Jung's Nietzsche

Zarathustra, The Red Book, and "Visionary" Works

Gaia Domenici

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030176709
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book explores C.G. Jung's complex relationship with Friedrich Nietzsche through the lens of the so-called 'visionary' literary tradition. The book connects Jung's experience of the posthumously published Liber Novus ( The Red Book ) with his own (mis)understanding of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, and formulates the hypothesis of Jung considering Zarathustra as Nietzsche's Liber Novus –– both works being regarded by Jung as 'visionary' experiences. After exploring some 'visionary' authors often compared by Jung to Nietzsche (Goethe, Hölderlin, Spitteler, F. T. Vischer), the book focuses upon Nietzsche and Jung exclusively. It analyses stylistic similarities, as well as explicit references to Nietzsche and Zarathustra in Liber Novus, drawing on Jung's annotations in his own copy of Zarathustra. The book then uses Liber Novus as a prism to contextualize and understand Jung's five-year seminar on Zarathustra: allthe nuances of Jung's interpretation of Zarathustra can be fully explained, only when compared with Liber Novus and its symbology. One of the main topics of the book concerns the figure of 'Christ' and Nietzsche's and Jung's understandings of the 'death of God.'

© The Author(s) 2019

Gaia DomeniciJung's Nietzsche https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17670-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Gaia Domenici¹

(1)

University College London, London, UK

Gaia Domenici

End Abstract

In spite of these trepidations I was curious, and finally resolved to read him. Thoughts Out of Season was the first volume that fell into my hands. I was carried away by enthusiasm, and soon afterward read Thus Spake Zarathustra. This, like Goethe’s Faust , was a tremendous experience for me. Zarathustra was Nietzsche ’s Faust, his No. 2, and my No. 2 now corresponded to Zarathustra though this was rather like comparing a mole hill with Mount Blanc. And Zarathustra—there could be no doubt about that—was morbid. Was my No. 2 also morbid? This possibility filled me with a terror which for a long time I refused to admit, but the idea cropped up again and again at inopportune moments, throwing me into a cold sweat, so that in the end I was forced to reflect on myself. (MDR: 102)¹

1.1 A Life-Long Confrontation

1.1.1 Jung’s Educational Background

On 14 November 1913, Jung heard the voice of his ‘soul’ for the third time. He felt confused, having no idea whose voice that could be, and still trying to figure out the meaning of the catastrophic visions he had been seized with a few weeks earlier. He asked the voice if it was ‘God’ speaking; if ‘God’ was ‘a child, a maiden’; to which the voice replied: ‘You are lying to yourself! You spoke so as to deceive others and make them believe in you. You want to be a prophet and chase after your ambition’ (RB I, 2, ‘Soul and God’: 233). The question of being a ‘prophet’, as well as the meaning of the ‘prophets’ for our time will be a major issue of Jung’s thinking. Such a question and what Aniela Jaffé has defined as ‘question of meaning’ (Jaffé 1967: 12. See also Bishop 2014: 75–78) come together in Jung’s approach to his own existence and writing. But what does it mean to be a ‘prophet’, according to Jung? And who are the ‘prophets’ of our time?

Carl Gustav Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil on Lake Constance. After only six months, his family moved to Laufen (near the Falls of the Rhine), where they lived until he was four years old. In 1879, Jung’s family moved again, this time to a village near Basel (Klein-Hüningen), where they settled and he received his education (MDR: 6–15). Although his family was not a rich or an influential one, he had the chance to attend excellent schools, namely Unteres and Oberes Gymnasium in Basel (formerly known as Pädagogium). According to Jung’s high school curricula—which are all still available for consultation, alongside teachers’ assessments and grades, at Staatsarchiv Basel–Stadt—he never attended philosophy classes during his studies at Oberes Gymnasium. Yet his philosophical education took place at that time, thanks to private readings in his father’s library, which kept the 17-year-old Jung strongly involved, while he was mainly concerned about the theological issue on God and the question of evil. According to his memoires, it was not easy to find texts from philosophers in the library of Johan Paul Achilles Jung who, being a parson, regarded them as ‘suspect because they thought’. Nevertheless, the young boy managed to first come across the second edition of the General Dictionary of the Philosophical Sciences [Allgemeines Handwörterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften, nebst ihrer Literatur und Geschichte] (Leipzig, 1832) by Wilhelm Traugott Krug, and then Christian Dogmatics [Christliche Dogmatik] (Zurich, 1869) by Alois Emanuel Biedermann. At the same time, he read several pieces of English literature and engaged with more specific philosophical matters by dealing with Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, and Meister Eckhardt, all authors that he particularly enjoyed. Jung then faced other philosophers, whose ideas he did not find equally stimulating, that is Schoolmen and St Thomas—whose Aristotelian intellectualism appeared to him ‘more lifeless than a desert’, as well as Hegel, whose language sounded ‘as arrogant as it was laborious’. The ‘great find resulting from [his] researches was Schopenhauer’, however, who ‘was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion, passion, evil—all those things which the others hardly seemed to notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility’. Because he was engaging with Schopenhauer’s philosophy so much, and was struggling to find a negotiation between a ‘blind’ Will and the intellect, Jung eventually sympathised with Kant, who allowed him to solve his problem: Schopenhauer ‘had committed the deadly sin of hypostatizing a metaphysical assertion, and of endowing a mere noumenon, a Ding an sich, with special qualities’ (MDR: 60–72). Jung read Eduard von Hartmann, too (ibid.: 101). Plato also appears in Jung’s Greek programme during his third and fourth year at Oberes Gymnasium. As reported by his teacher, Theodor Plüss, the class had to read: Euthyphron (chapters 1–8), Apology (first speech), Phaedo (chapters 1–13, 63–67, with particular stress on Socrates’s personality).²

The reason why Jung was so concerned with the issue of evil, was because he was going through a crucial religious crisis, having experienced that ‘god’ could not be reduced to the concept of ‘goodness’, but had to include evil in his attributes. Therefore, at the age of 16, Jung was looking for earlier thinkers who could back him up on his hypothesis. Facing the issue from a theological perspective did not seem to work for him, nor were his father’s ‘expatiations’ fruitful; he found them ‘sentimental-sounding and usually incomprehensible as well as uninteresting’. The problems with his father culminated when they had to deal with the concept of the Trinity, which the parson preferred to skip, claiming that he understood ‘nothing of it’ himself. At this point, the young Jung was more and more concerned, and still seeking answers. Probably sensing this anxiety, Emilie Preiswerk-Jung, Jung’s mother, suggested that he read Goethe’s Faust . The book ‘poured into [his] soul like a miraculous balm’, for the protagonist appeared to him as ‘someone who takes the devil seriously and even concludes a blood pact with him—with the adversary who has the power to frustrate God’s plan to make a perfect world’. Nonetheless Jung never sympathised with the character of Faust, whose behaviour he judged to be far too naïve; rather, he likened himself more to the figure of Mephistopheles, who seemed to him ‘cheated in quite a different sense: he had not received his promised rights because Faust, that somewhat characterless fellow, had carried his swindle through right into the Hereafter’. Mephistopheles made ‘the deepest impression’ on Jung, who immediately put him in connection with the ‘mystery of the mothers’ in terms of ‘initiation’. Due to the fact that he had highlighted the role of evil in a wider world perspective, Goethe appeared to Jung as a ‘prophet’, but ‘having dismissed Mephistopheles by a mere trick’ was something Jung could not forgive the German writer for (MDR: 36–60).

According to Jung’s German and Greek teacher, in his first year at Oberes Gymnasium, Emanuel Probst, some pieces by Goethe had already been part of the German programme. Still among Jung’s school curricula, it is possible to verify what a key role the classics have played in his educational background more broadly. The main authors treated were: Ovid, Caesar, Livius, Cicero, Catullus, Tibullus, Tacitus, Xenophon, Homer, Lysin, Sophocles Aeschylus, Schiller, Chamisso, Uhland, Shakespeare, Molière, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Delille, Claris de Florian, Madame de Staël, Guisot, Lamartine, Casimir Delavigne, Thiers, A. Dumas père, V. Hugo, E. About, Lafontaine, Töpffer, and others. In fact, keen interest and familiarity for both ancient and modern classics shine through all of Jung’s work, as well as his lexical choices. Furthermore, during his university years (still in Basel), Jung was a fellow of the prestigious fraternity ‘Zofingia’—of which several well-known personalities, such as Jacob Burckhardt, had previously been members—where various topics were discussed on a regular basis, ranging from philosophy to science, and of course literature. Bearing this in mind, and considering the famous legend which believes Jung to be an illegitimate great-grandson of Goethe’s (MDR: 35), the weight of Jung’s humanistic education might have gone further than a mere scholastic reading of texts. In this sense, it is thus arguable that he regarded himself as belonging to a humanistic tradition, by the side of the scientific legacy traditionally connected to his profession as a psychiatrist. Over the past decade, the significance of the humanities for a complete understanding of Jung’s depth psychology has been exhaustively explored by Paul Bishop, with particular regard to Goethe, Weimar Classicism, and German Idealism (Bishop 2008, 2012, 2014, 2017). The amount of classics kept in Jung’s library is indeed astonishing (see Shamdasani 2012). However, to this day, the effective weight of Jung’s school education had yet to be explored. Looking at Jung’s school programmes, the impact of not only German Classicism but also the Antiquities on Jung’s upbringing can be considered high enough to regard Jung belonging to a humanistic tradition as a matter of fact.

1.1.2 Nietzsche’s Presence in the Evolving of Jung’s Thinking

Jung’s humanistic background emerges especially through the references to several authors who assiduously occur in his published works. Among these, a crucial role is played by Nietzsche, particularly as the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Also Sprach Zarathustra] (1883–1885), a work which definitely impressed Jung throughout his lifetime. Besides Jung’s 1934–1939 seminar, expressly dedicated to a psychological interpretation of Zarathustra , this work appears to be mentioned, among his published texts, ‘at least 87 times’, as reported by Paul Bi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. ‘Visionary’ Works and Liber Novus
• 3. Nietzsche in Liber Novus
• 4. Liber Novus in Nietzsche: Jung’s Seminar on Zarathustra
• 5. Conclusion
• Back Matter