In my view, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung—each in his own, more or less adequate manner—came closer to the essence of things concerning the foundational elements of human consciousness and ‘truth’ than Plato and Aristotle did. By claiming instincts (and/or their psychic reflections, archetypes) as the foundational factors of human consciousness, they departed from the comparatively static (Uranian, Parmenidean, celestial) paradigm suggested by Platonic ‘Ideas’ and Aristotelian ‘substance.’ In Plato, these ‘primordial’ ideas or FORMS bear a closer resemblance to the elements and axioms of geometry than they do to the dynamic, polaristic, and ever-transforming instinctual/archetypal factors we see in various guises in the aforementioned modern philosopher/psychologists.[1]
Where the foundations of human consciousness are dynamic—and their interrelationships are fluid and ever-transformative, like the variables at play in a weather system—it ‘stands to reason’ that the abstract concepts derived from, and in reference to, this ever-transforming array of determinants and conditions will necessarily be provisional, tentative, and ultimately imperfect (incomplete, insofar as they are fixed in form). In superimposing self-consistent, axiological-mathematical schemes onto this protean matrix—whether it is Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes, Newton, or Einstein—an idealized, rationalized (and ‘de-natured’) framework or grid is being illegitimately foisted upon a fundamentally irrational datum. All the aforementioned modern thinker/psychologists saw through these rational-conceptual presuppositions and projected schemes. They peered into the magma-like, molten core (below the ‘crust’ and ‘mantle’). All four of them rightly understood that, being derivative and secondary, the rational (as faculty, function, system, schema) could only serve as a limited/limiting formulator and conveyor of these deeper, more mysterious factors at work ‘below deck,’ in the engine room of human consciousness. In Schopenhauer and Freud, a species of Stoic pessimism emerged as a posture in response to this profoundly unsettling realization; however, neither of them opted to disparage reason on that account, but continued to endorse its cultivation and wise employment as our chief bulwark against ever-encroaching barbarism—the rending of the ‘thin veneer of civilization.’ (“Where id was, there ego shall be.”—Freud)
In Nietzsche—who, in certain crucial respects, was perhaps more the artist-psychologist-poet than the rational philosopher—we find a somewhat different attitude towards the dynamic-creative-destructive ground of life and consciousness. The deity (or mythic mask) Nietzsche associated with the matrix of life and consciousness was Dionysus—but a Dionysus that was alchemically (or shotgun?) wedded to measure-bestowing Apollo. As with the patron-deity of ancient Greek tragedy, Nietzsche’s Dionysus was associated with a chastening and sobering ‘tragic-pessimism’ that held out the prospect of deepening and ennobling those exceptional souls capable of withstanding such a vision. With this crucial move, Nietzsche opens up the prospect of psychological (and perhaps, to a limited extent, spiritual) transformation under the artfully managed and expressed creative tension native to the Dionysian perspective or experience.
It would be left to Jung, however, to gather and recombine all these crucial pieces of a puzzle into his teaching of individuation, or the conscious path of wholeness. This path, of course, is only open to those persons, never large in number, for whom the reality of the psyche is as indisputable and compelling as the reality of the body and the features of the external world. For, unless and until the psyche and its archetypal contents become an imaginal reality for the person, there can be no meaningful or transformative individuation process—an ongoing dialectical relationship between ego and unconscious, with the latter invisibly but ineluctably leading the way. The ‘psychological faith’ required (on the part of the ego) to maintain this gradual but profoundly transformative process is not something that the ego can manufacture by fiat, but is born only from the metanoia or ‘about-face’ initiation. This crisis (of having ‘the world turned inside-out’) can be endured only by one who has at least provisionally established a psychic standpoint or center of gravity at a depth or level below the ego. As Lao Tzu says, ‘A path is formed by walking (on it).’ So, this psychic platform necessary for the (sane) survival of the ‘falling apart’ experience of the familiar ego standpoint is gradually formed by means of inwardly guided imaginative activity, otherwise known as ‘soul-making.’
If the general aim of the Platonic philosophical-moral education was to get the mind and will of the candidate to conform to the eternal-changeless Idea of the Good – and thereby rise above the mutable realm of generation and decay – the modern philosopher-psychologists present a rather different general aim of the philosophical, or individuation, process. Here – at least with Jung and in a more qualified sense, with Nietzsche – the aim is to manifest and actualize dynamic potentials inherent in the collective unconscious – one aspect of which is will – and to go about this work of manifestation on the physical plane and in the cultural arena. In the ancient (Platonic, as opposed to Sophistic) program, vision took precedence over action (will), but in the modern one, action, or pragmatics (in accordance with an unfolding, dynamic vision), assumes priority over merely contemplative apprehension. If, in the ancient scheme, humanity may have best been likened to mere servants or custodians of the “divine plan” or blueprint, in the modern one we are invited to become like little creator-Gods whose work consists in translating the text into living form.
[1] As a kind of spiritual ‘grandfather’ figure for all four of the modern thinkers, Goethe should almost certainly be mentioned here.
Paul's Bench 