Showing posts with label Nietzche. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nietzche. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Carl Jung: if you love flies and lice, which you also have to do to a certain extent, they will simply eat you up in the end.



For instance, if you love flies and lice, which you also have to do to a certain extent, they will simply eat you up in the end.

But you have other animals that you have to love, so you must give each part of yourself a decent existence.

Then naturally the different kinds of animals will check each other.

The birds of prey will hinder a superabundance of mice or other little vermin.

The big animals of prey will eat many of the sheep and cows, so there will not be an overproduction of milk and butter and so on.

It is exactly the same in the human constitution: there are innumerable units with definite purposes, and each can overgrow all the others if you insist upon one particular unit.

But if you love yourself, you have to love the whole, and the part has to submit to the necessities of the whole in the interest of democracy.

You can say it is perfectly ridiculous, but we are ridiculous.

The management of the whole psychological situation, like the management of a country, consists of a lot of ridiculous things.

Like all nature, it is grotesque-all the funny animals you know-but they do exist and the whole is a symphony, after all.

If it is one-sided, you disturb the whole thing: you disturb that symphony and it becomes chaos.

Then it is also an excellent truth that one should not go roving about, as Nietzsche defines it:

“Such roving about christeneth itself "brotherly love"; with these
words hath there hitherto been the best lying and dissembling,
and especially by those who have been burdensome to everyone.”

Those are the people who go about and tell everybody how much they love them or what they ought to do for their own good, always assuming
that they know what is best for them.

Or the people who want to get rid of themselves, so they unburden themselves on others.

There are certain lazy dogs who want to get rid of their own destiny so they put it on somebody else by loving them.

They fall on the neck of someone saying, "I love you," and so they put the bag on his back; they call that love.

Or they go to someone and burden him with what he really ought to do and they never do.

They never ask themselves what is good for themselves, but they know exactly what is good for him.

Do it yourself first and then you will know if it is really good.

So here Nietzsche tells other people they ought to fly-as if he could.

He cheats them as he has cheated himself.

It is the same mechanism that he blames Christian love for. But there is Christian love and Christian love.

When someone applies Christian love in the right way, it is a virtue and of the highest merit; but if he misuses Christian love in order to put his own burdens on other people, he is immoral, a usurer, a cheat.

You see, if he loves other people with the purpose of making use of them, it is not love; he simply uses love as a pretext, a cover under which he hides his own selfish interests.

To really love other people, he must first give evidence that he can love himself, for to love oneself is the most difficult task.

To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful.

Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it.

But in the long run, it comes back on us.

You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love.

That is the question-whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test.

So when Nietzsche blames Christian love, he is simply blaming his own type. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, 1472-1474

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Nietzsche: Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient




“Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient. Let it be his best cure to see with his eyes him who maketh himself whole.” [Nietzsche]

Nietzsche is realizing certain truths here which are highly important from a psychological point of view. "Physician, heal thyself" is particularly good teaching for our late Christianity.

You see, he assumes that the real cure is made where it is most needed and most immediate.

That is like the rainmaker of Kiau Tschou again.

He does not curse the earth or pray to heaven to behave and produce rain.

He says to himself that he was right when he left his village and when he got here he was wrong.

This place is out of order so he is the one that is wrong; that wrong is nearest to him, and if he wants to do anything for the chaotic condition, it must be done in him-he is the immediate object of himself.

So he asks for that little house and there he locks himself in and works on himself; he remains shut in until he

reconciles heaven and earth in himself, until he is in the right order, and then he has cured the situation: Tao is established.

That is exactly the same idea.

So the best cure for anybody is when the one who thinks about curing has cured himself; inasmuch as he cures himself it is a cure.

If he is in Tao, he has established Tao, and whoever beholds him beholds Tao and enters Tao.

This is a very Eastern idea.

The Western idea-particularly late Christianity-is of course to cure your neighbor, to help him, with no consid- eration of the question, "Who is the helper?"

Perhaps he is not a help, or perhaps he gives something which he takes back with the other hand.

There are plenty of people nowadays who join the life of the community, assume responsibility, and all that stuff, but I say, "Who is assuming responsibility?"

If my business is in a bad condition and a fellow comes along and says he will assume the responsibility and

run the whole thing, I naturally ask him who he is-and then I find he has been bankrupt.

Naturally I don’t want one who is himself a beggar and has given evidence of his own incompetence. Those people who are very helpful need help.
If they are physicians they should treat their own neurosis, otherwise they are just vampires and want to help other people for their own needs. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 824-825

Saturday, March 11, 2017

Carl Jung: All in all Nietzsche was to me the only man of that time who gave some adequate answers to certain urgent questions..

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Carl Jung: All in all Nietzsche was to me the only man of that time who gave some adequate answers to certain urgent questions..

To the Rev. Arthur W. Rudolph Dear Sir, 5 January 1961

It would be too ambitious a task to give you a detailed account of the influence of Nietzsche’s thoughts on my own development.

As a matter of fact, living in the same town where Nietzsche spent his life as a professor of philosophy.

I grew up in an atmosphere still vibrating from the impact of his teachings, although it was chiefly resistance which met his onslaught.

I could not help being deeply impressed by his indubitable inspiration ("Ergriffenheit").

He was sincere, which cannot be said of so many academic teachers to whom career and vanity mean infinitely more than the truth.

The fact that impressed me the most was his encounter with Zarathustra and then his "religious" critique, which gives a legitimate place in philosophy to passion as the very real motive of philosophizing.

The Unzeitgemiisse Betrachtungen were to me an eye-opener, less so the Genealogy of Morals or his idea of the "Eternal Return" of all things.

His all-pervading psychological penetration has given me a deep understanding of what psychology is able to do.

All in all Nietzsche was to me the only man of that time who gave some adequate answers to certain urgent questions which then were more felt than thought.

Max Stirner, whom I read at the same time, gave me the impression of a man who was trying to express an infinitely important truth with inadequate means.

Over against him the figure of Zarathustra seems to me the better formulation.

Those are the main points I could mention about Nietzsche and his influence on my own development.

If you have any further questions and if their answer is within my reach, I am quite ready to cope with them. Sincerely yours,
C.G. Jung

P.S. I may call the attention to the existence of notes that have been taken of my Seminars about Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

They would be accessible to you in California. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 621-622