The world is the history of the divine’s unfolding, a constant process of becoming, an immense drama in which the universe reveals itself to itself and achieves its freedom. All struggle and evolution are resolved in the realization of the world’s telos, its goal and purpose. In this great dialectic, all potentialities are embodied in forms of ever-increasing complexity, and all that was implicit in the original state of being gradually becomes explicit. Man—his thought, his culture, his history—is the pivot of that unfolding, the vessel of God’s glory. Hence theology for Hegel was replaced by the comprehension of history: God is not beyond the creation, but is the creative process itself. Man is not the passive spectator of reality, but its active co-creator, his history the matrix of its fulfillment. The universal essence, which constitutes and permeates all things, finally comes to consciousness of itself in man. At the climax of his long evolution, man achieves possession of absolute truth and recognizes his unity with the divine spirit that has realized itself within him.
When all this was set forth in the early nineteenth century, and for several decades afterward, Hegel’s great structure of thought was regarded by many as the most satisfying and indeed ultimate philosophical conception in the history of the Western mind, the culmination of philosophy’s long development since the Greeks. Every aspect of existence and human culture found a place in this world conception, embraced by its all-encompassing totality. Hegel’s influence was considerable, first in Germany and later in English-speaking countries, encouraging a renascence of classical and historical studies from an Idealist perspective and providing a metaphysical bulwark for spiritually disposed intellectuals grappling with the forces of secular materialism. A new attentiveness to history and to the evolution of ideas was thereby engendered, with history seen as motivated ultimately not simply by political or economic or biological—i.e., material—factors, though these all played a role, but rather by consciousness itself, by spirit or mind, by the self-unfoldment of thought and the power of ideas.
Yet Hegel also aroused much criticism. For some, the absolutist closures of his system appeared to limit the unpredictable possibilities of the universe and the personal autonomy of the human individual. His stress on the rational determinism of the Absolute Spirit and the ultimate overcoming of all oppositions seemed to undercut the problematic contingency and irrationality of life, and to ignore the concrete emotional and existential actuality of human experience. His abstract metaphysical certitudes seemed to avoid the grim reality of death, and to disregard the human experience of God’s remoteness and inscrutability. Religious critics objected that belief in God was not simply the solution to a philosophical problem but required a free and courageous leap of faith amidst ignorance and dark uncertainty. His philosophy was interpreted by others as a metaphysical justification for the status quo, and was therefore criticized as a betrayal of humanity’s drive for political and material betterment. Later critics noted that his exalted view of Western culture in the context of world history, and of rational civilization’s imposing itself on the contingencies of nature, could be interpreted as a justification for modern man’s hubristic impulse toward domination and exploitation. Indeed, fundamental Hegelian concepts such as those concerning the nature of God, spirit, reason, history, and freedom appeared to be open to completely antithetical interpretations.
Often Hegel’s historical judgments seemed peremptory, his political and religious implications ambiguous, his language and style perplexing. Moreover, his scientific views, though informed, were unorthodox. In any case Hegelian Idealism did not easily cohere with the naturalistic view of the world corroborated by science. After Darwin, evolution no longer seemed to require an all-encompassing Spirit, nor did the conventional scientific view of the evidence suggest one. Nor, finally, did subsequent historical events provide grounds for confidence in Western man’s inevitable spiritual consummation through history.
Hegel had spoken with the autocratic confidence of one who had experienced a vision of reality whose absolute truth transcended the skepticism and demands for detailed empirical tests that other systems might require. To his critics, Hegel’s philosophy was unfounded, fantastic. The modern mind did indeed incorporate much of Hegel, above all his grasp of dialectic and his recognition of the pervasiveness of evolution and the power of history. But as an entirety, the Hegelian synthesis was not sustained by the modern mind. In fulfillment, as it were, of its own theory, Hegelianism was eventually submerged by the very reactions it helped provoke—irrationalism and existentialism (Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard), dialectical materialism (Marx and Engels), pluralistic pragmatism (James and Dewey), logical positivism (Russell and Carnap), and linguistic analysis (Moore and Wittgenstein), all movements increasingly more reflective of the general tenor of modern experience. With Hegel’s decline there passed from the modern intellectual arena the last culturally powerful metaphysical system claiming the existence of a universal order accessible to human awareness.
In the twentieth century, metaphysically inclined scientists such as Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin sought to conjoin the scientific picture of evolution with philosophical and religious conceptions of an underlying spiritual reality along lines similar to Hegel. Their eventual fate, however, was also similar, for although regarded by many as brilliant and comprehensive challenges to the conventional scientific vision, for others such speculations did not possess a sufficiently demonstrable empirical basis. Given the nature of the case, there seemed to be no decisive means for verifying such concepts as Bergson’s creative élan vital operating in the evolutionary process, Whitehead’s evolving God who was interdependent with nature and its processes of becoming, or Teilhard’s “cosmogenesis” in which human and world evolution would be fulfilled in an “Omega point” of unitive Christ-consciousness. Although each of these theories of a spiritually informed evolutionary process gained wide popular response and began to influence later modern thought in often subtle ways, the overt cultural trend, especially in academia, was otherwise.
The decline of speculative metaphysical overviews signaled as well the decline of speculative historical overviews, and epic efforts such as Oswald Spengler’s and Arnold Toynbee’s, though not without admirers, were eventually depreciated like Hegel’s before them. Academic history now disengaged itself from the task of discerning great overarching patterns and comprehensive uniformities in history. The Hegelian program of discovering the “meaning” of history and the “purpose” of cultural evolution was now regarded as impossible and misguided. Instead, professional historians saw their competence more properly limited to carefully defined specialized studies, to methodological problems derived from the social sciences, to statistical analyses of measurable factors such as population levels and income figures. The historian’s attention was better directed to the concrete details of people’s lives, especially to their economic and social contexts—“history from below”—than to the Idealist image of universal principles working through great individuals to forge world history. Following the directive of the Enlightenment, academic historians saw the need to remove history entirely from the theological, mythological, and metaphysical contexts within which it had long been embedded. Like nature, history too was a nominalist phenomenon, to be examined empirically, without spiritual preconceptions.
Yet as the modern era moved to its later stages, Romanticism would reengage the modern mind from another field altogether. The decline of Hegel and of metaphysical and historical overviews had originated in an intellectual environment in which physical science was the dominant force in determining the cultural understanding of reality. But as science itself began to be revealed, both epistemologically and pragmatically, as a relative and fallible form of knowledge, and with both philosophy and religion having already lost their previous cultural preeminence, many reflective individuals began to turn inward, to an examination of consciousness itself as a potential source of meaning and identit
y in a world otherwise devoid of stable values. This new focus on the inner workings of the psyche reflected as well an increasingly sophisticated concern with those unconscious structures within the mind of the subject that were determining the ostensible nature of the object—a continuation of the Kantian project on a more comprehensive level. Thus it was that of all the instances of a Romantically influenced science (if we except modern evolutionary theory’s complex debt to Romantic ideas of organic evolution in nature and history, of reality as a process of constant becoming), the most enduring and seminal proved to be the depth psychology of Freud and Jung, both deeply influenced by the stream of German Romanticism that flowed from Goethe through Nietzsche.
In its concern with the elemental passions and powers of the unconscious—with imagination, emotion, memory, myth, and dreams, with introspection, psychopathology, hidden motivations, and ambivalence—psychoanalysis brought Romanticism’s preoccupations to a new level of systematic analysis and cultural significance. With Freud, who first turned to medical science after hearing Goethe’s Ode to Nature as a student, and who throughout his life obsessively collected archaic religious and mythological statuary, the Romantic influence was often hidden or inverted by the Enlightenment-rationalist assumptions that pervaded his scientific vision. But with Jung, the Romantic inheritance became more explicit as Freud’s discoveries and concepts were expanded and deepened. In the course of analyzing a vast range of psychological and cultural phenomena, Jung found evidence of a collective unconscious common to all human beings and structured according to powerful archetypal principles. Though it was clear that human experience was locally conditioned by a multitude of concrete biographical, cultural, and historical factors, subsuming all these at a deeper level appeared to be certain universal patterns or modes of experience, archetypal forms that constantly arranged the elements of human experience into typical configurations and gave to collective human psychology a dynamic continuity. These archetypes endured as basic a priori symbolic forms while taking on the costume of the moment in each individual life and each cultural era, permeating each experience, each cognition, and each world view.
The discovery of the collective unconscious and its archetypes radically extended psychology’s range of interest and insight. Religious experience, artistic creativity, esoteric systems, and the mythological imagination were now analyzed in nonreductive terms strongly reminiscent of the Neoplatonic Renaissance and Romanticism. A new dimension to Hegel’s understanding of historical dialectic emerged with Jung’s insight into the collective psyche’s tendency to constellate archetypal oppositions in history before moving toward a synthesis on a higher level. A host of factors previously ignored by science and psychology were now recognized as significant to the psychotherapeutic enterprise and given vivid conceptual formulation: the creativity and continuity of the collective unconscious, the psychological reality and potency of spontaneously produced symbolic forms and autonomous mythic figures, the nature and power of the shadow, the psychological centrality of the search for meaning, the importance of teleological and self-regulating elements in the psyche’s processes, the phenomenon of synchronicities. Freud and Jung’s depth psychology thus offered a fruitful middle ground between science and the humanities—sensitive to the many dimensions of human experience, concerned with art and religion and interior realities, with qualitative conditions and subjectively significant phenomena, yet striving for empirical rigor, for rational cogency, for practical, therapeutically effective knowledge in a context of collective scientific research.
But precisely because depth psychology was originally grounded in the broader scientific Weltanschauung, its larger philosophical impact was initially limited. This limitation existed not so much because depth psychology was vulnerable to criticism for being insufficiently “scientific,” compared with, for example, behaviorist psychology or statistical mechanics (clinical impressions, it was sometimes argued, could not constitute objective, contamination-free evidence for psychoanalytic theories). Such criticisms were occasionally voiced by more conservative scientists but did not significantly affect depth psychology’s cultural acceptance, since most who familiarized themselves with its insights found these to possess a certain internal self-evidence and persuasive logic, often bearing the character of an illumination. But more constraining for depth psychology’s impact was the very nature of its study: given the basic subject-object dichotomy of the modern mind, the insights of depth psychology had to be adjudged relevant only to the psyche, to the subjective aspect of things, not to the world as such. Even if “objectively” true, they were objectively true only in relation to a subjective reality. They did not and could not change the cosmic context within which the human being sought psychological integrity.
This limitation was further enforced by the modern epistemological critique of all human knowledge. Jung, though metaphysically more flexible than Freud, was epistemologically more exacting, and repeatedly affirmed throughout much of his life the fundamental epistemological limits of his own theories (though he also reminded more conventional scientists that their epistemological situation was no different). With his philosophical grounding in the Kantian critical tradition rather than in Freud’s more conventional rationalist materialism, Jung was compelled to admit that his psychology could have no necessary metaphysical implications. It is true that Jung’s granting the status of empirical phenomena to psychological reality was itself a major step past Kant, for he thereby gave substance to “internal” experience as Kant had to “external” experience: all human experience, not just sense impressions, had to be included for a genuinely comprehensive empiricism. Yet in a Kantian spirit, Jung stated that whatever the data provided by psychotherapeutic investigations, these could never provide substantial warrant for propositions concerning the universe or reality as such. The discoveries of psychology could reveal nothing with certainty about the world’s actual constitution, no matter how subjectively convincing was the evidence for a mythic dimension, an anima mundi, or a supreme deity. Whatever the human mind produced could be regarded only as a product of the human mind and its intrinsic structures, with no necessary objective or universal correlations. The epistemological value of depth psychology lay rather in its capacity to reveal those unconscious structural factors, the archetypes, which appeared to govern all mental functioning and hence all human perspectives on the world.
Thus the nature of Jung’s field and concepts seemed to require an exclusively psychological interpretation of his findings. They were indeed empirical, but, they were only psychologically empirical. Depth psychology had perhaps rendered a deeper inner world for modern man, but the objective universe as known by natural science was necessarily still opaque, without transcendent dimensions. It is true that many striking parallels existed between Jungian archetypes and Platonic archetypes; but for the ancient mind, Platonic archetypes were cosmic, while for the modern mind, Jungian archetypes were only psychic. Therein lay the fundamental difference between the classical Greek and the modern Romantic: Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Kant had intervened. With the bifurcation of the modern mind between Romantic and depth psychology interiority on the one hand and the naturalistic cosmology of the physical sciences on the other, there seemed to be no possibility for a genuine synthesis of subject and object, psyche and world. Yet the therapeutic and intellectual contributions of the Freudian-Jungian tradition to twentieth-century culture were many, and gained more significance with each passing decade.
Indeed, the modern psyche appeared to require the services of depth psychology with increasing urgency, as a profound sense of spiritual alienation and other symptoms of social and psychological distress became more widespread. With the traditional religious perspectives no longer offering effective solace, depth psychology itself, along with its numerous offspring, took on characteristics of a religion—a new faith for modern man, a path for the healing of the soul bringing regeneration and rebirth, epiphanies of sudden insigh
t and spiritual conversion (and other facets of religion as well, with the memorializing of psychology’s founding prophets and their initiatory revelations, the development of dogmas, priestly elites, rituals, schisms, heresies, reformations, and the proliferation of protestant and gnostic sects). Yet it seemed that salvation for the cultural psyche was not being widely effected—as if the tools of depth psychology were being employed in a context riddled with a more encompassing pathology than a subjectivist psychotherapy could hope to cure.
Existentialism and Nihilism
As the twentieth century advanced, modern consciousness found itself caught up in an intensely contradictory process of simultaneous expansion and contraction. Extraordinary intellectual and psychological sophistication was accompanied by a debilitating sense of anomie and malaise. An unprecedented broadening of horizons and exposure to the experience of others coincided with a private alienation of no less extreme proportions. A stupendous quantity of information had become available about all aspects of life—the contemporary world, the historical past, other cultures, other forms of life, the subatomic world, the macrocosm, the human mind and psyche—yet there was also less ordering vision, less coherence and comprehension, less certainty. The great overriding impulse defining Western man since the Renaissance—the quest for independence, self-determination, and individualism—had indeed brought those ideals to reality in many lives; yet it had also eventuated in a world where individual spontaneity and freedom were increasingly smothered, not just in theory by a reductionist scientism, but in practice by the ubiquitous collectivity and conformism of mass societies. The great revolutionary political projects of the modern era, heralding personal and social liberation, had gradually led to conditions in which the modern individual’s fate was ever more dominated by bureaucratic commercial and political superstructures. Just as man had become a meaningless speck in the modern universe, so had individual persons become insignificant ciphers in modern states, to be manipulated or coerced by the millions.
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