Analytical Thought and Myth: An Exploration of the Eternal Masculine and Eternal Feminine

This is a redacted version of a conversation on Facebook that I decided to pull out and make a post of. Much of the editing is to take out the other persons leaving only simple prompts, and, of course, to make it sound like a post rather than a Facebook conversation. Though, I have edited and expanded the main body as well.

 
 

As regards the idea of the eternal masculine and eternal feminine:

 

My reading about alchemy, which cannot be separated from Jung, so my readings in Jung, and philosophers like Cassirer either influenced by Jung or of the same mind; and though maybe not explicitly but inherently in Nietzsche and Derrida and the like . . . . . . for my education, as it were, every time I contemplate the idea of "God" to any serious degree I am confronted with the thought "it only makes sense if there are two: the eternal masculine and the eternal feminine," and it doesn't really make sense to try to combine them in a way that eliminates the idea of the difference. Although, then, as the Greeks pointed out in the protogenoi, you really need three: Ananke, Chronos, and Eros between them. That idea also central to alchemy. Any private debate or contemplation on the idea of a god leads me there: the feminine, the masculine, and desire that unifies them and is the means through which they "create," to choose a word.

 

So you are saying God is a duality not a "unity"?

 

Hmm. Is that what I am saying (he asks both the asker and himself)?

In answering I first want to take a step backwards. We can look at the universe two ways. The first way is the scientific way, the logical, rational way, and that I call the "universe." But humans are not solely rational creatures, they also have an unconscious. (Indeed, the rational conscious is a part of the irrational unconscious, but that's another discussion.) Thus, we can also look at the universe in a way that includes the unconscious. I am not saying that the universe has an unconscious – that is a mystical statement that might serve a purpose in a given context but not particularly here – but saying, simply, a person has an unconscious, and a person can engage the world in a way that includes the unconscious. The universe seen through the mind including the unconscious I call the "cosmos." (I am neither unique nor clever in making these terminological choices.) As the irrational unconscious + (its included) rational conscious is the totality of the mind, so also then is the "cosmos" the totality of being. Again, the important point is not to say the cosmos has an unconscious, it is to say that people have an unconscious, and to look at the universe through the full self must include that unconscious, in turn creating the idea of and engagement with the cosmos.

Something I Read #18 – Mircea Eliade

Actually, I should say "something I've re-read," and not for only the second time.

From the close of Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (trans. Willard R Trask, NY: Harcourt, Inc., 1987, 1959).

Yet the contents and structures of the unconscious are the result of immemorial existential situations, especially of critical situation, and this is why the unconscious has a religious aura. For every existential crisis once again puts in question both the reality of the world and man's presence in the world. This means that the existential crisis is, finally, "religious," since on the archaic levels of culture being and the sacred are one. As we saw, it is the experience of the sacred that founds the world, and even the most elementary religion is, above all, an ontology. In other words, in so far as the unconscious is the result of countless existential experiences, it cannot but resemble the various religious universes. For religion is the paradigmatic solution for every existential crisis. It is the paradigmatic solution not only because it can be indefinitely repeated, but also because it is believed to have a transcendental origin and hence is valorized as a revelation received from an other, transhuman world. The religious solution not only resolves the crisis but at the same time makes existence "open" to values that are no longer contingent or particular, thus enabling man to transcend personal situations and, finally, gain access to the world of spirit. This is not the place to develop all the consequences of this close relation between the content and structures of the unconscious on the one hand and the values of religion on the other. We were led to refer to it in order to show in what sense even the most avowedly nonreligious man still, in his deeper being, shares in a religiously oriented behavior. But modern man's "private mythologies" – his dreams, reveries, fantasies, and so on – never rise to the ontological status of myths, precisely because they are not experienced by the _whole man_ and therefore do not transform a particular situation into a situation that is paradigmatic. In the same way, modern man's anxieties, his experiences in dream or imagination, although "religious" from the point of view of form, do not, as in homo religiosus, mark part of a Weltanshauung and provide the basis for a system of behavior. An example will show the differences between these two categories of experiences. The unconscious activity of modern man ceaselessly presents him with innumerable symbols, and each of them has a particular message to transmit, a particular mission to accomplish, in order to ensure or to re-establish the equilibrium of the psyche. As we have seen the symbol not only makes the world "open" but also helps religious man to attain to the universal. For it is through symbols that man finds his way out of his particular situation and "opens himself" to the general and the universal. Symbols awaken individual experience and transmute it into a spiritual act, into metaphysical comprehension of the world. In the presence of any tree, symbol of the world tree and image of cosmic life, a man of the premodern societies can attain to the highest spirituality, for, by understanding the symbol, ­he succeeds in living the universal. It is the religious vision of the world, and the concomitant ideology, that enable him to make this individual experience bear fruit, to "open" it to the universal. The image of the tree still quite frequently appears in the imaginary universes of modern nonreligious man; it is a cipher of his deeper life, of the drama that is played out in his unconscious and that concerns the integrity of his psychomental life and hence his own existence. But as long as the symbol of the tree does not awaken his total consciousness and "open" it to the universe, it cannot be said to have completely fulfilled its function. It has only partly "saved" him from his individual situation – for example, by enabling him to resolve a deep crisis and restoring his temporarily threatened psychic equilibrium; but it has not yet raised him to spirituality – that is, it has not succeeded in revealing one of the structures of the real to him. (210-12)

"[S]ince on the archaic levels of culture being and the sacred are one" . . . a phrase that might be my theory of the aesthetic in a nutshell. Of course, having been crammed into a nutshell, it necessitates a hell of a lot of unpacking.

The book never itself speaks to the idea of the aesthetic. Nevertheless, it is a book I highly recommend for anyone interested in literature and the arts as an aesthetic – as opposed to merely cultural – endeavor.