More and more people are getting a sense of the greatness of C. G. Jung subsequent to the publication
of his Red Book in 2009. His greatness can be said in many ways but for me it lies in what he accomplished in his mystical descent into the abyss where he personally experienced the Western cultural split between spirit and matter (again said many ways) and found the Holy Grail within those volcanic fires, i.e. the healing medicine for our cultural, now seemingly terminal, affliction.
My essays attempt to describe in more detail, with reference to the Red Book text, the phenomenology of this healing medicine. But, as with such difficult matters, it needs to be said in so many ways, all circumscribing the central mystery held within the pages of the Red Book. My essays are simply one way of offering a description.
As we know, Jung had a deep connection to Goethe and his Faust. Jung describes Faust as belonging to the Golden Chain— “a series of great wise men, beginning with Hermes Trismegistos, which links earth with heaven. Faust is, according to Jung, “unpopular, ambiguous, and dangerous, it is a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world.” (MDR 189) Goethe’s Faust portrays the same voyage that Jung undertook, as recorded in the Red Book—a journey that may be described as towards the discovery of immanent transcendence, i.e. finding infinite depths of meaning (spirit) within earthly existence (matter).
This what my essays are concerned with: Jung’s discovery of immanent transcendence, the discovery of depths of meaning (spirit) within the so-called surface of life (matter). I recently found my way to Faust again, after many years, and was reading Safranski’s book, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art when I came across the following passage containing the phrase “immanent transcendence”:
Faust strives upward and Mephisto drags him downward. The point is that neither the “pure,” high-flying Faust nor the “pure” Mephisto who would bring him down triumphs. Instead, the result of these opposed forces—this up and down—is a movement outward, neither vertical transcendence nor pure immanence, but something else: an immanent transcending, if you will. Tempted by Mephisto, Faust becomes a transgressor of limits on a horizontal plane, hungry for experience. His urge is “outward,” into the fullness of life. Mephisto’s magical cape helps Faust immediately experience the things he hungers for. His vertical yearning is replaced by excitements on the horizontal plane, excitements that are extremely productive. The mechanics of this contest between Mephisto and Faust are as follows: Mephisto offers tangible pleasures, and Faust makes something sublime of them. Gretchen is an example. Mephisto obtains her as a sexual object, but Faust falls in love with her. Sex becomes eros, desire becomes ardor. This same pattern prevails throughout. Mephisto provides the goods—and Faust makes something more of them. (705)
With this is mind, backed up by Goethe if you like, I want to once again say my introductions to my essays here:
The Red Book is however an account of a momentous achievement by Jung—an achievement that I have called his hidden legacy. During the course of his ordeal, Jung found his way to the mode of being that Heidegger calls a clearing, where a new world can appear, as languaged in the polyphonic form that the editors of The Red Book rendered so faithfully for us. This clearing is also a new definition of the human being, one which can “welcome the coming guest”, with a new soul capacity to be the new language—language which, to our present form of consciousness, appears “life- threatening,” mad, and abyssal—the end of the world!
Jung and Nietzsche each made the great discovery of a reality that “overcomes” the opposites. Nietzsche, the linguistic scholar and philosopher, referred to this reality as self-presentational language while Jung, the psychologist, names it as the objective psyche. Both agree that this reality is “alive,” with its own intentionality. For the purposes of this essay I will call it living language. The discoveries of both pioneers inaugurated a blossoming of cultural practices, founded on incomplete interpretations of the telos of this living language, which articulate the emergence of a variety of possible worlds, among them the worlds of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, biotechnology, nanotechnology, etc. This essay attempts to describe a cultural practice that could emerge from a more complete understanding of the telos of the psyche, or living language, a practice that can articulate and manifest the possible world of the posthuman.
To say more than human things with human voice,
That cannot be; to say human things with more
Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
To speak humanly from the height or from the depth of human things,
That is acutest speech.
[Wallace Stevens, ‘Chocorua to its Neighbor’].
