Philippe's Reviews > The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

There is something in analytic psychology that is fundamentally congenial to my way of thinking. I discovered it when reading Jung's (quasi-)autobiography, which includes his reflections on 'life after death' (or the 'hereafter'). Jung starts with the observation that nowadays the mythic side of man is given short shrift. He can no longer create fables. “As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important and salutory to speak also of incomprehensible things. (…) We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a ‘going beyond all that,’ but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all mythologising is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives a existence a glamour which we would not like to do without."

In this book, Hillman takes a similar line of thought, but then applied to our present lives in the here and now. In the final paragraph of 'The Soul's Code' he writes: " ... this theory is meant to inspire and revolutionize, and also to excite a fresh erotic attachment to its subject: your subjective and personal autobiography, the way you imagine your life, because how you imagine life strongly impinges upon the raising of children, the attitudes toward the symptoms and disturbances of adolescents, your individuality in a democracy, the strangeness of old age and the duties of dying—in fact, upon the professions of education, psychotherapy, the writing of biography, and the life of the citizen."

We inquire not per se to find the truth, but to charge our existence with meaning and energy, to awaken the creative power of Eros, to expand our power to resonate and communicate with the world. It seems to me this is a reflection of a pre-scientific, magical way of thinking that has led an undercover existence since empirical science assumed its monopoly position as the legitimate way to acquire knowledge.

In her monumental book on 16th century hermetic thought Frances Yates describes a captivating episode that reveals the clash between the two worldviews in an emblematic way. In the 1580s the magus Giordano Bruno found himself debating Copernicus' heliocentric model of the solar system with scholars at Oxford. Both parties in the debate supported the Polish astronomer's findings but based on a radically different way of thinking. For the scholars the famous concentric circle diagram with the Sun at its center was a reflection of mathematical relationships. For Bruno it was a chiffre, a symbol that expressed the magical philosophy of universal animation. The Earth's movement was simply a manifestation of life's divine energy.

Who's to say that Bruno was wrong and only the Oxford scholars had the truth on their side? Maybe their visions did not exclude one another? Maybe there is a place for empiricism and magic to work side by side and complement each other? Analytic psychologists as Jung and Hillman are not the only ones who are thinking along those lines. Anthropologist Tim Ingold has devoted his life to the development and articulation of a way of thinking that could be called 'sympathetic', in the sense that it "both answers to the call of the subject and is in turn answerable to it." It seeks resonance rather than truth, hints at and hunts for dynamic 'Correspondences' between our ideas and the animate and inanimate world around us.

Or take a philosopher such as Michel Serres, who sees a return to science's mythic origins as an imminent and necessary phase of cultural rejuvenation: "By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’s first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously." (from Biogea)

Ingold says: "This means, if you will, not taking literal truths metaphorically, but taking metaphorical truths literally. The theorist can be a poet." This is what Hillman does and is when he approaches our sense of self. Sure, both nature and nurture play a role in our personal makeup. But is that all? And are these even the more decisive influences in shaping our fate? Enter 'the acorn theory'. As the fruit of an oak tree an acorn lends itself naturally to an organicist metaphor of self development unfolding in time. But that kind of metaphorical elaboration of a literal truth is precisely what Hillman is not interested in. Instead, the acorn is imagined as an archetypal idea: "The acorn is also a mythical symbol; it is a shape; and it is a word with ancestries, tangents and implications, and suggestive power. By amplifying “acorn” in these different directions, (...), we will be carried beyond the naturalistic strictures of its standard meaning. And by turning the sense of “acorn” and expanding its potential we shall be demonstrating how to turn the biology of the human beyond its organic setting."

The acorn theory says that we are embodiments of an essence that has chosen us as its vehicle to express itself. This is our sense of calling, or our daimon as the Greeks understood it. We can't see it and we can't measure it. But reading up on the lives of exceptional people yields abundant (albeit anecdotal) evidence of this call and how it manifests itself through our biographies. Paying heed to our daimon poeticises our lives. Indeed, by paying only attention to the power of genes, parental influence and social mores as shapers of our destinies we unintentionally dull our lives and deny them any sort of romance, any fictional flair. As a result we become less curious, creative, courageous and reflexive about our lives. Less tolerant also about deviations from a consensus, consumerist norm. So why wouldn't we take this hypothesis playfully serious and start to inquire ourselves about what tries to express itself through our unique presence in this world? Because it's not verifiably 'true'? Good luck with your truth then. I'm siding with Hillman and those other thinkers who are trying to re-enchant our world, and charge us with a feeling of destiny, responsibility and beauty.