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| Published in 1992 |
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| Hilman on the left; me on the right |
In this work, Hillman engages in a dialogue with Los Angeles-based writer Michael Ventura, both in person and via letters. The dialogue is free-ranging and like most of Hillman's work, it ranges over a wide variety of ideas and images (and Hillman will note the etymological relation of the two terms). There is one over-arching theme to the conversations: the failure of much of psychotherapy to do much good in the world. Indeed, we could go so far as to say that both Hillman and Ventura suggest its not the individual who needs the couch so much as the world. To whatever extent that individuals are messed-up, the environment in which they live and work and love is even more messed-up. The personal isn't the political, but the political is personal. Taking action in the world is a part of the cure; one can't live in a despoiled environment (physical, cultural, political) and not suffer a despoiled psyche. Of course, nothing in Hillman's work is quite so simple and direct as I've just summarized it, but that's a part of the joy in reading this series of dialogues. Hillman constantly points, questions, prods, and ponders, which, I imagine, makes him a compelling therapist. On the other hand, if you're looking for answers, programs, or blueprints, forget it; he won't do it. And, again as I imagine a good therapist would do, he makes you, the reader-patient, do your own heavy lifting.
To conclude this consideration of the book, and of Hillman, in particular, I offer the following quotations from the book. Hillman speaks best for himself. The following quotations are a few of those that happened to grab me, ideas and observations that engaged me. Enjoy and ponder.
We've had 100 years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse. Maybe it's time to look at that. We still locate the psyche inside the skin. You go inside to look at the psyche you examine your feelings and your dreams, they belong to you. Words interelations, inter-psyche, between your psyche and mine. That's been extended a bit into family systems and office groups – but the psyche, the soul, is still only within and between people. We're working on our relationships constantly and our feelings and reflections, but look what's left out of that.
What's left out is the deteriorating world.
So why hasn't therapy noticed that? Because psychotherapy is only working on the "inside" soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can't do the job anymore. The buildings are sick. Institutions are set, the banking system is sick, the schools, the streets – the sickness is out there. (3-4)
N.B. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from James Hillman and not his conversation partner, Michael Ventura. Put this in italics so nobody can just pass it over: This is not to deny that you need to do need to go inside – but we have to see what we're doing when we do that. By going inside we are maintaining the Cartesian view that the world out there is dead matter and the world inside is living. (12)
. . . . I won't except the simple opposites – either individual self in control or a totalitarian, mindless mob. This kind of fantasy keeps us afraid of community. It locks us up inside our separate selves all alone and longing for connection. In fact, the idea of surrendering to the fascist mob is the result of the separate self. It's the old Apollonian ego, aloof and clear, panicked by the Dionysian flow. (43)
. . . . Kenosis [from the Greek for emptying out; used in Christian theology in reference to Jesus emptying out the divine within himself to become fully human] seems now the only political way to be – emptied out of certainty. Otherwise, you've become a fundamentalist united with an almighty ideology, protected from above by a cause. Therapy is just one more of the current ideologies keeping its believers from the panic of kenosis, the panic that comes with the higher structure of guarantees has collapsed. Therapy becomes a salvational ideology.
But I want to stay with politics with this letter. I could compare kenosis with the emptiness in Buddhist thought and the Zen exercises of emptying and the Oriental aesthetics of pottery and painting. But I'd rather connect kenosis with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Kenosis is a form of action--not mashochistic action, victimized, crucified, beaten with lathi stickes and billy clubs. Protest. (103)
. . . . Kenosis puts the emptiness in a new light. It values the emptiness. It says “empty protest“ is a via negativa, a non-positivist way of entering the political arena. You take your outrage seriously, but you don’t force yourself to have answers. Trust your nose. You know what stinks. Don’t try to replace the helpless frustration you feel, the powerless victimization, by working out a rational answer. The answers will come, if they come, when they come, to you, to others, but don’t fill in the emptiness of the protest with positive suggestions before their time. First, protest! I don’t know what should be done about most of the major political dilemmas, but my God Prince my soul, my heart, my skin, my eyes) stinks, But my gut (my soul, my heart, my skin, my eyes) sinks, weeps, crunches, shakes. It’s wrong, simply wrong, what’s going on here. (104)
. . . .
Yet, to the question “What would you have done with Sadam Hussein in August 1990, in October, in January and February, wiseguy?“ I am only my physical sense of something wrong. Only my empty protest. Therapy blocks this kind of protest.… It does not let these “negative“ emotions have their full say. And I value them, analyze them, but therapy insists that they have to lead us into deeper meaning rather than immediate action. Therapy says, Think before you act, feel before you emote, judge, interpret, imagine, reflect. Self-knowledge is the point of the emotions and the protest, not public awareness. Know thyself; know what you are doing before you know the issue, and know the meaning of an action before you act. Otherwise you’re projecting and acting out.
So, therapy would say, you can’t protest in this empty way because you haven’t made clear what the protest really wants and why and what for. It has to mean something.
An empty protest, however, hasn’t got a defined meaning. It doesn’t have an end goal – not even the end of blocking something it protests about. My protest about the Gulf War doesn’t clearly say, “Stop the war!“ Empty protest is protest for the sake of the emotions that fuel it and is rooted not in the conscious fulfillment of improvement, but in radical negativity. And theological language, empty protest as a ritual of negative theology. It’s what the Hindus call neti, neti, neti – not this, not this, not this. No utopia, no farther shore toward which we march, only the march, the shout, the placard, the negative vote, the refusal.
What I’m suggesting here can’t even become a new motive conscientious objection because the C.O. must back up his position with a set of positive ideals (not taking life, all war is evil, peace, human community). It’s not even anarchism, for an anarchist has a positive goal of the literal ending of our governmental forms. It is not libertarianism, which again has a positive set of beliefs that can be put in the programs of deregulating and dismantling.
What could be more unpopular than empty protest? Not only will you be seen as stupid because empty, but you will also be alone in right field and ninth in the batting order. I find it very hard to play the political game without falling into the usual American popularity contest, the public opinion poll. How does one enter the public fray and at the same time be unpopular? By this I mean I don’t even have the honor of standing for the oppositional unpopular position like a Mencken, Chomsky, Jerry Brown, Ventura. You, Michael [Ventura] can be counted on to define an unpopular position but never truly an empty one. Your protests have beef. We read you to hear the “wrong“ thing, whereas I want is to be applauded! Yet I am often roundly cursed (when understood) or, worse, approvingly smelted into someone else’s arguments (because misunderstood). (104; 105-106.)
. . . . .
Puritanism is no joke. It is the structural fiber of America; it’s in our writing, our wiring, or anatomy. And, if Freud is right that anatomy is destiny, then we all dissent from the Mayflower. Then there’s no hope for an aesthetic awakening. I can’t overcome Lifton’s “psyching numbing“ because it’s ground is puritanism. We are supposed to be sensually numb. That is the fundamental nature of puritan goodness. We are numb because we are anaesthetized, without aesthetics, aesthetically unconscious, beauty repressed. Just look at our land--this continent’s astonishing beauty--and then look at what we immigrants, Bibles in hand, priests and preachers in tow, have done to it. Not despoiling, not exploitation, not he profit motive; no, as a people we are void of beauty and devoted to ugliness.
Yes we each know that nothing so moves the soul as an aesthetic leap of the heart at the sight of a fox in the forest, of a lovely open face, the sound of a little melody. Sense, imagination, pleasure, beauty are what the soul longs for, knowing innately that these would be its secure.
Instead our motto is “just say no.“ And we pass laws to make everything “clean“ and “safe“-- childproof, tamperproof, fallproof, bugproof. Start each meal with a preop prep--iced and chlorinated water to numb the tongue, lips, and palate. Laws to protect children in a moving vehicle so they can be kept alive to be ignored, scolded, and homeless. Laws for order, once the inherent cosmos (the Greek word for aesthetic order) of the world is no longer sensed. This is the promised land, and the laws are still coming down from the hill. Prohibition is the ultimate law of the land. Watch school kids of eleven and twelve debate on TV whether or not to turn in a friend of his parents for smoking on the sly, because smoking is bad for the friend's health. Is this friendship or is this espionage for the sake of the law? (130-131)
. . . .
Critics of the American style of mind from de Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century on down have said this is not a land of ideas. We are superb at implementing, and making useful (practical?) Inventions, but we are not philosophers. Europeans think and American apply. The major psychological ideas with which we practice come from Europe. . . . (One of my own great difficulties is due to the many years I spent in Switzerland, so that I never quite made a comfortable connection with the American way of psychology.) I have never offered a testable hypothesis, applied for research grant, produced a program, found a gadget or a procedure that could be named after me, invented a “practical" test, elaborated an experimental model, or examined a particular population. I work mainly in a chair thinking, on my feet talking, in the library reading; it all goes on in my head while my body lives life. In this way, my work can be accused of being a head trip and not practical, because we believe, in America, that the head's activities--this head so full of blood and flushed with excitement of spirit—is not practical. But it’s not the mind that’s impractical or heady; it’s the burned out, ashen, conceptual language of academia and television that we have all been taught is the correct expression of thinking. It’s this neutral, flatline language that is heady, not the impassioned head, popping ideas like grasshoppers. (141)
. . . .
One thing is sure: ideas don’t belong to academics. You don’t have to have academic knowledge to have ideas. Knowledge might help work with an idea, enrich it, discriminate it more finely, or recognize its history – that it’s not the first time that idea ever moved through someone’s mind. So knowledge may save you the embarrassment of inflation and help you pick up some skills about polishing ideas. But knowledge is not necessary. You can distinguish things you have learned from ideas you have. Keeping these distinct – knowledge and ideas – ought to help you feel that you can ideate without an academic degree. When an idea comes to mind, it asks first of all to be listened to and that you attempt to understand it. If knowledge helps do this, then fine. But first entertain your visitor. (144)
Put this in italics so nobody can just pass it over: This is not to deny that you need to do need to go inside – but we have to see what we're doing when we do that. By going inside we are maintaining the Cartesian view that the world out there is dead matter and the world inside is living. (12)
I won't except the simple opposites – either individual self in control or a totalitarian, mindless mob. This kind of fantasy keeps us afraid of community. It locks us up inside our separate selves all alone and longing for connection. In fact, the idea of surrendering to the fascist mob is the result of the separate self. It's the old Apollonian ego, aloof and clear, panicked by the Dionysian flow. (43)
Kenosis [from the Greek for emptying out; used in Christian theology in reference to Jesus emptying out the divine within himself to become fully human] seems now the only political way to be – emptied out of certainty. Otherwise, you've become a fundamentalist united with an almighty ideology, protected from above by a cause. Therapy is just one more of the current ideologies keeping its believers from the panic of kenosis, the panic that comes with the higher structure of guarantees has collapsed. Therapy becomes a salvational ideology.
But I want to stay with politics with this letter. I could compare kenosis with the emptiness in Buddhist thought and the Zen exercises of emptying and the Oriental aesthetics of pottery and painting. But I'd rather connect kenosis with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Kenosis is a form of action--not mashochistic action, victimized, crucified, beaten with lathi stickes and billy clubs. Protest. (103)
. . . .
Kenosis puts the emptiness in a new light. It values the emptiness. It says “empty protest“ is a via negativa, a non-positivist way of entering the political arena. You take your outrage seriously, but you don’t force yourself to have answers. Trust your nose. You know what stinks. Don’t try to replace the helpless frustration you feel, the powerless victimization, by working out a rational answer. The answers will come, if they come, when they come, to you, to others, but don’t fill in the emptiness of the protest with positive suggestions before their time. First, protest! I don’t know what should be done about most of the major political dilemmas, but my God Prince my soul, my heart, my skin, my eyes) stinks, But my gut (my soul, my heart, my skin, my eyes) sinks, weeps, crunches, shakes. It’s wrong, simply wrong, what’s going on here. (104)
. . . .
Yet, to the question “What would you have done with Sadam Hussein in August 1990, in October, in January and February, wiseguy?“ I am only my physical sense of something wrong. Only my empty protest. Therapy blocks this kind of protest.… It does not let these “negative“ emotions have their full say. And I value them, analyze them, but therapy insists that they have to lead us into deeper meaning rather than immediate action. Therapy says, Think before you act, feel before you emote, judge, interpret, imagine, reflect. Self-knowledge is the point of the emotions and the protest, not public awareness. Know thyself; know what you are doing before you know the issue, and know the meaning of an action before you act. Otherwise you’re projecting and acting out.
So, therapy would say, you can’t protest in this empty way because you haven’t made clear what the protest really wants and why and what for. It has to mean something.
An empty protest, however, hasn’t got a defined meaning. It doesn’t have an end goal – not even the end of blocking something it protests about. My protest about the Gulf War doesn’t clearly say, “Stop the war!“ Empty protest is protest for the sake of the emotions that fuel it and is rooted not in the conscious fulfillment of improvement, but in radical negativity. And theological language, empty protest as a ritual of negative theology. It’s what the Hindus call neti, neti, neti – not this, not this, not this. No utopia, no farther shore toward which we march, only the march, the shout, the placard, the negative vote, the refusal.
What I’m suggesting here can’t even become a new motive conscientious objection because the C.O. must back up his position with a set of positive ideals (not taking life, all war is evil, peace, human community). It’s not even anarchism, for an anarchist has a positive goal of the literal ending of our governmental forms. It is not libertarianism, which again has a positive set of beliefs that can be put in the programs of deregulating and dismantling.
What could be more unpopular than empty protest? Not only will you be seen as stupid because empty, but you will also be alone in right field and ninth in the batting order. I find it very hard to play the political game without falling into the usual American popularity contest, the public opinion poll. How does one enter the public fray and at the same time be unpopular? By this I mean I don’t even have the honor of standing for the oppositional unpopular position like a Mencken, Chomsky, Jerry Brown, Ventura. You, Michael [Ventura] can be counted on to define an unpopular position but never truly an empty one. Your protests have beef. We read you to hear the “wrong“ thing, whereas I want is to be applauded! Yet I am often roundly cursed (when understood) or, worse, approvingly smelted into someone else’s arguments (because misunderstood). (104; 105-106.)
. . . . .
Puritanism is no joke. It is the structural fiber of America; it’s in our writing, our wiring, or anatomy. And, if Freud is right that anatomy is destiny, then we all dissent from the Mayflower. Then there’s no hope for an aesthetic awakening. I can’t overcome Lifton’s “psyching numbing“ because it’s ground is puritanism. We are supposed to be sensually numb. That is the fundamental nature of puritan goodness. We are numb because we are anaesthetized, without aesthetics, aesthetically unconscious, beauty repressed. Just look at our land--this continent’s astonishing beauty--and then look at what we immigrants, Bibles in hand, priests and preachers in tow, have done to it. Not despoiling, not exploitation, not he profit motive; no, as a people we are void of beauty and devoted to ugliness.
Yes we each know that nothing so moves the soul as an aesthetic leap of the heart at the sight of a fox in the forest, of a lovely open face, the sound of a little melody. Sense, imagination, pleasure, beauty are what the soul longs for, knowing innately that these would be its secure.
Instead our motto is “just say no.“ And we pass laws to make everything “clean“ and “safe“-- childproof, tamperproof, fallproof, bugproof. Start each meal with a preop prep--iced and chlorinated water to numb the tongue, lips, and palate. Laws to protect children in a moving vehicle so they can be kept alive to be ignored, scolded, and homeless. Laws for order, once the inherent cosmos (the Greek word for aesthetic order) of the world is no longer sensed. This is the promised land, and the laws are still coming down from the hill. Prohibition is the ultimate law of the land. Watch school kids of eleven and twelve debate on TV whether or not to turn in a friend of his parents for smoking on the sly, because smoking is bad for the friend's health. Is this friendship or is this espionage for the sake of the law? (130-131)
. . . .
Critics of the American style of mind from de Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century on down have said this is not a land of ideas. We are superb at implementing, and making useful (practical?) Inventions, but we are not philosophers. Europeans think and American apply. The major psychological ideas with which we practice come from Europe. . . . (One of my own great difficulties is due to the many years I spent in Switzerland, so that I never quite made a comfortable connection with the American way of psychology.) I have never offered a testable hypothesis, applied for research grant, produced a program, found a gadget or a procedure that could be named after me, invented a “practical" test, elaborated an experimental model, or examined a particular population. I work mainly in a chair thinking, on my feet talking, in the library reading; it all goes on in my head while my body lives life. In this way, my work can be accused of being a head trip and not practical, because we believe, in America, that the head's activities--this head so full of blood and flushed with excitement of spirit—is not practical. But it’s not the mind that’s impractical or heady; it’s the burned out, ashen, conceptual language of academia and television that we have all been taught is the correct expression of thinking. It’s this neutral, flatline language that is heady, not the impassioned head, popping ideas like grasshoppers. (141)
. . . .
One thing is sure: ideas don’t belong to academics. You don’t have to have academic knowledge to have ideas. Knowledge might help work with an idea, enrich it, discriminate it more finely, or recognize its history – that it’s not the first time that idea ever moved through someone’s mind. So knowledge may save you the embarrassment of inflation and help you pick up some skills about polishing ideas. But knowledge is not necessary. You can distinguish things you have learned from ideas you have. Keeping these distinct – knowledge and ideas – ought to help you feel that you can ideate without an academic degree. When an idea comes to mind, it asks first of all to be listened to and that you attempt to understand it. If knowledge helps do this, then fine. But first entertain your visitor. (144)
N.B. Compare what Hillman says above with Hannah Arendt's distinction between knowledge and thinking (and implicitly "ideas") that she considered very thoroughly in her work The Life of the Mind: Thinking (1977). I find their respective ideas track closely.
. . . .
How [can] we evaluate an idea? Is the idea fertile, fecund? Does it make you think? Is it surprising, shocking? Does it stop you up from habits and bring a spark of reflection? Is it delightful to think about it? Does it seem deep? Important? Needing to be told? Does it wear out quickly? Especially: what does the idea itself want from you, why in the world did you decide to light in your mind? (145)
....
[M]y approach is, the world is getting worse and that’s correlated with therapy's concerns, and if we were less concerned with ourselves and paid more attention to the world, the world wouldn’t be getting worse. So, in your view, I’m still doing the therapy.
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