of a given present is committed to writing and thus stored, preserved beyond its own present. Or rather: this one present itself is frozen. It is not allowed to pass naturally, to come to an end, to be succeeded by a new present. ‘Present’ here does not mean the empty, abstract point of a ‘now’ on the axis of linear time. Present is a certain quality, in our case it is the 3 Hans Walter Wolff, “‘So sprach Jahwe zu mir, als die Hand mich packte.’ Was haben die Propheten erfahren?” in HerrenalberTexte 51 (1984): 9-21, my translation.

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content of a particular religious experience. By locking up the content of this present (the word revealed to Isaiah) it thus becomes possible to extend and hold on to this present beyond its time. All future time will then only be the blown up, prolonged present present, i.e., the present of then, of Isaiah’s revelation, a present which could possibly be extended into infinity. The flow of original time is arrested. The advent (future as “the time to come,” cf. German Zukunft: conventionally = “future,” but literally “that which comes towards us”) of new events, one new present after another, as well as of new revelations, is locked out, because this one conserved present is spread out in such a way that it takes on the role of all time, time as such. Everything which occurs is thereby turned into a mere “moment” (in the sense of a constituent element, or step, or stage) in the unfolding of this one extended moment (in the temporal sense). Linear time, that time that governs our own sense of time and upon which our sciences (physics as well as history) rest, is an “artificial” product. It is the product of absolutizing one sole moment singled out of the flow of moments in original time. Just like God the creator left the ranks of mythical divinities, who had always been natural deities, deities in nature, and rose above all nature, setting himself up as the supernatural, extramundane creator of the natural world, so the single moment here rises above the natural stream of events and declares itself to be time itself, the only and true time. The time of physics and history, of astronomy and biological evolution is not really the time, not “true” time (in which there would of course also have to be an epoch of mythical thinking that for whatever reasons did not have an idea of linear time). Rather, it is only one moment of original time. This would force the realization upon us that astronomical and biological evolution and the history of the historians are no more than aspects of one single fixed moment. Physics, biology, astronomy, history are an elaboration and unfolding of the imaginal content of this one, qualitatively determined instant, which has been spread apart into infinite duration, whereas all other instants or presences (present moments characterized by a particular quality) have simultaneously been excluded. We can also look at this from another point of view. If Isaiah had not stored up his revelation like jewelry in a bank safe, then other religious experiences of a totally different nature could have happened

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to him or to those after him. In the mythologically constituted world, each present had its own god or myth as the inner image of its qualitative substance. Now was the moment of birth, now of war, of love and begetting, of darkness, drought, harvest, illness, of the solstice festival, or what have you. Time was the advent of ever new archetypal situations, i.e., it was the manifestation of different gods, each appearing at his time and each having the unfolding of his nature in a particular myth. Isaiah, one might say, singles out one myth out of the plenty of diverse myths, turning it into the sole myth, a supermyth. He expands and folds this one (formerly intratemporal) myth over time itself, so that from now on it will be the nature of time to be nothing but the unfolding of this single myth. The one moment or myth loses its eachness (each at, and for the duration of, its appointed time) and becomes absolute. It is as if one single poem of our entire literary history would be raised to the position of the poem, so that all other poems would have to be considered as mere explications or instances of individual aspects contained in this super-poem. Or it is what a popular understanding alleges the immanent intention of Hegel’s philosophy to be: to be that philosophy of which all actual philosophems of the entire history of philosophy are only particular moments. Or it is like the developmental psychology of, e.g., Erich Neumann, which singles out one archetype (the Great Mother) from within the rank of all the many archetypes and deities and reduces all others either to her attendants or to mere phases in the development of this one archetypal principle. The nature of time is turned inside out. In an act of usurpation, an internal “piece” of time declares itself to be time at large. ‘Saving’ is the way a single present seizes power over all future and imposes on it its theme as the one and only theme. It is the way in which this theme, belonging to that one present, rises to the exclusive motivation operative in all “present moments” of history, moments however deprived of their true character as presences. The succession of ever different advents (different gods, moments, times) changes into the single heilsgeschichte (history as the working out of God’s salvation) of the monotheistic God. History ceases to be a stream of events and turns into one exclusive narrative, into the narration of a super-myth, which it is the task of our sciences to minutely elaborate and embellish. The one and only narrative has a beginning, as every story does, its

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Genesis, origin—be it “In the beginning was the Word” or “In the beginning was the Big Bang” or whatever, the one story having many versions and the course of its narration being still in process. And it has its ending (eschatology) as well as its linear and unambiguous course from beginning to end, the unerring hastening towards the end: so-called history. This amounts to a transformation of the essence of future: instead of advent, epiphany, future now means fulfillment of the stored up, deferred ending: apocalypse. In Christian terms, even advent itself is merely the advent of Him who has long been expected, so that advent is deprived of its character as advent. For part of true advent is the arriving guest’s foreignness, his unexpectedness, maybe also his uncanny or even assaulting reality. Once one has understood this, one can see that the sciences are the telling of this single narrative, that is, that they are a myth, one single myth still in the process of its own construction and narration. This myth only appears to be the truth for the reason that we have absolutized its truth (that it has like any myth) or that we have succumbed to its being absolutized, which absolutization stems from a distant past. The content or message of this myth is the idea of the absolute. But this of course does not mean that the narrative of the absolute would also be the absolute narrative. By understanding this, we can see through the appearance that we have been taken in by, and we can slowly perhaps recognize modern physics, astronomy, the theory of evolution, the science of history as gigantic works of that literary genre called “fiction” or “belles lettres,” and thus restore them to the soul, to imagination. In speaking of fiction I do not mean to say anything derogatory, for I do not have a low opinion of fiction. Also, I do not wish to suggest that the sciences did not, as they claim, come up with truths in the sense of reliable knowledge, but rather produced untenable fantasies. No doubt, the results of the sciences are, within the limits acknowledged by a responsible scientific attitude, indeed “true” (reliable). But: what we must do is take this unquestioned “truth” (of the scientific results) back into the imaginal: as one extended, prolonged moment of (from within) mythic imagination (time). By science fiction we understand a particular genre of novels, futuristic novels. But we begin to understand that the sciences themselves—the teachings and insights of our physicists,

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historians, etc.—are actual, literal science fiction, not despite, but on account of, their scientificity. After having moved far from our starting point, a passage in Isaiah, I would like to come back to Isaiah in order to examine, in the light of our present discussion, what happens in his text. In 30:8f . God commands Isaiah to write down His word. “Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be [more accurately: may serve as witness] for the time to come for ever and ever: That it is a rebellious people, lying children, children that will not hear the law of the Lord ….” Here we see the reaching out into the future. The written word shall become true some time in the future and then rise up as witness against those who did not participate in Isaiah’s religious experience: God’s word as time bomb for them. The reserving compacts and intensifies the content of this one experience into a bomb. This is important to note, for it helps us to distinguish the prophet’s sealing his truth among his disciples from the secrecy prevailing in mystery cults and men’s secret societies. Whereas in those cults esoteric silence is an authentic purpose, the prophet still remains intent upon communicating (preaching) the word, and his silence merely serves the purpose of reaching a more overpowering, indeed an absolute dissemination in the end. The natural conditions of preaching with its contingencies (now more, now less success) is no longer acceptable for him. He wants so to speak an Endlösung, a definitive solution (“for ever and ever,” i.e., once and for all). The present and the distant future are being overarched by the one word of revelation. The future is not a different, fresh present (advent), but only the fulfillment of this present, the explosion of the stored up word into external reality. It is the final chapter of the narrative whose first chapter we witness with Isaiah’s revelation. From now on, man and everything that is and happens takes place in time. Time has become an encompassing framework or container for everything that is, and everything that is in turn has “for the first time” turned into the Temporal, the Secular, whereas once, the phenomena and events occurred to man as time, as advent, epiphany. Because Isaiah’s actual present is only the inauguration of that new form of “present” that we could call history, and because it is essentially unfulfilled—for its fulfillment is expressly deferred to a distant time—

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existence in time becomes a waiting, an expectant looking for Him (8:17 ). The qualitative moment is no longer in itself rounded and complete. The expectant waiting is the psychological reflex of the retained breath, and also the reflex of the fixed, arrested truth (present), which as arrested is prevented from exhausting and completing itself. Man’s soul is put into the utmost tension, it receives a jet or rocket propulsion, because the completion of the narrative has yet to come, and the soul is by necessity totally committed to this distant goal; for the arrested moment, too, or rather especially, wants its completion. What the arrest does is to sunder the moment into its archê on the one hand and its télos on the other, and by distending them produce an immense internal tension corresponding to this nuclear fission. For this split has, like the split in a neurosis, the character of a dissociation: of a separation that occurs within a unity, but does not dissolve it. It has to be understood as the unity of separation (splitting, holding apart) and unity (holding together). This is a tension that, at the end of the Christian eon when it has receded from an objective spiritual level into the personal life and the subjective empirical feelings of the individual, has to be constantly reexperienced and reenacted by means of thrilling novels or movies. One needs pastimes and diversions to kill the empty time between the severed halves of the one present arrested in its course and to make the endless waiting for the systematically deferred ending endurable. But conversely, one also needs them in order to have something to interpose between those two halves, and thereby to constantly reenact the very holding apart that causes time to be empty, for without such constant re-enactment the distended archê and telos would instantly collapse again. At the time of mythic being-in-the-world, by contrast, thrillers and novels of suspense would have been unthinkable. For at that time, each present completed itself during its own time; it was released into its transience from the outset. Now archê and télos mark the borders (the beginning and ending points) at the opposite ends of the “line” of the phenomenon’s duration. The “line” holds them apart as mutually exclusive opposites, but also simultaneously connects them. Originally they were not points, but were ongoing beginning, ongoing ending, and thus have to be imagined as two strands of a present— twin strands as inalienably connected as, say, those in the double helix of the DNA structure. To begin meant being in the process of ending,

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and, precisely by coming to an end, reaching consummation and perfection. And to cease to begin meant to be over, dead, bygone. This release into their ending amounted to an unconstrained selfexpenditure on the part of the phenomena, to their splurgily giving themselves away, and thus to an ontological generosity. The conclusion was not preserved and sealed so as to explosively discharge, as it were, only “on the last pages of the novel.” Being intent upon and released into its final end (its telos or archetypal image), each moment was ontologically and logically (not necessarily ontically) fulfilling from its very beginning and for its entire duration. No suspense. No saved up denouement. Now, by contrast, ontological miserliness rules.4 My paradigm for the constitution of time in the archaic situation is the race in the race course (stádion) of the early Olympic games. Such games and particularly the race seem to have had their origin in the cult of the dead and the funeral rites for heroes (like those for Patroclus described in the Iliad ).5 In racing towards the goal and into the finish, the runner visibly enacted, for every theôrós to see, the meaning or sense of time and life. He ran into the transience of the race and into his exhaustion, symbolically into death. The connection between the race and death is born out by a much later terminology of the Greek physicians. They called the final stage of a terminal illness tò stádion, the race into the finish. But this finish did not just mean “over.” It also meant fulfillment. For the runner was not simply finished with and by the race. He had arrived at his goal, on top of the altar of the god (Zeus) placed at the end of the race course. There he had to complete the sacrifice with which the race had begun by setting fire to the bloody pile of wood, earth and ashes of which this altar consisted, in order to burn the thigh pieces of the slaughtered sacrificial bull deposited there. The flames consummating the pieces of the sacrificed animal affirmed, indeed celebrated, at once death and the fulfillment of life. And as Cornford and others have argued, the cultic race ended in a Sacred Marriage, with a divine transfiguration, in which the 4 This is a statement about an ontological (or logical) state and should therefore not be heard as a moral evaluation. 5 There has been quite a debate on this subject. See, e.g., E. N. Gardiner, Olympia (1925), pp. 63ff.; L. Drees, Der Ursprung der Olympischen Spiele (Beiträge zur Lehre und Foschung der Leibeserziehung 13, 1962); M. F. Cornford, “The Origin of Olympic Games,” in J. E. Harrison, Themis (1912), pp. 212ff; Walter Burkert, Homo Necans, (Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, 1972), pp. 108-119.

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runner reached his consummation (teletê) and in which, by viewing it, all those present participated. But it is likely that in even more archaic times the victor in the race was himself the sacrifice and that only later was an animal substituted for him. This would mean that he literally raced into his sacrificial death, i.e., into his real theôsis (deification, identity with the god; being made sacer). All the runners competed with all their might for the chance to be the victor in the race, where victory meant to be sacrificially slaughtered. This is the point where, by way of an aside, we might at least point to the vista that is opened up by our present reflections on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. If we hear that Derrida characterizes his own endeavors as a “prolonged hesitation,” if we think of the prioritized place he attributes to writing (écriture) and to différance, deferral, if we also think of his claustrophobic6 reading of Hegel and of the entire history of Western metaphysics, which for him necessitates enmity towards any “presence,” this may indicate to what extent his work may be bound by the pattern of thought inaugurated by the Old Testament prophets. The logical operation that in them showed itself only in and as their topic, as the particular objective reality they talked about (a literal distance between now and then as two separate ontic points in time), has in his thinking become—immensely sublimated, refined, and internalized—a style of consciousness or a logical form of operation (“deconstruction”) in which any content whatsoever can now appear. And from the insight into the connection between present, death and archetypal fulfillment (teletê), the question emerges whether the attack on “presence” and the strategy of différance might not have the underlying psychological meaning of an attempt to have death forever deferred.7 According to what we have found out, it is not accidental that the Christian Occident’s history book, the Bible, explosively discharges on its last pages in the book of Revelation (telling the story of the final breaking of the seals on the book sealed with seven seals), and that this particular revelation in turn happens to be of an apocalyptic (catastrophic) nature. The history of the Christian West, as the history 6

I am indebted for this formulation to James Hersh. This question might impress itself on us even more below when we come to a discussion of an Ezekiel passage showing the connection between the deferral of fulfillment and the longing for an overcoming of death and for Eternal Life. 7

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of the saved-up, arrested moment, had to run up to the apocalypse. The apocalypse, however, may now be conceived as the end of only this one moment, not as the end at large. As long as we fear the apocalyptic end of history through an atomic or environmental catastrophe as the absolute end, it is we who still equate this one moment of time with time at large, and thereby show to what extent we are blindly imprisoned in this single moment. The apocalypse, if it had occurred, would be the end of this imprisonment and the entrance into new moments, new presents. The way our story is presented, it seems that Isaiah writes down and seals God’s word because God remains hidden to the “rebellious, lying” people: sealing as the reaction to the refusal on the part of the people to listen and receive. But it may be more appropriate to conceive the sealing on the part of the prophet and the not hearing on the part of the people as two simultaneous sides of one and the same imaginal situation, in such a way, however, that the holding back of the experienced truth has a certain logical priority within this simultaneity and that God’s hiddenness for the people is its inner consequence. Maybe the particular present that Isaiah was confronted with, and that still remains to be ours, is the one special present of written (and thus frozen) truth and of a fulfillment reserved or deferred for a day to come some distant time in the future. And only because it is such an arrested present is it also the present of the hiddenness of God (= the not hearing on the part of the people) and of the expectant waiting of his prophet during this emptied out time. Maybe the prophet also needs the “rebelliousness” of the people and their repelling him as a necessary ingredient of this particular archetypal fantasy in which he is caught up, in order to be given sufficient motivation and impetus for the truly revolutionary feat of effecting the transition from oral, transient word to written, positivized message by saving up the word and forming it into a time bomb. If this were the case, it would mean that as long as the moment’s truth is saved up and held back like money in a firmly tied purse (we could also say: as long as it remains fixed as a doctrine of faith, a meta­ physical truth of philosophy or as a scientific truth), so long the fulfillment too would be promised ever anew “for the time to come for ever and ever,” but that, precisely on account of its being saved up, it could never come to be; it would be postponed to the Greek

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calends, forever deferred. The essential unfulfillment of the expectant hope would be permanent. But conversely, it would also mean that fulfillment could only occur if the present were permitted to be transient and pass away, which is its innate tendency to begin with. The truth hidden in it would have to be released into the open and surrendered to its own free flow, expressly at the risk of its (and our) dying and fading away. This would be the restitution of truth to the poetics of being, the founding of reality in the abyss of psyche—of the imaginal. Especially in Ezekiel there is a particular genre of prophetic verse that has been given the name Erweiswort (word of proof ) by Walther Zimmerli.8 In such passages there is first an announcement of a deed by Yahweh, which is then followed by a statement of purpose (“so that ye shall know”). Ez. 37:12-14: “Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves …: then shall ye know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord.” In such “words of proof,” we see, with a clarity that leaves nothing to be desired, how one moment’s nucleus (idea, archetypal content) is split and how its two fission products are stretched apart, as if they were an expander used for muscle building, so as to form a single arch across all future history. Now, in the present, we hear the advance announcement by God of a future deed. This is the one “half ” of the moment, its archê, which is split off from its inherent télos and set to one side. And then there is the (future) redemption of this promise through the performance of the deed itself, which is to serve as obvious proof that “I the Lord have spoken it and [truly] performed it.” This is the other “half ” of the same moment, its télos in which it finds its fulfillment. Just as the archê was set to one side, so is necessarily the split-off télos too. The present announcement is true, but unreal because it is without its fulfillment, and the expected apocalypse will be real, but untrue because it will occur as a mere brutal fact having its divine, revelatory meaning outside itself in the announcement uttered millennia before. 8 Walther Zimmerli, “Das Wort des göttlichen Selbsterweises (Erweiswort), eine prophetische Gattung,” in Mélanges Bibliques rédigés en l’honneur de A. Robert, 1957, pp. 154 - 164 .

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All time in between is the conjunction of that irreality and this untruth: utterly empty. Because the particular deed announced here is the eschatological one of opening the graves and raising the dead, we know that the prophet is not reaching out for a limited time span, a period of so many years, decades, centuries within time, but for all time. Time as such is overarched and “pocketed.” By setting up this tense arch stretching from the now of a promise to the then of its redemption at the end of, or beyond, all time, the prophets created the ontological frame or the archetypal schema for understanding history as one whole meaningful nexus in the sense of one narrative or one single drama. When Karl Jaspers wrote a book on the origin and goal of history, he could do so only because he resided within the one present split apart and distended by the prophets’ achievements, and because this one present remained identical for him with time as such. But the science of history, too, and even physics are only possible on the ground made available by the situation established through the “word of proof ”: because the sequence of manifold real events can only be experienced as one selfcontained nexus by virtue of the “word of proof,” whereas in the natural situation each time had its own, ever fresh origin. There were many times. Time was a countable noun. And each time was a finite entity. In addition to the superseding of time as such, there is another reason why in the Ezekiel passage quoted the genre of the Erweiswort thematically happens to speak of the envisioned resurrection of the bones of the dead and not about something else. What has been saved up, sealed, buried demands an explosive opening, an apocalypse. The method of locking up for the purpose of an intensified opening at the end of time is only the one side of an impulse whose other side is the thematic and eschatological concern for a hope of overcoming death. The method of deferring God’s word through writing (and thus freezing, positivizing, “killing” it) is the path to the idea of Eternal Life. This method is indeed the instrument with which human existence could be heaved out of its natural attitude and transplanted into the attitude of an eschatological hoping. Simultaneously, there was a psychologically real translation of the definition of life from phenomenal eachness and transience into eternity and positivity (Eternal Life). Inasmuch as eschato-logical hoping for Eternal Life already is resurrection from death, the act of storing up the word and

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freezing its life, by which act we are transported into hope, is in itself the word promising resurrection. The prophets’ story is one of bated breath. But bated breath here also means a long breath. Life ceased to be the constant, “monotonous” rhythm of inhaling and exhaling ever since Isaiah, by holding back his truth in a closed “purse,” intercepted the exhaling. The long breath must then be what distinguishes the history thus originated. The tremendous range of one single time continuum is created by the retention of breath, by the ascetic abstention from exhaling. It is an extent of time that provided for Occidental man the possibility to continually work on the one opus of the construction of technical civilization. The mythical world was characterized by remembering and forgetting, Mnemosyne and Lethe, inhaling and exhaling. For this reason each individual present was too short to allow for a continuous cultural development across centuries in the sense of that “progress” that is typical of the Christian eon. In the mythical situation, there was not one single time as the container of all moments; each moment or phenomenon had its time, was a time, and a new moment or phenomenon was also the beginning of a new and different time. Because the moment here was not an element within the time continuum, but a discrete time in its own right, there was hardly a place for a longer continuity.9 Each time was not only too short, but above all it came together with its “race” heading for its completion, its own apocalypse: the manifestation and experience of its imaginal meaning. This was the pre-prophetic dynamics of phenomena. They orgiastically wasted themselves for no more than their archetypal meaning. They exhausted themselves for nothing but the display of their shine, with nothing left for those who had not been present, had not participated in the initiatory experience of them: no practical result, nothing positive to transmit to the next generation, nothing that could serve as a jump-off base for a progressive development. The next generation had to start all over again and do its own breathing­ and-exhaling. Only by applying to each new situation the archetypal schema conquered for mankind by the Old Testament prophets (and that is 9 Instead of that continuity allowing developmental progress, archaic peoples had a different kind of continuity: tradition, a continuity of meaning.

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to say only by preventing each phenomenon or present from wasting itself on the shine of its “truth”) could one hold on to something positive that would last beyond its time: the sealing of the moment’s truth in a book logically stripped the moment of its epiphanic transience, abstracted and “rescued” it from its self-abandonment to its death = its visionary meaning. The moment was thereby reduced to its permanent abstract “information” aspect that could, apart from any initiatory epiphanic experience, be intellectually taught and learned and believed in faith or disputed in doubt.10 As the frozen act of an exclusive inhaling, it was only apperceived as a positive result (as a matter of fact, not as a meaningful experience) and thus was able to serve as a base to build on. An entirely new dynamics had been created. The arrest of the moment’s original dynamics unhooked it from the present, of which it had been an integral and inalienable part, and allowed its direction to be changed. Its energy that, if undisturbed, would have gone into the race towards its own finish is now used as a means to enable a civilization to push off from the previous generation’s experience (now a priori only allowed to be perceived as fixed results) to new levels of civilization and consciousness. The dynamism is turned into that of a power engine to be utilized ever anew for the purposes of the one super-moment, the one linear narrative inaugurated by the prophets.11 The industrious application of this power engine to every aspect of the world in science, technology and industry is that time­ overarching dynamics that we call “progress.” It allowed for the ever more comprehensive, ever more detailed subjugation of the world under the truth of the one arrested moment and for Western man’s continually accelerating rise above, and divorce from, “nature.” As far as I can see, there are only four types of approaches to, or theories of, history as a whole: (1) the annalistic approach to be found in chronicles; (2) the cyclical conception of time, ideas of an eternal recurrence (probably modelled after the succession of day and night or after the recurring seasons of the year); (3) the degeneration theory, 10 Both, religious believing and scientific knowing depend on the positivization of truth as the written word. An epiphany could not possibly be “believed” in. It was an experience, which means that as logically transient (not positive, not “written”) it “passed through” the experiencing person fulfilling and illuminating him in its passage. 11 This is made very clear in the Ezekiel passage: The fulfillment of God’s promise at the end of time does not have the quality of a purposeless shine of meaning, but has an external and positive purpose—that of “serving as [factual] proof,” of winning an argument.

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imagining history as a decline from the Golden Age to the Iron Age or to the Indian kali yuga (the model for this view probably being the biological ageing of us humans); and (4) the evolutionary or progress theory of history (inspired by the idea of the growth of plants or the growing up of children into adults). We may now add a fifth view of history: the involution of all time into one of its moments. What from one point of view appeared as the usurpatory rising of one moment above all peer moments, can from another be seen through to be a monomaniacal zooming in on this one single instant and the installation of all life, all time, all things and events within its narrow confines. This conception, however, demands of us some mental effort, a considerable stretching of the mind. What it is about cannot be perceived or pictorially imagined any more. It can only be thought. We have to rise to the challenge of thinking the infinite expanse of open-ended linear time as having its place in an expansionless geometric point: history, which is above all the history of scientific and technological progress and of the incredible amassing of knowledge about all details of reality and of the penetration to ever more distant galaxies of the universe and to ever more microscopic recesses of matter—this expanding history as the ongoing collapse of the universe in a (in the) Black Hole.

PART II

Technological Civilization and

“Medial” Modernity

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Burial of the Soul in

Technological Civilization

In 1803 Friedrich Hölderlin prepared the following poem for print. Hälfte des Lebens

Half of Life

Mit gelben Birnen hänget Und voll mit wilden Rosen Das Land in den See, Ihr holden Schwäne, Und trunken von Küssen Tunkt ihr das Haupt Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.

With yellow pears And full of wild roses The land extends into the lake, You lovely swans, And drunk with kisses You dip your heads Into the holy-sober water.1

The poet’s standpoint is summer in its pleromatic fullness. Standing in the middle of this summer within an intact nature, the alarming thought of winter emerges in him, a winter not simply of ice and snow, but of mute (“speechless”) walls of stone and clanking weather vanes of iron. Summer and winter are here not seasons of nature, but refer to an upheaval from a natural world of yellow pears, wild roses, and lovely swans, a world which certainly has its own natural winter too, to a world of technology with its mute, cold, soulless things. 1 Fr. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, vol. 2,1, p. 117. For the complicated history of the creation of this poem see vol. 2, 2 (commentary). For the interpretation of this poem see Ludwig Strauss, “Friedrich Hölderlin: ‘Hälfte des Lebens,’” in L. S., Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. W. Kraft (München: Kösel, 1963), pp. 478 - 512 .

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And this at a time when at bottom such unpoetic things were not even known. The walls at Hölderlin’s time were still built up with hand-hewn natural stones; and do not such walls, as we at times still find them around old cemeteries, precisely speak to us today? And weather vanes and other wrought iron implements from those days have a high nostalgic value and are traded at corresponding prices in antiques market, which shows that they do speak to the soul. Only we, with our walls of concrete, know what a really mute wall is, and of course we also already have a simple answer to Hölderlin’s desperate question, “Woe is me, where will I get, when winter has come, flowers?” We simply spray paint the missing flowers, just like that, with loud colors on the intolerably mute concrete wall, or stick them as a bumper sticker on that cold metal conveyer belt product, the automobile, thus imposing on this technical object a voice that is not its own. The soul that is in this way painted or pasted on no doubt drowns out the speechlessness of the things, but on the other hand, it can ipso facto also make us aware of it in an all the more uncanny way. Hölderlin’s summer and winter are not the changing phases in the year of nature, but refer to the revolutionary shift from nature to a technological reality. But if this upheaval is seen as a change from summer to winter, as a change of the seasons in a historical world year, then the question arises why the poet, and we along with him, try desperately to hold on to summer as our yardstick, and with a “woe is me” balk at the movement of time. Perhaps flowers and sunshine and shadow of the earth do not have to be around all the time. And maybe winter is mute only when we comprehend the speaking of summer as the only speech there is. Could it not be that winter has its own yardstick and is speaking its own speech, and could it not be our task to accompany the course of the year and to follow without reserve the movement of being immersed in the holy-sober water, in such a way that we are inside it with our hearts and view the world from its standpoint, with its measure? This would mean that we would no longer resist the winter that has been the condition we have been in for a long time already, resist it by continuing to hold on, over and against our reality, to the familiar summer speech of flowers and either nostalgically leave our hearts in the good old days of nature, myth, symbols or anticipate, in utopian style, a fictitious future summer of true humanness. In both cases

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winter is only skipped, and the now prevailing technological civilization is disparaged from a cultural-critical standpoint high above it and external to it. To be immersed in the holy-sober water would mean through patient listening to learn from the cold and mute things of technology themselves a new language with its own rules and its own idioms, a language that is not our mother-tongue, but the foreign language of concrete walls, airplanes, moon rockets, television sets, computers, nuclear bombs, and also the language of advertising, statistics, and the economy governed by multinational concerns. It is not truly so that between the yellow pears of the beginning and the clanking weather vanes of the end there is an unavoidable rupture. In the reality of the image there is a continuous movement from summer to winter, which in the first stanza announces its coming through the fact that the lovely swans dip their heads drunk with kisses into the holy-sober water. This movement appears as a rupture solely because the poet himself within his poem breaks out of his own poem: Suddenly an I stands up and in its desires and timidity wants to assert itself against the guileless objective self-unfolding of an image.2 We do not learn what happens when the swans dip their heads into the water and what they see there. The image is artificially disrupted. Instead, we are forced to suddenly circle around another center, around an I with its subjective fears of this movement. The real rupture is not between summer and winter, but between the innocence and objectivity of a self-moving image and the uprising of a subjectivity that ruthlessly pushes its way into the delicate selfcontained image and talks about itself instead of listening to the image. Woe is me, where will I get, when winter has come, flowers? But maybe this uprising and breakout on the part of the I is, in a deeper sense, itself after all a part of that guileless going-under into the holy soberness of the water that brings up winter. And maybe it is our task to acquire this deeper understanding, an understanding capable of seeing that even the ruthlessness of this poetic I is still encompassed within the innocence of being. Of course, in giving my talk the title “The Burial of the Soul in(to) Technological Civilization” it could seem that I, too, play the same familiar tune as the discontented and wish to bemoan the 2 Norbert von Hellingrath (Propyläen-Ausgabe von Hölderlins sämtlichen Werken IV, 301) already emphasized that only in the second stanza “the poet’s own I speaks up.”

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soullessness of technology, bemoan “civilization and its discontents.” But the implications of the expression “burial of the soul” are not quite that simple. It does not simply have a negative, derogatory meaning, as we moderns are inclined to think, because we have no relation to grave and burial. This was, for the ancient Egyptians for example, very different. They created the products of their entire cultural activities for the most part for the sole purpose of burying them and letting them disappear for good in graves. Just as we today invest billions in tanks and rockets and disk drives, which, after a few years, are only fit for scrap, so the Egyptians, if I may use such an inappropriate, grotesque comparison, invested their most precious treasures into the world of graves, not only gold and jewels of inestimable material value, but also the creations of their artistcraftsmen, sculptors, painters and poets. We, by contrast, are a culture which exactly the other way around excavates that which formerly had been buried and displays it in bright light, just the same as all our present-day productions. Starting with archeological digs via the philological and historical unearthing of sources, the dissection of corpses in medicine, investigative journalism, and in general the publication of information through the media, the display of nudity in magazines, up to psychoanalytic uncovering of repressed truths, it seems to be a basic need of our culture to bring the hidden to light and thereby disprove the realness of the grave. Even something like the anatomical dissecting of the body by no means arises merely from practical necessities, as we might perhaps be inclined to think, but from a specific idea of what is absolutely important, from an “archetypal” need of modern man. For as Ludwig Edelstein 3 shows, anatomical dissection appeared to the Greeks as superfluous for purposes of medicine; it served only the intellectual curiosity of the philosophers. Greek medicine obviously could get along quite well with the hiddenness and darkness of the body, without feeling it to be a regrettable evil. For us, however, it is considered as self-evident and absolutely imperative that the unknown be wrested from its hiddenness. Between the sinking of the highest value and central symbol of the Egyptians, the dead Pharaoh, into the mummy, into the several 3 L. Edelstein, “The Relation of Ancient Philosophy to Medicine,” in Ancient Medicine (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1968), p. 349.

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sarcophagi and into the richly adorned world of the grave on the one hand, and our archeological excavating, our museum exhibitions, and scientific explanations on the other hand, there is that event that we call in an essential sense Occidental history, one single event. This event of Western fate found its highest articulation as Christian religion, above all in the idea of Incarnation. There are of course quite a few symbols constitutive for Christianity, such as Crucifixion, Resurrection, and the effusion of the Holy Ghost, and Incarnation is but one of them. The question—with which of these events did Christianity begin and which symbol is thus the most central?—must not be answered here. Maybe this question is even mistaken from the outset, inasmuch as all essential symbols of a religion are probably all equally primary (gleichursprünglich) and interlocked so that each one comprises within itself all the others and no single one can be understood in isolation. There is not the one central symbol from which the others could be derived or to which they could be subordinated. The structure of a hermeneutic whole, such as a living religion, is of such a nature that it is there in its entirety all at once—not in a historical sense, but in essence. If I nevertheless focus on the Incarnation alone, then I do this not to the exclusion of Crucifixion, Resurrection, etc., but for the sole reason that it is the significant aspect of Christianity in the context of my topic. For the Incarnation seems to mean in my view nothing else but the burial of the soul in technology. To comprehend the idea of Incarnation as the truth of technology and technology as the fulfillment and completion of Christian Incarnation contradicts all our usual ideas. Modern technological civilization after all originates from the great counter-movement to the Church and Christianity, the Enlightenment. With the latter, modern man liberated himself from Christian religion and perhaps even from any religious outlook altogether and attempted to establish a wholly secular, maybe even anti-divine world. I do not want here, prior to my taking up our actual topic, to deal with these important objections, because it is the very task of the following discussion to demonstrate in detail the inner connection between seemingly secular technology and the idea of Incarnation. But at the beginning a reference to one obvious fact is in place: that technological civilization came into existence only in the West. This fact is so obvious and familiar that the statement contained in it can hardly be heard. For it states that

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technology must be rooted in the highest and deepest concerns of Western culture and must be understood accordingly. We can of course not say that technology flourished in the Western world for the simple reason that only in it were people intelligent enough, or that only here the scientific preconditions for inventions existed. Rather, it is the other way around; Western man had to apply his intelligence almost exclusively to technological development and to creating the scientific preconditions because his consciousness was informed by specific archetypal dominants whose nature it was to lead in that direction. For example, besides many other technical inventions, gunpowder was invented much earlier in China than in Europe. But what was it used for? It was “squandered” by way of fireworks, effused into the air, for the purpose of the ritual celebration of the New Year festival, whereas in Europe the invention of gunpowder set a development in motion which lead via cannons and bombs up to nuclear missiles and served the purpose of an ever more intensive access to reality.4 It is unthinkable that the Far Eastern world could have produced, on the basis of its own tradition, something like the atom bomb or more generally a mechanized world. On the basis of Chinese culture, technical inventions were no doubt possible, but their use, their status, and function was fundamentally different because the position of man towards Being was a different one. Man’s position towards Being finds its expression in the central motifs of his religion, just as conversely the latter’s motifs inform his consciousness and give it a specific orientation. That, however, which sets the religion of the West most apart from all the other religions is Incarnation, the idea 4 J. Lohmann [“Der Sophismus des Kung-Sun-Lung,” in Lexis II, 1 (1949), p. 4] pointed out that compass, paper, letterpress printing, gunpowder, and dialectics were used in China only in a playful way, whereas with us they led to a revolution in all areas of life. A parallel observation of Jung’s about the Romans, i.e., the Western pre-Christian antiquity, is interesting in this connection. It is, however, embedded in reflections of his about the origin of psychology: “… It was therefore quite logical that the discovery of psychology falls entirely within the last decades [Jung said this in 1928], although long before that earlier centuries possessed enough introspection and intelligence to be able to recognize psychological facts. In this regard it is the same as with technology. The Romans, e.g., were familiar with all the mechanical principles and physical facts which would have enabled them to construct a steam engine, but all that came of it was the toy made by Hero of Alexandria. The reason for this is that there was no compelling necessity to go further. This necessity arose only with the enormous division of labour and the growth of specialization in the last century. It needed the pressing psychological need [or predicament] of our age to push us into the discovery of psychology. …” (CW 10 § 159, trans. modified).

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that in the empirical-historical man Jesus of Nazareth God himself has entered the world. It is this historical basis on which in the last analysis Christian religion’s claim to absolute truth, most clearly elaborated by Hegel,5 is based, the Christian awareness, not existing without some justification, of the incomparability of Christianity. If Western culture is distinguished from all other cultures by two incomparabilities, by the development of a technological civilization on the one hand and by having an “absolute religion” (which is absolute because of its historical basis) on the other hand, the idea is not completely out of place that both could be connected or perhaps even identical. I am speaking here as depth-psychologist and psychotherapist and not from a theological standpoint. But precisely a depth-psychological examination of technology cannot do without religious and theological aspects. In the depth, theology is decisive, which is why already Freud and Jung were inevitably induced, in the course of their psychological studies, to deal with religious or theological questions. This is not really a border violation because the concern behind this interest in religion is and remains the therapy of the soul. By concerning myself with Incarnation in connection with technology, I do not desert the psychological, imaginal standpoint in favor of a historical or theological one. I am not trying to put the blame for the predicaments of the technological age on any earlier age, movement, or individual person; I do not attempt to find a “culprit,” neither Christianity, nor the ancient Greeks, nor the Old Testament Hebrews. Although my glance seemingly turns backwards, I nevertheless remain in our present6 and ask what are the efficacious images and living ideas under whose dominion we live today and that we suffer from. C. G. Jung already saw it similarly. He said: 5 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. Dritter Teil. Die absolute Religion (Theorie-Werkausgabe, vol. 17 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1969). If Hegel states that in Christian religion “the universal and the individual spirit are inseparable …; its absolute identity is this religion and the content of the latter” (p. 189, my translation), then he is justified to think so on account of the idea of God’s Incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth. On the absoluteness of Christianity cf. Ulrich Mann, Das Christentum als absolute Religion (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970). 6 Cf. W. Giegerich, “The Present as Dimension of the Soul: ‘Actual Conflict’ and Archetypal Psychology,” now Chapter 5 of The Neurosis of Psychology, Collected English Papers, Vol. 1 (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2005), pp. 103-117. The original German version (“Die Gegenwart als Dimension der Seele: Aktualkonflikt und archetypische Psychotherapie”) appeared in Analyt. Psychol. 9 (1978): 99-110.

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My problem is to wrestle with the big monster of the historical past, the great snake of the centuries, the burden of the human mind, the problem of Christianity. … Other people are not worried by such problems, they do not care about the historical burdens Christianity has heaped upon us.7

Precisely in view of our ever more alarming situation—death of the forest due to pollution, stocking up on nuclear arms, overpopulation of the earth, etc.—I do not want to try to find ways out that would allow us to shake off this historical burden. There are enough ways out. Rousseau, Hegel, Hölderlin, Marx, even Heidegger, to mention only a few, sought for and recommended ways out. By contrast, I would like to merely listen to our plight, without partiality, in order for us to finally get truly into our Christian mode and our technology and so that it might perhaps become more likely that one time we might, for the first time in Western history, become able to truly carry our historical burden. It is very hard for us to grasp and accept that the Christian tenets could also be a burden. Because it preaches charity and redemption, for a long time we have been wont to see in Christianity only something that redeems and to blind ourselves about the shadow that precisely a religion of redemption must bring along with it. Ordinary theology knows nothing of the burden of Christianity. It shook it off. However, if it makes out the contents of the Christian doctrine as mere truths of faith, is this not a playing down, a minimization, through which the doctrine is kept out of objective reality and immunized against it? Since the age of the Reformation at the latest, theology and the Church have left the real course of events, the real intellectual and social development, to its own fate and if anything at most offered, as bystander and onlooker from outside and above, moral exhortations. And correspondingly they also no longer derived their own truth from out of the plight of each age, forgetful of the fact that the divine never comes to us only from out of a written-down history, but always only as one’s “future” (Zukunft: literally “that which is coming toward us”) from out of each present that we are in, and its reality. If, however, the truths of theology and the Church have lost touch with the real world (technology, industry, natural sciences) to such an extent and 7

C. G. Jung, CW 18 § 279.

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have ceased to be the simple articulation of the active forces operative in reality, can they then still be considered the authoritative interpreters of the living Christian truth? If they understand the Christian truth as what formerly, 2,000 years ago, had in fact been intended by the historical Jesus or the Apostles or the early Church and if this is the truth they want to study, preserve, and restore, is what they do then not merely something like an archeology of their own truth and a preservation of their own historic monuments? And when they reserve their truth for faith in the interior of man and keep it opposed to objective reality, do they in this way not also systematically keep themselves in the impotence of unreality? By the way, if I speak here of the Christian truth, or of truth in general, what is meant is not truth in a theological or metaphysical sense, some “absolute, eternal truth,” the “true per se”— I have no knowledge about that—but truth in a psychological sense: an idea or fantasy is psychologically true if it is active, effective.8 In view of the alarming situation of the world it seems to me very urgent no longer to follow the undervaluation and derealization, promulgated by the Churches, of the Christian truths, but to take these truths more seriously and think them more rigorously than is typically the case on the part of theology and the Church. The Christian truths must not be conceived as a matter of mere personal faith and inner experience. It is precisely the real development of the Christian West which we have to regard as authoritative for the Christian truth. Our external public reality including technology, advertising, exploitation, etc. is not opposite to the Christian truth, but rather belongs to it, is essentially an integral part of it. Christian truth does not only have its upper mental and “conviction” (“faith”) aspect, but, like every religion, also its own physical reality and earthly weight (and as the religion of the Incarnation naturally a different type and a much more massive physical reality than other religions). Only by allowing the Christian truth to have its essential life precisely in reality (and I mean the way reality really is and not how it ideally “is supposed to be”) will we also do justice to the deep psychotherapeutic concern that C. G. Jung could not get out of his mind: the integration and redemption of the fourth. “Ever since the 8

Concerning the idea of psychological truth see C. G. Jung, CW 11 § 4 f.

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Timaeus the ‘fourth’ has signified ‘realization,’ i.e., entry into an essentially different condition, that of worldly materiality ….”9 What is needed is to see in matter itself the equivalent of spirit, but this ‘spirit’ will appear divested of all, or at any rate most, of its known qualities, just as earthly matter [in the image of the Mother of God] was stripped of its specific characteristics when it staged its entry into heaven.10

If we split off the fourth (the earth, the shadow, the material reality) by refusing to acknowledge reality as the locus of the Christian truth—which direction would then be open to us? Only that of a kind of Manichaeism and the allocation of the reality of the world to Fallen man, with the psychologically disastrous consequence that the real development would continue not to be connected to consciousness and thus could take its course in blind obedience to archaic instinctual patterns. If we want to acquire a real inner connection to our factual world (technological civilization), then it is decisive for our success to recognize in the Incarnation a psychological reality, that is, not a mere reality of faith, but a real factor of our intellectual life, an objective might with determining force that has to be reckoned with in reality because we all are in it and exposed to its workings in our ordinary practical reality. It is not a mere claim, an idea that we may or may not entertain. It is not (a representation) in us, but we are in it. It is the world in which we live, the scope of our existence. And thus it is absolutely irrelevant whether we believe in it, have inwardly experienced it and accept it or not. It is the unrelenting fate of all of us. The Incarnation must not be reduced to a Church-internal matter, it must be a public concern, and not a matter of faith and personal feeling, but of general, “official,” and binding knowledge. In what follows I want to look into the Incarnation from five points of view: (1) The interment of Heaven; (2) The artificiality of the flesh; (3) The fabrication of God; (4) The inflation of things; and (5) Divestiture. 9 10

C. G. Jung, CW 11 § 251.

C. G. Jung, CW 9i § 195.

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1. THE INTERMENT OF HEAVEN In the mythical world, it is nothing uncommon that gods take human guise and appear to mortals. To illustrate it with a familiar example, in the Odyssey Telemachus believes to have hosted a friend of Odysseus’s, a friend bound by a tie of hospitality to the latter, namely Mentes, the king of the Taphians—while in reality it was the goddess Athene who had appeared to him in this guise.11 In the Christian myth it is said that God had become man. In Jesus of Nazareth, who is a veritable human being, God has come close to man. And faith is capable of beholding the glory of God in the man Jesus, quite similarly as Telemachus all of a sudden recognizes in the departing Mentes the godhead. However, as analogous as the two conceptions seem to be, they are diametrically opposed to each other. The Christian “myth”12 of the Incarnation breaks out of the mythical constitution of the world and is that “myth” that founded a nonmythical or antimythical existence. Through severe controversies the Old Church struggled to grasp the specific nature of Christ and to ward off all sorts of reductions and one-sided views. Christ is neither simply a God who so to speak for appearance’s sake took on human shape, nor, conversely, a man who became equal to God, and also not a semi-divine cross between both natures, but at one and the same time, as Luther worded it, true God, born of the Father in eternity, as well as true man, born of Virgin Mary.13 For Christianity it is of highest importance that the divine and human natures of Christ are both acknowledged in full purity and intensity and that this contradiction is in no way weakened or mediated. Rather the task is to see to it that the two oppositional natures come together in one and the same person without their difference being blurred or, conversely, being construed so starkly that the two natures would practically fall apart into two separate essences, which had only accidentally found a lodging in one and the same person. The psychological content that in Christianity pushed its way forward into consciousness and was the driving force behind the 11

The Odyssey, Book 1. Here I must emphasize that I do not mean by Christianity the doctrine of the early Christian community, a small Jewish sect 2000 years ago, a doctrine that can only be accessed through hypothetical reconstruction, but a Western historical force into which just as much Greek mind as Israelite heritage entered. 13 Martin Luther, Explanation of the 2nd article of faith in his Kleiner Katechismus. 12

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passionate struggles of the early Church obviously demanded such a precarious tightrope walk, this extremely difficult balancing act, in order to arrive at an appropriate wording for it. It was a matter of conceiving of the idea of a reality in which the divine and the humanearthly were at once identical and different. In the mythical situation in which Telemachus found himself, everything was very different, if not inverse. His father’s guest-friend only appeared to be a human, while in reality being a goddess. But inasmuch as we are not allowed to see in Telemachus a superstitious supernaturalist, it is just as true that after the godhead had become disclosed, also the human-earthly reality of his conversation partner was not obliterated. As a matter of course it had been and remained to be Mentes, king of Taphians, who had spoken to him. Rather the god relativizes the human and the human the God, and what factually remains behind all this is solely what in fact had happened and obviously iridesces in two directions. It has an ordinary-human face and a divine face, and neither one is “the absolutely true one.” We could here neither speak of a “true man” nor of a “true goddess,” let alone, as in the case of Christ, of “a true man and a true god”— because here such a radicalized true being, i.e., a reality in the literal or positivized sense, does not exist. Already here the radical novelty of the Christian situation becomes apparent. But in order to be able to appreciate the enormous event that in the Christian Incarnation found its most emphatic articulation, we must still go back a bit more. There is a significant, widespread mythologem referred to by Erich Neumann14 as the separation of the primordial parents and by Heino Gehrts 15 as the myth of the distancing of Heaven and Earth. In the beginning Heaven and Earth were lying on top of each other in cohabitation, and everything was darkness. There had never been a separation of them, so their children, the sons of Heaven and Earth, had to live in eternal night—until one day one of the sons of the primordial parents heaved Heaven up and separated them from out of his position in between them. Thereby the open, light space that we perhaps can call “the World” in the emphatic sense, was created for the first time. In Greek mythology 14 Erich Neumann, Ursprungsgeschichte des Bewußtseins, (Zürich, 1949), chapter “Die Trennung der Ureltern oder das Gegensatzprinzip.” 15 Heino Gehrts, “Vom Wesen des Speeres,” in Hestia 1984/85, pp. 71-103.

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this motif lives on in the figure of Atlas, whose task it is to carry the vault of heaven. Frequently it is a world tree that keeps Heaven and Earth or the upper world and the underworld apart, so that the open clearance of the human World arises. As the figure of Atlas demonstrates, the one-time act of heaving up Heaven was not enough. The distancing had to be constantly maintained. Human existence was overshadowed by the fundamentally existing possibility that Heaven crashed back upon the Earth. Man was called upon to re-establish and affirm the separateness. This happened partly through special rituals, partly also simply through the mythical-ritualistic mode of existence. As Heino Gehrts16 in his profound essay on the nature of the spear showed, through the ritual of the erection of the spear the distancing of Heaven and Earth was ever again renewed and along with it archaic mankind’s dwelling in the open clearance each time newly acquired. What, by contrast, does the Christian Incarnation mean? The moving force behind the Christian vision aimed for what is called perichoresis, that is, the mutual interpenetration of the divine and the human nature. What was to be achieved was that God and Man, logos and sarx, word and flesh come in fact together in one point. This is the meaning of “Jesus the Christ” and it is what makes this figure so unheard of and exciting. Jesus the Christ or the Incarnation means nothing less than the systematic undoing of the Heaven-Earth­ distancing. The mission and the achievement of Christianity was to knock over the erect spear, to make Atlas collapse and to cut down the World Ash. Heaven and Earth have by no means lost their difference, but they have now been collapsed into one and as one identity. They are superimposed without interstice, nay, they even interpenetrate each other. Heavenly Logos has now been interred in earthly flesh. The World as the in-between, as the separateness providing an open clearance, is gone. From out of the collapse of the world, understood as described, something fundamentally new, something that had not been there ever before, emerges: the one point given in empirical-historical reality in which Heaven and Earth are intricately intertwined in such an indissoluble and inexpressible way that they appear to be a 16

Op. cit.

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homogenous whole. This point becomes real as the self-enclosed thing of physical reality, the body as empirical-literal reality. The Incarnation means the installation of a new constitution of being, of being in the sense of empirical-physical reality, the inauguration of the somatization of being. Only through the Incarnation did our concept of factuality and of sensible-objective physicality obtain a sound mythic foundation. Only the Christian vision renders the much older saying, sôma sêma psychês17 (the body the grave of the soul), really true. Is it astonishing that Greek medicine did not see any necessity for anatomical dissection, whereas our entire medicine both in a substantial sense rests on anatomical investigations and in a temporal sense began with them? For the man of the Christian West the body has apparently become an impenetrably enclosed physical thing that one needs to cut open if its nature is to be brought to light. For the Greek physicians, by contrast, the body was apparently not closed from the outset, rather it opened up an entire world with its own Heaven and its own Earth, a world extending to the very stars. For this reason a literal dissection of the body from outside, with which the anatomist on his part would remain outside, would not have provided access to its reality. The access to the body was only gained by the physician’s own entering that world; and in order for him to be able to do that it had to be a priori open: the physicality of the body had to be an imaginal one. Is it astonishing that the Egyptians buried their most precious treasures, while we take to excavating and exhibiting? The Egyptian burying meant, as a renunciation of the treasures, a distancing, through which a clearance, an open space was acquired, not all that different from forcing Heaven and Earth apart from out of the position in-between them, or different from the ritualistic erection of a spear. To absence was given a real presence in life. The Egyptian buried the precious things and thereby opened up the grave as a World. We conversely feel the urge to dig things up from the graves and to pull out of their hiddenness the farthest stars by means of radio telescopes, and the minutest particles of matter by means of electron microscopes, and to zoom in on them, to exhibit and stare at them, because we are under the dominion of the Incarnation, the perichoresis. For us the thing 17

Plato, Gorgias 493a; cf. Kratylos 400c.

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has become the purpose of our spiritual existence because in it Logos and sarx have to come together. Spellbound we have to search for the ultimate point of matter. The smaller that point, all the better, inasmuch as then the mutual interpenetration of Logos and flesh takes place in an even narrower area and still more of the world-constituting openness is destroyed. The Egyptian surrendered the fleshly (physical things) to the sarko-phágos (the flesh-eater) and through this sacrificial ritual achieved an extractio spiritus. Our doings, too, are a ritual, a ritual of continual knocking over the erected spear, the ritual of an ever deeper interment of heaven. The Word has become flesh. Here it is not the flesh that is eaten (as in the case of the sarcophagus) for the purpose of setting the wide world of the imaginal free, but the flesh conversely absorbs the Logos into itself. This has consequences even for the psyche of the individual person in modernity. For C. G. Jung neurotic symptoms are, as it were, the gods that have been buried in the empirical personality. He stated, “The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room ….”18 Is it astonishing that nowadays “the world has become small”? This is by no means due to our airplanes and means of communication, but, conversely, these could only be invented because the world had already become small, indeed nonexistent. How narrow (in a literal empirical sense) were in former times the dimensions of an Egyptian royal tomb or the geographic horizon of people in ancient days compared with the vast global distances into which our vacation or business trips take us or which are daily brought to us via television into our living rooms. But the tomb opened up a world of cosmic dimension, whereas our airplanes connect individual thing-like (positive) points within an empty space devoid of “world.” Kant still thought that he was able to look up in admiration and awe to the starry heaven above himself.19 For him heaven obviously was still something qualitatively different from the earth and ontologically distinct from it. We have in the meantime lost the possibility for good to look up to something (although subjectively it 18

C. G. Jung, CW 13 § 54. Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften (Akademieausgabe 1910 ff.), Vol. V, p. 161 (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft). 19

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is of course still possible). An upward-looking stance presupposes an open distance and also establishes it. For us there is only one homogenous space, one homogenous uni-versum (that which is merged into one), no longer an in-itself-contentious cosmos. The starry heaven merely still has the name heaven, but in reality it has become just as earthly a reality as our earth itself. This is also the only reason why mortal man can penetrate into outer space: the earth is thereby not really left at all. As long as one could look up to the real heaven above us in veneration, not even the most ingenious mind could have invented airplanes or rockets. For through this upward-looking, the distance of heaven, i.e., its absolute, namely qualitative, ontological, unreachability from the earth was established and acknowledged. Only after heaven has become interred in the earth, and ipso facto had become earthly itself (“sky”), did it turn into a freely accessible space for technological inventiveness. I pointed out that the distance that in mythological times had to be reproduced ever anew was not only reconfirmed through certain rituals such as that of the erection of a spear, but also through the mythological-ritualistic mode of existence itself. If we recall for example Telemachus, we can say that the mode of existence described by Homer consists in, and is mythological for the reason that, figuratively speaking, within a quite ordinary occurrence, the visit from a guestfriend, a spear is erected. The spear erected in the event keeps the Heaven and the Earth of (within) this very occurrence apart and at bottom for the first time sets up, through this type of distancing, the mortal man as mortal man and the goddess as goddess from out of an otherwise anonymous, clotted event.20 It is my thesis that this is what every myth, every symbol does. A thing is a symbol when and only when it within itself opens up a whole world and illumines reality as a whole in the light of this “world.” Not participation, pars pro toto, not analogy or correspondence, not representation of something irrepresentable in or by means of something sensible, not an assigning of a higher figurative meaning is what constitutes a symbol, but the Heaven­ Earth-distancing within the one concrete thing or event in question. The real thing is not transcended by the symbolic-mythological 20 On this whole topic see Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1972), pp. 7-68.

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meaning, but itself is, exactly the way it comes, the symbol. The real concrete object contains everything it needs within itself to be a symbol, to be an image, to be mythological. It is self-sufficient. Nothing must be added or done to it. The only thing indispensable is that within itself its own Heaven and its own Earth separate and it thereby opens up into a World. The Incarnation is for that reason indeed the myth of the unmythological, because it instructs our consciousness to construe everything as the one positive-factual point in which Logos and sarx come together, in which they are clotted; for as a mythical idea it does not want, in the manner of what is reported in our history books, to talk about long-bygone facts of the past, but essentially appears with the claim to be a living presence for every present and to transform the ontological constitution of the whole world. In this way it produces in the last analysis not only the mute concrete wall, the mute atom, or the stifled occludedness of the sexual organs in today’s pornography. It also lays the foundation for our faith, for example, in hormones and vitamins or brings about many a failure of marriages, because it forces us to demand that our marriage partner as this ordinary human being be at the same time divine. A separation of the earthly and the heavenly marriage is not permitted any longer. Nowadays the idea of a development of mankind from unconsciousness to consciousness is widespread. In the light of the picture drawn here this theory seems to me untenable. The popular distinction of the matriarchal from our allegedly patriarchal orientation does not get us any further, but rather obscures the subject matter. The—in fact ascertainable—changes in the mode of human existence should not be seen as a rise from unconsciousness to consciousness, but as a reversal in the essential meaning of conscious and unconscious. In the mythical world, consciousness means to have erected a spear and in this way to keep apart a World. In order to achieve and maintain this awareness, archaic man had of course to leave in darkness not only the dead Pharaoh and many a precious object, but also a wealth of scientific and historical facts or even to actively bury them. We achieve our type of consciousness by excavating and exhibiting all these things. Our exhibition of things and facts in the light of day is, however, in itself the burial of Heaven, of Logos, and of soul precisely in those exhibited things.

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By giving over the fleshly to the sarko-phágos, mythological man also sacrificed a possible consciousness about ontic things for the benefit of a consciousness in the sense of the ontological opening up of a World. But we are compelled to press back together the ontological distance into the worldless occludedness of the ontic things that results from this action, so that the ontic, the flesh aspect of things, can be brought into the limelight. The unconsciousness of mythological man was based on a conscious sacrifice; our unconsciousness, by contrast, is the obfuscation and occlusion of things and facts in the light—the “consciousness’s becoming unconscious,” as Jung called it,21 or, with the image of the Christian myth, the Logos’s becoming flesh.

2. THE ARTIFICIALITY OF THE FLESH When the topic of God comes up in conversation, the first question immediately suggesting itself is, is there a God in the first place? From this it is apparent that the most obvious perspective from which the topic of God is viewed is the question about his existence. This is not only the case in the modern ages and not only among the sceptics, but is characteristic for the Christian West at large. Already during the Scholastic Middle Ages, at a time when the belief in God was an undisputed common property rooted in the whole experience of life and when doubt was no more than a playful intellectual exercise, already then the need was felt to prove the existence of God. And that on the part of learned, pious monks who certainly could not be suspected of having had secret doubts that they needed to soothe. The question about the proof of the existence of God in the one or the other form occupied the entire Western thinking also later, not only up to Kant, who had demonstrated once and for all the impossibility of proving the existence of God, but also much later, be it, as with Hegel, in the sense of a renewed rescue of the proofs, or in the various atheistic, materialistic movements of the 19th century that precisely tried to prove the non-existence of God. The question is alive to such an extent that it was possible as recently as a few years ago that a theological book by Hans Küng appeared with the probably provocatively chosen title, Does God Exist? 21

C. G. Jung, CW 12 § 563, trans. modified.

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The question, Is there a God? has been raised so often, on a high philosophical level just as in pseudoscientific pamphlets and in everyday conversation and is thus so familiar to us that we no longer notice that it is by no means an obvious question, indeed, how unnatural it is. God and existence, God and an “Is there in reality …?”—this combination of terms or ideas is not simply inherent in the nature of the human mind, but only arises on a very specific historical ground, just as does the other typically Western-modern question whether I as I demonstrably exist or whether my existence is maybe not merely an idle dream. As we can see in Descartes, questions about the existence of God and of the I are intricately connected or perhaps only two different versions of one and the same question. The Western fixation upon the existence of God and the I expands into the general necessity on the part of the natural and historical sciences to insist on the proof of factuality. In order to be able to understand that these questions are by no means obvious ones, we must again make the mythological situation clear. In that situation, the question about existence could simply not be asked. Here one could neither say that, for example, Zeus exists nor that he does not exist. The notion of existence simply passes over the reality of the mythic gods. How should one be able to ask: Is there Helios? One obviously lived in his light day after day and felt the effects of his rays on one’s own body. We, too, do not ask: Are there dogs? Is there such a thing as wind? Do earthquakes exist? Natural phenomena have always already overtaken the question about their existence. Our doubts and questions come too late because the answers have always already been given to us by nature herself. How should it be feasible to ask: Is there Zeus? Quite apart from thunderbolts and other natural phenomena—had one not been to Olympia and seen the great statue of Zeus, and was it there not as plain as can be that it was god? The fact that in the real sun or in a statue made by humans the god could in fact be seen is not due to gullibility or superstition, but is to be explained from the mythic meaning of the word god, which can be demonstrated most easily using the example of the Greek theós. This word does not signify a personal agent, nor an existing being; it was originally not a possible subject of a sentence, but, as Kerényi22 22 Karl Kerényi, “Theos: ‘Gott’ – auf Griechisch,” in Antike Religion (München: Langen Müller, 1971), pp. 207-217.

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has shown, a word that could be used only as a predicate. This is why one could not form a vocative case of theós in the ancient language, and nothing could be predicated of it (in other words, one could not say: god, theós, is this or that). The word much rather had the function of predicating something of real events. Functionally theós is therefore similar to words like “unheard of,” “extraordinary,” “marvelous” (although it is not an adjective but a noun, and the particular words mentioned here do of course not give an idea of the specific meaning of theós). For example, the Greeks could say: “If one person helps another, this is god.” The event, the phenomenon, is god. This fact is of greatest significance. For what it means is that if the Greeks saw god in the sun or in a statue or in an occurrence, they did not read something mysterious into what they saw. It did not imply a claim of something hidden behind or inside it, it was not a matter of faith and therefore could not be a matter of doubt either and obviously could not be proven. It would have been absurd to wish to prove anything here, as absurd as if I thought I had to prove that I am happy or sad. C. G. Jung, whose psychological understanding of the God-concept coincides in this regard exactly with the mythological one, states it is just as stupid to try to prove the existence of God as to deny him. If a person feels happy, he needs neither proof nor counterproof. Also, there is no reason to suppose that ‘happiness’ or ‘sadness’ cannot be experienced.23

For the Greeks and correspondingly for mythological man in general the thoroughly natural phenomenon, as it was perceived with the senses, was itself theós. “God” signified a quality of real events themselves, an effect they had on man. The gods of mythology, which were the qualities of natural reality vividly portrayed as figures, therefore were natural gods. This is of course a truism. But what “the mythic gods were natural gods” means and what inferences have to be drawn from it remains to be gauged. Even if theoretically we perhaps already know better, the conception about myth still operative in the depth of our thinking is that it is something like the world interpretation, worldview, or world 23

C. G. Jung, Letters 2, February 13, 1951, to Heinrich Boltze, p. 4.

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explanation of early man. In view of nature, so this thinking goes, the primitive, too, had to somehow form a notion of it, and the result of his attempts is myth. This understanding of myth misses the mark of what myth in essence is and retrojects a Christian-modern situation into the time of archaic man. If we really want to go through with the insight that the mythic gods are natural gods, then we have to realize much rather that myth is not the interpretation of the world, but nature itself. The mythological images do not come subsequently after the fact, secondarily, but they are the heart and soul of real nature. Nature owes its essential character and being to mythological images, and not the other way around. The God-images do not represent an imaginal equivalent for a theory, they are rather the natural itself, natural instinct and natural world. Myth does not have a relation to instinct and to external reality; rather, what we now see as the opposition of inner instinct and external reality, and furthermore distinguish from mythic image, is precisely contained in myth, encompassed by it. Myth has nothing outside of itself. There is not first a nature or an instinct and then in addition a mythic image. Rather, myth is the very reality of the life of man. Mythological man did not live in the environment and not in his body and also not in his inner world, but he lived in myth. This, the myth itself, is mythological man’s instinct, drive, his inner and his real world, and the real world is for him conversely his myths. This is of course due to the fact that in each concrete phenomenon Heaven and Earth are kept apart so that man sees things from inside, because as spear-bearer he has his place in the open clearance between the heaven and the earth of the respective event. The fact that myth is the really lived life itself and not an image of it, this precisely is the essence of myth just as much as of nature. For “natural” or “instinctive” means “to be there of its own accord,” always already being there, prior to all opinions, all human willing and acting, guilelessly, innocently, self-contained and self-certain. Nature is what in an emphatic sense is “a matter of course,” that which is taken for granted because it is really self-apparent. That is to say, it is something that is in no need of being, and cannot be, understood by us, but it conversely speaks of its own accord, thereby bestowing itself and its meaning on us. According to an adage of Heraclitus, nature is something whose character it is to be evasive

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or to cease to exist if one tries to get to the bottom of it, to explain or prove it: phýsis krýptesthai phileî.24 It is the nature of nature that myth is the real environment and the inner world of man all in one, the real house of man’s existence. Nature means that the immediate, instinctive image itself has a full and all-comprehensive reality character. Because the mythic gods were natural gods, it was impossible to believe in them or to have doubts about them. One could never have asked whether they exist. They were after all, in the sense indicated, self-apparent and would have withdrawn the moment one inquired about them. However, if in the Christian world the question “Is there a God?” keeps the minds occupied, then this shows that the Christian God is not a self-apparent, natural God any more, but a God whose innermost nature it is to be somehow imposed from above, a God who does no longer manifest itself phýsei, simply as an instinct-experience and without question. Now he is, to be sure, substantial, a personal agent, an existing hypostasis and a possible sentence subject, but this is not an acquisition, but a loss. For his having become a subject he payed dearly with an ontological deficiency. The idea of the Incarnation expresses both aspects of this transformation of the essence of the divine in one and the same image. God has become flesh. What does this mean? Inherent in the idea of becoming flesh is, first of all, that the nature of God ceases to be “only” imaginal, mythic, and instead wants a positive, substantial existence, an existence in the flesh. God wants to be Something or Somebody, a real entity, the summum ens. This gives the impression that it was God’s wish precisely to enter nature. But, and this is the second aspect, the fact that this God had to become flesh shows that by nature he is somehow incorporeal, without substance, unreal. The natural gods did not ever need to become flesh because they bore their physical reality always already in their imagenature and, being image, could effortlessly and without much ado appear in this or that shape. From this follows a third and most significant point. Flesh gives at first the impression of being a word that signifies most decisively natural existence. But in the context of the Incarnation and through it, a fundamental transformation of the essence of flesh and, along with it, of nature ensues. The Logos becomes flesh. Here we must really 24

Heraclitus, fragment B 123 (Diels-Kranz).

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hear what is stated with the idea of the Logos turned flesh and must not content ourselves with what is meant. Not what is intended is crucial, but what has really been said and what is the historically active force. If a mythic idea such as that of the Incarnation is a lifetransforming reality, then the competent commentary on the Bible is written by history and not by the exegetes. We must not screen the idea of the Incarnation off from reality as a free-floating idea in empty space, which is believed in (or maybe not believed in) by individuals in their interior. No, we have to comprehend that it decides about the constitution of reality as a whole. The Word becomes flesh. Here something happens. And not only to the Logos that descends from above, but also to the flesh (i.e., to earthly reality) into which the Logos enters. The concepts of flesh and Logos are, of course, not assembled together into the dictum of the Incarnation as static entities like building bricks, with fixed dictionary meanings, but they are themselves exposed to the living process of the thought expressed in that sentence and are seized and transformed by it. What we are concerned with here is the incredible occurrence that the flesh (together with the Logos) receives a radically different nature. The concept, the notion of flesh, of earth, of reality is transformed. The flesh now has no longer its ground in nature, but it is flesh from above, and actually not really flesh at all, but Logos having become flesh. The things of nature had their own Logos, too, but this was of course the natural Logos, the Logos of nature, the Logos expressed in mythos. Now, however, an inversion or pole changing has taken place: the Logos heretofore contained in nature escaped from it, made itself independent as something in its own right and of its own origin, and thus turned into the primary, the fundamental and comprehensive reality. The Incarnation amounts to an ontological revolution. The reality character is moving from the natural, from the sensualmythical, to what comes from the Logos above. From now on the quality of ‘being real’ is no longer to be assigned to what exists by nature. Realness, this is from now on supposed to mean: the Logosquality (in the completely novel sense, established by the Incarnation, of the pure Logos, the Logos isolated from nature). Here the new reality concept that the natural sciences will later take as their basis is conceived and the mythic foundation for it is laid. The Incarnation therefore is ontologically speaking the grandiose blueprint, reaching

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out far ahead into the future, of the idea of the substitution of nature by a second, no longer natural nature, the program of the translation of the natural world into a technological one. In the Incarnation the Christian “myth” of the supernatural God lays the foundation, as is done by every myth in its own way, for its own type of “corporeality,” “earthy substantiality,” and “reality.” The theological name for the new type of corporeality is “flesh,” today’s philosophical name: “positive, technological reality.” What else could one expect technological reality to be but the Logos become flesh? And how else could one conversely imagine a Logos become flesh than in the style of technological reality? (At least if the Incarnation is not a lofty idea with no roots in the ground, but one that does something to reality.) Technology is Logos because it is what has its origin in reason, a product of the mind, idea. It is flesh because it is material reality and does not simply remain idea. And it is the result of a becoming because it is not what grew by itself (physis), but something artificially made, the realization of the idea into a tangible practical reality. This is not only true for the technical apparatuses, but also for the explanation of the world by the sciences. This explanation, too, is technology in the sense of a conversion of Logos into flesh, inasmuch as it is the substitution of the natural world (myth) by the positivistically conceived reality. Thus we see that flesh after the Incarnation does no longer mean the same as before, and it is precisely the purpose of the Incarnation to express or bring about this transformation of the essence of flesh, i.e., reality. Flesh, as Logos become flesh, is realized, transformed Idea, not natural flesh, neither literally as animal or human body, nor in the figurative sense as the already-existing earthly reality. Natural flesh would be, as we have seen, precisely mythic image, and mythic image God would never have still needed to become.25 This he would have 25 As one can see here, the term “natural” in such a sentence, and frequently in my parlance in general, is not used in an essentialist sense. It does not refer to “literal” nature as something primary that exists outside and independently of the relevant discourse. What “natural” means is in each case to be understood from what it is opposed to within each context. Therefore the word can mean one thing when the difference between animal and human is discussed and something very different when it is a question of the difference between the gods of pagan mythology and the Christian God (or the corresponding statuses of human consciousness). Inasmuch as I do not refer to an ontological given, I can say that in each context it is the one Concept that happens to be under discussion that within itself establishes its own difference between “the natural” and “the unnatural.” It bifurcates into these opposites as its internal moments, which mutually define and limit each other.

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originally been from the outset, without this, however, already having qualified him for being given the name flesh in this emphatic sense. Through God’s having the urge to become flesh, i.e., the urge for a positivistically conceived existence, the mythic image is split into two extreme directions and thus destroyed. Its reality / nature / corporeality aspect is separated as “flesh,” as the total novelty of a factual existence in empirical-historical reality. And along with it its Logos aspect conversely breaks out of natural reality and ascends into the unattainable otherworldly height of the pre-existent Logos. The Old Testament God had to some extent still been a mythic, intramundane, natural god, and the creation story, too, still has a largely mythic character within the context of the Old Testament. Only through the Incarnation does God really cease being a mythic image and turns into a completely extramundane, absolute God, i.e., a God detached from nature. Only through the pre-existent Logos does God truly turn into the creator God, and only through the Word’s becoming flesh does the creation through God’s word become fully realized. Because God is now no longer the most natural thing in the world, no longer mythic image, but as the wholly Other without immediate accessibility he is opposite to the natural world of man, he is for man somehow imposed from above, only asserted, and for this reason God must be intensely concerned for his real existence and demand faith. We must realize that the godhead was not pre-existent and infinitely distant from time immemorial and only through the Incarnation finally came close to man. Rather, God’s embodiment in the flesh and his separation from nature arise simultaneously; they are one and the same, although conflicting, process. Logos and sarx are the decomposition products of myth, the fission product of nature. Today they are for example called, infinitely faded, theory and reality. Whereas in the previous section we saw that the Incarnation undoes the Heaven-Earth distancing, we now must note that this undoing is only the other side of a carrying the Heaven-Earth­ distancing to an extreme. As pre-existent Logos and positivistic flesh, Heaven and Earth are no longer distanced, but dissociated, split off from each other. The distancing has, so to speak, been taken literally, as an absolute separation. In contrast to the distancing (the tension between the two separated poles of the world), their dissociation means that now the world occurs twice (in two separate complete

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versions), once as theory and once again as reality, or once as Beyond and once as this world, and man is correspondingly doubled too, having as the one person two parallel existences, or split-off per­ sonalities (see Fig. 1): he is at once wholly the fallen man of the flesh and wholly the redeemed man accord­ ing to the spirit (Luther: simul iustus et peccator). The literal way of con­ ceiving things then also results in the literal, in positivistic reality along Fig. 1: Splitting off and splitting apart with the abstract way of thinking, the fixation on tangible, demonstrable existence. The radical tearing apart of Heaven and Earth (dissociation) and the factual collapsing of Heaven and Earth in one point (Incarnation) apparently are the same. The moment that God breaks out of the simplicity and sheer self-apparency of the mythic image or, which is the same thing, out of nature, the situation gets complicated, paradoxical, conflicting. The event that found its articulation in the Incarnation also means, as a transformation of the essence of God from mythic, natural Being to extranatural Being, a transformation of the constitution of reality; and it means the task of consistently realizing or executing this transformation. Being is translated from one language into another, from the language of nature into the language of physics or technology. To be sure, we call our chemistry, physics, physiology, etc. natural sciences, but this is much like we still speak of ‘heaven’ after heaven’s having ceased to exist centuries ago. That which is explored by the natural sciences is not nature. The essence of nature is accessible only in myth, only in image—simply because the natural is by definition that which exists of its own accord, that which is self-apparent.

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What the natural sciences are concerned with is, like everything literally ( positivistically ) existing, nothing self-apparent, but a reasonedout artifice—only accessible through one’s abstracting from the natural as it presents itself of its own accord in sensuous-imaginal form; only accessible through the invention and use of highly artificial apparatuses and cleverly devised methods. Natural sciences serve the Incarnation: the instillation of the Logos, from above and outside, into what formerly was the natural and thereby the production of positive reality. The natural sciences are not a way of cognition, but of translation, the translation of Being from the constitution of nature into that of technology, from the mythological reality’s mode of being into the mode of being of Createdness (having been made). The things of the natural, mythical world are psychologically or ontologically speaking essentially uncreated, because as that which is or comes into being of its own accord, it is their nature to be that which “always already is there” and to be the unquestionably, instinctively certain. Only through the work of the natural sciences is the constitution of the whole world truly brought into the status of createdness. This is because the perspective into which the natural sciences coercively transpose the world in its entirety is the question how the things are “made,” constructed (and constructible). Technology is not simply the sum-total of the apparatuses and machines, but one way the world as a whole can be constituted. And nature is correspondingly not simply the entirety of trees, mountains, animals, and lakes, but one whole constitution of being. It is true, there were already technical inventions and apparatuses in prehistoric ages and in antiquity, too. But this was not technology in the sense employed here, but it was really nature, inasmuch as the inventive spirit is part of the nature of man. Every technical invention was embedded in a myth. Gods, Prometheus, heroes were the inventors or founders, the prôtoi heuretaí. Every technical activity followed a ritualistic nomos (law) and initiated into a mystery, into a world (quite clearly, for example, in the case of the blacksmith’s craft).26 Today technology is something qualitatively different: technical civilization. Now it is the horizon by which human existence is contained. It is total, absolute, foundation. Our whole being and understanding of being are technified 26

Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971).

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and oriented towards technification. The technical has become an end in itself in whose service we are, which is why the interpretation of technology as an instrument, from the point of view of practical benefit, is obsolete and naïve. Technology in the strict, ontological sense has existed only since Being had turned into the Creation, and this means into the Logos having become flesh. True, in nature, too, there is a Logos at work. One just needs to have a look at a spider web. But this the natural Logos, is not the pre-existent, extramundane Logos of technology, which is not, but has to become flesh. True, we still have poets and painters and also forests and rivers, but we no longer have any nature; and art, too, as Hegel27 has stated, has, as far as its highest determination is concerned, become a thing of the past for us. Just as myth, so also art can objectively be there only on the ground of nature and nature only on the ground of art and myth. The great lyric poetry of nature of, say, Goethe is no evidence to the contrary. It is not only since the waldsterben that nature is dying. It has long been dead in its essence, at least since, in the saying transmitted by Plutarch, “The Great Pan is dead,” the going under of the nature gods has been negatively stated, and since Christianity with its Incarnation positively sealed this statement by installing a new, wholly other God. Goethe’s and the Romantics’ nature poetry, as beautiful as it is, has been wrung and wrested from a reality that had already become unnatural—to express it crassly: it had been deviously usurped through the tour de force of the subjectively feeling I. The vacant position of the genies in the natural things has without more ado been taken by “the genius,” the I as the magician who in the Storm and Stress of his feelings was able to evoke the impression of an animatedness of nature. From “Wanderers Sturmlied,” e.g., one can immediately see how much effort it cost young man Goethe to force an animatedness on the world, contrary to the reality of the world,28 just as it cost old man Goethe an enormous struggle to maintain his “theory of colors” against the real physics of his age, and to maintain his symbolic view of the world against the general spirit of his time29— 27

Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Theorie Werkausgabe, vol. 13, pp. 25, 141. Emil Staiger, Goethe, Vol. I (Zürich: Atlantis, 1964), pp. 68 ff. Andrew O. Jászi, Entzweiung und Vereinigung. Goethes symbolische Weltanschauung (Heidelberg: Stiehm, 1973). 30 On the acknowledgment of the past of the symbolic in Faust II see my “Hospitality toward the Gods in an Ungodly Age” (1984), now in W. Giegerich, The Neurosis of 28 29

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until he, with unreserved honesty, admitted the irrevocable past of the symbolic and gave voice to the new truth in his Faust, Part II.30 Nature poetry, which was produced even long after Goethe, had no objective truth. How should it have had, how should there still objectively be nature, when the natural gods are gone? Objective art existed when the things themselves were still poetic and the poet did not give expression to his feeling-experience, but only listened to and reproduced the voice of nature. The death of the natural gods means that the anima, and along with it poetry, emigrated from nature and that now only the human being has a soul. After the death of the gods, nature is, and I say this in view of the beautiful lake before us,31 either only the ghost of itself or, where it is in its new truth, it is the organization of forces, cells, molecules, and particles and thus in its essence technological. “God’s beautiful nature”— this is a contradiction in terms. Beautiful nature is the guileless, uncreated nature of the mythic gods, not the nature of the Christian God. To be sure, there are still nature, art, symbols, but they have no being any more. They exist only as non-realities, mê onta. They belong under the heading of leisure pursuits, subjective feeling experience, antiquities—things of the past in other words, which as atavisms still extend into the present and have a noncommittal life alongside the real life. A rose was a rose, was a rose …. It is no longer a rose. And chickens and pigs are no longer natural animals, in the sense of the real animal that James Hillman last year helped us to appreciate. 32 Rather, they are egg-laying machines and meatproduction apparatuses. This is not wrong and immoral, it is not an abuse, but it is not right and good either, not any more than rain or sunshine are false or right. For nobody made it this way. It is simply the new truth of being, the truth of the fact that the moment when reality becomes the incarnated Logos, the flesh has become technological, even including literal pork, a truth, however, that we have been trying to get around for 2000 years because we do not want it to be true. .

Psychology: Primary Papers towards a Critical Psychology, Collected English Papers, Vol. 1 (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2005), pp. 197-217. 31 The Casa Eranos, in which this lecture was presented, is situated on the shore of Lago Maggiore. 32 J. Hillman, “The Animal Kingdom in the Human Dream,” Eranos 51-1982, pp. 279 - 334 .

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3. THE FABRICATION OF GOD Most of the time the question of the proof of the existence of God is seen as a matter of a disconnected, purely intellectual interest that has nothing whatsoever to do with real piety. However, if one takes into account that the Christian God himself is primarily concerned about his existence, his factual being-there and that he for that reason is dependent on faith, then one cannot simply brush the efforts to prove God’s existence aside as merely intellectual pursuits and oppose them to piety. Rather, these efforts are precisely a form of genuine piety, even though they do not present themselves as prayer or edifying emotion, but are clothed in the garment of logical arguments. For here, man opens himself to a decisive aspect of the nature of this God. We must not comprehend the proofs of the existence of God from out of an intellectual desire for certainty, but conversely we have to understand this desire for certainty as the expression of the fact that God presses for a real, objective presence, for his “There is …,” for his concrete being. God did not want to remain Logos (mere idea), but to incarnate. We must see through the logical-argumentative character and sense the immense dynamism behind that question of proof of the existence of God, the elementary force that compelled already the people of the Middle Ages to ask it, contrary to their obvious practical needs. This question quite evidently does not have its basis in a human need, for not one of the medieval monks had any doubts concerning the existence of God, neither intellectually, nor in his heart. Medieval man still had an almost mythical relation to God, so that it was precisely the question of the proof of the existence of God through which the new special nature of the Christian, no longer mythic, God fully came home to people. In this question, the Christian God himself makes himself felt; he presses into consciousness. The question has drive character. But of course, the drive that was stirring here, is not sexuality or one of the other “natural” drives, but it is the Logos that wants to become flesh, and because it is the Logos, it first of all makes itself felt in the style of logical argumentation. We must get clear in our minds that the Christian Middle Ages were the age of Scholasticism: the age of the school. The Early Middle Ages, converted from pagan religions to Christianity, had, to be sure,

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taken over the Christian contents, but had absorbed them with a still more or less mythic consciousness, which in no way corresponded to the nature of Christianity. During those early times, Christianity was still a quasi “nature religion” in character, a mythological religion, the only difference being that in its particular content it already dealt with a post-mythological absolute God. And thus it had been the task of the High and Late Middle Ages “to go to school” (schola) in order to conquer for itself, through centuries-long efforts, the basics of the specific spirit of Christianity for the first time. That was the achievement of Scholasticism, especially with the aid of Aristotelianism. Here Christianity was for the first time comprehended as a task and taken over as question, exactly as it corresponded to its post-mythological, no longer naturally self-apparent Logos nature. In all respects and in ever new attempts, Scholasticism questioned the contents of the Christian doctrine in order to acquire a thorough comprehension of it with all its implications, up to such questions, hardly understandable for us any longer, as the one about how many angels can stand on the point of a needle. It is as if Scholasticism acted according to the adage, “What you inherited from your fathers, acquire it in order for it to truly become your own.” Myth, with its natural gods, was sufficient unto itself. Not so Christianity with its supranatural and unnatural creator God. As everything artificial, it required a special acquisition and the strenuous effort of the Notion, simply because it cannot be taken for granted as natural. Through a diligent “working through” penetrating down to every fibre of his being, man had to be ejected from his natural basic position in and toward the world into the unnatural one, until the latter would have become his second nature. Because we have long had our firm place in this second “nature” and it therefore has become such that it is simply taken for granted, we can hardly still understand what degree of strenuous effort and unending repetitions was needed during the Middle Ages to extricate human existence from out of its imaginal constitution and to instill the Christian stance into man in such a way that it would be truly his own. To be sure, in accordance with the word “Scholasticism” this acquisition occurred in a “schoolboyish” style. One still clung to the dogma and the wording of the doctrine and had to cover oneself by always quoting Biblical passages and referring to ancient authorities.

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What makes the pupil a pupil is that he does not dare to say anything that is not in the books; he does not venture beyond the literally understood teachings of his teacher, whom he regards as an unreachable authority above himself. The mature, come-of-age mind, by contrast, precisely leaves the literal wording of his teacher behind, but has in return taken over as his own task the living spirit of the real concern that was hidden behind the material explicitly taught; it expresses this concern in its own way and independently develops it forward. The mature mind no longer looks up to the teaching of his teacher. He has it no longer outside and above himself. The concern that gave rise to it lives and seethes in him and pushes him forward, often even into having to contradict his teacher, in such a way, however, that with his contradicting he precisely stays faithful to him in a deeper sense. The conventional view about the Modern Age (Neuzeit)33 with its natural sciences is that it more and more broke away and distanced itself from Christianity. I believe the opposite is the case. With the end of the Middle Ages Western man had, as it were, learned his Christian lesson so that he had mastered and comprehended the deeper living concern at work in Christianity and was now (unconsciously) moved and captivated by it. It was not that he had to make the Christian teachings as the object of his studies his own—this he had done ages ago—but they had meanwhile awakened in him to a life of their own and had thus become the actual subject performing his research. If one identifies Christianity with the pupil-like clinging to the literal wording of the doctrine, then the Modern Age no doubt had deserted Christianity. But if we understand by “Christianity” a specific living concern, a quest on the part of the spirit, a real mystery that can take hold of a culture (in this case: Western humanity) and propel it onwards, then we can say that with the emergence of the natural sciences Christianity had finally come home to itself and learned to stand on its own for the first time. 33 When I speak of modernity in other texts I usually mean the time (philosophically speaking) after the closure of metaphysics, (economically) the time beginning with the Industrial Revolution, in other words, roughly since 1800. But here I mean the period beginning with the Renaissance. In German we can distinguish between the two periods terminologically, as Neuzeit on the one hand and Moderne on the other. But when this paper was written, I still used Neuzeit or “modern age” in an inclusive sense, for everything that came after the Middle Ages up to the present. I had not become aware as yet of the fundamental hiatus separating the two ages. However, this hiatus is not relevant for the present theme.

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When surveying the development of the natural sciences and technology, one is struck by its immense, historically unprecedented dynamism, even unrest. We are wont to class the sciences, because they are rational and use mathematics, with consciousness and the calculating mind. But despite the fact that the world explanation performed by natural sciences is in formal regards rational, the phenomenon of the natural sciences itself is by no means rational. They are irrational to the highest degree, they are drive, possession, passion. I am here not referring to a personal passion on the part of the individual scientist, but to Western humanity’s possession by a powerful question and search that it could not break free from. But this means nothing else but that the natural sciences as a whole are, although unbeknownst to themselves, genuine religio. This assertion creates only difficulties for those who already decided beforehand how a religion must look, instead of conversely allowing themselves to be taught by reality which guises the devotion to the divine can take. We can learn from C. G. Jung that it makes no difference whether one calls a given phenomenon either an addiction, phobia, compulsion, a mere instinct—or whether one calls it God.34 The real phenomenon does not change through the label assigned to it. It remains in either case one’s being driven by a force that one cannot escape. The religious drive that propelled the natural sciences forward with elementary force, thereby recklessly overriding even the human need for a world speaking to the imagination and the heart, this drive is the unconscious urge, taken over from Scholasticism, to prove the existence of God. Not of just any god, but of him whose very essence it is to demand this proof, so that to furnish this proof is the true form of devotion to this God. The concern of Scholasticism and of the natural sciences is identical. Only the form that it takes has changed decisively. It is not the natural scientists who have deserted Christianity. It is the Church that has abandoned the scientists and disowned the lively further-developing and vigorously-instinctually progressing Christian truth. Instead it raised the medieval-scholastic (pupil-like) form of the Christian truth to the rank of the actual truth and froze it in this status. Christianity was supposed to remain pure Logos (dogma, metaphysical doctrine, subjective faith, inner experience) and not have a material 34

487f .

See, e.g., C. G. Jung, CW 13 § 55; Letters 2, February 12, 1959, to Tanner, pp.

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reality. God was supposed to be reserved for the beyond and thus to be defused. By believing it had to burn the early progressive-scientific minds and their books at the stake, the Church itself involuntarily expressed her acknowledgment of the fact that her own living fire of the truth did no longer burn in the Church and theology, but now at the place where the natural sciences are. The lighting of the fire for the progressive minds and their books is not only repression (which it is, too). It is also a sign for her own fire having gone out and for her need to get heat from an alien fuel, a fuel that of course could and should really have been her own. If the latter had been the case, this fuel would not have had to be literally burned at all, but could have been the creative fire of the spirit consuming her adherents themselves from within. As we have seen, the natural sciences had taken over the inherited Christian concern. Only the form that this concern took had become a different one over against Scholasticism. Science no longer searches, pupil-like and literally, for the proof of the existence of God, because it has comprehended that a literal understanding precisely fails to achieve the task. For if the proof is furnished only as a logical (intellectual) one, it remains itself still a matter of thought and does not get to fleshly reality. The Logos would remain to be only Logos (noetic) and as such could of course possibly also be nothing but a figment of the imagination. Natural science had, as it were, comprehended (without however having a consciousness of this, because it had been pushed into the corner of irreligion) that there was only one single possible way of proving the existence of God. An absolute God, a God, in other words, who was no longer to be taken for granted because he was apparent from nature, but, as an extramundane one, was so to speak imposed from above, can only be proven by being manufactured. The Logos becomes flesh only through its fabrication, just as the idea of a house becomes only real if I build this house. The unconscious, but in fact accomplished task of science and technology therefore had been the building or fabrication or simulation of God in actual reality, as the continued work upon his incarnation. This is the empirical proof of the existence of God through his produced physical existence. God had to become positivistically demonstrable. The extent to which the natural

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sciences and technology have mastered this task I want to demonstrate at least sketchily by means of a few examples in the next section. But first it is necessary to clear a few obstacles out of the way. If God has been manufactured, so we might perhaps argue, then he has, to be sure, been empirically proven, but then he is ipso facto no longer a God. Because a manufactured god is not a god, let alone a transcendent, other-worldly God, a creator of the world. He would under these circumstances be himself a creature. And furthermore, how could there still be a faith that does not see and yet believes (cf. John 20:29)? Concerning the first point we must realize that the manufacturing of gods is actually nothing unusual. Gods were always fabricated in art, as statues, masks, etc., just as in general, according to C. G. Jung, “every spiritual truth is gradually reified and turns into a substance or tool in the hand of man.”35 Why should therefore, for example, an atom bomb not be a just as legitimate modern equivalent for an archaic statue of a god, all the more so since in our case we are dealing with a God whose nature it is to realize himself, to become, as Logos, flesh? The difference is only that the legitimate way of manufacturing the natural gods is art, the presentation in an image, an image that releases and opens itself into a whole “world.” In the image, the God is present only as an absent one, that is to say he is “buried.” But precisely this is what makes his ontological nature (his godship) manifest. Under the conditions of technology, fabrication (in contrast to presentation) means that the God, or his attributes, must be given a literal (physical) existence as positive fact: simulation. In the full visibility and ontic (i.e., positive-factual) givenness of the divine predicates in the guise of things entrenching themselves within themselves, the ontological divinity or godship of these predicates is precisely concealed. The technical things make a completely ungodlike and soulless impression.36 35

CW 13 § 302, trans. modified. I distinguish in this paper between the “ontological” and the “ontic.” As indicated, the “ontic” is synonymous with the positive-factual or the empirical or also the literal, referring to demonstrable realities, whereas the term “ontological” refers to the Being or the modes of Being that realities may be in. One and the same entity can be one thing in ontic regards and a very different thing in ontological respects. An example I often use is nature. Ontically nature is very much alive if one considers the devastation that is caused, e.g., by tsunamis and tornados. But ontologically, nature has been dead for a long time inasmuch as it has ceased to be the dwelling place of gods and nature spirits and, as far as its real logical status in our world-relation is concerned, has been reduced to dead objects, mere raw material for human production. From the point of view of my later writings I could say that the ontological refers to what I later call the logic or soul 36

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It is true, the fabricated God must remain a transcendent God. The question is only how to understand “transcendent,” “absolute,” “extramundane,” “not visible with the eyes (non-sensual),” and “creator.” If transcendent, absolute and supernatural would indicate that God has nothing whatsoever to do with empirical reality, then he would be of no concern to us and we could not have any knowledge of him. Such a notion would be totally nonsensical. The transcendent God, too, must as a matter of course be immanent to the world, if God is not supposed to be a naught, of absolutely no relevance for us. The task therefore is to think transcendence not literally and metaphysically, but as one quality within reality, an ontological quality, another “style” of the real. In other words, we have to conceive of an empirical absolute, an immanent transcendence, an intramundane extramundane or supernatural, a sensibly given non-sensible and a created world resulting from uncreated nature. All this holds true for technological reality. As something artificial, unnatural, man-made within the natural world it is what has left the natural world and transcends it. It is that which in the course of scientific and technological progress more and more “absolutizes” itself, i.e., which cuts itself loose from the naturally given and even pushes beyond itself, permanently overtaking itself. It is never finished. This is transcendence as an ontological quality of real things. And if physics teaches us that a piece of wood, in total contrast to it natural-sensible appearance, is in actuality empty space interspersed with a few tiny particles in comparatively cosmic distance from each other, then this is the empirical non-sensible, and the knowledge of the sciences is realized faith, faith that does not see and yet believes. In style and spirit, the natural sciences are sheer “supernaturalism.”

4. THE INFLATION OF THE THINGS Paul Tillich’s well-known definition of religion is: our ultimate concern. This definition is not implausible, but has two disadvantages. First of all, it still (covertly) posits, in a metaphysical manner, something Absolute, even if it does not hypostasize it as the Absolute, but transposes it, as “our unconditional and total involvement,” into .

of the realities in question, in contrast to their empirical-factual aspects. This distinction is similar to the “psychological difference,” the difference between man and soul, between, e.g., literal behavior and the inner logic or psychological (soul) meaning of this behavior.

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the human subject. Secondly, it understands religion from the position of man and makes God (as the symbol of the absolute) circle around man: “our concern,” our involvement in the “wholeness of our being.”37 I therefore prefer other expressions, for example C. G. Jung’s concept of the “symbolic life.”38 Jung understands by this a life in which we, beyond our banal, ordinary, or irrational existence, partake in the ritual of life and rather than satisfying our subjective needs and desires, respond to an objective being-needed. Needed for what? Here one could, following Hegel’s wording (which however is already committed to the Christian view), say: for the representation of the Absolute, for the purpose that the Eternal may have a real existence in the human world. To be sure, the “Absolute” is no concept for Jung, not a concept for the psychologist. But there is for him, in addition to personal life, also an objective-psychic “spiritual life” which makes the demand on us to be allowed to partake in our life and that engages us for the purpose that it may be. In this sense the symbolic life, although it cannot be without our activities, is nevertheless actually by no means our life, but an autonomous life of the mind, that needs and uses us, much like the drama uses the actor, for its own needs, whereas what is our “interest,” our concern, is irrelevant for it. Jung mentions the example of the Pueblo Indians who saw in the sun their Father and had the obligation to help him, their Father, to move across the sky—not for their own personal practical gain, but for the purpose that the sun might be. As one can see, this is through and through a matter-of-fact, ontological concept—in sharpest contrast to any definition of religion that circles around subjective emotional experience. If Jung says about our present age: “there is no symbolic existence in which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling my role, my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life,”39 then everything here revolves around it, the divine drama of life itself, for which man has been put into service. Of the 37

Paul Tillich, Systematische Theologie, Vol. I (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk,

1956), pp. 19-22. Tillich states, of course, that it was a question of “the object of ‘infinite

interest’ (Kierkegaard), that makes us to its object if we try to turn it into our object” (p. 19). But even this wording only confirms that from which it wants to move away: the subjectivity of the ego as the decisive factor. It does not make any difference if the one is called the object of the other or vice versa: the ego-centeredness is inherent in the perspective of the here prevailing relation to an ego (“involvement,” “interest,” object). 38 C. G. Jung, “The Symbolic Life,” CW 18, pp. 267-290 (§ 608-96).

39 CW 18 § 628 .

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primitives of Australia, Jung stated that they sacrifice two thirds of their disposable time to the symbolic life of the ancestors. And how enormous the role must have been that the symbolic life played for example among the Egyptians can be gauged from a single glance at the funerary worlds they left behind. The life of the Egyptians must to a large extent have been in the service of the purpose that the world of the dead be, that it may receive a real existence. There is today no symbolic life in this sense any more. Or is there perhaps one after all? Is it not possible that we, too, sacrifice two thirds of our disposable time to the symbolic life, with the only difference that we do not acknowledge it as such because we think that a symbolic life would have to be similar in content to that which we find among the Australian Aborigines, the ancient Egyptians, or in the Middle Ages? Millions of people are sitting night after night for hours in front of their television sets. We think, and they themselves probably think so too, that they do this for their pleasure. But as correct as this is in a superficial sense, in a deeper sense it is nevertheless only an egoic, subjectivist cover explanation that serves to camouflage the objective process. Both the existence of the phenomenon called television in general and the extent of the daily practiced cult of watching television do not have their origin and cause in our natural-human desires, which can be seen quite simply from the fact that such inventions first met with rejection and deprecation. Man’s natural desire is by no means directed towards entertainment. Around the year 1700, there were no daily newspapers, no magazines, no cinemas, etc., and the only books that were to be found in an ordinary household were the Bible, a hymnal, and at best also a book of country lore. These books were read again and again. From our point of view an unending monotony. And the time after the day’s labor was not called Freizeit (spare time), but Feierabend, a word that evokes the notion of the solemnity of the evening. A fundamental difference. And this is how it had been one way or another from time immemorial. It in turn required an ingenious technology pursued with an immense energy, namely advertising, in order to “arouse” (i.e., create) in people the desire for television and all sorts of other new inventions. No, the fact that television exists today does not come from out of man. Behind it, there is an objective necessity, a compulsion to

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produce and spread it. It does not serve the purpose of our entertainment, but we serve it. What is television in its objective essence? It is show, show as theatrum mundi, the mixed bag of an attempted assassination of the Pope, a new world record, an earthquake catastrophe, a western movie, an Oscar award ceremony, a quiz program, and a summit meeting. It is the theater of life with its ups and downs, with its spectacular events and its banality. It is “Formation, transformation, / Eternal Mind’s eternal recreation.” We are used for the purpose of playing in this drama (the divine drama of the eternal Mind’s eternal recreation) the ritual role of the eternal Mind, that is, of the Christian God. Man as consumer is needed and used so that the position of the absolute God as the indifferent spectator can be in fact filled, in other words, so that God can be visibly represented as incarnated. Television must exist so that the Divina Comedia is not merely idea and poetic work, but has a real existence in the flesh. Television has so little to do with personal pleasure or gain that it is not uncommon that it remains turned on even when nobody watches it. Its sole, secret meaning is apparently that the show be. We have a low opinion of advertising and even ridicule it. But in this way we misjudge its serious nature. Just as mythic poetry was the joyful praise of uncreated nature and its many gods, so advertising, as the ‘singing the praise’ of commercial products, is—in its deepest meaning—the hymnic praise of production: of the creation and the one Creator God. If we look at the computer only from the point of view of the saving of labor we cannot either explain the driving force behind this invention and its immense dynamic further development. The motivation behind the computer is, first, the powerful vision of making God as the noêsis noêseôs, the thought thinking itself, real and true in the flesh, that is, as a thinking that runs completely automatically and contained within itself and is completely self-sufficient. It has no referent outside of itself, no object, without which the thinking of finite man cannot possibly be. And secondly it is the vision of the real fabrication of God as the intuitus originarius. Our finite thinking is discursive. We can only think one thought after another, whereas God’s thinking can encompass and comprehend the whole at once. This is what the computer is supposed to simulate, as well as it is possible under the conditions of temporality. The driving force behind the computer is furthermore the vision of

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the real fabrication of God as the All-Knowing. Because the goal is the total storage of all information. The point is not our omniscience— we rather become still more ignorant through computer technology— but simply that omniscience be. The technology of telecommunication and the computer, on the one hand, cars and airplanes on the other hand have the purpose of simulating the overcoming of the limits of space and time. In our satellites and with space travel, God’s transcendent, supernatural standpoint or the supernatural as such obtains its empirical existence. And every day when television presents to us the new satellite weather map, we celebrate this supernatural standpoint. Spy planes that can recognize items as little as a golf ball on the earth from the height of many miles, are the real fabrication, under the conditions of empirical life, of the all-seeing eye of God. The whole reconnaissance technology and the whole interest in reconnaissance is driven by the necessity to supply the All-Seeing and Inescapable One (e.g., Psalm 139)40 with a real existence. What is demanded of Christian humanity is to totally record that which is, the real fabrication of an overall view—not for a practical human gain, but for the sake of blessedness. And not only because of new machine-readable identity cards and passports and through a census do we turn into mere numbers. We are, have already been, numbers for a long time; more than that, the very hairs of our head are all numbered.41 The development leading to the systematic breeding of new animal and plant species and to the manipulation of genes arises from the necessity to realize God as the Creator. Natural animals are uncreated beings produced by nature and as such represent a constant living “counterevidence” against the idea of the Creation. The Being of living organisms, too, must be given the constitution of being technological, of being made. But above all it is the atom bomb 42 that serves the purpose of guaranteeing a real presence to the absolute Lord over the world. There 40 “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there …”—Ps. 139:7f. 41 Matt. 10:30; Luke 12:7. 42 W. Giegerich, “Wildnis und Geborgenheit,” in Analytische Psychologie 14 (1983): 108-125, especially 117 ff.; “Saving the Nuclear Bomb,” in Facing Apocalypse, ed. V. Andrews, R. Bosnak, and K. W. Goodwin (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1987), pp. 96-108, now Chapter 1 in the present volume.

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had to be something that really and totally had the existence of the world in its grip. Otherwise, the Absolute would have remained a mere idea and not have become flesh. These few examples must suffice here. They indicate that technology has the task of literally (physically) manufacturing the predicates of God in actual reality. These predicates were no longer supposed to be nomina, a flatus vocis, but realia. In my opinion it would be misguided to seek in each individual technical invention a different god. A manifold of different divine figures is to be found in the things of nature. But technology as a whole is the work on the edifice of the one absolute God, the God of technology, as we have seen. This is what distinguishes the no longer natural God: that he has to be a single one and for that reason a total, all-embracing God. In order to be truly the Creator, he must subdue everything that manifests of its own accord under his domination. As long as there still are natural things, things that can be taken for granted as self-apparent, he has not yet worked himself up to his full being. It is inherent in his nature that he must permeate and conquer, extensively as well as intensively, one people, one culture, one realm of reality after the other. In his lack of being (his un-natural nature) lies his power (his dynamic force: his pressing for his realization). The natural, the mythic is (even as a world of concrete physical things) guileless and tender, because it is by nature instinctual image; and this is also why it is defenseless against massive seizure by the artificial. The innocence of simple being has no weapons; that it does not have any weapons and does not want anything from anything outside of itself, this precisely constitutes its nature. It is only the artificial that has an “object” vis-à-vis and outside itself, that always already finds the world as given to it, so that its very character consists in having to assert itself against the natural that it finds by overcoming it. And technological civilization is capable of this overcoming because for it the things have become positive-fleshly. Each thing is here the contraction of Heaven and Earth in one point and carries the concentrated force of a collapsed world in itself. Not only what the artificial does and brings about, but already its ontological nature, its very being, is force and doing violence. The explanation of technology from the hubris of man seems to me to miss the facts. It is likely to be an assertion serving a particular purpose, namely the purpose of camouflaging the “symbolic life” that

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in fact drives and steers us, but obviously must not become conscious. Technology is our burden, an obligation demanded of us, whether we want it or not. It is our fate, which is why it is reasonable to avoid any moralistic value judgment. The true hubris of consciousness seems to me to be precisely this personalistic-moralistic interpretation of technology, because it makes something out as the achievement of man that is certainly not his doing. Fundamentally other categories must be employed to grasp this amazing, outrageous, incredible phenomenon that we call technology. The more purely it unfolds its true nature, the more baffled and helpless we get towards it. When we have a good look at the objective behavior of 20th century man, then the opposite of hubris stands out, an exceptional modesty, even shame (aidôs). We no longer afford the luxury of kings so that they would represent for us our self in its highest form. We do no longer afford servants, who would give us the feeling of being superior. We identify with the socially weak and oppressed; it is therefore in them that we have our self, our identity. We feel compelled to present ourselves in a deliberately casual, if not sloppy, way and to dress in tennis shoes, blue jeans, and T-shirts. We like best to have our picture taken in the form of a snapshot and avoid poses and ostentation. It is impossible for us to use pompous language, and the sublime we can, if at all, only tolerate in one of three forms: either in the style of parody, satire, persiflage, irony; or in the wrapping of a scientific report about past forms of life; or in the form of a reductive unmasking (which, however, is also just one possible style of presenting the sublime). Does all this not precisely betray an unconscious knowledge on the part of modern man about the special danger of inflation today, because God is so uncannily close and real in technology as never before, namely in the flesh? Does it not show an urge to make himself small? An awe of man (although hidden from himself and denied) before the sacred, which makes him cover up his face—in his own way? No, it is not man who is inflated, but the technical things. Not only is more and more Logos, are more and more predicates of God stuffed into them; they also receive ever more weight of their own and ever more autonomy. The things are becoming the fascinosum—the camera, the car, the stereo system. The soul has been invested into them. From here the often completely senseless buying compulsion and consumption of commodities can be understood: it is an act of

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unacknowledged devotion. Already Marx spoke of the “fetishism of commodities,” albeit with almost the opposite intent from mine, namely an unmasking and ironic one. Nevertheless, the phenomenon had been seen and adequately named by him. The throwing away of things in our throw-away society is another aspect of the situation under discussion. It is as if the things only wanted to be bought by us (so that we pay our tribute to them), but did not want to be permanently available for our consumption and use. They become worthless, that is to say, they withdraw themselves and their value from us and remain autonomous. The same is the case with tourist attractions. Each tourist feels impelled to photograph for the millionth time this castle or that Greek temple. The things demand by themselves to have their picture taken again and again, in order that in this way respectful deference is shown to them. The photos thereafter usually gather dust in some drawer. They are not really for us, for our enjoyment. A similar case in point is the electric candles on Christmas trees. They are lit and twinkle “automatically” and all by themselves, no matter if someone is present and sees them or not. Music, too, ceases to be human music-making and is being somatized in the form of the independently existing, reified records. And even the music engraved into its grooves is one that has never been played by real people, but is a sophisticated artificial product of sound engineers. School children no longer have to calculate in their heads; the process of calculation takes place, literally “objectively,” in their pocket calculator. The life of the mind moves out of the human world and settles in the world of things. The things become the masters and man slowly becomes of secondary importance, turning into the Bediener (servant, operator) of the apparatuses (or under certain circumstances even to their slaves or victims). The place where the action is, the place where the essential decisions happen has passed from man (reason, way of thinking, morality, instinct) to technology. Most blatantly this becomes visible in the atom bomb, where the decision about its actual use is more and more taken out of the hands of man and is taken over by the automatic mechanism of computers, in other words, machines. The time window for subjective-human decision-making is being reduced to a few minutes or even seconds. The world of things obtains spontaneity, numinous-irrational power and a dynamism of its own.

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In sharp contrast to the illusion of consciousness that still today believes in humanitarianism, freedom, the individual, and subjective experience, the factual development moves ever more into the direction of a sober, objective existence governed by necessities. We speak derogatively of Sachzwänge, factual constraints. However, this conflict between consciousness and what is really happening is something that already belongs to the next chapter.

5. DIVESTITURE C. G. Jung reports that during his expedition in Kenya they once had taken a local black African along in their jeep who had never before sat in a car. After a while, the African asked that the car be halted and he then laid down on the ground. When asked what he was doing, he responded that he was waiting for his soul, which due to the fast ride had not been able to follow.43 We confound the situation of this African with ours. We still believe that it is we who, through the rational and technological development of our civilization, have rushed on ahead of the soul and that therefore the soul was still in that which was and lies behind us: in nature, in instinctual life and sexuality, in our body, in the earth, in the myths, or in traditional religion. But our soul has long emigrated from all that. It is she who is driving off at breakneck speed in the jeep, she who is at the helm of technological progress, whereas we have gotten out of the jeep and are waiting on the ground for the soul to finally catch up with us from the very point back there from which it set off moving ahead of us long ago. Or, strictly speaking, we have not gotten out because there is no getting out of the jeep of history. We are merely intellectual and psychological escapists and thus are and have been riding, now already for centuries, with our backs to the direction of travel. And then we complain about being alienated! Asked if he thought that God is dead, Jung answered, not God, not the gods are dead, but we are merely removed from the place of such happenings.44 We are indeed removed. It is all there, but we don’t 43

See, e.g., C. G. Jung, Letters 2, February 11, 1961, to Roger Lass, p. 622. This is a summary of passages from three letters: Letters 2, September 14, 1960, to Miguel Serrano, p. 594; November 30, 1960, to von Koenig-Flachsfeld, p. 612; and 10 March 1961, to John A. Sanford, p. 630. 44

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see it. The things conceal and withhold their meaning from us; the soul is truly buried in them for us. What Jung, however, did not say with the same clearness is that the place of such happenings has become a different one,45 new wine in truly new bottles, and that our removal consists in our having stayed put at the old, meanwhile deserted and empty place. Nature, myth, the ancient gods are truly dead. And it is not prohibited, but impossible to awaken ones who have died.46 We have had ample time— 2000 years—to get used to the notion that nature is that which is over, or actually 3000 years, if one keeps in mind that already for Homer the gods were a thing of the past.47 We only believe that we are still living on the earth. In truth, our anima has already for some time been orbiting around the earth on our satellites out there, in empty, icy outer space. Every satellite weather map on television evidently demonstrates to us that at bottom we look down on our earth from above and outside. Our psyche has long left behind the standpoint earth. We simply do no longer look up from the earth to Heaven. But we obdurate our hearts against this truth; we deny our soul and our real religion—in favor of vain convictions that require preaching or demonstrations on the streets or force of arms to get a semblance of power, or that as subjective feeling experiences or clever theories have only the status of a private hobby. 45

Jung knew well enough about the “metamorphosis of the gods” (see, e.g., CW

10 § 585, Letters 2, May 2, 1955, to Walter Robert Corti, p. 250), but he saw it mostly

in the distant past, for example in antiquity in the “decay of Olympus and the transformation of the gods into philosophical and theology ideas” (Letters 2, November 20, 1956, to Père Bruno de Jésus-Marie, p. 337). The metamorphosis of the gods from out of these ideas into machines and technological objects and structures he for the most part did not take note of. See, however, his essay “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies” (CW 10, pp. 307-433). The following passage, too, is quite plain (Letters 2, April 23, 1949, to Christian Stamm, p. xlvi): “Nowadays animals, dragons, and other living creatures are readily replaced in dreams by railways, locomotives, motorcycles, aeroplanes, and suchlike artificial products (just as the starry sky in the southern hemisphere, discovered relatively late by European navigators, contains many nautical images). 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, clattering monsters that cause infinitely more damage to life and limb than bears and wolves ever did in the past.” Animals have lost their numinosity! This means nothing else but: nature is dead. Numinosity (i.e., the absolute reality character) has gone over to technology. 46 Hölderlin, “Germanien” verse 15 f.: “… ich fürcht’ es, tödtlich ists, / Und kaum erlaubt, Gestorbene zu wecken” (… I fear it, it is deadly and hardly permitted to awaken ones who have died), op. cit., p. 149. 47 This has been pointed out most decisively by Walter Bröcker, Theologie der Ilias, (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1975).

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Seen from the one side, our deep love of nature and our interest in and feeling for the cultural treasures of the past as well as for myths and symbols are valuable human impulses. But from another side, they are sentimental nature romanticism and myth nostalgia lulling us into a dangerous sleep. They hold us in the delusion that what was formerly true is an eternal truth, that Mother Earth is indestructible, the old values unalterable. But the air and the oceans will not become clean again, and the tropical rain forest, once destroyed, will not grow again. More than that, independently of this ontic destruction, nature is, and has been for a long time, destroyed in its ontological essence. There are a number of fundamental real changes that have radically altered man’s stance to the world, and factually so, that is to say, no matter what his subjective attitude may be and whether he himself is aware of it or not: these are first the literal, physical possibility to leave the earth and to fly to the moon, secondly the possibility to literally, physically annihilate life on earth, indeed perhaps the entire globe. With this having become possible for and available to us, we have irrevocably fallen out of nature and now are psychologically standing outside and above it. We have de facto, whether we want it or not, a “higher” standpoint and are “superordinate” to it. We have encompassed the whole globe with our networks and in this way pocketed it, as it were (road network, electricity grid, installation of cables for telecommunications, etc.). This is our objective-psychic reality, our ontological situation. Unless we fool ourselves and walk into the trap of our sentimental feelings, there cannot any longer be a real in-ness in an intact world (nature, myth, faith), but only the remembrance of what is long gone. Our consciousness, however, clings obstinately to the medieval soul condition against the truth of the age; we are concerned with our selfrealization (the salvation of our individual soul), the truly humanitarian society (Christian love of the neighbor), an intact nature (God’s world), the meaning of life (the true faith), and our moral responsibility (our innocence of mind, purity from sins, our good conscience). Nowadays billions are invested in industrialization, in armaments, in the development of computers, in outer space research, etc.; but all this is only done, so we try to persuade ourselves, by repressive rulers, exploitative captains of industry, and deluded technocrats full of hubris. It is completely neurotic. The right hand does not want to know what

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the left hand is doing. They are our captains of industry, our dictators and technocrats, who in our place, so that our ego-consciousness can feel innocent, perform the exploitation, repression, and hubris. They carry our shadow for us, and this is why we belong to them, precisely to them whom we so much despise. There is a sure sign for the true locus of the soul: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matt. 6:21). The place where our money flows, there the soul has its place, not our private, non­ committal psyche, but the real soul, the collective unconscious in Jung’s sense, today’s realm of archetypal images. The rationalistic character of technology must not deceive us. It is not the opposite of instinct and unconscious psyche, but another style or mode of the unconscious. It is not that our ego-consciousness has become rationalistic—it is precisely idealistic, nostalgic, sentimental. Rather, our psychic instinctual life has changed its language and medium, away from the mythic to rationalism. The objective psychic, this is today technology (to be understood as a mode of being). It is our nature, our new earth, our drive, our body, our spiritual, symbolic life.48 It is the place where the real action is. Here a real wind is blowing, a powerful pneuma of unparalleled dynamism. Technological reality is not in the wrong toward us, no, our consciousness conversely owes something to it: Our conscious thought and feeling since the Middle Ages withheld psychology and theology from it. And thereby they withheld the acknowledgment from it that it is our locus of “soul-making,” our form of the alchemical opus and our place of theophany. This is what caused technology to be split off. It lost the connection to consciousness, to the conscious development, and consciousness lost the connection to what was actually going on in the depth. Technology was totally banished into the unconscious, and to such an extent that we do not even have an inkling that it is our true unconscious; and the scientists were condemned into the mindless narrowness of a split-off experts’ mentality. They had no chance to know about what dimensions their work has: that they are in truth the advocates and trustees of incarnation and that it was they (together with captains of industry 48 “Technology is cursed by our mechanical idea of it. It is the great repressed, the unconscious. … Technical things … are concrete images of animation, locations of the hylic anima …” (James Hillman, “The Imagination of Air and the Collapse of Alchemy,” in Eranos 50–1981, p. 327). This whole essay is of fundamental importance for our topic.

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and the advertising experts) to whom the administration of the Christian truth had passed. Because the title “religion” or “theology” was already occupied by the frozen dogmatics or by the inner feeling experience, they therefore represented for the scientists, too, the authoritative notion of theology and religion, so that the religious dimension of their own work had to escape their notice. Our ego-consciousness denies the natural sciences and technology their being psychological and theological and then is amazed that they are soulless and godless. Conversely, it awards the titles “religious,” “in close touch with nature,” “concerned about meaning” to the backwards orientation—whereas the latter is after all the deliberate break with religion, nature, and the meaning49 of real life. So we are twice removed: once from myth and nature, because the objective psyche has left them and has settled in technology, and secondly from technology as our present-day nature and mythology, because we cling to and are stuck in nature. Mythic man lived without a pluralism of opinions by virtue of the authority that his sensual-mythic instinctual nature possessed. How was he capable of living this way? It was made possible by the fact that he acknowledged his real deeds and not his opinions and wishes as the actual truth about himself and about Being. For us, too, there would not have to be a pluralism of opinions and no opining at all—if we allowed ourselves to be given by our instinctual nature, by our real work (technical development) the ways we have to think about that which is the true, and if we saw in our actual direction of travel the real sense and meaning of life, the only meaning that deserves the predicate “meaning of life.” Instead, we insist that our familiar thinking and wishing be allowed to prescribe to psychic reality how and where it ought to be. The big question is: Does in such a conflict between an idea of religion, nature, and instinctive soul that is familiar to us, on the one hand, and the current reality of religion, nature, soul on the other hand, does in such a conflict the truth lie with the idea or with reality? Must we say: “All the worse for reality!”— or: “All the worse for our idea!”, because it has shown to be null and void? However, the very conflict between consciousness and reality is itself essentially part of Christian Incarnation. The latter is the 49 “Meaning” in German is Sinn, and Sinn (“sense”) originally meant direction. So the meaning of life could also mean the real direction in which life is moving.

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divestiture or surrender, the kenôsis (Phil. 2:7, “emptying”), through which the divine Logos lowered himself, taking on the humble position of a slave. This is how it appears from within the Christian myth. If, however, we reflect on the happening of the Christian myth as a unit and what its effects were, the divestiture is to be comprehended in a somewhat more complex way, namely, first, as God’s stepping out of and thus splitting off his natural-mythic form of being and, simultaneously with that splitting off, secondly as the splitting up of the divine itself into two: into the pre-existent Logos and the flesh, the exalted triumphant victor and the humble form of a slave. This splitting up continues in the opposition of saeculum and civitas dei, of Sunday and work-day, of leisure time and labor. Because the Christian truth is split in itself, there are also two modes how the Incarnation itself can be seen, from the Sunday or Logos point of view, on the one hand, and from the work-a-day or the flesh point of view, on the other. The Sunday truth about the Incarnation, however, on its part has not yet fully humbled itself to its own slave form, that is, to the work­ day truth. The Sunday truth is the religious truth of the Middle Ages and of present-day Churches as well. Its structure is ambivalent. It has clearly drawn a dividing line between myth and itself as no-longer­ mythic; it maintains, however, over against the natural sciences, the position of the former myth. This in-between position is that of “meta­ physics.” Incarnation here means that a (somehow metaphysically imagined) God has become flesh in the historical human Jesus. One immediately sees that this is not a humbling, but the rise from nature to Logos, in other words, only the first half of the Christian truth. Because previously, the divine resided in tree and mountain, bull and eagle, sea and sun. If the anima emigrated from there, from pre-logical nature, and now man, the “rational animal,” the zôon logon echôn, turned into the singular seat of the soul, then this mythical happening means the first-time establishment of that Logos for whom the true humbling to the form of a slave and the acquisition of a bodily reality appropriate to it (namely as “flesh”) is still in store. Thus, it was consistent that gradually the preliminary or improper truth of Christianity (the truth of ego-consciousness, the Sunday truth) was superseded by its actual truth, the objective-psychic work-day truth, whereby technological reality turned into the seat of the soul.

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From the point of view of the Sunday religious truth, religion means: faith in the historical Jesus as the Christ and as “my personal” savior. Here everything revolves around man as person, his interior, his moral attitude, his faith. Through the Incarnation understood in this way, the idea of “the human” becomes psychologically the topmost value. Thereby our humanism and humanitarianism receives its mythic backing, as does at the same time the introspective inwardness and the individualism of modernity, in short, the entire hubris of consciousness that is based on an inflation through the incarnated Logos misunderstood as literal man. When “man” is the authoritative shape of God, then the truth about Being receives the form of the mental and of what corresponds to human reason: concept, doctrine, theory, ideology, metaphysics. The thinking and experiencing of the Christian West dwells within the Sunday truth and from this height looks contemptuously down upon the work-day truth, a truth, which, however, determines what is done and the real process. We afford the luxury of freedom of thought, that is in the last analysis, the freedom of giving over our worldview and religion to one’s subjective and arbitrary choice, because our thinking no longer feels bound and obliged by our work-day and its ritual reality (religio in the sense of religare). We act as if everything depended on our thinking, whereas the only thing that really counts is what our real behavior thinks. Our consciousness is no longer willing to be taught by factual deeds (mechanization, armament, industrialization, etc.) about what it must take for its truth and how it must think, but from a preconceived idea about the true and the good denies our factual action as our having gone off on the wrong track, and thus as an untruth. We lead a double-track life. We spend immense sums for “culture” (theater, museums, restorations, concerts, antiquities). And at no time before ours was it possible, as it is today, for such a broad public to see ad libitum the works of art and culture of millennia in the original or in true-color reproductions and to participate in the immensely rich treasures of knowledge about religions, symbols, and rituals. But all this passes through us, to say it with the words of Lichtenberg, “like the magnetic matter goes through gold, namely without giving us a direction” and changing our reality. All this obviously has its place in the compartment of “leisure time,” which as “free,” disconnected time

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runs in a noncommittal way parallel to the compartment “work-time” or “real world.” The whole striving for freedom of modernity in its manifold political, social, intellectual, and individual-psychological forms is also driven forward by the need to convert human existence into the ab-soluteness and abstractness of “Sunday” (the decision-free realm of ego-consciousness). Behind the political idea of freedom, too, there is in the last analysis the metaphysical urge for freedom from the real, from the earth and its weight. It is urgent for us to know and acknowledge that “man” (humanism), freedom, the individual, and our interiority are the untruth of the West. We are not Indians who in fact find their truth in their Self (Atman) and for whom it is a perfectly legitimate striving to attempt to rise above matter and material reality. What is India’s truth is for the West a settlement in the lie—neurosis. The Western truth is the opposite of the Indian one: it is Incarnation, the movement into external reality as the manifestation of the objective psyche. The culture of the Occident as a whole precisely did not produce convincing individual inner truths, but its major movement is the powerful shift to ever larger collective, objectively real, autonomous, and anonymous structures: physics, technology, industry, multinational concerns, commodities and consumption and advertising, bureaucracy, statistics. This is the direction of Western libido, and there is our truth, our meaning, our anima. But to what degree do we not, for example, feel superior to the phenomenon of advertising, although it is one of the pillars of our economic existence and we all contribute to its funding. We ridicule advertising slogans as if they were nothing and nonsense. But the institution of advertising as a whole simply expresses quite innocently what is, the true being of the things today. It is not that advertising deceives us (by and large), but we deceive ourselves by conceitedly looking down on it, which is, after all, our reality. When a cigarette commercial speaking of the “taste of freedom and adventure” is effective and “works,” so that it becomes noticeable in the sales figures, then this shows that the cigarette in truth is the taste of freedom and adventure and we are in the wrong when we think that it is merely a rolled up piece of paper filled with tobacco and that the slogan only serves the purpose of manipulation. By thinking so we deny our psychic reality.

Fig. 2. The historical movement of the anima and the metamorphosis of the Gods “Man” is apparently only a detour, an in-between station between the two real forms of the divine (ANIMAL and MACHINE): “Middle Ages” (which, however, in the sense here employed had already announced its coming in the human shape of the Greek gods and in the gradual substitution of the gods through philosophical concepts). “Man,” “the human,” had been the “means” or the fulcrum through which Being could be lifted from the one side (nature) to the other side (technology), but which on its own part was not an authentic form. Jung saw clearly (GW 12 § 41, my trans.) that the purpose of Christianity was “the lifting [of existence] out of the embeddedness in nature” and that the separation or redemption from the embeddedness in nature could succeed only “through a connection with the historical figure of the Redeemer.” Through the idea of the historical Redeemer “man,” (the human) was raised to the status of a “metaphysical” principle and inaugurated as the fulcrum. That “man” as this “metaphysical” pivot nevertheless remains inauthentic and enthroned only for the time of the obfuscated “Middle” Ages that are now coming to a close is not merely a contingency, but follows from the essence of the “human”: Only the ANIMAL and the MACHINE are capable of giving an authentic expression to the autonomous, fundamentally different reality of the gods, whereas with the human shape the divine is far too much brought into line with the human subject and thus becomes subjectivized and derealized as a mere matter of faith. What is lacking is the expression of the objective vis-à-vis.

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By holding on to humanism and introspective interiority the divestiture is literally realized as self-alienation alias neurosis. Incarnation is two different things. The Word’s becoming flesh on the one hand apparently posits the Wörtlichnehmen (literalizing) of the Logos in the sense of “Christian faith,” of free, disconnected thinking and leisure time. For it is after all the Word, the Logos, that is supposed to become real (flesh). But on the other hand, Incarnation at the same time demands the sublation of the Word through the Logos’s complete going under in(to) the flesh. For Incarnation has precisely also the meaning of the Logos becoming flesh. However, the Logos refuses to go completely under into its form of a slave; it rather wants to maintain itself, in addition to and above the latter, as literal Logos in the height and the light of our free believing and opining. It wants to remain identified with the literal empirical human being (the ego) and for this reason, by way of an underpinning of the ego, seeks to hold on to the metaphysical God outside and above the real as a whole. This, however, has the effect of getting human existence into the condition of inner conflict or dissociation. Man now has two identities at once, but in such a way that the one does not know of the other (see Fig. 2). He is totally a free lord over all things and subject to nobody (“Sunday,” freedom of thought, leisure time, free citizen) and totally a dutiful servant of all things and subject to everyone50 (assembly-line worker, manipulated, exploited, threatened by factual constraints and nuclear armament, oppressed by military dictatorships). The more freedom the Logos wants to achieve, the more oppressed must the fleshly form of a slave become. As long as this duplicity remains in effect, Christianity will remain fundamentally unredeemed. And yet, the divestiture, if it were followed through all the way, would in itself be its own salvation. The Incarnation finds it fulfillment only when the divestiture is total: in the Crucifixion. The Crucifixion is itself the Incarnation, the complete immersion in, indeed under, earthly reality. Through it the God up high including the pre-existing Logos ceases to exist, also in 50 Martin Luther, “Ein Sendbrief an den Papst Leo X. Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen” (1520) [“A Letter to Pope Leo X. On the Freedom of a Christian Man”] “Eyn Christen mensch ist eyn freyer herr / über alle ding / und niemandt unterthan. Eyn Christen mensch ist eyn dienstpar knecht aller ding und yederman unterthan.” [“A Christian man is a free lord of all things, and subject to none; a Christian man is a most dutiful servant of all things, and subject to everyone.”] Werke in Auswahl, ed. O. Clemen, vol. 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1959), p. 11.

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the sense of Hegel’s “speculative Good Friday,” (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), because now he has fully entered the flesh and exists exclusively in it, without reserve, without leaving himself a way out through which the metaphysical God up there could once more be restored after all. For this purpose of the restoration of the “former” metaphysical condition of God the Resurrection has constantly been misused. The Resurrection, however, is not the return of the old, but the Resurrection of the Crucified and God-less! The Resurrection does not undo the divestiture, but seals it. It states that the divestiture must not be understood in an abstract, literal way, as if the Crucifixion meant the absolute end of God. No, he lives on; with the Incarnation/Crucifixion he merely changed his shape or locus. He is now once more a nonmetaphysical, innerworldly God, just as the mythic Gods had been, too. The only difference is that he has his place not, like they did, in nature, but in the artificial world of technological civilization. As this technological civilization he is the Risen. Actually it is a glaring injustice to speak, with reference to our technological civilization, of secularization. Technology is not saeculum, but precisely the realized civitas dei, merely unacknowledged as such. Carl Améry spoke with respect to the dangers of technology of the “gnadenlosen Folgen des Christentums” (“merciless consequences of Christianity”).51 But one can do this only if one has lost the knowledge of what Gnade (grace, mercy) is. If we do not confuse grace with banal personal well-being, but rather understand it as the presence of God, then we must recognize that Christianity brought the fullness of grace—not despite technological civilization with its dangers, including the nuclear bomb, but precisely through it, in it. For the technical things are the empirical presence of the absolute God. And our age is the most Christian of all, because in it the fulfillment and completion of the Christian truth is in the offing, God’s real “becoming flesh.” Seen from the point of view of the work-day, the Occident lives extremely piously, almost faithful unto death, if one considers the atom bomb and the destruction of the environment. It is almost as if the motto of technological development had been: fiat deus et pereat mundus (may God be, even if the world perishes). 51

Subtitle of Carl Améry, Das Ende der Vorsehung (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1980).

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But perhaps the change from the natural gods to the absolute God, that is, the substitution of nature by the artificial world of technology, would not have needed to take on such literally devastating forms, if it had not only been the pre-existent Logos that has lowered itself to the shape of the workday slave, but if the human Logos, too—the soul, the heart, consciousness—would have followed this movement, instead of resisting it, saying, “Woe is me, where will I get, when winter has come, flowers?” For then the ritualistic form of human existence would have been restored all by itself. Not in the sense of a repristination of nature, but in the sense of a first-time progressing to a complete burial of the soul in the flesh. Through such a completed immersion, Occidental humanity’s relation to reality would no longer be one of being neurotically split-off. It would not look down upon it from outside and above as onto the saeculum. It rather would have its position again in the heart of earthly reality, analogously to how it was for archaic man. This means to be human could mean once more: to be the carrier of the spear that keeps apart the Heaven and the chthonic Earth of his world, the Earth, which, however, has meanwhile turned into the new, technological world. The Crucifixion would not only be followed by the Resurrection, but also by the descensus ad inferos and by the Ascension. The new, artificial “earth” promised and brought by Christianity, would itself be image again, mythical, in itself the underworld and “heaven” on earth. And our religion would no longer have to be imposed on us through preaching, because it would be our external reality, in which we live to begin with. Christianity and technological civilization would have become psychological: because we would have acknowledged that we are surrounded by them on all sides as by our objective psyche—which would amount, so to speak, to a return of “animism,” albeit not as a repristination of what was the truth of bygone ages, but in the completely new form of technological reality. In view of technology, it is not sufficient to abstain from it or to make scanty use of it and apart from that to appeal to the moral conscience of others. We cannot get away so simply. The truth of the age does not want to be avoided, it wants to be acknowledged, owned up to. And in order to take the step from Sunday to work-day, it is not sufficient to practice the Christian love of one’s neighbor at the workplace and in one’s neighborhood, and in this way to put Christian doctrine into practice. For with such a method the Logos would merely

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ennoble the work-day from above in a Sunday style, while keeping itself pure and free and innocent. It would deny the reality of the shadow (the work-day sphere) and its autonomous psychic power. This had precisely been the reason why the Christian doctrine, as we initially lamented, had to be given out as a mere matter of faith and be immunized against reality. Reality can never be reached and changed by moral exhortations, but only through ritual. If God is truly incarnated, then he demands as his authentic tribute that the Logos performs the “becoming flesh” all the way down to “Good Friday” in us, too, in our consciousness. This means that the Logos humbly takes its place beneath matter, beneath the technical things: that it acknowledges them as the locus of its own truth, own meaning, own soul, and of its God; that it therefore also abandons the faith in an extramundane God and “my personal redeemer,” just as well as the hubris to feel personally responsible for technology. With this complete burial of the soul into technology the rehabilitation of the Fourth (Jung) would have been realized at the same time. If, however, this tribute is not consciously paid, then it will be forced out of us, and with interest, against our will and from behind our backs. We cannot pick out our gods. We find them as givens. Whether we willingly agree or not, we have to deal with the absolute monotheistic God of Christianity and his post-natural, artificial reality. All our re-imagination from the point of view of the many natural gods of mythology has no chance over against it. It is this God and this reality that demand the tribute of our owning up to them. On July 2, 1796 , after having read the manuscript of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Friedrich Schiller wrote to Goethe: “How vividly I experienced during this reading … that over against the superb there can be no freedom except by loving it.”52 Maybe we can apply this moving statement to our situation, characterized by television, computers, and atom bombs, in the following modified way: Over against reality there is no freedom except by worshiping it.53 To this 52 “Wie lebhaft habe ich bei dieser Gelegenheit erfahren, … daß es dem Vortrefflichen gegenüber keine Freiheit gibt als die Liebe,” in Briefe an Goethe, Hamburger Ausgabe vol. 1 (Hamburg: Wegner, 1965), p. 232. Goethe was so impressed by this avowal on the part of Schiller that he included this sentence in his Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) [“Kindred by Choice”] in a modified form: “Over against great merits of another person, there is no other rescue but love”—Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 6 (Hamburg: Wegner, 1968), p. 398. 53 We could also follow Goethe’s wording and say: Over against the menace of the superior force of reality there is no rescue but worship (N.B.: the worship of this very reality!)

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we would only have to add the following (adapted from Thomas Mann54): If we can do it, we will do it. If we can not, it will be done to us.

54

p. 682.

See Thomas Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder (No place: S. Fischer Verlag, 1976),

CHAPTER NINE

The Occidental Soul’s Self-

Immurement in Plato’s

Cave

A

t breakneck speed we are today moving deeper and deeper into the age of multimedia, communication technologies, total networking, in short—of Virtual Reality. What is happening with all this is more than a mere technological change. It first of all amounts to a groundshaking psychological and ontological revolution. Man’s whole being-in-the-world is about to be transformed much more radically than it was changed by the Industrial Revolution. This development is completely new, indeed, to a large extent it still lies in the future, and yet it does not have its real origin in our age. It would be shortsighted to try to understand these developments only from what is visible phenomenally today; it would be like trying to comprehend a tree only by looking at the treetop and ignoring its roots. The changes we notice today come from far away, from the depth of our historical past. I will try to uncover the psycho-historical origins of this uncanny process and for that purpose turn to Plato’s “Parable of the Cave.” It can be seen as something like the primordial image of Virtual Reality or Medial Modernity.1 1 The words “medial” and “mediality” in this context are an adjective and noun derived from “the media” and referring to the specific quality or character not only of the media, but of the world at large informed and dominated by the media in the widest possible sense. Following Claus-Artur Scheier, I distinguish two phases of modernity, “industrial modernity” and “medial modernity,” where the second phase is the first phase’s having come home to itself.

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So that we may have a concrete basis for the following discussion, I want to call to mind briefly the contents of Plato’s “Parable of the Cave.”2 In a cave, people are living so tightly bound in fetters (and have been in this condition from birth) that, immobile, they can only look ahead at the back wall of the cave. Far behind them, a fire that they cannot see is burning. Between them and the fire there is a low wall across the cave. This wall is low enough to hide other people who hold up objects and statues and carry them along the wall on its far side. The fire throws the shadows of these things upon the back wall. Since the tied-up people cannot have any idea that there is something happening behind them and what it is that is happening—they can necessarily only become aware of what they see ahead of them—they take the shadow play of the shapes visible on the cave’s back wall for the true reality of life. If one of these people would be freed by force and compelled to turn around, he would, blinded by the light of the fire, not be able to see the objects, whose shadows he had before seen clearly and correctly. What he had seen before, the shadows, would seem to him to be clearer and truer than that of which they are only the shadows. But his pain and displeasure about his removal would become still greater if he would be pulled even further out of the cave and into the light of the sun. There he would, however, after his eyes slowly had gotten accustomed to the light, first see the shadows of the things there, then their mirror images in water, then the real things themselves, and finally the sun itself, and recognize it as the highest reality. Now he would bless himself because of this divine vision and feel sorry for those who had stayed behind. If he would now go back down into the cave, the people there would laugh at him because he would, again blinded, see the shadows on the back wall of the cave much more poorly than before. And if he wanted to free the people from their fetters and lead them up out of the cave, they would probably kill him, if they could.

Part I: The Psycho-Logic of the Parable of the Cave As we all know, for Plato himself as well as for interpreters of Plato, the Parable of the Cave is, on the one hand, an interpretation of the ordinary mode of being-in-the-world and, on the other hand, a description of the task of the philosopher, or to be more precise, the paideia, the education, the movement that he who is supposed to 2

Plato, The Republic, Book 7, 514–517 St.

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become a philosopher has to go through. We all who live in the sensible world of the living have our place in the cave and are, precisely because we think that we are in contact with concrete things and realities, in truth dealing merely with shadows. The task of the philosopher, by contrast, is to free himself, literally through a revolution, from being caught up in the sensible world and to rise to the light outside the cave, that is, to the world of Ideas. There are two places where within the parable the motif of violence comes up. The liberation at the beginning is a violent removal, and at the end of the story the philosopher, having returned with a missionizing intent, runs the risk of getting killed. But of course, one could add to this another, third act of violence preceding the story: the tying up of the people in the first place.

VIOLENT DISPLACEMENT The violence that the story talks about is the indication, appearing within the narrative and as a feature of it, through which the narrative betrays that it is itself an act of violence. It is not a simple description or interpretation which, in the image of the cave, would bring to light the real truth about the ordinary being-in-the-world. Rather, it sets up as its beginning a through and through fantastic image of life. Thus it does not describe, but does violence to, reality; it alters it, revolutionizes it. Even if Plato himself believes merely to want to rise from the given world (of the senses) to a higher world, what he does is nevertheless something completely different, namely a distortion, defamation, degrading of the initial situation. To be precise, it is two different defamations that come together in this story. But whereas in everyday contexts the word defamation implies a moral judgment (defamation can even be a crime), here it has only a descriptive function. What is described with this term is the revolutionary change that becomes visible in Plato’s parable, a change brought about by a logical negation, a pushing off from a given situation. It is essential not to find fault with it, that is to say, not to interfere with a subjective ego value judgment. We must not ask whether something is good or bad, but only how it really is. Firstly, the initial situation of the mind, that is “interpreted” as a cave existence by Plato, is of course not really people’s being caught up in a merely-sensible world. On the contrary, the people at the time of Plato, especially the great mass of the population untouched by

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philosophical reflection, at whose stance in the world the image of a cave existence is aimed, too, were still to a large extent living within a traditional piety. That is to say, they were still contained in, or at least pretty close to, a mythic experience of the world and a ritualistic stance towards life. For myth and ritual, however, visible, natural reality is meaningful in itself; it is in itself intellectual. In sensible reality—e.g., in trees, bushes, rivers, thunderbolts—gods, nymphs or daimones, and thus an intellectual meaning pointing down into the depth of being, were experienced. But this still meaning-satiated world experience is reduced by the Parable of the Cave to “nothing but” a (if I may say so) positivistic-sensualistic world relation. The colorful world, whose colorfulness consisted precisely in the animatedness of nature and not merely in an external visual impression, turns into grey shadows; the people living under the bright light of the Greek sun turn into tiedup troglodytes. And inasmuch as the cave, with its shadows (or shades: the classical Greek does not make a linguistic difference between these two aspects) and with Plato’s own allusion to a passage from the underworld book of the Odyssey, is a kind of picture of the underworld, they also turn into zombies, the living dead. This brings me to the second defamation. The Parable of the Cave, in addition to being a disparagement of the visible world, also amounts to a radical disparagement of the mythological, chthonic, invisible underworld and its underworldly shades, or, in psychological terms, of the imaginal. During the time of mythic-ritualistic being-in-the­ world man looked for his orientation in life primarily downwards, to the dead, the ancestors, even more so than upwards, to the gods of Heaven. Hades (in the sense of underworld) was the treasury of images; the god of the dead, Hades as personal figure, was also Pluto, the god of plenty with his cornucopia. From out of the realm of the dead, from the souls of the ancestors of the clan, one expected instructions and help. Plato’s cave, by contrast, is a blow to this relation to the lower world. If in the cave shadows/shades can be seen, then this now means something totally vain and no longer dead souls, ancestors, or lower gods. From out of the depth of the cave, nothing is to be gained any more. It precisely does not connect us with truth, with the depth of being. It detains us in blindness (atê). The true orientation according to Plato has to be away from the cave through a radical about-turn, upwards to a “higher” and ultimately “divine” truth.

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We can also demonstrate the same from another perspective. Since time immemorial, caves had also been a special place for initiations as well as necromancy. But the initiatory cave and the philosophical cave are diametrically opposed. The philosophical cave is the reversal of the initiatory one. Whereas in Plato the cave is a kind of dead end inasmuch as it has an untranscendable back wall, the initiatory cave did not have such a final closing. One’s entering that cave implied by contrast an opening to the infinite, a breakthrough into the depth of visionary experience through one’s being stuck in what was positive-factually given. That cave was in itself the change to the contrary, namely the inversion from empirical cave with a back wall as an absolute non plus ultra to the cave as the realm of visions. In Plato, the back wall has to be an impenetrable terminus of one’s glances, an absolute “Stop! So far and no farther!” so that the shadows of the objects thrown by the fire onto the wall fall on a reliable determinate screen. Conversely, we can say that the wall becomes truly impenetrable in the first place because of the fact that shadowy images of real objects are projected onto it as a mere “overlay” from behind the backs of the spectators. In addition it must be a dead tabula rasa, a clean slate, so that the projections of the objects onto the wall from behind the tied-up people will not be disturbed by or have to compete with any apparitions or visions manifesting of their own accord. In the initiatory cave, by contrast, nothing is projected from behind on the cave wall. Here the wall is itself alive. It is not really a “wall” in the sense of border and impenetrability, but becomes abysmal, pervious, open. In exact opposition to the Platonic cave, the initiatory cave is one from out of whose wall, i.e., from its infinite depth, the shades of the underworld emerge as a true vis-à-vis and as subjects of their own. They are not merely objects to be seen. They have a face and a voice with which they confront the initiates or necromancers and, as it were, “intrude” into their mind and into their lives with their, the spirits’ or specters’, demands on them. Here, the humans involved in the necromancy are informed about deeper truths by the shades, rather than watching fundamentally secondary and poor copies (only shadowy representations) of unseen “real” objects behind them. The apparitions come from in front, the Platonic shadows from behind. This difference is crucial.

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We find a very late echo of this archaic initiatory mode of experience in the poem Zueignung (Dedication) with which Goethe’s Faust opens. It was probably written in 1797 when after many years Goethe again began to work on the Faust drama that he had first started in his early years. This situation is reflected in the poem, but in an unexpected way. Its first lines read, “Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten, / Die früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt. /… / Ihr drängt euch zu! Nun gut, so mögt ihr walten / …” (“You approach me again, indistinct figures, who showed themselves to my cloudy eyes a long time ago in my early days. … You obtrude yourselves! Well then, you may prevail ….”) It is not the poet who as agent and subject “treats” some poetic material. No, the figures, the images are themselves subjects and obtrude themselves of their own accord and with an intentionality of their own, emerging as if from out of the darkness of a cave. This is why the poem’s title Zueignung, contrary to one’s expectations, does here precisely not imply the poet’s dedication of his work to the public or to some particular person. No, it means the reverse. He is the recipient. Those figures “dedicate” themselves to him, they want to become “his own” (eigen), part of his life. The appearing figures are not projections thrown upon a wall by a fire or light source behind Goethe’s back; they bring their own light, in fact, they come as light, they are themselves light, at first very dim, and only slowly, when one’s eyes get accustomed to them and more involved with them, becoming clearer and brighter. If we transport Goethe and this experience of his for a moment into an imaginary cave, seeing in this experience an already fully modern and now merely poetic (aesthetic) analogue to ancient initiation experiences, we could say that the figures that approach him are the slowly self-illuminating darkness of the cave’s back wall. The infinity of the darkness and impenetrability of the wall crystallizes in visible, gleaming forms. This is the distinguishing mark of the initiation or necromancy cave: the “shadows” that might appear in it would themselves be shining shapes. The move into this cave or the descensus ad inferos in general is the appreciation of the absolute negativity of the soul (the darkness and emptiness of the cave) and the willingness to firmly hold one’s place in view of this negativity. And the apparitions emerging in the cave are nothing else but this negativity itself that shines and speaks into human reality. To hold one’s place in view of the absolute negativity

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means that one on one’s own part comes with nothing, leaves behind everything that one owns. The negativity of the cave has to be matched by the total psychological emptiness of him who enters this cave. This is the sine qua non for the possibility of apparitions. Apparitions (and precisely not, as modern deluded psychology tries to tell us, projections)! Projections would be the exact opposite. The person entering the initiation or necromancy cave must have emptied himself so as to be a kind of clean slate, a screen upon which the gleaming forms emerging from the darkness throw their projections. The shadows in the Platonic cave are, by contrast, a privatio lucis rather than gleaming forms. And they are indeed projections onto the back wall of the cave, projections of positively existing things and projections by a positively existing light source. Because what the Platonic cave dwellers see is a priori the result of a fundamental privation, it is depotentiated, defused; as mere shadows of real objects they cannot obtrude any longer of their own accord as agents and subjects in their own right. They are in themselves lifeless images to be watched (objects of a human watching). Whereas the initiatory cave is the locus of absolute negativity, with Plato’s cave we are from the outset and irrevocably in the sphere of positivity. And whereas the source of the apparitions in the initiatory cave was the very darkness and emptiness of the cave, in the Platonic cave the source of the shadows is a light. The direction of the movement is reversed, too. The initiate moves into the cave, the necromancer descends into the underworld. But Plato’s cave people have been in the cave from birth and any possible movement takes them out of the cave. And whereas the apparitions come to the initiate from in front, from the depth of the cave, the shadows seen by the cave dwellers in the Platonic cave come from behind them, ultimately from the sun outside and high above the cave. The locus of truth is in the one case the darkness of the cave, in the other case the bright sun. Truth manifests in the former case of its own accord, but in the latter case it is defined as fundamentally hidden, behind one’s back, and if a contact with it is to be established it requires a strenuous and painful search for it. Conversely, the Platonic shadows as fundamentally privative forms of truth are visible to the everyday mind all the time without further ado, while the apparitions and visions in the archaic cave require special moments and special attitudes of approach, often also some form of blood sacrifice or offering.

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Furthermore, whereas the truth in the initiation and necromancy situation is on principle manifold and characterized by eachness, nowness, and mineness (it is always the truth of this specific situation now for me or for my family, clan, village), the truth of the Platonic situation is one singular, but universal, eternal truth valid indiscriminately for all and at all times (pictorially represented by the sun). I pointed out that the Platonic shadows are fundamentally depotentiated. This is not only due to their being shadows, i.e., copies. Shadows thrown by objects or people are just as real and authentic phenomena as the objects or people themselves. Normally we see both at once, the thing together with its shadow. The real problem with the Platonic shadows is the dissociation between the shadows and that which they are the shadows of, because the viewers are in between the real objects and the shadows. They (through their very mode of existence) split what is in actuality one single phenomenon, the real thing and its shadow, and hold these two parts of the one original phenomenon apart. And in addition, they face only the one part (the shadows) and absolutely ignore (remain totally ignorant of ) the other part (the real thing, which according to the Parable of the Cave has been put behind their backs). This gives the shadows on the one hand a seeming ontological independence, while on the other hand rendering them absolutely harmless. Reality has become voiceless and two-dimensional, flat. And this flatness is guaranteed by the impenetrable solidity of the cave’s back wall, which is the image of absolute positivity. Every perception is in this situation seen against the universal background of this positivity. This positivity assures that the cave dwellers are confronted only with dead (shadowy) objects seen, i.e., passive objects of their seeing, and do not have to fear to be obtruded upon by those shadows as agents in their own right and by any demands that they might make on them. Although the shadows seen on the wall are in Plato’s parable moving images, the world as the whole of everything that the cave dwellers might see, regardless of whether it be still or moving, is a priori fixated, securely immured in itself. The back wall of the cave, which in contrast to the initiation cave does not open up into the infinity of its own depth and darkness but is an absolute terminus, represents both an unwavering, absolutely fixed and clean slate on which reality can be “written” like a text (projected) so that the experience of reality is now

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a reading of “letters” (images, shadows) already written prior to one’s experiencing, rather than an “immediate” experience of reality. Inasmuch as experience as a whole, as variegated as it may empirically be in detail, now has logically a universal fixed foundation; the condition for the possibility a priori of the reliability of human knowing (for getting to know the truth, rather than truth in the sense of eachness) is provided. The singleness of the sun outside the cave and the fixity and impenetrability of the wall in the cave are of course correlates. In fact, both are identical, they are, to be sure, not alike, but the same: because they are the dissociation of one and the same real experience into two halves, the one half in front and the other half in the back of the human subjects (a dissociation that is reflected and becomes immediately apparent in the fundamental split of the real things and their shadows). Alchemy spoke of sol et eius umbra, the sun and its own shadow. The Parable of the Cave can be considered to be the unfolding and splittingapart of this original unity, so that its two moments (sun and shadow) become extremes at opposite ends. The people in the cave look ahead to the back wall, but what they see ahead of them comes from and has its truth behind them, which is what renders the images seen absolutely harmless. Only the truth, not its detached image or shadow or the letter referring to it, could “bite.” The human subject is sitting between the appearance and the truth. It holds appearance and truth apart and turns its backs on the truth. It is now (exists now as) their dissociation. But at both ends we have the same: show (watching the shadow play; contemplation of the sun). Plato’s image of the cave situation foreshadows the Kantian difference between mere appearance and thing-in-itself. Usually the thing-in-itself is imagined as being “behind” the appearance, as if the subject could see only the façade of reality and was not able to see through it deep enough. But it would be far better to realize that such a thing as the thing-in-itself is behind the subject as its a priori, while this subject is looking at the appearance ahead of itself. Here, as a Jungian psychologist, one might ask whether the stance of archetypal psychology is not also one that belongs in the Platonic cave (rather than in the initiatory cave). With its distinction between the literal (and literalism in general) and the imaginal or metaphoric, it seems to structurally repeat the Platonic distinction between the mere

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shadows in front of consciousness and the Ideas and with its emphasis on an epistrophe it may well have its equivalent to the Platonic aboutturn. “Seeing through,” “personifying,” and the talk of “the Gods” would then—unwittingly—be a form of reflection or thought, only disguised or held down in pictorial form. Be that as it may, the Parable of the Cave is not a description or interpretation, not a mere “theory about …,” but a deed, a violent act, that fundamentally alters what it describes. This act is the act of the described dissociation, which becomes only possible through the interposition or interjection of the human subject into the middle of experience so that it has one aspect of one and the same experience in front and the other unwittingly behind his back. And now it becomes also clear why the cave people had to be firmly tied to their seats. This interposition is first of all counternatural, even a violent act, so that it needs the fetters to make it permanent and irrevocable. Secondly, it is this tying the people up and thereby rendering them immobile which mirrors as well as makes possible in the first place both the fixity of the cave wall and the singularity, universality, and immobility of the ultimate truth (sun), that is to say, the whole system of positivity. This system works only if the subject cannot walk around freely and confront himself directly with whatever phenomenon as an undivided whole and in its own eachness, which ipso facto would turn it into a phainomenon or apparition. The subject has to stay put in the middle and has to keep its back turned to the truth. Its being tied up in fetters is indispensable for guaranteeing the fixity of the whole system, i.e., the stability of the wall as a clean slate and the absolute oneness and universality of the sun. Because the subject sits in between the two dissociated halves of the whole phenomenon with his back to its truth half, this new mode of experience is one that has an epistemological a priori and for whom there can be a knowing of principles. The a priori and the principles are fundamentally “behind” or “above” the subjective mind. They are the unconscious preconditions or hidden structuring elements in human perception and thinking. The experience in the context of initiation and necromancy (as well as myth and ritual in general), by contrast, was in epistemological regards fundamentally a posteriori and therefore characterized by eachness. If one wants to use the term “a priori” at all in connection with apparitions and similar experiences,

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then one has to say that it is (a) the apparition’s a priori rather than the one of (and behind) the subjective mind and (b) that the appearance of the apparition is structured by a “hysteron-proteron.” This is so because the apparition produces its a priori or truth for the first time as its result through its manifesting itself and as its manifestation. The “thing-in-itself,” as it were, comes about here only through and in the “appearance.” The façade is here the very essence with nothing behind it, and truth is fundamentally emergent, like the opening up of a blossom. This is why I had to state that this type of experience is inevitably a posteriori and characterized by eachness. One has to wait and see what reveals itself here and now. The about-turn that Plato demands of him who is to become a philosopher is therefore by no means a revolutionary turn away from the natural 3 stance to the world. This natural stance, the mythicritualistic mode of being-in-the-world, has much rather already been left once and for all prior to the initial cave situation described in Plato’s parable. When I said above that the parable’s description amounts to a distortion and defamation of the real initial situation, I now have to retract. It is not a defamation, because it does not refer to it at all. It is a completely fresh start from zero, as it were. The consciousness imagining the Platonic cave situation is unsuspecting about what I referred to as “the natural stance to the world.” It is not, with a polemical attitude, pushing off from that stance, but has from the outset its firm footing in a stance that resulted from a (logically) earlier pushing off and is now, for Plato, itself the natural initial stance. The liberation of the future philosopher and his gradual move out of 3 My use of such words as “natural” is not essentialist, but ad hoc. “Natural” does not have a naïve biological or cultural-Darwinist meaning here. I do not posit and refer here to a “true” nature of man. Rather what “natural” means is determined by its respective counterpart in each particular context. Here the initiatory situation is “natural” for (over against) the Platonic situation, because it was the self-evident basis from which the latter pushed off. The fact that the Platonic situation required a pushing off means that it is artificially produced. But for later times and their radical changes the Platonic situation may be what is to be seen as “natural.” Conversely, what I call here “natural,” the initiatory cave situation, is of course not natural in an absolute sense, inasmuch as human existence and all its modes are irrevocably contra naturam, reflected, not immediate. And that nature that would indeed be absolutely natural and from which this “contra naturam” pushed originally off can never be found. It has always already been left. So the difference between “natural” and “not natural” in all its numerous and various instantiations is each time essentially established within this irreducible (unhintergehbar) “contra naturam” by which human existence is defined, as the unfolding of its ever new internal difference.

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the cave pushes off from an initial situation that is the result of a prior and far more radical pushing off from the earlier natural situation. The about-turn within the parable is a minor, almost negligible event compared to that truly radical about-turn that logically and unspokenly precedes the parable and is the indispensable basis for it. The Parable of the Cave is thus the radical or absolute dismissal of that truth out of which people had lived for millennia, the truth of myth and ritual, of initiation and vision. And at the same time, it is the inauguration of a totally new orientation of man in the world through its positing a new, literally “higher” truth valid from then on. The rupture between the initiatory cave and the Platonic cave is total. There is no transition from the one to the other. When the Platonic cave story begins, the earlier cave has always already been left. Left to such an extent and so radically that no memory, let alone awareness, of that which has been left (or of the fact that there has been a dismissal of an earlier cave situation) remains. This is why in our Parable the initial condition is presented as the native condition of mankind, the absolute origin that has nothing before itself. And whereas that earlier cave was one that was truly entered by the initiate or necromancer and the experience there was truly coming from the deepest interiority of the cave, we see immediately that, despite the fact that the cave people are defined as having been born therein, this story never gets truly, namely logically, inside the cave: because the cave situation is fundamentally seen from outside; it has its ultimate truth outside, in the sun. This is where the narrator has his standpoint from the outset; he thus does not à corps perdu enter the cave and therefore also never gets into its interiority. He only enters with strings attached, strings tying him to the sun behind him. And this means that he has his heart or soul in the sun outside. His soul never gets into the cave. If it did, it would no longer be the Platonic cave. This is a cave that by definition has no interiority that you could get into. It has its own essence outside of itself. It is a priori the cave to be left after a fundamental about-turn, not a cave to be entered.

FROM MYTHOS TO LOGOS I confronted the Platonic cave with the cave of the initiates and necromancers and suggested that Plato with his parable or his philosophy at large pushed off from the piety of ordinary people and

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the traditional mythic-ritualistic mode of being-in-the-world. But upon closer look4 we have to admit that this type of piety and mode of being-in-the-world was by no means the starting point for Plato. Rather he reacted to the Sophists of his time, to the Greek enlightenment, to the situation that the Peloponnesian War had brought about, a situation reflected in the works of Thucydides, Aristophanes, Euripides, indeed even in Plato’s own dialogues such as Gorgias and Politeia (first book). Historically, the old ethical-religious tradition had already crumbled. It was no longer strong enough to actually inform the real life of communities. What Plato saw himself confronted with and what he needed to respond to was the world of the Sophistic doxai (opinions), which, groundless and free-floating, could be used and twisted around at will. There was no center or firm orientation any more. In a way one could already say that it was a situation of “anything goes.” Absolutely disturbing for the soul. So this is what Plato had to push off from and what is also the concrete background behind his Parable of the Cave. Furthermore, as far as the cave on its part is concerned, it did not come up in Plato for the first time. The idea of the cave already had a long pre-Platonic tradition, first among the Orphics, later among the pre-Socratics (Parmenides, Empedocles). It was not Plato who had located human existence in a cave for the first time. Therefore on both counts, the revolutionary shift that I claimed was happening in and through the Parable of the Cave cannot be attributed to this narrative. In the one regard, Plato continued, in his own way, an already existing tradition, in the other his parable addressed an acute plight of the soul in the concrete historical situation of his time, rather than representing the fundamental dismissal of the cave of the initiates and necromancers along with the former mythicritualistic mode of being-in-the-world as a whole. This mode and the society informed and governed by an initiating culture had been a thing of the past for a long time prior to Plato. But all this does not invalidate what had been demonstrated in the previous section. All it means is that the rupture between the two fundamentally different orientations in the world exemplified in the two diametrically opposed cave ideas was not literally, in a strictly 4

I am indebted to Claus-Artur Scheier for relevant hints (e-mail, February 20, 2000).

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historical sense, brought about by the Parable of the Cave and that Plato was not this shift’s originator. Nevertheless, Plato’s story is, as I claimed earlier, the inauguration of a totally new orientation over against the mythic-ritualistic one, and the dismissal of the latter. But how can the idea of the tied-up people in the cave be this dismissal and the inauguration of something totally new if, as we realized, the ritualistic and initiating culture had long been a thing of the past at the time of Plato and, as I stated at the end of the previous section, if Plato was unsuspecting about this earlier stance in the world, having his place in an already existing post-ritualistic tradition? This contradiction needs to be resolved. There are two answers to be given. The true origin of something radically new does not necessarily come to light at the historical first beginning of this new development. It can take generations until a movement achieves clarity about what its own deepest source and true logical root is. The radical rupture has already happened, but what the new inner truth is that necessitated this rupture still needs to slowly work itself out. The logical beginning is not already visible at the empirical-historical beginning. It is in this sense that I see in Plato’s Parable a conception in which the whole preceding tradition in which Plato stands comes to a point. Here the inner motive power of this tradition is epitomized and crystallized into one image that gives authentic expression to the truth that had already been in effect for some time. In this way it can be that we have to learn from the relatively late time of Plato what the tradition had been about from the outset that brought him forth. It is like what we know about the alchemical prime matter. What it truly is, its quintessence, comes out only as the late result of the refining and sublimating work of the adept. So although it is true that Plato immediately was addressing himself to the problem created by the decay of the notion of truth into the doxai of the Sophists that could be manipulatively used at will, his work at the same time transcends this immediate purpose and exemplifies the essential stance of this new tradition as a whole. In Plato’s immediate answer to the pressing problem of his particular age the logic of the general philosophical orientation towards the world is at once displayed, because this philosophical orientation comes in Plato to a culmination point. The particular implicitly also betrays the universal.

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For this reason we could call the Platonic cave with some justification by the more general name “the philosophical cave.” It tells us not only what Plato thought, but what the philosophical stance as such is. So the real opposition is that of the initiatory cave over against the philosophical cave. And between these two caves as symbols of two different stances in the world at large there is a fundamental hiatus, a rupture, the revolutionary shift from mythos to logos, where “mythos” stands for the mythic-ritualistic mode of being­ in-the-world, for the initiating cultures, while “logos” stands for thought, reflection, philosophy. This is the first answer to the contradiction needing to be resolved. The second answer has to address the aspect that “the philosophical cave” pushes off from the initiatory cave despite the fact that it does not attack this earlier idea and is even obviously totally unaware of it. On the immediate, literal level there is no reference to it, no fight with it as an “enemy,” that is, as an earlier stage of consciousness to be overcome by pushing off from it. The philosophical cave is only concerned with itself. Its whole energy is invested in pushing off from itself, namely in getting out of the cave, rather than in establishing this cave in violent opposition to the initiatory cave. This seemingly paradoxical feature is due to the dialectic of “pushing off.” As long as you focus on what you need to push off from, you precisely bind yourself to what you want to get away from. It will be your starting point and thus also the archê, the principle ruling over all your further endeavors. You cannot get away. If you really want to push off from something, you must begin as already having pushed off from it. The real pushing off begins as an entirely new, fresh start from its own beginning, on its own new “territory.” In other words, it begins as its own perfect tense, as its already having accomplished what it is to bring about. Otherwise, if it still wants and tries to accomplish the pushing off, it would thwart itself, getting stuck in what it wants to leave behind. It is comparable, in personal psychology, to an adolescent’s attempt to dissolve his emotional dependence on his parents. As long as he actively fights with them, he only gets more and more entangled with them. Some people stay in this fighting position with their parents their life long. They never get psychologically away from them and on their own. The dissolution of dependence on parents is only successful if it starts out as already having

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happened. It must be the accomplished cut. You have left them and stand on your own standpoint. In this way the philosophical cave is not fighting with or negating the initiatory cave. It is not the process of negating the latter. Rather, it is (or is only as) the (accomplished) negation of it, so that it no longer has to waste a thought on it. When thought begins, the negation of that as whose negation it is, is a negation in the perfect tense. For thought, the cave of the initiates and necromancers has always already truly been left behind, lies now way back behind the philosophical standpoint, is no topic for it, and is thus simply “forgotten” by it. The philosophical standpoint is concerned only with itself and its own internal problems and its own truth. But inasmuch as it is the former mode’s negation (its undoing, or sublation), it is this mode’s transformation. Radically new, and yet only a metamorphosis or further-development of the old. Therefore we do not have two separate caves, lying, as it were, side by side as neighbors or alternatives. No, there is only one single cave, and the philosophical cave is, as I pointed out, the violent reinterpretation and substitution of the earlier one. It is its successor. Thought is the negation and sublation of the mythic-ritualistic mode of being-in-the-world, logos the sublation of mythos. Thought (thought in that specific sense that is our topic here) is not an anthropological constant, it is not to be confused with the “thinking function” in the sense of C. G. Jung or with intelligence in general. As long as there have been humans, they have had, in principle, the capability to think in the sense of the thinking function, regardless of whether this function was developed and differentiated or not. It was there. But here we are not talking about a psychic function, a feature of the inventory of the human mind. Thought in our context refers to a cultural phenomenon, a particular type of world-relation that is not a natural given, but a historical acquisition. Thought is a specific constitution of consciousness or being-in-the-world, in contrast, for example and especially, to the mythological and ritualistic constitution of consciousness or being-in-the-world. A person may not have made much use of the thinking function that had been a potential in him all the time and then at a certain point can perhaps begin to activate and “develop” it. Thought in the sense of this essay cannot simply be activated, because it is not like a tool already available and ready for

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use. Thought comes into being only as the radical departure from the “natural,” mythic-ritualistic mode of being-in-the-world. It presupposes a violent cut, a having stepped out of the prior innocence and in-ness in the world, that innocence and in-ness that was capable of truly entering, for example as initiate, the infinite interiority of the cave and to be visited there by apparitions. Thought has left this interiority of the world. It has a standpoint in its own right outside the interiority of the world or the cave, and for this reason is reflection. The consciousness of the initiate does not have a standpoint in the same sense. Rather, it is like a clean slate and ipso facto infinitely open to what may show itself of its own accord and impress itself upon it. Thought—the system of reflection—is, by contrast, characterized by a firm standpoint. Thought or reflection needs the fixity and stability of the cave’s back wall as well as the Oneness of the sun outside the cave, and it needs, or it is as, the mind’s being firmly tied-up so as to be able to guarantee on principle the identity of whatever it may be focusing on and talking about. All this comes out into the open in Plato’s parable. The fact that thought is the sublatedness of the mythicritualistic mode of being in the world and of “nature” as such (i.e., the phainomena and apparitions in their eachness, nowness, and mineness, and each as an ultimate in its own rght) means that for it, for the standpoint of reflection, all the many phainomena and apparitions have been gathered together and, thus reduced to sublated moments, been subsumed under the idea of the One world or One substance as its attributes, its features, parts, elements, its individual phenomena, its unfolding into its moments. The task of reflection is therefore to logon didonai, to “account for … with reasons,” both for each individual phenomenon in terms of the whole world (logically, the One) and for the whole world as such, for Being. Philosophy’s “Being” is the sublated (collapsed-into-one) entire realm of myth, the sphere of mythic experience with its fundamental manifoldness. Long before Plato, the stance toward the world that we call reflection manifested itself in events of symbolic or better symptomatic value: Anaximander created, in the form of two sculptures, a globe of heaven and a map of the earth—clear “symptoms” betraying, in imaginal form, the fact that the mind had left the in-ness in the interiority and sensible immediacy of the here and now and had risen above the earth, having taken its position outside it, so as to be in fact

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able to have an overall view of all there is all at once. What Anaximander created is therefore the “symptom” of the birth of the concept: of the strength of the mind to totally abstract from all individual sensible detail and instead to conceive of “the whole.” For it is only by means of attaining the concept, which has abstracted from and, as it were, “pocketed” all sensible particularity, that this rise on the part of consciousness above the earth becomes possible. In “the whole” or “the All” or “the One,” all sensible detail has disappeared and is yet of course at the same time contained in and encompassed by it (“the all”!), albeit in logically negated (sublated) form. The concept contains that which it is about in reflected form, no longer as the immediate sensible reality that it originally was, but now as the property of the mind. “The whole” can of course not be seen, it must be thought; it is a thought. It is not difficult to understand why the radical break with the mythic-ritualistic mode of being-in-the-world and the rise from out of its immediacy to the reflectedness of thought had to be accompanied by the first emergence of the notion and sense of guilt. “Guilt” is really a new acquisition, I would almost want to say a new “invention.” It would have been impossible with the mythic-ritualistic stance in the world. The sense of guilt first manifested in Anaximander’s dictum, “From what things have their source of origin, into that they also perish, as is due; for they punish, and make recompense to, one another for their injustice according to the ordinance of time” (Fragment A9, Diels-Kranz). As is to be expected considering its origin in the revolutionary break with the previous mode of being-in-the­ world (the stance of immediacy), this was an ontological or logical sense of guilt, not a subjective moral guilt feeling. It later culminated in the tragic sense of life expressed by the great Greek tragedians (which would also have been unthinkable in a mythological or ritualistic context. It required the reflectedness of being).

THE CAVE AS UTOPIA So far we were concerned with the difference between a simple description of the initial condition of human being-in-the-world and a violent distortion and reinterpretation through which thought pushes off from a given condition to a fundamentally new world condition. Now we come to a second aspect of the Parable of the Cave, to its secret dialectics.

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For Plato there is an unambiguous direction for the movement in his story, the direction of the way up, which is viewed as an ascent from delusion, or from untruth to truth. (The fact that the philosopher later returns into the cave does not detract from the unambiguity of the direction inasmuch as his return has the sole purpose of liberating those who remained behind so that they might proceed to the ascent to the higher truth, too.) For Plato the ascent is the movement from the initial given condition to a distant higher goal. For us, however, things look very different. We have just made clear that what Plato presents as the initial state is anything but the initial state. It is the distortion of the real initial state, its reversal into the opposite. For us the real opposition between the old and the truly new does not fall between the one and the other world within the Parable of the Cave, i.e., not between the cave and the world of the sun. For us it falls between the traditional being-in-the-world outside the philosophical cave and before the rise of reflection on the one hand, and the whole Parable of the Cave fantasy itself with its two worlds on the other. The image of the cave and of man’s existence in the cave with which the narration begins, is itself the true revolution. The revolution does not lie in the about-turn that happens in the course of the narrated action. What for Plato is the given starting point from which he wants to push off to something newly discovered is in truth even a veritable utopia, although admittedly one that does not present itself, nor know of itself, as a vision of the future. The utopian character becomes perhaps a little more accessible to the imagination if we take into account what it is that Plato at bottom designed with his image of the cave existence. It is nothing else but the mental picture (represented with the still primitive technical means of his time) of the model or principle of the “cinema.” In the fire burning in the cave we recognize the early form of the projector lamp and in the sculptured objects that are carried along the wall (which separates the auditorium from the projection room) the equivalent of the moving filmstrip; in the back wall of the cave we can easily recognize the projection screen and in the shadow images the exciting or emotionally gripping movie itself that the people tied-up in the auditorium are watching gefesselt (lit. “tied-up,” but then also “captivated,” “enthralled”). In this movie they do by no means see merely physical projections or light effects (which is what they of course are, in a

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positivistic understanding), but they believe to have before their eyes the drama of reality itself, true life, probably even a life that is more significant than their own personal, banal existence. And it is of course essential that contrary to expectation, the tied-up people in the cave do not experience their imprisonment as misery, but as joy and pleasure, which is also why they absolutely refuse to be freed. Almost two and a half millennia before anybody was able to conceive of the technical realization of the “cinema,” Plato unwittingly produced the model of it. To be sure, he is not concerned, on the ontic and technical-empirical level, with the literal movie-house as a special institution within existence as a whole. What he is concerned with when he designs his image is to put the entire being-in-the-world and the essence of man ontologically or logically on a new foundation. By placing man in the cave (the cave as now designed by him), Plato conceives, far ahead of his time, the idea of human existence as a “cinema” existence. In Plato, people thus do not go to the movies, e.g., on Friday night. They have been born in the “cinema.” The cave or the “cinema” is here the definition of man. Man is a troglodyte or movie-watcher. This redefinition (over against the former “definition” of man as initiate and initiated) is indeed utopian. Even if at Plato’s immediate time much had changed with respect to the world experience informed by myth and ritual, factual life and the thinking of people was nevertheless still far too much grounded in the former world and in traditions that still granted substance for it to be comprehended as an existence that defines itself, and orients itself in the world, in terms of the external input of a flood of images and information, i.e., in terms of “show” and “infotainment.”

IMAGINATION VERSUS THOUGHT, HERMENEUTICS

VERSUS PSYCHOLOGY

I said that Plato unwittingly produced the model of the “cinema.” What I just described was certainly not what Plato intended. He is struggling with an entirely different problem, the pressing problem of truth that had come up through the falling apart of all values in the course of the Sophistic enlightenment, which in turn is the result of a superficial apperception of the new mode of being-in-the-world, the mode of thought and reflection. And his answer, as far as the Parable of the Cave is concerned, comes out most clearly in the about-turn

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that he subjects the would-be philosopher to. With this about-turn and the ensuing ascent finally up to the clear awareness of the sun, the new stance in the world (reflection) finally comes home to itself. It is not really an entirely new position that Plato establishes. Rather, he draws the inherent consequences of the philosophical orientation in the world, consequences that had not been drawn before. The Parable of the Cave with its about-turn presents merely the unfolding of the full logic of reflection (reflected being-in-the-world). In Plato’s parable, thought, as it were, finally sees through to itself, thinks itself through. Plato discovers that the revolutionary shift from the initiatory cave to the philosophical cave established, to be sure, the stance of reflection, but that this was only the first immediacy of reflection. And so it became necessary to apply this original revolutionary shift once more to its result (this is the about-turn in the story) and to thereby realize reflection as completed reflection, namely as the unity of, as we might say, the intentio recta (the tied-up mind watching the shadow images in front of itself: immediate reflection) and the intentio obliqua (the reflection of what a priori structures experience from behind: reflected reflection). Reflection, to be true reflection, cannot only reflect “the world” and the things in it; it must also reflect itself. What reflection did to the mythically experienced world it must also apply to itself. This is Plato’s discovery. The about-turn within the story reflects, and necessarily has to reflect, that about-turn as which the stance of reflection exists. To push off from the immediacy of the mythic-ritualistic stance is only one half of a real pushing off. The price for pushing off from something is that this pushing off has to be performed once more against this pushing off itself. Why? Because reflection is the sublation of immediacy or innocence, and reflection, as the simple pushing off from something, is itself only the innocent first immediacy of itself. What does it mean, what does it amount to, that reflection has come home to itself, by turning against its own first immediacy and fulfilling itself as the unity of intentio recta and intentio obliqua or as completed reflection? The answer is: the Parable of the Cave is the event in which thought or reflection realizes that it has to be inevitably “metaphysical” (avant la lettre), if it goes all the way through with itself. Within the cave story, if one is oneself captivated (“tied up”) by the imaginary world it creates and takes its starting point, sight unseen,

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for granted, the ascent is a radically new development, a dangerous, unheard-of move forward, indeed a literal revolution. But for us it is, as I said, only the unfolding of the logic that has been inherent in the new, post-mythological stance of “thought” or “reflection” all along and had merely not been seen by Plato’s predecessors and particularly not by the Sophists, who completely naïvely “acted out” the new stance of reflection. The unfolding of the full logic of reflection as the realization of the necessity to become aware of what is in the back of the thinking mind as its own a priori, is undoubtedly a major achievement and move ahead. But it is an advance within the same logic of thought as such, within the same single stance in the world, the stance of reflected being. It is the completion of this already prevailing new stance and not a true revolutionizing of the mode of being-in-the-world, as the move from Mythos to Logos had indeed been. So there can be two very different readings of this story. We can stay inside it and go along with the development described in the narrative, thus in a way “sympathetically” letting ourselves first be tied up, too, and then participating in the experience of the fellow who was forcefully turned around and had to suffer one painful shock after another. Here we would be imagining (picturing in the mind) the parable and taking the movement it describes at face value, literalized, as a sequence of individual events. While in this way the narrative would so to speak take us by the hand and lead us onwards, in our understanding we would at the same time try to stay true to what Plato intended (regardless of whether it be Plato as auctorial author or “Plato” as a mere signature under this text). Interpretation would here be an attempted exegesis (elucidation of the text) in the spirit of conventional hermeneutics. But we can also think the Parable of the Cave itself, think the thought that it is, a thought, however, that is presented only in the naïve form of a narrative and image rather than in the form of thought. What to the former style of reading appeared as a sequence of several events we would now comprehend as the internal moments of the logic of one single event, one stance in the world. Much like Anaximander comprehended in one single glance “the All” and thus had risen to the concept of “the All,” we would see in the parable one single whole. We would leave the immediate impressions created by the story behind and, abstracting from them, now reflect the story of the discovery of

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reflection itself, that is to say try to rise to the concept of it. At the same time it means that we would go by what it in fact is, says, and does, and not by what it was intended to mean: this would now no longer be an interpretation in the sense of exegesis, but one a little more in the sense of how the psychoanalyst “interprets” the statements and behavior of his patient: making the hidden, avoided, or repressed underside of the manifest conscious. According to Walter Bröcker, for one, Plato is supposed to have tried, with his ascent to the Ideas, to provide a new meaning (or to rescue some of the old sense of meaning) after the loss of meaning that myth once upon a time had provided. Apart from the fact that I think that the break with myth was lying in a distant past that the Parable of the Cave had long left behind and was not still the reference point for an attempt to compensate for its loss, I also think that to see in the internal movement of this story a movement from the, as it were, nihilism of the Sophists to the higher meaning, firm values and “principles” of what later would be called metaphysics only makes sense if one stays stuck in the first sense of interpretation, i.e., if one “falls for” the intended meaning of this Parable. If however one thinks this story, then the alleged movement of the parable is not one from out of Sophistic sensualism and subjectivism to objective “higher ideals.” Rather, it is no more than the attempt to go seriously all the way through with the new situation of “reflected being” and to overcome its first immediacy, its naïveté that found its purest expression in the Sophists. The overcoming refers only to the na ï veté of the Sophists’ standpoint, but not to their standpoint per se. With his ascent, Plato overcame only the half measure of the Sophists’ thinking and deepened (reflected, interiorized) it into its own truth, but he did not literally transcend it. The Sophists were dependent on the sun (the Idea of the Good), too; they had only systematically kept it behind their backs, so that they remained absolutely unconscious of it. Within the narrative and for the picturing mind there is a real about-turn that goes along with a real liberation from the fetters of the cave people. But thought sees through to the fact that it is the ascent that establishes the fetters of the cave people for the first time. The people in the cave, and the Sophists in reality, did not feel tied up and imprisoned. They did not long for liberation. They felt absolutely free. It is the philosopher who sees and posits the fetters

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that do not exist for the people concerned. Conversely, the about-turn, rather than undoing the fetters and leaving them behind, does no such thing. The philosopher is not the freed man. He does not get truly out of the cave at all. His getting out is only how it appears to the literal narrative-imaginal view. In reality the philosopher stays tied to the cave situation as his beginnings throughout. The cave is his archê, and as an archê it rules over everything that follows. The philosopher as the apparently freed and turned-around man takes his origin as tiedup cave man along with him even to the contemplation of the sun outside the cave. His upward-looking to the sun owes its perspective to and reaffirms this origin. For thought, his not getting out happens, to be sure not within the empirical cave of the narrative or imagination, but certainly within the whole structure or logic of the cave. This whole structure is never left. The ascent amounts merely to an unfolding of the internal dialectic of the fetters, leading deeper into the logic of this fixity. The second moment in the story (the about-turn and the ascent) is the reflection of the first moment in the story (the original cave situation). But to think the Parable of the Cave means more than letting one moment within the text reflect another one of its moments. Rather, to think the parable amounts to having to reflect the whole structure, both the original situation of being tied up and the reflection of this situation through the about-turn, in other words, to reflect the relation itself of the two moments of the narrative. And in this sense thought has so to speak stepped outside the narrative and along with it outside the cave (much like Anaximander had stepped out of his containment in the immediacy of earthly existence), and thought is in fact the only way to truly leave the cave. By looking at the relation of cave and sun, the thinking mind no longer looks up to the sun as the philosopher, as the freed cave man, inevitably does. For the reflection of the whole relation, the sun has been reduced to one moment of and within the story and is thus logically (syntactically) on the same footing with the other moment (the shadows in the cave), although it is of course qualitatively (semantically, in content) radically different, indeed opposite to it. A further aspect: thinking the Parable of the Cave is the prerequisite for our becoming able to give it a psychological rather than a hermeneutic reading. The hermeneutic reading would treat it

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as an expression of ideas. As psychologists we no longer simply read it as a text in the history of ideas or intellectual history, but as an event in the history or alchemy of the soul. As a “text” it is the written articulation of somebody’s views (meaning, intention, theories, opinions). As “event” it is something real in its own right, a hard fact, a “substance,” a “prime matter,” and as such it objectively intrudes into and possibly alters the world.

THE DIALECTIC OF UTOPIA AND REALIZATION The Parable of the Cave as event is, as we have seen, the establishment of a utopia, the utopia of the definition of man as a troglodyte in the “cinema,” where he is bombarded with a flood of images and information. Now it is of course strange that Plato does precisely not give out his utopia as a program to be realized, but characterizes it as something that needs to be overcome through a radical about-turn. The program for Plato is ascent to the Ideas, requiring the violent departure, indeed exit, from the “movie world” of the cave, which in his version is furthermore depicted as the naturally given original state. This contradiction needs to be explained. Our century5 can perhaps be called the century of utopias. But we have had to watch how one after another, major social utopias, whether from the left or from the right, failed miserably, even when the greatest efforts had been made to render them real. I surmise that this is above all because utopias that are consciously and explicitly declared and set up as programs for action remain merely subjective, mere contents of consciousness and for this reason are not able to logically reach reality. They get stuck in a powerless “ought.” All the actions performed for the purpose of their realization may of course empirically alter reality in many regards, but what had actually been aspired to with the utopian program, namely the inner spiritual-mental transformation of society, the transformation of the logic of existence, they are precisely not able to bring about by force. So utopias are by nature compelled to remain what they had been from the outset: unreal. The utopian vision that is explicitly and directly supposed to be realized ipso facto keeps constantly putting this realization off into the future. This is inherent in the logic of utopias. 5

This essay was written in 1994.

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The situation in Plato is totally different. For him, the cave is precisely not a utopia or goal. The cave is for him the real starting condition from which one has to move away in order to get to something that represents the actual goal. This, and only this, is what makes it possible for Plato’s utopia to in fact logically reach reality. Because that which as utopia or distant goal is, for Plato and the times after him, actually something like a ceiling still high above oneself (namely the cave as the “the cinema”) is set up as the self-evident ground or basis from which one is supposed to have to push oneself off to the explicit goal (namely the world outside the cave and “the sun”), consciousness unwittingly really settles in the utopia. The more consciousness endeavors to get out of the cave and the more it longs and strives to get to the sun, the more it turns for the first time the (actually utopian) cave into the real starting point of this striving, into the real basis from which to push off, which, being an imaginary story invention, it had precisely not been by origin. By and by and ever more firmly, with ever more binding force, consciousness is placed on the basis of the utopia. It sees it as its basis, actually pushes off from it as its basis, and thereby it slowly turns it in fact into a reality. Apparently it is the power of the mind to be able to bring about what is empirically impossible: both to pull itself up by its bootstraps, and the reverse: to push off from something which for the time being is precisely still totally out of one’s reach. Although it still lies in the future or hovers high above one’s head, it is nevertheless treated as if it were a basis on which one is already standing, so that one can push off from it. To perform this contradictory feat is only possible on the ground of Logos, on the ground of language. It is the secret of the Parable of the Cave (a secret even for Plato himself!) that what it endeavors to get away from is its actual goal. To settle human existence in the cave is what the soul is concerned with by creating this parable, contrary to the conscious intention. Only because it was and remained a real secret, only because the soul really strove with honest conviction and deepest fervor to get out of the cave and to attain to the Ideas in the heights, did it succeed in totally extricating itself from its rootedness in the mythic experience of the world and in establishing the cave as its new dwelling place. This is the dialectic of the goal. If the goal character of the cave had been conscious to the soul (and this means first of all to Plato), if it had

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been presented as the goal, then this goal would inevitably have been continually put off into the future and would never have become real, just as with the utopias of our century. Plato himself is a case in point. When he tried to put his explicit utopia of the ideal state into practice at the court of Dionysios I in Syracuse, this turned out to be a disaster. The modern utopian is standing between an empirically given social condition and his utopian dream of the ideal society. He has what is real behind his back, because he has logically broken with it and is now oriented totally toward his utopia and the future. For him the actual about-turn lies between what is already there in contrast to the utopia, and this utopia itself. What is really existing remains outside his narrative of the ideal. Because empirical reality (as what is obsolete) and the ideal aspired to (as something in the future) remain logically toto coelo separated, the utopia is condemned to stay stuck in the status of being utopian; it has to be this way because there is no logical connection between the initial real situation and the dream of the aimed at situation. The utopian striving is itself the wedge driven into reality as the present. It bursts apart and continually holds apart its (this present’s) moments (namely, reality and truth) as obsoleteness and futurity. Therefore the latter cannot help but be constantly put off to the future, since the logical break between reality and idea is always reconfirmed. The modern utopian has his standing in the dilemma between both, and all his efforts only promote this dilemma, not, as he hopes, the one side of this dilemma, the goal aspired to. In Plato, the idea of the actual state (i.e., that which is portrayed as and claimed to be the actual state) has been drawn into the fantastic narrative itself. It ipso facto becomes a component of the utopia itself. It becomes itself fantastic (the secret desired state). This means that Plato has already in fact broken with the factually given as such; he has left behind himself the break, as something that has logically been executed long ago, but sort of in return he carried along the logical character of “actual givenness” or “reality” and incorporated it into the utopia itself. The about-turn that lies in between the utopia and factually existing reality is not left behind as something outside the parable. Plato is not himself the wedge systematically holding apart the moments of being (reality and truth). Rather his Parable of the Cave can also account for the moment of reality (the cave, the world

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of the senses), along with the moment of truth (sun, Ideas). In this way the narrative has truly appropriated the radical break, integrated it into its own inventory, so that the break now returns within the Parable of the Cave as an explicit motif and sublated moment in the form of the utopia-internal about-turn. For this reason Plato’s Parable of the Cave no longer has anything outside of itself and behind it—precisely because it has left the actual break or dilemma absolutely behind as fully accomplished. Other than the modern explicit utopia, it can thus no longer be bothered or threatened from outside by the dilemma, threatened in the sense of proven to be a lie: because it has “the lie” (its counterfactual utopian character) fundamentally within itself or is it. With respect to its logical form it is closed within itself, self-sufficient, comprising all reality. Even the revolution that occurs within this story remains internal to one and the same utopia. Contrary to the appearance within the narrative, this revolution does not really break out from some initial state (cave existence) and arrive at something totally different (the upper world outside the cave). In this sense the ascent out of the cave is not a locomotion. There is no real motion at all. The ascent is merely the open demonstration, the external, sensible image of that internal logical self-contradiction as which the Parable of the Cave exists, the selfcontradiction between the two sides of this one utopia. With its aboutturn, consciousness therefore only becomes more and more set on this self-contradictory fantasy, only digs itself deeper and deeper into it and its contradiction. In this sense it is the fact that the reality aspect has been incorporated into the fantastic-utopian narrative which from the outset gives this utopia the strength to become reality.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LOCOMOTION

INTO “WORK”

From the point of view of the Parable of the Cave itself, the actual difference is between the cave and the world out there in sunlight. For us, however, the decisive break lies between the traditional being­ in-the-world informed by myth and ritual on the one hand and the entire relation of cave and sun on the other hand. The whole of cave and sun is, first, one single utopia so that within the Parable of the Cave there is no possible getting out of the cave. And, secondly, the

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about-turn has been integrated into the utopian narrative itself as its internal motif and moment, instead of having been left outside as its origin, between the utopia (the Parable of the Cave as a whole) and that which precedes it. Because of these two facts, the sense of the ascent to the Ideas is reversed. As with a treadmill, consciousness thinks that it is advancing toward the sun “out there” as its goal and that it is in the process of moving “out” of the cave, while in truth it is solely the ground as a whole that is moved ahead under the runner’s feet, namely from out of the old into a new truth, without that runner getting away from anything and coming closer to something else. What is intended and presented as a linear locomotion in empirical, almost geographical space proves to be the “locomotion” or rather transformation of “space” itself, namely the transformation of the whole logical constitution of existence. Within the new truth, that truth that could be called the “world of the Parable of the Cave (as a whole)” there is no movement forward, because the new truth is a priori, as we have seen, the unity of cave and sun. The closer you get to the sun, the deeper you get into the cave. The deeper your are in the cave, the more you intensify the truth of the sun. As Heraclitus knew, the way up is in itself the way down. Only where, as in the case of the modern literal utopias, the starting situation as an empirically real condition and the utopia as the ideal are toto coelo separated (dissociated) can there be a movement forward from here to there. But precisely because it is a locomotion forward from here to there, that is to say a “spatial” movement (even if “spatial” only in a metaphorical sense), everything will logically remain the way it was, inevitably so. This locomotion demonstrates its own absurdity. Conversely, the movement of the Parable of the Cave, which is a movement that stays put without getting anywhere, in fact reaches its goal precisely. The Parable of the Cave was able to mobilize and concentrate all the energies of the Occidental soul for an ascent to Ideas. This is one factor. A second factor is that the logic of this ascent is characterized by the contradiction of a pushing off from that which is conceived as an already given, existing basis, whereas in truth it is the ceiling hovering high above us. Because these two factors were operative at the same time, the Parable of the Cave itself turned into a psychological engine or motor. The narrative of the Parable of the Cave is a logical (not empirical) engine for the absorption and utilization of human

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(or better, soul) energy. By breaking out of the cave, the soul pushes off from the image of a future freely posited by itself. Into what does it push off? Into this future as a real one. The image of the cave is a satellite, shot off from the earth into outer space, a satellite that serves as the Archimedean point from which the earth could be in fact unhinged. The energies of the soul mobilized by the Parable of the Cave do not transport man, as in the case of the literal utopia, in a straight line from here to there endlessly farther. Rather, the energies employed for (as conscious intention sees it) the transport toward, and for the arrival at, the highest Idea were in fact, even if secretly, diverted by the (psycho-) logical engine called “Parable of the Cave” and harnessed for the work upon the fundamental transformation of the ground of existence (or the logical constitution of existence). As an aside, I want to mention that mythic tales were by no means psycho-logical engines in this way. They did not try to harness the soul’s energy and utilize it for some future purpose. On the contrary, it is first of all their nature, as innocent narratives, to spend or waste themselves; much like flowers bloom in order to blossom, simply unfolding their beauty and never minding that to bloom means to whither. (“The rose is without why; it flowers because [or while] it flowers, / It pays no heed of itself, does not ask whether it is seen”—Angelus Silesius.) Secondly, they do not want to push off from anything and do not want to get anywhere. They always start out, if one wants to word it in this way, from the very “goal,” from their long having arrived at the “goal.” They simply are the self-display of, and have their place in, the “ever-present origin” (Jean Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart) or at least individual aspects of it. This is the fundamental difference between the mythic tale and the Parable of the Cave. But this difference is of course at the same time the expression of the difference between pre-reflected being-in­ the-world and re-flected being-in-the-world.

THE UNITY OF CAVE AND SUN OR THE TRUTH OF

THE APPEARANCE6

If ascent to the sun is descent into the cave, then cave and sun are two sides of one and the same thing. What the world of the cave is we 6 “Appearance”: German Schein, which means both illusory being (mere appearance, semblance) and appearance as radiance, manifestation.

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have already elaborated. In an objectifying view it is the “cinema.” But what then is the whole world outside the cave, the world of the sun, including the sun itself? If we stay within the image, then the sun is the transcendent principle of the light from which the empirical light of the projection lamp in the cave receives it potency to shine in the first place. For Plato himself the world outside the cave is the realm of Ideas with the sun as the highest Idea, the Idea of the Good. We could also say: the realm of what is valid on principle. The Ideas are also the standards for everything that is true, good, and beautiful. Thus they are also, in modern terms, the “values,” and the Idea of the Good, which is behind all the other Ideas or values and gives them their strength, is the Idea of the value per se, the value of all values. What does this mean if we insert it into objective reality (the reality of “things”)? What corresponds to the Idea of the Good in that world in the same way that the “cinema” corresponds to the cave? It is Money. The truth of the cinema is a dual one: the unity of exciting experience (or show) and Big Business. While the audience, oblivious to the world, is totally absorbed by the experience of the movie action and believes to be participating in the drama of real life, to be witnessing the truth of being, the movie is at the same time a multimillion-dollar business of big concerns or investors, whose only interest in the movie is their profit. The movie itself, its content and level, its artistic quality, its message are of no concern for the motion picture and distribution industries; the movie is for them just some commodity like all ordinary commodities, too, and the only thing that counts is that the financial investment pays. The qualities of the movie are, if at all, significant only inasmuch as on them may depend whether the movie will go down well with the public and thus be a financial success or not. In other words, these qualities are at most significant as means to an end, as bait in the service of the marketing of the movie, as the sum that it brings in, which is the true goal. Money is the actual truth of the cinema. But that does not by any means imply that the emotional experience aspect, the movie as representation of life—even more so, as seeming appearance (self­ manifestation) of the truth of life— would be nothing but an untruth over against Money. Rather, both together represent the whole truth of the cinema in its dialectically contradictory nature. So that the

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money can multiply, countless people must sit tied to their chairs in the cave and must have not only the projection room, but also the financial circles that financed the movie behind their backs. That is to say, they must totally abstract themselves from the money aspect. They must devotedly take the illusory picture that they are offered for the truth. It is thus the money aspect itself that demands that it be abstracted from, that it remain completely unconscious—because otherwise there would be no cashing in. Conversely, the illusory world of the movie is completely dependent on the money of the financiers. Without them there would be no movies. But above all, the reason why the movie, even the horror movie, can only be “nothing but” cinema or Hollywood, i.e., serve the non-committal entertainment during one’s Frei-Zeit (leisure time, lit. free(d) time, time released, unmoored from all attachments and binding commitments); it does not really horrify; it does not have a committing message for human existence, because it is inherent in its logic that it is known that as financed and projected show it is nothing but illusion and by no means an epiphany manifesting of its own accord. Thus we are confronted with the contradiction that Money as that which makes the movie possible has to be at once ignored (abstracted from) and nevertheless truly acknowledged as the ultimate source of the projection, although acknowledged in a scotomized fashion. If both aspects do not come together, the whole thing does not “work.” The two sides constitute together the One grand truth that is called Schein (illusory being) or reflection. We already know that Plato’s Parable of the Cave, too, is the unfolding and division of One truth into its two sides, cave and sunlight, and now we can add that it is the truth of the logic of illusory being. Plato’s parable at the same time indirectly shows the internal dialectic of this truth. The violence which is supposed to hold the darkness of the cave and the sunlight, sol et eius umbra, apart, points to the internal contradiction or the incompatibility of the two sides. The about-turn at the beginning and the return back into the cave at the end of the story point to the indispensable unity or identity of the two sides. The irrevocable unity has of course its ground in the fact that the Parable of the Cave is the unfolding and dissociation of one single truth. The division occurs within the primary unity, which therefore leaves its trace in the dissociated result in the form of the hidden identity of the two extremes.

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The show of the shadow play in the cave and the vision/contemplation of the Idea of the Good are the two extremes of this One truth. Both are the same (namely show), although not alike. In the same way, the tied-up cave man and the philosopher, having ascended to the light of the sun, are in logical regards by no means two separate beings. Rather, it is only the narrative-imaginal mode of Plato’s story that divides into two separate figures what in actuality is one and the same human stance in the world (or one and the same being-in-the-world), one stance that is at once fixated on the Schein in the first sense of a show of shadows to be experienced and on the same Schein in the other sense as the absolutely abstract, empty and naked value of Money, but of course in such a way that its both sides are dissociated from one another and the left hand is ignorant of what the right hand is doing. Therefore, in empirical reality just as in our narrative, the One self-contradictory truth can be acted out in such a way that the different logical moments are concretized as distinct behaviors or roles that in turn are allotted to different people, a fact that can, for example, in practical reality lead to vehement conflict between the artistic interests of the movie maker as entertainer and the financial interests of the producer. The Parable of the Cave, as a narrative and image, is the still naïvely presented picture of the logic of illusory being or the logic of reflection, a logic that receives its own logical analysis above all in the “Doctrine of Essence” part of Hegel’s Science of Logic, but partly also in the work of Karl Marx.

Part II: Occidental History as the Process of the

Cave’s Realization

OCCIDENTAL HISTORY AS AN ALCHEMICAL LABORATORY Whitehead is the author of that statement according to which the whole of Western philosophy consists merely of footnotes to Plato.7 While this is certainly a terrible exaggeration and unfair to the great original achievements of many later philosophers, it rightly points to the enormous, even overarching significance of Plato for everything 7 “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1979), p. 39.

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that followed him in philosophy. What from a psychological point of view, however, is particularly wrong with the “footnote” idea is that it tends to construe “Plato” as a “text” only and thus as the property of the intellect—of “professional” philosophers, philologists, interpreters, historians of ideas. But as I already indicated, we have to appreciate the Parable of the Cave as a reality in its own right, an event in the history or alchemy of the soul, and not only as a philosophical conception. The nature of this event is that it was (a) the articulation of a program or task and (b) that since then this task had been imposed on Occidental mankind. Since that time the Occident stood objectively under the (unspoken, unconscious) behest to make the Parable of the Cave and its logic “real.” The great, secret project had been to transpose reality as a whole from out of the logical status of substantial being into the status of reflection and illusory being. The task had been to perform the patient work of the step-by-step abrasion of “nature” (as a logical or psychological category). Or it had been to recreate the world as illusory being, as posited, reflected, as a world of shadows. We could also say: it had been the necessity of pulling all reality into the cave and to regain it there as a “reality” that was no longer a world of natural experience, but of artificial projection. In this connection we may also recall the important insight expressed by C. G. Jung that “every spiritual truth is gradually reified and turns into a substance or tool in the hand of man.”8 For this project the Occidental soul had been harnessed for 2,500 years; by it, it had been passionately captivated. Its whole energy, its deepest intelligence had been applied to this task. The greatest minds of the Occident stood under the spell and were—wittingly or unwittingly—in the service of it with all their creative energy and with ardent devotion. This is so because the cave of the Parable of the Cave was precisely not presented as a utopia that is continually pushed off into the future. Rather, it has always already won man over for itself, dragged him into itself and settled him in itself. It is not, as Whitehead stated, that Plato’s “shadow falls over all of Western thought.” This would imply a separateness, our being overshadowed by some other outside. No, we are and have “a priori” been inside the Parable of the Cave; it is all 8

CW 13 § 302, trans. modified.

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around us as our cosmos or horizon. It is not something that we have vis-à-vis ourselves like a theory or an option. Inasmuch as the Parable of the Cave has the logic of an engine, it has always already dragged us as laborers into the treadmill that it is. For this reason my speaking of the Parable of the Cave as a “program,” that had to be “realized,” can easily be misunderstood. It should not be taken in that sense in which we speak of a “party program” or a “five-year plan.” These “egoic” designs for the future have indeed their entire realness outside themselves, as a mere ought or hope. In sharp contrast to these types of programs we must base our understanding of “program” here on the sense that is used in electronic and computer technology or in genetics. The program of a washing machine or a word processor and the program encoded in genes have their realness in themselves. They are a priori finished, in the status of the perfect tense. They are like an algorithm. Such a program must therefore not still be realized. It is free of any ought. Rather than making this program real you merely “run” it as that which is complete within itself from the outset. It is in this sense that the Parable of the Cave is a program. Its being “made real” therefore consists in the “running” of it, unreservedly and for so long, so often, and on ever more subtle levels of reality, until there is no reality left any more and anywhere that would not already have been subjected to the processing of this engine, a processing which turns being into illusory being and produces from out of the raw material called “natural reality” (mythically experienced reality) a virtual reality. It would therefore be totally wrong to think that Plato had prescribed this program to Occidental mankind. He is not its author or inventor at all. He merely articulated the “algorithm” that was inherent in the soul’s revolutionary shift from mythos to logos, and had already unwittingly been at work for a few centuries since that shift prior to Plato. Thus it is the soul’s program, and what the Parable of the Cave is about both antedates Plato and extends its reaches beyond him way into the future, into our time. Plato is merely the point where it, as it were, surfaces, comes to light. In responding to the immediate problem that had become virulent and pressing at his own time, Plato at the same time and unwittingly happened to articulate with his Parable of the Cave something that does not belong merely to his time, nor only to the philosophy of classical antiquity as a whole, nor even

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merely to philosophy proper and the history of ideas at large, but to the history of man’s real, concrete being-in-the-world as such. In the Parable of the Cave, the innermost truth, the blueprint, and the logic of operation9 informing the whole world characterized by “thought” (reflected being) became explicit, a truth and logic that had implicitly already been operative ever since the world-shattering shift from mythos to logos. But the revolutionary shift from mythos to logos is precisely not a single, one-time event like a cut that occurred way back in the historical past and at one blow expelled human existence from mythos and transported it into logos. Or rather, it is this single cut, but this cut is happening as an ongoing process, as that one great extended event that we call the history of the last 3,000 years or so. It is, in other words, a cut that as a cut has nevertheless the character of a prolonged alchemical opus. Logically it is indeed a cut, sudden, abrupt, absolute, like black and white without grey tones in between, without a gradual transition from the one to the other. But in empirical history, this cut takes time. It happens like geological upheavals and ruptures happen in geological time. In this sense, Occidental history is to be comprehended as the alchemical laboratory in which the prima materia (the logic of the world and of human existence in the world) are being worked and transformed, transformed, as it were, from the stage of the unio naturalis into the stage of unio mentalis. The many different operations that were executed during this process (separatio, putrefactio, mundificatio, sublimatio, evaporatio, distillatio, etc.) as well as all the different concrete movements in intellectual and economic history, each with its own specific contribution to the opus, through which these operations upon the prima materia were performed (Christianization, Scholasticism, Renaissance, Enlightenment, modern science and technology, industrialization, the rise of capitalism and consumerism, to give only a few general examples) will not be our topic here. Rather, we will turn directly to the result of this millennia-encompassing alchemical work, as far as it has become visible in our time. Today we seem to have entered the exciting age in which the process of the realization of the cave as the new logical locus of human existence or man’s being-in-the-world seems to draw to its (beginning) 9

The engine character.

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fulfillment. This I will try to suggest by pointing, rather superficially, to major characteristic aspects of and developments in our time, in the hope that through their enumeration a sense of the inner truth of the present form of existence emerges. Four moments make up the essential reality of the cave existence or of the logic of illusory being. • The shadow as the empty, vain illusion, as the mere reflectedness of a formerly substantial being. • The being tied up, that is, the powerful fascination by beautiful, uplifting, captivating illusions (“illusory being”) such as show, glamor, entertainment, attractions providing free-floating 10 pleasure. • The cave as a narrow, tight inside-room cut off from the real world, which however presents itself as the new (illusory, virtual) world in miniature, that is, as the new all-comprehensive notion of all reality. • The sun (or the Idea of the Good, i.e., Money) as the split-off, isolated ultimate truth of illusory being and as its spiritus rector— or as the new form of God.11

THE LOGIC OF THE PRESENT TIME AS THE REALITY OF

ILLUSORY BEING

I will try to illustrate the four moments just mentioned by means of concrete phenomena from the world of positive things. However, these phenomena must be understood merely as small empirical signs or symptoms of the fact that in the depth the logic of illusory being itself has long begun to permeate our reality and now surfaces congealing in concretized forms. It will not always be possible to clearly decide whether a particular phenomenon belongs more to the one or to the other group. They are of course all interlocked, being moments of one and the same radical change. Each phenomenon at least indirectly implies and involves all the others. 10 It is to be noted that the being tied up consists in free-floatingness (abstractness, indifference, arbitrariness). Being tied up presupposes or implies Frei-Zeit (“free(d) time,” leisure time). 11 The God of Schein (illusory being) is, as a matter of course, only a Schein god (a seeming or illusory god).

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SHADOW REALITY The status of shadow implies that the real is reflected, desubstantialized, derealized, and is only as derealized still real. It is reality as fundamentally sublated. This can be seen precisely from the modern status that the very epitome of substantiality and corporeality is in, the human body as viewed by modern medicine. To the extent that it is truly modern, medicine apperceives the body no longer in its sensible presence nor by means of sensory perception. Where it still does this, it continues old traditional modes of medicine. But where it is truly modern, it relates to the body as it is simulated through computer images, but how it could never be seen by the unarmed human eye. Frequently, the colors on the screen do not represent visible objective colors, but are freely chosen, artificially posited. In other words, what becomes visible is the already reflected, thought body, not the one that is immediately given. In a similar way satellite images of our earth or of weather processes do not represent what is sensibly perceptible. It is not what the human eye would see, if it were up there, not even what the eye armed with telescopes would see. What they show is an always already processed image, the result of computer calculations. The image is not simple, innocent image, but starts out as one that has already gone through reflection and conceptual thought. It comes as interpreted. Formerly one could assume that a photograph was the picture of something and in this sense had the status of a document (proof ). Nowadays, in the age of digitized images and image processing, the meaning of “photography” has fundamentally changed. Photos can be manipulated at will, without leaving a trace as a manual retouching would. One can change the facial expression (the mood shown) on the faces of people or eliminate persons from or insert them into a scene. All this means that the notion of truth itself (in the sense of a correspondence) is objectively decomposed. It has become meaningless. From now on it is objectively clear for the soul that a photographic picture cannot ipso facto have the status of a proof. The image is simply by definition not the image of something real. It only shows itself. It is show, presentation. The concept of truth and reality is sublated. Also, the fact that an image is optically composed of so many pixels and in reality of a series of zeros and ones undermines the very notion

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of “image,” “figure,” Gestalt. The figure is essentially an organic whole, a unity in such a way that all its details are animated by this unity. Of course, dream images do not come as pixels or digital data. But for the soul, today’s reality of the logic of the image also fundamentally undermines the reality of the archetypal image. Only the naïve, easily impressible ego might succumb to the suggestive power that the inner images as show still have and believe that they remain immune to such changes. But the soul knows better. It has lost this innocence. Flight captains once upon a time oriented themselves by their immediate perception of the weather conditions outside the aircraft’s windows. The modern captain is largely cut off from direct sensory perception. He receives his information via sensors and computer screens. We have nowadays flight simulators that have the purpose of imitating real flight situations. But the point is that just as the flight simulator imitates the real situation, the situation in a real cockpit has also become similar to that in the flight simulator. Both situations are not really distinguishable. The real cockpit as well as the flight simulator are small replicas of the Platonic cave. They pull the external world around them into a small interior space and reproduce it there in the sublated form of “shadows”: as computer images or signals from information-providing devices. Quite obviously the living room has today taken on the character of a cave. We sit for hours, tied to our armchairs, in front of our television sets, and the world comes to us into our living rooms in sublated form via the television screens, as show, image, shadows of immediate reality. Everything presented on television has ipso facto been sublated in the absolute indifference of “anything goes.” This is why there is on television an indiscriminate array of soap operas, news about war casualties, talk shows, the latest statistics of the number of unemployed, quiz shows, earthquake disasters, etc. It is also well known that politics, real politics, has to a large extent become a show and is more and more drawn into the world of television. Not only are elections lost and won through television, the politicians, too, are largely only the Platonic shadows of real politicians, a priori reflected; they are illusory being, inasmuch as they perceive themselves and reality via the image that they and the political issues present in the media and that they wish to present. They have their logical or psychological place not really in reality, but in the cave of their image,

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of public opinion, of the show they have to present. Small wonder that actors and media moguls can become heads of state. It is questionable whether we are still living in democracies or not much rather in mediacracy. War correspondents are nowadays equipped with portable satellite receivers, so that they are constantly informed about the general reporting in the media and public opinion. They thus do not see what happens during the war that they witness directly through their own eyes alone. Their seeing is already informed by the trends and views of the public in their home countries and by the categories inherent in those views. Television swallows up the real world and gives birth to it again as a reflected, illusory one. We all experience that the exchange or market value has indeed taken the place of the utility value of objects. Pocket calculators and electronic watches are often given away for a few dollars. Price and value have been dissociated. The same computer software can be offered by the producing company for a very high or a very low price; the price decision is made not according to the real value of the product, but tactically according to marketing considerations. In the case of electronic products the idea of the factual value of an item has been altogether decomposed anyway, because in view of the immense development cost on the one hand and the possibility to copy the oncedeveloped product a million times without considerable expense on the other hand, the price of the individual item is a priori artificial; it has to be artificially set because it is impossible to say what it is worth. Electronic products no longer have their being in their material, substantial existence (e.g., in the diskette on which a software is purchased), but they are through and through of an ideal nature. Which is of course also the reason why one only buys a licence to use the program and not the software itself. But ordinary products and commodities have also been annihilated as far as their logical status as “substantial being” and their own dignity is concerned: first very generally through their incorporation into the world of a consumer society, in which, through their consumption, their logical vanity is revealed. Then there is the fact underlining the same aspect that the commodities also belong into the world of the modern throw-away society. Even more fundamental (because it does not merely refer to the use of the finished merchandise,

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but to its very origin) is the fact that in an ecologically oriented society the recyclability and safe disposability of products has to be taken into consideration prior to the production process. If the idea of waste disposal stands at the beginning of the production process, it means that the products are also produced as future waste. The idea of waste and trash is a primary and comprehensive perspective, which demonstrates that the solid substantiality of the products is sublated. In their true logical status, the commodities are a priori waste (and thus in the last analysis worthless) even when they come fresh from the factory and are still in their shiny original wrapping. Whereas former civilizations were concerned with producing their major cultural products for eternity (both in the sense of sub specie aeternitatis and in the sense “that they might last forever”)—their pyramids, temples, cathedrals, parchment books—we have to note that one of the most pressing concerns of our civilization is how to dispose of nuclear as well as more ordinary waste. Although this interest in “getting rid” is of course demanded by practical empirical necessities, it is also indicative of the psychological changes in the constitution of being in our age and helps to inscribe into consciousness the soul’s project of the decomposition of the reality character and substantiality of reality as such. When we think of “classical modern” art, the art of the Cubists and the movements following them, we see that natural reality was portrayed as one whose substantial intactness had already been decomposed. The Cubists did not try to paint the sensibly given any more, but the concept or essence (one might almost be tempted to say: the Platonic Idea) of the sensible object. The natural world had been seen through as being shadows. Extremely important and characteristic of our age is the institution of advertising. Advertising is all-present and permeates almost all of modern life. Its task, too, is to translate all reality into the status of shadow and to bring this shadow character out into the open for everyone to see. Great works of art like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, architectural treasures of mankind like the pyramids or Greek temples, the beauty and virginal wilderness of tropical forests, spectacular landscapes like that of the Grand Canyon, elegant cheetahs, funny apes, and domesticated animals, the sensual appeal of the human body, highest spiritual, emotional, moral goals

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and values like love, freedom, happiness, adventure, coziness, purity, peace—all come up in advertising, are given back to us by it, but precisely only as something fundamentally depleted, devalued, cheapened. It is hardly possible to still appreciate the Mona Lisa for example; this picture has been spoiled for us, worn out. It cannot be overlooked that advertising often makes use of (quasi) archetypal ideas for its purposes. Advertising celebrates (this word can here be taken in its full religious meaning) everything that belongs to natural reality and to the world of man, but precisely only as empty form, as external design, as cliché without any substantial content. And it celebrates all this only for the purpose of adorning the advertised product with the abstract value of the celebrated reality. The association of a product with any of these celebrated values, feelings or realities is usually completely arbitrary. There is no intrinsic connection, e.g., between freedom and adventure on the one hand and a brand of cigarettes on the other hand. The values, emotions, ideals, human desires, as they appear in advertising, are totally detached from any real substrate, totally free-floating, self-satisfied, and only as such freefloating ideas, as what the Medieval nominalists called a flatus vocis, are they by association and suggestion artificially connected with a product. Freud distinguished between a taking possession with the purpose of the destruction or the preservation of the object. Similarly, we can also distinguish between a celebration of something with either the one or the other purpose. And then we would have to say that advertising celebrates what it touches for the (hidden) purpose of destroying (logically decomposing it, i.e., draining it of all inherent substantial meaning and dignity). The institution of advertising is a great mincing machine. The sole real relation to reality of advertising—its objective purpose of profit maximization and the subjective interest of the advertising agency in getting income—belongs already to the sphere of illusory being in its highest form as Money. It is not profit that is the truth of advertising. Profit is only the sprat with which to catch the mackerel, the bait by which man is lured into pushing ahead the alchemical opus of the translation of all reality into illusory being. The truth of advertising is the presentation of reality as illusory being and of illusory being as illusory being and thus the production of absolute virtuality (Schein).

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Advertising often produces pictures of the highest technical expertise and highest esthetic perfection, so that one might feel tempted to ask whether it could not perhaps be that the greatest and most authentic works of art of our time are created in the advertising industry (provided one is willing to narrow down one’s notion of art and of beauty to mere formalism). In support of this view one might also think of the fact that some of the greatest creative talents have today been absorbed by the advertising industry. But this does not alter the fact that whatever has entered the world of advertising is, as that reality that it once had been, annihilated, sublated. Highly significant and revealing is also the feature of our time that it is a time of absolute presentation—absolute presentation because it is (and is meant to be) the presentation of nothing. The packaging, the show, the image in the PR-sense of the word are ends unto themselves. What is presented is the presentation per se. This tendency has become objectified in the existence of presentations, layout, and image processing programs. In this way and in combination with modern laser or inkjet printers, powerful tools are made available to the ordinary layman to create fancy documents without much effort and without special training. This shifts the emphasis away from the substantial content, which often is rather poor, to the visible form. The same is true in schools, where the production of fancy presentations by pupils is sometimes more important than the ideas and the information that the presentation is about. Much energy goes into the design, and graphic artists often dictate a format that is contrary to practical needs or to logical meaning. The optical impression triumphs. The mind loses out. Book covers, it seems, must now have a picture on them, regardless of whether the picture has an intrinsic relation to the content and makes a real contribution to it or is merely stuck on as an eye-catcher. The wrapping not only makes itself independent of the content, it also seems to gain superiority over it. Another striking example for this exteriorization, now on home ground, namely the essence of man, is to be found in sports. The big sports events, watched by thousands or millions of people either live or on television, demonstrate to everyone who has eyes to see that man has in his essence been reduced to being a living advertising billboard. The excitement of the games or competitions is here, too, only the sprat to catch the mackerel with. One should

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not let oneself be fooled by the intensity of the emotions, which of course get our primary attention. Psychologically something else is important: champion sportsmen and sportswomen and the excitement they cause exist for the sake of advertising, advertising is not just a negligible accessory to the all-important sports achievement and the excitement it causes. Furthermore, the fact that top soccer players are literally sold and bought by the various clubs should not be seen as an isolated phenomenon restricted to one limited area of life, sports. It is an isolated sign of the general truth about the essence of man, namely that he, too, has logically become merchandise, even if not empirically. Even royalties are commercially exploited, just as actors and other celebrities, but also ordinary people, sell themselves by exposing themselves and intimate details of their lives in magazines, talk shows, or reality TV. The essence of man is pulled into show business. Man no longer has his essence in himself as his substance, has personality. Even where, as in show business, the personality of show masters is essential for their success, this personality is merely an asset or tool to do his business with, not his inner substance. Not that feature through which such persons stand out, but the sensational aspect of their standing out is what counts. A noteworthy spectacle is how through “lean production” and other efficiency measures in industry jobs are rationalized away for the purpose of a company’s becoming competitive on the world market. For thousands of people this is vivid proof of their having become redundant, superfluous, worthless and in this way ejected from out of reality altogether. They are forced to live the life of shadows. We must here not make the mistake of seeing only the superficial aspect, namely that this affects only one particular area of life, that it is only an external factual event that does not touch who and what they are, and that, even though out of a job, they nevertheless gain one advantage, the advantage of having lots of free time to spend on other worthwhile things. All this is empirically true, but logically, psychologically the empirical reality of having been made redundant is the visible sign of the true status of the people concerned, and not only of their status. What happens to the still relatively small percentage of the whole population is the display of the revolutionary fact that the nature of man itself has taken on shadow character.

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Even the very concept of life is depleted of its substantial content and transformed into the abstract-formal notion of life as the functioning of organs and as merely biological life (vegetating, naked life) as something that needs to be preserved at all cost. The question what a truly human life is does not count. Life does not have a content or substance or goal, it is reduced to the formality or “mechanism” of being alive. This becomes especially apparent in two powerful shifts in our world, first the concentration of so much passion on the issue of abortion (no matter whether it be pro or contra), secondly the factual development of modern medicine that makes the transplantation of organs, artificial procreation, perhaps even cloning possible. The counterpart to this is that the very idea of life in a substantial sense, in the sense of a human life for something and out of a source (a tradition, a religion, a social or spiritual commitment), which has not disappeared altogether, has been translated into its formalistic or “shadow” form in the “life-style” idea. Tourism is another way in which a formerly real world is turned into a virtual one and pulled into “show.” Since the objects of sightseeing have their fixed location and cannot travel, the “audience” of the “show” travels to them and recreates them on location as elements of the show. The expression “reality TV” and the phenomenon designated by this name make it unmistakably clear that reality, i.e., the realness of reality itself, is being pulled into television. The logical essence of reality changes. Reality no longer has its logical place in reality. It emigrated from itself and settled in illusory being, in virtuality. It becomes reality in the new sense only once it has been reborn in television and as show. Adjusting a famous statement of St. Augustine to our topic (i.e., inverting it), we can say: Noli in te ipsum ire. In repraesentationes redi. In interiore televisione habitat veritas (“Don’t go into yourself. Turn around to ‘representations’ [or shows]. Truth resides inside television”).12 And his vanitas foris, veritas intus, we would likewise have to turn around: truth is not inside, it is precisely in the very vanitas, in illusory being, where, however, these terms always have to be taken in their logical or ontological dimension, not in their immediate empirical or personalistic-psychological senses. 12 Augustine had said: Noli foras ire; in te ipsum redi: in interiore homine habitat veritas [“Don’t go outside; turn back (or around) into yourself: truth resides inside man,”] (De vera religione 39, 72).

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Around 1900 there still existed a concept of honor as a living power. Honor was that idea or fiction that bestowed upon a person his or her substantial being. Most blatantly this is seen from the fact that a person who had the misfortune of going bankrupt was more or less obligated to shoot himself in order to restore his honor. Now politicians and captains of industry can be found guilty of corruption or serious finance crimes (for which often thousands of workers have to pay the price), but that does not put them beyond the pale nor stop them from perhaps cashing in on what they did, by appearing in talk shows and the like, which has of course its counterpart in, and is supported by, a public eager for disclosures and treasuring sensational qualities far higher than moral standards. Inasmuch as today “honor” is a word without meaning, just an empty combination of sounds, it becomes clear to what extent man has his essence no longer in himself as his inner substance. Precisely because honor was a fiction, an invisible inner value that was nevertheless publically considered to be a sine qua non of being human (or at least a respectable member of society), it was one way the sense of man’s essence as an inner substance was both acknowledged and held alive. Perhaps the most fundamental feature to be at least mentioned in this context is the decomposition of language. Abbreviations and acronyms take the place of words or expressions that have a soul (a meaning, feeling tones, and intralinguistic associations). Language is both in practice and in linguistic theory reduced to its partial limited function as a tool for communicating information. This, too, is a fundamental exteriorization. The place of words, we could say, has been taken by linguistic signals. Language in its innermost nature is transformed into the shadow form of itself. Also, the nature of speaking has changed. Actually, the typical thing is that people do not just speak any more, expressing themselves or their opinion, but produce calculated statements a priori (although often unconsciously) aimed at having a certain effect on the public. Speech is a reflected reality from the outset. So far I listed mainly examples for the sublation of the substantial nature of the world of things and beings. The translation of reality from being into illusory being also shows in something else: in the sublation of space and time, in their being deprived of their sensible reality. Modern means of transportation (car, intercity express trains,

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airplanes, rockets) relativize the limitations of space and time. Electric light suspends the difference between day and night, a time-honored difference of mythological dignity. Whereas formerly the year was structured by holidays, which assured that time had a qualitative character, the depletion of holidays of their substantial (metaphysical, religious) significance to nothing but days off from work and time for fun deprives time also of this remnant of its qualitative substance. Even more significant is the sublation of space and time through modern communications technology. Because information has become digitized and turned into an electronic impulse, it can be spread over the globe at the speed of light. In effect, it can be at once at all and any places on earth (“telepresence”). This demonstrates that time and space, both as empirical experience and as Kantian transcendental forms of intuition, have been sublated. In a telefax letter I positively hold the sublatedness of the sensory, substantial reality of the letter in my hands. It is obviously a case of “illusory being” that the fax is a letter.13 With a real letter, something passed materially from the writer to the recipient. This sheet of paper my friend, my beloved herself, had held in her hand. This is her handwriting and it still shows me some of her emotion. Here a tear of hers fell onto the paper, and the paper still emits a trace of the scent of her perfume. All this sensory reality has been filtered out in the case of a fax. The sensible presence that a fax letter can have is always one provided by the recipient himself who supplies his own paper and printer. Sender and addressee remain each on their own side. The fax letter has its place exclusively in the medium of abstract universal, “information,” into which both the writer and the addressee “logged in,” and this is what gives the illusory impression of there having been a communication. In Homer, people (e.g., Odysseus in his travels) oriented themselves on the earth through looking at the stars and planets, which were gods. Plato oriented himself on the earth by looking up to the everlasting Ideas, which were the successor figurations of the gods or the sublated gods (planets). We seemingly again orient ourselves by looking up to heavenly bodies, namely to communications, television and spy satellites which are the sensible-objectified representation of 13 E-mail, which became so popular after this paper was written, would be an even better case in point. (Note added 2006).

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Plato’s supersensible Ideas. But precisely because they seemingly are the return to the Homeric mode of orientation, they are now the explicit representation of the sublatedness of the planets or gods, their representation as illusory being or as virtual reality (whereas Plato’s Ideas were to be sure this sublation, but only implicitly [an sich] or for us, but not yet in such a way that they themselves would have made this explicitly visible. As late as for Kant there was a distinction of metaphysical significance between above and below. He was able to look up, with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, to the “starry heaven above me.” Today there is no longer an above and a below, just as the “in me” of the moral law, revered by Kant simultaneously with the heaven above, as well as the Augustinian veritas that resided in interiore homine are gone. All these qualities of space have been sublated into the indifference and simultaneity of (owing to the speed of light) universally present “information.” And along with these qualities, the corresponding feelings such as devotion and awe are finished, indeed, the words for them have lost their meaning; they are now only sounds. Today our life (our real life, i.e., our logical life) therefore neither takes place in empirically real space, nor in metaphysical space, but decidedly in that sublated space that is called “information” or cyberspace. In cyberspace, the real space with its distances has simply been dropped. The technologies of virtual reality make it possible that for conferences, people from all continents can (seemingly) directly come together in the here and now (i.e., in the “telepresence”) of a virtual space. BEING TIED UP What first may come to mind when thinking about the second moment of the Parable of the Cave, that of being tied up, is the emergence and continual perfection of the “captivating,” enthralling novels (and later movies) during modernity: detective stories, mysteries, thrillers. Consciousness gains through these means the possibility to become abducted from out of the real world and to be totally, although only temporarily, pulled into and captivated by an artificial world. Throughout the ages at least since late Antiquity there have been adventure stories of diverse kinds with heroes, knights, monsters and dangers to be overcome, unheard of miracles, etc. To go

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off into fantasy land has been an age-old pleasure for the mind. But if one looks at the Hellenistic novels, the romances of the Middle Ages, the picaresque novels of the 16th and 17th centuries, to mention only these examples, one is struck by the slow pace of the action, the broad epic descriptions, the relative comfortableness, harmlessness, and naïveté of the plots. They had their eager readers, too, but that kind of captivating power that our modern thrillers have and are meant to have one seeks in vain in them, and it was probably not intended either. It is something truly new. And what is new is that the main purpose is to enthrall the mind, to hold it captive. The plot and the action are secondary, mere means to the end of suspense. Consciousness demands the objective reified representations of its truth of being logically tied up, and it demands opportunities for literally celebrating this its logical status for certain times, and periodically again and again. Another type of objective representation of this need of the modern soul is drug abuse and all sorts of addictions. The addictions are the perfect empirical-experiential demonstration of the logical character of being tied up, inescapably captivated. Their immediate purpose for the persons concerned is, just as with the thrilling novels and movies, their being abducted from out of real life. The addicts are only a small percentage of the whole population, but what they do with their addiction they (unwittingly and unintentionally) also do for all those who are not addicted, for society at large. Through their literally acting out a general logical character of modern man’s being­ in-the-world, they visibly demonstrate to all of us one aspect of the soul’s truth today. Sports events, such as the Olympics or football and soccer games have a similar function. They have their psychological right to exist in that they produce immediate, live suspense, stir up passionate emotions and in this way take consciousness totally prisoner for themselves for as long as they and their effects last. The violence practiced by some members of fan clubs in connection with such events is not only a consequence of the disinhibiting effect of too much alcohol drunk by them; it is above all a means for getting more absolutely intensive high feelings. Major sports events belong today to the logic of panem et circenses, earlier known in our history only from later Roman times. Circenses is a keyword in general, perhaps best translated into our modern language by “entertainment industry,” or by “opium for

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the people” (Karl Marx 14 ). Entertainment happens in and presupposes Freizeit, “leisure time,” in the strict logical sense of free(d) time, time unmoored from any attachments and binding obligations, but it serves the converse purpose of radically captivating consciousness and of thereby visibly displaying the soul’s already prevailing logical status as tied-up soul. The absolute unmooring of time and the status of being tied up belong together. This is the dialectic of “being tied up.” Anything that has the power to excite, to stir up passions, to give people a kick is welcome as a means to create concrete literal instances of enthrallment and thus (at least temporary) of mindlessness. The entertainment industry therefore has to appeal primarily to the lower instincts and needs, to the senses and sensuality. Violated taboos, nudity, sexuality, cruel crimes, natural disasters, scandals, spectacular news, sensations are most helpful in this connection. This is also why the absolute newness of news becomes so important. The media want to be the first to break the news, and the audience wants to have the illusory feeling of being almost present live while something is happening. Instantaneousness both of reporting and of receiving the news becomes of prime importance, although in most cases it would not make any real difference if one learned about these news items a day or a week later. Not the intrinsic importance of news, but their “newsworthiness,” i.e., its power to excite, is what makes it important. This is why “important” does not really mean important in the sense of lasting significance—tomorrow it may already be forgotten—, but only important now. And often, when nothing happened that was really exciting or sensational, television broadcasting stations help making it at least look like a sensation by postponing the regular program and inserting a special program about an event to inflate it a bit simply by giving it so much special attention. It is the excitement that turns a show into a show in the first place. The shadow play in the cave presupposes the tied-up audience, and it so happens that the fetters consist in the stirred-up emotions that blind the mind. This is why investigative journalism is so important: the hunt for new sensations. The tied-up audience needs to be constantly fed with sensations in order to stay tied up. The 14 Marx used this phrase with respect to religion. But it fits all sorts of entertainment, not only that “higher” and “inner, spiritual” entertainment called religion.

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sensations and the like are the fuel with which to light the fire of the emotions constantly afresh. The ties, as we have seen, are not literal fetters, but performative. And this is why, e.g., Heidegger could consider “boredom” an entrance gate to philosophy, 15 because boredom is the opposite and enemy of a state of being captivated by stirred-up emotions. Thrill and excitement16 are but one mode of celebrating the soul’s logical status of being captivated. Another possible means is anesthetization. Here the dullness and stupidity of certain television quiz shows can be mentioned. They have a stupefying effect. They lull, not the audience but the thinking mind of the audience, into a dazed state because of their triviality. Whereby the triviality at the same time beautifully reconfirms once more the character of cave time as absolutely unmoored, indifferent time. The deafening noise in discotheques or of walkman music also serves the purpose of dulling the waking mind. A third important tool for celebrating the psychological status of being tied-up is certain mass events, such as demonstrations, pop concerts, mass Church congresses (Kirchentage). The subjects or contents can be truly important ideals, such as justice, human rights, freedom, religious faith. So it is not primarily the issues that make me mention such events in this context, but the very mass character of the events, in other words, their form aspect. Although mass events can evoke strong affects, too, this is not the point to be made here in connection with them. I am thinking of an effect that applies also to events of this nature even when they go on very quietly. This effect is the creation of an unconscious herd feeling, of the illusion of being amidst thousands of like-minded people. This, the form (and actually experienced feeling) of being contained in the fold of the like-minded, is, it seems to me, what gives them their true importance, whereas the explicit issues and topics become secondary, in the last analysis merely the fuel for creating the warm feeling of belonging, for which 15 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit, Gesamtausgabe vol. 29/30 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), esp. Part One. 16 As David Miller pointed out in a letter to me, the addiction to pornography on the computer and in hotel cinema (where actual touching cannot take place: shadow reality!) could be mentioned as an additional instance, especially if one considers that the gross monetary take on pornography now exceeds that of both professional football and professional basketball in the USA. (Note added 2006.)

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they are used up. In this sense of belonging, the free(d) time—the time cut out from normal life with all its restraints—is made real again; and at the same time the immediacy of the feeling of belonging is a most captivating experience. Another aspect of such mass happenings is one’s immediate participation in their show character. Either one is oneself one of the demonstrators (= actors in the show), or one even gets perhaps an opportunity for one’s self-presentation if one is allowed to speak to the audience through a microphone. What today goes under the rubric of “culture” (the way this word is understood in our time) belongs to the same logical sphere of entertainment as television, sports and other sensational events, although admittedly it belongs in empirical, semantical regards to an altogether different class. The Salzburg or Bayreuth Festivals cannot, of course, be compared with the trivialities of television quiz shows or with football games. But logically they are entertainment in just the same sense as those events. It is merely entertainment for a different taste, of a more sophisticated level, and often for a different social class. What counts in our context is that the freed-time aspect and the being tied up are celebrated here, too. Nevertheless, television is probably the major way in which the second moment of the cave existence realizes itself. When one considers that millions of people spend hours in front of television every day, and furthermore, that children frequently grow up watching television (if they do not grow up, so to speak, “within” it, encompassed by it), the enormous power of the state of being tied up becomes apparent. The viewing figures and top ratings of television programs, but also the profit made with movies in the cinemas and the sales figures of bestsellers can be interpreted as a kind of objective measure of the captivating power. And yet it is not just the fact that we sit so regularly and for so long in front of our television sets that reveals the captivating power of television. This power shows much more in something far less noticeable, namely in the fact that we do not merely, not really, sit vis-à-vis television, as it first appeared, but in actuality inside it. For more and more we are already looking into the world and into life through the perspectives imparted to us by television, even when we are not literally watching television.

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THE CAVE WORLD The third moment of the cave existence is the self-enclosed interior room of the cave itself. The inside room of the cave is not just like any interior. It is that special interior that has pulled the whole external world and reality into itself, appropriated it, so as to reproduce it there in miniaturized shadowy form as its own property. We could use for this movement the psychological term “introjection,” although in a not psychic, but logical sense. There are a number of impressive real examples in which the cave receives visible objective representations and which therefore can serve as so many individual images for the cave. We already mentioned the cinema and television (the living room with its television set). Another one is Disneyland. It is a limited, fenced-in area which has the purpose to recapitulate within itself the large real world in toy model size. The toy model character reveals what is shown of the world as being fundamentally sublated. The enormous fascination of Disneyland is probably based on the fact that it offers to the imagination a real sensible aid and support for experiencing the great Occidental project of the realization of the cave. Disneyland is of course in empirical regards by no means a complete representation of the world. It cannot drag the world as a whole into itself in order to let it reemerge there anew. But this is also not necessary. All the soul needs is “to get the idea,” to see the idea representatively realized in symbolic form. By demonstrating through a sufficient number of examples this miniaturized reproduction of (aspects of ) the world within a well-circumscribed interior space, the imagination is enabled to complete the intended picture that is factually merely suggested (the picture of the successful introjection of the world at large) and so to logically experience and celebrate in Disneyland the cave as realized in sensory reality. This fulfills the soul of modern man (who for the most part has not heard of Plato’s cave and is unsuspecting about the cave as the grand project of the Occident) with great satisfaction and gratification, the external manifestation of which is this fascination (of the ego). The project of the Occident is not individual people’s project or the project of consciousness. It is the project of the unconscious soul, a project that asserts itself and prevails even in spite of consciousness.

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Very expressive as an image is also the project named “Biosphere 2 ,” an experiment planned in America and designed to last one hundred years. A number of people are supposed to live in a hermetically closed artificial world, which however is supposed to simulate the real world in miniature. In an airtight glass structure of 1.3 hectare area, a mini-world with a tropical rain forest, a desert, a savanna, arable land and an ocean has been constructed and people, who are supposed to move into it for a limited time only, have to live in it under self-sufficient conditions. The idea is that this might also serve the preparation and as a test for the creation of a space station into which life on earth and man could possibly withdraw as if into a kind of Noah’s ark, if life on earth should in the future have become uninhabitable through a nuclear or environmental catastrophe. This idea, which had already been expressed in numerous science fiction novels and movies, shows symbolically or symptomatically to what extent the soul has already made itself at home in the idea of an exodus from the real world and of its immurement in a cave, and how fascinating this idea is for it. A further image of powerful realness is the shopping mall. Whereas stores are particular rooms which are clearly in and part of the real world and into which one enters for special purposes, the shopping mall is a priori conceived as a self-sufficient world of its own. It is an interior room into which—pars pro toto and at least according to the underlying idea— the whole world has withdrawn. In it the consumer experiences the sublatedness of the real world, which is returned to him as a illusory (virtual) world of the infinite variety of consumer goods and of the complete gratification of needs. Soothing music is supposed to lull him into an artificial feeling of comfort and happiness. In addition to the literal shopping malls, whole inner city areas are being stylized in the direction of shopping malls through pedestrian zones and remodeled stores. In very different, more metaphorical or sublimated ways the immurement of the soul in the cave takes place through the so-called walkman. The person with a walkman seems to move through the real world; he is sitting in a tram, he does his homework, he is jogging through nature, and yet in actuality he is totally enwrapped in the music coming at deafening volume from his walkman and, as far as the soul (not the ego) is concerned, shielded from the external world. This, too, is an interior world. One must not be misled by the external

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impression that the person with a walkman is in the outside world and as ego may be fully aware of it. In truth, i.e., psychologically, logically, he is inside the hermetically sealed world of sound, swallowed by it and unable to hear anything outside, while from the point of view of the ego he is merely listening to it and in control of it. Walkmans are instruments for the voluntary self-introjection of people into the interiority of the cave, here a “subtle-body” cave of music. Another sublimated way of encasing oneself in a pure interior world, an idios kosmos, is obviously the use of those drugs that are often (mis)named “mind-expanding.” Slot machines, gameboys, computer games, all of which can totally enthrall people for hours (which is part of “being tied up”), are similarly ways how consciousness voluntarily cocoons itself in the cave (again in its sublimated form), namely in a sublated, simulated reality. In many of the computer games it is a question of fighting against monsters, evil powers and intruders from outer space, in other words, of themes that are not in principle different from the topics of tales about the tasks of mythic heroes and from the fantasy games played by children of former times, such as “cops and robbers” or “cowboys and Indians.” But whereas the earlier children’s games were played “out there” in the real world, with the result that the imagination animated this real world and the real players with archetypal meanings, fantasy now resides inside the screen or the computer and conversely pulls man’s consciousness out of the world and into the interior of “the computer.” The computer games no longer open up “World,” they shut consciousness inside their interior worlds. Another even more intensive version of “cave” related to that of the computer games is the hi-tech cyberspace or virtual reality installations where, similarly to flight simulators, a person as “cybernaut” is equipped with communication prostheses (data gloves, data suit, monitor glasses, etc.) and a set of artificial senses so that he can in fact enter an artificial computer-produced reality, move around in it and experience it and his own movement within it including all the tactile and acoustic sensations produced by his moving in it. The psychotherapeutic consulting room is another significant illustration of the realized Platonic cave, now an illustration with the emphasis on the experiential and existential side of human existence itself. It is a closed inner room, a temenos ‘cut out’ of the ordinary real world, in which the patient, by entering it, leaves the real world outside, turns his

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back to it, “forgets” it, in order to truly turn inwards. But by turning inwards into the cave of his own interiority and of his memory, the whole outside world, inasmuch as it is part of his experience or fantasy, and his own real life out there (his biography) is reborn (to some extent even recreated, reinvented) in shadow form from within this cave, as memory images. One’s own life experience with all its real events, conflicts and relations to others and one’s own true nature is supposed to be recapitulated and viewed in a mirror (“reflected”).17 Real life is systematically translated into a secondary world of images given out as the primary reality. Psychotherapy is the astounding ritual in which man logically immures himself in the (Platonic) cave, more than that: redefines himself as cave man, by translocating his essence and his logical place from out there in the real world inside, as an essentially inner reality, the world as image or “idea” (Vorstellung, Schopenhauer: “The World as … Idea”), as irrevocably sublated world. While for the most part still living and working in the real external world, he establishes, through this ritual, his true essence, figuratively speaking, in the interiority of the consulting room, and, in truth, in “the interior of the personality,” or in “his own unconscious.” The psychotherapeutic consulting room is the objective visualization or ritualistic concretization of the unconscious as “the inner,” and the idea of “the unconscious” is conversely the consulting room evaporated and distilled into the form of a mental conception, the consulting room incorporated into man’s self-understanding and as his self-understanding. The unconscious is thought and felt to be in us—which it needs to be in order to be the Platonic cave as an inner room in the first place. But as C. G. Jung never tired of impressing on his readers, in reality we are in it, surrounded by it on all sides. It is essential to understand that both mutually contradictory views must be maintained at the same time. The cave is in us, but we are really inside this cave that we harbor in ourselves, as its tied-up inmates, who are exposed to and often helplessly subject to the images produced by it. This is the dialectic of “the unconscious.” It is a self-contradictory notion. 17 Cf. James Hillman, “From Mirror to Window,” in Spring 49, 1989, where the narcissism of psychotherapy is brought out. Cf. also James Hillman & Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1992).

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Jungian psychology completed this internalization into the cave by no longer restricting it only to one’s personal biography and to current experiences in the world. In Jungian psychology the unconscious even swallowed God as “the God-image in the unconscious” or “the Self ” as well as our whole collective past as the “archetypes of the collective unconscious,” which are our sunken, sedimented (and thus sublated) cultural heritage. The cave has become all-comprehensive. It now includes and encompasses even the spiritual reality of human existence, the former world of metaphysics and religion. Speaking of religion, there is a much cruder version of the cave than this very subtle, distilled psychological version of it. This is the phenomenon that we call fundamentalism. This is much more like something we discussed before, the soul’s immurement in computer games and the like, only that it is more permanant than those temporary forms. In fundamentalism, the soul cocoons itself in a given religious creed, political ideology, or world view taken over as a readymade positivity. In contrast to “the unconscious” this is not a logical move in the sense of a real redefinition of man, but a subjective or ego move that requires some degree of constraint and thus “violence” toward oneself. In the case of fundamentalism, it is the immurement aspect itself (the activity of immuring oneself ) which is at the center and which is “acted out” rather than the cave as that into which one immures oneself (which is more or less exchangeable). In the case of the unconscious, however, what counts is the simple result of a real translocation, “the cave” as a logical locus (psychotherapy is a ritual that transforms the logic of being-in-the-world). Perhaps one could say that fundamentalism is a constant having to cross a threshold, while psychology in fact settles on the other side of the threshold. And this is why fundamentalism needs a constant vigilance and effort of the will to uphold this immurement; it is easy to see why it is often paired with a kind of fanaticism. The cave remains here without, as the given doctrine (a positivity!) in which one settles, whereas the idea of the interior of man and the psychotherapeutic work based on this idea have logically interiorized and distilled the cave (although, of course, not yet all the way: not into the pure concept of interiority, but still only as an imagined inner space). The interior of man is an image informing one’s way of seeing, the style of one’s self-conception, not a literal (positive) place and not, like belief-systems, a positivity, either.

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Not religion in former times (where it was in principle at the forefront of the development of consciousness), but certainly religion in modernity, where it is fundamentalist or spiritual entertainment, has been rightly characterized by Marx as “opium for the people.” Both fundamentalism and entertainment serve the purpose of numbing the mind, i.e., of turning man into cave man. The one works by providing a ready-made structure for the mind, thereby depriving man of the necessity to think actively, the other by providing diversions, distractions. Psychology’s idea of the inner or the unconscious is far more sophisticated and advanced as a form of the realization of the cave than is the phenomenon of fundamentalism. But the drawback of this advanced form is that like most of the previous forms mentioned (Disneyland, shopping mall, walkman, etc.), it too is a particular individual symbol of the cave within the world at large and not a representation of the real world’s immurement in the cave. With your unconscious you still know to have the real world all around you. Disneyland and shopping malls are special places that you go to at times and that need your special activity of going there for you to be in them; they are not around you all the time and regardless of whether you want to be there or not. They are essentially temporary, partial, and dependent on your subjective moves. Therefore they all are strong symbolizations of the cave, individual specific visualizations of what the cave reality is about, namely the real world’s having been introjected into a small interior, enclosed room, and reality’s having been translated into the form of illusory being or virtuality. But they are not themselves this reality of the cave as that which has truly swallowed and encompassed the real world within the confines of its inner space. And they are not this encasement as an objective reality that is no longer dependent on subjective doings and attitudes. Fundamentalism has an advantage here, because its religious or other ideology is thought to be all around you and around the real world all the time, and objectively so, because it is seen as the truth. The only trouble with fundamentalism in this respect is that it is the mere claim of truth, but does not have the form of truth. A truth speaks for itself. It needs no subjective effort, no will-power. It is not an assertion. It simply is. Remembering Jung’s insight that “every spiritual truth is gradually reified and turns into a substance or tool in the hand of man,” the cave

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in its all-encompassing reality and as the simple truth of modern human existence also has to find its full objective realization, i.e., materialization. And indeed, the gigantic project of a total networking spanning all the world and of the connection by cable (or wireless technology) of all households and institutions, businesses, even all apparatuses in households and businesses is the project of the objective realization of the cave itself in its full form and as the truth of existence. The words “Internet” and “World Wide Web” perfectly reveal what they are about. With total networking, human existence is totally placed inside a closed net or web. Information and communication are the spiders spinning their web around mankind and the world, and they are at the same time themselves this web in which man and world are caught. This web is the cave having come real and true. It is both the materialized Platonic cave and yet, as Platonic, a fundamentally subtle-bodied cave (“information,” “communication”). Its walls are not made of rock. Now it is really true: the frontier is closed. The “web” is all-inclusive, it does not have anything outside itself. It is there all the time and governs our lives even without our personally having to log into it. I am in the web, even if I refuse to own a computer. The open “World,” which was “World” because it originated through, and permanently existed as, the separation of the mythic world parents Heaven and Earth, has finally closed. The information and communication cave is the rescinding and undoing of the Heaven-Earth-separation and instead the installation of positivity. To be inside the cave amounts to an inversion of the relation between man and world. When man still lived in the real world, his sense organs and his intellectual sense (his reason) were an intermediate and mediating third through which he experienced reality (the reality of nature and of the divine). Sense organs and sense (mens) were simply the interfaces between both the real human being and the real world, which thus in fact met. In the cave, however, what before had been means and mediator (organ for experiencing the world) has turned into something in its own right. It has obtained an independent reality and has become explicit as its own end. This means that what had been in the middle has now been turned inside out to the position of the periphery around us, and along with it what had been outside and what it had been the mediation for, the world, has been pulled inside, into the middle. The world as what it once had been has, to be sure, dropped out altogether out of this game. Man now does not

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face it, the world, but only sense data, information, stimuli (the Platonic shadows). It is to them that he now relates, rather than relating through them and through his reason, which used to connect him with the divine, to what had been outside him, the world. However, between this new “outside” (the flood of sensible stimuli and of the input of information) and man, there arises, as a new middle, that successor figuration of the “World” that is called virtual reality or illusory being. This is the reversal of the relation of man and world. This also has effects for the nature of man. Although sense and information data come to him as input from outside, he is no longer

Fig. 1: The schematic structure of the in-itself dissociated mandala according to Jakob Böhme’s “Forty Questions Concerning the Soul” (1620) . In our context, the full circle represents the cave as the whole structure displayed in Plato’s parable, the two half circles the parable-internal cave (the cave in the narrower sense) and the world of sunlight respectively.[Diagram taken from Jacob Boehme, Forty Questions of the Soul, Facsimile Edition, trans. John Sparrow (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 1997), p. 45.]

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vis-à-vis them the way he was formerly vis-à-vis the world because as a sensible-physical being he is reached by them immediately, without distance. This is the very nature of stimuli. He turns logically, not necessarily empirically into the object of this input, into an appendage of the whole system of data. Just as in a literal virtual-reality setup the human being is, through his data suit etc., enclosed into the virtualreality equipment and hooked up to it, absorbed into it, so he has also in his logical essence as a cave dweller turned into a technical component within a large information and communication machine, namely into a receiver and a data-processing machine. THE SUN The fourth moment of the Platonic cave reality is the sun, the Idea of the Good or Money. Whereas the three other moments discussed so far are part of the immediate existence in the cave and thus of the cave as the story-internal image, the sun is, within the story, the cave’s radical other, indeed its own opposite, accessible only through an about-turn and through leaving the cave, although, as we have seen above, it is part of the whole cave reality in the wider sense, namely as the cave’s truth. The Platonic cave made real is the entire relation of “the cave itself ” as the system of entertainment and being cocooned within the great web of information and communication on the one hand and of Money as the truth of this system. This relation is a dissociated one (which in Plato’s narrative is represented by the motif of the about-turn). “Dissociated” does not simply mean split, cut into two. It means the contradiction of at once mutually excluding one another and of nevertheless being fundamentally inseparable, even dependent on one another, the one side being the truth of the other and the other the precondition of this truth, but of course in such a way that neither side is allowed to be conscious of the other (completely ignorant of each other, with their backs turned to each other). This dissociated relation of the infotainment side and the Money side of the cave reality as a whole can be visualized best with a mandala drawing by Jakob Böhme (which already Jung pointed to18), at least as far as the purely structural relationship is concerned. Böhme drew two half-circles back to back within a larger circle (see Fig. 1). 18

C. G. Jung, CW 9i § 534.

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The world outside the cave (in the narrower sense), the world of Money, permits a clear, unimpaired view of the real situation behind the entertainment side of the cave (in the wider sense), just as Plato’s sun provided access to a higher and eternal truth over against the transience and shadow nature of the world inside the cave. That Money is in all the aspects so far discussed the ultimately decisive force and that Money is all-present and all-mighty, inasmuch as nearly everything can be “sold” and as everything, even people, are venal, does not really need to be shown. One just has to keep in mind the incredible sums that are paid for the television rights for big sports events or the proceeds for video games and the like. From the outside perspective it is possible to see through the sentimentalism, the underlying nostalgia, the hollowness of the experience inside the cave and to also become aware of the captivation or addiction aspect. The naked glance at the financial forces underlying “the cave” may well appear as cynical because it mercilessly reveals the emptiness and shadow nature of the entertainment world, which here includes also the “higher” entertainments such as the ones called “the search for meaning” or “indulging in a sense of meaning.” It even includes the sciences, which can no longer be upheld as the form of truth in the innocent sense of the word, being themselves to the highest degree dependent on Money and being in the process of getting commercialized. And it includes everything of the “life world” in Husserl’s sense, just as of the educational systems, health systems, etc. It is all reduced to Money, to the bottom line. It can be seen that Money has gained a preponderance over against the still so-called real, which in turn is seen through as illusory being. But Money is also the means for pulling the real more and more into virtuality. Again I must warn the reader against mistaking a logical analysis for a moral judgment. To reveal mercilessly the emptiness and shadow nature of the entertainment world is here a description of its character and status, not a verdict. I mentioned the Roman phrase and reality of panem et circenses. Panis and circenses are not opposites, the one pointing to and belonging in the cave, the other representing the reality outside the cave. Both panis and circenses together are abbreviations for the cave existence, and both have their truth outside the cave, in the Money that finances them.

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Four essential features reveal that Money is indeed the highest “Idea” and the whole realm of the Ideas. 1. Money is today immaterial, not substantial. A banknote in German is called Geldschein, where “-schein” was originally used because the Geldschein was understood as Schein-Geld, fake money, illusory money, by comparison with gold or silver coins. In reality it brings out into the open the truth about money, also gold coins, namely that it has been Schein, illusory being, from the outset, even as a banknote or paper money is a universally exchangeable substitute for commodities, a substitute whose materiality has been reduced to nothing but paper, in contrast to gold or silver. With “plastic money,” money having become electronic, the nonmaterial nature of Money has become objectively represented even more decisively. The plastic credit card as a sensibly existing entity is not itself Money. It is merely something like the entrance ticket to the non-material realm of Money, which on its part has become completely distilled into a purely intellectual reality. In its new form as information stored as bits and bytes, it has shown itself able to do without any material substrate whatsoever that could and would still want to “symbolize” or “embody” purchasing power. 2. Money did not only free itself from its material substrate. It also to a large degree cut itself loose from its relation to consumer goods as realities, for which it could be an exchange medium. Nowadays merchandise is not the only thing that is traded; whole merchandise-producing firms are bought and sold like consumer goods. But most important: the daily turnover of capital in the world is many times higher than the daily turnover of goods. The former exchange medium on the markets of goods and commodities has now itself become a commodity of its own on the money “market.” Money has been completely reflected into itself and is thus “illusory being,” absolute, a self-sufficient purpose, revolving purely around itself. In this way, its purely speculative nature has received its objective representation. On each stock market trading day, around five hundred billion dollars are traded. At the New York Stock exchange alone up to one hundred million shares are sold. With the new derivative speculation instruments (swaps, futures, options, etc.), Money has surpassed itself once more and eludes even more any corporeality or concrete understandability.

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with material goods does not, however, mean that as a self-serving speculative, noetic world it would be split off from the world by a chôrismos (separation, hiatus). It is precisely the other way around. The money market reacts in a highly sensitive manner to the real economic and political situation. All essential information is incessantly registered and processed by means of personal computers, large workstations, or even mainframes. The material acquired in this way enters into the decisions to buy or sell, whereby often on the basis of the computer-produced analyses and dynamic processes alone automatic buying decisions are induced by computer programs. In this way, all of reality is reflected into Money, and this is, after all, its true speculative nature. Conversely, Money determines almost all socially relevant decisions to a degree unknown before. It not only permeates our acting, but also our thinking. Consciousness adapts to Money and is assimilated by it. And Money and the money economy increasingly subsume the whole world. They bring about ever tighter international involvement and thereby in fact translate the world into the global village. 4. The banknote was still an entity and somehow, despite being no more than a piece of paper, had a thing-like character. Money in its present form is not only immaterial and of ideal (noetic) nature, it can no longer be imagined using the model of a thing, not even that of a spiritual entity. It is sheer motion: continual flow of capital, unending transaction. It constantly circles around the globe at the speed of light, electronically controlled. It must work incessantly. The world of finance does not really know the difference between day and night any more. When the Stock Exchange in New York closes, the one in Tokyo opens. The world of finance is a self-regulating and selfregenerating system, a system in which the compulsion to move at an ever increasing speed is built in. Inasmuch as the streams of capital literally flow in the sky via the satellites of modern communications technology and via digital networking, and the worldwide economy forms a continually rotating and vibrating web above us and our lives, Money is now in fact and objectively shown to be our heaven—not sensible sky, but truly heaven, Plato’s supracelestial (hyperoyranios) heaven.

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THE IMMUREMENT IN THE CAVE: AN INEXORABLE,

SELF-ACCELERATING PROCESS

The soul’s immurement in the cave is an uncanny process. The description and compilation of many of the examples given may evoke emotions that go into the direction of cultural criticism, feelings of a loss, decline, and degeneration that need to be bemoaned, or even in the direction of moral condemnation. But this would be a wrong assessment, at least one not appropriate to and inherent in my psychological argument. What happened is not an unexplainable catastrophe that befalls us as a kind of accident, even where, for the moment and as the first immediacy of something new, it shows in the form of excess or pathology. It is the (beginning) conclusion of a project of the soul that began almost 3000 years ago and this means a goal pursued by it with fervor. The goal is, as shown, to expel human existence from “nature,” that is, from the immediacy of the human being-in-the-world, and its transportation into the logic of reflection or reflected being-in­ the-world. Such a fundamental change cannot merely happen in mente, as a mental one, because it would happen only subjectively, as a personal attitude or belief. It must happen in the alchemy of the soul, that is to say, in the “material” medium of concrete life. Any real transformation must be an objective change in and of the real world and manifest in its transformation, in order to be fully real, just as according to Jung any spiritual truth is gradually reified. It is therefore to be assumed that this process will not come to an end until all remainders of the “natural” status of human reality have been completely abraded and transported into the status of illusory being or virtuality. Inasmuch as it is not the project of people, but the project of the soul, it would be an illusion to assume that we could stop it. There is inherent in the development of communication technologies, the media and the multimedia world an autonomic dynamism that cannot be curbed or invalidated. It is a process that wants to arrive at its end, its completion. This development toward a virtual reality concerns only one side of the Parable of the Cave, the world of show or the cave itself. But for its other side, the light of the sun, the same is true. The continually moving and self-accelerating system as which Money exists cannot really be checked or its development stopped. The financial system rules over us, not we over it. It has a momentum of its own.

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The process will probably find its end only when we will have gone deep enough into the “cave,” so deeply that it has completed itself. But truly completed it will only be if the fulfilled cave can be in fact realized to have been, and to be, no more than the first immediacy of the absolute interiority of the soul, the still positivized, concretized form of this interiority, and if this interiority of the soul can be released into its own and from its being held down in the state of positivity. Jung saw that “no culture before ours was ever forced to take this psychic [or soul] background as such seriously. Always the soul was merely a part of a metaphysical system. But modern consciousness can no longer resist the knowledge that there is a soul. … This distinguishes our time from all others” ( CW 10 § 161 , trans. modified). But he identified the (for modern consciousness) inescapable “knowledge that there is a soul” with what he called the “discovery” of the unconscious, and particularly that unconscious that was the sublated spiritual past and that one was supposed to turn to in order to regain an access to the divine. But the unconscious and the inner are themselves forms of the cave (in the narrower sense). This is why Jung’s marvelous insight into the absolute revolution of our being-in-the-world (“no culture before ours was ever …”) miscarried. The wind was taken out of its sails. It lost its very point, was domesticated, safely encased and held down in a compartmental aspect of life in the world. The fact that modern consciousness could no longer resist “taking the soul background as such seriously” shows in the historical move into the age of the media and mediality; it shows in that the intermediate and mediating third through which man had always experienced reality (the reality of nature and of the divine) has now become something in its own right. It has been turned inside out, from its unobtrusive mediating (not really background!) position to an external and explicit position as the successor figuration to the former heaven with its gods or God, so that it turns into an object and focus of attention. The real revolution is that from medium to object of consciousness. “The medium is the message” (McLuhan 19). “The linguistic turn” (Richard Rorty 20). The soul as “language” (as the 19 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 20 Richard M. Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

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medium as such) is all around us. And Money in the way I described it, as world-encompassing incessant motion and liquidity above our heads, is the objective representation of the soul as “language,” however “language” in still positivized or literal form, still held down in the form of “letter” (Lacan), of “writing” and “gramma” (Derrida), not yet released into its form as soul: absolute-negative interiority. Modern man as cave man is he who has in principle realized to be inside mediality, inescapably enwrapped by it. The modern world as “medial” reality provides, nay, is the sublated immediate (Platonic, metaphysical) reading of Plato’s Parable of the Cave. The whole system of thought since its inception in early Greece with the Pre-Socratics has been the project of realizing what first became explicit in Plato’s parable. For this realization to become possible, the slow passage all the way through metaphysics in all its stages to its final conclusion had been necessary. But a full realization of it would consist in its full sublation, in the complete abrasion of its “letter” or “writing” form. The historical phenomenon of Occidental thought can now be realized to have been the project of the revolutionary transposition of human existence from man’s interiority in the world (“nature,” myth) into his interiority in mediality, i.e., in interiority per se: “cave” existence as the existence in “the soul,” in “language,” which ipso facto implies that the natural world with its things and gods or God, the cosmos, and Being as such have irrevocably been sublated (become “illusory being”).21

21 With its emphasis on “the imaginal,” archetypal psychology does justice to this situation. “Image” as a form is the sublatedness of what it is the image of. It is synonymous with Plato’s shadows. But to the extent that archetypal psychology then transfers the quality of substantial being simply to “the image,” i.e., to the product of the historical sublation process of substance and Being, by insisting on esse in anima and that “image is psyche” and that the image is the ultimate basis, it undoes, and falls behind, its own progressive insight and becomes nostalgic. Semantically the emphasis on “image” acknowledges the logical status of illusory being and of the sublatedness of “nature,” but syntactically it reassigns the sense or feeling of substantial dignity to it and paves the way for the ego’s cocooning itself once again in a world full of gods, i.e., in “natural being.” Immurement in the Platonic cave.

CHAPTER TEN

The Function of Television and

the Soul’s Predicament

I

t is obvious that the television set is a technical machine and that the invention of television is a marvelous engineering achievement. But I do not want to talk about technology. I want to propose today the strange idea that television, as a social institution, is also a psychological machine. It is unusual to look at such phenomena as television psychologically, so that it would be necessary to explain what “psychological” could possibly mean in this context. In the time span available I cannot give you a thorough explanation, but I hope that in the course of my discussion it will, at least in general terms and through this one example, become clear what the psychological approach to such a phenomenon is about and what not. In the early part of this century, Russian-born David Sarnoff of RCA, Radio Corporation of America, was instrumental in developing the radio as a mass medium built around a network, and later he did the same for television. About 60 years ago, at the World’s Fair in 1939, he gave television its starting signal. “Now,” he said to the crowd of first viewers, “now we add sight to sound. It is with a feeling of humbleness that I come to this moment of announcing the birth in this country of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society. It is an art which shines like a torch of hope in the troubled world. It is a creative force which we must utilize for the benefit of all mankind. This miracle of engineering skill which one day will bring the world to the home also brings a new American

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industry to serve man’s material welfare.” Thus television was not only hailed as an engineering miracle, it was also expected to be a creative force, an art, and to shine like a torch of hope in the middle of a time when America had suffered from many years of its worst depression and when World War II was impending. When in the late 1940s and the 1950s television really started to spread among the population, the widespread hope that it gave rise to was that it would have a fantastic educational and civilizing effect, that it would lead to a promulgation of knowledge among all of mankind and of raising the standard of information in society. But from the beginning of television there have also been other voices, critical voices warning against television and sometimes even condemning it, blaming it for the destruction of tradition, morals, and family life, especially also for the decline of culture and higher education. In some extreme cases, people have gone so far as to demonize it, claiming that it is one of the factors in our modern world that will ultimately bring about the end of the world, as for example seems to be the case with Li Hongzhi, the leader of the huge Chinese FalunGong, the sect that has been in the news recently because of its massive demonstrations in Beijing. When evaluations are so far apart, ranging from demonization to glorification, from fears of the end of the world to expectations of a huge benefit for all mankind, it might seem wise to stay in the middle between these two extremes. This could be achieved by very soberly seeing in television no more than a technical instrument. As with all instruments, it all depends on the use you make of it. Just as a knife in the hand of a surgeon or in the hand of a murderer can save or take life, so television can broadcast high-quality educational programs as well as the most silly, the most violent, or pornographic programs; and as a television viewer, you can sit in front of the tube most of your free time or you can be very selective and responsible about how often and which programs you watch. From this point of view, whether television is good or bad depends solely on the use or abuse that both the television stations and the individual user of television make of it. Television itself is neither good nor bad. But such a view is probably a bit naïve. It proceeds from the assumption that the broadcasting stations and their program directors on the one hand, as well as the people as viewers on the other hand,

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are free to decide about what use they make of television. But are they free? Is it really in the hands of individuals to decide? Has the institution that we know by the name of television not developed into a powerful force that to a large extent makes us do what it wants us to do? The program directors are not completely free. They are under immense pressure. They are dependent on the ratings their productions receive. If what they produce does not get the top or at least sufficient ratings, they lose their jobs. I could imagine that many a program director would love to produce better, higher level programs, but his hands are tied. He has to be obedient to his supreme lord, the viewing figures. And the audience? Are they free? A small percentage of the population will certainly always be relatively independent of television, but the vast majority is under its spell. Television is seductive, more than that: it is habit-forming, addictive like a drug. If one takes all this into account, it is absolutely illusionary to think that admonishing people to make good use of television and both to avoid bad programs and to refrain from watching TV indiscriminately and constantly would do any good. I read a statistical survey according to which last winter the average American family watched the tube for more than 50 hours a week. With television, something has come into the world that has its own almost autonomous dynamics, its own momentum, and nobody is powerful enough to stop it on its course and probably also not powerful enough to merely steer its course into a somewhat better direction. No, with the idea that in itself television is a neutral technical instrument that we could use the way we want, either in a beneficial or in a detrimental way, in other words, that the good use or abuse of television is solely dependent on us humans, with this idea television is certainly underestimated, underdetermined. There is a television set in almost every household. The institution of television is a completely familiar, almost inconspicuous aspect of everyday life for us. Television is everywhere. But what needs to be seen is that this familiar and seemingly harmless part of our daily life is a truly uncanny reality. We must respect it. It is true, humans make television sets and television programs, but the reverse is also true: namely that the makers of television are themselves somehow in the grip of this curious phenomenon that apparently they are making. It is larger than they.

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I said that it was probably naïve to see in television only the neutral technical instrument. There is another form of naïveté with respect to television that shows especially in connection with the great and increasing problem of violence plaguing today’s society. When such irrational, incomprehensible killings occur as the one that took place recently at a school in Littleton, Colorado, where two teenage boys killed a number of their fellow-students and one of the teachers without obvious motive,1 one often hears that it is television that is to blame. Of course, if, as George Gerbner of the University of Pennsylvania states, there are on average 20 acts of violence per hour in TV programs watched by children, and when we consider that by the age of 10 or so children have often watched many thousands of killings on television, it is very hard not to see a connection between the increasing readiness of youngsters to resort to violence and television. But it is naïve to think that the violence comes from those programs and that if only television became so to speak “clean,” free of scenes of brutality, then we would not have our present problems with violence in schools and by youth gangs as well as by individual children. And quite apart from the fact that it is a bit naïve to try to explain that unsettling phenomenon of children’s violence in terms of their being conditioned directly by what they watch, such an explanation would at any rate not be a psychological one, as I understand psychology. This explanation would only look at what happens on the surface or empirical level and at what television does directly to the egopersonality. The interest of psychology, by contrast, is what television does to the soul. “Soul” here is a mythological expression for what one might call the mode or the logic of our being-in-the-world. The logic of our being-in-the-world is nothing that belongs to the individual. On the contrary, the individuals participate in the mode of being-in-the-world that is dominant at a given time. So if we want to find out how television affects the soul, we must not look at the individual, what he does and feels, how and why he uses television, etc. We could not, for example, design a questionnaire and hope in this way to find the answers to our question because it would always 1 On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (aged 17 and 18 years respectively) went on a rampage through the corridors of Columbine High School. In their wake, they left thirteen dead and twenty-four injured before turning their weapons on themselves.

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be the empirical or surface personality, the ego of the individual, that would fill out the questionnaire. But we do not want to know what he and she thinks, but what the soul thinks and experiences. This is all the more important inasmuch as there are great individual differences in people’s use of and reaction to television. Some do not watch television at all, others watch it excessively. Some are very selective about what they watch, others watch indiscriminately. For an empirical investigation, these individual differences would be important. For a psychological study they are not, because whether I watch TV very much or not at all and what I feel and how I react to it is in this regard not all that important. If, as I claim, television is a psychological machine, an apparatus for slowly but persistently working at the transformation of the mode of our being-in-the-world, the transformation of the logical constitution of consciousness, indeed, even the transformation of the very idea of Truth and Reality itself, then I cannot escape the effects of television even if I personally do not own a TV set at all, just as I cannot escape the Zeitgeist. What television as psychological machine is working at will affect us all because it affects the character of the world in which we live. This is all the more true inasmuch as television is not an isolated phenomenon. Its invention is not an incidental and as such a casual occurrence. Rather, it is an outgrowth of Western civilization at large and it is thus deeply rooted in its wider context and supported by many, many other facets of modern life. Thus it is expressive of a certain dynamism in Western civilization itself. If this were not the case, it would not be so successful. It can be successful because it answers to a need, a need not simply inherent in the nature of people, but a need produced by the logic of the modern situation. Television is both one symbolic expression of modern culture and the machine that propels this culture forward on its course, the course towards its inherent telos. To say that television is a psychological machine implies that the effects it has are not side-effects, but intended. Of course not intended by certain people who make television their subjective purpose, but “intended” by the dynamics inherent in the objective logic of this uncanny phenomenon called television. After World War II, when the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany became fully known and the occupation forces wanted to start a re-education program, some American educators suggested that

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many of the Grimms’ fairy tales should be banned because there are such violent scenes in them as a wolf devouring an old grandmother and Red Riding Hood. The idea seems to have been that if young children at an impressionable age are confronted with such scenes of cruelty, this would plant the seeds of a cruel and violent attitude in them later on. The underlying image of man in this line of reasoning is that of a machine that reacts predictably because it can react in only one way. This is not, however, how people actually are. Even a small child has the human capacity not only to react in an immediate oneto-one relation of trigger and reaction, but to respond, to give his or her answer. A human response is different from a mere reaction in that it is creative, i.e., not only to be understood in terms of a simple cause­ and-effect relationship. In a true response there is an element of freedom. As such the response is not totally predictable. In therapy it often happens that I have the impression that in the present session we really got to the core of the problem and that this session will probably mean a kind of breakthrough. But even though the patient seemed to be quite involved and moved, too, during that session, the future showed that the insights gained did not have such a great impact at all. And at other times, I am surprised to hear from a patient that a casual comment I had made some sessions ago and that I do not even remember making, struck and moved the patient deeply and had a lasting effect. What I am trying to suggest is that the effect of television, too, is not to be discussed on the level of contents, on the level of what can be seen on the surface. In particular, the question as to why young individuals actually come to resort to such shocking and outrageous acts of violence as the massacre a month ago by the two students of the school in Littleton, cannot be answered with mono-causal explanations. Why children turn to serious violence is a very complex, many-faceted question. And if television is truly an uncanny reality, as I suggested, it affects us on a much deeper and more fundamental level than that of the particular contents and quality of the programs we watch. This is of course not to deny that television also influences us on the surface level of contents. Of course the excessive number of images of violence do somehow have an effect in the long run. Of course our perception of the world, our ideas, even our daily habits in general are influenced and slowly formed by the way the daily news and other subjects are presented to us. On account of the TV coverage they get

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of the events, people in Yugoslavia, in Serbia, for example, probably perceive the NATO bombings very differently from people in other parts of the world, who have access to very different news presentations on television. But this influence is of the same type as the effect of ordinary communication in a society, communication in the form of rumor, as printed newspapers, books, etc. It is only more powerful. There is, however, an effect of television that is not the effect of how it is used, of what contents are chosen and how they are presented, but is rooted in the nature or structure of television as such, as the particular medium that it is. And this is the aspect that I want to devote myself to today. So if television is one of the factors contributing to the increase of violent crimes committed by youths, then I would have to locate the main problem not with what obviously comes out of our TV sets, but with the phenomenon of television itself. Television is a magnificent technological achievement. But it is much more than a technical machine for the purpose of spreading information and providing entertainment. As I said, it is above all also a psychological machine, an apparatus for slowly but persistently working at the transformation of the very mode of our being-in-the­ world, the transformation of the logical constitution of consciousness, indeed, even of the idea of Truth and Reality itself. As such it works on all of us, because it does not merely work on us. It works on society or even mankind at large: on the prevailing logic. It does its job regardless of whether I as individual decide not to watch television or to watch only carefully selected programs. We are all children of our time and of our society. What is going on in our time at a deep level, will sooner or later affect us all, even if personally we try to resist certain changes that we experience as bad and try to defend old values and traditional ways of life. What television as psychological machine is working at will affect us all because it affects the character of the world in which we live. In order to see how television affects the soul, I will now discuss some of its characteristic features. The first feature is one that has already been alluded to: its seductiveness. Television is even addictive. It is not like other machines that quietly and passively wait until they are turned on. Rather, if we look at how television in fact affects people, it is almost as if it were alive, like a living being actively demanding something from us, namely wanting to be turned on. For many many

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people, the first thing they do when they come home is switch on the TV, not because they have the particular wish to watch this or that program at that very moment, but routinely, automatically. If you have a pet, e.g., a dog, you have to feed it and take it out for a walk every day. It requires this of you. TV of course does not need a walk or literal food, but somehow it also seems to want something from us. The “food” it wants from us is merely to be turned on. It is as if a certain insistence exuded from it in our direction. Television reaches out for people, takes hold of them, and it reaches them unconsciously, bypassing their rational decision-making center. Seen from outside, it is the human person who turns the TV set on. But if one really thinks about what the relation between TV and human being is, one could almost say that in reality, psychologically or logically, it is the human person who has to do the TV set’s bidding. Television viewers could almost be seen as an attachment of the TV set or as its appendix, rather than the other way around, the TV set as an extension of our capacities to see the world. If so, one might even diagnose a complete reversal and say that within the whole of this relationship, the television viewer has unwittingly become the real machine, whereas the TV almost has the status of a personality, a subjectivity. The institution called television is using us, not we it. This is of course necessary if television as a psychological machine is to do its work. Man has to be fully in this machine’s grip as its workpiece if this machine is to achieve its objective of transformation effectively. Appearances are deceptive. It looks as if people were bigger than television and as if the TV set was a relatively small object in front of them. But in reality television is much larger; when we are seemingly watching it, it is actually all around us, and metaphorically speaking we are sitting inside the TV box. Why? Because it engulfs and encompasses us, not us as bodies to be sure, but us as our human nature, the essence of our being. I said appearances are deceptive. This is so because the appearances have to do only with the external, physical aspect of reality, with us as bodies in space. But we have to look at what is really happening, and that is not what happens physically in space. It is what happens psychologically or logically to consciousness, to the psyche, to the logic of our existence. If, for example, in the United States, according to one statistical survey, the average family spent more than 50 hours a week last winter

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in front of a television set, we can see how television has swallowed, as it were, almost all the free time, the time that remains after subtracting the time for work and for sleeping. It has, as it were, pulled people’s private lives into itself. With respect to time, television acts almost like a Black Hole. Of course, this fact concerns just an external and literal aspect, the way people spend their time. But this external fact may serve us as an image or symbol for the psychological engulfing capacity of television. Just imagine, millions and millions of people the world over every day spend quite a bit of their time watching television. And they do this not as a merely technical and practical procedure, like one brushes one’s teeth, for example. No, there is, as a matter of course, a certain amount of inner participation; the soul opens itself up to the images or message that come from within the TV set. It is almost as if watching the tube has taken the place of what formerly was people’s daily devotions. Here it is necessary to introduce an important psychological insight. If you devote yourself to some thing, some object, long enough with a certain amount of dedication, this object will slowly come home to you, enter your mind, inform your way of thinking and experiencing. The man-made objects and tools that we use, the things that we surround ourselves with in the long run tend to assimilate our consciousness. That is, the logic invested in those objects reacts on the logical constitution of consciousness, unnoticeably affects or infects it, so that what at first was only an object or content of consciousness will in the end show up as the structure or logical form of consciousness itself. We all know this phenomenon from our own learning experiences. For the beginner, everything in a new field is just a strange new content to be memorized. But after some time the contents will have been absorbed, and now consciousness can think in terms of this field; the former contents have become categories of the beginner’s more seasoned way of looking at things. Applied to our theme this means that if an immense number of people in the world watch television regularly for some time every day, it is inevitable that the logic of television will react upon the logical constitution of consciousness, and assimilate consciousness to itself. Mind you, here I am not speaking of the infectious effect of the particular programs, of the specific contents of television, in other words,

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of what one sees (e.g., scenes of violence). I am talking about the assimilation to the phenomenon of television watching as such, regardless of what programs are being broadcast, figuratively speaking the assimilation to the television set itself. This is why I could speak above of television as a psychological machine. Before we can now turn to an examination of how this psychological machine functions and what the direction is into which it transforms the logical constitution of consciousness, I have to voice a warning. What I will have to say may often sound such that it could be read as a deprecation, even condemnation, of television. Yes, indeed, it may sound so, but to take it as such would be a misunderstanding. It is vital to try to look at the phenomenon dispassionately and even appreciate it for what it is, even if some of its essential characteristics may impress us as negative. The task here is to comprehend, not to evaluate and not to lament. This is not an exercise in cultural pessimism, but also not one in optimism, in an ideology of progress, either. It is an attempt to analyze and understand. So if nevertheless many statements that I will make may seem to invite a negative response, a response of rejection, this imposes the task on me as I am speaking and on you, as you are listening, to exert a certain amount of intellectual discipline in order to resist the temptation to hear it as a value judgment. For, as Heidegger once stated, one’s turn into the open is one’s refusal to read negatively that which is.2 So television takes possession of the viewer. Now we have to ask what it does to him, once he is in its grip. I will discuss five central aspects that make up the inner world of the phenomenon of television or the goals towards which this psychological machine is working. The first thing to note is that it bombards the viewer with images. This feature could be placed under the heading of “uprooting.” It is inherent in the nature of television that there is a constant change and a constant flux of images. One image chases the next. You cannot stay with one a bit longer, you cannot go back, as in a book. There is new input all the time (even if some images, like certain commercials, are repeated again and again, the constant motion or sequence of images remains). Television thus does not invite savoring. Television is by definition restless, always racing forward. Every second has to be used. By 2 Martin Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter?” in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1972), p. 279.

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hurriedly jumping from one impression to the next, it seems to aim at turning consciousness into a floating one. Nothing is supposed to sink in, to go into the depth of the soul and take root there. Television does not allow for meditation, for pondering and reflection. A very important part of television is the news reports. The logic of television is such that it is driven to try to get the news to the viewer as quickly as possible, ideally instantaneously, almost as the events are happening (“live”). The viewer is supposed to be given the impression of being present at the scene, right there where the action is. This is also the reason why live performances and eyewitness statements are so important. Television, we might say, serves the moment, serves the goal of immediacy, absolute presence. But since each moment is immediately over, each news item outdated in the next moment, television requires constantly new news, new things to report on, new images to broadcast. Another aspect that belongs in this context is that in talk shows, for example, the moderator has to cut off the participants after a certain short time of their speaking, because there is a rule that no statement should be longer than the attention span of the ordinary viewer. So television favors the quick pointed contribution, maybe even the catchword-type statement, not the careful development and discussion of an argument. Now let us look at what the implications of this feature are. The first implication is that television is, if I may say so, “contraceptive.” We get massive input, but due to the compulsion to hasten on, it is not allowed to sink in. Television’s inherent purpose (that is, the purpose objectively inscribed in its structure, not a purpose people consciously assigned to it) is to present things in such a way as to prevent “conception,” that is, that kind of true reception that allows that which has been received to be psychologically appropriated by the person receiving it, and to become fully this person’s own, so that he or she might become pregnant with it. It does not favor its images to sink in and for the viewer to establish an inner relationship with them, to make sense of them and to integrate them into his whole worldview and into his existence. It is obviously not intended for the impressions to be absorbed and digested. There is no time for maturation. This in turn means that the contents seen on television tend to remain unrelated, essentially alien elements, outside, external to the human being and that the human viewer correspondingly remains

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essentially, that is logically, an external observer. Each image is the mere fact or event of its happening, the factual “event” is not turned into an “experience” in the sense that James Hillman uses this word in his Re-Visioning Psychology.3 The occurrence of this image and then of the next one and so forth is all, this is where what is happening is supposed to stop: the transmission of the images is not meant to penetrate into the audience. Events are supposed to remain events; they are not supposed to become ensouled, humanized, because the soul is not allowed to process them and to add its own to them, thereby enriching them. The modern word for this kind of input that remains and is meant to remain unintegrated external impression is information. Information in the modern sense4 is essentially alienated from people, and people are alienated from it. “Information” is in itself, sort of by definition, lifeless, sterilized, dead; information is when a content is encapsulated in itself and as such insulated so that in this packaged form it can be employed as a self-contained unit without the danger that it might infect or impregnate us. I mentioned that live broadcasts are of vital importance to television. This is so because of the inherent sterility of information. The abstract idea of the live presentation has the purpose of compensating for its inherent logical lifelessness and unconnectedness. “Live” implies: to be present at the very moment when the action takes place. In German: dabeisein, to be there, at the right spot. One sees immediately how this idea is the exact opposite or reversal of a much older idea of presence, presence in the sense of epiphany. The presence of the live broadcast implies our human presence at the right place and moment, at the very moment when something happens. By contrast, the epiphanic presence meant that a truth, an aspect of the depth of being, maybe even a divinity, was presenting itself, and this meant also disclosing and revealing itself to a human person or a community. This presence was thus a visitation, an intrusion into the human sphere, a being entered and thus also being altered by the reality that manifested itself. The fact that often such experiences were expressed in images of a sexual union (as, for example, in mysticism), and sometimes even in 3

p. x.

James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York et al. (Harper & Row) 1975,

4 Formerly, in the Middle Ages, the word had a very different meaning. It was the name for the shaping of matter through form, which was basically God’s work.

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images of a resulting pregnancy (for example, the Greek god Zeus begetting children with many many humans), this fact shows that such presence also implied conception, or, to use another more psychological word: initiation. An epiphany was always the call to those who experienced it to become initiated into the inner meaning of that reality aspect that had manifested itself. The presence in the sense of the live broadcast, by contrast, means no more than abstract physical presence: two things at the same point in the space-time continuum of physics, ultimately to be described in mathematical terms. No revelation, no entering, no touching. Only an abstract juxtaposition. The idea of live programs or performances becomes important only at a time when input is a priori defined as information. The sterility of information has to be compensated for by the “live-ness” of the presentation, because “live” seems to be related to “life” or “alive.” But it only seems to be. As the abstract juxtaposition in the physical sense of time, it is in itself just as sterile as information. By contrast, if you read a great book written maybe hundreds of years ago, this is certainly not a “live” event, but what is written there can come alive and be truly present to you. The need for live performances is the indication that as a child of the contraceptive information society you are no longer enriched and animated by a presence in the older sense of the word. Of course since this sense of presence is in itself lifeless, referring to no more than a juxtaposition, the idea of the live broadcast is not such a great compensation for the lifelessness of “information.” So in order to equip the so-to-speak mathematical idea of presence with an appearance of life, a second compensation is needed: through the arousal of strong emotions. Excitement, thrill, intensive affects: for sure, this must be life! The images broadcast have to be of such a quality that they stir people up emotionally. But again, these strong emotions are the exact opposite of epiphanic experiences. Emotions and affects are essentially self-, or ego-centered, even autistic. They are mere “natural events,” not human “experiences.” Primarily they throw one back upon oneself, they make one intensively feel oneself, the movement and passions in one’s body. They are not intersubjective, not the event of a connection or relation with some Other, inasmuch as the Other that caused them is reduced to the status of a mere stimulus or trigger arousing the respective emotion.

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It is just like with drugs. The addict uses drugs not in order to establish a relation with the drug (as, e.g., the connoisseur of tea or wine does who really wants to savor the tea or wine, thereby establishing a relation to it); the drug is a mere instrument for the addict to help him get his high. The intensity of his emotional state goes together with his being enclosed all within himself. This is why emotions are so abstract, but why they also conceal their abstractness so successfully, so that the impression of the opposite, the impression of real and concrete life, of connectedness, of presence and so on is given. So we have the TV images or impressions as self-enclosed “information”; and we have the person self-enclosed in his private emotions; and we have the “live” broadcast, which brings that person and an event abstractly together in an only physical or literal presence: a situation of total alienation. All three aspects are immunized against each other. But the human person is also alienated from himself, from his or her soul. We have to realize that television even induces a kind of selfrenunciation, a de facto self-renunciation that is an objective or structural one, not a consciously intended one. People are seduced into watching all sort of programs, many of which are worthless, and thus to honor, nay, to religiously observe them. The television set could in some ways be compared to what in former times was a shrine and TV watching to what formerly was people’s daily devotions. One has to step back a bit in order to see this. This comparison does of course not hold true if, trying to perceive the similarity, you look from outside at the subjective attitudes of people (ego-personalities) in both cases, but it does hold true if you look at what objectively takes place and see it from within. The individual devotedly sits in front of his TV shrine and sacrifices his time, attention and feeling to often the most stupid programs. I submit: It is not really people’s own wish to watch television. Rather, they have been seduced. Objectively, it is an addiction, and as such an involuntary service, even if subjectively people think that they are doing it of their own free will and for their own pleasure. There is so much objective, not subjective, dedication, so much factual giving oneself over to the constant flow of external impressions coming out of the television set. It is an unconscious and unacknowledged self-renunciation.

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In genuine religions or cults, one’s self-abandoning devotion was to some deity. As such it was in turn rewarded by the deep satisfaction of the soul and the ensuing enrichment of one’s feeling of self and wholeness. Such an enrichment on a deep or soul level does not take place with TV. It cannot take place there because the images, by arousing our emotions, enclose us autistically within ourselves instead of connecting us with some Other. On the contrary, after watching television people are often left with a feeling of emptiness, of being drained or hollowed out, but even if they do not consciously have this reaction, the phenomenon of television watching shows that this depletion or deprivation is built into its very structure. For as I said above, television is addictive. Just as with drugs, there is generally no real fulfillment, but at best only a momentary “high” that, however, only leaves you craving for more. Television pulls people away from themselves, away from their soul, from their self, and by making them abandon themselves to the external impressions presented to them in the tube establishes them in the abstract ego. The word for this whole phenomenon is “entertainment” (which is the counterpart to “information”). This phenomenon of “entertainment” did not exist formerly, not in any traditional culture, it is completely new. What is the hidden or psychological meaning and purpose of “entertainment”? It is to “kill time.” The need for entertainment is the need to kill time. Obviously, today time is something that has to be killed. There must not be a fulfilled presence, no fullness of time. And what is the inner meaning of the need to kill time? It is the need to fly from one’s self and soul and to exclusively cocoon oneself in the world of the ego. Another aspect of alienation comes into view if we consider the fact that inherent in television is its commitment to the ever new and constantly changing presentation of images. Certain images may be repeated, but there must be a constant and quick flux of them. Television is governed by the same logic that we also find in our technological civilization’s commitment to innovation, with the consequence that our civilization necessarily has the character of a throw-away society. Everything that our industries produce is produced with the idea in mind that it will become waste to be disposed of. In advanced societies lots of thought goes into the question of how to produce products in such a way that they can be most efficiently and

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most harmlessly disposed of later. So before they are produced they are already conceived of as waste and—imaginally—recycled. The expiry date comes, so to speak, before the production. Imaginally the product is already used up. This feature is reminiscent of the need today to kill time. To produce something does not mean any more to release it into a lasting presence, to enjoy and dwell with its presence. Imaginally, its presence is already overcome. And especially if you buy a computer, you will often find that by the time you have installed it and gotten used to it, it is already outdated. Inherent in our time is a tremendous dynamic to move on to ever new levels, a dynamic to surpass what has been achieved so far and thus to render everything present obsolete. This powerful tendency towards change is, I believe, also visible in the incessant change of images on TV. The need for change and quick flux goes hand in hand with the compulsion in modern life to come up with new ideas, truly novel things, with avant garde productions, styles and fashions that are completely different from everything known so far, a compulsion that often expresses itself in the need to do something out of the ordinary, even to be shocking. All these tendencies are in contrast to that type of culture that was determined by traditions. Traditions have to be preserved. It is essential in such cultures that one does things the same way that they have been done all the time before, too. Faithful repetition of the same, not the quick movement from one thing to the next, to the next, and so on. The preservation of what has come down from the ancestors is in exact opposition to the need for innovation and the incessant flow of ever new images in television. And of course, by swamping the viewer with a flood of ever new impressions, television necessarily cuts him off from tradition. The phenomenon of television as such is a device to undermine tradition, to pry modern man loose from his embeddedness and rootedness in a tradition, to destroy the binding strength of whatever is left of myth, ritual, values and meaning, and thus of course also to cut him off from his own instincts. Instead, it hands him over to change, innovation, ever new input as an end in itself and not, e.g., for the sake of improvement. For it is very important to realize that in modern culture, innovation is for innovation’s sake. Just as the economy is compelled to grow because continual growth is the principle of the modern economic life, so change and innovation are today principles or ends in themselves.

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Especially on television one can see that the pressure to produce more and more programs does not mean better and better programs. I mentioned that the television viewer devotedly gives himself over to the multitude of impressions presented to him. This selfabandonment could also be called a self-exposure. But “self-exposure” can have different senses. It can mean to open oneself to a new experience, to a new truth, such as in an initiation process, where one allows oneself to be reached by a truth, maybe even “baptized” by it. This is not the sense of self-exposure that applies to the television situation. While watching TV, one exposes oneself to the flow of impressions more in the sense of the German word Berieselung (lit. sprinkling, but figuratively: constant subjection to), such as the Berieselung with music that in the United States is called “canned music” or Muzak, the unending music in shopping malls that is supposed to put the potential customer into a good buying mood. To this music many people feel exposed in such a way that they are annoyed and reject it, they try to close themselves to it because they don’t want to be manipulated and forced to hear music that they have not chosen or are not in the mood for. Now, watching TV is different in that usually you do it voluntarily. You turn on the TV yourself. And so there is normally no annoyance or inner rejection. But nevertheless, one’s selfexposure to what comes out of the tube has the character of a Berieselung, because rather than an effect of opening the innermost self of a person to what he or she experiences, television tends to have a doping effect. The self shuts down. Rather than sharpening the mind and one’s senses, it is dulling, sometimes even literally lulling people to sleep. Many people fall asleep watching TV and wake up hours later in front of a totally different program or a snowy screen. Of course, there can also be critical programs on television alerting you to injustices in society or other problems that you have not been aware of, programs that in this sense make you conscious of things that are wrong in the world. But this is merely what television can do on the content level of the programs. Television as such, as the logic of this medium, does not make its viewers more conscious. It does not by itself invite keen thinking, sharp observation, a state of intensive awareness. It has a hypnotic effect. A small example: it has happened many times that I have wanted to see the weather report. I watch the report, and all of a sudden I

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realize that it is over and I did not get it. The information was all there, but even while I was watching it, it did not reach me; rather, it induced me to stay within my own thoughts. This is of course in keeping with what was said about the sterility of “information.” In some households, the television set is turned on not in order to be watched, but merely as background noise while one is doing other things. Much like Muzak, television is supposed to make you unconscious; it is to give us constant input. Why? Sometimes, when several people are together and engage in a good conversation, it happens that all of a sudden there is a moment of quiet, a moment when nobody speaks. In German one sometimes says after such a moment: “Now an angel has gone through the room.” In ancient Greece, one would quite similarly have said that in such moments Hermes, the messenger the gods, had manifested. Both angels and Hermes mediate between gods and humans. Such unplanned moments of silence, moments when people as egos stopped talking, were experienced so to speak as holes or openings in ego-time, holes that as such were seen as a potential (no more than a potential) to connect with another, higher or deeper sphere, a sphere beyond the human, all-too-human. Obviously, the idea was that in the silence of such moments there might be a message from this other sphere. So if television has to provide constant input, we can suspect that the purpose of this is to prevent moments of quiet and silence from occurring. The constant flow of images from television just as Muzak and the background noise from walkmans, etc., has the purpose of preventatively plugging with incessant input any holes in time that might possibly occur, in order to guarantee the uninterrupted continuity of ego-time. Here we can remember what has been said before about the seductive, addictive nature of television. As a social institution television has the function of a drug. The only difference to other drugs like marijuana or heroine is that it is not seen as a drug and in some countries its use is even financed by the state. In my opinion it is naïve indeed to see people who have succumbed to alcoholism, to medication or drug abuse, etc. as outsiders. There is not such a great difference between them and most other people in society. It is modern society as a whole that craves to be doped. The need to be doped is one of the most powerful forces in society today. The literal addicts can be seen

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as those few in society in whom the pathological nature of the general need on the part of society for some sort of drug becomes apparent for everyone to see. We could be grateful to the addicts, because seeing them could help us to become aware of an underlying pathology of the collective psyche at large. Television is a major, but unrecognized drug for the masses, only a socially more acceptable one. Ideologies and fundamentalism (in all the different varieties that it comes) are other and very different ones. So television is a machine that has to alienate us also from what in this century has been called the unconscious, especially from the collective unconscious in the sense of C. G. Jung. In the 60s and 70s, drugs were often called “mind-expanding.” If one only looks at the immediate effects of such drugs as LSD, then this name is justified. But the moment one takes the larger social significance of them in our time into account, the name is misleading. No, they are not used for the purpose of expanding the mind, but for having more input and very intensive and impressive input. One’s wanting more input and ever stronger impressions serves psychologically the function of diverting and dulling the mind, not expanding it. True mindexpansion requires concentration, emptiness and silence, not being flooded by impressions. Perhaps one other feature of television goes together with its function as a doping device. I am thinking of the tendency to have more and more silly and infantile programs on television, not only programs that I evaluate as silly, but also those that want to be and are meant to be silly, explicit nonsense programs that nonetheless are obviously enjoyed by a great many people. I wonder whether a hundred or more years ago people would have enjoyed or at least accepted such programs, and I rather think that they would have felt insulted, not to mention that they would have seen it as a waste of time. Apart from such explicit nonsense programs, one can also note a tendency in many other programs to become more trivial, more simplistic and infantile. What happens when millions of people are fed with such stuff? Could it be that television also has the unspoken task of inducing what one might call a systematic stultification of the population, a lowering of the cultural niveau mentale? The work towards such an increasing stultification could be seen as a support for the general dulling and doping effect that television has and, as I claim, is supposed to have.

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Moving from the question of how television affects the viewers to the question of what it does to the material itself that it presents, I want to discuss television’s externalization function, which in turn has several aspects. One of them is the shift away from content or substance to external form. Technical gimmicks made possible through computer-aided image processing become more and more important. A lot of effort of advertising on TV (but also elsewhere) goes into the technical perfection of the image. The content is often no more than the material or occasion necessary to demonstrate the amazing technical possibilities we have nowadays. All the passion goes into design and into packaging; content and meaning are relatively unimportant. Design and the packaging of the contents seem to have higher priority than the often trivial contents themselves. We could also speak of a process of estheticizing. It is not what something is and means that is the most central, but the esthetics of it, the external impression it makes, its image character. There are different realities that we call images. The images in mythological tales, on the one hand, and the image as television image or the image as it appears in advertisements, on the other hand, are worlds apart. In the image on TV and in advertising the content is functionalized or instrumentalized for the purposes of some effect. I am not thinking only of the obvious fact that in the last analysis content, for example movies and shows, is from the point of view of the institution of television no more than the bait needed to make the audience see the commercials, in other words, that which television is actually and exclusively about (even though the ordinary television viewer naïvely sees it the other way around). It is more important here that even quite apart from commercials, the television content as such, as television images, becomes indifferent and exchangeable. They are used for the ulterior purpose of the success of the show or presentation. To be used here also means to be used up, consumed, evaporated. The content does not have its dignity and meaning in itself any more. They are no more than fuel for the esthetic or emotional effect to be produced. In this way, television continually works at the further emptying out of all values and everything substantial. The content is rendered abstract, that is to say, it is abstracted or alienated from its own internal substance and now counts only as a stimulus. Perhaps one could call this process

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the digitization or atomization of the whole world of ideas, values, meanings. They all become, as it were, “bits” and “bytes” to be used ad libitum. They are no longer part of a larger context, part of a cosmos of meanings. As contemporary French philosophy tells us: the time of the grand narratives is over. The consumption of contents for creating an impression in turn implies a certain derealization of the contents. This derealization can be seen most clearly in the TV newscasts, where the reports about catastrophes, tornadoes, spring tides, avalanches take on the character of a kind of video clip, of a show, a spectacle that seems to be staged for the entertainment of the audience and for the heightening of their emotional stimulation. There is hardly any difference between images of such catastrophic events in the news portions of television and the same type of images in movies about catastrophes. The difference that in the latter case the scenic images are produced by movie makers and in the former case by nature cannot be seen. The images of real events are absorbed, sucked into the image and movie world and their “special effects.” Reality loses its reality character and becomes an element in virtual reality, in cyberspace. In this way atrocities merely help to spice up the otherwise often rather boring newscasts. Real dangers and threats tend to be perceived like scenes in enjoyable horror movies. The extent to which the perception of reality has already been subjugated to cyberspace can be read from an aspect of the present war being waged by NATO in Yugoslavia. For many weeks this war has exclusively consisted of air raids. The reason for this is not that this is, from a military perspective, the most efficient way to get results. No, militarily it is clear that air raids alone are insufficient. The main reason that NATO restricts itself to air raids is that the politicians of the NATO countries are under great pressure from public opinion that this must be a “clean” war without casualties, without loss of life, especially on one’s own side. If all of a sudden real deaths occurred, your son or husband, your relative or neighbor being killed in action, this would burst the bubble of the movie or virtual reality quality within which reality is perceived. And this must not happen. One way of describing the difference between virtual reality and actual reality is this: actual reality is ultimately characterized by the fact that in extreme situations it is considered necessary and worthwhile to stake one’s life, and that means to possibly die, for the principles and

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traditions one lives for, whereas in virtual reality there is nothing worth dying for. The process of externalization that television works at concerning individual contents has been discussed by me so far with respect to their logical character or formal aspect. But it applies also to the content side of the contents presented on television. There are particular shows in which individuals are invited to confess, in front of the camera and an audience, aspects of their lives that hitherto would have been considered absolutely personal and intimate, such as sexual preferences, perversion, criminal actions, psychological problems, etc. Television invites an uninhibited self-exposure, self-exhibition. What is private is brought out into the open, it is made public, displayed before an audience and before the anonymous mass of TV watchers. This phenomenon is the soul’s work on the systematic destruction of the notion of something “inner,” of the sense of interiority, of the feeling of shame, and with respect to the previous value system it is a complete reversal. Things are turned inside out. Divulgement and self-display are the new maxim. The ultimate aim is a world that is exclusively surface, where before there was a difference between a surface and a hidden depth. The notion of surface takes me to another aspect of television, its “sensationalism,” as I want to term it. I use this term both in its usual meaning and in a more philosophical sense. In other words, I refer back to the two meanings of “sensation,” namely the sphere of sense perception, sense data, sense impressions, on the one hand, and that which causes an enormous stir or excitement, on the other. Television is absolutely committed to the senses and the sensory. We already talked about the quality of the TV image as stimulus and about the flooding of consciousness with input, which means nothing else than: with sense data. What television as the type of medium that it is offers are impressions and more impressions. Television is a machine for producing sense stimuli. This is the first meaning of its sensationalism. The other meaning has to do with the fact that television is compelled to capture the attention of the audience. We already talked about the dictatorship of the ratings, the viewing figures. In order to reach the audience and make it stay with TV after years of television watching, the producers of programs or of commercials have to come up with ever new, ever more clever and surprising effects. The more

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shocking, thrilling, sensational, the better. Ever new superlatives are needed, such as in high-performance sports ever new records. In general, television tries to be thrilling, and this is why we have so many thrillers and action movies. From movie to movie, the action has to become faster and more dangerous, with more nudity and more daring sex scenes. All in all, this means that television is designed to appeal to the affects of people and to their lower instincts. The image of man that emerges when one reconstructs from the emissions of television the counterpart that such emissions are aiming for is the image of man as exclusively consisting of affect, emotion, man as a receptor of sense stimuli. Mind, reason, or spirit have no place in it. Whereas for thousands of years it was always felt necessary to rise above the emotions and the sphere of mere sensation to the realm of ideas or spirit, the psychological machine called television has the function to cocoon us ever more deeply in the emotional and to confine us in sensation. But here one has to be on guard. Is it really the senses that television celebrates, the senses in the full sense of the word? Just as with the image above we have to distinguish the sphere of the senses as it was constituted in former times and as it is real in the context of television. It is not a fluke of language that the traditional word “sense” in English and similarly “Sinn” in German comprises two almost opposite meanings. On the one hand, sense refers to the senses and the sensory, but on the other hand one also says “this makes sense” if one wants to say that it is reasonable. So the old meaning of sense was concrete because it always implied the whole relation between the sensible or sensory and the mind or reason, even if one wanted to speak predominantly only about one side of this relation. The sensory and the rational were perhaps like the two sides of a coin, ultimately inseparable, although only one side was seen at a time. The sensible or the sensory were ultimately experienced as at least potentially, or imperceptibly, containing within them their own opposite, a rational or ideal core, and understandably so, for the sensible is after all one access road to the real, one way to establish contact with reality. But the sensation into which television has to pull people is different. It is abstract, devoid of a connection to idea or content. In philosophy the school of thought called sensualism operated with an idea of primary sense data that was abstracted from the real phenomenon of experience. Pure

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sense data are a fantasy, an unreal idea. In reality they are not as such accessible. But the kind of sensation that television is bringing about has to be comprehended as this abstraction having come true, having become realized. Television is the work on the project of establishing the reality of this abstract sensation. Television has the job of making something impossible possible: it so to speak has to realize the idea of a coin that does not have a back side, to realize an absolute sensation, one that is not the other side of ideation or reason. The proper name for it is simulation. Television has the job of establishing simulation as the new form of truth and reality. What is simulation? It is Schein, show, display, mere appearance as an end unto itself, that is, an appearance that by definition does no longer want to be the appearance of something. It wants to be appearance for appearance’s sake. Simulation is the sensible as self-sufficient, not as a sign of something real. It is positivity (a positivized or positivistic sense reality), but only as virtual. The sensation that television aims for is thus the self-contradiction of a desensualized sensation, a sensation depleted of the sensuous and sensual. Not the rich, pregnant sensuousness of the fulfilled moment, not the sensuality with which something real gives itself a felt presence, but the empty, naked sensory pure and simple. The type of sensation in the sense of what we call simulation has precisely the task of reducing the senses and the sensual to absurdity: to virtuality. Looking at all the different aspects of the achievement of the psychological machine named television and particularly remembering what has been said about the importance of live broadcasts, we can now say what television is really about. The picture emerges that it is that machine that has to remove one by one all traces of reality and existence, existence as such, from its previous logical place, from its containment and rootedness in some meaning or truth, in eternity, infinity, in the absolute or in a tradition—and instead to transport it into the ephemeral, fleeting Now, the now in the sense of the abstract mathematical point within the space-time continuum. Today, what counts is the factualness of the now, its occurrence, the so-called “happening” as such, not what it is the now of. Formerly, the present had a special dignity on account of what presented itself in it. Now, the now-ness itself, in the absolute emptiness and abstractness of its positivistic temporality, is the only important thing and the only

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thing that can give a sense of importance. All substance, content, and meaning is continuously being consumed and, as it were, sacrificially offered to the naked now as fuel for the purpose of celebrating and exalting it, the now, and in order to install existence as such in this now as its new ground. Above I stated that the hidden psychological purpose of “entertainment” is “to kill time.” The now in the sense of this absolutely abstract now-ness is, as it were, the corpse of time; it is what is left once time has been killed. The killing of time serves the purpose of creating and establishing this empty now. But of course, the killing of time can conversely happen only in the now. The now is at once the goal, the result, and the precondition of the killing of time. The now can be created only within itself. It is a uroboric situation. What is it that is killed when time is killed? It is time’s fullness, its cultural substance, its specific qualitative nature, the rich literary, artistic, religious, philosophical, and personal-biographical associations, the many historical reverberations and overtones that each one of its moments comes with, in other words: memoria. The now that we are talking about here is time stripped bare of all this so that only the empty form of time (now-ness) is left. But is television not a model of fullness, richness? Here we have to expand on what has been said above about the nature of the image in the television sense of the word. The predominance of images destroys our writing culture and ultimately promotes illiteracy (both in a literal and in a wider sense). Images establish and favor the immediacy of the now and decompose abstract concepts and insights or knowledge grounded in complex rational argumentation and long historical experience, i.e., experience with a many-layered historical depth. Images present what they present as finished, ready-made results and obliterate the long logical and psychological processes that led to the result. In this way they disintegrate cultural memory. This is also one reason why it is highly problematic to construe psychology as an imaginal psychology. One must not get fooled by the fact that semantically imaginal psychology tries to bring back cultural memory by referring consciousness back to the ancient myths and ideas of all peoples. This semantic acting-out of cultural memory only obscures the fact that syntactically or logically a psychology that defines its stance and method as imaginal is in cahoots with the world

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of television’s now-ness, legitimizing and ennobling the latter’s logic by providing it with a semblance of cultural depth. The imaginal approach, despite its reference to time-honored myths, eliminates the phenomenon’s historical depth because it just like that juxtaposes uprooted mythic images (or other elements of diverse historical contexts) and modern psychological events in the timelessness and innocence of one uninterrupted, all-comprehensive logical present, and without much ado reflects the one in the other. It systematically abstracts from, and filters out, all cultural-historical stratification and all the historical mediation processes functioning via logical negations and revolutions. The image is so welcome because qua image (above all mythic image) it seems to come stripped bare of any reference to the respective concrete historical locus and specific logical status of consciousness that gave rise to it. But stripped bare it is only for that view that restricts its apperception of it to its image quality. In reality, however, gods and ideas have a Sitz im Leben; they are situated in a specific culturalhistorical context; they are answers to the concrete questions posed by the respective historical loci. Just as the blank walls of museums are indiscriminately ready to receive whatever picture one wants to hang there, and just as television operates with one screen that is indiscriminately open for all sorts of images in their endless sequence and their diverse multitude, the imaginal approach construes all the diverse phenomena, images, divine and historical figures, ideas as, each one at its time, appearing, and making their exit from, one and the same stage called “the imagination.” The only criterion for the selection of mythic images to be adduced in a particular case is their imaginal likeness. What, on the semantic level, is the polytheistic multitude and the temporality of the sequence of the images is, on the syntactical level, sublated into the inalienable present, simultaneity, and indifference of this one stage. Contrary to appearances, in the explicitly polytheistic imaginal standpoint monotheism has by no means been overcome; it merely receded from the semantic level into the inner heart, the very structure, syntax, or logic, of its approach. Imaginal psychology’s polytheism is in itself a sublimated monotheism. If all substance is continuously being consumed in order that existence be installed in the naked now as its new ground, we could

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say in mythological language that television is a machine that has the function to relocate, or to help relocate, the soul into a new locus or topos. Is it accidental that in our time it has been said (Barnett Newman): “The Sublime is Now”? This of course implies that now­ ness as such and nothing else is the sublime from now on. In order to put this relocation of “the soul” or of human existence into a historical perspective, I will now go back to a famous story of about 2,500 years ago, the Parable of the Cave by Plato. There is an underground cave. In it there are people who have never been out in daylight and have been tied from birth in such a way that they can only look forward towards the back wall of the cave. Having been born there and being unable to turn around they don’t know that they are in a cave and what is behind their backs. Behind their backs, there is a fire, and between the fire and the tied-up people various objects are being carried past the fire so that it throws the shadows of these objects onto the back wall. The cave people see those shadows, and for them the shadows are the ultimate reality, since they do not know any real things. One of the cave dwellers is freed and forced to turn around, which he does not want to do because the light of the fire and later the daylight and finally the sight of the sun hurt his eyes. But once accustomed to this brightness, he sees the real world and recognizes that before he had seen only the shadows of shadows. Plato wants to say with this story that the initial and ordinary place of human existence is in a cave. We are all sold to sense impressions, to mere appearances which are actually no more than shadows. It is necessary, Plato thinks, to be pulled away from this primary fascination and to be turned around in order to move through a strict philosophical education or through severe spiritual practices to a deeper, fuller perception of reality. For Plato, this actual reality was the world of Ideas or Forms, and this realm was symbolized in his parable by the world outside the cave. For at least 2,500 years the basic striving of Western man has been in the direction of the movement in this tale: away from the shadows to the real truth. But today, I think, we are witnessing the opposite movement, the soul’s move down into the cave with the intent of settling there. Plato’s cave never existed literally. It was a fiction for man to push off from. It seems that the striving today is to give this fiction a literal reality, for the first time. When we watch television in

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our living-rooms, have we not almost literally become Platonic cavedwellers, staring at the images coming from the TV, the shadows of the real world out there? Are we not, as if in fetters, captivated by what we see and unable to pull away? Exactly 60 years ago, at the World’s Fair in 1939, David Sarnoff, while giving the first demonstration of television in the USA, predicted that one day television “will bring the world to the home.” Indeed, it did and continues to do so. But what Sarnoff did not say was that the world, as it is brought to the home in this way, is reduced to shadows. We do not experience the real bombs that fall in Serbia, but only see the shadows of those bombs. The world brought into the home: that is the world shrunk and projected into the Platonic cave; it is reality reappearing in cyberspace, translated into virtuality. Television watching is the ritual by which consciousness is constantly trained in the new real idea that the real place of the world (of the global village!) is the private home or, in more general terms, that the place of reality as such is in cyberspace, and that virtuality or simulation is the new form of truth. And Television is the Great Transformer. It brings about the transmutation of the real world. It already revolutionized politics; it changed sports; it is affecting the judicial system …. I began with the theme of the increasing incomprehensible violence in our society, especially from children and youngsters, and the possible role that television might play in this, a violence that is incomprehensible because it is not motivated by “normal” motives, such as greed, jealousy, fury, etc. After what I have discussed here, I am ready to propose one answer. I stress one. Such a problem has causes on many different levels and in many different areas, personal and collective, biological and social, empirical and logical, and each case of a violent act has to be looked at individually. So I do not want to give the explanation. I only want to highlight one aspect that forces itself upon me in the present context. Could it be that acts of irrational violence are an attempt on the part of the nostalgic soul to break out of the cave and to establish a moment of a reality that is not virtual, and a sense of truth that is not simulation? How else, if not by committing the absolutely outrageous act of killing, could you break out of cyberspace—even if only for the instantaneous, fleeting now of this act? For there is no permanent exit out of cyberspace.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The World Wide Web From the

Point of View of the Soul’s

Logical Life

P

sychology is usually conceived as the study of what happens “inside” people, of their feelings, emotions, impulses, desires, fantasies, ideas, reactions. From this point of view the emergence of the Internet would have to be seen as a new factor in external reality, a change in our environment, and the psychological question could be, how does this new environment affect the way we feel, perceive, think, and behave? Psychology could study what a ‘healthy’ use of the Internet is and where one’s use begins to have the nature of an addiction; it could study to what extent the new forms of communication are liberating and soulful or, possibly, inauthentic, abstract substitutes for ‘real’ relationships and what the emergence of the Internet does to family life as well as to the development of the faculties of imagination and concentration in children; it could even consider whether this new medium could make new forms of therapy possible. Psychology understood in this way operates from within the opposition of inner vs. outer, subject vs. object, human person vs. factual reality. But psychology can also be conceived quite differently. Rather than placing the soul on the one side of this opposition vis-à-vis the other side, it could view “the soul” as what animates in depth the particular form that the entire relation of man and world takes in each major historical situation. This would be a radicalization of what C. G.

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Jung termed “the objective psyche” (which is in a sense a contradiction in terms). The soul of man’s world relation is the complex (living but abstract) logic governing this relation, and what we call, with a still mythological expression, “the soul” can be more precisely known as the logical life of “its” (the soul’s) self-relation, self-expression, selfproduction. I set “its” as well as “the soul” in quotation marks to indicate that it should not be mythologized (hypostasized). There is, for this conception, not an entity called the soul of which it could be said that it first exists and only then also expresses itself. Rather, we have to rise to the challenge of the self-contradictory conception which allows “the soul” to be comprehended as the result of “its” selfexpression and self-generation, in and through which it consequently “first” comes into being. This self-relation or self-expression as which the soul exists undergoes essential shifts in the history of “the soul.” Modifying the title of Jung’s early main work (Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, 1912) we could, with respect to this history, speak of “transformations and symbolizations of the soul’s logical life” and with the term “transformations” (or metamorphoses) refer to the process of changes in the form of “the soul’s” self-relation, while “symbolizations” refers to the particular formations that result from these changes and in which they, as it were, congeal or crystallize at different concrete moments in this historical development. The following discussion is based on the second view. Its advantage is that it relieves us of the anthropo-centric, personalistic interest in whether such a phenomenon as the Internet is good or bad, an advance or a sign of cultural decadence, useful or dangerous. More fundamentally, it relieves us of the (apparently so ‘natural’) illusion that technological development is, and could be, essentially in the service and for the benefit of us humans. The project of technology has its own inherent ends and we have to serve it just as much or more than it serves us. The practical benefits for individuals that the incredible progress of, e.g., modern medicine brings and the idea that the very point of technology is to benefit us are only the bait, as it were, necessary to harness our energies for the project of technological progress and to spur our enthusiasm and inventiveness. In themselves, the practical benefits of technology, just as its unwanted effects, in reality have the status of by-products, side-effects. What the great opus

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of technological progress is really about is the deepening of knowledge about reality, i.e., an increase in consciousness, as well as the factual transformation of human existence in the direction of a higher degree of complexity, differentiation, and logicity. So, returning to the Internet, how we feel about it, what it may possibly do to individuals and to human society at large, and what the proper ethical relation to it would be does not have to trouble us. All such questions, so important for what is called “the ego” in psychology, in other words, for the everyday mentality and the concern for survival in the widest sense of the word, can be left behind. Instead we can simply take the Internet and the World Wide Web as phainomena in which “the soul” speaks about itself, does something with or to itself and displays itself in the particular status that it has reached in the present locus in history. What Jung said about myths, fairy tales, and dreams, namely that in them “the soul speaks about itself, and the archetypes reveal themselves in their natural interplay, as ‘formation, transformation / eternal Mind’s eternal recreation’,”1 mutatis mutandis applies to the Internet, too. And by looking closely and deeply at the World Wide Web it can teach us about the constitution of the logic of our world relation, the present status of the soul’s logical life into which we are placed.

THE EMERGENCE OF “THE INNER” The first characteristic feature of the Internet to be examined is that it is imagined—imagines itself—as a “web.” The image of the web is reminiscent of the spider web and implies that we are surrounded on all sides by the Web and find ourselves in it. Living with the World Wide Web amounts to a revolutionary change in man’s essential orientation in the world over against our inherited predominant orientation. In order to appreciate this fundamental reversion and to see it in context I have to go back in history a bit. From the earliest times through the 18 th century man’s basic orientation had been outwards. The shaman’s soul left his body and went out and away on a journey into the cosmos, to the farthest stars; during the age when myth and ritual governed man’s being-in-the­ world, man looked essentially out into nature. In it he had his spiritual, 1

GW 9/1 § 400, my translation.

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psychological life, because it was animated by gods and spirits; or rather, natural phenomena were their embodiment. And just as children look up to their parents, so man looked out to nature and up to the gods inasmuch as he understood himself as a child of Mother Nature and as ultimately descended from particular gods. Similarly, at a later time, both in Christian religion and throughout the grand tradition of Western metaphysics (onto-theo-logy) from, say, Heraclitus to Hegel, man looked up to God, to the lógos eôn (“the existing logos,” Heraclitus), to The Absolute, although at different historical periods in epochally different ways. This mental stance corresponded to the prevailing essential economic situation, the craft (and, later, manufactory) mode of production. However, at the beginning of the 19 th century, with Hegel’s philosophy, the project of metaphysics had been brought to its final completion. Metaphysics had achieved a state of having become completely spelled out, completely translucent to itself and thus fulfilled its notion, the notion of explicating the “natural light of reason.” At the same time it thereby released consciousness out of its containment in, and by, metaphysical knowledge and into a new “worldly” thought, which is by definition in constant opposition to metaphysics. This new thought is that of Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, and so on, down to the present day. 2 On the practical economic side this highly abstract mental change (the radical break with onto-theo-logy) expressed itself in the revolutionary transition from the craft and manufactory to the industrial mode of production, heralded by James Watt’s invention in 1784 of his second, double-acting steam engine, a power motor that in contrast to wind- or water-driven works creates its motive force internally and solely under human control, and that can be universally applied (relatively) independently of local natural conditions3: The break with onto-theo-logy was tantamount to man’s emancipation from nature. Human consciousness had risen above nature; man had outgrown his child-status vis-à-vis it. Nature, once a mother goddess, and later in philosophical logic the paradigm of all creativity (production), was in practical reality reduced to a mere source of dead raw materials absolutely devoid of meaning, raw materials to 2 Cf. the writings of Claus-Artur Scheier; e.g. his Nietzsches Labyrinth: Das ursprüngliche Denken und die Seele (Freiburg and München: Alber, 1985), pp. 30–66. 3 Cf. Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Vol. I, MEW, vol. 23 (Berlin, 1969), p. 398.

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be technologically exploited ad libitum, while simultaneously, within the sphere of subjective feeling, becoming romantically, nostalgically transfigured (which is both a result and the constant verification of its logical obsolescence). To this situation of a “disenchantment of nature” (Max Weber), of a loss of meaning and the emergence of nihilism, depth psychology responded at the beginning of the 20th century by reversing our essential orientation. The natural world out there and heaven above—this had become clear by now—had had to be given up to the sciences and to technology once and for all. A sense of meaning could no longer be gained from them. Now we were told, it was necessary to turn inside (“introspection”), to search our unconscious, our dreams, our hidden personal memories, not only to free ourselves from our neurotic complexes, but also (this was above all Jung’s contribution) to find a depth of meaning in the soul. The unconscious was, Jung taught, creative: it produced symbols saturated with meaning, and in the unconscious could ultimately be found the Self or the God-image in the soul. However, just like God, it was not only a source our hope could turn to, but also a source of fear: “we feel now that the greatest enemy is threatening us, not from without but from within.” 4 Introspection as the fundamentally new orientation of 20th-century man was thus a means to rescue a sense of, and create a last asylum for, the former creative-destructive and meaningful Mother Nature, the divine, the absolute. The unconscious, our interior, is nothing else but the interiorization of what in reality had become obsolete.

EXTERNALIZATION After this historical excursion we have the background necessary for appreciating the revolutionary change brought about by the Internet. Now our essential orientation has to go outward again, nay, it is already going outward, and inevitably so, independently of our subjective inclinations. The Web is all around us. It is (or is destined to become) the locus of all information. Instead of looking into ourselves, we have to “log in” to the Web. The unconscious used to be in us; we were its surrounding vessel. For the Internet, for 4 C. G. Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, ed. James L. Jarrett, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 869. This statement dates from February 1936.

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computers and cell phones we are no more than the human interface; we are its attachments. A (both symbolic and literal) indication of today’s outward orientation is the (for our age typical ) position of people in front of a television set or a computer terminal staring into the screen (in contrast to introspectively looking within). The place of real life, of where the heart of society beats, the place of “the soul,” is out there “behind” the screen, in the Web, no longer in us. In ourselves we only find the subjective soul, our personal feelings and fantasies, not what Jung termed the “objective,” “transpersonal,” or “autonomous” psyche (which he, however, had still tried to locate in the individual). The Web is truly transpersonal, largely independent of the individual. We (more and more) live in the Web, not in ourselves, not in our body, and not in reality. The Web is not only all around us, we also constantly cocoon ourselves into its information and images when we log into the Web, and only by doing so, by logging in and enwrapping ourselves in it, is the Web confirmed and maintained, is it truly the Web in the first place. A dominant fantasy today is that of “artificial intelligence.” Although the practical realization of this fantasy is still very poor (and perhaps impossible), the existence of this fantasy is another indication of the real reversal of our orientation. (An orientation is as revealed by a fantasy as it would be if “artificial intelligence” had already become a technical reality.) Much as in traditional metaphysical thought intelligence was primarily considered to be an attribute of God and only secondarily also to occur in humans, so in the idea of artificial intelligence we again note a strong tendency to remove the notion of intelligence from its confinement in the individual as his or her attribute and to give it a place in the objective world out there and as an autonomous reality. More and more of our appliances, modern machines and weapons are becoming “intelligent” (of sorts), clearly showing the translocation of the idea of intelligence away from the interior of the individual and into things. And it is a collective dream to connect all these intelligent apparatuses through the Web, so as to be able to access them from anywhere. The first conclusion that we can draw from these observations is that the age of psychology, of depth psychology, of introspection, is over. Its time has apparently been only a brief historical interlude. There

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is no “interior” any longer. The unconscious is no more the place of mystery. The “soul,” the Self, the locus of essential action, of “depth” and mystery are all externalized, located out there in the Web and no longer in us. The individual is obsolete, a past reality. These statements need to be qualified. By saying that the individual is obsolete I do not, of course, claim that it is no longer existent. The statement is not an empirical statement of positive fact, but a (psycho-)logical one. What I mean is that the individual has lost its essential significance. It is obsolete in all essential regards. Likewise, we still have our interior, we still can explore our unconscious and practice introspection. We still dream. And in the unconscious we can still discover great mysteries. People can also, just as before, venture on the path of self-development, self-seeking, and becoming Self. But what has to be realized is that all such activities and whatever one can access through them are logically no longer up-to-date. As far as their highest determination is concerned, they are obsolete, disengaged from the place where the “real action” is today. They have only the status of a pastime activity. For the subjective feeling experience, the mysteries and images of the unconscious imagination may still be impressive and rewarding, but they have their logical place only within the leisured sphere, segregated from real life, of private, personal entertainment (although a more “noble,” sort of entertainment than what is usually referred to as such). In a way we are returning today to a situation similar to that at the time of myth (and, to a lesser degree, of metaphysics). During that age, man also did not live in positive, naked reality, in nature, in his body—as the psychological century used to imagine—, but cocooned in a kind of “web,” namely in myth. All of nature, of physical reality, including his own body, was enwrapped in mythic images (and metaphysical ideas). Myth was a “network” of images invisibly enveloping every person, thing and event. The Web today is a kind of modern equivalent.

ALIENATION OF IMAGE AND MATERIAL SUBSTRATE

FROM EACH OTHER

By bringing the situation of myth and of the World Wide Web so close together, we also become immediately aware of the fundamental

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differences between them. Myths were of an imaginal, poetic nature.
Even if they spoke of real, visible phenomena, of trees, creeks,
mountains, winds, lightning, sun and moon, they nonetheless were
the inalienable property of the mind. Mythical figures were beheld
and experienced in natural things and events; but they were not, as
positive facts, in those things, but rather, as poetic images, in the (style
of ) seeing and experiencing. The information and images in our present
and near-future communication world are no longer the immaterial
property of the mind. To be sure, they, too, need the “human interface”
to come to life. But this is secondary. Primarily and in themselves they
have a positive, physical existence of their own, namely on some server.
They are in the status of positive facts: technological, objectified (bits
and bytes) and materialized (aO
FMFDUSJDBM charge). As such they are essentially
“out there,” externalized, removed from the human mind and its actual
thinking and experiencing. Information and image processing today
take place outside and in front of the mind performing this operation,
namely on the computer screen and in the materialized object (message
or image) itself, by manipulating some bits in the electronic media.
This is a second and different way in which the “inner” gives way (here,
the inner as the interiority of the mind, as mental or imaginal reality,
not as a locality). Here one might argue, that the sculptor or painter of old did
exactly the same. Did they not also process the image in the material
object in front of them by altering it? Yes and no. Of course they worked
with material objects, stone or wood and canvas and paints. But, and
this is essential, in working with them, they worked upon the
immaterial, mental image, not upon digital data, a series of zeroes and
ones. The paints and shapes that the artist worked with were in
themselves imaginal, immediately meaningful and expressive of feelings
and reality values. By changing the colors or design in his painting,
the painter already worked with (embodied) meanings and imaginal
shapes; he did not merely work with the material substrate (pigments
and oils) as positive fact. From the outset the materials used in creating
the painting (the paints) were expressive, and thus “symbolic,” the
unity of being materially, sensually present and intellectual. This is not the case with the electronic data making up an “image.”
An example might be the images of Earth sent down from weather or
other satellites. As the monotonous series of zeroes and ones in which

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they arrive, they are in themselves absolutely meaningless, abstract, not image at all. Any meaning or image quality (colors, illusion of three dimensions, etc.) subsequently presented to us at various websites has been secondarily and arbitrarily assigned to them. It is the result of the processing work of some algorithm translating the irrepresentable and inconceivable into a visual shape. For the nature of the image this means that now it is fundamentally only the simulation of an image, all meaning is the simulation of meaning, a simulation for the benefit of the “human interface.” The image, as it appears to us on the screen and speaks to our senses, feeling and understanding, is free-floating, self-enclosed, self-serving: cut off from its substrate. A radical gulf separates it from the absolutely imageless electronic data underlying it. The immediate connection that once existed between the image and the materials making up, e.g., the painting has been severed in the case of the images as they appear in the Internet. In a way, the relation of the image to its substrate is like that of a “sticker” to the surface on which it is affixed. The image has lost its innocence, but also gained absolute intrinsic independence for itself over against its own actual material reality.

MATERIALIZATION AND LOGIFICATION With this analysis we have arrived at a very curious, complex situation, indeed at a self-contradiction. The new image that belongs to the Internet is on the one hand completely externalized. The mind has disinherited it, divested itself of it, totally delegating it to, or “sinking” it into, the material (physical) reality of electronic processes, magnetic storage media, etc., that by definition are absolutely imageless and meaningless. On the other hand, however, the image is and has to be completely independent and self-sufficient vis-à-vis its actual material reality, because only in this way, only by freeing itself from its substrate, is it image in today’s sense in the first place. The image is decidedly immaterial, even anti-material, within itself logically negating, and pushing off from, its own material base. As this freefloating “thing,” it is of an ideal nature. It is “mental,” “spiritual.” To this must be added another observation. The material base, logically negated by the image so that it might achieve its strict ideality or image nature, is already in itself “spiritualized”: software, not hardware, not steel, stone, wood, paper, etc. In the language of the esoteric

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tradition we might say that matter here has obtained the status of “subtle body.” It has been alchemically refined, sublimated. In this regard, what is digitization other than a total dismemberment, indeed, pulverization of “body”? Electronic and magnetic media and, even more so, completely wireless transmissions by means of infrared rays or via satellites, moving at the speed of light, are the form in which material reality comes as close to mind or spirit as it can get. According to Schelling,5 light is the ideal or spiritual in nature, an analogue to the mind in the extended world. It is something intellectual (ein Geistiges), but something intellectual posited objectively (ein objektiv gesetztes Geistiges). It is ideal and real at once. Mind or intellect does not have to be subjective, occurring exclusively as human mental activity. With this idea in mind, we are in a position to understand in its contradictory nature the externalizing movement that we noted. By divesting itself (in the sense of kénôsis, an “emptying,” Phil. 2:7) of what used to be its inalienable property and by instead “sinking” the latter into the material reality of electronics, the mind releases itself from its bondage to our personalistic subjectivity and into the state of objective, “real,” “autonomous” existence vis-à-vis, and to a large extent independent of, us. But this materialization does not mean that it lost its mind character. Rather, through this influx of mind, matter has conversely been sublimated, vaporized, distilled, and thus to a high degree spiritualized. So mind and matter exchanged their natures. Mind took on the objectivity and independent existence of matter, matter the subtlety and invisibility of mind. It is a double movement: the incarnation of the logos (“the Word was made flesh”) and the logification of matter.

INDIFFERENCE, IMMUNITY, ABSTRACTNESS:

SIMULATION

This movement, as kenôsis, has of course consequences for the human subject in its subjectivity. The subject is not involved in it, although certainly affected by it: it is left behind, empty-handed and logically jobless, because the subjective mind or spirit has been deserted by the mind itself and thus exists only in the status of an empty shell or of a dry snake skin shed by the snake that once animated 5

Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie (1801).

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it. Here what we learned about the status of the image as it appears in the Internet world comes in. The image is free-floating, we said, only the simulation of an image, cut off from, and within itself turning against, its material substrate. As such, it is exactly this empty shell or dead skin deserted by the spirit or meaning that, according to our traditional expectations, should (and once did) animate it. The Internet is absolutely indifferent to the images or ideas presented in it. Whether ancient myths, sublime philosophical ideas, great works of art, or pornography, instructions to potential terrorists for building bombs, trivialities, crackpot ideas, racist manifestos—the Internet is on principle open to anything and everything because it is nothing but a medium, a facilitator, without any qualitative determinateness of its own. And its indifference is appropriate, because the images or ideas are no longer (as they were in the mythic image) expressive of their substrate nor reflective of the specific place where they appear. Medium (Internet) and content (information, image, or idea) completely correspond to each other in their alienatedness from and immunity to each other. In this way, the Internet is the successor to the earlier phenomenon of the museum on a higher, sublimated level. It is its perfection. Already the museum was absolutely indifferent to the items placed in it. And these items (paintings, sculptures, artifacts) had been ruthlessly pulled out of their intrinsic and specific contexts: churches, temples, graves, pyramids, ceremonial houses, as well as performed rituals and living traditions. They had thereby been transformed into the status of the abstract, free-floating image in the modern sense. Museums, however, are still bound to concrete geographic places, and are solid buildings. The Internet is far more sublimated, far more spiritual, in that it is also freed of such heavy materiality and limiting embeddedness in a particular place. It is fundamentally atopian, of no place (topos): a mere medium. The medium is that place that within itself logically negates its place character, that is, all those specific qualities, all determinateness, that a real place has. And as such it is the appropriate “place” for the absolutely contextless, abstract image or idea. It is nothing special any more for a student at an American university, while staying in a European city, to take his or her oral M.A. exams while his or her professors are at the university on the other side of the Atlantic—via video conference: in cyberspace.

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Once the image or content has become essentially abstract (abstracted from the rootedness in a particular place and local tradition), it must also be abstract with respect to the human subject. The latter as “receptor” is now logically just as indifferent to the image and in principle open to anything as is the Internet as “provider.” There is no intrinsic connection between a content and the impression it makes on the individual, the appreciation or sense of conviction it evokes in him. The power of conviction is not inherent in the modern image itself (as it had been for millennia, for example as the religious images in temples or churches). What content, opinion, or image an individual “buys” or not, is arbitrary. It is dependent only on contingent extraneous factors. On principle, however, the human subject is just as much a “white wall” and open to anything and everything as is the Internet. Human consciousness is fundamentally disengaged from, unreachable for, immune to, the contents that come to it, because (this is simply the other side of the same coin) the image or idea is autonomous and self-enclosed (absolutely enclosing its meaning and significance within itself ). Therefore the image/idea is for us, from the standpoint of our human feeling (ego), essentially meaningless. It now has the status of a commodity for consumption, and this is why we have to “buy” it (or may refuse to “buy” it). It is interchangeable, like the various brands of toothpaste in a supermarket. It no longer speaks to us and reaches us of its own accord; it no longer quietly convinces, being the simple expression of the inner truth of a people in a given historical situation. Rather it is, like drugs, a means to an end, a mere stimulant for the senses and emotions as well as for our craving for a belief system. But in order for the content of the images to be turned into such a belief system, in other words, in order to give them credibility for one’s personal consciousness and transport the latter into the state of being convinced, an additional “glue” is needed to compensate for the lack of natural evidence and authority: a subjective effort to declare it to be, and to constantly uphold it as, the universal and exclusive truth. This is why we have fundamentalism today and why belief systems inevitably have the status of ideologies in the pejorative sense of the word (at our time, even the traditional religions have unwittingly degenerated into being mere ideologies; religions are no longer the expression of the inner

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truth of the actually lived life of a people; today, they are the private affair of each individual person. Each person is all alone responsible for his own “meaning of life,” a privatization that necessarily gives to each personal conviction the status of something arbitrary. Its counterpart is “anything goes”). For a long time it was possible to consider photographs to be documents, evidence. To be sure, they could be retouched, but that was only the exception that proved the rule, and it usually left traces. Now, with the digitized image, the capacity to be “forged” (manipulated) has been “integrated” into the nature or definition of the image itself, so that an actual instance of manipulation can no longer be considered an external act of violence performed upon the image. The image now is just image, show, self-presentation, self-display. Therefore the so-called “original” and the so-called “forgery” are equally valid. These two terms have lost their meaning. The notion of “truth” in contrast to fiction has become meaningless. The two are indistinguishable. This fact beautifully illustrates the abstract nature of today’s image. It is autonomous. It is no longer expressive of something, does not have an external referent. It is only self-expressive, self-referential: self-enclosed. This is why it can also be instrumentalized and employed for all sorts of extraneous purposes, and why it is essentially in need of propagation and advertising, since a relation between it and the human subject must be manufactured. I say “manufactured” because the artificial establishment of such a relation requires highly trained professionals and is the job of gigantic industries, the advertising industry and the media. At best, ideologies and today’s images come with that kind of authority that is fundamentally the (real) simulation of authority, the (real) simulation of conviction or belief. If the conviction has the status of simulation, then like the image, it too has the character of a selfsufficient show, self-presentation, display. It is important not to understand this as the believing person’s show, as if it were a subjective wish on his or her part to “put on a show” of believing. This is not at all what I am suggesting. The person is really convinced, but this conviction has within itself, logically, objectively, the character of a simulation, a show, because it is not really the image or idea that is convincing. The image or idea on the one hand and the subject’s conviction on the other hand do not touch. Both stay virginally intact, each on its side. Although it is what the conviction says that it is about,

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the image or idea reserves itself. Correspondingly, the conviction, too, is self-enclosed, fundamentally disengaged from the content that it is about; it is just an emotional state in the person. The content is arbitrary, contingent. It serves only as a trigger or as fuel for an emotional state. As the image does not have a referent, so the conviction is not the result of one’s being reached and convinced by the image or idea itself (by its intrinsic truth). What the person is reached by is only the packaging of the content: the advertising through which it has been sold. Simulation here does not mean that the conviction did not really exist, was dishonest, only pretended, but that the bond of necessity between subjective mind and image/idea implied by one’s conviction is simulated. In other words, “simulation” is not used as a moral judgment about a subjective behavior, but as the description of an objective quality. The word is used as in technological parlance (e.g., “flight simulator”), not as in medicine. The Internet, the image or content, and the subject’s conviction are all alienated from and immunized against one another. We have to add a fourth candidate, the human person himself, the individual. The new individual is alienated from his conviction, or put the other way around, as feeling or thinking person the individual is removed from his own individuality, soul, innermost self. The individual exists as the continuing negation, within itself, of his own individuality. His or her “own soul” is on principle inaccessible to the person; the individual turns his back on his “own individuality.” He exists only as his own packaging. The packaging as which the person exists has two aspects; it implies not only packing one’s individuality away (from oneself ), but also displaying oneself. Individuality is today essentially simulated individuality: self-stylization, display, fashion, design. Above all today’s top athletes show how the person has mutated into a kind of billboard displaying all sorts of advertising. One’s essence is in the surface, in the body tattoos and piercings, in the designer clothes and their ostentatious labels, in the buttons one wears and the stickers on one’s car, in one’s self-exhibition as in certain TV shows. It is revealing that the fashion modeling is considered a dream profession. Again we see: the locus of soul and self as well as of meaning is no longer inside the individual. It is all outside, in the public sphere, in full view. By the same token, the modern image as simulation of image means that the image is reduced to a kind of external packaging that hides and

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shuts away its inner substance and truth. Within itself, the image logically negates its own substance, turns against it. It is now all presentation, display, without really being the presentation of some imaginal substance or depth. The image within itself burns up its imaginal substance in the process and for the purpose of its sheer selfpresentation. It uses its substance as fuel.6 The modern image is essentially image in the PR sense of the word. “Presentation” is one of the big words in our age. Every “office program” for computers today comes with presentation software. Desktop publishing programs are supposed to allow everybody to create fanciful documents. A lot of effort goes into the colorful presentation of people’s and companies’ home pages on the Web, with all sorts of pictures, technical gimmicks, animation, etc. Most of the time, the technical sophistication of the form of presentation is in striking contrast to the poverty of the content presented. There is in our time no equivalent effort concerning the substance to be presented. The question about the quality and depth of the contents one wants to present and, indeed, whether one has anything in the first place that would be worth presenting, is simply not asked. Now, all this must not be construed as a mistake. It is intended; it is the inherent telos of the logic informing the information society. The implicit motto is, “presentation for presentation’s sake.” Today’s fascination is with form. Presentation no longer means “manifestation,” let alone “epiphany.” It no longer really refers to the presence of something (some truth, some archetypal reality). That is, it is no longer mythic, gnoseological, aiming for a knowing, a meaning, a concept. It is now functional. It aims exclusively for the intensity of the impression it makes, the intensity of the excitement and stimulation of the senses and emotions it evokes, or, sometimes, of the suggestive power of a vague feeling of “meaning” it provides and of the noncommittal associations it incites. It is the degree (of impressiveness) that counts today, not what the impression made is. Both in advertising and in public life (e.g., in television shows) we can see that the absolutely silly, the ugly, the undignified is valued just as highly as its opposite. How is this possible? Because presentation does not imply presence, but only stimulation. 6 But because this substance is reductively viewed only as fuel, the substance itself (as what it is in itself ) is not touched, just as in the case of the individual, individuality itself is not consumed by having been translocated into the external presentation.

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More than a hundred years ago Nietzsche foresaw this situation and described its logic. “The true world we have gotten rid of: which world remained? perhaps the apparent [scheinbare] world? … But no! along with the true world we have also gotten rid of the apparent one!” 7 It is not enough to deny the “true world” and to declare the world as such to be merely “appearance.” Only if the idea of the “merely apparent” is totally overcome is the idea of the “true world” also overcome. As long as our thinking interprets the world as only apparent, it clings to and confirms the idea of the “true world” as the standard from which alone the evaluation of the world as a merely apparent one can be made. Appearance has to be released from its bondage to its opposite (the thing-in-itself, truth, validity, authority) and thus become absolute, a free-play of images absolutely without meaning and binding power. The image today is absolute “packaging”— absolute because packaging has become altogether emancipated from “content” as such. Simulation pure. The image in myth and traditional cultural contexts pointed backwards, to what was “behind” it and manifested in it. It was “expressive.” Now the image is only oriented “forward,” toward the viewer. It is, as emancipated packaging, intrinsically instrumental; its nature is that it has a function, that it is meant to evoke, stimulate, or, sometimes, call to action. It is “impressive.” Today’s image is only image in (and by virtue of ) the impact it has, and it can have this intrinsic impact because within itself it logically sublates its own content, burning it up as fuel or alchemically distilling it into the sublimated form of pure energy so that it can be utilized8 as the power to be emotionally effective or impressive. Because of this logical structure, the new image (and along with it human existence as a whole) is totally depleted of meaning. Although abstractly, in some formal regards, at times very similar to the mythic or poetic image and for this reason frequently confused with it, the new image is in truth diametrically opposed to the former. The image that belongs to the Internet world means the absolute end of myth, of 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Wie die ‘wahre Welt’ endlich zur Fabel wurde: Geschichte eines Irrtums,” a brief section of his Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols), in Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (München: Hanser, 1960), p. 963, my translation. 8 I am here not talking about an external utilization of the image (by people, by the ego for their subjective purposes), but about an objective utilization inherent in the logical structure of the image itself.

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religion, of “the meaning of life.”9 To still seek meaning, seek “depth,” seek a mythic, religious, metaphysical foundation of life is simply a misunderstanding—unless it is a deliberate, obstinate self-delusion. The longing for a “depth” of being is one’s clinging to the distinction between depth and surface, inner and outer, “true world” and “apparent world,” a distinction that for two hundred years has been historically superseded in favor of absolute presentation and comprehended and expressed in the work of Nietzsche as having been superseded. The meaning of the phrase “meaning of life” has evaporated.

THE GLASS BEAD GAME What I said about the nature of the new image corresponds in some way to the vision Hermann Hesse portrayed of the Glass Bead Game in his novel of the same title. The Internet can be comprehended as the Glass Bead Game become real. This game is a “play with the complete contents and values of our culture.” But as the name suggests, with the contents in the form of (metaphorical, not literal) “glass beads.” Glass beads are shiny, colorful items, notoriously inexpensive. They are not expressive of any content or an inner depth of meaning. The glass beads are their colorful shine. They also do not have any inner value, as did, e.g., the “one pearl of great value” that the Biblical “merchant man” had found and that made him sell all his possessions in order to be able to buy it (Matt. 13:45 f.). That pearl symbolized the kingdom of heaven. In the idea of the Glass Bead Game, Hesse envisioned all the contents and values of our cultural tradition transformed into a state of complete sublation, sublimation, evaporation, namely, completely aestheticized, translated into Nietzsche’s absolute appearance or into what I called emancipated packaging, pure display. Potentially, according to its inherent telos, the Internet is the collection into itself, as one gigantic treasury, of 9 As before, I am speaking on a psychological level, not on a level of empirical behavior. The end of myth and religion and metaphysics means that they have lost their validity in and conviction for “the soul,” which, of course, does not preclude that many individuals (egos) will still practice traditional, or even invent new, religions or run after some sort of a “meaning of life.” It is a frequent phenomenon that the ego ignores the state of the soul or even deliberately, against its better insight, insists on getting its own desires fulfilled and tricks itself into some sort of believing (fundamentalism, fanaticism, intellectual consumerism, emotionalizing, self-intoxication and self-stultification by means of [literal or figurative] “drugs,” etc. In all such cases one’s believing is in the status of superstition).

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the complete contents of human knowledge and culture, past and present. And it is the congregation of these “precious” contents only in the form of “glass beads,” sheer simulation, presentation, display, image, information. In contrast to Hesse’s vision, however, the Internet does not have a Magister Ludi, a mastermind.10 It is essential to it that it has no center, no hierarchy. It is truly “non-ego.” It is not only self-developing, selforganizing, but also self-serving. Its usefulness for us is a side-effect. Just as it would be an illusion to think that roulette is there for our winning, so it would also be with the Glass Bead Game called Internet if we were to apperceive it primarily in terms of “benefit for mankind.” The players are needed so that there can be a game in the first place; but it is not played for their sake: it is played because “the game must go on.” I said, “The meaning of the phrase ‘meaning of life’ has been evaporated.” We have to connect this idea with the statement, “The (Glass Bead) game must go on.” In this game, there is not a pearl of great value any more, neither monotheistically the One pearl representing the kingdom of heaven, nor is polytheistically each and every pearl precious. No, in the Internet, no longer the pearls but only the “game” played with them counts: their movement as such (not what it is the movement of ), the flow, the instantaneous exchange and transportation (of information) as such, the communication itself. Consciousness has moved from the level of semantics (the “pearls,” the items, contents, substance) to the level of syntax (logical form and logical movement as such). The Internet thus must be comprehended as the objectified, concretely visible representation of the soul’s logical life, and of the soul as logical life. Formerly, psychic reality had almost always been imagined in terms of contents, beings, substances (gods, demons, spirits, object images like the pearl, the stone, the grail, the heavenly city, etc.). Consciousness was imaginal consciousness, adequately expressing itself in concrete images. The Internet is testimony to the fact that (collective) consciousness today has advanced to a constitution where it must not imagine, but rather comprehend “psychic reality” as logical movement per se, not the movement of something. Now with 10 Unless, of course, “Magister Ludi” would merely mean “expert surfer,” rather than mastermind of the Internet.

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the Internet and the World Wide Web the alchemical fantasy of Mercurius as quicksilver, as fluidity, as evasive and self-contradictory, has finally found a concrete representation and realization in empirical reality. For the alchemists, Mercurius was only a distant vision, an anticipation, a dream about which they could therefore speak only obscurely. For us this dream has become an objective (invisibly) visible reality “out there”: a reality in which consciousness can (and will slowly be forced to) know itself, that is to say, can learn which status or constitution it has long reached: the status of mercurial or logical consciousness (instead of imaginal consciousness), a consciousness of “syntax” or logical form. A consciousness that would be aware of and in tune with this new logical constitution that it happens to be in would not dwell on contents, hold beliefs, long for a depth of meaning— but “surf.” “Surfing” is the “subjective” equivalent of the “objective” status of logical form or movement. As the haphazard jumping movement from one site to the next and on and on, Internet surfing is also the perfect symbolic display in reality of the new logic of the supplement and of différance (Derrida), and, by implication, of the obsolescence of the logic of identity and center11 that was the sine qua non of such traditional notions as the individual, personality, Self, truth, meaning (of life).

THRILL AND “THE NOW!” Surfing goes along with thrill. Thrill is that state in which the individual is absolutely in the Now. Here we have to come back to what was said above about the indispensability today of the stimulation of the emotions and the importance of the sensual impression something makes on people over against what it is that makes the impression. To be more exact, we have to remember that it is the intensity of the impression or affect that really counts. What is the importance of the intensity of impression? The sheer affective intensity creates a Here!, Now!, This! and I!, and this is what all the effort in present-day culture ultimately seems to be about. Absolute immediacy is the goal. “Happenings,” instantaneous news reports, live broadcasts on television and the frenzy of mass music festivals, multimedia events, a psychotherapy that cultivates one’s emotionality and the spontaneity 11

This logic would be more adequately described as the logic of the copula.

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of one’s affects, “the sublime is now!,” thrillers, big sports events, drugs producing “ecstasy”—in a way, it seems that today’s consciousness has regressed to the very first status, that of “sense-certainty,” of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The question emerges how this (attempted) total reduction of actuality to the absolute emptiness of an abstract Now! and the stripping away of experience of all substantial content, of any depth and permanent validity, in favor of the abstract intensity (of impressions) is to be understood. Is it only for the production of thrill, of fun (“Spaßgesellschaft” [“fun society”])? No. Thrill is a by-product and at the same time a means to an important end. In a state of thrill a person is completely sucked into the Now!, and conversely, that Now! exists only by virtue of a person’s (a consciousness’) having been totally absorbed by the abstract intensity of an emotion. The rationally unbelievable fascination that video games—despite their senseless time-killing quality—have today for millions of people comes precisely from the fact that regardless of their possible sophistication and seemingly mythical plots they are intrinsically pointless, nothing but “killers of time,” and absolutely captivate consciousness for nothing (nothing but the Now! of the intensity of tension). All other contents of consciousness, indeed, all contents, are wiped out. Consciousness becomes oblivious of the world. One’s total attention is in the extreme tension of the game, in the excitement of the nerves. The players of video games probably think that their fascination is their own. They do not realize that they are unconscious victims and executioners of a force larger than they, that by being fascinated they only do the bidding of what the logic of “the soul” or the “historical locus” we are at today needs and demands. So the question remains of what the total reduction of the richness of substantial phenomena to the emptiness of the Now! is about. Our impression could be that the extreme “regression” to the “physiological excitement of the nerves” as well as the corresponding hollowing out of all traditional values, cultural contents and religious or metaphysical meaning should be interpreted in terms of cultural decadence. We could think that it is a simple negation, pure destructiveness, nothing but the path into atheism, nihilism, cynicism, sensualism and sensationalism—and thus the celebration of what the Bible calls “the flesh,” after centuries or millennia of mankind’s striving to rise above

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the sensual. We should not succumb to this external impression. The opposite is true. What seems to be an atavistic reduction ultimately to nothing but a physiological state is in actuality a further step in “the soul’s” alchemical opus, a step of an intensive sublimation, evaporation, abstraction and thus a continuation of the striving towards the realization of a higher intellect or spirit. I submit that the concerted effort at constantly producing the greatest intensity of impression possible is an attempt at the intramundane realization of “the transmundane” or “transcendence,” an attempt to represent atemporality or “eternity” under the conditions of empirical reality, an attempt at the logical overcoming of “the flesh” in the medium of “the flesh” and while being in “the flesh”—in favor of a presence of the spirit. As paradoxical as it may seem, this logical overcoming the sensual can become real only in the absolute sensuality of a Now! How else could “this world” be overcome within “this world” and with the means of “this world” than by a reduction to the point of zero of “world” (the wealth of phenomena pregnant with meaning, the plenitude of images and contents of consciousness) and of the flux of time (the abundance of ever new concrete moments)? The noetic substance of experience has to be burned up and vanish in the zero point that the reduction to “physiology” amounts to. This is what the fixation upon the intensity of affective states or upon the production of the Now! is really about. It also is what the gigantic phenomenon of advertising is about. Companies may think that advertising has the purpose of gaining new customers and increasing profits. But this is only the subjective (ego) purpose. The objective and ultimately religious purpose is the ever more perfect, ever more sophisticated and ever new realization of the emptiness of the Now! The advertising industry is a machine for constantly elevating the level of intensity and refinement in the style of how people are bombarded with advertising. This is why billions of dollars have to be spent and the inventiveness of the most talented minds has to be harnessed to catch people’s attention by using all sorts of gimmicks and shocking surprises, and by appealing to the lower instincts, drawing for that purpose upon traditional ideas, images, cultural contents, and values as fuel. The Now! of absolutely heightened emotionality is the zero point of the phenomenal richness of the world, the negation of the fullness of time, the spot blanked of the temporal

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in the middle of time. As such it is the empirical simulation of the “nunc stans” of Scholastic philosophy. The Now! is the accomplished kenôsis (emptying). In the zero, and by virtue of its zero-ness (now­ ness), the modern subject experiences its thrill as the modern form of bliss.12 Why? Because here, in the naughting of the noetic contents of consciousness in favor of pure attention, the “kingdom of heaven” has become actuality for “the soul,” the incarnation has been successfully translated into a technical reality. But conversely, it is the thrill in which, and by virtue of which, alone the Now! becomes real. This is why the intensity of impressions is all-important and why there is an insatiable need for sensations, emotional newscasts, new happenings, new hits, new thrillers, etc. as ever more fuel for the production of thrill. Medieval man had tried to literally leave the world within the world (monastery, hermits) and to literally overcome the flesh while in the flesh (through severe asceticism, tormenting the flesh). The kénôsis was acted out in empirical human behavior. This was only the first immediacy of this overcoming; the naïveté of this literalism has been taken away from us; the history of consciousness has irrevocably catapulted us onto a more complex level of reflection. Today it is no longer possible to work at this goal on the level of one’s subjective behavior (pious lifestyle; subduing the flesh) and in the interiority of one’s personal attitude (repentance, conversion, faith, confirmation). The individual is sublated, merely the simulation of individual, as we have seen. But it is only the first immediacy of this project that has been spoiled for us; the project itself remains and holds us in its grip as much as ever. The only difference is that today the opus has become structural and logical: it has been taken out of the hands of individuals and is performed in the objective logical constitution of man’s being­ in-the-world as a whole and as the fundamental transmutation of this constitution. If the kénôsis was not to be the concretistic acting out on the level of behavior, but had to be the logical negation of everything worldly, everything notional or noetic, it could not consist in literally 12 Thrill is the form in which the ego is captivated in and for the Now! But the actual subject of the modern mode of bliss is not the ego. It is the objective psyche, “the soul,” “the Self.” Thus not all thrill is a subjective emotional state, consciously felt by the ego. It is possible, too, that on the ego level a video game or one’s Internet surfing is performed quite routinely, quite matter-of-factly, just like ancient rituals were, while in the background, remote from ego feeling, “the soul” experiences its highest fulfillment.

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eliminating one kind of contents or events and privileging another. Rather, it had to turn against, even annihilate, all contents and events, but only structurally or logically by depriving them of their “naturally” given depth and meaning, of their intrinsic notional substantiality and validity, while behaviorally and with respect to their literal existence precisely retaining them. Indeed, in contrast to all earlier periods of history, consciousness had now, after their logical sublation, become open and indifferent to all contents. The Internet is the objective representation of this indiscriminate, absolutely tolerant, openness.

CODA

A Little Light, to Be Carried through Night and Storm: Comments on the State of Jungian Psychology Today

T

he century of psychology is over. The great expectations have been shattered that the emergence of psychology, in particular therapeutic or depth psychology, had given rise to at the beginning of the 20th century. Even Freudian psychoanalysis today is faced with a hostile spirit in mainstream thinking. For psychology in the tradition of C. G. Jung the situation is, on the one hand, a little easier, but on the other much more difficult. It is easier because for the most part it operates leeward of other psychologies, hardly being taken note of; it is more difficult because its innermost substance is fundamentally threatened. This threat comes from different directions. It is, firstly, already inherent in the very way Jungian psychology itself is construed, inasmuch as Jung’s high claim that his psychology was in the status of a strictly empirical science has proven untenable, and as his hope that psychology might provide an answer to the psychological-spiritual predicament of the age failed, as we are now forced to understand.1 The threat to the substance of Jungian psychology comes, secondly, also from the adherents and friends of this psychology, on the one hand 1 Wolfgang Giegerich, “The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man,” Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice 6, no. 1 (2004): 1–65.

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from the professional Jungians in whose hands it has been turned into something completely different from what Jung himself intended with his ‘complex psychology,’ as above all Sonu Shamdasani has demonstrated. 2 No one is likely to want to say that what Jung had struggled with is still alive among them and has fruitfully been further developed by them. Still today one would probably concur with Hillman when he stated years ago that the Jungians “really are mostly second rate people with third rate minds.”3 Jungian psychology has the misfortune not to have been able to attract great minds, in contrast, e.g., to Freud’s psychology, which produced a psychologist like Lacan and was able to inspire many philosophers and poets. On the other hand, the threat comes also from the adherents of Jungian psychology in the wider public, among whom Jung’s work degenerated into “pop psychology,” in other words, into a commodity, which has above all the function of satisfying private ideological-spiritual and emotional needs and thus of compensating for a feeling of lack. Recently the threat comes, thirdly, from outside, from the Zeitgeist, which with tremendous power pervades the political climate, indeed even affects legislation and administrative regulations. Depth psychology, which would actually have the task of being, in a certain way, “subversive” with respect to the prevailing collective trends, has meanwhile been taken under the state’s wings, controlled and thus “pocketed” by it. Whereas the state legitimately approaches what it has to regulate from purely external viewpoints, in the case of psychology comprehended as the discipline of interiority, such treatment from an external perspective is fatal. All the more fatal inasmuch as today this external way of looking at things has become hardened and much more radical: an abstract, completely utilitarian, scientistic, technicistic, quantifying approach. What is essentially wanted today is standardization (enforced conformity, i.e., Gleichschaltung) and control. The supreme guiding principle is that of the distribution of the available money. A few keywords for this powerful tendency are: certification of practices, quality management, mandated standard treatment procedures for specific illnesses, efficiency, evaluation, evidence-based medicine, ICD-10, provision of 2 Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3 James Hillman, Inter Views (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 36.

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health care for the population. This is the one aspect. The other is that the prevailing attitude bases all its hope on biological factors, brain physiology, genetics, behavior therapy, but excludes the mind, the soul, hermeneutics. In this situation Jungian psychology, as a psychology “with soul,” finds itself in a position like that in which the dream ego found itself in the following dream of Jung’s: “It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. … I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. ….”4 But what is that substance that in fact is still left of our Jungian heritage and that today needs to be carried through night and storm as a little light? Apart from numerous individual insights, it is a twofold treasure, something that carries a tension between its two aspects within itself: Jung’s gift to us of a concept of “soul” and of a concept of “individuality.” After Jung’s death Karl Kerényi wrote, “If I now, looking back upon the phenomenon C. G. Jung, put into words what was most characteristic about him, also on the basis of personal contacts during the last twenty years, then it is taking the soul for real. For no psychologist of our time, the psyche possessed such a concreteness and importance as for him.”5 The decisive point here is what is meant by “soul.” A marginal comment on this passage by Kerényi himself makes this clear. Quoting sentences from a letter of his to C. J. Burckhardt on December 18, 1961 , he states, “Jung wrote me … citing an alchemist, ‘maior autem animae [pars] extra corpus est’ and he really meant it. He stands out as the only one among his colleagues—at least I have not found a second one among the not confessionally bound psychologists—, who firmly believed in the existence of the soul.”6 The greater part of the soul is outside the body. With this thesis Jung breaks through the anthropological, biologistic, personalistic prejudice that as a matter of course and without the least critical reflection prevails in, probably, all psychology today. Man is within “soul,” not the other 4 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 87f. 5 Karl Kerényi, Wege und Weggenossen, vol. 2 (München: Langen Müller, 1988), p. 346, my translation. 6 Ibid., p. 487, my translation.

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way around. “The soul” is a real Universal, and a concrete Universal at that. Now the door is opened up to the insight that it is logical life, the spiritus rector of man’s world relation. This entails two important additional aspects, namely insight into the essential historical character of “the soul” and into the fact that it is not merely concerned with functionality and mechanisms (reactions, processing of experience, the psychic apparatus), but also with substantial contents or meanings— a fact that is of course in greatest opposition to the nihilistic presupposition of probably all other psychology. Above all, this concept of soul means that it has been comprehended that the subject matter of psychology cannot be positivized, but is logically negative. It may seem paradoxical, but is in truth consistent, that precisely because he has a concept of “soul” as a real Universal and as something that cannot be positivized, Jung is able to have real knowledge of true individuality in its singularity and uniqueness. Both sides (the Universal and the individual) are interdependent, since they both stand on this side of the prevailing abstractness, for which even what is individual is subsumed under an abstract Universal (under a diagnosis, a theory, a definition, a “case report,” a statistic, a technique to be applied to it, or merely under the abstract universal concept “individual”), for which, however, it must not be individuum ineffabile and must not be apperceived as such. Because if it were seen as such, it would escape from the (today sublimated ) concentration camp of a thinking in terms of control that rules over the entire logic of our age. But this is precisely what the Jungian approach demands of us in therapy: to meet each person, indeed each moment, in its singularity, in other words, outside of that concentration camp; to release ourselves, without logical safety nets, into the freshness and newness of each present moment and into the atomic subjectivity of ourselves—in order to discover in it, only in it, our true universal humanness. This is not a lofty program for the illumination of the world, but a little light that is to be carried, in the silence and unseenness of what we as individuals do, through the night of our present.

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INDEX

Index

A absolute 78, 83, 85, 88, 91–94, 96, 97, 99, 107, 109, 114, 130, 134, 141, 142, 161, 170, 181, 190, 191, 195, 275, 304, 312, 313, 324 absoluteness 89, 90 addiction 187, 261, 274, 294, 309 to pornography 263 advertising 43, 89, 90, 92, 122, 157, 163, 192, 193, 202, 205, 253, 254–256, 300, 321–323, 329 Aion (Jung) 61 alchemical opus 51, 201, 248, 254, 329

alchemy 4, 6, 16, 17, 45, 51, 58, 102, 221 distillation 324 imagery 15, 16 laboratory, Occidental history as 245–249 Mercurius 327 of history 18 of the soul 237, 246, 277 prime matter 226, 248 projection 4 separatio 103 sublimation 318 vessel (retort) 15, 51 Alewyn, Richard 31 Améry, Carl 208 Anaximander 229–230, 234, 236 anima 2, 19, 44, 45, 52, 82, 83, 98,

183, 199, 203, 205, 206 hylic 201 animus 2, 82 anthropological fallacy 2–4, 11 appearance 77, 86, 98, 134, 142, 221, 240–243, 288, 293, 304, 307, 324 absolute 325 for appearance’s sake 304 vs. thing-in-itself 221, 223, 324 archetype(s) 7, 57, 60, 61, 66, 97, 141, 269, 311 Aristotelianism 185 ascension 88, 209 atemporality 329 atom bomb—See bomb Aufhebung 58, 135—See also sublation Augustine 86, 257, 260

B Behemoth 94 being-in-the-world 78, 110, 230, 232, 234, 245, 248, 269, 277, 278, 284 faith as mode of 113 logic of 284, 330 modern 137, 261 mythic mode of 124, 139, 144 mythic-ritualistic mode of 216, 223, 225, 227, 311 negation and sublation of 228 thought as radical break from 229, 230

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INDEX

being-in-the-world (cont.) ordinary mode of 214, 215 pre-reflected 242 reflected 233, 242, 277 ritualistic mode of 21, 119 thought as a mode of 228, 232 traditional 231, 240 transformation of man’s mode of 213, 285, 287 black hole(s) 134, 135, 152, 289 bomb 19–21, 25–28, 34–36, 37–41, 47–54, 62–68, 69, 70, 86, 94– 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 109, 110, 131, 143, 157, 160, 189, 194, 197, 208, 210, 308, 319—See also time bomb and Analytical Psychology 65 and psychotherapy 68 and the future 67 as Bringer of the Unconscious 67 as collective symptom 63 as God 96–98 as God’s own reality 95 as guest 65 as psychopomp 65–66 as therapist 68 Christianity as 110 psychology of 56 boredom 263 Bröcker, Walter 199, 235 Burckhardt, C. J. 335

C Catholic Mass 6–7 cave initiatory 217, 219, 221, 223, 224, 227, 228, 233 philosophical 217, 227, 228, 231, 233

Platonic 217, 219, 221, 223, 224, 227, 251, 267, 268, 271, 273, 279

Chares 124, 126, 127

Christ 45, 107, 108, 120–123, 125,

127–133, 135, 165–167, 204 as Archimedean point 120 as deliverer 113 as sacrificial lamb 107 as scapegoat 108 as unhinger of the universe 120 crucified 113 divinity of 127 imaginal 127 triumphant 113 Christianity 20, 21, 72, 92, 103, 107–110, 120–124, 127–133, 159, 161, 162, 165, 167, 182, 184–187, 203, 207–210 cinema 192, 231, 232, 237, 238, 243, 244, 263, 264, 265 collective unconscious 2, 46, 48, 49, 67, 201, 269, 299—See also objective psyche Columbine Massacre—See Littleton, Colorado complexio oppositorum 1 compulsion 187, 192, 196, 276, 291, 296 consciousness 2, 21, 39, 44, 53, 54, 64–66, 95–97, 103–106, 109, 110, 146, 151, 160, 164, 165, 171, 172, 184, 187, 188, 198, 200, 201, 204, 209, 210, 222, 223, 227, 229, 230, 237, 238, 240, 241, 253, 260–262, 265, 267, 270, 278, 288, 289, 305, 308, 327–329, 331 and money 276 and reality, conflict between 202 and the unconscious 97 as having moved from semantics to syntax 326

becoming unconscious 172

Christian 51

INDEX

339

consciousness (cont.)

the Bomb as real devotio of 65

collective 9, 326

the nuclear bomb and 94, 95

constitution of 66

Western 118

destruction and reconstitution consumerism 66, 248, 325

of 58

contradiction 37, 61, 109, 137, 165,

inappropriate 68

226, 227, 237, 240, 241, 244,

decline of 66

273—See also self-contradic­ development of 87, 171

tion

differentiated 104

in terms

electrified 104

God’s beautiful nature 183

finite 97

objective psyche 4, 310

floating 291

wildlife conservation (nature

flooding of, with sensory input

protection) 28

302

internal 244

higher 104

of purified opposites 114

history of 330

Cornford, M. F. 145

hubris of 196, 204

countertransference 62

human 75, 312, 320

Crucifixion 127, 159, 207, 208, 209

illusion of 198

cyberspace 260, 267, 301, 308, 319

imaginal 326

D in the mythic world 171

increase in 311

Derrida, Jacques 146, 279, 327

innocent 109

Descartes, René 129, 173

logical constitution of 289

descensus ad inferos 209

television and 289

deus absconditus 35

thought vs. mythic-ritualistic

dialectic(s) 61, 78, 160, 244

228

absolute 114

transformation of 285, 287,

of “being tied up” 262

290

of “pushing off ” 227

logical form of 289

of the fetters (Parable of the

logical status of 306

Cave) 236

logical vs. imaginal 327

of the goal 238

metaphysics and 312

of the Parable of the Cave 230

missile 102

of “the unconscious” 268

modern 58, 278

of utopia and realization 237–240

mythic 185

différance 146, 327

natural—See natural conscious­ digitization 301

ness

as dismemberment 318

new level of 62, 66

of images 250, 321

noetic contents of 330

of information 259

personal 320

dissociation 53, 78, 80, 144, 179,

splitting of 38

340

INDEX

180, 207, 220–222, 241, 244, 273

in God’s nature 76

neurotic 38, 46

of Being 84

Divina Comedia (Dante) 193 Doctrine of Essence (Hegel) 245 Does God Exist? (Küng) 172 dogmatism 55 dream(s) 7–12, 14, 18, 66, 96, 173, 311, 313, 335—See also via

regia

and the opus parvum 14

great vs. small 10, 18

interpretation, object-level

method of 2

privileging of 10

epiphany 76, 77, 78, 83, 84, 88, 91, 128, 131, 133, 142, 143, 151, 244, 292, 293, 323 Erweiswort (word of proof ) 148, 149

esse in anima 279 Eternal Life 131, 132, 146, 149 evil 9, 27, 37, 106, 111, 158, 267 absolute 43, 108

and hypocrisy 110–112

and modern chemistry 105

and the scapegoat 106

in Christianity 107–109 good vs. 52, 53, 104, 105, 111 Jesus on 105–106 Jung on 103–104 Kant and Hartmann on 103, 105

E Edelstein, Ludwig 158 ego 1, 2, 15, 18, 19, 53, 55, 57, 65, 67, 82–84, 125, 129, 192, 207, 215, 247, 251, 265, 266, 269, 285, 293, 295, 298, 311, 320, 329

ego-consciousness 33, 46, 58, 201– 203, 205 ego-personality 284, 294 ego-psychology 92 ego-time 298 embeddedness 30, 36, 319 in nature 113, 206

in the imaginal 125

in tradition 296

Enlightenment 31, 63, 159, 248 entertainment 33, 92, 192, 193, 244, 249, 261, 262, 264, 273, 274, 287, 295, 301, 305, 315 and fundamentalism 270

higher 262, 274

spiritual 270

in Christianity 109, 110 matter as 41–43 extraversion 2, 59 Ezekiel 146, 148, 149, 151

F fairy tale(s) 7, 8, 26, 102, 103, 286, 311

fallacy anthropological—See anthropo­ logical fallacy personalistic 4—See also anthropological fallacy Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas 22, 312

fission nuclear 81, 144

first 81, 85

ontological 82, 83, 84

products of nature 179 products, stretching apart of 148 Flagg, James Montgomery 121 flatus vocis 84, 195, 254

341

INDEX flesh 164, 167, 169, 172, 176–180,

182–184, 188, 189, 193, 195,

196, 203, 207–210, 318, 328–

330—See also sarx

free time 244, 256, 262, 264, 282,

289—See also Freizeit

freedom 35, 50, 51, 89, 112, 198,

204, 205, 207, 210, 254, 263,

286

of thought 204, 207

Freizeit 192, 244, 249, 262—See also

free time; spare time

vs. Feierabend 192

Freud, Sigmund 3, 9, 56, 85, 161,

254, 334

fundamentalism 269, 270, 299, 320,

325

G Gebser, Jean 242

Gehrts, Heino 106, 119, 166, 167

Geldschein 275

Gerbner, George 284

Glass Bead Game 325–327

global village 276, 308

God(s) 14, 36, 41, 70, 73, 75, 79,

81–84, 86–89, 91, 93–98, 102,

104, 105, 107, 110, 112, 113,

122, 127, 129, 131, 132, 138–

141, 143, 147, 148, 161, 165–

167, 174–176, 178–182, 187–

189, 191, 194, 196, 203, 204,

207, 210, 216, 222, 259, 269,

278, 279, 298, 306, 312–314,

326

absolute 91, 92, 179, 185, 188,

193, 195, 208–211

and epiphany 77

and literalism 77–78

and the Devil 109

and the historical Jesus 127

God(s) (cont.)

anthropomorphic 75

as created by Ego 84

as creator 84, 179, 185, 189, 193,

194

as dead, Jung on 198

as flatus vocis 84, 195

as love 97

as spirit 76

as the noêsis noêseôs 193

ascension of 88

Christian 90, 91, 96, 97, 107, 176,

183, 184, 193

concealment of 139

dark 35

dilution of 78

divine nature of 81

earthly reality of 85

end of 208

existence of 78, 172–174, 184,

187–189

extramundane 76

fabrication of 164, 184–190, 193,

194

false 74, 87

idol as 85, 87, 94

image as 79

idealization of 77

infinite 97

invisible 75, 76, 86

literal 78, 79

lower 107, 216

metaphysical 207, 208

mode of being of 82

monotheistic 76

mythic 76, 78, 79, 92, 107, 173–

176, 183, 208

existence of 78

natural 63, 174–176, 179, 182,

183, 185, 189, 195, 209, 210

and art 189

death of 183

342

INDEX

God(s) (cont.) nature of 75

new form of 249

new nature of 88, 90

nuclear bomb as 95–98

of this world, Satan as 106

pagan 103

presence of 208

pure 80

pushing off from animal base 75

reality 79

self-exaltation 79

Son of, Jesus as 131

split in nature of 75, 76, 78, 84–85

sublated 259

supernatural 178

theriomorphic 75

transcendent 73, 190

transformation in essence of 180

tribal, of the Israelites 74

true 73, 74, 78–80, 91, 94, 95, 97,

165, 166

true vs. false 74, 84–88

within 107

youthful 74

God-concept 174

God-image(s) 70, 85, 90–92, 175,

269, 313

godhead 75, 78, 165, 166, 179

godhood 85, 86

God’s word 138, 139, 143, 147, 149,

179

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 102,

182, 183, 210, 218

Golden Calf 20, 71–75, 77, 79, 81,

82, 84, 85, 99

Gracian, Balthasar 115

Great Mother 28, 43, 141

Grimm, Brothers 102, 286

H Hartmann, Nicolai 103, 105

Harvey, William 129

Hegel, G. W. F. 50, 118, 126, 135,

141, 146, 161, 162, 172, 182,

191, 208, 245, 312, 328

Heidegger, Martin 20, 82, 162,

170, 263, 290

heilsgeschichte 141—See also history

Heraclitus 58, 61, 175, 241, 312

hermeneutics 57, 159, 232, 234,

236, 335

Hermes 102, 107, 112, 298—See

also Mercury

Hesse, Hermann 325, 326

Hillman, James 45, 61, 73, 74, 81,

82, 183, 292, 334

history 9, 17, 18, 19, 29, 30, 36,

39, 46, 47, 50, 51, 61, 64, 70,

83, 84, 103, 122, 128, 137,

140–143, 148–150, 152, 162,

171, 198, 248, 261, 311,

331—See also heilsgeschichte

abstract 71

apocalyptic end of 147

as commentary on the Bible 177

empirical 248

expanding 152

fifth theory of history 152

four theories of 151

human, and time 137

of Christianity 21

of consciousness 330

of God 75

of ideas 237, 248

of literature 141

of philosophy 141

of religion 97

of the Occident 63, 64, 70, 82,

146, 159, 162, 248

as alchemical laboratory 245

INDEX

343

history (cont.) image(s) (cont.)

and substance 323

of the soul 54, 118, 237, 246, 310

and television 289–296, 298, 300–

of Western metaphysics 146

302, 305, 306, 308

religious 81

and the imaginal approach 306

science of 142, 149

and the Internet 317, 319

the Bible as 146

and the World Wide Web 314

zero point of 128

animal 76

Hölderlin, Friedrich 155, 156, 162

archetypal 8, 18, 102, 128, 134,

Homer 47, 170, 199, 259, 260

145, 201, 251

hubris 9, 70, 93, 195, 196, 200, 201,

as (absolute) packaging 322, 324

204, 210

as a means to an end 320

humanism 50, 67, 204, 205, 207

as autonomous 320

humanitarianism 198, 204

as cave 251

Husserl, Edmund 22, 274

as commodity 320

Huysmans, J. K. 44, 45

as naïve 234, 245

hypocrisy 110, 111

as presentation 250, 255, 321, 323

I as psyche (Jung) 81

as simulation 319, 322

idolatry 74, 85–87, 92–94

Being as 81

and the Bomb 98

computer 250, 251

invention of 79–80

concrete 326

Ignatian rule 115

detached 221

Ignatius of Loyola 112, 113

different realities of 300

illusory being 242, 244–247, 249,

digital 250, 316–317, 321

251, 254, 257–260, 270, 272,

as simulation 317

274, 275, 277, 279—See also

independence of 317

virtuality

divine 80

image(s) 16, 17, 20, 21, 33, 45, 52,

dream 251

60, 61, 68, 72, 73, 77, 79–81,

earthly 74

105, 110, 123–126, 130, 133,

fantastic 215

134, 157, 161, 164, 171, 172,

forgery of 321

176, 189, 209, 217, 218, 220,

free-floating 317, 319

221, 226, 232, 237, 242, 265,

graven 79

266, 306, 321, 329

Hades as treasury of 216

abstract 319–321

in politics 251

alienation of 315–317, 322

inner 141, 251

and conviction 322

instinctive 176

and medium as alienated from

instinctual 195

each other 319

internal 273

and myth 175, 180

lifeless 219

and photography 250

logic of 251

344

INDEX

image(s) (cont.) memory, in shadow form in

(Plato’s) cave 268

mental 316

modern 320, 322, 323, 324

as end of myth 324

forward orientation of 324

mythic 44, 73, 132, 134, 175, 178–

180, 306, 315, 319, 324

network of, myth as 315

new 72, 317

and the Glass Bead Game 325

vs. mythic/poetic 324–325

object 326

objective self-unfolding of 157

of ascent from cave (Plato) 240

of Black Hole 289

of Christian religion 125

of God 73

of human interior 269

of man 286, 303

of sexual union 292

of the cave (Plato) 215, 216, 221,

231, 232, 242

of the Self 108

of the sun (Plato) 243

of the unconscious imagination

315

of the web 311

of violence on television 286

on television 251, 296

poetic 316, 324

primitive 72

primordial 107, 213

processed 250

in painting and sculpture 316

processing 316

on computers 300

produced by the unconscious, as

cave 268

psychological 45

real 72

image(s) (cont.) religious 320

satellite 250, 316

self-contained 157

self-moving 157

shadow 231, 233

simple 72

soul 105

the world as 268

without referent 322

image-nature 176

imagination 29, 33, 36, 41, 52,

118, 123, 125, 138, 142, 187,

188, 231, 232–237, 265, 267,

306, 309

active 8

mythic 119, 131, 133, 142

unconscious 315

immediacy 230, 233, 277, 291

absolute 327

first 134, 233, 235, 277, 278, 330

of earthly existence 236

of the feeling of belonging 264

of the now 305

sensible 229

sublation of 233

Incarnation 127, 128, 159, 160,

161, 163–168, 171, 176–182,

188, 201–205, 207, 208, 318,

330

individualism 10, 59, 204

individuality 61, 322, 323, 335

isolated 125

ontological 61

packaging one’s 322

personalistic 61

simulated 322

true 336

individuation 2, 3, 56, 59–61, 66–

68

Industrial Revolution 21, 133, 186,

213

345

INDEX industrialization 68, 200, 204, 248 information 92, 126, 151, 158, 194, 232, 237, 251, 255, 258, 259, 260, 271–273, 275, 276, 282, 287, 292–295, 298, 313, 314, 316, 319, 323, 326 processing 316 sterility of 293, 298 infotainment 232, 273 innovation 295, 296 intentio obliqua 233 intentio recta 233 interiority 8, 13, 15, 109, 205, 224, 229, 267–269, 279, 302, 316, 330

absolute 12, 278 absolute-negative 16, 279 alchemical retort as image of 15 and Plato’s Cave 224 discipline of 334 introspective 207 method of, psychology as 13 of the soul 278 true 16 interiorization 14, 109, 110, 313 absolute-negative 14 Internet 271, 309–311, 313, 317, 319, 320, 322, 324–327, 330, 331

introspection 11, 67, 68, 110, 160, 313–315 introversion 59 irrationality 33, 35 Isaiah 138–141, 143, 147, 150

J Jaspers, Karl 149 Jeremiah 139 Jesus of Nazareth 127–130, 132, 161, 165 Jung, C. G. 2, 4–13, 17, 19, 20, 22,

27, 45, 48, 55–63, 65, 67, 68, 81, 86, 95–98, 102–104, 107, 161, 163, 169, 172, 174, 187, 189, 191, 192, 198, 199, 201, 210, 228, 246, 268, 270, 273, 277, 278, 299, 310, 311, 313, 314, 333–336

K Kalff, Dora 46 kali yuga 152 Kant, Immanuel 103, 105, 131, 169, 172, 221, 259, 260 Kena Upanishad 117 kenôsis 203, 318, 330 Kerényi, Karl 173, 335 Kierkegaard, Søren 22, 191, 312 Kratylos 168 Küng, Hans 172

L Lacan, Jacques 279, 334 Last Man (Nietzsche) 66–67 leisure 183, 203, 204, 207, 244, 249, 262, 315 Leviathan 94 libido 5 Western 205 literalism 22, 77, 80, 98, 221, 330 Littleton, Colorado 284, 286 live broadcast 292, 293, 327 logical life 260, 336 soul’s 310, 311, 326 logos 21, 41, 167, 169, 171, 172, 176–179, 181–185, 187–189, 196, 203, 204, 207, 209, 210, 224, 227, 228, 234, 238, 247, 248, 312, 318 loss of meaning 36, 235, 313 Luther, Martin 96, 112–114, 165, 180

346

M Magister Ludi 326 Mann, Thomas 76, 211 Mann, Ulrich 74, 90, 161 Marx, Karl 22, 162, 197, 245, 262, 270, 312 matriarchy 42–44, 52, 171 Matter 41, 42 McLuhan, Marshall 278 media 21, 158, 213, 251, 252, 262, 277, 278, 316, 317, 318, 321 mediality 21, 213, 278, 279 memoria 305 memory 224, 268 cultural 305 Mercurius 16, 17, 102, 103, 327 Mercury 102, 107—See also Hermes; Mercurius mind 14, 42, 52, 178, 215, 217, 229, 230, 238, 255, 261, 262, 270, 303, 316–318, 335 absolute 41 autonomous life of 191 come-of-age 186 conscious 109 dogmatic 55 dulling of 297, 299 eternal 7, 193, 311 everyday 219 expanding of 299 explosive 102 human 162, 173, 228, 316 interiority of 316 invisibility of 318 life of 197 modern 46 natural 58, 59, 118 numbing of 270 picturing 235 poetic basis of 81 subjective 222, 223, 318, 322

INDEX

mind (cont.) thinking 234, 236, 263 tied-up 229, 233 vs. matter 318 waking 263 Western 101, 102, 112 modernity 21, 48, 53, 169, 204, 205, 213, 260, 270 defined 186 industrial 21, 213 medial 213 money 68, 87, 201, 243–245, 244, 245, 249, 254, 273–277, 279, 334

as actual truth of the cinema 243 money market 275, 276 monotheism 21, 91, 306 Moses 73, 75–77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 87, 88 Mother Earth 28, 41, 200 Mother Nature 312, 313 mysterium tremendum 35 myth(s) 7, 8, 12, 45, 68, 72, 82, 119, 120, 122, 123, 141, 142, 156, 165, 166, 170, 171, 174– 176, 178–182, 185, 198–200, 202, 203, 216, 222, 224, 229, 235, 240, 279, 296, 305, 306, 311, 315, 316, 319, 324 Christian 165, 172, 178, 203 modern 44 nostalgia 200 super- 141 mythological man 172, 174, 175 mythos 21, 121, 177, 224, 227, 228, 234, 247, 248

N narcissism 71, 268 narrative 74, 79, 141–144, 149, 225, 234–236, 239–242, 245

347

INDEX absolute 142 as an act of violence 215 fantastic 239, 240 form, as naïve 234 grand 301 linear 151 of the absolute 142 utopian 240, 241 natural consciousness 117, 118 natural sciences 162, 177, 180, 181, 186–188, 190, 202, 203 natural world 53, 63, 64, 88, 92, 103, 129, 132, 140, 155, 175, 178, 179, 190, 253, 279, 313 nature 26, 28–30, 35, 37, 39, 41– 46, 50, 53, 60, 63, 98, 103, 105, 109, 113, 114, 115, 133, 140, 151, 155, 156, 173, 175– 183, 188, 190, 193–195, 198– 203, 208, 209, 216, 229, 246, 266, 271, 277–279, 301, 311, 312, 315, 318 denaturing of 28 disenchantment of 313 pre-logical 203 repristination of 209 negation 128, 133, 228, 322, 329 absolute 133 logical 215, 306, 330 simple 328 negativity 133, 218 absolute 14, 218, 219 of the cave 219 Neumann, Erich 71, 106, 141, 166 neurosis 5, 13, 14, 27, 33, 39, 48, 56, 57, 58, 63, 68, 144, 205, 207

Newman, Barnett 307 Nietzsche, Friedrich 22, 66, 83, 93, 109, 312, 324, 325 nihilism 235, 313, 328 noêsis noêseôs 6, 16, 193

non-ego 326 nostalgia 66, 114, 200, 274 nuclear ash 81 nuclear bomb—See bomb numinosity 46, 77, 83, 85, 87, 91, 94, 199

O objective psyche 4–10, 19, 41, 45, 47, 48, 53, 57, 202, 205, 209, 310, 330—See also collective unconscious Odysseus 165, 259 ontotheology 312 opus contra naturam 58 opus magnum 10, 14, 18, 20, 22 opus parvum 10, 14, 18 Otto, Rudolf 96

P packaging 255, 300, 322 absolute 324 emancipated 324, 325 panem et circenses 274 Parable of the Cave 213, 214, 216, 220, 221, 222, 224–226, 230– 242, 244–247, 260, 277, 279, 307–308 patriarchy 42–45, 52, 70, 171 Peloponnesian War 225 phenomenology objective 96 of God-images 70 of nuclear bomb 70 of religion 97 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 126, 328 Plato 213–217, 219, 221, 223–227, 229, 231–235, 237–240, 243– 247, 259, 260, 265, 273, 274, 276, 279, 307

348 Platonism 60, 61 Plutarch 182 polytheism 20, 21, 92, 306 pornography 171, 263, 319 positivity 4, 5, 13, 16, 81, 119, 133, 149, 219, 220, 222, 269, 271, 278, 304 absolute 220 of Being 133 of reality 131 presence 33, 43, 89, 90, 140, 141, 146, 292–296, 304, 323, 329— See also telepresence absolute 291 and live broadcast 293 empirical 208 epiphanic 128, 292 living 171 material 64 objective 184 of God 208 physical 293, 294 real 168, 194 sensible 250, 259 vs. stimulation 323 presentation 250, 300, 323, 326 absolute 255, 325 and advertising 254 as stimulation 323 for presentation’s sake 323 live 292, 293 of image 189 of images on television 295 vs. fabrication 189 prima materia 17, 248—See also prime matter prime matter 15, 16, 226, 237—See also prima materia projection 4, 52, 110, 111, 219, 244 shadow 9 psyche 2, 3, 4, 12, 39, 53–54, 61, 65, 72, 86, 98, 148, 169, 199, 201,

INDEX

288, 335 and the bomb 38 archetypal fantasies of 56 collective 48, 70, 299 final-synthetic view of 57 human 13 image as (Jung) 81 instinctual 83 objective—See objective psyche objective level of 95 psychology as product of 62 reality of 57, 96 receptive 72 suffering 57 transpersonal 56, 314 unconscious 47, 48, 201 Western 72, 108 psychoanalysis 21, 56, 333 psychology 1–3, 8–15, 18, 19, 21, 53, 56, 59, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 82, 87, 109, 111, 201, 219, 269, 270, 284, 305, 309, 311, 314, 333, 335, 336 analytical 55, 56, 62, 63, 65 and history 17 archetypal 20, 43, 61, 117, 221 as method of interiority 13 as product of psyche 62 complex 334 conventional 61 conventional understanding of 2 defined as discipline of interior­ ity 8, 334 defined as science of the soul 1 depth 1, 2, 8, 55, 313, 314, 333, 334

developmental 141 ego—See ego-psychology empirical 11 ethics of 19 Freudian 334 imaginal 305, 306

349

INDEX psychology (cont.) imagistic 61 Jungian 2, 4, 11, 22, 60, 61, 65, 66, 269, 333, 334, 335 objective 6, 7, 9, 12 of the Trinity 6 of transference 6 personal 9, 88, 227 personalistic 10 pop 334 reductive 111 self-reflection of 62 universality of 12 vs. physics 5, 39 vs. the sciences 12 with soul 7 psychopomp 58, 65 the Bomb as 65 psychotherapy 19, 47, 68, 268, 269, 327

R rationality 32, 33 male 42 Re-Visioning Psychology (Hillman) 292 reality 6, 11–13, 17, 22, 25–27, 35, 36, 38, 45, 48, 52–54, 60, 70, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 87–88, 92– 95, 98, 104, 117, 118, 124, 130, 132, 134, 139, 142, 148, 152, 156, 160, 162, 164–166, 168, 170, 173, 177–179, 182, 183, 187, 195, 202, 204, 205, 209, 210, 215, 220, 221, 232, 235–240, 246, 247, 249, 251, 253, 254, 256, 265, 283, 288, 292, 293, 301, 303, 304, 307, 308, 309, 311, 314–316, 327 actual 80, 188, 195, 301, 307 and idea 239

reality (cont.) and illusory being 249, 254, 257, 258, 270 and money 276 and myth 175 and television 257, 286 and the Incarnation 177, 178 and truth 85, 86, 239, 250, 285, 287, 304 archetypal 323 artificial 210 as essence of flesh 178 autonomous 314 blocking out voice of 26, 27 bodily 203 cave 270, 271, 273, 274 chemical 4 concrete 77 consciousness vs. 202 demonization of 93–94 divine 127 vs. secular 115 earthly 77, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 166, 170, 177, 178, 207, 209 empirical 34, 239, 245, 256, 327, 329

empirical-historical 167, 179 external 3, 15, 39, 40, 46, 48, 49, 52, 83, 86, 121, 124, 139, 143, 175, 205, 209, 309 fleshly 188 God as 97 highest 214 historical and social 138 human 218, 277 imaginal 121, 125, 129, 132, 316 imaginal quality of 79 immediate 251 independent 271 inner 38, 39, 46, 268 intellectual 275 literal 119, 121, 123, 125, 126, 307

350 reality (cont.) logical essence of 257 material 9, 164, 178, 188, 205, 317, 318 medial 279 mental 51 mythic 43, 125, 181 natural 90, 94, 174, 179, 216, 247, 253, 254, 271, 278 numinous 89, 90 objective 13, 33, 146, 162, 163, 243, 270 objective-psychic 200 of advertising 254 of archetypal image 251 of cave existence 249 of God 79, 84, 85, 93–96, 99 of image 157 of mythic gods 173 of religion 202 of soul’s life 138 of the psyche 57, 96 of the shadow 60, 210 of the Western world 109 ordinary 118, 123 perception of 301 phenomenal 78 physical 38, 39, 96, 168, 176, 315 positive 15, 34, 123, 129, 131, 132, 133, 166, 178, 180, 181, 315 practical 164, 178, 245, 312 primary 268 psychic 5, 202, 205, 326 psychological 37, 49, 50, 164 public 139, 163 reification of 84 repressed 94 ritual binding of 93 ritualistic 86, 204 secondary 84, 123 secular 133

INDEX reality (cont.) sensory 77–80, 93, 216, 230, 258, 259, 265, 304 simulated 267 special aspects of 12, 13 speech as reflected 258 spiritual 269 split in 38, 39, 52 sublated 250, 255, 267 substantial 3, 6 technical 52, 102, 314, 330 technical approach to 57 technological 94, 156, 178, 201, 203, 209 transformation of constitution of 180

true 214 two kinds of 123 two-dimensional 220 unconscious 95 virtual 213, 247, 260, 267, 272, 273, 277, 301, 302 vs. actual 301 visible 327 vs. theory 179, 180 reality TV 256, 257 redeemer 108, 206, 210 reflection 1, 25, 58, 62, 69, 88, 132, 222, 227, 229, 231–236, 244–246, 250, 277, 330 completed 233 critical 39, 335 first immediacy of 233 immediate 233 philosophical 216 psychological 38 reflected 233 task of 229 true 233 religion 71, 72, 97, 119, 127, 159, 160, 161, 163, 187, 191, 202,

INDEX 204, 209, 257, 262, 269, 270, 320, 325 absolute 161 ancient Semitic 74 Christian 92, 125, 159, 161, 312 definition of 191 dualistic 109 Greek 102 living 159 mythological 185 nature 185 of redemption 162 real 20, 199 reality of 202 Tillich’s definition of 190 traditional 198, 320 repression 50, 106, 108, 110, 188, 201 resurrection 58, 149, 150, 159, 208, 209 ritual(s) 8, 119, 160, 167, 169, 170, 191, 193, 204, 210, 216, 222, 224, 232, 240, 296, 308, 311, 319 psychotherapy as 268, 269 romanticism 19, 182 nature 200 Rorty, Richard 278 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 31, 32, 33, 162

S Sacred Marriage 145 sand picture(s) 46–52, 54 sandplay 4, 8, 46, 47, 49 therapeutic 46 Sarnoff, David 281, 308 sarx 167, 169, 171, 179—See also flesh scapegoat 106–108 Scheier, Claus-Artur 213

351

Schein 242, 244, 245, 249, 254, 275, 304—See also illusory being; virtuality Schelling, Friedrich W. J. von 318 Schiller, Friedrich 210 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 96 Scholasticism 112, 129, 172, 184, 185, 187, 188, 248, 330 Schopenhauer, Arthur 59, 268, 312 Schweitzer, B. 124 Science of Logic (Hegel) 245 Seifert, Friedrich 106 Self 15, 108, 205, 269, 313, 315, 327, 330 self-contradiction 240, 304, 317 dialectical 4 logical 240 self-exposure 297, 302 self-presentation 264, 321, 323 self-reflection 1, 8, 56, 62, 64 sensation 304 absolute 304 sensationalism 302, 328 and television 303–304 sensualism 235, 303, 328 sensuality 43, 262, 304 absolute 329 sentimentalism 66, 200, 274 sexuality 184, 198, 262 shadow 2, 9, 60, 71, 97, 162, 164, 201, 210, 256, 257 of Christendom 71 shadow play 214, 221, 245, 262 Shamdasani, Sonu 11, 334 shame 196, 302 Silesius, Angelus 242 simulation 189, 304, 308, 317, 318, 319, 321, 322, 324, 326, 330 and television 304 and virtuality 304, 308 defined 304 of God 188

352 simulation (cont.) of image 322 of individual 330 Snell, Bruno 124 Sophistic enlightenment 232 Sophists 225, 232, 234, 235 doxai of 225, 226 nihilism of 235 sensualism of 235 soul 1–3, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15–19, 37–41, 45–48, 52, 55, 61, 68, 73, 81, 83–87, 98, 99, 103, 105, 108, 123, 125, 128, 138, 142, 144, 156, 161, 168, 175, 183, 196, 198, 199, 202, 209, 210, 216, 224, 225, 238, 247, 250, 251, 253, 258, 261, 265, 266, 278, 279, 289, 291, 292, 294, 295, 302, 307, 309, 310, 335, 336 absolute negativity of 218 alchemy of 237, 246, 277 and television 284, 287 as language 278 as logical life 310 as objective 5 as speaking about itself 7, 8, 311 as topic of psychology 3 bomb 102 burial of 158, 159, 171, 209, 210 concept of 335, 336 contents 4 defined 284 dreams and access to 10 energy of 242 history of 54, 118, 237, 246, 310 immurement of, in (Plato’s) cave 266, 277 immurement of, in computer games 269 intellect vs. 9 interiority of 278 logical life of 310

INDEX soul (cont.) meaning of 335 medieval 49, 200 modern 261, 265 nostalgic 308 of ancient Greeks 110 of modern man 36, 49 opus magnum of 10, 14, 18, 20, 22

poetry of 49 project of 277 relocation of 307 science of, psychology as 1 seat of 203 technology as split from 39, 40 tied-up 262, 263 true locus of 201 unconscious 265 via regia to 12 Western 102, 109, 241, 246 soul-making 201 spare time 33, 192—See also Freizeit Spirit 41, 42 and Matter 41 Mercurius 102 spiritus rector 64, 249, 336 subjectivism 10, 235 sublation 58, 135, 207, 228, 233, 258–260, 279, 325, 331 subtle body 318 super-ego 88 symbol(s) 6, 8, 12, 43, 57, 60, 66, 68, 101, 156, 158, 159, 170, 171, 183, 200, 204 black hole as 289 crucifix as 128 initiatory and philosophical caves as 227 nuclear bomb as central 48, 54, 64

of Christianity 159

353

INDEX symbol(s) (cont.) of decline of entire world, Bomb

as 66

of invisible deity, animal as 75

of the (Platonic) cave 270

of the absolute, God as 191

pedestrian mall as 67

rockets as 117

space travel as 117

terrible, nuclear bomb as 49

the unconscious as producer of

313

symbolic life 191, 192, 195, 201

symbolization 5, 270, 310

synchronicity 3

T technology 1, 9, 17, 18, 35, 39–45,

49, 52, 63, 68, 95, 114, 135,

151, 155, 157–163, 178, 180,

181, 182, 187–189, 192, 194–

197, 199, 201, 202, 205, 206,

208–210, 247, 248, 259, 271,

276, 281, 310, 313

Telemachus 165, 166, 170

telepresence 259, 260

television 29, 42, 89, 90, 114, 157,

169, 192–194, 199, 210, 251,

252, 255, 257, 259, 262–265,

274, 281–291, 294, 295, 299,

300, 303, 305, 307, 314, 323, 327

and self-exposure 302

and sensationalism 302–303

and silence 298

and simulation 304

and the unconscious 299

and tradition 296

and violence 284, 286, 287, 308

as absolute presence 291

as addiction 283, 287, 294, 295,

298–299

as Black Hole 289

as contraceptive 291, 293

as psychological machine 281,

285, 287–290, 303, 304

as shrine 294–295

as taking possession of the viewer

290

as the Great Transformer 308

compared to Muzak 298

criticisms of 282

doping effect of 297, 299

images on 300–301, 305

importance of live broadcasts for

292–293, 294, 304

“The Spirit in the Glass” (Brothers

Grimm) 102

thought 5–7, 9, 16–21, 41, 85, 177,

188, 201, 222, 227–230, 233–

236, 248, 250, 279, 312

as a mode of being-in-the-world

228, 232

Christian 129

freedom of 204, 207

imagination vs. 232–237

Jung’s 56, 62

logic of 234

reflectedness of 230

self-thinking 17, 20, 193, 233

technology as 17

traditional metaphysical 314

Western 246, 279

thought pattern 40, 41, 46, 90, 111

archetypal collective 44

Christian 129

Tillich, Paul 96, 190, 191

Timaeus (Plato) 164

time 107, 128, 137, 141, 142, 144,

305

actual time 137

and breathing 150

and history 63, 137, 149

and live performance 293

354

INDEX

time (cont.) and the apocalypse 147, 149–150

and the cult of the dead 145–146

as container 143, 150

cave (Plato’s) 263

cyclical conception of 151

disconnected 204

disposable 192

empty 144, 149

flux of 329

free—See free time

future 140, 147

geological 248

historical 138

history and 30

holes in 298

idea (experience) of time 137

in the thought of Derrida 146

involution of 152

killing 295, 296, 305, 328

leisure—See leisure

linear 139, 140

linear conception of 57, 137

movement of 156

mythic view of 141, 144–145

negation of the fullness of 329

original 140

overcoming the limits of 194, 259

qualitative character of time 259

sublation of 258–259

true 140

turning point of 128

unmooring of 262, 263

time bomb 143, 147

timelessness 306

transcendence 56, 81–83, 93, 190,

329

transference 6, 9

Transformations and Symbols of the

Libido (Jung) 5

Trinity 6

truth 5, 19, 50, 57, 85, 87, 95, 104,

114, 126, 131, 138, 142, 143,

147, 150, 151, 162, 216, 221,

222, 223, 226, 232, 239, 240,

245, 256, 271, 273, 274, 297,

304, 323, 324, 327

about money 275

absolute 39, 85, 161, 163

absolutization of 142

and epiphanic presence 292

and fiction 321

and fundamentalism 270

and Goethe 183

and packaging 323

and reality 85, 86, 89, 93, 98, 239

and television 257

and the church 120

archetypal 95

vs. empirical 139

arrested 144

as emergent 223

ascent to (Plato’s cave) 231

Christian 163, 164

creative 95

decay of notion of 226, 250

dismissal of mythic 224

divine 216

eternal 117, 274

God’s 85, 89, 93, 94, 97

hidden 54, 148

higher 96, 224, 231, 274

imaginal 125

in Plato’s cave vs. initiatory cave

219

inner 226, 249, 320, 321

innermost 248

intrinsic 322

metaphysical 103, 133, 147

new 297

objective 183

of (Plato’s) cave, the Sun as 273

of advertising 254

355

INDEX truth (cont.) of appearance 242

of being 243

of consciosuness 261

of entertainment system, Money

as 273

of existence, (Plato’s) cave as 271

of God’s word 139

of technology, Incarnation as 159

of the Bomb 94

of the cinema 243–244

of the logic of illusory being 244

of the Sophists 235

old vs. new (Plato’s cave) 241

ontological vs. logical 87

philosophical 228

Plato’s Cave as dissociation of

one single 244

privative form of 219

psychological 20, 96, 97, 163

pure 94

real 307

repressed 158

restitution of, to poetics of being

148

science and 142–143

scientific 147

self-contradictory 245

simulation as a new form of 304,

308

soul’s 261

spiritual 189, 246, 270, 277

sublation of concept of 250

theoretical 63

transformation of the idea of, by

television 285, 287

ultimate 222, 224, 249

unconscious 51

universal, eternal 220, 320

vs. appearance 221

written 147

U Uncle Sam 121, 129, 132–134

underworld 58, 65, 66, 119, 120,

167, 209, 216, 217, 219

unus mundus 3

uroboros 7, 8, 12, 14, 62, 305

utopia 20, 22, 156, 231, 232, 237,

240–242, 246

and realization 237

and the state 239–240

modern 239–241

Plato’s 238, 239

Plato’s Cave as 230–232

utopian thinking 50, 51

V

via regia 8–14

violence 71, 195, 215, 244, 261, 269,

284, 286, 290, 308, 321

virtuality 257, 270, 274, 277, 304,

308—See also illusory being

absolute 254

W Wanderers Sturmlied (Goethe) 182

Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido

(Jung) 310

Watt, James 312

Weber, Max 313

Whitehead, Alfred North 245, 246

Wilhelm Meister (Goethe) 210

Will to Power (Nietzsche) 83

World War II 121, 282, 285

World Wide Web 271, 311, 315,

327

Y Yahweh 74, 90, 148

356

Z Zeitgeist 285, 334 Zeus 104, 145, 169, 173, 293

INDEX Zimmerli, Walther 148 Zosimos 5