But Jung himself, strangely enough, in both of his carefully prepared
arguments, specifically rejects all intention of dealing "metaphysically"
with this theme, in spite of the fact that every movement toward a fuller
recognition of creative energy is nothing less than metaphysics, even though
not in name.
The skilled observer, scrutinizing the motives and peering into the history
of the person whose traits and trends he is called on to investigate, must
see, in imagination, not only a vast host of acts, but also a vast network
of intersecting lines of energy of which the casual observer, and even the
intimate friend, may be wholly unaware. We call these lines of energy by
many special names,--"Libido" or "Urlibido," first of all, then love and
hate and jealousy, and so on.
What are these lines of energy, and how can we study them to the best
purpose? Obviously they are incomplete editions of the love and reason and
will the laws of which we can study to best advantage in ourselves and in
men where they are displayed in their best, that is, in their most
constructive form. To make such studies is to recognize metaphysics, but
instead of doing of doing this tacitly and implicitly we should do it openly
and explicitly.
The study of human nature should, in short, begin at the top, rather than at
the bottom; just as, if one had to choose what phase of a symphony one would
choose in order to get an idea of its perfection, one would take some
culminating moment rather than the first few notes simply because they were
the first. To be accurate, one could not do justice to the symphony except
by studying it as a whole, and similarly one should study the man as a
whole, including his relations to the universe as a whole. It is as wholes
that great poets conceived of their poems and great artists of their
pictures, and it is as a whole that each and every human life, standing as
it does as the representative of the body of the universe, and the spirit of
the universe, on the other, should implicitly be viewed.
The psychologist should sympathize deeply with the anatomist and the
physiologist and the student of cerebral pathology, but equally deeply with
the philosopher and the metaphysician who study the implications, present
although hidden, that point to the bonds between the individual and the
universe. To fail to recognize that these bonds exist,--as is done when the
attempt is made to study human beings as if they were really and exclusively
the product of their historic past conceived of in an organic sense,--would
be to try to build one-half of an arch and expect it to endure. The truth
is, we do not, in my opinion, genuinely believe that a human is nothing but
the product of his organic past, or the product of his experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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