Sanford Drob's "Reading the Red Book"



I am pleased to announce that my new book, “Reading the Red Book: An Interpretive Guide to C.G. Jung’s Liber Novus” is available for pre-order from Spring Journal Books (http://www.springjournalandbooks.com). 

The book will be available for shipment on or around September 1, 2012.

Praise for Reading The Red Book


"Drob writes with the heart of a spiritual seeker and the mind and eye of a scholar... Reading The Red Book, along with his earlier work, has established him as an important and unique voice in Jungian scholarship."

STANTON MARLAN, PH.D., ABPP, PRESIDENT OF THE PITTSBURGH SOCIETY OF JUNGIAN ANALYSTS, AND AUTHOR OF THE BLACK SUN: THE ALCHEMY AND ART OF DARKNESS

"Sanford Drob has provided us with an indispensable guide to the structure and function, the purpose and meaning of Jung's hidden masterpiece: this lucid commentary will surely establish itself as the inevitable starting-point of Red Book interpretation for many years to come."

PAUL BISHOP, PH.D., PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW, AND AUTHOR OF READING GOETHE AT MIDLIFE

"An outstanding map to guide the reader through the labyrinth of associations, images, and thoughts contained in Jung's Red Book. Drob locates its innumerable themes within an historical context of classical, modern, and postmodern philosophy, connects Jung's ideas with his later works, and elucidates Jung's unique contribution to Western thought. Reading The Red Book is a work of exploration that serves as a companion to any reader who wishes to fathom the secrets of Jung's most enigmatic work."

JOHN HILL, M.A., SENIOR JUNGIAN TRAINING ANALYST, ZÜRICH, AND AUTHOR OF AT HOME IN THE WORLD: SOUNDS AND SYMMETRIES OF BELONGING

"In this essential companion to Jung's Red Book, Drob tracks the path of Jung's psychological wrestlings, placing those struggles within the broader tradition of philosophical, theological, and mystical thought. In this way the reader is privileged access to witness not only the astonishing raw, bloody, personal birthing of Jung's ideas—but then also to be led into more tranquil areas for reflection. Drob's comments as well as thematic groupings aid one in imagining those squirming offspring into realms with implications both practical as well as ideological. This book is clear, intelligent and helpful—truly a must read for those who dare cross the Red Book portal."

PAT BERRY, PH.D., PRESIDENT, INTER-REGIONAL SOCIETY OF JUNGIAN ANALYSTS, AND AUTHOR OF ECHO'S SUBTLE BODY: CONTRIBUTIONS TO AN ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY

"...a much needed antidote to the perilous times in which we live where our political, economic, educational and environmental practices are in dire need of the soul's perspective."

ROBERT D. ROMANYSHYN, PROFESSOR, PACIFICA GRADUATE INSTITUTE, AND CREATOR OF THE MULTI-MEDIA DVD, ANTARCTICA: INNER JOURNEYS IN THE OUTER WORLD


Sanford L. Drob is on the Core Faculty in Clinical Psychology at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California. His most recent books are Kabbalah and Postmodernism: A Dialog and Kabbalistic Visions: C. G. Jung and Jewish Mysticism (Spring Journal Books, 2010).

The Red Book and Difference

With his 1968 paper "Différance," Jacques Derrida introduced a notion that was to have a variety of ramifications in philosophy, literature and political thought. Derrida produced a "difference" in the spelling of his term by substituting an "a" for an "e" in such a manner that this difference cannot be heard in French but only be discernible graphically. He introduced "différance" in order to make oblique reference to the spaces between letters, phonemes and words that allow them to be distinguished from one another, and hence produce language and meaning. Derrida goes on to suggest that différance is “older than being itself,” and he indicates that while différance itself can never be presented it makes possible the very gesture or presentation of being present. A basic idea here is that without differentiation there could be no experience, meaning or being whatsoever. One ramification of Derrida’s ideas on difference is that the search for a unitary philosophy, absolute truth, singular vision of self and the world becomes a chimera, as any unity, singularity or absolute must rest upon the foundation of that which is different from itself. This leads to a respect for differences in art, culture, thought, and religion, and the abandonment of any Hegelian-like effort to integrate all ideas and things. A further implication of this view is that things and ideas are integrally related to, and indeed dependent upon their polar opposites, and that the effort to exalt one pole of a binary opposition (good, being, presence, reality) and debase its opposite (evil, nothingness, absence, illusion) is a fruitless endeavor. With this highly truncated account of the role of difference (difference) in late 20th century thought, we are, I believe, in a position to appreciate Jung’s own thoughts on difference in the Red Book and Psychological Types, which as we have seen were authored during the same period. Over 50 years prior to Derrida’s seminal essay, Jung appreciated the significance of difference for all things human and otherwise:

“Differentiation is creation. It is differentiated. Differentiation is its essence, and therefore it differentiates. Therefore man differentiates since his essence is differentiation” (347).

Jung recognized that an important implication of difference is that we are unwise to think we can ally ourselves with one pole of a binary opposition:

“When we strive for the good or the beautiful, we forget our essence, which is differentiation. And we fall subject to the spell of the qualities of the Pleroma” (349).

Jung further seemed to grasp that another implication of differentiation,” is a call to allow the world to develop in all of its differences. In the Red Book, a white bird sits on Jung’s shoulder and says, “Let it rain, let the windblow, let the waters flow and the fire burn. Let each thing have its development, let becoming have its day” (310).

In the Red Book, Jung holds the view that a primal unity is torn asunder in the human subject, as “we are the victims of the pairs of opposites. The Pleroma is rent within us” (348).

While Jung is adamant that man’s “very nature is differentiation,” (347), he does not abandon the notion of transcending difference. According to Jung:

“…he who accepts what approaches him because it is also in him, quarrels and wrangles no more, but looks into himself and keeps silent. He sees the tree of life, whose roots reach into Hell and whose top touches Heaven. He also no longer knows differences” (301).

We might say that the possibility of (psychologically, philosophically and mystically) transcending difference lies in the fact that it too is a pole of a binary opposition with unity or non-differentiation. For Jung, differentiation is a function of our conscious mental life, in the unconscious the opposites remain indistinct (Psychological Types, par. 179). For Jung, the process of individuation involves the differentiation of psychic functions (e.g. sensation and intellect), ego from non-ego, positive from negative, good from evil, and then their re-integration in the formation of a Self. For Jung, such differentiation is necessary for direction and purpose (par. 705), and to prevent an arbitrary identification with one pole of an opposition, “together with a violent suppression of its opposite” (Par. 174). Here Jung describes on the psychological level what Derrida and others were to declare on a philosophical level fifty years hence: the importance of reintegrating the so-called “inferior” poles of various oppositions (e.g. evil, the imaginary, absence, the irrational) into the discourse of the self (Jung) or the times (Derrida).
It is not only differentiation, but ultimately a reintegration of the opposites that is necessary to prevent the ego from falling prey to one or the other poles of an opposition. Indeed, it is a fundamental principle of Jungian psychology that the opposites must each be given their due and ultimately united, for “when the individual consistently takes his stand on one side, the unconscious ranges itself on the other side and rebels” (par. 175). Indeed, this is the idea behind Jung’s concepts of the shadow and compensation and his interest in the venerable doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum (which I have explored in an earlier post).

Interestingly, while Derrida eschews all philosophical and mystical efforts to think or experience unity, he too allows for the possibility of transcending difference. He writes: “The efficacy of the thematic of difference may very well, indeed must, one day be superseded, lending itself if not to its own replacement, at least to enmeshing itself in a chain that in truth it never will have governed” (Derrida, Différance, p. 7).

Jung frequently found himself on the cusp between unity and difference. While he took a keen interest in the myths, symbols, (and their differences) that he found in various cultures and traditions his notion of the archetypes of the collective unconscious he sought to ascertain a unity underlying these differences

Existential Themes in the Red Book

The relationship between Jung and existential and humanistic thought has often been noted in passing, but seldom articulated in any detail. We have already seen (this blog: Jung on Death, December 1, 2009) the strong affinity between Jung’s Red Book views on “living towards death” and similar views put forth by Martin Heidegger in the 1920s. Here I will discuss Jung’s existential views on personal authenticity and freedom. Over a quarter of a century ago Walter A Shelburne (Journal of Religion and Health 22:1) noted the similarities between Jung’s conception of individuation and the ideal of “authenticity” as it appears in the writings of Jean Paul Sartre. Shelburne pointed out that in spite of significant differences both individuation and authenticity involve a call to the individual’s inner resources, creativity and freedom and the overcoming of self-deception in the service of achieving a meaningful existence.

In the Red Book, Jung is adamant that the individual should not follow a personal or spiritual model but should instead assumes personal responsibility for his or her own life:

“If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves” (231).

“The image of the hero was set up…through the appetite for imitation. Therefore the hero was murdered, since we all have been aping him” (249).

While Jung’s views on personal responsibility will later be tempered by his concept of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, in the Red Book he suggests that the individual and not the collective archetypes is the source of life’s meaning: “The meaning of events comes from the possibility of life in this world that you create. It is a mastery of this world and the assertion of your soul in this world” (239).

“The time has come when each must do his own work of redemption. Mankind has grown older and a new month has begun” (356).

Interestingly, Jung suggests that the divine in instantiated in man precisely through a rejection of imitation and the assumption of individual freedom:

“The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship. He needs no imitators and no pupils. He forces men through himself. The God is his own follower in man. He imitates himself” (245).

The creation of personal meaning and the assumption of personal responsibility involves a descent into the shadow depths of one’s soul:

“you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself , then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest” (249-50).

“With fear and trembling, looking around yourselves with mistrust, go thus into the depths… (244).
The existential theme of authentically living all of one’s possibilities appears. Even death does not release one from this obligation

“You do not come to an end with your life, and the dead will besiege you terribly to live your unlived life” (308).

The Red Book on Language

In the Red Book, we find Jung struggling with the question of whether words do or can have a definitive meaning, whether they point to specifiable ideas, kinds and things, or are rather always subject to an indefinite series of reinterpretations. This is a question that was paramount in the minds of many intellectuals during the period that Jung was writing the Red Book. It was, for example, during this same period that a young Ludwig Wittgenstein was writing in his Notebooks the ideas about language that were to eventuate in the “picture theory of meaning” in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. In that work we find the idea (which Wittgenstein himself was later to repudiate) that the fundamental units ("Names") and statements ("Elementary Propositions") in language pictured unique states of affairs in the world (i.e. “atomic facts”), thereby saving language and thought from an indefinite series of interpretations of reality. Wittgenstein was later to trade in the picture theory of meaning for the notion of “meaning as use,” which opened up nearly infinite possibilities of linguistic use and interpretation. Jung, in the Red Book, seems to be torn between these two views, on the one hand he considers the idea that language and the world are indefinitely open to interpretation while on the other hand he is attracted to the notion that there are specifiable meanings (archetypes) that can be grasped and circumscribed by words. With regard to the first view, Jung’s “Anchorite” declares:

…”you must know one thing above all: a succession of words does not have only one meaning. But men strive to assign only a single meaning to the sequence of words, in order to have an unambiguous language….On the higher levels of insight into divine thoughts, you recognize that the sequence of words has more than one valid meaning. Only to the all-knowing is it given to know all the meanings of the sequence of words.” (268)

It would seem, at least on the view of the Anchorite, that language is completely fluid and subject to reinterpretation. Interestingly, Jung suggests (quite correctly) that this an essentially Jewish hermeneutical view. Jung responds to the Anchorite, “If I understand your correctly, you think that the holy writings of the New Testament also have a doubleness, an exoteric and an esoteric meaning, as a few Jewish scholars contend concerning their holy books.” For some reason, however, the Anchorite rejects this view, stating, “This bad superstition is far from me,” adding that the Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus “was a clever head, but fantastically abstract, as the Jews are wont to be when they devise systems: moreover he was a slave of his own words…words should not become Gods” (270).

In another place, Jung attributes the reinterpretability theory to the Gnostics, commenting “that the sequence of words have many meanings…does not sound properly Christian.” Jung says it sounds Gnostic, adding that “they were really the worst of all the idolators of words…” Indeed, Jung bemoans the fact that in our scientific age, words have replaced the Gods. The sick god Izdubar asks Jung "Have you no Gods anymore?," to which Jung responds, "No, words are all we have...Science has taken from us the capacity for belief" (279).

Jung, proffers another seemingly more positive view of language, one that would seem to be diametrically opposed to the “fluid language” theory originally posed by the anchorite. According to Jung,

“The writing lies before you and always says the same, if you believe in words. But if you believe in things in whose places only words stand, you never come to an end. And yet you must go on an endless road, since life flows not only down a finite path but also an infinite one” (270).

Further,

“The word becomes your God, since it protects you from the countless possibilities of interpretation. The word is protective magic against the daimons of the unending, which tear at your soul and want to scatter you to the winds. You are saved if you can say at last that is that and only that. You speak the magic word, and the limitless is finally banished. Because of that men seek and make words” (270)

On this view, far from opening up an abyss of limitless interpretation, language actually fixes meaning—“protects you from the countless possibilities of interpretation.” It is the world itself, and not the words we use to describe it, which on Jung’s view here, is infinitely variable. Jung’s point is a valuable one and serves as a counterpoint to the one made by the “Anchorite.” When I say anything; for example, if I say, “I love you,” or “the brain is the organ of consciousness,” I am in fact closing off possibilities and constraining reality. Reality is far more complex than either of these phrases, or, for that matter, any phrase I can use to describe it, and there is indeed a strong sense that with language “the limitless is finally banished.” However, it is not banished for long, for a soon as one asks, “What does one mean by…love, consciousness, etc?” our words become subject to reinterpretation and the “finite path” again becomes “infinite.” It is perhaps for this reason that Jung reflects:

“In words, the emptiness and the fullness flow together. Hence the word is an image of God. The word is the greatest and the smallest that man created, just as what is created through man is the greatest and the smallest…So if I fall prey to the web of words, I fall prey to the greatest and the smallest” (298).

The debate regarding “fixity of meaning” vs. “openness to interpretation” is not really a debate about the nature of language, but is rather a comment upon two aspects of language and its relationship to the world.

Jung is wary of the aspect of language that leaves itself open to indefinite interpretation. Indeed, while in other places in the Red Book he is open to and even welcomes chaos, he appears to be of the view that one needs a language, needs some narrative or myth that grasps at least a potion of life and to prevent one from falling into an infinite abyss.

“But no one should shatter the old words, unless he finds the new word that is a firm rampart against the limitless and grasps more life in it than the old word” (270).

There is in the Red Book, and in Jung’s later writings as well, a tension between existential and mythological views of life and the world. In the former one discovers the depths of one’s soul through a courageous encounter with chaos, madness and the infinite possibilities of sense and nonsense. In the latter, one develops one’s soul through the assimilation of a personal/collective myth, which occurs via an encounter with the enduring meanings of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. This tension between the existential and the mythological is reflected, if somewhat dimly, in the double view of language in the Red Book.

The Red Book and the Idea of the "Shadow"

For Jung the “shadow” archetype embodies those aspects of the self that the ego rejects as evil, damaging or reprehensible. According to Jung, the ego acts as if the “persona,” the “acceptable” aspects of one’s personality that one presents to the world, as coextensive with the self, with the result that one’s shadow aspects emerge without warning and wreak havoc upon self and others. Jung arrived at the view that the process of individuation involved the acceptance and incorporation of one’s shadow into one’s personality and the forging of a self that is far wider and deeper than one’s ego or persona.

While in the Red Book Jung does not make explicit reference to the shadow archetype, his struggle with his own shadow as well as the ideas behind the shadow archetype are evident throughout this work:

“I have to recognize that I must submit to what I fear; yes, even more, that I must even love what horrifies me” (233).

“You are entirely unable to live without evil” (287).

Jung’s thinking here is partly covered by the rabbinic dictum that “were it not for the yetzer hara (the “evil impulse”) people would not build houses, take wives, have children, or engage in business.” The idea here is that while one may reject and at times be horrified by one’s baser or animal instincts and desires (and indeed if such desires go completely unchecked they can be destructive and evil) without them one would not have the drive for life at all.
Jung sees other values in the darker aspects of human personality as well. He advises, “He who comprehends the darkness in himself. To him the light is near” (272). Much, of course, can and has been said regarding the insight afforded by an encounter with one’s shadow. Awareness of one’s own aggressive and thanatic impulses provides one not only with a wider awareness of one’s own possibilities, but provides an important basis for empathy with others. Goethe, who Jung revered and apparently believed to be his ancestor, once said that he had never heard of a crime that he could not imagine himself committing. In my work as a forensic psychologist I have held “Goethe’s principle” as essential for coming to terms with the behavior of those I am asked to examine and work with. (In this light it is interesting to note that Goethe’s Faust, despairing of his capacity to achieve perfect knowledge through book-learning and science, makes a pact with Mephistopheles who promises to show him things he has never seen; it seems that one can learn things from one’s [inner] devil).

In the Red Book, Jung suggests that a confrontation with one’s dark side is necessary for psychological transformation: “You will need evil to dissolve your formation, and to free yourself from the power of what has been, to the same extent which this image fetters your strength” (287). The idea here is that an incursion from one’s shadow self can break apart the limiting structures of one’s persona or ego ideal and open one to creativity and change. Indeed, in spite of and even because they are rejected by the ego, there are many positive aspects of the shadow self.

Only by accepting the evil within us can we prevent it from harming and controlling us. Jung writes:

“Thus we probably have to accept our evil without love or hate, recognizing that it exists and must have its share in life. In doing so we deprive it of the power it has to overwhelm us” (288).

One should not work to suppress or eliminate the shadow aspects of one’s self. This is because, “the more the one half of [one’s] being strives toward the good, the more the other half journeys to Hell” (314). Jung adds, “Because we know that too far into the good means the same as too far into evil, we keep them both together” (315). Jung is here developing is notion that the psyche tends to compensate unconsciously for a one-sided diet of ideas, feelings and actions.

Jung’s comments on the “shadow,” also apply to the “personality” of God which, as we have seen, Jung came to believe to be an archetype that is equivalent to the self:

“the God I experienced is more than love; he is also hate, he is more than beauty, he is also the abomination, he is more than wisdom, he is also meaninglessness, he is more than power, he is also powerlessness…” (339).

Indeed, God’s completeness and the fact that the divine is the template for the human personality necessitate the existence of the divine shadow:

“If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful. Good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one half of him” (243).

According to Jung, God himself “suffers when man does not accept his darkness” (287). It is for this reason that “men have a suffering God” (287). Presumably God’s suffering would end once mankind accepted the evil within itself! This seems to me to be the meaning of Jung’s statements in the Red Book, “I also want evil for the sake of my God” (289), and “Because I wanted to give birth to my God, I also wanted evil” (289). As we have seen, in the Red Book, Jung sees a close correspondence between God and self, and, as such, the God who suffers because of the individual’s failure to accept his own darkness, is the inner God of the self. One might translate this in psychological terms as follows: the failure of the ego to integrate the shadow results in a deeper suffering on the level of the self. While in Psychological Types Jung seems to suggest an equivalence of the individual’s shadow and the unconscious (Par. 268), Jung’s more considered view appears to be that it is possible, even imperative for an individual to attain consciousness of his shadow self.

Jung on Symbols and the Self

In this post I examine some themes relating to symbols and the self as they appear in Jung's Red Book and Psychological Types.

For Jung, “symbols” rather than “facts” or “ideas” are the royal road to both psychological insight and wisdom. In the Red Book we learn, “there are not many truths, there are only a few. Their meaning is too deep to grasp other than in symbols” (291). Indeed, one of Jung’s greatest contributions to the intellectual dialog of the 20th century was to re-elevate the symbol, as a vehicle for knowledge, insight and personal transformation. “The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them” (236). However, in an age where the world has become all too real, in the sense that reality is defined by science and reason, we are in danger of losing our connection to symbolic meaning, and this, for Jung, amounts a loss of meaning altogether. Symbols, for Jung, are pregnant with latent meaning. “The mouth utters the word, the sign, and symbol. If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol it means everything” (310).

In Psychological Types, Jung explains that symbols (in contrast to signs) are the best possible expression “of a relatively unknown thing, which…cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented” (Psych Types par 815). For Jung, a symbol cannot be created through conscious mentation, but must always be created through unconscious activity, an activity that has both rational and irrational elements (Psych Types, par 822). Jung called the psychic function that produces symbols, the “transcendent function” (par. 828). In the Red Book Jung describes how “the symbol can be neither thought up nor found: it becomes. Its becoming is like the becoming of human life in the womb” (311).

As we have seen, Jung holds that symbols are the means through which the psyche reconciles or unites opposites. For Jung, “The raw material shaped by thesis and antithesis, and in the shaping of which the opposites are united, is the living symbol” (Psych Types, par. 827). In this Jung is later echoed by the French structural anthropologist Levi Strauss, who held that myths reconcile contradictions within a culture that cannot be reconciled through reason. By holding that opposites can only be reconciled via symbols, Jung consciously opposed himself to Hegel, who had held that contradictions could be overcome through dialectical reason.

In the Red Book Jung says, “good and bad must always be united if the symbol is to be created” (236), and in Psychological Types he explains that a symbol is “born of man’s highest spiritual aspirations,” and “from the deepest roots of his being…from the lowest and most primitive levels of the psyche” (Psych Types, par. 823). If we reflect upon these ideas for a moment we realize that the contradictions that symbols reconcile must always involve a conflict between good and bad, civilized and primitive, or at least between “accepted” and “rejected,” otherwise there would be little need for their reconciliation. In Psychological Types Jung describes how the symbols of the great religions reconcile spirituality with sensuality (par. 825). One need think no further than symbol of communion, whereby the Catholic initiate consumes the body and blood of Christ, or the symbols of Jewish ritual whereby blessings are recited over sensual pursuits such as eating, drinking, and copulation.

Jung makes the bold claim that “symbols” provide one with “inner freedom.” In the Red Book he states, “Our freedom does not lie outside us, but within us…One can certainly gain outer freedom through powerful actions, but one creates inner freedom only through the symbol” (311). How can we understand this claim. First, we should note that Jung relates how “in the symbol there is the release of the bound human force struggling with darkness” (310-311). Presumably the symbol, by reconciling good and evil enables one to integrate the dark aspects of self and the world and frees one from the grip of one’s shadow. Further, by reconciling conflicts that would otherwise produce depression, anxiety or other psychological symptoms, the symbols created by the transcendent function free us from our neurotic misery. Amongst the symbols discussed by Jung, those pointing to the “self” are paramount. To take just a few examples, for Jung, the Kabbalists' Primordial Man, alchemist’s philosopher’s stone, Hindu and Buddhist (as well as Jung's own) mandalas, Jesus, Buddha and God Himself are all symbols of the union of opposites that constitutes the Self. Indeed, like its symbols, the Self points to something that is familiar yet (because it is largely constituted by the unconscious) very imperfectly known. Indeed, the archetype of the Self provides the reconciliation between freedom and determinism that has, at least since the time of Kant, eluded the philosophers. Without being able to specify how this is the case, we can all recognize that the Self is both determined by our heredity, history and environment, and the source of our free will. This is an interesting example of how a symbol expresses a meaning and reconciles apparent contradictions, albeit in an imperfect and unclear manner.

In this context it is interesting to note that for Jung, science also operates with symbols: “Since every scientific theory contains a hypothesis, and is therefore an anticipatory description of something still essentially unknown, it is a symbol” (Psych Types par. 816). I think I understand what Jung is driving at here—but I don’t think it’s quite accurate to associate the unknown with specific hypotheses. Rather scientific theories contain concepts (e.g. gravitation, the atom, space, matter, time) whose meanings are anticipatory, inasmuch as they far exceed what is known in their current formulation. The problem with regarding scientific concepts as symbols, however, is that according to Jung symbols are never purely cognitive or rational. Indeed, for Jung, the symbol “is an astonishing and perhaps seemingly irrational word, but one recognizes it as a symbol since it is alien to the conscious mind” (311).

Now the “Self” is, according to Jung an archetypal idea or symbol, but it might also be thought of as a concept, one that has differing nuances depending upon the context within which it appears; think of the different but overlapping ways that “self” is understood in everyday parlance, in self-psychology, as part of the construct of self-esteem, and in Jungian psychology. However, it would seem that for Jung, the self as a symbol cannot be turned into a rational or scientific concept without loss of meaning. Jung comments that symbols die once they are provided with a rational interpretation:

“So long as a symbol is a living thing, it is an expression for something that cannot be characterized in any other or better way. The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. But once its meaning has been born out of it, once that expression is found that formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined even better than the hitherto accepted symbol, then the symbol is dead, i.e. it possesses only a historical significance” (Psych. Types par. 816).

This is the sort of thing that Nietzsche had in mind when he proclaimed the death of God. In the Red Book Jung suggests that science, presumably by explaining clearly and rationally so many things that God had hitherto been invoked to explain, had killed the gods, or at least made them mortally ill. On Jung’s account, the symbol of God was no longer pregnant with meaning, and in need of a new influx of mystery; something he sought to provide through his notions of fantasy, the archetypes, and the collective unconscious.

We might ask whether the symbol of the Self, is itself threatened with death, e.g. by biological or cognitive science, and in what human “self-understanding” would consist if the very symbol/concept of the Self was no longer viable or interesting. This is not a result that Jung found particularly palatable. The editors of the Red Book point out that in a letter to Hans Scmid, written on November 6, 1915, Jung wrote:

“the core of the individual is a mystery of life, which dies when it is grasped…That is why, in the later stages of analysis, we must help the other to come to those hidden and un-openable symbols, in which the seed of life lies securely hidden like the tender seed in the hard shell. If a symbol is understood it is ripe for destruction because it has outgrown its shell. Salvation is given to us in the un-openable and unsayable symbol for it protects us by preventing the devil from swallowing the seed of life” (n. 337).

Jung on Knowledge, Intuition and Belief

Jung does not offer a formal and systematic theory of knowledge in the Red Book, but throughout this work he turns traditional epistemology on its head: placing his weight on the side of the imaginary as opposed to the real, the irrational as opposed to the rational, madness as opposed to sanity, and myth as opposed to science. We might say that Jung's view is not unlike the one that Jacques Derrida would develop 60 years later: that of redressing the imbalance resulting from the tradition’s “privileging” of certain critical ideas over their opposites.

In the Red Book, Jung is adamant that true knowledge must spring from a total engagement with life: “Scholarliness alone is not enough, there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight…You can attain this knowledge (of the heart) only by living your life to the full”(233)

Later in the Red Book, Jung has what he describes as a trite visionary encounter with an old man’s daughter, and asks for thoughts regarding “so-called ultimate truths.” Jung suggests that these truths “must be quite uncommon” to which she responds:

“The more uncommon these highest truths are, the more inhuman must they be and the less they speak to you as something valuable or meaningful concerning human essence and being. Only what is human and what you call banal and hackneyed contains the wisdom that you seek” (262).

On the other hand, truth and knowledge paradoxically spring from conditions that are opposite from those we might expect: from depression, unlearning and lack of intention. Jung tells us:

“…we do not love the condition of our being brought low, although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge of ourselves” (263).

Here Jung places himself squarely within an existential tradition which holds that knowledge of self arises through an encounter with one’s demonic or shadow self. Such knowledge is opposed to the “knowledge” that one learns from science, books and traditional models of learning. One of Jung’s inner figures, the Anchorite states: “I’ve spent many years alone with the process of unlearning. Have you ever unlearned anything” (269).

Knowledge is not something that one can intentionally seek or derive. Jung asks, “Do you still know that the way to truth stands open only to those without intentions?” (236).

This, of course, accords with Jung’s conception that “archetypal” knowledge arises spontaneously from the collective unconscious and can never be arrived at through the conscious workings of the ego.

In the Red Book, Jung suggests that intuitive knowledge (at least, his own intuitive knowledge) is superior to argument and reason. As we have seen when we considered Jung’s assertion that “Through uniting with the self we reach God,” Jung claimed that this realization was neither wished for nor expected, that indeed he consciously wished he could disown it as a deception, but that it “seized [him] beyond all measure, and that in spite of the fact that it left him bitter he was certain of its truth (338). Jung remarks, “No insight or objection …could surpass the strength of this experience,” and while Jung claimed that he himself could explain the experience away in terms that would “join it to the already known,” this “would be unable to remove even the smallest part of the knowledge…” (338)

Jung’s inner guide, Philemon, is also certain of his intuitions but perhaps not quite as certain as Jung himself. Philemon avers: “I do not know whether it is the best that one can know. But I know nothing better and therefore I am certain these things are as I say. If they were otherwise I would say something else, since I would know them to be otherwise. But these things are as I know them since my knowledge is precisely these things themselves” (349).

Neither Jung, nor Philemon, consider the possibility that their intuitions might simply be mistaken; this despite the fact that in other places in the Red Book, Jung holds that one who becomes enslaved to thinking vs. feeling or vice versa, ends up in error (247), that our concepts, unlike existing things, can yield and be in error (333), that (according to Philemon) “the overpowering essence of events in the universe and in the hearts of men,” (i.e. God), is no law, but “chance, irregularity, sin, error, stupidity {and] carelessness, (300), and that “yes and no are both true and untrue” (333).

Throughout his career Jung waivered between two conceptions of knowledge, a Platonic one, in which one can achieve certainty through an intuition of essences (i.e. the archetypes), and a dialectical or postmodern one, in which all so-called truths must be complemented by their opposites and in which so-called "knowledge" is always colored by the “personal equation” (or psychology) of the knower. This tension, already evident in the Red Book, was, I believe, never fullyresolved or even adequately recognized by Jung. Perhaps there is a coincidentia oppositorum between Jungian certainty and Jungian open-mindedness, but it is not one that is readily apparent from a reading of Jung himself.

Perhaps Jung’s Red Book comments on the subject of “belief” can put us on the road towards a resolution, or at least better understanding of this problem. On the one hand, Jung tells us:

The dead rejected Christian belief “Because the world, without these men knowing it, entered into that month of the great year where one should believe only what one knows” (349),

and,

“The childishness of belief breaks down in the face of our present necessities” (336),

and,

“…I believe that it is better in our time that belief is weak. We have outgrown that childhood where mere belief was the most suitable means to bring men to what is good and reasonable. Therefore if we wanted to have a strong belief again today, we would thus return to that earlier childhood. But we have so much knowledge and such a thirst for knowledge in us that we need knowledge more than belief. But the strength of belief would hinder us from attaining knowledge. Belief certainly may be something strong, but it is empty and too little of the whole man can be involved, if our life with God is grounded only on belief” (335).

However,

“Desiring knowledge sometimes takes away too much belief. Both must strike a balance” (336).