Nietzsche forced us to recognise that the category of ‘Truth’ functions only by being enveloped in its expressive distortion - truth is only possible in an utterance that conceptually distorts the stable self-identity of this truth. Truth is, in other words, an eternal variation upon its own mode of presentation. Precisely for this reason, Nietzsche (or Zarathustra) pleaded with an enlightened and nihilistic Europe to consider the discourse of the madman as a discourse on truth, to discern the disparity between truth and its presentation, or the fact that ‘there is reason even in madness’.
A particular truth of a given situation is articulated only insofar as this very articulation distorts the situation itself. It is in perverting a situation, in imperfectly reproducing its essence, that its truth is simultaneously located in the interstices of this imperfect rupture. The truth of everyday life can be glimpsed only when everyday life falters. In other words, the truth of everyday life is always enveloped in madness, in a failed fidelity to the everyday: this was Nietzsche’s ‘morbid truth’ in the unpleasant recognition that ‘God is dead’. With God as the Other to which everyday life is referred, His death, whilst throwing the social into a confused wilderness of ethical deprivation, will come to reveal a higher truth: the truth of the Übermensch - the superior moral altitude residing beyond (Christian) Good and Evil. The truth of a higher morality is indirectly formulated by a distortion (an introduction of madness) in our current moral coordinates.
Whilst the depravity of madness is undesirable for society, its undesirability nevertheless acts as a form of critique that simultaneously reflects an equally as uncomfortable truth - a truth which everyday life rejects in the same moment as it rejects madness. Truth and madness, as interminable expressive variations upon each other, both refuse the common sense of everyday life.
Who would become the intellectual heir to this insistence on the intimacy of truth and its simultaneous distortion? As a Freudian and a devotee to German Idealism, my answer may strike some (myself included) as mysterious: Carl Jung. For the Freudian and the German Idealist tradition, Jung emerges as little more than an enemy, so much so that he would be employed by Deleuze and Guattari in their extensive attack on Freudianism (the Oedipus, the topographical unconscious), German Idealism (dialectics, the transcendental, negation) and structuralism as a whole.
The Jungian system describes the individual consciousness as a ‘point of contact’ with a collective unconscious that has been shaped with the development of human society. Our subjective experience of the world and ourselves were de-contextualised and formalised into ‘archetypes’ (the Self, the shadow, the trickster, the devouring Mother, the tyrannical Father, and the animus/anima) which have been hidden in arcane and mystical texts through history (in heretical Christian doctrines such as Gnosticism, in the obscure formulas of alchemy, in Catholic astrology, in forgotten Sumerian, Eastern, or Egyptian belief-systems). These archetypes of the collective unconscious act as phenomenological templates of our subjective experience - they are the ‘truth’ of humanity in its struggle against itself, and they emerge only erratically and traumatically to consciousness. Indeed, consciousness actively represses its psychic heritage, abandoning it in order to maintain a smooth functionality within social, everyday relations. Their unsettling presence means that they can be articulated only when we are least prepared for them - in dreams, our memories of childhood, or fantasy. Their aggressive truth emerges only as a ‘rupture’ in the stability of individual consciousness - and therefore their irruption into consciousness is often accompanied by their obfuscation, by a psychotic episode which distorts their ultimate truth.
Phenomenologically and ontologically, there is ample material for a criticism of Jung. Each consciousness would somehow be magically connected to a shared psychic substrate, a psychic substrate which acts for itself through impersonal thoughts which are alien to yet simultaneously constitutive of ‘what we are’. Consciousness would therefore somehow house both ‘itself’ and ‘itself as an abstracted agent’ of another, collective narrative. We would be forced to posit an internal agent within us which, as conscious subjects, we repress without knowing we repress it (and therefore not knowing what to repress, whilst always somehow repressing the right thing). This internal agent would be ‘the real us’ and yet be irreducible to ourselves; a shared, autonomous (conscious) unconscious; an archaic ‘cauldron’ of subjective archetypal knowledge which individual knowledge occasionally ‘dips into’ whilst dipping into itself, and whilst actively avoiding without being able to justify this avoidance. From any rational perspective, this theory presents severe limitations.
Much more could be said about the philosophical limitations of Jung’s system. However this is not a criticism of Jung - but rather a somewhat indirect ode to Jung. What ultimately distinguishes Jung is his impressive fidelity to creativity. A ‘creative principle’ characterises Jung’s system - this is the creativity of the exile, of the madman, of the accidental proponent of truth.
For Nietzsche, one of the highest achievements in contemporary society was the position of the child. The child embodies an affirmation of something existing beyond the everyday. The child is a mode of excess expression, a criticism of the pre-formulated forms of articulation of the social, a testament to a higher truth. The child beckons the ‘noontide’, the revaluation of values, the dawn of the superior morality of the Übermensch. In the history of psychoanalysis, on the other hand, the child is relegated to a far lesser position - to a position of inferiority. The figure of the child represents an impotence, an incapacity to access the sophisticated modes of social expression. Childhood is an intermediate period to be abandoned, to be broken free from in an integration into the structures of the social.
Jung, like Nietzsche, rejects this overt denigration of the child. The child harbours a disjunctively creative potential which inevitably criticises the repressive structures of the social. The child, like the madman, has the capacity, in their distorted and inconsistent narratives, to produce a more radical truth than could ever be reveal from within society. In Children as Individuals, Jungian scholar Michael Fordham directly presented the archetypal substrate of childhood fantasy, imagination, and drawings - the latent truth, in other words, of humanity that is inadvertently articulated in the creations of childhood.
Unlike Freud, for whom artistic creations are sublimations of inarticulable desires, Jung’s understanding of creativity is located on the margins of a greater truth. For Jung, the discourse of the madman, whilst disconcerting and irreconcilable to everyday common sense, must be recognised for the truth latent in its inconsistent utterances. The position of the madman, like the child, is not subordinate, but superordinate, to society. It looks down upon the repressive structures of the everyday as from the perspective of a more fundamental truth.
A vindication of creativity - this is Jung’s ultimate achievement. A vindication of creativity operating by the acknowledgement of an obfuscated (but necessary) truth located in the productions of madness and childhood. Even the phenomenologically, ontologically, or metaphysically reserved reader of Jung must (like the critic of Nietzsche as an unserious thinker) see in him an alternative framing of creativity and childhood, an alternative which introduces a radical disparity internal to the category of truth.
I also like this post. I thought I shared the general distaste for Jung in our circles, but when I really thought about him, I ended up wanting also to recognize and 'ode' his courage and his discipline. The Red Book is no small feat. Honoris causa.