Over the last few days I felt a mood of ineluctable finality! All my creativity dried up and I felt that the vein of ore I had been mining for twenty-five years was exhausted. As I descended into this mood, I opened a prestigious Jungian journal to an interview on neurobiology. This interview explores the importance of neurobiology to Jungian analysis and to clinical work in general. A portion of the interview suddenly arrested my movement through the article:
DW: What for you are the key findings of neurobiology?
MW: First and foremost, neurobiology has finally put to an end to the Cartesian split. It has enabled us to understand man as a mind-brain-body being in the way that nothing else has.
This statement, spoken in a completely matter-of-fact manner seems to represent the comprehensive conclusion of the dominant narrative of our time—neuroscience. It’s hardly a matter for discussion any more. Done and dusted. No more controversy. Whew, Cartesian consciousness finished at last. What I “heard”, in reading this simple declaration, was something akin to the cry that went up in Ancient Greece, “Great Pan is dead!” But don’t get me wrong. The wail of grief was not for the end of Cartesian consciousness as declared so nonchalantly by our author. No, far from it! The grief came with an inner knowing that the end of materialism is upon us—our darkest hour has arrived. Our culture, as formed by language—its appearances, its practices, its beliefs—has been hardening for a long time and now it is near the nadir. When we can comfortably, without any stress, “understand man as a mind-brain-body” we are declaring that everything is now to be thought as being only of a material nature—everything!
The Cartesian split is not overcome in any manner whatsoever when we language the “overcoming” in terms like our author’s (who is simply representing the governing narrative to us). All we have to do to reach this conclusion is deny access to any language that expresses mind in its own terms, its own rhetoric, its poetry. Mind now is to be understood in purely material terms: “our subjective experience emerges from the information that comes to us through our bodily senses”. We still may say, “I” and “You” but now we know that such terms have a purely material reference.
The author reminds us of Jung’s position on the mind-body split: “It is due to our lamentable mind that we cannot think of body and mind as one and the same thing …we are unable to think it.” With the calm certainty of one for whom the question of the mind-body split has unproblematically concluded, she glibly over-rides Jung’s assessment, claiming, “Neuroscience is enabling us to ‘think it’”. The materialist “way of knowing” has now usurped all other perspectives and there is no way out.
In the middle of these dark ruminations, I was reminded of a dream I had in the early 1990’s which taught me that when a particular historical moment is in ascendancy, we humans must live it out as best we can until IT reaches its summit (or nadir) and expires. We cannot end it with human means—just like that!
My dream begins:
Early morning in the city, few people around. Some trams sidle into their station, ready to start the day. I drive into a bay. I will follow them as they start to move out and as I follow, the road gets more and more rocky and narrow. Stones become boulders and all my forward motion is impeded. I get anxious and fearful . . . Then in the city, the broken down part, I see huge cranes lowering a long horizontal piece of stone into place. It is an artwork called “Petrified Christ”.
This dream, so rich in implicit meaning, shows how our momentum into the future (progress) is associated with an increasing, constricting hardening until all forward movement is impossible. As language becomes more and more “materialistic”, opaque, literal, utilitarian, then we become less and less moved by language, and more and more anxious. Poetic speech dies! To bring this point home, the psyche shows us the endgame—the supreme living symbol of the West as now petrified, no longer transparent to spiritual reality, no longer able to move us, and culture.
This is the endgame of materialism. Far from sunny neurobiological optimism in the belief that we have “overcome” the Cartesian split, we are now at the nadir of our historical story—a story of complete elimination or erasure of any cultural recognition, through language or beliefs, of spiritual reality.
But my dream also heralds the next movement, the next possible story! At the nadir of my “Pilgrim’s Progress” towards the future, with all movement brought to a halt in petrified, impenetrable opacity, a work of art appears, “Petrified Christ”! I have long pondered this startling possibility emerging from the self-completion of the historical moment that we know as materialism. It seems the psyche is now standing outside its former configuration and viewing the entirety of its previous historical moment (the Christ symbol) from a completely new perspective—that of “art”.
When the psyche undergoes its transformations we human beings must “suffer” these movements as our history. My dream suggests the possibility of a new history in the making. We have not and cannot overcome the Cartesian split from within the epoch that gave rise to it in the first place. Many sensitive souls bemoan the appearances wrought by this split and dedicate their lives to overcoming the split—an impossibility since it is the psyche’s a priori “doing”.
My dream suggests the psyche simply has “lost interest” in the question, now being a new configuration in which the hardened, opaque, object-things of the world—the endgame of the appearances informed by the supreme symbol of the Christian age—can now appear as “art”.
The previous epoch originated in the living symbol of Christ, initially so transparent to spirit, guiding and shaping our culture, fulfilling itself in a complete descent into the spiritual darkness of materialism (kenosis—emptying out of spirit). But now, what are we to “suffer” as the new spiritus rector? My dream suggests that we are to turn to those very appearances that are so hardened, opaque and bereft of transparency to spirit—mere objects, no longer symbolic of any spirit—the final outcome of the materialist “movement”—and view them, in their condition of mere “petrified” matter, as art!
We are now to think matter as the supreme value i.e. the “Petrified Christ”, not symbolically [i.e. as transparent to the supreme spiritual value, which lies “in the beyond”, leading us to bemoan the historical loss of transparency (nihilism)], but artistically!
This indeed is a new thinking the things that the psyche is presenting to us. Any ordinary object of the world is now to be thought as art and, as a work of art, each object is the supreme value. This new truth may be the informing power that certain contemporary art forms are expressing today. Artists are placing a frame around ordinary objects such as toilets or pipes or garbage and they become art.
Figure 1: Duchamp
In this framing action we are unconsciously obeying the psyche’s necessities. We are submitting to or surrendering to the ordinary disenchanted appearances of the world, once felt to be the endpoint of a nihilistic world without meaning, but now each to be thought as the supreme value. Not as symbolic of a supreme value that remains “eternal” or “transcendent”. Not as representing or metaphoric of the supreme value. Each ordinary object of our world, once “framed” IS now the supreme value, when understood as a work of art in its character as mere matter.
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Last night I entered the utter darkness of our darkness—the endgame of a historical era. In this darkness, my dream kept pulling at me. I knew it held a key. I had to find a way to think the thought of the dream. What was it saying? The only way to approach it was as an empty hand. I had to learn how to think an impossible thought. It is so easy to import thinking from the age that has led to and culminated in nihilism. This dream thought is impossible from within the old framework. I have to learn how to think it in its own terms, or rather, to let it think itself out through participation with my mind.
Although, as I said, the rich vein of ore that I have mined for the last twenty five years is exhausted, a new, entirely unexpected vein has opened up. I feel renewed!
We are collectively near or at the nadir of our present historical time with its appearances that are in the status of objects bereft of any intrinsic meaning—nihilism. As the darkness darkens to its blackest point, my dream shows that this point is also the beginning of a new historical time, with its characteristic appearances: each ordinary object as an art piece and in its mere-ness or ordinariness, being at the same time truth or the supreme value.
Maybe something of the new spiritus rector is guiding the hand of these young artists who wrote this manifesto recently:
Feel all the things. Feel the hard things. The inexplicable things, the things that make you disavow humanity’s capacity for redemption. Feel all the maddening paradoxes. Feel overwhelmed, crazy. Feel uncertain. Feel angry. Feel afraid. Feel powerless. Feel frozen. And then FOCUS.
Pick up your pen. Pick up your paintbrush. Pick up your damn chin. Put your two calloused hands on the turntables, in the clay, on the strings. Get behind the camera. Look for that pinprick of light. Look for the truth (yes, it is a thing—it still exists.)
Focus on that light. Enlarge it. Reveal the fierce urgency of now. Reveal how shattered we are, how capable of being repaired. But don’t lament the break. Nothing new would be built if things were never broken. A wise man once said: there’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. Get after that light.
This is your assignment.[1]
[1] Illustrator Wendy MacNaughton and writer Courtney E. Martin found at https://www.brainpickings.org/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=80e5318e8d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_05_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-80e5318e8d-238027549&mc_cid=80e5318e8d&mc_eid=c6f039c70e
