archetype – GV Loewen

Venus Envy

Venus Envy (esthetic and aesthetic)

It is almost always the goddess of love, not the god. Indeed, we are told that the truer god of love is that Christian, which lends itself to the problem Plato examines in the Phaedrus, wherein love is cited as a form of madness. If this is so, if the compelling vision of the beloved is taken as herself merely a sign of the presence of love both transcendental and ‘proper’, to stay civil, then to Plato we can simply add Nietzsche’s insight about us ‘being more in love with love itself than the beloved’. Between these two takes is played out the entire problematic of what love is and how it is perceived. It is striking that love is represented by the female form in the vast majority of cultural cases, suggesting at once, and especially in the Christian era, that while the hearth of sexuality is female while the Kerygma of love is feminine, and even the ‘eternal feminine’, of Goethe, which ‘lures us to perfection’. What then is this perfect love? Is it the mimesis of Jesus as a resonant presence in the world or yet an overcoming of his absence? Or is it a sense that when in love we rather transcend ourselves?

What I will suggest here is that love carries within it two unquiet aspects: one, the esthetic of Eros and the aesthetic of what can be called ‘autothanos’. Erotic love is possessed of a well-known power. It is the outward expression of the desire for union, on the one hand, as well as the desire to lose oneself in the other. Most of us have experienced this form of love at least once, and if fortunate, multiple times, over the life course. Yet Eros, while affirming intimacy and unification, does deny the world, which is its chief weakness. Autothanatic love occurs when the loss of self in the other is no longer the key to the relationship in question. While the erotic replays this merger, here just at this present moment but thence needing and thus heeding iteration, the autothanatic is an actual state of being. It may be cautiously compared with Stendhal’s idea of the ‘second crystallization’ in love relationships. But the loss of self which is conjured by intensely erotic stimuli and the memory of union does not affect the personhood of the partners at hand, instead augmenting it. It is this augmentation that, if relations become more holistic over time spent together, carries me across myself and back into the world. I no longer have a heightened sense-perception of worldly experience, of the ‘colors brighter tastes better’ sort, but instead a superior worldview.

This is expressed symbolically by the superiority of the gods themselves in Classical contexts, and the superiority of one’s ethical action in the world in Buddhism and Christianity, for instance. If my mate and I have overtaken ourselves – recall Rilke’s lines about how lovers are close to the ability of being able to see beyond death if they could also see beyond the presence of the beloved – and are also no longer moved only by the presence of the beloved other, we are then on the path to superior being as a way of being in the world. As an historical presence, this sensibility is made manifest in Jesus’ efforts to love all equally. It does not matter if this love is rejected by this or that person, as it inevitably will be, only that our own sense of what love actually is, as both a singular reality and an ethical ideal, welcomes the world into its embrace rather than denying its relevance, as does erotic love.

Hence the nature of Eros is that it in-dwells the esthetic alone. At first sight, it is envy: ‘How beautiful she is, I wish she were mine!’ This is the ‘Venus envy’ of the would-be lover. It would suffer no harm upon the newly-lighted object, but at the same time, would never sacrifice itself to obtain her. Indeed, its purpose is to prove its worth to the other, and thus acts almost against the ideal of union. It stakes a claim to be its own being and in that, throws across the ultimate compliment, hoping for the same in return: ‘I would love you; I, another being like yourself yet almost wholly different.’ In one sense, this is why what used to be referred to as courtship ritual takes on the appearance of birds parading their plumage in the hopes of catching someone’s eye. Gender is here mostly immaterial, just as it becomes in love proper and thence absent all the more so in that autothanatic. And yet we cannot entirely dismiss the cultural suasion of the esthetic, as we are socialized to prefer a ‘type’ of other as a potential beloved, whether or not the details of this ideal mate attain such perfection in her physical or mental form. Given that the vast majority of relationships and marriages occur within social class boundaries, between persons of more or less the same educational backgrounds – these variables by far outstrip those ethnic and religious based – an ample part of esthetically driven love has nothing to do with ‘looks’. The key is rather a general recognizability. Even in ‘slumming’, we zero in on someone who fits an archetype: the adventurer in the male and the nurturer in the female, for example, as expressed in human form by the rebel who is running and who harbors a secret hurt that indeed the nurturing female, of whatever class but the higher the better, can both rein in and heal. In the meanwhile, the female’s family is scandalized, bringing the adventure home to roost, and the male’s family is heart-warmed, bringing in turn the nurturing into an otherwise utterly foreign territory.

But the numbers do not lie. Such cross-class relationships tend not to stand the test of time, and never attain an autothanatic state, for their participants’ entire reason of being with an alien beloved is based upon playing out the theater of hero and heroine; in a word, the self has been lost before love itself could absent it. And so, while it may appear ironic and even misogynistic that Venus envy should be the surer path to authenticity in love, as well as its correspondent Freudian term, this sense of covetousness we must feel in order to make what otherwise could be anyone, a random individual human in whom I have no personal interest, into the object of love is quite necessary. Perhaps even most well-aligned life-chance variable intimacies never attain the second level, but nevertheless, they serve as rehearsals which eventually allow us to take that more profound leap. In doing so, we, in a dialectical movement, exert an Aufheben upon both the thesis of myself and the antithesis of herself. This uplifted union, which has at once, through this movement, bracketed the esthetic ambit of Eros and its proper love into a specific compartment of long-term relations as well as confining its esthetics to outward expressions of sexuality or sensuality – apparel, tone of voice, sentimentality, private fable and its attendant vocabulary, cosmetics and even health and fitness, all reside on this list of esthetic items – has now risen to the occasion which autothanos provides for it.

In so doing, I am no longer conscious of being self-consciously allured by erotic union. At first, this realization may hit me as does a resigned rationalization, just as when one ages and one is no longer capable of daily or yet hourly sexual act. I must overcome the feeling of loss this relative absence of Eros inevitably occasions, and I find that the best manner of accomplishing this ethical demand is by widening the aperture of who can be loved in the first place. The esthetic is all about the ‘whatness’ of the object of love. In erotic intimacy I seek to lose my identity, merge it with the other, even for a short time. In fact, the both of us might feel slighted and thus distanced from one another if we did not take this merger in bits and bites. But the aesthetic vision of love overtakes all of this: it is no longer envious, perceives the other as a ‘who’ and not a ‘what’ in its move from object to subject, and does not so fervently attest to the narrow ideal of simply loving the one, especially at the expense of the world. This peculiar aesthetic motivates the autothanatic; it does not seek the conjury of magic which romance alone incurs between partners, but rather the transformation of alchemy, mirroring in its novel amalgam the ethical dialectic which as well must occur in order to for two persons to reimagine themselves as those who should share a life together.

This willing loss of being-one, which we are calling here autothanatic, is the ethical aspect of Mitsein. ‘Being-with’ is well known to have as its phenomenological property the idea that the world becomes part of Dasein’s closest-to-hand; not the world entire, but something of that world – the beloved other – who has, in an irruptive event, made my Dasein into a less self-interested being. The beloved other is the world’s expression of the call to conscience, and indeed, her fuller presence to me enjoins a demand that nothing else in that same world can equal. Even so, the acknowledgement of and adoration offered to this other as the beloved, does not by itself impel us to gain the aesthetic ground of objective love. It provides the personal template, even at base, the attraction, as in esthetic beauty, for my Dasein to be willing to see in the wider world this ‘same’ beauty. I see it at first as the same, but ideally come to understand that personal beauty is only the ‘lure to perfection’ which the eternally feminine pronounces in both male and female alike. One might venture to say that there is also a ‘love at first sight’ directed to the world, but we only know how to fall into this event through the memory of doing so for another person like myself. As with that adolescent moment, I am at first envious as well of the world. Yet the world’s beauty is so diverse and vast as to put the lie to my resentment thereof, in a movement given simple but apt imagery by Nietzsche, when he speaks of the tide’s treasures washing up on a beach afore my witness. The tide takes away these precious items but then immediately replaces them with a new set. We find, if we live long enough outside of ourselves and through the love of the world our own personal beloved has herself represented unto us, that life itself is that tidal wash, allowing us a glimpse of just as many treasures of the world.

Autothanatic love participates in this movement, for we too can be one of those precious things to others, and not just to another. It is this wider, less self-interested level of love that proclaims that we too are kindred with the aesthetic object, a perceptual event which transcends its art history context, its art market value, and its art methods formalism. For while the beloved other provides the model for the wider love, our most authentic and objective model of loving the world rests not in the beloved, but rather in art. It is art which has no need of the personal; it has never loved the one. Its entire instanciation lies in its ability to be understood by all, in whatever depth of profundity, just as one seashell on the beach before me may appear more intricate in its beauty than another. There are as many paths to perfection as there are loves in the world, but that said, there is only one perfection itself. Art allows even the personally unloved to gain that same vantage and advantage which Eros begins. In this, the call to conscience which is the love of the world offers its truer gift.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Decoy of Self-Improvement

The Decoy of Self-Improvement (a conflict of metaphysical expectations)

I am a thrown project, arcing over what is at hand, stumbling through what is closest to me. I find I am a being in the world, a being which is completed only in mine ownmost death. I inherit nothing of my own, at first, and this cultural persona yet resonates with archetypes universal as well as the apical ancestry of the specific culture history into which I have come. As a boy, I had a certain set of role models after which I could shape myself: the adventurer, the warrior, the navigator, the architect, the bard and so on. The list of gendered archetypes for men is no longer than that for womankind, but it is much more projective, opening onto the world and indeed, taking the world for its own. And while it is an open question whether or not the hero’s life is still superior to that of the person’s, we are today confined by the dynamic extant between personhood and persona, an unquiet keep into which no hero can tread.

To insert the heroic into modernity we have invented the popular discourse of self-improvement. I am not a hero, for I live in the world of humanity alone, but I may believe that I yet can act heroically, mimicking not the character of an archetype but simply some of its behavior. Each of our culture heroes, after the agrarian revolution, are figures like ourselves, augmented human beings, demi-gods due to a mixed birth, miscegenative misfits who are thus mis-aligned in both the social world and that dreamscape of the pantheon. The agrarian culture heroine is marked by her divorce from animality. In pre-agrarian societies, these beings are defined by their ability to change their incarnative presence, animal spirits who can take the shape of a human being and back and forth, as well as take on many other forms, relevant or appropriate to their task at hand. In my home, it is Raven who is the leading figure in what for us is now a most alien sensibility. Raven discovered the first people in a giant clamshell washed up on a remote beach, the metaphorical image connoting some kind of deep culture memory of the Bering Strait crossings, some 20-40K years ago. We are told that Raven was as astonished as were the people themselves, and this too is of profound import: across the pre-agrarian consciousness, humans and animals share not only a common nature, they share a common humanity as part of that nature.

This is the metaphysics of transformation rather than that of transfiguration, which appears much later in human history. And at this later time there is as well a split, a schism, between the great irrigation civilizations of the East and those of the Middle East and West. In the former, transcendental metaphysics came into its own, with the goal of leaving this life for something that carried one’s being far beyond it. In the West, the this-world was understood as a proving ground for the otherworld, and, in passing over the evaluative limen which demarcated the two, one was transfigured. The concepts are distinct: in transformational metaphysics, it is a two-way street. One can change into something else for a time, and then change back, as the need arose. It is highly likely this idea came from the seasonal rounds subsistence societies were compelled to rigidly follow. Even the village sites changed, and in Raven’s geographic region the winter habitation sites were considered permanent, those for the summer, nomadic and temporary, shifting to follow fish, game, and plant food. The community took on a mobile form and format in the warmer months, and settled down into a rich symbolic harvest of narrative, theater, song and dance, during those colder. It was in winter that the animal spirits and others more radically Other, such as the world-transformer Kanekelak, or the Thunderbird, appeared and thence convened with Raven’s children and all of their relations. In these cultures, the mask represented this convention of Being, allowing the transformation of the hunter and the gatherer into something archetypical.

In the metaphysics of transfiguration, there is no going back. It is strictly a one-way street, and in the West, it was the Egyptians who invented this sensibility. There were no seasonal rounds in massive irrigation societies, from the Yellow River in China, to the Indus-Harappan in India, to Sumer and Mesopotamia, through Babylon and to the Nile. Sedentism proper had taken over, writing was invented as well as slavery, large-scale warfare, and the priesthood, this last nothing more than a ‘calumniation’, according to Nietzsche. The Epic of Gilgamesh agrees with him and indeed broadens the critique, for its major ethical theme exhorts the hero to turn his back on the accumulated wealth of the new epoch and return to the garden; the world’s undomesticated larder which by itself never quite generated enough surplus for the social stratigraphy we accept as ‘natural’ to have taken hold. It is today ours to live with as best we can, but the perduring voice of the first mythic narratives still gives us pause: what if we could engender the perfect society, the best way of human life?

If the culture hero as a figure is the frame within which I seek to improve myself, then the return to paradise is the goal. The sensibility is still agrarian, however, for I wish to become something other to myself at present and then never go back to it. It may well be that the conflict between pre-agrarian goals attained by agrarian means is what, at base, sabotages my efforts to make today’s society into an earthly Nirvana, wherein all are treated justly and all have what they need to live at a certain qualitative standard. We have yet to discover an authentically modern self-understanding, bereft of either aspects of the social contract – the idea of paradise itself – or those of the archaic civilizations – that I can transfigure myself and thus become more than I have been. There may be, in spite of these vast gulfs of both history and memory alike, still some points of contact. Raven is a pragmatist at heart. His transformational abilities are to be employed ad hoc, and never to simply gain status. It is of especial relevance that the huge surpluses that were in fact generated by the coastal chiefdoms were here redistributed through status-enhancing displays. The Potlatch, one of Bataille’s examples of the corresponding outlet for this set of cultures’ ‘accursed share’, saw both gift-giving and destruction of valuable objects, the ritual sacrifice of slaves, and alliance-marriage of young women. It must have been a lurid, outlandish spectacle, with its combination of grotesquerie and wanton vandalism, its deep cultural theater and the very presence of the transformer beings themselves, perhaps at a bit of a distance, their forms blending with the shadows of the giant conifers and the overshadows of the more distant mountains.

For ritual too would become more staid with the advent of agriculture. Even its most grim displays – like the cutting out of a the heart of a slave or war prisoner at the top of the cultic Meso-American pyramid; in one stroke the formidable obsidian blade would slice through the ribcage, for the heart must still be beating as it was held up to the God in question – was a moment of climax. Propitiation had been altered from a simple orison to the cougar when one killed a deer or a women’s chorus on the beach willing the safe return of the whale-hunters and their canoes, to a highly rehearsed and therefore rote repetition of liturgical prayer, in the recesses of temples meant to ape mystery without their spaces actually being mysterious, such as the cave in which one of the first people witnessed the transformers’ secret song and dance. With sedentary society, highly stratified and specialized, generating uncounted surpluses of both foodstuffs and the mouths it had to feed, cosmogony gradually loosened its hold upon cosmology, and humanity itself, by shifting its sense of the temporal into an historical cycle rather than one timeless and eternally recurring, began to insert itself into the workings of the universe.

But nowhere in human history and prehistory alike do we find the idea of self-improvement. It is a distinctly modern sensibility, even if it attempts an amalgam of more ancient sources. I am not a hero, yet I can act heroically; I have never experienced paradise, and yet I can create my own; I seek no Olympic summit but rather only to move institutional mountains. The symbolic decoy of this novel approximation of Dasein’s own authentic arc lies in its departure from our existential lot. I cannot be an allegory of myself, I cannot live as does the archetype, for indeed the latter does not ‘live’ in any real sense at all. Even here, however, such odd delusions are not fatal, for the entire worldview with which they had been associated is long past. No, the truer decoy, beyond any symbolic distraction, rests in the sensibility that only the individual person has the mandate to improve himself, and more than this, only himself. Yet further, that the individual person is the only space in which there could be improvement, implying that society as a whole is thereby bettered only because solitary persons have elected, of their own free will and perhaps goodness of heart, to better themselves. This radically inductive approach to cultural evolution is both utterly new – pace the social planners and utopianists from More to Skinner and everyone in between – as well as being oddly blind to its disconnect from the world. Its ethic – that I as a role model foster more compassionate attitudes and actions amongst other with whom I interact – is equivocal. Its light comes in the form of the neighbor, which is the most radically disjunctive of archetypes since he is fully human and yet has abandoned his humanity in a transformational manner. The neighbor excerpts herself from the bonds and bounds of all social roles, but yet returns to the world after her heroic act is completed. The world, in the interim, has not itself been altered.

Let me suggest then that self-improvement outside of either symbolic distraction or the delusion of induction can be understood as the irruption of the neighbor, this libertine of compassion. Such action turned to act is, phenomenologically speaking, an expression of Dasein’s call to conscience; it is bereft of the self-conscious, as in its personal Potlatch it throws to the winds all possible worry and transforms concern to care, but more importantly, it is also devoid of self-consciousness, in that the sense that I must render care to myself first and foremost is also discarded. The neighbor is a presence outside of the present, it is an action becoming act, a being-within-the-worlding, and a figure without archetype. Its humanity is perhaps primordial, and only its ethic, historical. It decoys nothing, and yet it improves something, and this other-than-the-self which, in its transformation, also enacts something outside of itself and without self-reference. It allows me to become part of that which is closest to me, and, for a moment, the world is no longer simply at hand, but rather has arced itself up to meet my thrownness and take me into its essential embrace.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The ‘Zeitmotif’ and the New Art

The ‘Zeitmotif’ and the New Art (Metaphorical Realism)

In his 1851 essay on music drama, Wagner outlines the structure of the leitmotif, a recurring theme which can be used to convey a wider sense of emotion concerning a character, an abstract force, a place, or even an intent. Used in this way, an audience is reminded of the presence of the essence of the character, force, or place etc., just as all of his principal characters themselves represent more abstract qualities in the human and historical imagination. Characters, by definition, cannot be archetypes, but they can cleave to them. And this is what we are presented with through the use of the leitmotif: it is the connecting link between person and persona, character and type, experience and essence. Insofar as the entirety of the romantic aesthetic was transformed by Wagner’s idea, the leitmotif as a concept in a sense contains itself.

I would like to suggest a corresponding conception for history, rather than art. Rather than Zeitgeist, the ‘spirit of the age’ or of the times, which is either too narrow temporally if in fact realistic, or unrealistic if overextended in time, and increasingly so the more time it is claimed to be able to represent. Its thus far place-filler converse, ‘leitgeist’, suggests a kind of transhistorical presence, a ‘recurring spirit’ which, akin to that of religious ethics or soteriological doctrines, also by definition cannot adhere to any specific time period. So then, the fourth possible term available would be ‘Zeitmotif’: a temporally contained motive which also implies historical motivation. In modern art too, the leitmotif is present, and in all arenas of popular art Wagner remains the benchmark. Video game soundtracks are an ubiquitous example of the use of leitmotifs. Every important character has their own theme, for instance, as well as do certain kinds of events or yet scenes. Brands have theme-songs or specific melodies attached to them, and even cartoonish characters in children’s video games have simple ditties which, due to their repetitive and even omnipresent replay, have become instantly recognizable, even outside of their digital and interactive contexts.

By contrast, the Zeitmotif does not so much recur as characterize. Indeed, if we were to subjunct modern art to modernity more generally, we could call the leitmotif itself a Zeitmotif, for it is something which in itself is characteristic of the art of a particular age. For pre-modern or traditional relations of production or cosmologies, the leitgeist would certainly qualify as a Zeitmotif, for it too is characteristic of an important aspect of a world-system, yet as well constrained by a specific historical time period. It is not at all a contradiction to state that historical conceptions, even self-conceptions, can include the transhistorical. The reality of the former does not even imply, objectively speaking, the wider reality of the latter. Thus the ‘presence of God’, so presumed as universal in premodern contexts, has for us fallen away, both from ourselves and perhaps more radically, from itself as well. The Fall of Man becomes the less-dressed rehearsal for that of the divine.

The history of art presupposes that each innovation seeks for itself pride of place amongst the competition to represent not only its individuated subject matter, but the very age in which it finds itself present. This intent could well be called a leitgeist, but the content of each of these successive styles or genres is clearly much more limited. We can argue that the origin of modernity in art appears with Goya, and especially his willingness to, quite without romance though indeed with the highest human drama, depict violence and horror. This period in art only begins to reach its far horizon with the advent of digital imagery. It ascends to its symbolic nadir perhaps with Picasso – Guernica comes to mind – where a Catalonian catatonia is catastrophically catalogued. A Zeitmotif ignores the ‘school’ of artists, their nationality, and their respective lifespans as long as none of these fall outside the wider period identified by a Zeitgeist. In this, the two concepts are themselves linked, just as the archetypical suasion of a leitmotif casts its arm loosely round the figure of a leitgeist. The Zeitmotif in the new art acts as an aesthetic centrifuge.

In the older sensibility, a corresponding Zeitmotif could not be subjectively identified. This is so due to its content, which spoke of transcendence and not history, the otherworld rather than the this-world. The Madonna figure is certainly, from an art historian’s perspective, a leitmotif in the sense of it being a recurring expression, and, from the view of the history of ideas, a Zeitmotif, since it is a ‘sign of the times’, as it were. But in itself, and from the context of this genre’s ‘production and consumption’ – more empathically, ‘creation and assumption’ – it is simply a snapshot of an ongoing presence, a leitgeist, rendered and portrayed yes, but neither invented by, nor tethered to, in any way the artist or the viewer. Only in modernity is the Zeitmotif both acknowledged as a ‘thing’ which exists and which has various content, but as well understood as it being itself a form of formal analysis. The lack of the subjective analytic in premodernity does no disservice to its art, of course, but it does place it somewhat outside our general ken. We are conscious of its presence as representative of a worldview, but not as the presence of a God.

To reiterate most plainly: today, any leitgeist is but a Zeitmotif, any Zeitmotif a temporally truncated non-recurring leitmotif, as well as an emblem of a Zeitgeist. How then do these additional terms help us explicate apparently qualitatively different periods in both art, belief, cultural practice, and even realismus?

Our ability to recognize contrast between and amongst successive, or even simultaneous, genres in the arts provides a first clue. Brahms and Bruckner shared a number of important things; they were both major composers of their time, they had their respective followings, neither married, and both fell in love with women who were utterly unavailable to them. They met the once; enjoying together with gusto the one thing perhaps to their minds that they truly shared; a love for south German cuisine and beer. Brahms’ avatar was Beethoven, Bruckner’s, Wagner. Brahms had himself already endured the fashionable conflict between his followers and Wagner’s, the latter supplanted by Bruckner’s after Wagner’s death in 1883. Even so, viewed over the longer term, there is no authentic conflict here. Both composers’ apical ancestor was Beethoven, and the romanticism of the 19^th century did not truly vanish until the advent of Schoenberg, a few years after both men’s own respective passing. The case is instructive on more than one count. First, we must learn to distinguish mere fashion from history proper as the identification of a Zeitmotif can only occur within the ambit of the latter. Next, we can also begin to apprehend the phenomenological property of ‘taste’; its ‘regimes’, to borrow from Bourdieu, too formal to themselves provide egress from their also fashionable frames. For institutionalization does not an epistemology grant. Finally, but not exhaustively, a Zeitmotif collects to itself that which can often appear to be in opposition. More profoundly aesthetically, but no different structurally, is late 19^th Vienna when juxtaposed with more recent feuds between popular music groups, such as The Beatles with The Rolling Stones, that same band with The Who, or Metallica with Guns ‘N Roses. A Zeitmotif thus does not make distinct an aesthetic judgment, but is rather a simple phenomenological rubric.

Further, the presence of a Zeitmotif is not limited to a specific form of content. In our example, we would have to as well identify an entire ‘Wagnerian’ persona, versus that ‘Brahmsian’. This analytic points neither to acolyte much less to martinette, but instead attempts to disclose, in the existential sense of the term, the Dasein of the form in question; its beingness in the world. Nietzsche was, for a short time, a Wagnerian, but we would never think of the philosopher today as wearing that heart on his sleeve. And speaking of Dasein, Heidegger was a member of the NSDAP for about two years, before belatedly realizing the fuller import of that movement’s own leitmotifs. Today, only the embittered critic trades in Nazified insults when it comes to the lineage of great thinkers. By contrast, a Zeitmotif has staying power; but always within its own amalgamated arc! And yet further, and more evidence of the parochial quality of the presence of a Zeitmotif in situ, as it were, one would strain to find either a Wagnerian, Brucknerian, or a Brahmsian today, and while each composer still has his respective fans, mostly it is the case that if one loves one, one loves all three and others besides. So, what can construct a Zeitmotif also, over time, serves to ‘deconstruct’ it – in the looser sense, surely, but indeed including the characteristics ‘differing’ (we recognize the distinct styles of yet musically kindred composers) and ‘deferring’ (we abjure judgment, recusing ourselves from stating with any final emphasis which composer is ‘superior’) – without our analytic losing its hold over the historically inclined framework, once in place.

While a leitmotif recurs not merely to reiterate its charge’s presence but as well to remind the listener or what-have-you that indeed this presence has in fact reappeared, a Zeitmotif is much more static, relying upon its somewhat standoffish but always-fullest presence to stifle any lapse in our collective memory. In this, it maintains an advantage over the older leitgeist, which, in its very abstraction, must avail itself of its uncanny properties. Like any vision, it then risks the perennial problem of having utter authority over the visionary but that over no other. In direct contrast – and perhaps also as an historicist ‘replacement’ of the leitgeist? – the Zeitmotif’s presence rests in the mere presentification of itself; it is simply there, and thus its version of risk is that we, equally simply, neglect to note its ongoing presence, since it can rapidly recede into mundanity, as with everything else.

Perhaps it is reasonable to conclude that it is this very otiose quality which animates the Zeitmotif, and is in turn reanimated by it. Even at the level of fashion, our spirits are at least titillated by their being the appearance of conflict. In narrative of course, it is proverbial that ‘if one does not have conflict, one does not have a story’; that is, at all. We may venture to say the same of life, in spite of our almost innate sense that we must avoid conflict as best we can. Simmel’s discussion of the irreal, though not quite uncanny, quality of there being a life which can only be lived by experiencing a number of different lives and thus inhabiting, or yet indwelling, a number of different phases of life, resonates here; for the concept of the Zeitmotif comes home to us most intimately when we understand ourselves through its ledgered yet lustrous lens.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

An Interpolation of Jungian Archetypes

An Interpolation of Jungian Archetypes

The model of genesis in modernity is contained in the relationship between genotype and phenotype. The former is Godhead, the latter humankind. In all such patterns, something innate makes itself known through indirect expressions of spirit into world, form into content. This is known as ‘manifesting’ and the object to which the spirit tends or has contrived, as a ‘manifestation’. Though the very idea of innateness may seem archaic, it is at least clear enough that consciousness has its seat in a complex neural architecture no longer so much automatically endowed with faithful reason but rather to be imbued with a reasonable faith.

Faith in itself, for one. For Jung, our connection with the wellspring of human expression cross-culturally and universally to be found amongst individual persons hailing from every such known culture, can be traced backward, as it were, from the manifestations of archetypical conceptions of essential life and its utter limits to what he referred to as the ‘collective unconscious’. This is a different understanding than say, Durkheim had, of what could constitute shared being in the world. Durkheim’s ‘conscience collectif’ was something only innate due to the internalization of purely social forms in childhood. Its expression was moral indignation – though not, it should be noted in our days of feigned anxiety, moral panic – and its archetype was society alone, or rather the ‘ideal society’, to borrow from Santayana. In this singular ideal, the individual found herself trending upward and outward, so that her inevitably and originally small-statured person became enlarged with the life of the world itself.

But our relationship to the collective unconscious is not as clearly defined. As with his mentor, Jung saw in both dream and myth the recurring clues to what must be something both potent and patent to the human soul. Whereas Freud looked to the trauma of birth and growth for the key to these expressions, Jung instead found in them a different kind of imagery, that of the archetypes. These are abstracted and stylized figures and forces that cleave well to Weber’s ideal types analysis, worked out during the same time period as Jung’s archetypes. Famous examples of Jung’s figural archetypes include the mother, the child, and the Syzygy and Shadow. The yet more abstract archetypical concepts, something one could refer to as ‘ideations’, include the flood as well as his famous anima and animus. I am going to choose four of the most salient archetypes to modernity in terms of its relationship to pre-modern myth and interpolate between each cardinal direction based on Jung’s ‘mandala of modern man’ (frontispiece for his 1959). But I will not be limited by his specific understanding of the relations amongst the archetypes. Instead, I will propose that for each set of archetypes there are hybrid figures which ‘occupy’ the spaces in between the cardinal points; half-way beings that are made up of aspects of both of the more basic archetypes that themselves occupy the diagrammatical spaces on either side of them.

Though it took Jung four decades to completely work out his understanding of the innate ordering of essential human consciousness, his 1919 conception yet rings true as a basis upon which we can magnify the myriad expressions of cultural life that seem to uncannily hold together within our shared beliefs and even in our popular entertainment. It is commonplace, for instance, to read of digital media narrative being based upon archetypes such as the hero or the warrior. If one shrinks away from such realities and accuses his fellow human of a basic lack of imagination, that same one must recall to herself that for Jung, at least, our imagination is itself based upon the dynamic presence of the archetypes and their ability to be expressed ‘phenotypically’. We can pause just here, of course, to ask the immediately docketed question, ‘is it the case then that in order for humanity to mature further our set of archetypes must be altered or even abandoned altogether?’ Certainly there have been enough more recent critiques of Jung’s understanding – the most obvious being the stereotypes of gender to be found within it (but then again, are these not the realities of historical expression that are themselves to a certain extent predetermined but are by no means instinctual or ’natural’, by the dynamo of the collective unconscious?) – to issue a reasonably well defined caveat. In terms of gender, since this is itself a most fluid conception, Jung’s prefigurations adapt, I think, quite well. After all, we note the presence of female warriors throughout known history, as well as male nurturer figures. That the balance of these archetypes are represented by varying degrees of genderedness is a tendency alone, and not an essentiality. I hope my interpolations will underscore this sensibility.

Let us first take four well known archetypes in their cardinal dyads, Mother-Warrior and Syzygy-Shadow. Figure ‘a’:

Syzygy (all genders)

Warrior (masculine) EGO Mother (feminine)

Shadow (no gender)

Ego occupies the very center of the diagram just as it does for the mandala. We can now see how, in each quarter or corner of the proposed circle, there is a space which is occupied by a combination of the two closest archetypes already present. Filling them in with the most obvious hybrids, figure ‘a’ generates the following. Figure ‘b’:

Syzygy

Visionary (moderate) Nurturer (intimate)

Warrior EGO Mother

Adventurer (immoderate) Disciplinarian (distanced)

Shadow

As with the original four archetypes, the hybrids are situated in opposition to one another, both within the ambit of traditional gender dominance and across it. Now it is time to detail within each of the conceptions their specific and essential characteristics, beginning with the top of the diagram or stylized mandala and ending at the bottom, travelling left to right.

Syzygy: This is Jung’s own hybrid being. In its original conception it holds within it both male and female but we can update this with a more contemporary sensibility that simply says that this archetype includes all possible genders and does not make any discrimination amongst them, whatever their total number may be. In that Jung is careful to note that his archetypes, unlike say, Plato’s ‘ideas’, are essentially dynamic – we may then ask after what they are responding to, and kindred with the dynamic between the moral and the historical, the ideal and the real, we could very well answer ‘society’ itself – it is not a logical stretch to extend and refigure the Syzygy, the ‘conjoined being’, as containing multitudes in the same manner as we shall see that each elemental archetype is more abstract than their hybrids. Along with its being, each archetype has a simple mantra. In this case, the Syzygy passionately declares its love for each and all. ‘I will love you’ is thus its fail-safe and essential Ursprachlichkeit. Hence the authentic lover, unbiased regarding form or content, is a Syzygy. Its opposite is the Shadow, the being of no gender and possessed by the absence of love given its premonitory stance towards death itself.

Visionary: A blend of Warrior and Syzygy, the visionary being tends toward the masculinity – though not the maleness per se; recall that women and men, in Jung, each have strong traits of the ‘opposite’ gender even if one often is predominant – but is not compelled to manifest this orientation in its vocation. The visionary is the active and activated lover. It is not content to love the world as is, nor those within it. It rather seeks both a higher love and a transformed world. The artist and the philosopher are visionaries. We will see that its opposites are, as the diagram declares, both the Adventurer and the Disciplinarian, the one due to its very indiscipline – which also makes it the opposite of the other opposite, as it were – and the other in its defense of the world-as-it-is. The visionary’s mantra is ‘I will change you’. In this, it states with unction both its purpose and its goal, and the fact that along with the world, I myself as I now am is not either what I could, or yet should, become.

Warrior: This is the quintessential masculine archetype. It, like the Visionary, is outward facing, away from Ego, since its primordial duty is to defend it against external attack. It’s mantra is ‘I will protect you’ and thus it leaves the internal workings of Ego to other figures and forces, specifically the Mother and its ‘feminine’ hybrids. The Warrior is likely the most commonplace and cliché hero, so much so that indeed heroism has been defined in certain phases of cultural development as courage in combat alone. Yet the definition of what may constitute combat is rarely so single-minded. Coming to one’s own defense, as an expression of the Warrior archetype, involves reason and rationality as well as bravery and indefatigability. It also may entail vision or a sense of adventure as well as maintaining a faith, ultimately in oneself. Thus the worker and the officer of the peace are Warrior types, as well as of course the soldier. Though the Warrior’s opposite is the Mother, both are charged with the same duty to Ego, it is just that the former extends this duty outward and the latter inward.

Adventurer: The contemporary home of ‘toxic masculinity’, the Adventurer is, even so, not always self-aggrandizing and self-serving. It does have the tendency to exhibit Ego’s most outwardly niggardly traits, such as hedonism and narcissism. The pirate and the politician are alike adventurers, for they live for the day and their goal is status and repute. Both positive and negative attention serve equally well in this quest, and indeed, the very ignobility of the Adventurer’s questing places it in direct contrast with that of the Visionary’s. Its other opposite, the Nurturer, places compassion foremost, whereas the Adventurer idealizes passion alone. Yet its base desires framed by basic passions drive the Adventurer also to new worlds, as the Visionary is also driven, but these worlds are more simply heretofore undiscovered rather than inexistent. In a word, Ego’s outwardness is given both worldly and rootsy form through the Adventurer archetype. ‘I will desire you’ is thus its mantra.

Shadow: Traditionally understood as the dark undersoul of humanity, one’s Shadow figure perhaps has gained a bad rap and rep alike. It is reasonable to say that though the Shadow, in its genderless and distanciated state, is the most challenging archetypical aspect of selfhood, it also represents the most basic perspective on our shared existence. Just as the Syzygy calls us to the transcendental through the love of another and ultimately, the love of all, so the Shadow reminds us of our mortal limits. Both are existential figures and they are, in this, obvious opposites. In love, human existence reaches its nadir, in death its lowest point; indeed, its completion of being in itself, whereas the Syzygy demands that we lose our being in the presence of the other. In an additional opposition, Ego loses itself in love only to another human other, but in death, it loses itself to the Other as otherness itself. The Shadow is expressed in the criminal, specifically the murderer, but also in the dictator and perhaps as well in the melancholic. If the Syzygy knows nothing but affirmation, the Shadow understands nothing but denial. So its mantra is ‘I will doubt you’; not only is my existence placed in doubt because of its mortal limit, but also each of my decisions, future-directed as they are, can be called into doubt given that, as Gadamer has eloquently put it, ‘we can only be said to have a future as long as we are unaware that we have no future’.

Disciplinarian: This is the rule-enforcer and the defender of the normative. It is the opposite of both the Visionary, who seeks to overturn all norms and social forms, and the Adventurer, who transgresses the one and flouts the other at will and for its own device. ‘I will guide you’ is the Disciplinarian’s mantra, and like the Shadow, of which it is half composed, such a statement belies its ultimate suasion. Guidance in this case may be reasonably taken for a limited vision, the very thing the Visionary is compelled to reject. Society as formed, culture as expressed, are the Disciplinarian’s own guideposts. All authoritarians and others who are charged with reproducing society – teachers, pastors, judges, and mentors in athletics specifically – take the form of expressions of the Disciplinarian. Reproduction of the already created is the ultimate goal and duty of this archetype, as opposed to the creation the new itself in the Visionary, or the mere seeking of the novel in the Adventurer. Yet the Disciplinarian is not after all the Shadow alone, it is also composed of the Mother. So in its strict heeding of the rules and their enforcement upon Ego, it is also called to the duty of basic care. And it remains the case, no matter what genius which youth possesses, that in order to overcome something we first must understand in the greatest detail what that something is.

Mother: One of Jung’s most famous archetypes, the Mother figure is traditionally understood to be quintessentially feminine, though once again, not necessarily female in its worldly representation. The Mother’s mantra ‘I will care for you’, includes both the guidance of the more authoritarian oriented Disciplinarian as well as the development which, as we will immediately see, is embodied in the Nurturer. Thus the Mother figure is of the same rank as the Warrior, only taking care of the inward looking aspect of Ego rather than protecting it against forces emanating from elsewhere. In this primordial vocation, we discover the ‘care of the self’, so historically lit by Foucault, for one. The social worker or even the prostitute are examples of this archetype’s material expression. Its form of love is concernful being, and thus it expresses in its manifest duties one of Dasein’s ownmost essentialities. Ego’s very ability to exert care about its world comes from its own auto-maternal ‘instinct’. Though in opposition to the Warrior in terms of the spatiality over which it exerts its care and protection, the Mother archetype remains the ‘warrior of Ego’s inner world’, so to speak, and hence the Bourgeois contraption of placing the real-time mother as both architect and defender of the Domus.

Nurturer: Finally, the last of the hybrid archetypes, which in this case combines the care of the Mother with the love of the Syzygy. Its mantra, ‘I will develop you’ nods in the latter’s direction by acknowledging that the love of another alters and grows our own being as Ego, and indeed one can reasonably suggest that only through the radical departure from ourselves that love requires of us on the intimate plane do we in fact develop the wider care for others and for the world around us. The Nurturer is aware of this demand and seeks to prepare Ego for its advent. For before falling in love in the passionate and shameless grace of lovers as seeking a unified and genderless being, Ego must come to understand the compassion required to recognize that an other has both desires and needs which I might thence fulfill. It is the task of the Nurturer to engender this understanding, trending away from the purely inner care that the Mother so engenders. The artistic mentor or the friend in general are examples of the Nurturer archetype. The Nurturer’s opposites, the Visionary and the Adventurer, are both far too externally oriented to develop the compassion necessary to love other human beings instead of the abstracted world of visions and the all too passionate experiences of the one who only and always ventures forth. Even so, in its opposition, the Nurturer nevertheless prepares Ego for all worldly Erlebnisse, as well as forming the basic framework for the recognition of human suffering, which then the Visionary takes up as its call to arms.

In sum then, each of the eight primary aspects of Ego in this new mandala of the modern person requires of us to stand centered and balanced and to not completely eschew any single figure, let alone be possessed by any one as well:

Syzygy Loving of the other

Visionary Changing of the world

Warrior Protecting against the external

Adventurer Desiring of experience

Shadow Doubting of existence

Disciplinarian Reproducing of what is

Mother Caring for the inner life

Nurturer Developing of compassion

Taken together, these eight archetypes envelop Ego existentially as manifestations in cultural expression as well as essentially, as aspectual elements of Ego’s ‘primordial’ being-present. It is clear that amongst them, if all are called to as a set of balanced acts and thus as the outcome of a great variety and permutation of actions in the world at large and with and amongst others in that shared world, that Ego itself should not want for any ability and should be able to rise to any occasion, no matter the stringency of its demands. The task then for any psychological or even humanistic interlocutor is to help the patient access each of these archetypes and develop manners of expressing them. A common case in my own professional experience is the person who is attempting to leave a cult-like organization behind, replete as it is with authoritarian demands and highly structured role types. Here, Ego has suffered an absence of the Disciplinarian as well as the Visionary, opposites though they are but as in Jung, such dynamics can be imagined by envisioning arrowed lines between the relevant two figuresin each diagram that are then connected via the ‘Mysterium Coniunctionis’ which is also said to have created the Syzygy being. Hence this person has sought out, uncontrollably and with a violence toward the self, a cultural space in which both forms of demanding authority are consistently expressed. In so doing, of course, both the nobility of the authentic vision as well as the caring of the authentic rule-enforcer and reproducer are lost in the narcissism of the leader of such organizations, himself solely an adventurer at the cost of others’ autonomy and autochthony.

By now it should be understood that in each ‘case’, this or that Ego will be struck with an imbalance regarding these eight forces as anthropomorphized figures or cultural configurations, and it is the analyst’s duty to discover which imbalance is present and set about aiding the person in recovering that centeredness of being from which all human endeavors must begin.

G.V. Loewen is the author of fifty-five books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.