A few years ago, I read Philip Ursprung’s study of Beuys Joseph Beuys: Kunst Kapital Revolution, which provided a solid introduction to his work withiA few years ago, I read Philip Ursprung’s study of Beuys Joseph Beuys: Kunst Kapital Revolution, which provided a solid introduction to his work within the broader context of postwar socio-political developments. However, as I noted in my review, the book lacked engagement with "Beuys’ more hermetic side—the shamanic quality of his presence and performances, as well as the profoundly romantic inspiration behind his work (and the inevitable ethnonationalist resonances that accompany it)."
This slim volume fills that gap by foregrounding Beuys’ own voice in conversation with Volker Harlan. Their exchange took place in 1979 in the foyer of St. John’s Church in Bochum where Harlan served as a pastor. At the time, Beuys was 58, and Harlan just over 40. Trained in both theology and biology Harlan would soon co-found Germany’s first anthroposophically-inspired private university at Witten-Herdecke in the early 1980s. Anthroposophy refers to the teachings developed by Rudolf Steiner in the early 20th century. It reflects a esotericist worldview that encompasses elements of various religious and spiritual traditions.
The book consists of two main parts: a transcript of the Beuys-Harlan conversation and a substantial postscript by Harlan in the form of an essay. In articulating his views, Harlan is at pains to highlight the convergence between elements from Steiner's doctrine and Beuys' ideas, attempting to underline their visionary reach and spiritual depth. More recently, Hans-Peter Riegel has played on the same connection to expose Beuys as a sectarian and a closet Blut-und-Boden ideologue. Despite these liabilities also for Riegel the importance of Beuys' artistic and pedagogic contributions remains, however, beyond doubt.
What Beuys actually has to say seems far more compelling than these partisan skirmishes - both in substance and in style. Given his esoteric influences, one might expect his language to be dense and abstruse. Yet, his way of expressing himself is strikingly precise and often grounded in direct personal experience. Already in the first few pages, he articulates one of his most fundamental theses- ‘everyone is an artist’ - in simple terms by contrasting a 'middle class concept of art' with a notion that sees it as an 'anthropological concept'. I'm veering a bit from Beuys' discourse by saying that politically speaking the former sees art as something that is produced, commodified and consumed by different groups in society. Epistemologically it is associated with a 'retinal' concept of art, as something that is essentially grasped by the eye. In contrast, the anthropological view frames it as a constant in our existence, as something "that once more describes the essence of being human, the human being as the expression of freedom, embodying, carrying forward and further evolving the world’s evolutionary impulse." It is worth pausing at this statement. Intellectually one can decode it as a hybrid of esotericist and idealist ideas. And yet it is also pointer to a generative capacity of which in principle anyone can partake. That capacity is a given but has to be reactivated and practiced. Beuys explains trenchantly, and beautifully, this process of unceasing preparation that grows and facilitates our capacity for worlding. This process of continuous preparation is intimately woven into the fabric of the world.
Art is life is an alchemy that hinges on the interplay between energy (as the potential for change), warmth (as the impulse of activation of the energy in human affairs), and substance (as a tangible/intangible intersection of energy forces). This constitutes a fundamental break with 'the retinal'. It also follows "that this artistic process is possible in all professions; that this process is possible in every field of work, and can be seen in conjunction with the issue of human work."
Beuys stresses the necessarily social, collaborative nature of this work. There is a beautiful passage that echoes stirring lines that I read in Jung's autobiography and resonate strongly with my own ethos.
"I don’t go any further than that and say that I’ve achieved anything. I say only that I have done certain experiments and explorations that have stimulated discussion. They were, in fact, only successful once they provoked discussion. Further than this, I don’t go. I certainly do not claim that any lasting value attaches to these experiments that I have conducted. That cannot be my concern. My concern can only be whether one can instigate this kind of process, this movement; in other words, whether one can bring people to and into this kind of movement, in the culture that holds and has held sway, and has numbed them into inaction; whether things can be freed up and released, so that people accomplish this together. That is where my interest lies, in fact; again it’s a therapeutic interest you might say, a medical, chemical, therapeutic interest in making something happen, that extends right into political action – which is not really political since the concept of politics is no longer appropriate."
To be an artist is to rekindle our capacity to experience and reenact life’s evolutionary principle. From this core insight—one that arguably aligns with a long tradition of Romantic and ultimately esoteric thought—Beuys develops a distinctive aesthetics, politics, and ecology. While its emphatic anthroposophical framing may not resonate with all readers, this book offers a valuable and accessible introduction to Beuys' world.
[image] Joseph Beuys, Joseph Beuys extends Ulysses with six further chapters on behalf of James Joyce, notebook 1, Photo: Wolfgang Fuhrmannek, HLMD....more
The book would have been better titled ‘The hummingbird and the eagle’. For the author contrasts two temperaments and fuses them into a loving archetyThe book would have been better titled ‘The hummingbird and the eagle’. For the author contrasts two temperaments and fuses them into a loving archetype: the hummingbird, which uses an awful lot of energy to stay in the same place, and the eagle, which flies to great heights in a thermal column quasi without a wingbeat. Protagonist Marco embodies the frenetic static pole, in Hillmanian terms 'the senescent'. His granddaughter Miraijin (and to some extent his daughter Adele) represent youthful movement along a vertical axis. What the story shows, firstly, is that they - the senex as guardian, and the ‘new human’ as unfolder of life's generative potential - need each other to establish a real developmental dynamics. Second, Veronesi filters the static, guardian element through a kaleidoscopic lens of dramatic life events. It is the ‘eternal youth’ who brings in the ‘calm chaos’ that I feel is the mysterious heart of Veronesi's novels. It is reminiscent of what the Taoists call ‘wu wei’. Third, the author also suggests that this ‘effortless action’ is not quietist and does not preclude an overt activist agenda. Veronesi's genius lies in his ability to infuse these profound questions into the reader’s consciousness with cinematic immediacy. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and its thought-provoking exploration of love, resilience, and transformation....more
It was great fun. I gorged myself on this campy buffet of esoterica in two instalments, in bed, before going to sleep. After the first episode, I fellIt was great fun. I gorged myself on this campy buffet of esoterica in two instalments, in bed, before going to sleep. After the first episode, I fell into a strange half-slumber in which I riffed oneirically on Promethea's adventures. It was quite something. Unfortunately, the experience didn't offer itself for a repeat. That said, I'm not taking it too seriously as an introduction to Western hermeticism. It remains, after all, a graphic novel. For a conceptually richer introduction to the mundus imaginalis we have to read elsewhere. I am not sure whether I will continue with Book Two but I may give Alan Moore's Jerusalem a go....more
Tarot seems to be hot. I read in the Saturday newspaper supplement that #tarot generates 26 million hits on Instagram and 8.8 million hits on Tiktok. Tarot seems to be hot. I read in the Saturday newspaper supplement that #tarot generates 26 million hits on Instagram and 8.8 million hits on Tiktok. In the wake of the Covid interval, tarot has been taken up massively by particularly young women who use the deck for 'self-reflection and therapy' rather than fortune-telling in the strict sense.
I came to the Tarot about 15 years ago when I found a deck in the seat pocket of an airplane. I was intrigued, but not enough to delve deeper. But in the last few years I have become very interested in Hermeticism as a millennia-old intellectual and spiritual movement, and this has fuelled my curiosity about 'magical' practices (Frances Yates' book on Giordano Bruno was a real eye-opener here). These interests have seeped into my doctoral research in the field of urbanism, which focuses on the development of a design methodology conceptualised as a 'practice of imagination'. I see a practice of imagination as a generic, layered springboard for 'worlding'. By this I mean a necessarily tentative practice of weaving patterns with and passing patterns on to other human and non-human beings in a process of maintaining 'ongoingness' and vitality in our world. Decolonial and feminist thinkers have foregrounded this kind of onto-metaphysics of 'worlding' as a blind spot in the Western modernist-colonial project (see, for example, the work of Donna Haraway and, less well known, Carl Mika, Professor of Māori and Indigenous Philosophies, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand). Rachel Pollack's book on the Tarot reinforces my sense that there is a meaningful resonance to be established between 'worlding' and not only indigenous practices and knowledge systems, but also with fringe, hermetic and occult movements in a Western history of ideas. And I think these deserve much more attention in our attempt to counter the ruinous effects of a Western, anthropocentric, logocentric, utility-maximising worldview.
What Pollack proposes here is to use the Tarot as a platform for a genuine practice of imagination. This is not about predicting your future or the future of others. Nor is it about individual 'self-therapy'. It is a springboard for cultivating a playful, inquisitive and receptive attitude to the world. A Tarot deck can be seen as a complex, modular and endlessly reconfigurable network of codified knowledge with mythical resonance. But it is also a collection of miniature works of art and a game. If it were a musical instrument, the basic fortune-telling would be the folk music of the Tarot. But it is also possible to compose symphonies and full-scale oratorios on it. Pollack's approach is both Jungian and Kabbalistic. Several chapters are devoted to reflections and practices based on the Jewish wisdom tradition. I am not particularly attached to the idea of the Tarot as a 'sacred text' and so find these sections a little less interesting. I lean more towards the Jungian (and Hillmanian) practice of 'soul making', of 'loving the images', which is about developing layered relationships with archetypal images and 'dreaming' them 'forward'. This helps us to go 'beyond information', to activate our intuition, to expand our conceptions of ourselves and our relationship to the world, and thus to create 'newness' and 'ongoingness'. This is what Pollack calls 'frontier tarot'. Another way of doing this is to engage in speculative, metaphysical experiments in thinking and sensing. What if we assume that God did not know everything in advance when he created the universe, and instead relied on the Tarot? How did the cards come about and what does that tell us about the world and our place in it? This may seem like a rather naive idea, but Pollack presents detailed, suggestive and profound readings that give flesh to these questions. In tracing her thoughts a reader feels perhaps as if one is taken by the hand in contemplatively journeying through a sprawling medieval retable. (Pollack uses both the classic Rider Waite deck and a self-designed deck that is visually less sophisticated but clearly also deeply felt). In the final part of the book Pollack delves deep into the structure and logic of the Major Arcana to extract a developmental perspective on a spiritual, seeking human life.
I do not take all of these ideas on board in any sort of literal sense. However, I find the spirit of Rachel Pollack's approach to Tarot very congenial to my own artistic-academic pursuits in a very different field. In any case, this book shows that there is still quite a lot of mileage to be had in these perennially popular cards....more
The author of this book - The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism - is a collective working in the spirit of C.G. Jung's legacy. It grew out The author of this book - The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism - is a collective working in the spirit of C.G. Jung's legacy. It grew out of the Bollingen Foundation in New York. The Foundation was the recipient of a visual archive that sedimented from the long series of Eranos conferences, initiated by Olga Froebe Kapteyn on the Swiss shores of Lago Maggiore. Jungians approach symbols as dynamic and polysemic cultural entities. In her introduction editor Kathleen Martin writes: "A symbol mysteriously unites disparities. Thus, the reader will find that we have avoided pat definitions and equations since these tend to constrain a symbol. A still vital symbol remains partially unknown, compels our attention and unfolds in new meanings and manifestations over time." Symbols offer an invitation to develop a relationship of curiosity with them. They are sources of contemplation and individuation. James Hillman said that "the gift of an image is that it affords a place to watch your soul". The task is not to understand the image. Hermeneutics kill the image. It's about observing and understanding our position with respect to archetypal images - whether culturally transmitted or emerging from our own minds. That is the only thing we can do that is genuinely therapeutic. The reason for the four stars rather than five is that there never seems to be enough in this kind of book. The store of images is potentially endless. And I agree, it's odd that the bicycle is included but the anus is not. ...more
This annotated collection of essays is an attractive introduction to the core ideas of post-Jungian (or 'archetypal') psychology. In his introduction,This annotated collection of essays is an attractive introduction to the core ideas of post-Jungian (or 'archetypal') psychology. In his introduction, Ben Sells makes clear what the ambition of this approach is: "to make psychology more psychological", i.e. to release "psyche from the twin cuffs of laboratory and high church to once again breathe freely in the many things of the world." Archetypal psychology seeks to transcend the dualism of matter and spirit by introducing 'soul' as the enabling, generative factor that animates the world. The world is neither dead matter nor a manifestation of pure transcendence. It has soul. Human beings have soul; everything has soul, manifested in visible, expressive form. This requires a capacity for sensing and imaging, and an aesthetic response to the world (from the Greek aesthesis, which roughly means 'sense experience'). Imagination is the human faculty that activates and guides this modus vivendi.
Elsewhere James Hillman has written: "The cognitive task will shift from the understanding of meaning to the sensitisation of particulars, the appreciation of the intelligibility inherent in the qualitative pattern of events". Hence the challenge to develop "a new nose", more akin to an animal sense. A different pattern of behaviour emerges: rather than intervening, we learn to make the right moves, to craft well. This pattern could be called 'poiesis'". This, in a nutshell, is the Hillmanian vision behind archetypal psychology.
The present volume contains ten essays, four of which are by Hillman. They deal with more fundamental ideas such as the polytheistic nature of the soul, the connection between concrete sensation, psychic image and spiritual meaning in 'psychological life', and the universal and transhistorical character of images and myths.
Four further essays are written by therapists working in the archetypal mould and address issues of practice. A big bonus is a long piece by Gilbert Durand, who is not really a Jungian, but rather a Bachelarian. He sought to rehabilitate the imaginal as a necessary anti-historical counterweight to the image-hostile march of progress in Western civilisation. And, like Bachelard, he did so by approaching the imagination and its products as a scientist, pointing to structures and dynamic patterns common to all humanity.
Finally, there is a piece by the distinguished Islamicist Henry Corbin, for whom the 'mundus imaginalis' was a metaphysical datum, an in-between world that, in true hermetic fashion, secured the link between the human and the divine. All in all, a very rich and valuable collection for readers interested in post-Jungian psychology and/or the philosophy of the imagination....more
This essay is complementary to the piece that was included in the collection Imagination, imaginaire, imaginal curated by Cynthia Fleury. The author cThis essay is complementary to the piece that was included in the collection Imagination, imaginaire, imaginal curated by Cynthia Fleury. The author covers similar terrain but takes a somewhat different angle. The basic idea is to show that the realm of imagination is not a hazy, dreamlike cloud of abstractions, but a domain that exhibits a structural and evolutionary logic of its own, and hence is amenable to disciplined study. The focus here is primarily on introducing a basic vocabulary, a typology of symbolisms and imaginaries and to sketch a contour of Gilbert Durand's contribution to the field: " ... the work of G. Durand ... therefore concerns above all the structuring of the imaginary, its coherence, its systemic nature, against the background of a symbolic language which imposes semantic and syntactic rules on the imagining subject."...more
Robert Mugerauer wrote this book in the mid-1990s prompted by his observation that hermeneutics and deconstructionism had not been taken up by spatialRobert Mugerauer wrote this book in the mid-1990s prompted by his observation that hermeneutics and deconstructionism had not been taken up by spatial researchers in their work, despite these philosophical ideas having been around for a while. At the time of writing Marxist and phenomenological approaches held sway. The import of this book is therefore pedagogical. Mugerauer presents two case studies in which he demonstrates the application of a deconstructionist and a hermeneutic approach to understanding spatial data, respectively. These are complemented and contrasted by a third section which foregrounds a 'traditional' approach to interpreting environments. In general this aims to understand an artifact in the light of its origin or creation, its forms, materials, and content. The author himself does not want to advance an argument, or make a case in favour of any of these approaches.
The opening chapter usefully discusses the overall orientation of each method. Then follow three chapters, each devoted to an approach. Hermeneutics appears in the third chapter because it tries to steer a middle course between tradition and deconstruction.
Within the scope of the traditional approach Mugerauer weaves Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Carl Jung’s life stories and their cultural contexts together with their theoretical views and the houses they designed and built. Wittgenstein aimed for simplicity and modernist austerity in the design of his sister's residence in Vienna, while Jung sought complexity and the integration of symbolic meaning in the layered genesis of his Bollingen tower near Lake Zurich. For both, the design and construction of a dwelling marked an important stage in their lives and in the construction of their personal identities.
The deconstructionist framing of pyramids that follows is necessarily somewhat unequivocal. Pyramids have traditionally been seen as the paragon of solidity. They reflect foundational acts and sustaining principles. A deconstructionist reading discloses fissures that reveal what his hidden: "the fictive web spun as the strategy and posture of cultural forms of desire." In this chapter the author moves from Egyptian pyramids to 18th century France to the postmodern pyramids we find in contemporary malls and cultural centres.
The final chapter is devoted to a hermeneutics of the American landscape. It strikes me as the richest and most layered. Involves uncovering the religious meanings that have been concealed and forgotten, particularly through the lens of 19th century American landscape painting.
In a short postscript the author pleads "to continue questioning the approaches and most importantly, through them, the subject matter." Almost half of the book is devoted to notes, bibliography and index.
This booklet offered me an entry into the work of Gilbert Durand, an author I was not previously acquainted with and whom I discovered, I seem to remeThis booklet offered me an entry into the work of Gilbert Durand, an author I was not previously acquainted with and whom I discovered, I seem to remember, through fleeting references in the writings of esotericist scholar Antoine Faivre. Most of Durand's work seems not to have been translated and is only accessible in the original French. He was born in 1921, became a decorated French Résistance fighter during WWII, went on to study with Gaston Bachelard to become a highly respected authority in the field of cultural anthropology and mythology. For the best part of his career he held an academic chair in sociology and anthropology at the University of Grenoble II. In the 1960s he founded the Centre de Recherches sur l'Imaginaire (CRI). The 'imaginary' and the 'imaginal' are Durand's distinctive areas of research. His seminal work is his book Les structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire, published in 1960. The shorter work I'm reviewing here appeared in 1964 and can be read as a sort of summary of or introduction to the main opus.
Durand's project is grounded in his observation that "the basic disease from which our culture may be dying is man's minimization of images and myths, as well as his faith in a positivist, rationalist, aseptized civilization." (quote taken from a translated essay by Durand in B. Sells, Working with Images: The Theoretical Base of Archetypal Psychology). In response, Durand develops an approach to apprehend the role of images, symbols and myths in human societies. L'imagination symbolique is a compact introduction to Durand's symbology, which functions as the theoretical principle underlying all mythologies.
In the introductory chapter Durand provides an outline of his symbology. Symbols are a subset of the broader category of signs. Signs facilitate an indirect representation of the world. Symbols more specifically establish a link between a human lifeworld and a referent that is inaccessible to human perception (say, the afterllfe, or the unconscious, or any transcendental entity that cannot be directly apprehended). The relationship between symbol and referent is therefore epiphanic. A symbol can be gestural (ritual), linguistic (myth) or iconographic (image). Characteristic is the play of redundancies in the relationship between sign and referent: a given symbol can incarnate a wide range of 'qualities', and, vice versa, the transcendental realm can infuse all aspects of our sensible reality. It is through this play of redundancies that the fundamental inadequacy between sign and referent is being negotiated.
Chapter I offers a succinct historiography of what Durand calls 'Western iconoclasm', i.e. the process of marginalisation of symbols in our culture. Platonism was an apogee of symbolic imagination. The fundamental problem addressed by it was the link between the sensible world and the world of Ideas and it leveraged a symbolic function to mediate between these two realms. In the centuries that followed this symbolic imagination was progressively censored by Christian dogmatism, Aristotelian conceptualism and, finally, Cartesian scientism. Durand sees this process as initiated and sustained by the desire of a religious orthodoxy to prohibit the prerogative of personal gnosis, to eliminate the mediating function of Woman, and to quash human freedom to literally make meaning as part of a concrete spirituality. The Roman Catholic Church wanted to avoid personal enlightenment in favour of an uncritical internalisation of dogmatic truths.
Chapter II deals with the rediscovery and of the imaginal in our times, initially in form of the reductionist hermeneutics of the emerging disciplines of psychology (Freud) and ethnology (Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss). These approaches tried to fit symbolic imagination into a prosaic intellectualism with a bearing on the psychoanalytic and the (functionally or linguistically) structuralist respectively.
In Chapter III Durand highlights 20th century attempts at a more "instaurative" hermeneutics. He devotes a few pages to the work of Ernst Cassirer, who developed a symbolic anthropology based on Kant's legacy. His perspective is evolutionary and considers myth as a propaedeutic and ultimately degenerated form of symbolic imagination. But Cassirer still sees science as the provisional summit of the unfolding process of symbolization that is characteristic of humanity. Durand disagrees with this assessment. It was Jung who restored symbolisation, activated in the particular form of symbol-archetypes, to its proper mediating function between consciousness and the collective unconscious, hence becoming the engine of the process of individuation. A dynamic and 'poietic' (i.e. generative) relationship between symbol and world - at micro and macro levels - is also at the heart of Bachelard's symbolic cosmology. Durand's project takes its cue from this nodal insight and sees his work a basically an extrapolation and generalisation of Bachelard's attempt to build a world wherein human beings might feel truly at home.
In Chapter IV Durand outlines his main ambition to restore the symbolic imaginary as the main driver behind psychosocial homeostasis, at the individual and at societal level. To explain this he posits a dialectic between a diurnal and a nocturnal symbolic regime. Anthropologically this plays out at psychophysiological, pedagogical and cultural levels. Symbolic imagination keeps these antagonistic forces more or less in balance. If it doesn't we are faced with all kinds of pathologies. The more intricate this dialectical play is, the more an individual or a community is able to engage on a path of integrative transformation. To make sense of this process human beings need to rely on an hermeneutics. Following Paul Ricoeur and acknowledging the reality of six centuries of commitment to a positivist project, Durand accepts that we need both the Freudian hermeneutics of demystification as the Bachelardian hermeneutics of remythisation. But the latter carries more weight, as "there exist non-faustian societies, without scientific researchers and psychoanalysts, but there are no societies without poets and artists, without values." There is also an ethical choice implied. The so-to-speak Freudian way roots in the brutal acceptance of our mortality. Remythisation is eschatological, lets hope carry us beyond our horizon of our mortality.
Chapter V retraces the ambit of Gilbert Durand's project of an 'open' or 'opening humanism'. Symbolic imagination is a dynamic process of meaning making, of confirming the reality of transcendence in a world incarnated in mortal flesh. This vitalising function of symbolic imagination, through its diurnal-nocturnal dialectic, manifests itself at different levels: the biological, the psychosocial, the planetary and anthropological and the transcendental. "The totality of human culture is encompassed by the irremediable rift between the fleetingness of the image and the perennity of the meaning constituted by the symbol."
One cannot be but enchanted by the enormous breadth and breath of this compact book and by its fundamentally empowering message. ...more
This is a fun and interesting book for readers looking for an entry into the growing field of contemporary esoteric studies. The book was published toThis is a fun and interesting book for readers looking for an entry into the growing field of contemporary esoteric studies. The book was published to mark the 20th anniversary of the University of Amsterdam's Center for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (HHP). The Center has been a major driving force behind the establishment and acceptance of serious scholarship on the complex cultural and intellectual phenomenon of Western esotericism. In a way, it is amazing that we have had to wait so long for the emergence of this field of research. It certainly testifies to the doctrinaire spirit of the kind of orthodox academic research that has failed to live up to its own standards of rationalism and open-mindedness. This book is somewhat unusual in that it is composed as a collection of thirty short chapters, written in response to an equal number of "journalistic" questions. The list of authors amounts to a who's who of contemporary scholarship in the field. The questions go in many directions and traverse past and present, East and West, secularism and religion, popular and high culture. Some examples of chapter titles: "Is occultism a product of capitalism?", "Can superhero comics really convey esoteric knowledge?", "Esotericism, that's for white people, right?", "Isn't alchemy a spiritual tradition?". ... I didn't read all the chapters, but jumped back and forth and picked up interesting ideas in almost every section. Antoine Faivre's chapter on "imagination" was a bit lightweight. I expected more from the éminence grise in this field. All in all, the book is a successful attempt to highlight the fantastic diversity and cultural significance of esotericism in (predominantly) Western culture....more
I had this book in my rucksack during a remote trek through the Alps. A fortunate choice that provided me and my companion with much insight and enterI had this book in my rucksack during a remote trek through the Alps. A fortunate choice that provided me and my companion with much insight and entertainment in the quiet hours after the daily hike. These conversations were recorded in 1983. Hillman was then in his late fifties. Almost three decades of work remained, but his main ideas on archetypal psychology had already been presented in landmark books (Re-Visioning Psychology in 1975 and The Dream and the Underworld in 1979). Laura Pozzo (who I have not been able to trace in any way beyond her role in this book) did a really good job of prompting Hillman over five days of in-depth conversations on a wide range of topics. The chapters are organised thematically and the table of contents is pretty much printed on the book's cover. I found the material on psychopathology, therapy, dreams and the imaginal - core Hillman territory - the most interesting. The lively reflections on his relationship with the Jungian school give insight into the man's mercurial and maverick temperament. The biographic tidbits and the chapters on this working and writing methods put his work and style further into relief. All in all this book offers a very good introduction to a fascinating personality and set of ideas. Definitely an incentive to pursue further reading in this area. ...more
There is something in analytic psychology that is fundamentally congenial to my way of thinking. I discovered it when reading Jung's (quasi-)autobiogrThere is something in analytic psychology that is fundamentally congenial to my way of thinking. I discovered it when reading Jung's (quasi-)autobiography, which includes his reflections on 'life after death' (or the 'hereafter'). Jung starts with the observation that nowadays the mythic side of man is given short shrift. He can no longer create fables. “As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important and salutory to speak also of incomprehensible things. (…) We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a ‘going beyond all that,’ but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all mythologising is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives a existence a glamour which we would not like to do without."
In this book, Hillman takes a similar line of thought, but then applied to our present lives in the here and now. In the final paragraph of 'The Soul's Code' he writes: " ... this theory is meant to inspire and revolutionize, and also to excite a fresh erotic attachment to its subject: your subjective and personal autobiography, the way you imagine your life, because how you imagine life strongly impinges upon the raising of children, the attitudes toward the symptoms and disturbances of adolescents, your individuality in a democracy, the strangeness of old age and the duties of dying—in fact, upon the professions of education, psychotherapy, the writing of biography, and the life of the citizen."
We inquire not per se to find the truth, but to charge our existence with meaning and energy, to awaken the creative power of Eros, to expand our power to resonate and communicate with the world. It seems to me this is a reflection of a pre-scientific, magical way of thinking that has led an undercover existence since empirical science assumed its monopoly position as the legitimate way to acquire knowledge.
In her monumental book on 16th century hermetic thought Frances Yates describes a captivating episode that reveals the clash between the two worldviews in an emblematic way. In the 1580s the magus Giordano Bruno found himself debating Copernicus' heliocentric model of the solar system with scholars at Oxford. Both parties in the debate supported the Polish astronomer's findings but based on a radically different way of thinking. For the scholars the famous concentric circle diagram with the Sun at its center was a reflection of mathematical relationships. For Bruno it was a chiffre, a symbol that expressed the magical philosophy of universal animation. The Earth's movement was simply a manifestation of life's divine energy.
Who's to say that Bruno was wrong and only the Oxford scholars had the truth on their side? Maybe their visions did not exclude one another? Maybe there is a place for empiricism and magic to work side by side and complement each other? Analytic psychologists as Jung and Hillman are not the only ones who are thinking along those lines. Anthropologist Tim Ingold has devoted his life to the development and articulation of a way of thinking that could be called 'sympathetic', in the sense that it "both answers to the call of the subject and is in turn answerable to it." It seeks resonance rather than truth, hints at and hunts for dynamic 'Correspondences' between our ideas and the animate and inanimate world around us.
Or take a philosopher such as Michel Serres, who sees a return to science's mythic origins as an imminent and necessary phase of cultural rejuvenation: "By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’s first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously." (from Biogea)
Ingold says: "This means, if you will, not taking literal truths metaphorically, but taking metaphorical truths literally. The theorist can be a poet." This is what Hillman does and is when he approaches our sense of self. Sure, both nature and nurture play a role in our personal makeup. But is that all? And are these even the more decisive influences in shaping our fate? Enter 'the acorn theory'. As the fruit of an oak tree an acorn lends itself naturally to an organicist metaphor of self development unfolding in time. But that kind of metaphorical elaboration of a literal truth is precisely what Hillman is not interested in. Instead, the acorn is imagined as an archetypal idea: "The acorn is also a mythical symbol; it is a shape; and it is a word with ancestries, tangents and implications, and suggestive power. By amplifying “acorn” in these different directions, (...), we will be carried beyond the naturalistic strictures of its standard meaning. And by turning the sense of “acorn” and expanding its potential we shall be demonstrating how to turn the biology of the human beyond its organic setting."
The acorn theory says that we are embodiments of an essence that has chosen us as its vehicle to express itself. This is our sense of calling, or our daimon as the Greeks understood it. We can't see it and we can't measure it. But reading up on the lives of exceptional people yields abundant (albeit anecdotal) evidence of this call and how it manifests itself through our biographies. Paying heed to our daimon poeticises our lives. Indeed, by paying only attention to the power of genes, parental influence and social mores as shapers of our destinies we unintentionally dull our lives and deny them any sort of romance, any fictional flair. As a result we become less curious, creative, courageous and reflexive about our lives. Less tolerant also about deviations from a consensus, consumerist norm. So why wouldn't we take this hypothesis playfully serious and start to inquire ourselves about what tries to express itself through our unique presence in this world? Because it's not verifiably 'true'? Good luck with your truth then. I'm siding with Hillman and those other thinkers who are trying to re-enchant our world, and charge us with a feeling of destiny, responsibility and beauty. ...more
Hillman takes a thought-provoking approach to the phenomenon of war, very likely uncomfortable to early 21st century sensibilities that have been cultHillman takes a thought-provoking approach to the phenomenon of war, very likely uncomfortable to early 21st century sensibilities that have been cultivated on a sedate and mostly also uncritical diet of liberal democratic ideas. Yes, war is horrific. And it is also a crucible in which the spirit of individuals and communities is forged. Today, we witness how Ukraine is rediscovering itself as a body politic under the onslaught of Russian cruise missiles. And we sense how bracing this is. It's a tricky position, I realise that. The mere thought of Mariupol is also a punch in my gut. But Hillman deserves the benefit of doubt when he raises the following point at the very outset of the book:
"We can never prevent war or speak sensibly of peace and disarmament unless we enter this love of war. Unless we move our imaginations into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull. This means “going to war,” and this book aims to induct our minds into military service. We are not going to war “in the name of peace” as deceitful rhetoric so often declares, but rather for war’s own sake: to understand the madness of its love. Our civilian disdain and pacifist horror—all the legitimate and deep-felt aversion to everything to do with the military and the warrior—must be set aside. This because the first principle of psychological method holds that any phenomenon to be understood must be sympathetically imagined. No syndrome can be truly dislodged from its cursed condition unless we first move imagination into its heart."
It's a typical Jungian strategy. Here is an example of a comparable move in C.G. Jung's quasi-autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections when he approaches the subject of life after death. Why on earth would we spend time on something for which there is not a shred of empirical evidence? Jung starts with the observation that nowadays the mythic side of man is given short shrift. He can no longer create fables. “As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important and salutory to speak also of incomprehensible things. (…) We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a ‘going beyond all that,’ but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all mythologising is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives a existence a glamour which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any good reason why we should. (…) A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it - even if he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss. For the question that is posed to him is the age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole. Reason sets the boundaries far to narrowly for us.”
This way of thinking is exemplary for Jung, and it fits hand in glove with his drive to bring to light and to tap into human beings' repressed potential. In the process of individuation Jung invites us to go beyond the bounds of reason, to establish a connection with the mysterious realm of the unconscious and to connect with our guilt-laden shadow persona.
Hillman transposes this line of thought to the subject of war. This book aims to present an archetypal psychology of war—the myths, philosophy, and theology of 'war’s deepest mind'. The aim is not to control, comprehend or eliminate war. It' s not about what is true or false, morally bad and good. The aim is, as Jung said, to embrace an archetype to make us more whole, to sediment these mythic spirits into cultural rituals of sacrifice, art, and atonement.
The early Enlightenment philosopher Giambattista Vico offers, perhaps, an even more powerful clue to the ambit of Hillman's project. Vico went against the grain of Cartesian doxa by putting human being's capacity for 'inventio' (rather than proof) at the center of his historiography. Inventio triggers a mutation of consciousness. In his 'Nuova Scienza' he writes: "Rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, this [i.e. Vicos own] imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them; and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for whan man understands he extends his mind and takes in things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them." By inventing something we forge a passage to a new evolutionary level. We create a context that as yet does not exist. We might see Hillman's 'sympathetic imagination', brought to bear on the phenomenon of war, as an act of invention that forces us to rethink who we are.
Having endorsed the scope and intention behind's Hillman's project, I have to admit that the book does not live up to its promise. The narrative is very loosely composed, in an almost stream-of-consciousness sort of way. The prose is very often a pleasure to read, as is often the case with Hillman. But the argument doesn't make a lot of headway beyond the initial, fascinating expression of the ambition to give shape to the archetypal impulse of war. And Hillman is sometimes perilously close to glorifying and sacramentalising war as some sort of ultimate (male) initiation rite. Indeed, for some soldiers the 'storms of steel' are the "one great lyric passage in their lives" and a limit experience of comradeship.
However, my thoughts went back to a passage in which the elderly Wilfred Bion reminisces about his service as a tank commander in the First World War: "These clichés do nothing to convey an impression to anyone who had not had the experience but to me - sixty years later - their very banality recalls that immensely emotional experience. The behaviour, facial expression, and poverty of conversation could give an impression of depression and even fear at the prospect of battle. Fear there certainly was, fear of fear was, I think, common to all - officers and men. The inability to admit it to anyone, as there was no one to admit it to without being guilty of spreading alarm and despondency, produced a curious sense of being entirely alone in company with a crowd of mindless robots - machines devoid of humanity. The loneliness was intense; I can still feel my skin drawn over the bones of my face as if it were the mask of a cadaver. The occasional words exchanged echoed like a conversation heard from afar. ‘Wipers’, ‘Yes, the Salient’, Guns sound a bit frisky.’ ‘Awful - but cheer up - you’ll soon be dead.’ ‘You’ve said it.’"
Hillman doesn't talk about these experiences of glacial fear and loneliness. But it's probably there, rather than in the intoxication of battle, that "the maximum of intensity and the maximum of impossibility" can be experienced at the same time.
Dutch historiographer Eeclo Runia is probably is more successful in carrying out Hillman's program. In his book 'Moved by the Past: Discontinuity and Historical Mutation Runia holds that there is a fundamental opposition between two diverging approaches to the past: a traditional, 'botanising', positivist conception of history on the one hand, and what he refers to as 'commemoration'. Runia: "Commemoration hinges on the idea that acts of people are committed by us—not, of course, in person, but as members of the group, the nation, the culture, and ultimately the species that brought the catastrophe about. Calamitous acts of people are made by us, because they could have been made by any one of us—if, by chance, we had been born a couple of hundred kilometers farther down or if we hadn’t been blessed with—as the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl has expressed it—“the grace of late birth.”"
I believe that this understanding of commemoration - as a self-reflexive attempt to formulate an answer to the question “Who are we that this could have happened?” - is very much in the spirit of Hillman's sympathetically imaginative approach to war. And indeed, both authors refer to a common root source: Vico. And both invoke the notion of the 'sublime' to characterise the confrontation with what we don't like to be confronted with. But Runia offers deeper insights here. Hillman's conception of the sublime remains a wishy-washy shorthand for a feeling of awe in confrontation with the numinosity of war. For Runia an historical moment in time is sublime when it constitutes a leap in the unknown, a collective effort of invention by creating a new civilisational context (as happened in the French Revolution and in the First World War).
It wouldn't be much of a surprise if, in the next few decades, humankind would want to leap away from its shriveled past as colonisers and consumers into a new civilisational context. What upheaval do we have for ourselves in store? Ernst Jünger wisely professed himself an optimist for the 22nd century....more
This booklet offered me a first excursion into the thought of James Hillman and I know for sure I'm going to be hooked for a long time.
I have been foThis booklet offered me a first excursion into the thought of James Hillman and I know for sure I'm going to be hooked for a long time.
I have been following an indistinct thread of ideas for a while now at what feels like the edge of our dualist, imperialistic Western worldview, prompted by the likes of François Jullien, Lars Spuybroek, Tim Ingold, Friedrich Schelling, Gilles Deleuze, C.G. Jung, Gaston Bachelard, John Durham Peters, Kenneth White, Nigel Thrift, and Michel Serres. A confluence of Far Eastern thinking, post-phenomonology, analytic psychology, media and systems theories, new materialism and beyond-representational approaches.
A key idea is that agency is not exclusively a human attribute or privilege. It's literally everwhere and it's up to us to become sensitive to its potential. This requires from us an aesthetic presence in the world (from the Greek aesthesis, which roughly means 'sense experience'). We have to re-sensitise ourselves to the flow and pulse of life in order free ourselves from debilitating civilisational discontents.
This idea seems very foundational in Hillman's thinking as well. For Hillman the world is not dead matter but a psychic reality. It has soul. Human beings have soul; every thing has soul, which is manifested in visible, expressive form. This requires a capacity for sensing and imaging, and an aesthetic response to the world. Hillman: "the cognitive task will shift from the understanding of meaning to a sensitisation of particulars, the appreciation of the inherent intelligibility in the qualitative pattern of events." Hence the challenge to develop "a new nose" which is more akin to an animal sense. A different behavioural pattern emerges: rather than to intervene, we learn to make the right moves, to craft well. This pattern we might call 'poiesis'.
Where is the heart in all this? The heart is the seat of our imagination, at least when it is not trivialised as being merely a mechanical pump (the Harvey heart) or a seat for our feelings (the sentimental, Augustine heart). "The animal heart directly intends, senses, and responds as a unitary whole." Hillman refers to this mode of cordial apprehension as 'imaginal'. In the projected images consciousness and world interpenetrate. The world arises from love and desire.
"And so the task is less to take back these kinds of projections (who takes them back and where are they put?) but more to leap after the projectile, reclaiming it as imagination, thereby recognizing that images always be experienced as sensuous independent bodies. Cordial projection requires an equally leonine mode of consciousness: pride, magnanimity, courage. To desire and to see through desire—this is the courage that the heart requires."...more
In a series of short biographical vignettes Maggy Anthony surveys the first generation of key women in Jung's entourage. C.G. Jung was an imposing manIn a series of short biographical vignettes Maggy Anthony surveys the first generation of key women in Jung's entourage. C.G. Jung was an imposing man who magnetically pulled smart women in his orbit. One reason for that attraction is the fact that Jung took these women really seriously. Given their Victorian background, he was probably one of first men to do so. He worked with them, as patients or analysts, incentivised them to study and develop their own practice. Many of these women remained unmarried and grew into formidable champions of his legacy. The author hypothesises that another reason for the attraction "was possibly the women sensing that Jung needed them as much as they needed him." An early experience of absence of his mother - due to illness - created within him a lifelong need for the creative and intellectual companionship of women.
The shadow side of this deep connection between Jung and the women in his circle is that very few of them were able to assume a critical stance vis-à-vis Jung's work and contradict or go beyond his ideas. Specifically they remained captive to the (sexist) concept of 'animus' (the female's inner masculine image). Anthony devotes one chapter to more recent trends in analytic psychology that aim to reframe and de-genderise the tensions between anima and animus. All in all an enjoyable and informative read (3.5 stars). ...more
As I am discovering more of Carl Jung, my respect for this intellectual giant keeps growing. Anthony Stevens’ compact introduction to Jung’s work was As I am discovering more of Carl Jung, my respect for this intellectual giant keeps growing. Anthony Stevens’ compact introduction to Jung’s work was an excellent curtain raiser. This book, Jung’s (quasi-)autobiography, was an ideal follow-up.
According to scientific standards it almost goes without saying that someone who writes about life after death and about UFOs should be dismissed as a crackpot. But that judgment vanishes when one learns about the disciplined and rational way in which Jung approaches these subjects.
His take on the ‘hereafter’, for instance, goes as follows. Jung starts with the observation that nowadays the mythic side of man is given short shrift. He can no longer create fables. “As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important and salutory to speak also of incomprehensible things. (…) We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a ‘going beyond all that,’ but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all mythologising is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives a existence a glamour which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any good reason why we should. (…) A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it - even if he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss. For the question that is posed to him is the age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole. Reason sets the boundaries far to narrowly for us.”
This way of thinking is exemplary for Jung, and I find it truly empowering. Jung’s whole life work was devoted to bringing to light and tapping into repressed potential. The process of individuation invites us to go beyond the bounds of reason, to establish a connection with the mysterious realm of the unconscious and to connect with our guilt-laden shadow persona. We would do well to embrace this disposition also as a planetary society because our collective neuroses are leading us inexorably into catastrophe.
Jung’s accomplishment was huge. He developed a highly idiosyncratic but compelling theory and a powerful therapeutic practice. In this book he narrates how these insights emerged from seminal childhood dreams and visions. Seen from a wider historical perspective, Jung saw his work as a continuation of long tradition of inquiry into matters of mind and spirit, connecting late Antiquity Gnostics to medieval alchemists. All this unfolded in persistent friction with a rationalist Zeitgeist.
The book traces the full arc of his life and intellectual development. While much in the later chapters was edited by his secretary Aniela Jaffé, the voice throughout feels unmistakibly Jung’s. The prose is refreshingly straightforward and clear, even when it deals with matters far beyond the conscious intellect.
The concluding ‘Retrospect’ offers one of the most perplexing sections in this book. It’s a monumental and very moving assessment of Jung’s ultimate place in life. The modesty and honesty are sobering and unique. There is not the slightest impulse to ingratiate himself with his readers. The lines bristle with competing emotions: “I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness. I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about (…) The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.”
The discovery of Jung’s thought has been for me a mind-bending experience....more
I’ve been reading up on Jung’s work lately. A recent discovery. My infatuation with Hesse, on the other hand, dates back to my adolescent years. InitiI’ve been reading up on Jung’s work lately. A recent discovery. My infatuation with Hesse, on the other hand, dates back to my adolescent years. Initially I thought Serrano’s book dealt with meetings between Hesse and Jung and this intrigued me greatly. But no, Serrano had only bilateral relationships with both and treats those sequentially. The first part of the book, devoted to his ‘friendship’ with Hesse, is hagiographic and sentimental. There is more meat on the bone in the latter half of the book, dealing with Jung. I was annoyed by Serrano’s exaggerated tone of deference towards his mentors. Also his penchant for nebulous esotericism contrasted negatively with Jung’s generally very disciplined reasoning about parapsychological phenomena. However, I must admit that Serrano’s rendering of the overall outline of Jung’s work struck me as largely in line with what I read elsewhere (and that includes Jung’s quasi-autobiography). So I had very mixed feelings about this book. Until, towards the end, I casually looked up Serrano’s wikipedia bio. I was shocked, but also laughed tears with what I read there. What an incurable, calamitous crackpot!...more
I tremendously enjoyed this lucid and compact introduction to Jung’s ideas. Much of this was hitherto unknown to me as I was led to believe that Jung I tremendously enjoyed this lucid and compact introduction to Jung’s ideas. Much of this was hitherto unknown to me as I was led to believe that Jung was a bit of a crackpot. Not any longer. As a result of reading this book I’ve added him to my personal pantheon of ‘all-time great system thinkers’. I started with the audiobook (expertedly narrated by Tim Pigott-Smith), then switched to the e-reader version as I wanted to add my own notes, and finally also purchased a printed version for my library....more