C.G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination
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Carl Jung and the Alchemical Imagination: Passages into the Mysteries of Psyche and Soul by Stanton Marlon
“Pierre Hadot has elaborated another idea of Heraclitus, the idea that ‘Nature loves to hide’ and noted that ‘the occultation of nature will be perceived not as a resistance that must be conquered’, stripped to its bare truth, ‘but as a mystery into which human beings can gradually be initiated.’ For Hadot, stripping the veil from Isis reflects a dominating Promethean orientation to truth, while initiation he considers aesthetic and Orphic. The Promethean and Orphic attitudes represent two differing, perhaps opposed, yet simultaneous historical developments bound together like a double helix around a single historical axis: the master metaphor of nature’s secrets.
For Alan Kim, ‘Grand and tendentious philosophical narratives, be they of the Hegelian, neo-Kantian, or Heideggerian variety, necessarily ignore inconvenient facts, sometimes by calling into question their importance vis-à-vis history’s “deeper” motion.’
By contrast, Hadot’s attention to the finer grain of facts reveals an integrating and wholly unexpected ‘dialectic’ between the Promethean and Orphic orientations to nature: dialectic not as successive sublimations, successionist degradations, and hierarchies, but as an unending conversation between two equal partners.
I would claim that it is not by methodological decisions, presuppositions, and acts of thinking alone, not in the practical, down-to-earth, and very sober, that we do justice to the darks shrine of otherness. In contrast to Giergerich and Hillman, psychology for me is a darker art, mongrel, a mix they dismiss. If the stone can be thought of in terms of absolute negative interiority, it can also be seen as absolute negative exteriority, the mattering of idealist thought, a white earth exterior and ecstatic, a dark sky marked by tracing a dark light, the Egyptian goddess Nuit, scintilla-like leaning over us—an erotic presence calling us toward her to an absolute that is not an absolute, seducing us to a wonder beyond language of truth—on this white earth, black light matters!”
