What is Soul?

Wolfgang Giegerich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000061369
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Rooted in the metaphysics of bygone times, the notion of soul in our Western tradition is packed with associations and meanings that are incompatible with the anthropological and naturalistic thinking that prevails in modernity. Whereas treatises of old conceived of the soul as an infinite, immaterial substance which was the ground of man's hope for eternal salvation, modern psychology has for the most part discarded the concept in favor of more tangible touchstones such as the emotions, desires, and attachments which characterize man as a finite, bodily-existing positive fact. An exception to this trend has been the analytical psychology of C. G. Jung. Against the positivistic spirit of his times, Jung insisted upon a "'psychology with soul,' that is, a psychology based upon the hypothesis of an autonomous mind." In this volume, Wolfgang Giegerich once again takes up the Jungian commitment to a psychology with soul. Agreeing with Jung that the soul concept is indispensable for a truly psychological psychology, he supplements and re-orients the Jungian approach to both this concept and the phenomenology of the soul by means of a whole series of nuanced discussions that are as rigorous as they are thoroughgoing. The result is nothing short of a tour de force. Tarrying with the negative, Giegerich's particular contribution resides in his showing the movement against the soul to be the soul's own doing. In animus moments of itself, consciousness in the form of philosophy and Enlightenment reason turned upon itself as religion and metaphysics. Far from abolishing the soul, however, these incisive negations were themselves negated. As if dancing upon its own demise, the soul came home to itself, not as an invisible metaphysical substance, but more invisibly still as the logically negative evaporation of that substance into the form of subject, or even better said, into psychology.

CHAPTER 2
___________________

The Phenomenology of the Soul (1): The Experienced or Occurring Soul. Verticality, Incursion

2.1 THE OPPOSITION BETWEEN EVENTS OF SOUL AND ORDINARY HUMAN EXISTENCE

2.1.1 A preliminary touchstone: “Intrusion.” “The exceptional”

When we approach the concrete phenomenology of life in the world with our empty formal definition of the soul as “that which is not what is not soul,” this empty form gets quickly particularized and filled with material qualifications. We know what is not soul: everything that is positive-factual, conventional, routine, matter-of-course, natural, human, all-too-human, the normal and familiar. If soul is what is not not soul, it is, within the experiential sphere, in the most general sense what is felt to intrude into normal life. It is the fundamentally exceptional, that which disturbs the customary order of things: the extra-ordinary. It is what disrupts or breaks through the normal routine of life and is contrary to our natural expectations. It is the unheard-of and the incomprehensible, that which cannot be explained in terms of our previous experience and knowledge. Thus it is in particular the eerie, uncanny, the numinous as the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum, often also the holy in contrast to the profane, at least as long as the holy has not already become conventional.⁵⁴ The experienced soul is by no means always “soulful” in the sweet, romantic, beneficial, or harmless sense. Rather, it can even be downright inhuman. At times the soul is a brutal reality. It may ruthlessly pass over our human concerns, our survival and self-protection interests, our needs for stability, comfort, and consolation. It frequently forces its interests upon us, regardless of what we want. It drags us away from what would be natural, ordinary, decent, or reasonable and seduces us or compels us—whether we will or no (cf. “vocatus atque non vocatus ...”)—to do something contra naturam, be it exceptionally great or perverse.

Our whole natural world with all the things in it is soul in the most general sense of the word. But this soul is in itself fundamentally contra naturam. It comes into being by always already having pushed off from biological life, just as the latter within itself pushed off from the lifeless. Life is also contra naturam. And so we have to realize that what “nature,” as that from which to push off, means is each time something different. For life “nature” means the lifeless, the world of physics and chemistry. For the soul in the most general sense “the natural” is biological life. And for the soul as the particular concept of psychology the natural from which to distinguish itself and to push off is the natural world as a whole, both in the sense of the cosmos and of what is socially considered “natural” or “normal.”

In soul events, a counter-will makes itself felt. The soul has a will of its own. It is will. And as counter-will it is non-ego, non-I. It often directly crosses our will, as Jung liked to put it. Something that is not our human will insists, obsesses us, wrecks our plans, forces our attention. And that which crosses our will, as Jung also said, wants to mitleben, to be acknowledged as our own, to become an integral part of our life, our consciousness and attitudes.

Clearly, the type of manifestation of soul that we are here talking about shows the soul in the form of otherness. This form is, as a matter of course, psychologically authentic in the archaic, the ancient, and still in all the later pre-modern situations, where the soul generally was objectified as gods, demons, angels, fairies, little people. In the modern world, which is characterized by the fact that in it the soul has reached the logical form of itself as self (self-relation, self-awareness), the form of otherness is in the main inauthentic. As this inauthentic form it appears in individuals above all as neurotic symptom, as the result of a consciousness that systematically and stubbornly insists on its untruth and thereby—artificially—forces its already real and implicitly known truth into the form of radical otherness (the neurotically dissociated “non-ego”). There is, however, also one authentic possibility of the form of otherness in modernity, and the sign of its authenticity is that it is essentially only temporary. This occurs when there is a need for advancing from the present to a new logical status of consciousness, a new stage of one’s development, from the customary to a new soul truth. We usually do not gradually “grow” in a natural way into a new form of consciousness. There is no simple transition. Rather, the new constitution of consciousness is sprung on us, on, and right into, the old constitution of consciousness. Within the old form of consciousness the new one all of a sudden appears, and it appears initially merely as an isolated disturbing, sometimes even pathological (symptomatic), factor and precisely not yet as what it actually is or is meant to be, consciousness’s new constitution. Just think of puberty and the intrusion of the awareness of sexuality. By being this thorn in the flesh of the old form of consciousness it slowly decomposes and corrodes the latter and thereby becomes the new form of consciousness—unless, of course, the soul at this point chooses to go the way of neurosis, of absolutely refusing and denying this its new truth and celebrating its untruth as its truth.

Soul events are intrusive and disturbing. By contrast, all events or phenomena will be experienced and have to be seen as what is not soul if they conform with our expectations, social customs, and personal habits, are immediately understandable and can be explained in terms of our knowledge about the laws of nature, of cause and effect, and of all everyday life experience, if they strike us as familiar, ordinary, conventional, natural (also in the sense of “as a matter of course”). Above all everything that falls for us into the sphere of the “human, all-too-human” is in radical contrast to what we mean by events of soul. The world in general, to the extent that it is, on the one hand, in practical regards domesticated, civilized, humanized, regulated, or, on the other hand, in theoretical regards made familiar and subjected to scientific knowledge, belongs to this side of our opposition.

2.1.2 The soul sense of “exceptional”

But things are not as simple as they appear from the description I have given so far. The description needs at least two qualifications to do justice to our question what soul is.

The first qualification concerns the determination of what is meant by “the extra-ordinary,” “the exceptional,” “the incomprehensible,” “the fascinosuw.” Not everything exceptional and unexpected, not everything that is awful or fascinating is as such necessarily expressive of soul. The huge, the outsized, the sensational and uncommonly impressive are not ipso facto events of soul. We need to introduce an additional distinction.

The battle of Stalingrad in World War II and the bombing of Dresden at the end of World War II were certainly something extraordinary and gigantic, happenings of exceptional emotional and physical impact. But from a psychological point of view they were nevertheless ordinary empirical-factual disasters; for the people involved they were events of ordinary human misery, and not manifestations of soul. All the catastrophes of the type that frequently become the topic of disaster films are likewise enormous occurrences that intrude into and disrupt the customary order of things, but they nevertheless have no soul dignity. They excite our human, all-too-human emotions, incite our survival instincts, and call for our efforts to cope, to rescue what can be rescued, but do not speak to the soul. In other words, they belong to and remain within the world of positivity, factuality. We know that the possibility cannot be excluded that some day a huge meteor might hit the earth with the most terrible consequences for all life on our planet. If that happened, it would certainly be something truly exceptional and spectacular, and yet it would be without psychological relevance, just as was the comparatively minor event of the destruction by terrorists of the New York Twin Towers. The soul has no stake in such phenomena, they may be as monstrous and unheard-of as they may be. They are phenomena that address only the its emotions and its desire to survive.

What then are extra-ordinary phenomena that in fact possess soul significance? How are they different from the just-mentioned ones? What distinction do we need to introduce to get criteria to distinguish soul events from the merely positive-factually extraordinary? Whereas we can call the psychologically trivial occurrences, even if they are spectacular and huge, merely-objective, events of soul are in themselves objective-subjective. They are not merely flat physical facts vis-à-vis the subject. Although they, too, are objective facts, soul events nevertheless also have subjectivity within themselves. They objectively come to the experiencing subject as a kind of thou. They have a meaning, or rather, they are events of meaning. They have logos-character and “the quality of consciousness” (CW 8 § 658). They are in themselves linguistic. They speak. They are intriguing and contain a “mystery.”

This means that the subject, when hit by a soul event, is not only confronted with an objective fact, some occurrence that is totally an other. Subject and object do here not have their place each on opposite banks of a dividing river. No, although a soul event is happening to the subject as something other and unexpected, maybe even as utterly disturbing, and although as such it is undoubtedly something objective and factual, the subject nevertheless wittingly or unwittingly encounters itself, or some aspect of itself, in this object. It senses that in what is out there it, the subject, is already in some way contained and involved. Tua res agitur. Involved or implicated not in that external sense how we may realize that certain events are the effect or outcome of our own earlier decisions, actions, or omissions. Such an effect does not immediately speak to us; only through an external reflection or insight do we relate it to ourselves via the memory of our earlier behavior. Cause and effect remain fundamentally separated by time as two different events. A soul event, by contrast, does not refer to any other event outside itself. It has the subject-quality or consciousness-quality immediately within itself, within its objectivity. This is why it is experienced as significant and meaningful for ourselves (ourselves as persons, as humans, not merely important for us as animals the way, for example, medical results or natural catastrophes are important for us).

So soul phenomena cannot be thought of except in terms of a self-relation.

However, keeping in mind the essentially intrusive character of soul events, we must not understand this self-relation as our relation to ourselves via the objective event, nor as our relation to our own other, but conversely as an alien self-relation that we find ourselves drawn into. It is the soul’s relation to itself, its speaking to itself about itself (the logos psychês pros haytên⁵⁵ already referred to), a speaking that is fundamentally self-sufficient, has its own purposes, finds its own fulfillment within itself, but for which it is nevertheless essential that it both manifests in something objective and reaches the human subject. It is a speaking that makes both the objective reality in which it manifests and the human subject who feels addressed by it sublated moments within itself. The human subject is, as it were, merely the antenna or the receiver which, however, makes this self-relation not only audible but also possible in the first place. Because other than with radio programs, the soul’s dialogue with itself has no radio station broadcasting its programs somewhere “out there” regardless of whether anybody turns his radio on or not. The soul is, as we learned, not an existing substance or entity. In the case of psychological reality it is much rather the receptivity of the human subject that dialectically is the condition a priori of the soul’s speaking to itself, a speaking to which the human subject is exposed or which disturbingly intrudes into the human subject’s own concerns. The human subject is merely a moment in the soul’s self-relation and yet also its precondition. But conversely, the human subject is only turned into the antenna for the soul’s speaking to itself through this very speaking, which in man creates its own antenna, and thus its own precondition, within itself. This whole complex and self-contradictory relation is what we call soul.

Soul, understood this way, sounds very mysterious, and it is of course also mysterious in a certain sense, but it is nothing that belongs to a metaphysical backworld behind this world. It is a very real part of our human experience. Let me illustrate this by an example. It is an obvious fact that there is such a thing as poetry. Poetry is part of our human world here on earth. Our conventional idea is that it is the poet as author or subject who makes the poems as objects, as works (erga). But Goethe for one once said in passing, “... just as with poems, I did not make them, they made me.”⁵⁶ The poems, in other words, are the true acting subject, they create themselves and merely utilize a human subject to realize themselves.⁵⁷ It is they that turn the human being into a poet in the first place. In the process of the emergence of poetry the so-called human author is in reality not the true author at all, but merely a sublated moment in this whole process. What makes a poet a true poet is precisely his capacity to allow himself to become sublated as a being in his own right and to become instead an integral moment of the self-production of his poem. At the very beginning of our Western poetic tradition Homer likewise denied his authorship. The Iliad was the result of the singing of a goddess, the muse. And in modernity, on May 13, 1870, another poet, Rimbaud, wrote similarly in a letter (to Izambard): “It is wrong to say: I think. One would have to say: it thinks me... I is an other.” This otherness of I experienced by Rimbaud is exactly the I’s sublatedness as I in the conventional sense of author and self-sufficient subject.

This is one aspect. The other is that poems are of course not independently free-floating all around us the way the radio-waves from our broadcasting stations are. The latter could be received by several individuals. That poets are sublated moments in the creation of poetry does not mean that they are merely technical antennas, passive mouthpieces or recorders (and thus in some way external to the poems, namely merely instruments). Rather, their poems are also uniquely theirs. Nobody else could have come up with Goethe’s poems. He as the individual that he is has become integrated into his poems. It is this particular, singular human being Goethe, just as it is this other particular, singular human being Rimbaud, who is necessary not only for their poems to come into existence, but who i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Prefatory Note
• Sources and Abbreviations
• Introduction: What Is Soul?
• 2 The Phenomenology of the Soul (1): the Experienced or Occurring Soul. Verticality, Incursion
• 3 The Phenomenology of the Soul (2): The soul as subject, style, and work (soul-making)
• 4 The Phenomenology of the Soul (3): The two opposite purposes (directions, teleologies) of the soul
• Index