C.G. Jung and Nikolai Berdyaev: Individuation and the Person

A Critical Comparison

Georg Nicolaus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136894848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book explores C. G. Jung's psychology through the perspective of the existential philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, drawing striking parallels between Jung's theory of individuation and Berdyaev's understanding of the person.

Placing Jung and Berdyaev firmly within the context of secular humanism, Nicolaus draws on their personal experiences of individuation to show how both writers seek to enable a renewal of our self-understanding as persons in a post-religious society.

Topics of discussion include:

• the foundations of Berdyaev's personalism
• Jung's psychological interpretation of the Christian God-image
• individuation and the ethics of creativity.

C. G. Jung and Nikolai Berdyaev: Individuation and the Person offers a fresh perspective on the ethical implications of Jung's theory and serves also as an introduction to Berdyaev's thought. As such this book will appeal to analytical psychologists, scholars engaged with Jungian thought and all those interested in the interface between spirituality and depth psychology.

Chapter 1
Introduction

This book explores the relationship between C.G. Jung’s psychology of individuation and Nikolai Berdyaev’s philosophy of the person, which takes shape as an existential–philosophical interpretation of Christian spirituality. The notion of the person is both central to modern identity and at the same time subjected to a process of dissolution in our postmodern present.

One of the basic assumptions of this book, which some readers might find contentious, is that it is the decline of Christianity as a living spirituality that inevitably leads to a dissolution of personal identity. Jung’s notion of individuation, i.e. of becoming a person, is placed in these pages within a perspective in which it is seen as intimately linked with this dimension of western spirituality and its destinies. This linkage implies that I will not be offering a contribution to analytical psychology inasmuch as it understands itself primarily as a neutral, scientific discipline, but to analytical psychology inasmuch as it is concerned with the soul, which cannot be abstracted from its spiritual concerns.

The notion of the person as it will be explored here represents the ‘place of interaction’ between the psychological and the spiritual dimension. The way in which the spiritual operates in the depths of the western soul is still shaped significantly by its Christian heritage, despite its decline, a fact that Jung recognized clearly. It is for this reason that he devoted so many of his writings to Christianity. My attempt, then, will not be to offer a contribution to contemporary scientific psychological theories of personality but rather to explore this boundary line between psychology and spirituality, which is constitutive for analytical psychology as a psychology with soul.

I have received valuable impulses from Evangelos Christou’s essay The Logos of the Soul (1976) for the way in which I have conceptualized this interface of the psychological and the spiritual. Christou seeks to develop an epistemological basis for psychology beyond the Cartesian paradigm. Psychology, he argues, cannot proceed by dissecting the psyche into ‘faculties’ or psychical states. It has to start from the notion of psychological experience. Psychological experience designates a realm beyond the Cartesian split of abstract spirit (which in philosophy leads to abstract metaphysics) and an equally abstract empiricism of sense data in science. It constitutes a sphere all of its own, the sphere proper to psychology. We can, he argues

never get away from the soul. Hence the notion of objectivity, impersonality or abstraction so dear to science is impossible when we introduce the experiencing soul into our picture of the cosmos since every abstraction is also the source of psychological experience.

(Christou 1976: 37)

We will be primarily concerned with the experiencing soul. Our approach will not be scientific in the narrow sense but in a broad hermeneutical sense. Within this hermeneutical approach theology and philosophy will be the subject of this book insofar as they themselves are concerns of the soul as sources of psychological experience. In this sense this book, even though it will contain much theology and philosophy, nevertheless remains primarily psychological. But what will interest us are not the biological, but the spiritual preconditions of the psychological.

Soul as the subject of experience is neither the ‘mind’ of philosophy nor the ‘body’ of science. The subject of psychological experience itself can be more accurately defined as personality¹. Using traditional language we could say that personality ‘hypostatizes’ soul as the originating source of the meaning of psychological experience. It does so not as a ‘metaphysical substance’ but as a ‘unity of acts’ (Scheler 1973). It constitutes the unifying, organizing centre of psychological experience by synthesizing it into a meaningful gestalt. It is through this activity that human spirituality becomes manifest in the psychological sphere. Interpreted this way, human spirituality is not just a matter of religion. It pervades all aspects of human life.

We ought to carefully distinguish the notion of personality that Christou proposes from a narrow ‘Cartesian’ subjectivity (and thus also from the ‘ego’ of depth psychology) on which most modern notions of personality are based:

The problem of personality only makes sense if we place it into its meaningful context, namely, the meaningful wholeness of the soul. An understanding of the problems of personality therefore will depend on the possibility of formulating psychological experiences, and conversely the possibilities of formulating and interpreting psychological experience are themselves a product of the action of personality.

(ibid.: 77)

In this action of personality human spirituality finds its expression. Christou presents us here with an interesting ‘figure-ground’ phenomenon. Just as a psychology that is based on a phenomenology of psychological experience needs personality as its ‘logos’ so personality needs this kind of psychology in order to come into view in a non-reductive fashion. If we can call the Cartesian ego ‘literalized’ spirit, personality in this deeper sense is deliteralized, and yet nevertheless still personal spirit. We will see that this is precisely the notion of the person, which Berdyaev develops. On these grounds therefore, an interesting complementarity between Jung and Berdyaev may be uncovered. Without soul, spirit remains literal, abstract and lifeless; without spirit, soul remains shapeless and dissolved in unconsciousness. It is this intricate dialectic of the spiritual and the psychological dimensions within the human person with which we will be concerned. I want to suggest that this figure-ground phenomenon could be formulated more clearly by complementing Christou’s notion of psychological experience with that of spiritual experience and interpreting both as two dimensions of existential experience, which have to be distinguished while nevertheless remaining inseparably united within the actual totality of existential experience. The concrete totality of human experience always includes both of these dimensions.

This experiential totality will be considered in the pages of this book from a Christian perspective because there is not only an accidental but also an essential link between the notion of the person and Christian spirituality. It is of course equally possible to opt for a spirituality of depersonalisation, and tendencies in this direction are to be found even within parts of the Christian tradition itself, but if one opts for a spirituality of personalisation, it will tend more or less towards the shape of a Christian spirituality, if the latter is understood in a very universal and broad, non-confessional sense.²

How much this type of spirituality is ‘programmed’ into the spiritual ‘DNA’ of western man, which is the reason why Jung gives it so much attention, can be demonstrated by one example: the general declaration of human rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations affirms in its preamble its ‘faith in the dignity and worth of the person’ (cited from Kobusch 1997: 11, trans.). This goes to show how the whole trajectory of secularization is still implicitly shaped by this spirituality. The German philosopher Theo Kobusch has put forward on these grounds the thesis that we are not actually living in an age that is hostile to metaphysics but only to a specific type of metaphysics ‘which is different from the metaphysics of the person, which can also be called a metaphysics of freedom’ (ibid.: 12). This metaphysics of freedom is identified by Berdyaev very clearly as originating within Christianity and coming to full unfoldment only in modern thought, especially in Kant.

I will want to both reconnect the notion of the person to its origins within Christian spirituality and also examine how this notion of the person and the spirituality belonging to it are ‘re-visioned’ in Jung’s and Berdyaev’s thought in line with our new post-religious predicament. So what exactly is meant here by ‘Christian spirituality’ and how does it relate to the notion of personality? In this introduction I will want to pick out just one central element that will be important to us. Berdyaev’s particular understanding of Christianity is both specifically modern (perhaps in some ways even postmodern) and at the same time deeply rooted in the mystical tradition of eastern Christianity and Jacob Boehme’s theosophy. All forms of more mystically oriented Christian spirituality have always been centred on the theme of a spiritual rebirth. I initially was intending to use the biblical expression ‘the inner man of the heart’ (taken from 1 Pet.: 3, 4 and Rom. 7: 22) as a title because it alludes to the distinction of the inner and outer man common to the mystical tradition. The inner man, or the true person, is initially hidden, unconscious. It does not manifest automatically in the developmental process. Only by passing through a process of spiritual rebirth do we truly become a person in the full sense of the word. This birth of the new man/woman implies the death of the old. We will follow this process of death and rebirth on both the personal and the collective level. Jung interprets Christianity as a form of the myth of the dying and resurrecting, i.e. the transforming, God. This allows him to link up his interpretation of Christianity closely with the contemporary predicament, a stratagem equally employed in recent postmodern thinking.

This process of death and rebirth has also found symbolic expression in the alchemical imagination that flourished in the early Renaissance. Especially (but by no means only) in Jacob Boehme’s Christian theosophy does this classical theme of the Christian mystical tradition become enriched with the alchemical imagination. Alchemy introduces a volatile ferment into Christian symbolism, enriching it with new complexities for modern souls. And Jung’s own psychological–alchemical interpretation of Christianity seek a renewal of the meaning of Christian symbols by offering a psychological interpretation of this alchemical imagination in the light of the process of individuation through which one becomes a person in the full sense. If we make the attempt to understand Jung’s psychology as a psychology of the person it will therefore appear primarily within the following developmental line: Christian mysticism, alchemy, its psychological interpretation, which latter in turn enables a new, specifically psychological appropriation of Christian symbols with the aim of the renewal of the central concern of Christian spirituality – the ‘second birth’. Jung offers a psychological perspective, which puts the whole of Christianity in a new light, a psychological light.

Berdyaev’s thought, on the other hand, gives expression to the shape that such a renewed Christian spirituality as spirituality could take. While we will soon see that there are therefore significant tensions between Jung’s psychological and Berdyaev’s spiritual perspectives, a wealth of striking resonances and correspondences can nevertheless be found between their views. These resonances stem from the shared focus of both writers on the experiential dimension of the process of the ‘second birth’ as a starting point for their reinterpretation of Christian symbols in the light of the changed psychological/spiritual situation of contemporary man/woman.

What Jung and Berdyaev share is that they present us with a reinterpretation of Christianity which has passed through the dissolution of the Christian God-image in modernity. Both of them have studied Nietzsche with an equally acute awareness of his importance. Neither of them writes for those who still possess an intact traditional, confessionally bound ecclesiastic faith, which has (apparently) managed to remain unaffected by these historical processes.

Michel Foucault famously declared the Death of Man after the Death of God had already been declared by Friedrich Nietzsche. There is an inevitability about this development. Jung alludes to this inevitability when he writes in Aion: ‘The destruction of the God-image is followed by the annulment of the human personality’ (Jung 1951: para. 170). But unlike contemporary postmodern philosophers and a growing number of post-Jungians who are unhappy with concepts like ‘Self’ and ‘individuation’ and prefer a ‘polytheism of the psyche’ to the (supposedly) rigid ‘monotheism of the Self’, I want to interpret Jung on the basis of the assumption that he himself was essentially trying to restore the lost integrity to the human personality by restoring psychological vitality to the Christian symbols through developing them further.

I do not want to deny that other equally valid interpretations of Jung’s psychology are possible. But, granted the relative validity of this basic hermeneutic starting point, I want to suggest that these Christian symbols can then be seen in Jungian terms, as the ‘archetypal matrix of human personhood’. Jung, in this perspective, does not simply want to restore them but rather attempts their further development in the direction of a heightened emphasis on the feminine archetype of the sapientia dei or Sophia as it appears in the alchemical imagination. This shift in emphasis indicates a shift from abstract ‘patriarchal’ spirituality towards a grounding and appropriation of spirituality in and through psychological consciousness. It seeks to formulate a new understanding of spirituality for contemporary man. His late conception of the unus mundus offers a powerful corrective to modern individualism based on a defunct Cartesian paradigm. Thus Jung’s psychology both dissolves modern individualism and also reconstitutes something analogous to Christian personalism within the changed framework of his psychology of individuation. We will see, though, that this changed framework implies an ‘appreciative transcendence’ (Dourley 2001) of Christianity, which shows itself to be the living enactment of the myth of the transforming God.

Jung may in this way have anticipated contemporary trends. The growing interest at the present time in the archetypal figure of Sophia and the emergence of an emphasis on feminine wisdom and its ecological vision of interdependence and a compassionate concern for the neglected minorities may be indicative of a move beyond the more caustic relativism of postmodernism. There is an emerging awareness that we need a more feminine, flowing, tolerant, open and ecologically minded sense of spiritual values. Deconstruction for its own sake has reached a dead end, however useful it may have been. More recently even postmodern philosophers themselves have shown a renewed interest in Christianity³. Perhaps this shows that we are slowly moving towards a new openness and humility in considering anew the classical themes of spirituality, which, according to the philosopher of culture Mikhail Epstein, was already anticipated by Berdyaev in his essay The New Middle Ages (1933: 67–119)⁴.

Berdyaev attempts a development of Christian symbols that is parallel to Jung’s in order to give a place to human freedom and creativity in the sphere of Christian spirituality. Much of free creative self-expression, which ought to have been given a spiritual–religious meaning, had to emigrate out of the domain of ecclesiastic Christianity into the secular sphere, even though it had its origin within it. Both of these elements which Jung and Berdyaev address, that of soul and that of human freedom and creative self-expression, could not be fully accommodated within traditional Christianity and as a consequence found a home in the ‘pagan’ rebellion since the Renaissance and its progressive push towards secularisation. The spirituality that had initially been shaped by ecclesiastic Christianity has burst its container and has in turn given shape to the underlying meaning-structures of modern secular society. Jung and Berdyaev share an awareness of these underlying historical dynamics.

We have learned and are still learning very bitter lessons about the link between claims of absolute truth and violence. For good reasons contemporary thinkers are more or less unanimous in their suspicion towards all ‘metanarratives’ which end up justifying the violation...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Berdyaev’s life
• Chapter 3 An introduction to Berdyaev’s philosophy
• Chapter 4 Person in Jung and Berdyaev
• Chapter 5 Esse in anima and the epistemology of the heart
• Appendix 6 Person and God-image
• Chapter 7 Individuation and the ethics of creativity
• Chapter 8 Conclusion: Moving beyond the pre/trans fallacy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index