Ancient Psychology

Ancient Psychology, rooted in a very different ground from modern therapeutic thinking, held that the fate and character of each of us is born in mystery, that our individuality is so profound and so hidden that it takes more than a lifetime for identity to merge. Renaissance doctors said that the essence of each person originates as a star in the heavens. How different this is from the modern view that a person is what he makes himself to be.

It is the unfathomable mystery that is the very seed and heart of each individual. Care of the soul appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. The uniqueness of a person is made up of the insane and the twisted as much as it is of the rational and normal. To approach this paradoxical point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature.

James Hillman and archetypal psychology

Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology, in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths (gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals) that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. The ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. It is part of the Jungian psychology tradition and related to Jung's original Analytical psychology but is also a radical departure from it in some respects.

Whereas Jung’s psychology focused on the Self, its dynamics and its constellations (ego, anima, animus, shadow), Hillman’s Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on psyche, or soul, and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life."

Hillman (1975) sketches a brief lineage of archetypal psychology By calling upon Jung to begin with, I am partly acknowledging the fundamental debt that archetypal psychology owes him. He is the immediate ancestor in a long line that stretches back through Freud, Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus - and with even more branches yet to be traced.”

The development of archetypal psychology is influenced by Carl Jung's analytical psychology and Classical Greek, Renaissance, and Romantic ideas and thought. Indeed, Hillman’s influences are many, and include other artists, poets, philosophers, alchemists, and psychologists. One could easily include in this list Nietzsche, Heidegger, Henry Corbin, Keats, Shelley, Petrarch, and Paracelsus. Though all different in their theories and psychologies, they appear to be unified by their common concern for psyche.

People in present state

People who live in the present are quieter.

Minimalism

Less is more, less is better.

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, and Frank Stella. It is rooted in the reductive aspects of Modernism, and is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract expressionism and a bridge to Postmodern art practices.

The terms have expanded to encompass a movement in music which features repetition and iteration, as in the compositions of Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, John Adams, and Terry Riley. (See also Postminimalism).

The term "minimalist" is often applied colloquially to designate anything which is spare or stripped to its essentials. It has also been used to describe the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, and even the automobile designs of Colin Chapman.

Marsilio Ficino

Two books by Marsilio Ficino:

The Platonic Theology
The Book of Life

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his "Platonic Theology," translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance. This is the fourth of a projected six volumes.

Care of the soul

"Care of the Soul" by Thomas Moore

Moore's studies in Renaissance psychology, philosophy, and medicine contributed to the work.

Renaissance authors: Marsilio Ficino and Paracelsus

Jung said that every psychological problem is ultimately a matter of religion. He also said that the work begins and ends with Mercury. Mercury is the god of fictions and fabrications, of trickery, thievery, and sleight-of-hand.

A spiritual life of some kind is absolutely necessary for psychological health.

Fulfilling work, rewarding relationships, personal power, and relief from symptoms are all gifts of the soul.

Marsilio Ficino: The mind tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world.

James Hillman (the founder of archetypal psychology)
Robert Sardello
Rafael Lopez-Pedraza
Patricia Berry
Alfred Ziegler

Cure of the soul: cura animarum.
 the craft of life: techne tou biou (Plato)

We can be the curates or curators of our own souls, an idea that implies an inner priesthood and a personal religion. To undertake this restoration of soul means we ave to make spirituality a more serious part of everyday life.

The emotional complaints:
Emptiness
Meaninglessness
Vague depression
Disillusionment about marriage, family, and relationship
A loss of values
Yearning for personal fulfillment
A hunger for spirituality

All of these symptoms reflect a loss of soul and let us know that the soul craves.We yearn excessively for entertainment, power, intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and material things, and we think we can find these things if we discover the right relationship or jib, te right church or therapy. But without soul, whatever we find will be unsatisfying, for what we truly long for is the soul in eac of these areas. Lacking that soulfulness, we attempt to gather these alluring satisfactions to us in great masses, thinking apparently that quantity will make up for lack of quality.

"therapy" refers to service to the gods.(Socrates)

Apuleius (Roman writer): Everyone should know that you can't live in any other way than by cultivating the soul.

Epicurus: cultivating the simple pleasure.

Soul is nothing like ego(self). Soul is closely connected to fate, and the turns of fate almost always go counter to the expectations and often to the desires of the ego. Soul is the font of who we are, and yet it is far beyond our capacity to devise and to control. We can cultivate, tend, enjoy, and participate in the things of the soul, but we can't outwit it or manage it or shape it to the designs of a willful ego.

Care of the soul is not solving the puzzle of life; quite the opposite, it is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that blend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be.

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.
---John Keats

Care of the soul is not a method of problem solving. Its goal is not to make life problem-free, but to give ordinary life the depth and value that come with soulfulness. The word care implies a way of responding to expressions of the soul that is not heroic and muscular. Cura means several things: attention, devotion, husbandry, adorning the body, healing, managing, being anxious for, and worshiping the gods.

"Soul" is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.

Care of the soul begins with observance of how the soul manifests itself and how it operates. We can't care for the soul unless we are familiar with its ways. Observation is a word from ritual and religion. It means to watch out for but also to keep and honor, as in the observation of a holiday. The -serv- in observation originally referred to tending sheep.

This definition of caring for the soul is minimalist. It has to do with modest care and not miraculous cure. Therapy sometimes emphasizes change so strongly that people often neglect their own natures and tantalized by images of some ideal normality and health that may always be out of reach. By trying to avoid human mistakes and failures, we move beyond the reach of soul.

James Hillman: The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

It is the soul that makes us human.

To feel and imagine may not sound like much. But in care of the soul there is trust that nature heals, that much can accomplished by not-doing.

Paracelsus (16th century physician): The physician is only the servant of nature, not her master. Therefore, it behooves medicine to follow the will of nature.

In caring for the soul, a symptom has its own will and that "curing" in some way means following that will.

Observance has considerable power.

Modern interventional therapy sometimes tries to solve specific problems and can therefore be carried out on a short-term basis. But care of the soul never ends.

Every ending is a beginning. The life of the soul is a continual going over and over of the material of life.

Storytelling is an excellent way of caring for the soul. It helps us see the themes that circle in our lives, the deep themes that tell the myths we live.

Taking an interest in one's own soul requires a certain amount of space for reflection and appreciation. A little distance allows us to see our own complexity. Love of the soul asks for some appreciation for its complexity.

Often care of the soul means not taking sides when there is a conflict at a deep level. It may be necessary to stretch the heart wide enough to embrace contradiction and paradox.

Pierre Hadot: What Is Ancient Philosophy?

What Is Ancient Philosophy?
Benjamin Balint

According to Pierre Hadot, a prominent historian of ancient thought and professor emeritus at the College de France, philosophy today—specialized, professional, and detached from life—is but a shadow of its glorious Athenian past. But that is not the original part of his thesis. A wide array of modern minds have thought the same: Hegel lamented that philosophy is no longer “practiced as a private art, as it was by the Greeks,” Heidegger called for a return to the Greek grammar of being, and Kant claimed that “the ancient Greek philosophers remained more faithful to the Idea of the philosopher than their modern counterparts have done.” What is new in What Is Ancient Philosophy? is that its author confidently identifies Christianity as the agent of philosophy’s decline.

In his latest book, first published in France in 1995, Hadot surveys with care the great schools of classical thought—Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cynicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism—and argues that they share not only a drive to offer rational explanations of the world but also a conception of philosophy profoundly different from the way that discipline currently understands itself. As in his last book, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot shows that unlike today, philosophers in the age of Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum practiced their craft; they did not merely study it. Since they considered philosophy a means of inner transformation rather than a purely theoretical endeavor, the ancients aimed not at resolving abstract problems or thinking systematically but at preparing themselves for truth and making themselves susceptible to it by cultivating certain attitudes of mind: equanimity and absence of worry ataraxia), independence (autarkeia), good disposition euthumia), and so forth. These inner calibrations in turn demanded a highly developed philosophical exercise (askesis) of self–awareness, self–mastery, and examination of the conscience. Philosophy required rational living as much as rational thinking.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the philosophers of antiquity, from the Pre-socratics to the late Neo-platonists, flourished in tight communities of shared dialogue and practice. The Stoic sage Seneca counseled that “the living word and life in common will benefit you more than written discourse,” and his contemporaries indeed tended to think together and to think out loud. “For Aristotle,” as for others, Hadot says, “the discussion of problems was ultimately more formative than their solution.” Membership in a philosophical school entailed not doctrinal allegiance but, as Hadot puts it, “the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and ultimately a certain desire to be and to live in a certain way.”

If this strikes you as closer to religion than philosophy, then you are thinking like an early Christian. For far from rejecting pagan philosophy, Hadot notes, Christianity borrowed from it extensively, ultimately deriving its very conception of itself from Greek thought. The fledgling religion presented itself not only as a philosophy, in the ancient sense of the term, but as the philosophy. If doing philosophy meant living in conformity with reason (the thinking went), if it really represented “a conversion of one’s entire being,” then Christians were philosophers and (at least some) philosophers Christians. Hence we find the apologist Justin, for example, declaring—scarcely a century after Jesus—that “those who, before Christ, led a life accompanied by reason are Christians, even if they were known as atheists. Such were Socrates, Heraclitus, and those like them.” (For a wider discussion of Justin’s view, see “The Christianity of Philosophy” in the May 2001 First Things, where Peter Simpson concludes that “the Christian faith for [Justin] was the true and complete philosophy.”)

Hadot further argues that the first Christians annexed from philosophy not only large swaths of the ancient ideological landscape, but also many of its spiritual practices. In the early Christian exercises aiming to instill virtues such as peace of mind and absence of the passions, and in the tradition of contemplative monasticism as developed by such fourth–century Church fathers as Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen, Hadot detects a strong whiff of Greek philosophical practice. Hadot admits that these exercises “formed part of a broader ensemble of practices which were specifically Christian.” Still, though “the Christian philosophers tried to Christianize their use of secular philosophical themes,” they could not help “de­scribing their spiritual exercises by means of the vocabulary and concepts of secular philosophy."

But the heart of Hadot’s argument lies in his contention that in the process of digesting it, Christianity slowly but inexorably broke philosophy apart. The ancient schools that had not disappeared (Platonism and Aristotelianism in particular), re­moved from the ways of life that inspired them, “were reduced to the status of mere conceptual material which could be used in theological controversies.” Philosophy, made to serve theology, became merely theoretical. “Aristotelian logic and ontology,” for example, “furnished concepts that were indispensable for the formulation of the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation.” But Christianity, itself a pervasive way of life,had little use for the practical elements of ancient philosophy (other than those it chose to appropriate). So when philosophy emerged many centuries later into its own again to breathe the air of the Enlightenment, it “consider[ed] itself a theoretical science, because the existential dimension of philosophy no longer had any meaning from the perspective of Christianity.” And so it was, Hadot concludes, that philosophy, stripped to its conceptual content, became the impoverished thing it is today.

The problem with this story is not its moral. As morals go, Hadot’s is uplifting and deserves to be heard. The lesson, he says, is simply that “there is no discourse which deserves to be called philosophical if it is separated from the philosophical life, and there is no philosophical life unless it is directly linked to philosophical discourse.”

The trouble lies rather with the story itself. To begin with, as mentioned above, nostalgia for the original union of praxis and theoria propels some of the most powerful currents of modern philosophy; it may even be said to be a kind of shibboleth of fashionably self–critical moderns. Alexander Nehamas, in The Art of Living, showed that the Socratic attention to the ways philosophy shapes personality deeply informed the views of Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault—and Hadot himself, citing Descartes, awkwardly admits that the old ideal of philosophia never really died (had it vanished entirely, we would not find Hadot’s own book so unstartling). He might have added that the insistence that thought not abstract itself from life would also form a crucial theme for both the existentialists and the pragmatists.

Further, Hadot’s account—which might more aptly have borne the title Where Did Modern Philosophy Come From?—in considering ancient philo­sophies as ways of life, too often obscures their substance. What about the content of ancient contemplation sets it apart from modern philosophical reflection? Is there nothing about the subject matter of classical speculation that distinguishes it from the study of philosophy today? On this Hadot utters not a word.

But his narrative wobbles most of all in the description of Christianity’s link to ancient philosophy, a relationship that is both closer and more remote than the author allows. More remote because in his account of the assimilation of philosophy into the early Church, Hadot fails fully to acknowledge the distinctively reveal­ed character of Christianity or in­deed the ways in which faith colors the Christian conception of truth. “Faith,” Kierkegaard reminds us, “is not a knowledge.” Surely there is a great leap from truth rationally discovered to truth divinely revealed and from the imperative to doubt to the command to believe, but this is a gap Hadot is not keen to describe.

On the other hand, these two great forces are closer than Hadot permits precisely because the ideal of transformative knowledge defines religion in a way no other quality does. For this very reason, some claim that ancient thought is precociously religious more than Christianity is belatedly philosophical. But we needn’t go that far to recognize that the inseparability of speculative discourse and concrete conduct is a fundamentally religious notion. Philosophy may have embroidered the idea, but religion had always announced that the truth that fails to transform its bearer is no truth at all. (This is true also in Judaism. In his commentary on the Torah, the rabbinic scholar Samson Raphael Hirsch writes: “All ‘religion,’ all so–called ‘honoring God in spirit,’ is worthless if the thought, the idea of God, is not strong enough to exercise its power practically in the control of our words and doings.”)

Seen in this light, the Christian stewardship of philosophy, far from dissolving it, may actually have preserved the union of thought and deed. The real question would then be: Why did our modern philosophers, those “artists of reason,” when freed from their religious guardians to sculpt an intellectual world afresh, choose to reject the potent synthesis that marked Greece and Christendom alike? But that would be another, more judicious book.