“To be a human being amongst individuals and to stay one without end, irrespective of in what circumstances… that’s what life is all about, that’s its activity,” the younger Dostoyevsky exulted in a letter to his brother simply after his dying sentence was repealed — dying, that nice clarifying drive for what it means to be alive, what the stakes and sanctities of dwelling are.
Within the two centuries since, our understanding of what it means to be human, to be mortal and imperfect and ablaze with feeling, has altered dramatically as we’ve entrusted the chilly logic of computation with answering the soul’s cry for connection, for creativity, for which means — one thing Dostoyevsky’s up to date Samuel Butler anticipated in his far-seeing admonition towards the dehumanization of humanity in the hands of our machines, one thing that has metastasized in right this moment’s technocratic cult of posthumanism.
In Jung vs Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age, Glen Slater bridges ecology, depth psychology, programs concept, and varied post-Cartesian philosophies to discover how this civilizational cult has effected “a widening divide between fabrication and authenticity, a lack of extra self-aware and soulful modes of dwelling, and a rise in nervousness and melancholy,” and what we will do to rewild the psyche and reclaim the soul.
He begins by drawing an analogy between the catalytic impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on awakening the modern ecological conscience and the necessity for a aware awakening from the harmful dream of posthumanism into which Silicon Valley has lulled us. Simply as the economic capitalism of Carson’s period commodified our planet’s ecosystems and elemental sources, Slater observes that digital capitalism has “turned our habits of thoughts into the earth’s most precious commodity”; simply as Carson pioneered the holistic view of ecology which may be our solely path to saving Earth, her up to date Carl Jung pioneered the holistic view of psychology that may, simply would possibly, save the human soul from dying by commodification.
Slater writes:
Whether or not or not we’ve turned the ecological nook, there may be extra consciousness about the way in which we relate to the world round us and the actions required to avert a local weather disaster.
Nevertheless, the world inside us, the internal lifetime of thought and emotion, is one other matter. Right here integrative understanding has been resisted. The human psyche, the ecosystem of the thoughts, with its personal constructions and dynamics, our relation to which is unquestionably as important as our relation to the outer world, now faces its personal important disruption, one which primarily parallels the syndrome Carson described… The depths of human nature have gotten tougher to acknowledge and shield. Ample info has furthered scientific information however not human understanding. It has as a substitute left us dazed, confused, and disoriented. Consideration, motivation, id, self-image, and the capability to purpose clearly and picture deeply are all impacted… Whereas some great benefits of digital applied sciences are impressed upon us at each flip, the speedy entry of those applied sciences into each side of life is evidently impacting our ecology of thoughts.
With an eye fixed to the urgency of “transferring past objectification of the earth and of the our bodies and minds that inhabit it,” he provides:
The technosphere now overlays the ecosphere and we can not assist however inhale its post-industrial gases. Virtuality has begun to displace actuality, making the bottom of human existence exhausting to discern… The human psyche and the character of the entire particular person are usually not solely struggling on this technospheric atmosphere, the struggling has itself been given over to technological options, leading to a vicious cycle.
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The penchant for digital methods of relating, increasing religion in AI, and the one-sided training designed to service these items are combining to generate reductive conceptions of psychological life. We’re, specifically, discounting the deeply human… the important qualities of human expertise, which prolong from the instinctual patterns that form primary conduct to the timeless values that mildew the cultural creativeness. The deeply human anchors the vertical axis of internal understanding; it grounds the ecology of thoughts. It is usually what connects us to the more-than-human. In our period, nevertheless, an nearly unique dedication to a horizontal axis of knowledge gathering threatens this verticality and grounding. That is resulting in a world drowning in info and thirsting for understanding.
On the coronary heart of this civilizational disaster is the systemic compartmentalization of our expertise, evident within the core polarities and dichotomies of Western tradition — previous and future, internal and outer, matter and spirit. Pulsating beneath all of it is our dissociation from the lifetime of the physique, which connects us to the lifetime of the Earth and the lifetime of the universe. All the things lovely that we contact and see and listen to — birdsong, a dawn, a kiss — is a bittersweet reminder that we’ve a physique and are due to this fact mortal. Dissociation thrives on the denial of death that started with our ancestors’ mythologies of immortality and is culminating in Silicon Valley’s lurid and profitable desires of redesigning human nature, of downloading the thoughts onto disembodied machines and lowering the soul to a datum.
Pointing to Jung’s timeless cosmogony of the unconscious because the antidote to this damaging delusion, Slater writes:
Jung’s comprehension of the depths of human nature constitutes an incisive counterpoint to the assumptions of posthumanism and to the dissociative bubble that presently fosters these assumptions… Jung sheds mild on the self-regulating nature of the psyche and the archetypal types behind this — types we could select to miss however can not in the end dismiss. These types pertain to mind construction, anatomy, and advanced patterns of notion and conduct. However additionally they mirror the bigger rhythms of the cosmos and are seemingly woven into the material of life itself. Jung pointedly demonstrates that at the same time as we’ve embraced purpose and science, the archetypal world of non-rational impulses and non secular concepts have continued to unconsciously affect our ideas and actions.
Jung’s crowning contribution was to ask an understanding of the psyche as the muse of all notion, expertise, thought, feeling, and motion — the wellspring of our humanity. In exploring the psychology of the unconscious with all of its interlaced convolutions — archetypes and complexes, projections and introjections — Jung illuminated the way in which our desires and fantasies unconsciously form the course of our lives, the way in which our arts and sciences cohere into an unlimited collective unconscious that shapes the course of our civilization. With an eye fixed to Jung’s legacy, Slater writes:
It’s the psyche that incorporates the pursuit of the angelic, the claims of the animal physique, and the constructions and dynamics that be part of the 2. It’s the psyche that generates and insists upon the symbolic expressions of tradition, which are sometimes based mostly on the transformative and aspirational energy of unusual, even elemental, issues — mountains and rivers, suns and moons, fireplace and rain — thereby reminding us of the inextricable bond between thoughts and world. If cosmic matter has given rise to consciousness, and we at the moment are known as to know the character of consciousness, realizing that fascinated about our pondering is the mandatory companion of any exploration and understanding of the universe that surrounds us, our grasp of the internal world turns into simply as very important as our grasp on the outer world — maybe much more so.
Practically a century after the Swiss poet, thinker, and linguist Jean Gebser made his exquisite case for the evolution of consciousness, Slater displays on Jung’s legacy and writes:
Godlike energy necessitates godlike duty. This begins with self-awareness, which is rooted in a sober consideration of the human psyche, essentially the most vital a part of which is shedding mild on the shadow aspect of our willful pursuits… Will and purpose alone can not kind a seat of clever company — a much more expansive consciousness is required.
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An enlargement of consciousness is crucial if we’re to make accountable use of the transformative energy in our palms… With divine steerage largely past our secular imaginative and prescient, we’re left to look inside for one thing deeper than our controlling inclinations and to look with out to understand the steerage of nature’s intelligence. Steerage should in the end come from dialogue with these marginalized sources of data and from the cultural creativeness, which shapes this dialogue. The outcome will likely be a “co-creation” — a partnership between innovation, self-knowledge, and a cosmology befitting this age. Such a co-creative course of will mitigate and form our applied sciences in addition to generate alternatives for religious renewal.
Such co-creation, Slater argues, calls for a reanimated view of existence — one which “counters the commodification of all issues that’s at the moment consuming us,” one which “conveys a confluence of spirit and matter — the very means by which a way of soul is generated.” He writes:
A reanimated world is one through which spirit and matter are usually not simply equally regarded however acknowledged as mutually dependent. The nice activity of this late trendy period is thus to deliver collectively what the religious preoccupations of the previous world and the fabric focus of the brand new world have torn aside. The psyche reveals us this dependency at any time when an individual or group makes an attempt to embrace one with out the opposite, in the way in which the uncared for aspect begins to rule the unconscious… However the earth course of itself suggests we rediscover nature as spirit in addition to perceive it as matter — nature as presence, intelligence, and root supply of inspiration and creativeness… Each thoughts and earth are calling for views able to marrying these dimensions of actuality.
Countering this fragmentation of actuality requires, above all, studying to withstand our dissociative tendencies and belief our feelings — for, as thinker Martha Nussbaum observes in her masterwork on the intelligence of the emotions, “feelings are usually not simply the gas that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they’re components, extremely advanced and messy components, of this creature’s reasoning itself.” Slater considers the constructing blocks of this self-trust:
Such belief begins with a pure appreciation of emotional intelligence and the guiding potential of this intelligence, which may really feel prefer it emanates from a will of its personal. This belief could develop over a very long time or it might come as a sudden life-lesson. However few issues past the contemplation of emotional responses open the door to the deeply human and the notice of getting an internal associate [that] operates other than aware, rational path. To be stuffed with emotion is to be animated by one thing despite ourselves; maybe for this reason we find yourself frequently conversing with the unhappiness or anger that grips us. Feelings like these stand in want of negotiation, mollification or maybe simply extra consideration. Usually, once we wish to preserve transferring on, the feelings won’t permit it. And typically once we would select to carry again, feelings cost forward.
As a result of our feelings are a fundament of our human nature, which is itself a fractal of Nature, they’re the uncooked materials for the co-creative course of that provides an antidote to the dehumanization of humanity. Slater writes:
We’re affected by need for extra satisfying methods of being, outrage about all that’s frequently exploited and destroyed, worry of what stresses and overwhelms, and disgrace about taking part within the machinations of all of it. To contemplate the way in which emotion comes upon us, from a nature we name “ours,” all of the whereas being a department of Nature itself, calls into query whether or not these feelings even belong to us or to the sufferings of the world, and we’re being directed to really feel and reply on its behalf. In different phrases, our animation often is the world’s means of chatting with us, and thus be an indispensable dimension of the co-creative course of. Recognition of the autonomous intelligence of those deep emotional responses could also be an invite to attune ourselves to the presence of the earth’s personal intelligence — or intelligences.
It’s the psyche that bridges these areas of intelligence, the internal and the outer, the human and the cosmic, dying and life. Slater writes:
The psyche, which is clearly grounded in nature, additionally leads us past this floor, into a priority with future and leaving some hint of ourselves in service to humanity… We neither must lean on notions of a spirit that actually departs the physique, nor on fantasies of downloading our minds. Reasonably, we settle for that the substance of psychic expertise, collected over a lifetime, marks all the pieces we do and everybody round us. And such a marking may be dreamed on. Life and dying thus intertwine to supply defining qualities of being.
In a passage evocative of James Baldwin’s soulful insistence that “it is necessary… to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light,” and that “everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light,” Slater provides:
The surprise of psychological life is that this dimming of the ego-light permits the notion of one other mild, one which has been within the background all alongside… Posthumanism brightens the ego-light, the sunshine of the mind and can that blankets the sunshine of pure consciousness the clever ape presents to us. It fails to reconcile our religious attain and our instinctual floor. It cracks cultural vessels which have all the time incubated this reconciliation and truncates reasonably than extends the human experiment.
Lensing Jung’s legacy via the sunshine of thinkers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, William James, Yuval Harari, and Oliver Sacks, Slater goes on to discover and rejoice the countercultural motion within the margins of this techno-trance — methods of seeing and of being that, not like posthumanism, refuse to exclude magnificence, eros, and transcendence from the human story, a narrative advised within the language of the soul, irreducible to knowledge. Complement Jung vs Borg with Iain McGilchrist on how we render reality, James Bridle on rethinking intelligence, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on bridging the scientific and the sacred, then revisit Jung himself on the most important paradigm for living.
