Letter from Guild member

“I am writing to say how disappointed I am to receive the Guild Lecture pamphlet The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man. I fail to see how the arguments expressed by the author, Wolfgang Giegerich, can possibly be compatible with the aims of the Guild summarised on the back of the booklet as being ‘a meeting place for those who wish to explore the religious and spiritual quest enhanced by the insights of depth psychology’, when the lecture explicitly denies the validity of any spiritual quest.”

Response from Wolfgang Giegerich

The response to the Guild Lecture pamphlet with my The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man to which I have been asked to respond in turn expresses the writer’s deep disappointment. I can fully understand and sympathize with this reaction. It is indeed painful to be confronted with something that denies the validity of one’s cherished expectations and vested interests. To the extent that this letter is the expression of a sincere personal feeling I respect it as one possible reaction. But I sense a contradiction in the writer’s statement when he or she continues with the charge that the arguments in my text, in his/her opinion, cannot possibly be “compatible with the aims of the Guild summarised on the back of the booklet as being ‘a meeting place for those who wish to explore the religious and spiritual quest enhanced by the insights of depth psychology’, when the lecture explicitly denies the validity of any spiritual quest”.

A quest, I think, is essentially open-ended. It is very different from a confirmation of a given faith as well as from the gratification of one’s spiritual needs. A quest is not like a search, say, for one’s misplaced keys, where what is to be found is known in advance and merely not at hand; it is not merely a process of personally actualizing for oneself generally or collectively known answers. The outcome of a quest, if it is a real one, is not known ahead of time. It is in principle even feasible that an honest quest or exploration might lead of its own accord to the insight that the very idea of a quest had been based on wrong assumptions or has become obsolete because times have changed. In contrast to a petitio principii, a begging of the question, a quest must question everything, including its own presuppositions.

So there are two decisions at stake for the seeker. I can only mention them, not discuss them, here. The one concerns “truth”, the other the role of negation. (1) Do I assume that there are spiritual truths which exist somewhere and that my task is merely to get to them, — or do I have to venture into the open to find out “from scratch” what the form, the logical constitution, of truth in our time has to be? And do I have to turn within and to follow one of the traditional spiritual paths in the sense of what Aldous Huxley called perennial philosophy to find out about “truth”, — or do I have to allow myself to be taught about “truth” by my pathology as well as the pathology and deep reality of the age, because they are the first immediacy of where the objective psyche is moving? (2) Is there, or is there not, room for negation in my quest, room also, e.g., for such experiences as the ancient one of “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” or the modern one, “God is dead”?

The letter that I have to respond to here is too short for me to be sure, but I surmise that underlying the writer’s disappointment may be a fundamental misunderstanding that hinges on the role of negation. My suspicion is that the writer reads my position as amounting to a simple abolishment of the spiritual dimension of human existence altogether, to an act of decapitation, amputation, or castration. If so, in this reading “negation” is itself positivized and experienced as an external act. But “The End of Meaning” lecture operates with and within a fantasy of transformation, metamorphosis. In a transformation process the negation is internal: the self-negation, self-sublation of that which is undergoing this process. So nothing of the substance, the prime matter, is literally lost, it only changed its (logical) form. Alchemically speaking, it is a process of distillation, evaporation, sophistication; psychologically one of integration and absolute-negative interiorization. As a kind of visual aid for such an interiorization let me just mention a biological example. There is the view that the human organism has not left the ocean altogether, but rather integrated it into itself; we still take our food from, as it were, our inner “ocean”, our blood, whose chemical consistency is strikingly similar to that of seawater. But because we have our sublated “ocean” within ourselves, we do not need the literal ocean around us anymore; as our element it is obsolete for us, or rather: we cannot even go back into it by penalty of death.

But of course, if, as I suggest, the letter writer’s reading is a misunderstanding, it is probably a misunderstanding not of the intellectual kind that can be cleared up, but one rooted in and necessitated by the respective psychology as which each of us exists. And as such I must and can respect it, too. The difficulty with my lecture is that in order to understand such an argument about a transformation, you have to submit intellectually and psychologically to the transformation process yourself. There is no other way. The fish cannot do justice to the world of Aquarius. If you hold on immutably to your initial position, the new argument will necessarily appear as simply destructive. I can understand that not everyone is willing to expose himself to such a process.

I can understand it, but it is also a cause of concern for me, not so much for me personally, as for me as a therapist of the soul. For the first time in history it has become possible today, in modernity, to indulge in private truths, in a private spiritual life, that is fundamentally dissociated from, indeed in direct opposition to, the public truth, no longer responsive to and authenticated by what is going on in the depth of our age. Does this not show “the intensity of our prejudice against the future, which we obstinately want to be as we expect it(?) We decide, as if we knew. We only know what we know, but there is plenty more of which we might know if only we could give up insisting upon what we know” (C.G. Jung, to Sir Herbert Read, 2 Sep. 1960).

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Notes

I have selected the following concepts as probably benefiting from some further explanation: logical; negation (also as in self-negation, absolute-negation); positivized; sublated.

From W.G.

“As to positive and negative: maybe the following idea might put people on the right track. In contrast to living beings, organisms, i.e., plants, animals, people, which do have a positive existence, ‘life’ does not have a positive existence; it is not an entity, not thing-like. You cannot see and touch and demonstrate it. It exists only in the living beings, and yet is not identical with them, because those beings can die, i.e., lose their life. It is (logically) absolute-negative: absolutely negative, because it is not simply nothing (on the contrary, it is a powerful reality, only not ‘positive’). One has to be careful not to " positivize" what is logically negative.“

From J.K.

The word “positive” here has some of the connotations of the OED definition: “Dealing only with matters of fact and experience; … not speculative or theoretical.” “Facts and experience” are what can be explored by the physical sciences. The qualification “logical”, however – “logically positive” (or “logically negative”) – introduces an additional idea: that different dimensions of Reality are apprehended differently, and constitute different forms of truth – they are in this way “logically” different.

From John Beebe

“The … goal of Giegerich’s approach to Jung can be found in a word that recurs throughout the essay: sublation. In his book The Soul’s Logical Life he explains that “ ‘sublation’ is the translation of the Hegelian term Aufhebung in the threefold sense of (a) negating and cancelling, (b) rescuing and retaining, (c) raising to a new level” (p.98). I found on the Internet a passage that seems to me to unpack the intent of this term, in a book applying this thinking process to Hegel’s own philosophy:

‘Hegel … taught us that if we want to refute a philosophy, we cannot do it from ‘outside’ by arbitrary arguments but through unfolding and developing its own immanent and internal contradictions which it is not yet aware about.’ (Stojanov, 2001)

(The whole longer essay, The End of Meaning…, as well as responses by other Jungians, including John Beebe, is published in the Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, vol.6 No. 1 2004, which is published by the C.G.Jung Institute of New York. It is distributed free to analysts in the USA and to members of the International Association of Analytical Psychology.)

From J.K.

I found the above explanation helpful, and Giegerich agreed it might serve as a suitable clarification.

further to “sublation”: I was reading a history of philosophy, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity, where I found a clear illustration of what I thought Giegerich was getting at. It goes like this: When we read older religious poetry, such as Milton, John Donne, George Herbert, we recognise their Christian beliefs in the whole framework of their poems, imagery being only one aspect. But when we come to modern poets, although they may be Christian and invoke the metaphysical concepts and imagery, there is a difference:

“Something has undoubtedly changed since the era of the great chain of being and the publicly established order of references. I have tried to express this by saying that the metaphysics or theology comes indexed to a personal vision, or refracted through a particular sensibility. …

… “it is an articulation of a personal vision.  It is one that we might come to partake in as well, as a personal vision; but it can never become again an invoking of public references, short of an almost unimaginable return – some might say ‘regression’ – to a new age of faith. …

….It is not just that they are more tentative than the old public creeds. It is also that what I call their personal index makes them a different kind of thing. We know that the poet, if he is serious, is pointing to something – God, the tradition – which he believes to be there for all of us.  But we also know that he can only give it to us refracted through his own sensibility.”

When I tried out some of this with Giegerich, he agreed:  “… the statement by Taylor, ‘he can only give it to us refracted through his own sensibility’, is very much to the point of what I intended to say.”

Judith Keyston  January 2005