-----Original Message-----
From: pcp-request@mailbase.ac.uk [mailto:pcp-request@mailbase.ac.uk] On
Behalf Of Robert Feldhaus
Sent: 10 September 1998 16:22
To: pcp@mailbase.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Taoism and PCP
At 12:24 PM 9/9/98 -0700, Marcus wrote:
>For example German literature and thought of
>the 19th and early 20th century is full of "Polarität" with the particular
>twist that the polarity is seen as some kind of imperfect state we need to
>overcome to realise the essential oneness of e.g good and evil, or other
>less important dichotomies so that intensifying the opposite is
>paradoxically a way of rising beyond both poles of the construct to some
>sort of superordinate oneness. This echoes some of the things Luis Botella
>objects to, I think. It also has been suggested by some that it was this
>kind of polarity in the thinking of intellectuals and literati that made it
>much more difficult for them to handle the rise of Nazism and to react with
>outright rejection to the ideas of Hitler et al thus leading to a kind of
>"trahison des clercs".......
Very interesting! This brings to my mind Jung's notion of
"enantiodromia"--the phenomenon of any extreme turning into its opposite,
somewhat like a pendulum, when pulled out to one side, swings back to the
other. He saw the one-sidedness of a person's conscious approach to the
world (say, being overly rational) being compensated for by the unconscious
(which might then result in violent eruptions of emotion). Jung was
directly influenced by German dialectical thinking, and polarity was a core
aspect of his theory. Interesting, then, to note that Jung was accused of
being a Nazi sympathizer! At least early on, he viewed the Nazi movement
as a kind of spontaneous uprush of forces from the German racial
unconscious, and therefore as a necessary balancing of more conscious
aspects of the German mentality.
Bob Feldhaus
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