1935 6 March LECTURE 7 Zarathustra Seminar
Prof. Jung:
I think we can today go on to the next chapter, “Joys and Passions.”
My brother, when thou hast a virtue, and it is thine own virtue, thou hast it in common with no one. To be sure, thou wouldst call it by name and caress it; thou wouldst pull its ears and amuse thyself with it. And lo! Then hast thou its name in common with the people, and hast become one of the people and the herd with thy virtue. Better for thee to say: “Ineffable is it, and nameless, that which is pain and sweetness to my soul, and also the hunger of my bowels.”
What does he mean by that first sentence?
If I have a virtue, justice for instance, then surely I have it in common with other people; I cannot assume that I am the only one who has the virtue of justice.
Miss Hannah: Does he mean by that the virtue of being yourself? Because a long way back (Prologue, sec. 4) he uses virtue in that sense.
Prof. Jung: Yes, in those passages he means by “virtue” the value of personality, or one can say the self.
For the real value of a personality is always symbolized by a jewel, a treasure or something of the sort, because everything is centered round that central value which would be the self.
And that value can be called “virtue” because “virtue” has almost the meaning of magic power.
Therefore, the Latin word virtus was used to designate specific magic qualities, like the virtus of a medicine, or a metal, or a stone, for instance.
The virtus of the amethyst is that it protects one against intoxication, and the virtus of the horn of the rhinoceros is that, when made into a goblet, it protects one against
poison.
That is a Chinese idea; they imported rhinoceros horn from Africa for that purpose.
There was the same idea in Europe in the Middle Ages-you have probably seen those horn drinking cups.
Then virtus later on became simply the same mana quality of a brave and courageous warrior.
And later still it was supposed that people who followed a certain way, who observed certain laws or rules, acquired a virtue; for instance, if one lived an ascetic life, or performed certain ceremonies, one acquired the virtue or the man or the magic quality of a saint or a sorcerer; that was a new significance of the “virtue.”
Nietzsche takes it more in that sense, as effect, mana.
You see, another definition of mana is the idea of the quite uncommonly efficacious, and virtue would be an excellence or an efficacy of uncommon nature.
A man with virtus is an outstanding man, who has quality, value-one cannot say what it is exactly.
It is simply mana.
So Nietzsche’s idea would be that virtue is the thing which one has in common with none, because the highest virtue or virtus of a man is that he is himself.
Individuality, self-ness-not selfishness-is the one quality which he has in common with none, because the self is utterly unique, and inasmuch as the self is realized in an individual it means uniqueness.
And uniqueness means isolation, and it means also loneliness looked at from a human point of view, for it is differentiation, and a thing which is different is all by itself and not in any sort of participation; it is not connected by underground channels where the real life comes from.
It is really and properly isolated, and therefore comparable to none.
Now the passage: “To be sure, thou wouldst call it by name and caress it.” What about that?
Mrs. Adler: Is it not the rationalizing action of consciousness? He brings it to the ego.
Prof. Jung: You mean he would make it a conscious quality and thus a quality of the ego?
Mrs. Adler: A rational quality, just that, and not something he has to do.
Prof Fierz: He says, “When thou hast a virtue” he does not say “virtues.” It might be justice or any other virtue, and that is not what you mean by “personality.”
Prof Jung: Not exactly; that is the interesting thing.
Mrs. Leon: You spoke of the principle of justice as being a virtue, but if that is formulated in laws it would have a collective aspect and lose its mana.
Prof Jung: Well, that is something else. You see, when I speak of a virtue and call it ‘justice,” I simply take one example, and by that I am giving you the name.
Nietzsche starts with the idea that one has a virtue usually when one speaks of a virtue one means a specific one and then he goes on, “And it is thine own virtue”-which means specific to yourself.
You must realize that this is a virtue which you have in common with nobody else; it is an individual belonging, and he implies that you had better not give it a name.
He says, “To be sure, thou wouldst call it by a name”-meaning, naturally, that you are inclined to speak of a specific virtue, but as soon as you call it by a name, “Then hast thou its name in common with the people, and hast become one of the people and the herd with thy virtue.”
So don’t designate your virtue by a name, for you thus make it specific: it becomes just one of the virtues.
Mrs. Fierz: It is making it exoteric instead of esoteric.
Prof. Jung: You can put it like that.
For if you bring a thing which is nameless down into the sphere of the collective, you become part of collectivity, a herd particle; you have impoverished or reduced a uniqueness to a collective thing.
Then the highest value has sunk to the level of a coin that can be found in anybody’s pocket.
So this idea, as he expresses it, is, “Better for thee to say: ‘Ineffable is it, and nameless, that which is pain and sweetness to my soul, and also the hunger of my bowels.'”
Let thy virtue be too high for the familiarity of names, and if thou must speak of it, be not ashamed to stammer about it.
By giving a name to your virtue, you will disenchant it, lower it, deteriorate it to a collective level; and then it would not be your individual accomplishment.
It would be just a character quality and no longer the excellence of your uniqueness.
Miss Wolff: I think he explains also in the second sentence that giving a name and displaying an interest is to be on too intimate terms with it, and that can have the same effect upon himself. For if he is familiar, then it is a possession which he can put in his pocket, no longer a thing greater than himself. He becomes it.
Prof. Jung: That would be practically what Mrs. Adler said: it would be assimilating it to the ego.
If one can call it by a name and put it in one’s pocket, the ego would be on top-! have a virtue.
Giving a name to a thing generally has the peculiar effect of familiarizing it.
It is as if it were depotentiated; as by giving a name to a demon, one has power over the demon.
Therefore, one reads in the Book of the Dead that the Egyptians always put a book in the coffin of a dead king, containing the names of the gates and doors of the underworld, for they were only opened if he could call them by the right name.
So in Grimm’s fairy tale, that demon Rumpelstiltskin comes and works mischief until he is called by his name, and then he gets so angry that he immediately explodes and is finished because his real name is known.
Therefore, primitive kings or sorcerers have secret names: the name by which they are known generally is only a cover which conceals the real one.
If anybody should know their real name it might have an effect upon their life and welfare, so they hide it.
We have much the same custom.
As a rule we have two, and often three, names: first our family name and to be called by that is not injurious, but when you are called by your private or Christian name, you can be injured because that person has an immediate hand in your psyche.
For instance, if somebody suddenly calls out your Christian name in a crowd of apparent strangers, you will immediately be hit as if by an arrow.
Therefore, one has a family name and if possible a title, which is most protective; a family name is already a bit specific but you can hide any amount of God-knows-what vanities behind a title and are not injured.
For ordinary people a family name is quite good enough, but with the Christian name, the devil begins, particularly when the other sex calls you by it.
This is not true in America where I was amazed to find that anybody called anybody by the Christian name, and it is even made into a belittling diminutive.
That simply proves that the individual has been too highly familiarized there.
A lot of trouble arises on account of it; one is secretly undermined by it.
Prof. Fierz: I remember when I was in a big powder factory in Wilmington, the man with a broom who opened the doors called, “Hello, Charlie,” to the director, who was a very big man. It is as if one said to the President, “Good morning, Otto.”
Mr. Baumann: You spoke of people bringing their virtue down to the collective level, and I think it also happens that people put it into their personas. For instance, a man thinks he is being frank when he always tells every nonsense without thinking.
Prof Jung: That would be the effect of the familiarization of a virtue; you call it by a name and then you talk of it-you paint yourself with that war paint.
A man who always insists that he is exceedingly truth loving and honest, lies at the slightest provocation because he had familiarized his virtue.
Nietzsche is quite right when he says one should consider a good thing in oneself as an excellence of one’s own, as one’s uniqueness; one should not call it by a name.
For it does not matter what name one gives to it; if there is an excellence, it will be shown in many forms.
A just man will have value in many different quarters, not only in exercising justice; but if he says his keynote is justice you can be sure he is lying. He says it in order to cover up injustice.
So it is quite right to say, “Ineffable is it, and nameless”; it is something greater than oneself. It is one’s own uniqueness.
One reads in the Upanishads that when Prajapati is deliberating about the creation of certain parts of the world, he usually consults with his own greatness, as if his own greatness were something different from himself, some super-quality, not the quality which he can name and put into his pocket.
And that is the self.
So even Prajapati, the Atman of the world, has a self, something greater than himself; then his own greatness speaks to him.
Thus speak and stammer: “That is my good, that do I love, thus doth it please me entirely, thus only do I desire the good.”
Here he expresses the idea that having a virtue means a general indescribable good, a value that presides, one could say, over the whole of oneself; and you should not name it in order not to create the wrong appearance-as if you could put that good into your pocket and use it when it pleases you.
It should appear, even in your formulation, as something which is in your being generally.
It is always there and it will act when it pleases.
You see, that is at the same time a formulation for the relation to the self, as an everlasting presence that cannot be disposed of and that cannot be named-that is there self-evidently, and will work by its own virtue.
Then he says, Not as the law of a God do I desire it, not as a human law or a human need do I desire it; it is not to be a guidepost for me to super earths and paradises.
An earthly virtue is it which I love: little prudence is therein, and the least everyday wisdom.
The only quality he gives to it is that earthly quality, which is, of course, analogous to his calling the self “the body”; he wants to include the body as the visible appearance of the self.
He wants to make a whole of it, not only “a guidepost for me to super earths and paradises.”
Not only a soul meant for paradise, that is; he also means the body, the living unit.
And naturally if you take virtue as being a quality manifested in the whole of yourself, including the body, then there is little prudence in it and still less common sense.
You know, common sense always advises us to give names to things in order to control them; it is as if you could take a thing into your hands, make it small, and grasp it.
While if you deal with things to which you cannot give a name, you are confronted with an unknown quantity, and that always arouses your fear.
It is uncanny, particularly in insisting upon less prudence and common sense.
But prudence is an exclusion of certain ways.
It is our own foresight, and you know how far foresight leads us-not very far.
By prudence and common sense we might exclude a way which would lead us to the right place.
Of course on the other hand, if it is a matter of uncommon sense, then you need common sense.
Usually people with common sense are lacking in uncommon sense, and alas! people with uncommon sense lack common sense-and that is equally bad.
But that bird built its nest beside me: therefore, I love and cherish it-now sitteth it beside me on its golden eggs.
What kind of picture is this? What does it mean?
Mrs. Baumann: It is the uncommon sense idea.
Prof. Jung: This bird obviously means that earthly virtue which has so little prudence and common sense.
But I would like to know the meaning of this peculiar symbol. Why just such a funny picture?
Mrs. Stutz: It is sent by God, coming from heaven, but it develops out of nature itself.
Mrs. Adler: A bird is a spiritual fact, so this virtue does not come from the earth; it is an opposite conception.
Mr. Allemann: This earthly virtue has spiritual power in it, and it is a creative thing. It sits on golden eggs.
Mrs. Leon: But nesting also suggests that weaving quality of women; they sometimes weave nests instead of plots.
Mr. Baumann: Has it not the quality of a rebirth, a resurrection?
Prof. Jung: Now you are getting warmer!
Mrs. Sigg: It has something to do, perhaps, with the Holy Ghost and its motherly qualities.
Prof. Jung: Ah yes, it has very much to do with the Holy Ghost.
You see, when Nietzsche, a parson’s son, speaks of a bird with golden eggs, it has surely never the American meaning of “business.”
Dr. Strong: There is also the idea of self-perpetuation-going from bird to egg and then the bird again.
Prof. Jung: Yes, and the gold itself suggests permanency and duration.
Miss Wolff: Quite simply, it shows again that it is absolutely not his own doing; the bird came to him and Nietzsche just waits until the eggs are hatched.
Prof. Jung: So the bird would mean what? You are speaking of Nietzsche himself.
Mrs. Fierz: Zarathustra. And in as far as he is the wise old man, he can also be depicted as bird. It would be the Hamsa.
Prof Jung: Well, the Hamsa is a miraculous bird sure enough, and it is also a sort of phoenix, because the old wise man knows of the elixir of life.
He can give himself rebirth, always rise again from his ashes.
He is a great sorcerer, and he is a bird because he is a spirit.
You see, we could say that this bird is quality, virtue-made visible in the figure of
Zarathustra, the greater one in Nietzsche.
So this is a symbol of the self appearing in the form of a wise old man; in other words, the idea of the fact of the self is still enveloped by the symbol of the wise old man, in this case by the wise old bird, the Hamsa.
Mrs. Fierz: Professor Zimmer quoted an Indian legend in his Berlin Seminar which I think illustrates this. Markandeya, who is a very great saint, is wandering all over the world, and at the same time the world is the body of the God, so that actually he is inside the God’s body. Wandering thus through many countries and kingdoms and meditating about the marvels of the earth, the saint happens to arrive at the God’s mouth and suddenly stands on the surface of his body.
But he cannot recognize this because of the God’s maya.
What he sees instead is an endless ocean and in this ocean a mountain-like sleeping giant.
And just as Markandeya is going to ask the giant who he is, he is swallowed up again by the mouth of the god, and is wandering all over the world inside the god’s body.
Then, after a long time, Markandeya without his knowing arrives again at the god’s mouth and is again suddenly standing on the surface of his body.
This time he sees a baby playing under a tree, and the baby says: “Hello, Markandeya! Come here, my child, and be not afraid.”
Markandeya is terribly angry that a mere baby should be allowed to call him “child” and by his first name, instead of respectfully giving him his saintly titles.
But then the baby says: “I am your father and creator”; it reveals its eternal godhead to
Markandeya, so that the saint now knows.
But again he is swallowed up by the god’s mouth-and the interesting part of the story is this: that being inside of the body of the god again, Markandeya remembers him not as the god, but as the swan, as Hamsa.
So, what on a super personal level is the god, on our everyday level seems to be the swan, the bird of the wise old man.
Prof Jung: That is very interesting.
Well, because that memory is wisdom, it is the wise old man who remembers back through the ages into the time before man, when there were only the gods; so it was a memory of a divine world.
Professor Levy-Bruhl alluded to that bugari world of the Central Australian aborigines, a mythical period in the past of mankind, a sort of heroic age when men were demigods and animals; and it was like a dream.
They call dreaming by the same name.
So in the dreams one is in that original divine world, the world which is eternal, which lasts during the transitory world in which we are actually living and forever after.
It is always the world outside time and the sage is supposed to have the memory of it, and it is interesting that this memory is represented by an animal.
You see, it is necessary to pass through the stage of the animal in order to reach the absolute memory, because the ancestors are animal-like; therefore, it is always
represented by a snake or a bird or another animal, according to circumstances.
Mr. Baumann: But has not the bird rather the special quality of pointing to the future? In other Seminars we talked about birds bringing new ideas to people, showing them what they have to do.
Prof. Jung: That is the bird considered as a messenger.
But this bird functions rather differently.
He says the bird has built a nest in him; it is now firmly rooted.
When a bird builds his nest in your room, it means to stay.
So this bird has established itself in Nietzsche; it is his other psyche.
This memory, or the wise old man, the connection with the world outside time, is now within him and is going to hatch the golden eggs. “Gold” generally means value; also the virtue of gold is that it is in a way beyond time.
It does not oxidize, but remains the same.
That the eggs are golden, then, means highest value, greatest luck; and a number of them would mean fertility, many golden possibilities for the future.
They have nothing to do with the well-known hen that lays the golden eggs, meaning riches-spiritual riches are meant here, quite obviously.
And it is interesting that he speaks of the earthly virtue, meaning the virtue of the body, yet in the next sentence uses this spiritual symbol, an air being, a bird that has built its nest.
It would denote a sort of intuition in Nietzsche that the body of which he speaks is not without spirit; it is not a contradiction between body or matter and spirit, but is a body that lives, a spiritual body.
You see, this is really the old idea of the breath body, the subtle body, which is always represented either as bird or ghost, because it is smoke-like and has no weight.
It rises out of our coarse body and floats in the air, like a flying bird or a wreath of smoke.
You can find all these ideas in the psychology of the primitives, that gives real substance for such a peculiar paradox.
We must respect the fact that when Nietzsche speaks of the body, he does not exactly mean what we understand by a substantial or material body, but something that is spirit as well, and there is also that middle thing which the primitives call “the subtle body.”
Nietzsche was in a sort of trance condition when he wrote Zarathustra spoke of it in the beginning-and we have come across many places where such primitive images have simply welled up from the depths of the primitive unconscious.
Therefore, it is no wonder that entre autres we meet this most important concept of primitive psychology, the idea of the subtle body which is spirit as well as body.
It is the union of the two by this thing between.
And we cannot speak of psychical reality without remembering the fact that the psyche can also have very real effects which are performed through that something which is called “the subtle body.”
Thus shouldst thou stammer, and praise thy virtue.
By that he means you cannot possibly talk clever words about virtue, the uncommon efficacy of the self; you cannot say anything definite about it because it is greater than you.
You can only stammer as if in the presence of a greater one.
And you are right if you stammer and are embarrassed, not finding suitable terms or analogies.
Then you do justice to it. Once hadst thou passions and calledst them evil.
But now hast thou only thy virtues; they grew out of thy passions.
This is rather unexpected; it is as if a new thought were beginning here.
The question obviously has occurred to him: But why virtue? Virtue is something very positive, but where is the shadow? Where is the negative side of virtue? Where is vice?
And he comes to passion, because passion is supposed to be the mother of all vice: evil passions are surely vices.
So he cannot consider the idea of virtue without considering at the same time its negation.
You see, he makes something very great of his conception of virtue, and I think we are perfectly right in assuming that he really means the self.
Now the self surely is the greatest borderline concept we possibly could invent.
It is a great symbol, and it includes also the darkness.
We would be quite wrong in assuming
that the self is what we would call “wholly positive.”
It has its own negation, casting a shadow because it is also material, not only what we call “spiritual.”
We usually associate beauty and all sorts of divine things with the spirit, and are inclined to assume that all the darkness,
the heaviness, and everything bad is associated with the body.
Also by historical tradition one is inclined to make all of the spirit and very little of the body.
Nietzsche feels that here, and therefore he suddenly remembers, “Once hadst thou passions and calledst them evil.
But now hast thou only thy virtues; they grew out of passions.”
He is anticipating modern psychology when he sees virtue in connection with passions;
he understands that the self consists of pairs of opposites and that it is in a way a reconciliation of opposites.
But he does not say that here, so one must leave it out of consideration.
Thou implantedst thy highest aim into the heart of those passions: then became they thy virtues and joys.
And though thou wert of the race of the hot-tempered, or of the voluptuous, or of the fanatical, or the vindictive;
All thy passions in the end became virtues, and all thy devils angels.
Once hadst thou wild dogs in thy cellar: but they changed at last into birds and charming songstresses.
Out of thy poisons brewedst thou balsam for thyself; thy cow, affliction, milkedst thou-now drinketh thou the sweet milk of her udder.
And nothing evil groweth in thee any longer, unless it be the evil that groweth out of the conflict of thy virtues.
In speaking here of passions, of the origin of virtues, he does not treat this problem in the way psychology would treat it, of course.
We would be conscious of the fact that our virtues possess a shadow and that the shadow is just as real as the virtues.
At least I hope you have given up such illusions as the notion, for instance, that you are completely converted, that you are now an absolutely new man, and that all the former
sins have vanished.
I am sorry: that is an infantile illusion.
We cannot get rid of ourselves; we carry our body, and our shadow and everything else is as it always has been.
We can only hope to become balanced between light and shadow-that is practically all we can hope for, no more.
It is a catastrophic illusion to think that one can jump out of one’s skin and be an angel from henceforth.
But Nietzsche deals here with a psychology that creates good out of evil, and the connection is good.
It is surely true that there is even a causal connection between evil passions and corresponding virtues.
But it is not exactly as he puts it, that we make a virtue out of our devil.
Of course, in a way one can create the appearance of having created a virtue out of a
devil-humility out of vanity, for instance, and generosity out of miserliness; but if one has really created generosity out of miserliness, then it will be a miserly generosity.
One’s cleanliness will be an impurity at the same time, and one’s frankness will be a lie in a miraculous way, because one forgets that the shadow is still there.
One can create ten thousand angels but one’s ten thousand evil passions are right behind those angels: it is a mere facade.
A facade is very real. It is the front side of the house and the house would collapse if it had not a facade, but there is something behind it.
Otherwise a facade makes no sense.
In this way we can understand it then-that one can even create the illusion to oneself that “Henceforth naught of evil groweth in myself except that one evil which comes from the conflict of virtues.”
You see virtues, like all things which are named and specified, easily get into a quarrel; a virtue which is named has the disagreeable quality of being very imperious.
Justice, being named, wants to be nothing but justice, and of course it gets into conflict right away with compassion; one cannot be just and compassionate at the same time because justice must be hard and cruel, otherwise it is not justice.
Fiat justitia pereat mundus.
And true and essential compassion, compassion as it should be, from
the standpoint of man cannot be just. And so on.
So a man who really tries to be virtuous, having named his virtues that is, is always heading for tremendous moral difficulties, the so-called conflict of conscience, where the two goods clash.
Then he does not know whether he should be more compassionate or more just or more respectable or more moral,-or should he be more human?
The more he has all these marvelous virtues and the more he believes in them, the more he gets into a hell of a conflict between them; he will create one collision after the other between his own virtues.
So he says, My brother, if thou be fortunate, then wilt thou have one virtue and no more: thus goest thou easier over the bridge.
If you have only one virtue-provided you don’t name it-you escape the conflict because that one virtue gives quality to your personality, and that will make itself felt in all quarters of your life, not only in the one which it would strike if you gave a name to it.
For instance, if you say your virtue is justice, then within the realm of justice you are just, but outside of it you can be anything else; where justice as you understand it does not enter the question, there your named virtue simply would not play a role.
But if you don’t name it, then that valuable substance which produces justice can produce something else just as well-generosity or compassion, for instance. If you call it ‘justice”
then it must produce nothing but justice, because you have caught it in the cage of your concept.
You see, a concept is what you have grasped in that particular form; you have stolen that value and put it into a cage and then it can only produce what you say it should produce.
It is no longer a general value of personality.
Illustrious is it to have many virtues, but a hard lot; and many a one hath gone into the wilderness and killed himself, because he was weary of being the battle and battlefield of virtues.
Here he refers to one who has sustained too many moral conflicts, not between good and evil but between two goods, which is worse.
A battle between good and evil is easily won.
You can slay the devil by the aid of all sorts of helpful ideas and institutions, public support.
Everybody will shake your hand and congratulate you on having slain the dragon.
But to slay another virtue is harder: there you gain no recognition.
The just will say you are just, but others will say you have not been compassionate; and others will say, yes, you have been frank and honest yet you were not generous or compassionate.
For if you are honest and believe in honesty you will speak the truth, and you will make a hell of a mistake: you will be cruel, tactless, unjust and you can have every vice under the sun.
Just because you believe in that one virtue, you will have offended against all others.
My brother, are war and battle evil?
Necessary, however, is the evil; necessary are the envy and the distrust and the backbiting among the virtues.
You see, he puts it very plainly here: each ideal claims the whole man, for provided one names the virtue, each virtue claims its own essence.
If one says it is justice then it must be the jus test justice, otherwise justice is not satisfied and will keep on grumbling; if you allow your compassion to make you deviate from the path of justice, then justice will begin to complain.
And if your justice violates your feeling of compassion, then it will be compassion that is wailing and lamenting.
Again somebody is not content, and finally you are in the situation of that famous old parable of the man, his son, and the ass.
Lo! how each of thy virtues is covetous of the highest place; it wanteth thy whole spirit to be its herald, it wanteth thy whole power, in wrath, hatred, and love.
Jealous is every virtue of the others, and a dreadful thing is jealousy.
Even virtues may succumb by jealousy.
He is quite right, jealousy is the real character of virtues, of all ideas.
He whom the flame of jealousy encompasseth, turneth at last, like the scorpion, the poisoned sting against himself.
People in conflict between good and evil as a rule don’t undergo such a terrible battle as those in whom virtues are clashing, where two perfectly good things fight against each other.
That is the worst.
That is civil war where brothers are slaying each other.
It is a sort of poisonous war because you cannot deny that this idea is good and that idea is good and that they are irreconcilable.
Suicide may result from such a conflict more than from a case of clear good and evil; one would hardly commit suicide on account of the fact that one does not like to steal, but one might if one is in conflict between morality and compassion, say.
Mrs. Adler: That would only mean named virtues?
Prof. Jung: It is always under the supposition here that virtues are specified by names.
He says, “My brother, if thou be fortunate then wilt thou have one virtue and no more.”
That means an indistinct virtue, not a named one.
Mrs. Adler: If those virtues were not named, then the conflict would not be possible?
Prof. Jung: Well, of course if they are not formulated, such conflicts cannot take place; then it is the one value that rules the whole thing and you have not assumed the power by giving it a name.
You see, we usurp something by giving it a name.
We say it is this and nothing else, and think we have the purest substance of the thing when we name it.
It is like qualifying a thing, as when one says that this is such and such a man.
How can we say what a man is?-or what man is in general?
He is millions of things.
By saying he is such and such a man, you have classified him and then he is no longer free.
If he allows it, he will be forced into that category.
Usually we defend ourselves against being put into cages.
But the State puts everybody into a category, and popular movements do it, and the church-those who belong to it are marvelous people and otherwise they belong to the devil.
Or one is a German and beloved by God, and the other is a Frenchman and Satan’s own son.
You see, those are all names, and it is the same when you name or specify certain qualities.
I don’t say that this is all wrong of course, or that we have to give names is simply a tragedy.
But don’t forget that behind all names is the nameless and unutterable; beyond all our virtues there is one real virtue that has no name.
For virtues are gifts.
I may have the faculty of being kind as some one else has the faculty of playing the piano, and as others have the moral art: they just have the gift of being nice or being good.
Those are all gifts, and the poisonous thing is making a morality of it and imagining it to be a merit.
If you are musical it is no merit; if you are a red parrot it is no merit. It is just so.
So you see, if you don’t give names, then it remains more or less a natural fact.
It is not differentiated and it will work as something in nature will work.
For instance, a dog is jealous, voracious; he hates his fellow dog and he tries to get his bone.
But he has justice and even a sort of compassion in the measure in which a dog should have such virtues.
If you have a big dog and a small one and put the bone between them, then the bone is considered to be in the middle when it is nearer to the small dog than to the big one: the distance between the big dog and the bone can be greater than the distance between the small dog and the bone.
I have made that experiment with my own dogs.
If it is right in the middle, they hesitate as to which should take it; but if I put it a bit to one side the small dog takes it.
If I throw a ball, they both jump at the same time, but they always consider that the one who is first must get the ball, and the other desists; and if the ball is rolling towards one of them, then the dog on the other side desists.
It is really natural politeness. So primitives have exquisite manners.
They have immense virtues and immense vices, but they work more or less smoothly together, so that a fairly round individual appears.
Of course, it is wholly unconscious because it is not named. If they said, “Now I am compassionate, now I am just,” they would have an inflation and of course they would then be one-sided; they would be at once in conflict with their surroundings and with
themselves if they were capable of having a moral conflict at all.
Miss Kaufmann: I know that Nietzsche is right here, but I must say that to find a name for an experience is also a great experience.
What he means here perhaps only applies to people who have too much consciousness, and consciousness is a kind of imperative power.
But with the right kind of consciousness, to name it can be so beautiful; it has happened to me so many times that I got my balance just because I found a name which was just the right thing.
Prof Jung: Yes, there is a great merit in names.
It is tremendously important to give a name to a thing-it may really save you from demons and disintegration and chaos.
To be able to name things is man’s greatest prerogative.
But you can see what they made of it-having nothing but names.
And with a man like Nietzsche it is, of course, a different question.
We give too many names; we name things far too much, thereby killing possibilities which would otherwise function naturally.
We must be careful only to give names where we really know.
For instance, if you call a certain tendency or psychological movement in a man “sexuality,” then it is just sexuality and you have spoiled the whole thing: it becomes absolutely unmanageable and you can do nothing at all with it.
You make the same mistake if you call it “spiritual.”
If you give it a certain name you qualify it, put it into prison, into a drawer, or a cage, and you can no longer handle it because that name is all wrong.
But if you give the right name to a thing, ah, that is something else; there you have acquired a power over nature.
Science chiefly consists in an attempt of man to give the right names to things, and science is a great achievement of man.
Mr. Baumann: The Greek philosophical school made a great fuss about what they called the virtues, and it has a great influence upon the whole of science.
Was it partly because they had to put something up against Greek mythology?
Prof. Jung: That early philosophy was the great attempt of the human mind to free itself from the mythological level; as scholasticism was the heroic attempt of man to free his intellect from the evidences of facts, of immediate impressions, affects, and so on.
Therefore, that utterly detached manner in which they tried to think.
Dr. Escher: Can one call this process re-abstraction?
Prof Jung: Yes, one could designate it like that.
Giving a name to a thing creates a sort of abstraction, you remove a thing from life by having abstracted it; then in order to bring it back into life you have to undo the attempt, give up the name, and that would be re-abstraction.
Nietzsche is really trying that here.
He tries to dissolve the abstraction of differentiated concepts into nameless experiences.
He does so because he has been tremendously impressed by the utterly irrational experience of Zarathustra; he is filled with that experience and he believes in it, so he wants to convey it to everybody.
Therefore, this particular admonition: don’t name your virtue, in order that the virtue
may remain an unutterable value which will lead you in the right way.
Don’t use too much man’s prerogative of giving names, for thus you are not creating life substance but killing it.
Now, the idea of this last sentence, “He whom the flame of jealousy encompasseth, turneth at last, like the scorpion, the poisened sting against himself,” is that the one who is in a raging battle of ideas or moral duties will eventually kill himself.
He will go under in this fight .Ah! my brother, hast thou never seen a virtue backbite and stab itself?
This means again that those virtues which are named have a tendency to kill themselves.
If you overdo justice it is no longer justice; it is as if you jumped off the roof of your house: you fall dead.
You can kill each virtue by following up only its own tendency.
Compassion that goes beyond common sense one could say was no longer compassion; it simply becomes a vice and so it kills itself.
Now he says Man is something that hath to be surpassed: and therefore shalt thou love thy virtues,-for thou wilt succumb by them.
This is very interesting.
If you try to follow up your virtues, you cannot avoid naming them, and then you will get into that battle which will eventually destroy you.
And that is exactly what he wants: man ought to be surmounted.
This man must be killed in favor of the Superman; otherwise he cannot produce the Superman.
This, curiously enough, is a Christian idea, and I brought a picture which illustrates it.
It is a codex of the thirteenth century from the Bibliotheque de Besan con, Jesus-Christ crucifie par les vertus dont il avait ete le modele.
He is being crucified by all the named virtues; one is hammering the nails into his feet and his hands, another one is stabbing his side, and so on.
His virtues have really brought that painful death upon him-obviously a very Christian idea.
That is medieval philosophy, you see.
To that extent could they draw the conclusion that it was really the virtues, not the
devils, which brought Christ to his cross.
Now what does this symbolize?
Mrs. Fierz: Is it not the idea of the enantiodromia?-if you go to the very end of the thing then it must change.
Prof Jung: Oh yes, it is an enantiodromia, but more important here is the thought that it was not the evil people-those evil Jews or Romans or whoever they were-who crucified Christ.
It was his virtues, his greatness, that really led him to the cross; consciousness of those qualities, the named virtues, killed him, tore him to bits.
And the cross is, of course, the well-known individuation symbol, which means that individuation is the necessary outcome of moral development.
If you are consistent in the moral development you get into the moral conflict and into the role of Christ, namely, into the process of individuation.
That is not a weakness, it is strength-as it was not a weakness that Christ was crucified.
It was strength because it was voluntary; he made up his mind to the crucifixion.
And that is Nietzsche’s idea: you should live your virtues because they lead to your destruction, and only through your destruction can you create the Superman, which is of course the highest man, the self.
The act of destruction is the nailing to the cross in the Christian mystery. The cross is the symbol of individuation. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 424-440
