+++ Jung writes very clearly in Psychology and Alchemy, 1953 (2023 minus 70, 1873 plus 80), some say his most influential book:
"As a doctor it is my task to help the patient cope with life. I cannot presume to pass judgment on their final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion—be it suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion—ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with their own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if they are to find out what it is that supports them when they can no longer support themselves. Only this experience can give them an indestructible foundation." Now clearly we must admit of a chance that foundation, which in alchemy means to build with philosophers' stone, or the material of wisdom-loving, unimperial constructs, is here applied in much the same way that early secularists like Mozart and Mark Twain sought to make us helpful things. (John Dewey's Art as Experience, 1932, is also germane to the experience of aesthetics in democracy.) What makes a democratic constitution, or any particular democracy, a wise construct? The material of which it is built is equally important to its design. The Federalist Papers inscribed by Hamilton mention experience as this material, indeed both experience and experiment, or what Jung called the aqua pontica and aqua permanens, the material flow of energy which endures through change and connects. This was all done symbolically of course, with the aprons and compasses and squares and light not meaning those things actually. All societies, it appears, of a certain scope and vintage exhibit for Jung this idea of a permanent flow-fabric. You might call these "the great religions" or something else, the major building-systems of early or late Eurasian antiquity, like ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, or Mesopotamia; Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Jainism, Islam, and so on. All describe bridges or ladders, stairways or paths to a better place, in addition to temples or great shelters, made of a certain substance. What is this substance? Olga Tokarczuk was a Jungian psychologist by training before becoming a novelist. She mentions experience and bridges regularly, as does Blake, and Tokarczuk mentions Blake in kind reciprocity. Blake's first printed text, All Religions are One, agrees with the Federalist No. 85 (both are 1788) that "As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences." True as this basic premise might seem to us, it has for most of history -- the recorded kind that is, i.e. recent time -- been a minority opinion and often quite risky to express. When accumulation and accrual were sparse, the creating and preserving faculty of experience -- which of course connects memory to sense, emotion, and reason, as well as objects, behaviors, other people, and nature -- could maintain its compositional primacy. Yet this pre-eminence fades with time and the accretion of what one might call dross, quasi-skeletal remains of emperors' stone-craft, or the worn-out vestiges of past life not yet revivified into nutrients of the present. Therefore Epicurus, who articulated experience and experiment in science and art to the disfavor of revealed authority (which takes one "iteration" of the flow, one image or season unable to bear full weight, to be the whole fabric), was denounced in his own city and banned by the Inquisition. Made of pseudo-real material, what structure would not panic as to its own quaking? This tension may indeed have been fated by the perfidious bark itself of human imagination. How can these two concepts of urbanity, of planetary residence, reconcile? Jung had some good intuitions thereon, and wrote "In alchemy the tree is the symbol of Hermetic philosophy." As Dewey tried to apply to democracy and expression, a tree is a process (or process of processes) not an object, sui generis, not "tree," and especially not "tree only." Every season brought new weather and new work of growth, flower, and repair. The effort has been ongoing. Blake certainly revived Dante, who had revived both Lucretius and Virgil, and Yeats revived Blake (though not till as late as 1895 alas). The work process sometimes involves spirals, cycles, centers, or plants, as one may find easily in Yeats' A Vision. There is a vegetable quality like that which Leonardo attributed to the full planet as its "vegetative soul," a living and changing process of processes (like volcanoes and deltaic siltage) that could nevertheless be burnt up or fizzled out by poor stewardship. Yggdrasil is the old Norse world tree, and Paris the Hindu material of wise construct. Fibers and cells of trees which cycle water with sun-energy may well sufficiently inspire but that is up to each and every body. Jung also advised that "It must nevertheless be stressed that side by side with the distinct leanings of alchemy (and the unconscious) toward quaternity there is always a vacillation between three and four which comes out over and over again." One might call four "the field, all by itself" or the ground and three any given formation which might appear, that is, world and tree; I see no need to call these boy-girl per se but ancients tend to have done so (perhaps that was the germ of their own disorientation, their loss of the path or even of path plain and simple, a mismap). Be that as it may. Four, the square, is extra planarity, the plenitude of future quantum fields yet none more just now, and three is the minimal, the instance, the each of two dimensions. They interact and error-correct just like sense and memory do according to the new brain science and Dante. Herein we might observe a new "indigenous critique" for the newest century. The Dawn of Everything, a very Jungian new book in its way, shows many reasons to appreciate that constitutional democracy didn't cross any European's mind for millennia until they heard back from the peoples of the New World on how they did things. This taming of the centaur by Minerva (or the city of Medici) is never over and done with, as we see in Botticelli. The requisite divinity of nature, of all nature including our own, and our role in preserving it is a critique of experience as such. Something similar to this learning could renew experience, not just how it plays out for any given person but how we build for it a future line, plane, or space. Both choice and fate pertain. +++
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