1935 12 June LECTURE 6 Zarathustra Seminar
1935 12 Jung LECTURE VI Zarathustra Seminar
Prof Jung:
What is the connection between this new chapter, “The Preachers of Death,” and the preceding one?
Mrs. Baumann: I think the last one also preaches death; there is only the choice between the heights and the kennel of dogs, and if one gives that up, one has no more life in the body.
Prof Jung: Have you a particular passage in mind to substantiate your idea?
Mrs. Baumann: At the end of the chapter he says. “But it is not the danger of the noble man to turn a good man, but lest he should become a clusterer, a scoffer, or a destroyer.” And the last thing of all is, “Cast not away the hero in thy soul! Maintain holy thy highest hope!”
Prof Reichstein: I should say the young man was meant to be the life, and now comes the contrast: he cannot live his life.
Prof Jung: You think the connection is really an enantiodrornia?
Yes, the enantiodrornia begins where the young man is struck by lightning.
Throughout that preceding chapter Zarathustra preaches the heroic attitude, but he realizes that there is a young man who strives to follow him, and later, on the hills, the young man says: “My destruction I longed for when I desired to be on the height, and thou art the lightning for which I waited.”
Zarathustra is the thundercloud from which the lightning issues, which means that he is not human, but a spirit, a demon full of dangerous energy; that is, of course, the quality of a being so pregnant with thought.
Consequently, when the young man, who is not up to such intensity of tension, comes up to Zarathustra, up to the level of the demon, he is as if struck by lightning.
This would be insanity; it is the sudden explosion in the head which many cases of schizophrenia describe.
They experience such things in the beginning, saying that something snapped in their head, for instance, or there was an explosion like a pistol shot-and from that moment on they are different.
There is a special term for it in French, le trouble cenesthesie.
Cenesthesie comes from the Greek koinos, meaning general sensation.’
And these peculiar troubles are particularly in the head.
They are sort of preliminary symptoms; the continuity of the mind breaks up into parts like a surface of ice or a mirror.
One finds a characteristic symptom in the pictures such people draw, the so-called breaking lines.
For instance, they make the picture of a tree, and then some part of the tree is broken off and they substitute a different design, something which does not fit in; it is like a break which goes right through the picture, as if a piece had broken off and another piece, an entirely different construction, joined on there.
Such people have at least one breaking line, or even several, in their mental condition.
It doesn’t mean that they are necessarily insane, for such things also happen with people who only have a neurosis, where they are perfectly capable of improvement.
I remember the case of a woman who was not insane at all although she had an insane sister.
She had a neurosis, and drew a picture which contained a number of breaking lines; it gave me quite a shock when I sat it.
But she explained to me that it had been made in a moment of terrible emotion and that the chaotic impression it produced was due to that, though she could not describe what the emotion had been.
You see, that shows that it was the right diagnosis; a breaking line means that there is a split, and people with bad splits cannot explain it or they come to an utterly irrational conclusion.
It is just as if they could not jump across that split; they can explain thus far and then are stopped by an unknown emotion.
But this woman was able to explain the breaking lines as emotion.
Then I told her she had better try to bring out that emotion, to make another picture that would express it.
Now in the first picture she had drawn a human figure, herself, but completely dissolved or exploded by breaking lines, an eye here, a hand there and a foot somewhere else, like a corpse that had been exploded into many parts by a shell or a high explosive-such deep emotions have that shock effect as if a projectile had entered the body and exploded it completely.
While in the next picture she represented herself as whole but confronted with a terrible snake, and that snake was the cause of her emotion: it was the Kundalini snake.
For when the snake raises its head, the hissing of the snake, as they describe it in the Tantric Yoga, has the effect of a tremendous shock.
That is not always true, but in people with a delicate constitution, as she had, it produces a shattering effect.
But the fact that afterwards she could produce a picture which was completely composed, where the figures were whole and logical, showed that she could bridge the gap, could strengthen the breaking lines.
These are of course not always indicated in the same way; there may be a more or less symmetrically composed picture, and then in a corner there is an intrusion which contains something else.
Or perhaps a part of a human figure (or an animal or whatever it is) is dissolved into strange things.
So it is not always like split glass, but also can be like a growth, a tumor for instance.
When you look at such a growth in the microscope in reality, you see the regular tissue of the body and then suddenly that dissolves into a strange chaotic accumulation of cells which don’t show a trace of the former healthy tissue.
So you can describe it in different ways.
Now you see, that is the lightning which destroys the young man, who is of course, in comparison to the extreme old age of the archetype, always a young man-the wise old man is at the least two million years old.
Mrs. Baumann: In the end of that last chapter I understood that there was a demonstration of Christianity which he did not realize at all, and I was just wondering whether that would not be the disturbing element, whether that might be what I meant when I called it death.
Prof Jung: Oh yes, that whole preceding chapter, “The Tree upon the Hill,” is of course due to the overvaluation of the spirit, as indeed the whole drama of Zarathustra is based on that prejudice.
In the age in which he lived he could not help identifying with his figures.
First of all, he was suffering from the materialistic and rationalistic attitude of his time, which naturally assumed that one’s thoughts were oneself, with no objectivity-as people still identify with their thoughts and think they can manage them as they want, because they feel them as utterly subjective.
And then there was the Christian conviction. That was just the paradox of the nineteenth century.
On the one side they had a perfectly rational mechanistic attitude, and on the other side
they were capable of being good Christians where the spirit was everything.
During the week a professor confessed a mechanistic theory of psychology, and on Sunday he went to church and believed God knows what.
They had two drawers: in the one a materialistic philosophy and in the other the Christian belief; so even if they did not openly believe in the spirit or the Christian dogma, at least in their practical life they followed Christian morality.
That can happen to the most enlightened minds.
For instance, people adopt an Eastern creed like Taoism or any other Eastern system, and then, quite inconsistently with their conviction, they live an ordinary life fitted to the church.
But the two things don’t work together.
Brahmanism is not meant for good Christians, nor is the Christian life meant for Brahmanism.
They simply and it is extraordinary how such a thing can remain quite unconscious.
You see, Nietzsche certainly does not believe in God any longer: he thinks he has done with that-God is dead-and then here is another overestimation of the spirit just as good as any Christian one.
Without questioning, he identifies with Zarathustra; he personifies him, calls him a different name.
Nietzsche knows he is not Zarathustra, yet he nevertheless identifies, instead of treating Zarathustra as a demon or at least a disembodied spirit.
If he would only assume that Zarathustra was really the spirit of the old Zarathustra of Persian times, he could realize that he was speaking and not himself, and then he would never climb a hill to meet Zarathustra-in order to be struck by lightning.
But he was a child of his time; he did not know psychology.
If he had known what we know nowadays probably his case would have been better, I don’t know.
We always must recognize, however, that we would not know what we know today if Nietzsche had not lived.
Nietzsche has taught us a lot.
When I read Zarathustra for the first time as a student of twenty-three, of course I did not understand it all, but I got a tremendous impression.
I could not say it was this or that, though the poetical beauty of some of the chapters impressed me, but particularly the strange thought got hold of me.
He helped me in many respects, as many other people have been helped by him.
Therefore, we cannot say he should have done differently; we only must remember,
if we take it to ourselves, that in reading Zarathustra, we must apply certain criticism, for it is very clear where Nietzsche went the wrong way.
Otherwise one is simply infected by that identification, because we all suffer from the prejudice of the spirit; of course, it is wonderful to identify with that thing which becomes spiritual, but when we study Nietzsche critically, we see the dangers.
Now, because his teaching is imbued by the identification with the
spirit Zarathustra, he really teaches something which would mean a mass slaughter.
For by far the greatest majority of people could not stand such an identification, as he himself could not stand it and as nobody can stand it; it can be stood for a certain time but then it is just too much and one collapses: one goes crazy.
That realization is not coming to the foreground, however.
You get a certain idea, as Mrs. Baumann has rightly pointed out, in the last sentence, where he conjures his audience, “But by my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in thy soul.”
There must be a mighty good reason for casting away the hero; otherwise he would not admonish them not to do so.
Sure enough, the hero should not be cast away. It is poison when you identify but it is not if you don’t.
But Nietzsche had not that point of view; he simply could not think it.
His idea obviously was, either you are a philistine or a little bourgeois; you are fat and eat and drink and sleep and so on, or you must be a hero, and he grows afraid, obviously, that man will lose the hero ideal, being threatened by so many dangers.
Therefore, in spite of all that could be said as counter-argument, he says, don’t give up that hope, don’t give up that hero ideal.
He is in a way, by his identification with Zarathustra, a preacher of death.
That insight slowly dawned upon him unconsciously in the preceding chapter and now he must say something about those people who are preaching death.
But since it has been an unconscious thought he naturally projects it upon others; he does not know that he is one of the foremost.
It is the rule that unconscious thought is projected, so you always discover it round you.
For instance, people who have erotic fantasies of which they are not aware, must surely become aware of what they must find in themselves through their projections-like those people who join the society for the suppression of pornographic pictures.
There was an Englishman who was a member of such a society.
He collected all the pornographic photographs he could lay hold of-of course only in order to destroy them.
He had five thousand, and then he announced in a meeting of the society that before they were destroyed, he wished very much that the society would take the trouble to inform themselves of the evil of the world by looking at them.
And they all stuck their heads together to look at those five thousand pictures, so they had a good meal before the final catastrophe when the pictures were burned.
Naturally, nobody in his sound senses would believe that they did not enjoy it.
Then afterwards they had the voluptuousness of believing they had done a good thing for the world.
As if they had not helped the pornographic business by buying all that stuff-many factories and printing-presses benefitted by that large deal.
Well now, this chapter begins.
There are preachers of death: and the earth is full of those to whom desistance from life must be preached.
Who are those people to whom renunciation ought to be preached?
Prof. Reichstein: I think the connection is here with those wild dogs in the cellar. He wants to kill them, and if he is beginning to preach of death, that will be the natural part which must be killed. Therefore, those men “to whom desistance from life must be preached” are the simple men.
Prof. Jung: Well he obviously means that those people who are not able to live up to the heroic idea had better disappear; of course, those are the ordinary people who have no dogs in the cellar.
But who has dogs in the cellar? No normal person.
First of all, it is against simple decency to lock up dogs in the cellar: you wouldn’t do that; you have dogs in your rooms, in your garden.
They are nice companions for man, very friendly things; it would be abnormal to lock them in the cellar.
So the ordinary normal human being has his dogs on the surface; he lives with them and to a certain extent the master is equal to the dog and the dog to the master.
You often notice that peculiar likeness between a dog and his master: they take on the same expression, and you can liken dogs to certain human types.
There is an inner relationship between man and dog; therefore an old hunter says it is good for the dogs to sleep with the hunters.
The horse is also a friend of man.
And Philo stratus, in his book about Apollonius of Tyana, says that elephants like man very much; he heard them whispering among themselves in the night, and they were very sad because they were afraid they had not pleased man during the day.
They were ambitious to be appreciated by him.
This is a very precious piece of animal psychology, inasmuch as our own psychology is similar; many people worry for hours in the night lest they have not lived up to the expectations of others, have not done the right thing by them, have not shown love
enough.
So you see, the ordinary normal individual lives together with his animals and therefore he cannot and will not overreach himself.
Now, those are the people that Nietzsche says are all too many; they are superfluous when it comes to the heroic ideal.
Full is the earth of the superfluous; marred is life by the many too many.
May they be decoyed out of this life by the “life eternal”!
That is of course a hit at Christianity which preaches the importance of eternal life and the relative unimportance of the temporal life; he says it is quite well for them to die out, to pass away into eternal lifebecause they make nothing of this life.
‘ The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, tr. F. C. Conybeare (London and New York, 1912).
Philostratus (a Lemnian, born ca. 170), faithfully recorded the sayings of Apollonius, who was born 3 B.C. and lived a hundred years.
Traveller, miracle worker, Pythagorean, ascetic, he did not know of Jesus but was a kind of rival.
“The yellow ones”: so are called the preachers of death, or the “black ones.” But I will show them unto you in other colours besides.
What are these yellow ones?
Mr. Allemann: They would be Buddhists.
Prof Jung: Yes, and the black robed ones are usually Christian, Protestant as well as Catholic, because black is the official color, though it originated really in the East where they wore black cloaks.
The early Christian monks wore black cloaks, as they still do in the Greek orthodox church; die Trauernden, the mourning ones, was the official title for monks in the second, third, and fourth centuries.
So black, which signifies mourning, death, abnegation, became characteristic of the priests.
In official functions they used other colors, white expressing innocence, purity, red expressing love; and yellow comes in too, but I think that was a later invention.
Blue is not a church color.
Mr. Allemann: Violet?
Prof. Jung: Yes, but violet, purple, and crimson appeared much later; the original colors were white, black, yellow, and red.
And curiously enough, these were the mystical colors of the four elements in alchemistic philosophy; they must have to do with some original conception.
They would be the colors of the four functions; what we call now psychological functions were originally elements or temperaments.
Our four functions are four characteristics of consciousness, but when there was no psychology, when one only knew the differences between human beings, one spoke of temperaments, meaning emotional differences, the melancholic, or sanguine, or choleric, or phlegmatic temperaments.
The phlegmatic person is the one with slow cold humors; the melancholic has a very black bile and is very depressive; the choleric is an irritable or irascible personality, easily inflammable or impulsive; and the sanguine is the optimistic, gay, easygoing person.
These were explained by a particular condition of the so-called “humor,” a fluid, the humidity or the juices of the body.
This idea of the four temperaments is of antique origin, the first attempt to classify
people on the horizontal, one could say, but there was no particular value attached to it.
Another attempt at the classification of human beings in antiquity was the vertical system: the three stages, hylikos, psychikos and pneurnatikos-the material man, the psychical man and the spiritual man.
The temperaments were linked up with the four elements-fire, earth, water, and air-and they also were often characterized by four colors.
In the Eastern Lamaistic mandalas, one again finds four colors-white, red, green and yellow; but in the west green is not a church color because it is the color of vegetation, which has nothing to do with the church and the spirit.
It is peculiar that blue was not used but it just wasn’t.
Mrs. Baynes: The Virgin’s robe is nearly always blue.
Prof. Jung: Yes, in art, but that has nothing to do with the official colors of the ritual; they call them church colors, Kirchenfarben, and they coincide with these very ancient alchemistic colors.
There is a passage in one of the Latin pseudo-Hermetic writings where they speak of
the vulture as the spiritus volatilis rising from the black mother: Vultur in cacurnine mantis rnagna voce clarnet; ego surn ater et albus, rubens et citrinus, meaning: “The vulture upon the top of the mountain cries with loud voice, ‘I am white and black and red and citron.'”
That is, he is the one that unites the four qualities, being above the temperaments, in the language of those days.
With us it would mean the one that is neither thinking, feeling, sensation, nor intuition, but above the four functions.
The meaning in alchemistic philosophy also was that the four must come together into one, and they tried to express it in the material chemical process by uniting the four elements-fire, earth, water, and air-or more psychically, uniting the four temperaments into one.
The one, that central thing, was called by many names, the lapis philosophorurn, aurum nostrum, our gold, (which was not the ordinary gold) and many other metaphors.
It was very clearly not a chemical body, and one cannot say it was spiritual, because it was as much matter as spirit.
It was symbolic, and held a central position; as for instance, the Lamaistic mandala is by no means in heaven, but is always embedded half in the earth and half in the upper world.
The yellow robed ones are surely the Buddhists because the official color is that orange yellow of their robes.
It was originally a disreputable color worn by the low castes as a sign of humility and abnegation.
The Jews were always characterized by yellow in the Middle Ages; they were made to wear either yellow hats or a yellow ribbon, and in Basel, as late as I865 Jews had to produce a yellow identification card at the gates of the city if they wanted to enter.
Then the quarantine flag is yellow, meaning contagion, look out! Now we will continue,
There are the terrible ones who carry about in themselves the beast of prey, and have no choice except lusts or self-laceration.
And even their lusts are self-laceration. To whom does he refer here?
You know, Nietzsche had great historical knowledge.
Mrs. Baynes: Does he not mean those Christians who first sowed tons of wild oats and then went into the desert and mortified the flesh?
Prof. Jung: Exactly.
He could easily mean a man like Raimundus LuiIus or Ignatius of Loyola or St. Augustine or Tertullian, who first led very wild lives and then suddenly turned against themselves, turned to self-laceration; it was the same wildness of instincts, only it was turned to a spiritual purpose.
They have not yet become men, those terrible ones; may they preach desistance from life, and pass away themselves!
It is a very curious thing, but men like Ignatius of Loyola were really heroes; Loyola died among the Moors as a missionary, died the death of a martyr, and martyrs were heroes-only for the purpose of the spirit, were they heroes.
And here Nietzsche sees very clearly to what heroism leads; he himself says to make a god of thy seven devils.
He also gets sweetness out of his cruelty, transforms wildness into another purpose.
But he only sees that in other people, and he thinks it is there something quite different.
But whether it is a Nietzsche or an Ignatius of Loyola or any other who turns round and sacrifices himself or lacerates himself for his purpose, he has a heroic attitude.
Nobody becomes a hero without turning against himself to a certain extent, for everybody has that rabbit heart within, which defends itself to the last against the hero attitude; if one has only an inkling of heroism one feels very much how one has to turn against oneself.
But otherwise one gets nowhere.
That particular reproach, that they have not even become men, shows that he sees the inhumanity very clearly, but identifying with Zarathustra is just as inhuman.
There are the spiritually consumptive ones: hardly are they born when they begin to die, and long for doctrines of lassitude and renunciation.
They would fain be dead, and we should approve of their wish!
Let us beware of awakening those dead ones, and of damaging those living coffins!
They meet an invalid, or an old man, or a corpse-and immediately they say: “Life is refuted!”
But they only are refuted, and their eyes, which seeth only one aspect of existence.
Shrouded in thick melancholy, and eager for the little casualties that bring death: thus do they wait, and clench their teeth.
Or else, they grasp at sweetmeats, and mock at their childishness thereby: they cling to their straw of life, and mock at their still clinging to it.
Their wisdom speaketh thus: “A fool, he who remaineth alive; but so far are we fools! And that is the foolishest thing in life!”
To what does grasping sweetmeats refer?
That must be a different case. Surely he does not refer to any religious system.
Mrs. Baumann: Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die.
Prof. Jung: Yes, the Epicurean point of view, the ironical worldly standpoint, which is by far the most frequent form of philosophy.
Their idea is that it is foolish to live at all, but alas, one lives and makes the best of it.
It means nothing but it is a sort of friendly habit to exist.
This is an absolutely practical philosophy which has many followers.
“Life is only suffering”: so say others, and lie not.
Then see to it that ye cease! See to it that the life ceaseth which is only suffering!
And let this be the teaching of your virtue: “Thou shalt slay thyself!
Thou shalt steal away from thyself.” To whom is he referring here?
Mrs. Crowley: To Schopenhauer.
Prof Jung: Of course. Nietzsche was a great admirer of Schopenhauer, but later on he became his opponent.
Schopenhauer’s point of view became anathema to him because it was very Buddhistic; he was overcome by a great compassion for humanity and the undeniable suffering of life, and therefore said that one should simply cease to will life in order to put an end to that whole phantasmagoria of existence.”
“Lust is sin,”-so say some who preach death-“let us go apart and beget no children!”
“Giving birth is troublesome,”-say others-“why still give birth? One beareth only the unfortunate!”
And they also are preachers of death. What famous man would he be indicating here?
Mrs. Baynes: It might be Tolstoy, that was his doctrine.
Dr. Elliot: Not in Nietzsche’s day; Tolstoy did not have a philosophy as a young man.
Mrs. Sigg: Malthus?
Prof Jung: Yes, the birth control man, he wrote before the middle of the nineteenth century, I think between 1840 and 1850, and started a huge noise all over Europe.
Of course Nietzsche was much impressed by Mal thus because everybody was impressed then.?
“Pity is necessary,”-so saith a third party. “Take what I have!
Take what I am! So much less doth life bind me!”
Were they consistently pitiful, then would they make their neighbours sick of life.
To be wicked-that would be their true goodness.
But they want to be rid of life; what care they if they bind others still faster with their chains and gifts!
Now to whom does this refer? “Take whatever I have. Take whatever I am.”
Mrs. Crowley: It could refer to monks.
Prof Jung: Oh no, they never say to take whatever they possess; they never were quick at giving.
Mrs. Crowley: I thought they gave everything to the monastery.
Prof Jung: Yes, but they had very good cellars.
Miss Hannah: It sounds Christian. Christ himself preached it.
Prof. Jung: He is not modern enough, and Nietzsche has already dealt the Christians one mighty blow.
After Malthus we must expect somebody a bit more modern.
Mr. Allemann: Marx.
Prof. Jung: Yes, the communistic theory and such ideas, which originated in the second part of the century.
And ye also, to whom life is rough labour and disquiet, are ye not very tired of life? Are ye not very ripe for the sermon of death?
All ye to whom rough labour is dear, and the rapid, new, and strange-ye put up with yourselves badly; your diligence is flight, and the will to self-forgetfulness.
If ye believed more in life, then would ye devote yourselves less to the momentary.
But for waiting, ye have not enough of capacity in you-nor even for idling! What would this be?
Mrs. Baynes: It is the tired business man.
Prof. Jung: Yes, he refers to the main characteristic of the second part of the nineteenth century, industry, business life, and the tired business man.
Everywhere resoundeth the voice of those who preach death; and the earth is full of those to whom death hath to be preached.
Or “life eternal”; it is all the same to me-if only they pass away quickly!
He wipes out practically the whole generation of men; only a few remain and they will be killed by lightning.
This is pretty radical: he just takes the sponge and wipes out whatever has been written on the blackboard of history, a thorough remedy.
This is important.
It conveys the idea that everything that exists must be done away with because it is not
worth continuing. What does that imply?
Mrs. Sigg: Making a new beginning.
Prof. Jung: Yes, uprooting the whole of actual mankind, producing a complete revolution, in order to prepare the ground for a new world.
Mrs. Adler: It seems to me to be very funny and compensatory, because Nietzsche had in reality absolutely no interest in life; he pictures such things, but people who are very near to life are more careful and conservative.
Prof. Jung: Yes, but Nietzsche is not speaking. Nietzsche is a young man who has been struck by lightning; Zarathustra, the spirit, is speaking.
And the spirit is like a mighty elementary phenomenon which comes when it wants to come and destroys what pleases it to destroy.
You see, the spirit did not ask whether we were ready to have a new century or a new world, but simply comes when it is ready and destroys whatever resists.
So Nietzsche is not moved by human considerations at all; he is simply following the intimations of Zarathustra’s spirit.
We come now to the next chapter, “War and Warriors.” What is the logical sequence between this title and the preceding one, “The Preachers of Death”?
Mrs. Baumann: Would it be war to destroy the world?
Prof Jung: Yes, war ever has been the means of destruction, and that is what he is preaching, obviously.
The question is, of course, what form the destruction would take, and the unconscious already prepares the answer.
It would mean war or at least a warlike attitude which is ready to strike and to destroy, an absolutely reckless readiness, even.
Now, here I must speak again about the peculiar prophetic quality of these two chapters. You see, one could say it was not logical; it simply flows out of him, and has obviously the quality thought and imagery.
Yet it is just as much fact, because the spirit of Zarathustra is, one could say, the mirror of the flow of events which are potential facts, though they do not yet exist.
Our unconscious has two aspects: the one is the past or the remains of the past, and the other is the future, or marks of the future.
The unconscious can flow out in a sort of backward flow, to things that reach into the past far beyond an individual existence; as you know, one can go back in time for thousands of years-or one can go forward.
Zarathustra is directed to the things which are to come; the past only comes in inasmuch as it is the building material of a new future.
He mirrors the images of the potentialities of the collective unconscious-what is likely to be-so when he speaks of death and the preachers of death, it is not mere words; one could designate that as a potential fact, that which the unconscious holds in store for times to come.
Whenever somebody speaks directly out of the unconscious, one must always keep in mind that those are mirrored facts and truly prophetic: a true prophet mirrors the flow of potential facts.
So these chapters are pregnant with the future.
They illustrate what is going on in our days, for instance; we have had a good deal of wiping out and it seems we are not yet through with it.
He says, “marred is life by the many-too-many,” and, you know, people talk a great deal nowadays of the overpopulation-and certainly Central Europe is overpopulated.
We are deeply impressed in Switzerland with the fact that we cannot possibly nourish our population of five millions; we can only produce food enough for two millions, and what about the other three million if we should have to shut our frontiers, for instance, if we could not buy?
It is pretty obvious that they would go by the board.
Italy has a teeming population and they are preaching death, sending division after division to Abyssinia to nourish the mosquitos there; that is a serious attempt at bloodletting.
So, for the wiping-out idea, war is a matter of discussion in our unconscious as one of the most suitable means of destruction.
Our unconscious is full of destructive schemes-that is just the fact; of course, not so much the personal unconscious, but if we go a bit deeper into the truly collective layers, we find such a tendency.
Therefore, there is a general veil of fear over Europe of a threatening and very obscure future; one suspects fate of playing a huge trick.
Every country is arming to the teeth in order to be ready for peace; because of that fear even most peaceful people are thinking of weapons and fortresses.
We see that most clearly expressed in France; the French mentality is filled with fear.
On the day when Hitler declared general military service, the Frenchmen did not even go to their beloved cafes.
They deserted their habitual places on the boulevards, because they thought in the next moment bombs would be coming down upon Paris.
That is characteristic; the atmosphere is electric with fear and with possibilities of war.
These two chapters really show the unconscious preparation of the future.
Mrs. Baumann: I want to ask whether you see in the dreams or fantasies of your patients, pictures of general conditions, and if you do see them, how do you distinguish between the personal and the political?
Prof. Jung: As a rule you don’t see these things, because most of my patients are not concerned with the welfare of the world.
They are much more concerned with their personal welfare, so they produce pictures which have a far more personal significance.
Prophetic dreams are rare; prophecies that are merely for the next day are quite frequent, but they are unimportant or only of a subjective importance.
The true prophecy demands size always and not everybody can boast of having that quality.
You see, Nietzsche was such a fellow.
Mrs. Jung: It seems to me that it is not only destruction that one sees here; it could also represent an attitude to life, linking up again with the hero spirit that he has praised before.
So I think it is also a positive thing, a positive attitude to life, not necessarily destructive.
Prof Jung: That is perfectly true.
But it is really destructive here, and then during the course of the chapter the enantiodromia takes place which prepares the next chapter, “The New Idol,” where he comes to the idea of the remedy.
For the unconscious never sticks to utter destruction.
The unconscious is the spirit of life, the stream of events that go on and on.
The unconscious does not know death or complete destruction, but only knows change and usually change according to the law of enantiodromia.
So it is always a relative destruction, but I think a relatively far-reaching destruction is meant here.
If it is only as far reaching as the world war it is already of a good size!-and the unconscious is envisaging catastrophes which even exceed the world war.
Mrs. Sigg: I think this sentence, “Ye shall be those whose eyes ever seek for an enemy-for your enemy,” could be taken as a prophecy of modern psychology.
Prof. Jung: Yes but wait until we come to it!
Mrs. Adler: In your lecture at the University about the anima, you spoke about a man who heard voices; in that case I suppose the prophecy was spoken; it came through voices.
Prof. Jung: In that case, the voice was chiefly concerned with personal things.
There were some general hints, yet with a very personal application not concerned with world events.
It was always the personal attitude to a possible change in the surroundings.
But the object was not changed in the surroundings, only the change of the personal attitude; and there was little of prophetic material even there.
Mrs. Adler: But don’t you find in many cases of hysteria, for instance, very great suffering in the collective unconscious?
Prof. Jung: Ah yes, that is true, but you find that everywhere; the general situation mirrors itself in every case of neurosis.
As everybody has a collective aspect, everybody is suffering in his financial dealings,
for instance, from the actual world crisis.
That goes very deep in many cases.
Everybody is mentally affected by actual events and by the general situation.
Perhaps one could say that nowadays one quarter of the Swiss population is affected by mental illness.
Insanity is spreading; there are very abnormal mental conditions prevailing in Europe, and everybody is more or less affected by it.
But it is characteristic for the ordinary neurotic that to him in the first place it is personal suffering.
You see, as soon as somebody is threatened with a loss, even if the loss is worldwide and everybody is concerned with it, that person is concerned personally in it, and handles it as if it were his own case and not a general one.
For instance, it is always an enormous revelation to certain patients when they come out of their analysis to hear me talk about other cases.
Then they discover that other people have similar symptoms when they had thought that they were the only ones on God’s earth who had had such experiences.
It is amazing to what extent people, particularly through suffering, are concentrated upon themselves; they become autoerotic to the nth degree and forget all the rest
of humanity who might be suffering from exactly the same evils as their own.
But it is true as Goethe says in Faust:
On Sundays and holidays what I adore
Is a talk about war, with all of its scare,
Whilst far off in Turkey the foreign folk there
Continue to fight just as much as before.
One stands at the window, sipping one’s glass,
Watching the flagged vessels glide down the river;
When night comes, then one is contented to pass
Homewards, blessing peace and our era forever.
But if that same fellow should be hit by a bullet, then the whole world would disappear.
This is just human and quite universal.
Now we will go on with our text:
By our best enemies we do not want to be spared, nor by those either whom we love from the very heart. So let me tell you the truth!
My brethren in war! I love you from the very heart. I am, and was ever, your counterpart. And I am also your best enemy. So let me tell you the truth!
I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. Ye are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them!
What does he reveal here?
Always in the beginning of such a chapter a thought which has been unconscious before comes to the daylight.
You see, when you hear somebody talk of a general wiping out, you may safely take him aside and ask why he wants to wipe out those people, what his personal motive is.
You remember Nietzsche was a retired professor who lived by the benevolence and good heartedness of very nice citizens of Basel.
I knew an old lady myself who spent several thousands francs a year to support Professor Nietzsche.
And when he lived in the Engadine he emphasized very much how beautiful it was
to be six thousand feet above the normal.
So what does he reveal here? It is very mean to point to it.
Mr. Allemann: His own hate and meanness against other people.
Prof Jung: Well, his own hatred and envy of those people who lived in the fact, who could cope with this world.
You see, there is no man, even if he is an exceedingly gifted genius, who is entirely free from that very normal envy of the ordinary well-being.
And Nietzsche never felt well; he was entirely isolated.
Nobody understood him; all his so-called friends stared at him with deep apprehension because they wondered what was coming next.
They were afraid of him and felt already the insanity in the things he wrote.
So he was really in a position that could not be called agreeable.
Nothing is more natural than that he should hate and envy those people who could cope with ordinary life.
One sees that every day in neurotic people who are forced through their condition to live a type of life which is not, and cannot be, the ordinary type.
How they envy those who can live the ordinary life within conventions, within the ordinary expectations!
instance, the people who can enjoy the ordinary pleasures and amusements of others, who find it a particular pleasure to sit together with all their relatives every Sunday.
Or to be in a society where the only link is that they were all born in the same year; or who walk behind a flag with a band, perfectly happy and most serious, enjoying their pleasure.
People who are isolated by a particular fate always feel envy and hatred of those who can live the life they find.
So it would be more natural if, instead of saying, “I know the hatred and envy of your hearts,” he should say, “I know the hatred and envy of my heart.”
But since it is Zarathustra who speaks-he has not a human heart-therefore, it is projected; to Zarathustra it is they who feel envy.
As spirit he does not feel hate nor envy, but just wisdom.
Nietzsche on the other hand would feel that he belongs to these people. “Ye are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy,” means that he is not demon enough not to feel hatred and envy.
And if ye cannot be saints of knowledge, then, I pray you, be at least its warriors.
They are the companions and forerunners of such saintship.
Here, you see what he understands by warriors; they are not beyond hatred and envy, and don’t need to be great, but they can be at least warriors of knowledge, even if they are not the saints.
Now, of what knowledge should they be the warriors?
Miss Wolff: Of truth perhaps, because he says, “Let me tell you the truth.”
Prof. Jung: But what is that truth?
Mrs. Crowley: Does it not mean the prophetic knowledge, those facts that Zarathustra is feeling, sensing in the future?
Prof Jung: Yes, he means the knowledge he preaches, the knowledge of the Superman.
You see, in spite of the fact that they are not saints, not perfect, they are subject to the very human and very personal motives of hatred and envy, they can be warriors.
One can win a battle even with bad soldiers.
I see many soldiers; could I but see many warriors! “Uniform” one calleth what they wear; may it not be uniform what they therewith hide!
What does this mean?
Mrs. Baumann: Would that they were individuals instead of a collective group.
Prof Jung: Yes, in speaking of warriors, he instantly thinks of soldiers naturally; yet soldiers are in uniform, which means absolutely collective with no personalities whatever.
They are not responsible man for man, but are only responsible as a body.
It is always the danger of such organizations that the individual becomes broken in to such an extent that personality is lost.
Of course one called that in German already before the war, Kadaver-gehorsarn, which means the blind obedience of corpses; they don’t exist in reality.
They are only obedient images.
So here he hints at the idea of individuation; they should not be uniformed.
They should be themselves.
Ye shall be those whose eyes ever seek for an enemy-for your enemy.
And with some of you there is hatred at first sight. What does he mean by that?
Now, Mrs. Sigg.
Mrs. Sigg: I should think the important thing in the chapter before is that Nietzsche himself does not see his own individual enemy because he has projected it-does not see his own hostility against life.
Prof. Jung: Well, the idea is that our worst enemy is always our own enemy, the enemy we harbor within our own system; and we should find that enemy and give him a chance to fight us.
He is very much in favor of equal enemies, not one to be despised but really hated.
So “your enemy” means that you should seek the conflict within yourself; the war here takes on an entirely new aspect.
One was inclined to think of this war as a general universal phenomenon, but ere he makes a peculiar break and suddenly the whole thing which seemed to be outside, a political war, becomes a war within the individual.
It is not the enemy you shall seek, but your enemy, and that of course gives an entirely different aspect to the whole question of war and warriors.
One could almost say that this is the place, as Mrs. Sigg has pointed out quite correctly, where modern psychology begins.
It begins with a sort of self-criticism with the question “What is against me?”
If I cannot do what I like then something must be against me, and it must be something
strong, at least as strong as myself and perhaps stronger because it really can hinder me from doing what I want to do.
And that enemy is nowhere outside.
Of course all neuroses begin with the illusion that it is outside.
Somebody outside works tricks against them, people above or below them have sort of electric rays that make them jump; they think that the Jesuits are against them, or the international institution of waiters or porters, as a former patient of mine thought.
Every neurotic has a bete noire somewhere, the mother or the father, or this person or that person who has bad intentions.
Or if a certain things had not happened, if the circumstances were different, all would be well.
But put them in different surroundings and they discover that the same old thing begins again, because they carry the enemy within; they can go where they please but the enemy is always in themselves.
Of course it takes a couple of months or even a year in new surroundings to find this out, because they have the feeling that in new conditions everything will be different-all the old worries will be left behind.
But then things go wrong and they discover where the devils are, and then they cannot understand how people learned about their secrets and think they must have been in connection with their former acquaintances.
For instance, the patient I mentioned was a lawyer, a highly intelligent man, and he was persecuted by the waiters in cafes; they always stuck their heads together and laughed and he knew they had certain thoughts about him.
He had certain thoughts of course-that he was homosexual.
So he went to the station and bought a ticket to a small place called Brugg near Zurich, and then he walked over the mountain through the woods to another station on the same line where he took a ticket to Basel.
Then by crooked ways he ran through the town of Basel to the German station where he took a ticket to Freiburg; there he hid himself and ten hours later he took a train to Hamburg, and then he knew that he had depiste'” his enemies and everything was all
right-he had escaped them.
But in just half a year he noticed that a waiter winked to another one when he entered a cafe.
Of course he began to think furiously in what way they could have detected his where-abouts.
He speculated how they could possibly have found out, and finally he came to the conclusion that there must be an international journal for waiters through which they exchanged news, that they had a secret paper issued in which was a sort of signalments of the people they wanted to persecute.
But he never could discover such a paper.
That happens to neurotics; usually after a sort of incubation time all the troubles begin in a new place.
That is the reason why so many people move continuously.
I met a lady who had travelled three times round the world in order to escape circumstances, but she always came to a world where there were still circumstances. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 541-560
