The Soul Of The World

[Triton]

The Soul Of The World:

"The greater part of the soul is outside the body" - Sendivogius.



"Let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that
seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible
form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented
by each event as it is, its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking
its interior image -in short, its availability to imagination, its
presence as a psychic reality….All things show faces, the world not
only a coded signature to be read for meaning, but a physiognomy to be
faced. As expressive forms, things speak; they show the shape they are
in. they announce themselves, bear witness to their presence: "Look,
here we are." They regard us beyond how we may regard them, and how we
dispose of them… Then, we realize that what psychology has had to call
"projection" is simply animation, as this thing or that spontaneously
comes alive, arrests our attention, draws us to it."



When something goes wrong in a life, depth psychology still looks to
intra- and inter-subjectivity for the cause and the therapy. The
public, objective, physical world of things - buildings and
bureaucratic forms, mattresses and roadsigns, milk-packages and busses
- is by definition excluded from psychological etiology and therapy.
Things lie outside the soul.

Psychotherapy has been working successfully within its province of
psychic reality conceived as subjectivity, but it has not re-visioned
the notion of subjectivity itself. Even now, even its success there
comes in question as the patients' complaints bespeak problems that
are no longer merely subjective in the former sense. For all the while
that psychotherapy has succeeded in raising the consciousness of human
subjectivity, the world in which all subjectivities are set has fallen
apart. Breakdown is in a new place - Vietnam and Watergate, bank
scandles with government collusion, pollution and streetcrime, the
loss of literacy and the growth of junk, deceit, and show. We now
encounter pathology in the psyche of politics and medicine, in
language and design, in the food we eat. Sickness is now 'out there.'

The contemporary use of the word "breakdown" shows what I mean.
Nuclear power plants like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl provide
vivid examples of possibly incurable, chronic breakdowns. The traffic
system, the school systems, the courts and criminal justice system,
giant industries, municipal governments, finance and banking - all
undergo crises, suffer breakdowns, or must be shored up against the
threat of collapse. The terms "collapse," "functional disorder,"
"stagnation," "lowered productivity," "depression," and "breakdown"
are equally valid for human persons and for objective public systems
and the things within the systems. Breakdown extends to every
component of civic life because civic life is now a constructed life:
we no longer live in a biological world where decay, fermentation,
metamorphosis, catabolism are equivalents for the dysfunction of
constructed things. My colleague and friend in Dallas Robert Sardello
writes:

"The individual presented himself in the therapy room of the
nineteenth century, and during the twentieth the patient suffering
breakdown is the world itself… The new symptoms are fragmentation,
specialization, expertise, depression, inflation, loss of energy,
jargoneze, and violence. Our buildings are anorexic, our business
paranoid, our technology manic."

Wherever the language of psychopathology occurs (crisis, breakdown,
collapse), the psyche is speaking of itself in pathologized terms,
attesting to itself as subject of the pathos. As breakdown appears in
all these symptoms of Sardello's list, so then does psyche or psychic
reality. The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment
of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its
symptoms, it becomes aware of itself as a psychic reality. The world
is now the subject of immense suffering, exhibiting acute and crass
symptoms by means of which it defends itself against collapse.

Hence, to call a business "paranoid" means to examine the way it
presents itself in defensive postures, in systemizations and arcane
codes, its delusional relations between its product and the speaking
about its product, often necessitating gross distortions of the
meanings of such words as good, honest, true, healthy, etc. To call a
building "catatonic" or "anorexic" means to examine the way it
presents itself, its behavioral display in its skinny, tall, rigid,
bareboned structure, trimmed of fat, its glassy front and desexualized
coldness and suppressed explosive rage, its hollow atrium interior
sectioned by vertical shafts. To call consumption "manic" refers to
instantaneity of satisfaction, rapid disposal, intolerance for
interruption (flow-through consumption), the euphoria of buying
without paying (credit cards), and the flight of ideas made visible
and concrete in magazine and television advertising. To call
agriculture "addictive" refers to its obsession with ever higher
yields, necessitating ever more chemical energizers (fertilizers) and
mass killers (pesticides, herbicides) at the expense of other life
forms and to the exhaustion of agriculture's earthen body.

This new sense of psychic reality requires a new nose. More than the
psychoanalytic nose that searches for depth of meaning and hidden
connections, we need the nose of common animal sense, an aesthetic
response to the world. This response ties the individual soul
immediately with the world soul; I am animated by its anima, like an
animal. I reenter the platonic cosmos which always recognizes that the
soul of the individual can never advance beyond the soul of the world,
because they are inseparable, the one always implicating the other.
Any alteration in the human psyche resonates with a change in the
psyche of the world.

[The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World]