“Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of Self” by Andrea Wulf

This is a group biography of the Jena Set, a group of playwrights, poets, professors, novelists, scientists, and philosophers, who gathered around the university town of Jena at the turn of the nineteenth century. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller were the rambunctious group’s mentors, rivals, foils, antagonists, friends, and inspirations. The feelings were somewhat mutual. Often complicated relationships were involved.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte might be said to have been the philosophical originator of the subjective perspective, which most distinguished the Jena Set. “The only certainty, Fichte told his students, was that the world was experienced by the self—by the ‘Ich’. The Ich, he said, ‘originally and unconditionally posits its own being’ and through this powerful initial act the ‘non-Ich’—the external world that included nature, animals, other people and so on—came into existence…. This ‘non-Ich’ was everything ‘which is different from and opposed to the Ich’. That didn’t mean that the Ich creates the world, rather it creates our knowledge of the world. Put simply, the world is the way we think it is.”

Schiller, although closer in age to the rest of Jena Set, was paired more with Goethe in his role as part-time mentor and counselor to the young, unruly crew. “Among Schiller’s own [journal] Horen contributions was Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, a long essay composed of twenty-seven letters addressed to his Danish aristocratic patron. Over more than one hundred pages Schiller argued that art was the tool for an alternative revolution to that of France…. Reason, rationality and empiricism had brought powerful knowledge, but what was missing was the refinement of moral behaviour. All the knowledge in the world could not develop a person’s sense of right and wrong…. ‘Utility is the great idol of our time,’ Schiller wrote, ‘to which all powers pay homage.’ Profit, productivity and consumption had become the guiding light of modern societies…. But it was beauty that transports us towards ethical principles and makes us better people…. For Schiller, taste and beauty were the bulwark against brutality, greed and immorality…. Beauty, Schiller now argued, had the ability to unite our sensual and rational sides…. The struggle between the sensual and the rational was a battle between the heart and the head which neither could win…. Only art could mediate the two.”

The Jena Set was a diverse and talented lot. “During that spring of 1797 the Jena Set met almost every day. ‘Our little academy,’ as Goethe called it, was very busy. Wilhelm von Humboldt was labouring over a verse translation of one of Aeschylus’s Greek tragedies, which he discussed with Goethe. Meanwhile, Goethe was working on his prose poem Hermann and Dorothea, for which he consulted the older Humboldt brother on verse metre, while conducting experiments with Alexander [von Humboldt] for which they set up an optical apparatus to analyse light and to investigate the luminescence of phosphorus. August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel worked on their Shakespeare translations, while Schiller was writing his play Wallenstein. Interested in everything—art, science, and literature—their interdisciplinary approach would become a major theme as their thinking evolved…. In the afternoons or evenings, after they finished lecturing at the university or working at home, they all rushed along the cobbled streets to Schiller’s apartment near the Old Castle. Here, in Schiller’s parlour, Goethe recited his poems and others presented their work until late at night. Over the course of several evenings in the middle of March, Wilhelm von Humboldt read Fichte’s latest edition of the Wissenschaftslehre aloud to everybody. After that, he read extracts from Friedrich Schlegel’s publication on ancient Greece and Rome as well as August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel’s translation of Julius Caesar, and Alexander von Humboldt presented the results of his animal electricity experiments.”

Although Novalis was often stuck working at his family’s mines, he regularly rode on horseback the five hours to Jena to commune with his friends. Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel’s pet project was the genre of intentionally written fragments. “Novalis had written more than one hundred fragments of various lengths, collectively published under the title Pollen. Another set of more than four hundred were simply called Fragments and mostly written by Friedrich Schlegel but also included several dozen by Caroline and August Wilhelm…. Pollen and Fragments, became the foundational texts of a new movement, launching Romanticism on the public stage—it was ‘our first symphony’, as August Wilhelm Schlegel said. It was here, on the pages of the [journal] Aethenaeum, that the term ‘romantic’ was coined and first used in print in its new literary and philosophical meaning.” Friedrich Schlegel declared, “Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the society poetical; poeticise wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humour.” Novalis added, “By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise.” Wulf explains further, “They wanted to romanticise the entire world, and this meant perceiving it as an interconnected whole…. Romantic poetry was unruly, dynamic, alive and forever changing, they believed, and should not be corseted by metric patterns because it was a ‘living organism’. Its essence was ‘that it should forever be becoming, never perfected’, Friedrich Schlegel explained. It was inherently incomplete and unfinished…. Ideas were formulated, overturned and discarded. They were not interested in a closed system bound by rigid rules but in a world view that was open and in flux…. At the centre of everything was poetry—but not poetry as we understand it today. The friends turned back to the original ancient Greek term poietikos—‘creative’ or ‘productive’. For them, romantic poetry could be anything: a poem, of course, but also a novel, a painting, a building, a piece of music or a scientific experiment…. Friedrich Schlegel believed that the novel was the genre best suited to expressing the spirit of the modern age. Novalis agreed and even spoke about spending his entire life working on one novel—never completed, forever being written, infinitely evolving and thereby filling a library with what would be the ultimate romantic project.”

At the end of 1798, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling moved to Jena, taking up a professorship of philosophy. “Where Fichte’s Ich was shaped by its opposition to the non-Ich, Schelling believed that the self and nature were identical…. Schelling now insisted that everything was one…. Schelling’s new universe was alive. Instead of a fragmented, mechanistic world where humans were little more than cogs in a machine, Schelling conjured up a world of oneness. The living and non-living worlds, he explained, were ruled by the same underlying principles. Everything—from frogs to trees, stones to insects, rivers to humans—was ‘linked together, forming one universal organism’…. He reunited what the scientific revolution had separated: nature and humankind.” Schelling explained, “At the first moment when I am conscious of the external world, consciousness of my self is there as well, and vice versa—at my first moment of self-awareness, the real world rises up before me.” On the nature of the human mind, he expanded, “Mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind…. As long as I myself am identical with nature, I understand what living nature is as well as I understand myself.”

Schelling arguably provided a synthesis for the evolving philosophical ideas of the Jena Set. The rest of its various participants would almost certainly not have agreed. “Goethe had always believed that the process of gaining knowledge—Erkenntnis—came through direct observation. Most idealists, including Fichte, rejected this idea and insisted that all knowledge of reality originated in the mind. But not Schelling. He was an idealist who believed that ‘absolutely all of our knowledge originates in experience’…. During those autumn weeks in 1799, Schelling prepared his new lecture series…. Published a few months later as the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling’s lectures introduced aesthetics and the arts as the tools that reveal the union between the subjective world of the self and the objective world of nature…. Schelling explained that it was the unconscious self which brought the external world into existence, and through this act it became the conscious Ich. ‘The objective world’, Schelling believed, ‘is merely the original, still-unconscious poetry of the mind.’”

Although much older than the rest, Goethe ended up being the glue that held this bickering, backstabbing, and brilliant crew together. He counseled, cajoled, and mended broken friendships. Through his poems, plays, and novels, as well as his scientific experiments, he also offered inspiration. “So much had changed since Goethe and Schiller had first spoken after the meeting of Jena’s Natural History Society on that hot July day in 1794. Goethe had watched everybody leave: first Fichte, in 1799, then the Schlegel brothers, and finally Schelling and Caroline, in 1803. They were not alone. The ‘current exodus’, as Goethe described it, continued with the departure of several other professors…. As quickly as Jena had risen, it seemed to tumble.” Living to the last in nearby Weimar until his death in 1832, Goethe would proclaim, “I took in and used whatever came before my eyes, my ears, my senses. Thousands of individuals contributed to the creation of my works—wise people and fools, intellectuals and idiots, children, men in their prime, and old people…. I often reaped what others had sown. My life’s work is that of a collective.”

“Slouching Towards Utopia” by J. Bradford DeLong

This is DeLong’s magnum opus, decades in the making. It is an economic history of the long-twentieth century, an epoch he defines as between 1870 and 2010. He posits that this time period was both unprecedented and the most consequential in human history. “The value of the stock of useful ideas about manipulating nature and organizing humans that were discovered, developed, and deployed into the world economy, shot up from about 0.45 percent per year before 1870 to 2.1 percent per year afterward…. A 2.1 percent average growth for the 140 years from 1870 to 2010 is a multiplication by a factor of 21.5…. As a rough guess, average world income per capita in 2010 would be 8.8 times what it was in 1870.”

DeLong points to four factors which made the long-twentieth century unique: “Technology fueled growth, globalization, an exceptional America, and confidence that humanity could at least slouch toward utopia as governments solved political-economic problems…. Twice, in that long century, 1870-1914 and 1945-1975, something every preceding generation would have called near utopia came nearer, rapidly. But these generation-long episodes of economic El Dorados were not sustained.” He gives his guesses as to the why, “Driving it all, always in the background and often in the foreground, were the industrial research labs discovering and developing things, the large corporations developing and deploying them, and the globalized market economy coordinating it all. But in some ways the market economy was more problem than solution. It recognized only property rights, and people wanted Polanyian rights: rights to a community that gave them support, to an income that gave them the resources they deserved, and to economic stability that gave them consistent work. And for all the economic progress that was achieved during the long twentieth century, its history teaches us that material wealth is of limited use in building utopia…. The shotgun marriage of Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Polanyi, blessed by John Maynard Keynes, that helped raise the post-World War II North Atlantic developmental social democracy was as good as we have so far gotten.” DeLong quotes the eminent sociologist, Max Weber, “Material interests may drive the trains down the tracks, but ideas are the switchmen.”

In the meat of his text, DeLong goes through the broad strokes of world history during the long-twentieth century, with a focus on economic factors and a focus on the global North, while also digressing to involve Japan, China, Korea, Argentina, Botswana, and others to give a global picture. “What changed after 1870 was that the most advanced North Atlantic economies had invented invention. They had invented not just textile machinery and railroads, but also the industrial research lab and the forms of bureaucracy that gave rise to the large corporation. Thereafter, what was invented in the industrial research labs could be deployed at national or continental scale…. Not just inventions, but the systemic invention of how to invent. Not just individual large-scale organizations, but organizing how to organize…. Successful economic development depends on a strong but limited government. Strong in the sense that its judgments of property rights are obeyed, that its functionaries obey instructions from the center, and that the infrastructure it pays for is built. And limited in the sense that it can do relatively little to help or hurt individual enterprises, and that political power does not become the only effective road to wealth and status.”

DeLong’s preeminent focus is on the rise of the United States, in all its fits and starts. The most notable downturn was the Great Depression. DeLong gives much credence to the role of contingency in shaping history, “Why did the Great Depression not push the United States to the right, into reaction, or protofascism, or fascism, as it did in so many other countries, but instead to the left? My guess is that it was sheer luck—Herbert Hoover and the Republicans were in power when the Great Depression started, and they were thrown out of office in 1932.” Another huge downturn, necessitating the slouch—as opposed to the march—to utopia, was World War II, preceded by the twin rises of communism and fascism. “Before the twentieth century, ideology—as opposed to religion—did not kill people by the millions and tens of millions. The stakes were not thought to be worth it. Such enthusiasm for mass murder awaited a combination of aristocratic militarism, really-existing socialism, and fascism. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that utopian aspirations about how the economy should be organized led nations and global movements to build dystopias to try to bring the utopian future closer.”

The main success story outside of the global North, for DeLong, was East Asia. “The lesson of history throughout the Pacific Rim is that as long as exports earn enough dollars for domestic businesses to obtain access to the global-north-produced machines they need, and the global-north-invented technologies they embody, and as long as the machines go to firms that are efficient and effective, this formula enables a country to advance…. And this is why it is important that subsidies go to companies that successfully export—pass a market-efficiency test, albeit a market-efficiency test applied not in some home free-market economy but among the import-purchasing middle classes of the global north.”

For DeLong, after the Great Recession, neoliberalism was discredited by the economic events of history. Instead, he remains a cheerleader for social democracies. However, DeLong is not above criticizing their actual failures. “In retrospect, the social democratic insistence on government production of goods and services is puzzling. Governments were not merely demanding, nor distributing, nor regulating prices and quality. They were engaged in production…. Even today, in the twenty-first century, there are still immense state-owned and state-managed enterprises: railroads, hospitals, schools, power-generating facilities, steelworks, chemical factories, coal mines, and others. None of which have ever been part of governments’ core competence. Organizations such as hospitals and railroads ought to be run with an eye on efficiency: getting the most produced with the resources available…. As a result, government-managed enterprises—whether the coal mines of Britain or the telecommunications monopolies of Western Europe or the oil-production monopolies of developing nations—have tended to be inefficient and wasteful.”

Perhaps, most relevant today is DeLong’s discussion of the inflationary crisis of the 1970s. “By 1969, the United States was not a 2 percent but a 5 percent per year inflation economy…. President Richard Nixon took office in 1969, and the economists of the incoming Republican administration planned to ease inflation with only a small increase in unemployment by reducing government spending and encouraging the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. Their plan only half worked: unemployment did indeed rise—from 3.5 percent to almost 6 percent between 1969 and 1971, but inflation barely budged…. Their attempts to fight inflation by marginally increasing unemployment no longer worked because no one believed that the administration would have the fortitude to continue those efforts for very long…. One possible “solution” was to create a truly massive recession: to make it painfully clear that even if [unemployment] rose to painful levels, the government would not accommodate, and would keep unemployment high until inflation came down. No president wanted to think about this possibility. It was, in the end, the road the United States took, but largely by accident and after many stopgaps.” DeLong later explains why the public has such a hatred for inflation, “People do not just seek to have good things materially; they like to pretend that there is a logic to the distribution of the good things, and especially its distribution to them in particular—that their prosperity has some rational and deserved basis. Inflation—even the moderate inflation of the 1970s—stripped the mask away.”

Finally, DeLong concludes with the period of hyper-globalization and what economist Richard Baldwin coined “the second unbundling” of industry and intra-firm communication. DeLong states, “With the coming of the internet, it was no longer necessary for a firm’s sophisticated industrial division of labor to be geographically concentrated. You no longer had to be able to walk or drive to your supplier’s offices and factories…. It may have been the transoceanic nonstop jet flight and the international hotel chains that were the key link in this second unbundling…. Attaching to the global trade network is an immense opportunity, but it requires that everything, or nearly everything—infrastructure, scale, public administration, governance, and foreign knowledge of your production capabilities—be working just right…. Still, by 2010 the world’s deployed technological capability stood at more than twenty times what it had been in 1870, and more than twice what it had been in 1975.”

“Critique of Practical Reason” by Immanuel Kant (translated by Mary Gregor)

The second of Kant’s three critiques deals specifically with human agency and morality. Kant begins, “If, now, it is found that this rule is practically correct, then it is a law because it is a categorical imperative. Thus practical laws refer only to the will, without regard to what is attained by its causality…. In a practical law reason determines the will immediately, not by means of an intervening feeling of pleasure or displeasure, not even in this law; and that it can as pure reason be practical is what alone makes it possible for it to be lawgiving…. Pure reason is practical of itself alone and gives (to the human being) a universal law which we call the moral law…. Accordingly the moral law is for them an imperative that commands categorically because the law is unconditional; the relation of such a will to this law is dependence under the name of obligation, which signifies a necessitation, though only by reason and its objective law, to an action which is called duty.”

Kant contrasts duty with happiness. “The direct opposite of the principle of morality is the principle of one’s own happiness made the determining ground of the will…. The maxim of self-love (prudence) merely advises; the law of morality commands…. What duty is, is plain of itself to everyone, but what brings true lasting advantage, if this is to extend to the whole of one’s existence, is always veiled in impenetrable obscurity…. The moral law commands compliance from everyone, and indeed the most exact compliance. Appraising what is to be done in accordance with it must, therefore, not be so difficult that the most common and unpracticed understanding should not know how to go about it, even without worldly prudence…. To satisfy the categorical command of morality is within everyone’s power at all times; to satisfy the empirically conditioned precept of happiness is but seldom possible.”

Kant next contrasts morality with legality. “What is essential to any moral worth of actions is that the moral law determine the will immediately. If the determination of the will takes place conformably with the moral law but only by means of a feeling, of whatever kind, that has to be presupposed in order for the law to become a sufficient determining ground of the will, so that the action is not done for the sake of the law, then the action will contain legality indeed but not morality.” It is reason alone, not any feelings of the senses or outside pressures, that must determine the free will towards moral duty. “What is essential in every determination of the will by the moral law is that, as a free will—and so not only without the cooperation of sensible impulses but even with rejection of all of them and with infringement upon all inclinations insofar as they could be opposed to that law—it is determined solely by the law.”

Kant reiterates his categorical imperative that all rational agents must be treated by other agents as ends, in and of themselves, and not merely as means. “The moral law is holy (inviolable)…. A human being alone, and with him every rational creature, is an end in itself: by virtue of the autonomy of his freedom he is the subject of the moral law…. This subject is to be used never merely as a means but as at the same time an end…. In the order of ends the human being (and with him every rational being) is an end in itself, that is, can never be used merely as a means by anyone (not even by God) without being at the same time himself an end, and that humanity, in our person must, accordingly, be holy to ourselves: for he is the subject of the moral law.”

Kant squares his philosophy with his understanding of Christianity, “The moral law is holy (inflexible) and demands holiness of morals, although all the moral perfection that a human being can attain is still only virtue, that is, a disposition conformed with law from respect for law…. With respect to the holiness that the Christian law demands, nothing remains for a creature but endless progress…. The moral law of itself does not promise any happiness…. Holiness of morals is prescribed to them as a rule even in this life while the well-being proportioned to it, namely beatitude, is represented as attainable only in an eternity…. Morals is not properly the doctrine of how we are to make ourselves happy but of how we are to become worthy of happiness.”

Finally, Kant concludes, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.”

“Alchemical Studies” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

This is another book by Jung detailing how the work of alchemists was a precursor of psychology. He begins, “In medieval alchemy we have the long-sought connecting link between Gnosis and the processes of the collective unconscious that can be observed in modern man.” He opposes this to modernity’s constant striving for greater consciousness, “Such a symbolic unity cannot be attained by the conscious will because consciousness is always partisan. Its opponent is the collective unconscious, which does not understand the language of the conscious mind…. The unconscious can be reached and expressed only by symbols, and for this reason the process of individuation can never do without the symbol. The symbol is the primitive exponent of the unconscious, but at the same time an idea that corresponds to the highest intuitions of the conscious mind.”

For Jung, the alchemists’ project involved projecting outwards towards the material world what was deep within their inner psyche. “In the abstruse symbolism of alchemy we hear a distant echo of this kind of thinking…. But we also find in it a groping towards the future, a premonition of the time when the projection would be taken back into man…. How obstinately it was projected back into matter. Psychological knowledge through withdrawal of projections seems to have been an extremely difficult affair from the very beginning…. It sounds very strange to modern ears that the inner man and his spiritual growth should be symbolized by metals…. After Zarathustra had received the drink of omniscience from Ahuramazda, he beheld in a dream a tree with four branches of gold, silver, steel, and mixed iron. This tree corresponds to the metallic tree of alchemy, the arbor philosophica, which, if it has any meaning at all, symbolizes spiritual growth and the highest illumination.” Pagan myths also contain a certain type of truth. “Even though mythology may not be “true” in the sense that a mathematical law or a physical experiment is true, it is still a serious subject for research and contains quite as many truths as natural science; only, they lie on a different plane.” As far as projected contents, “whatever their reality may be, functionally at all events they behave just like realities.” Jung, later, continues, “The alchemical projections represent collective contents that stand in painful contrast—or rather, in compensatory relation—to our highest rational convictions and values. They give the strange answers of the natural psyche to the ultimate questions which reason has left untouched. Contrary to all progress and belief in a future that will deliver us from the sorrowful present, they point back to something primeval.”

The medieval alchemists considered themselves Christians in good standing. “We can safely call the light the central mystery of philosophical alchemy. Almost always it is personified as the filius…. The filius remains in the adept’s power…. This filius was equated with Christ.” The Rosarium, a medieval alchemical text, states, “From the stone you shall know in natural wise Christ, and from Christ the stone.” Jung elaborates, “And yet that light or filius philosophorum was openly named the greatest and most victorious of all lights, and set alongside Christ as the Saviour and Preserver of the world! Whereas Christ God himself became man, the filius philosophorum was extracted from matter by human art and, by means of the opus, made into a new light-bringer. In the former case the miracle of man’s salvation is accomplished by God; in the latter, the salvation or transfiguration of the universe is brought about by the mind of man—“Deo concedente,” as the authors never fail to add. In the one case man confesses “I under God,” in the other he asserts “God under me.” Man takes the place of the Creator. Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world order that man has ever attempted: alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before.”

Although alchemy seemed to be the precursor of chemistry, it was also the precursor of psychology. “The purpose of distillation in alchemy was to extract the volatile substance, or spirit, from the impure body…. This was not an ordinary chemical operation, it was essentially a psychological procedure…. The accentuation of the centre is again a fundamental idea in alchemy…. Its physical counterpart is gold, which is therefore a symbol of eternity. In Christianos the centre is compared to paradise and its four rivers. These symbolize the philosophical fluids, which are emanations from the centre…. Nothing is more like God than the centre, for it occupies no space, and cannot be grasped, seen, or measured. Such, too, is the nature of God and the spirits. Therefore the centre is “an infinite abyss of mysteries.” The fire that originates in the centre carries everything upward, but when it cools everything fall back again to the centre.”

The mind cannot escape the unconscious. “It is a process of coming to terms with the unconscious, which always sets in when a man is confronted with its darkness…. Here the human mind is confronted with its origins, the archetypes; the finite consciousness with its archaic foundations; the mortal ego with the immortal self, Anthropos, purusha, atman, or whatever else be the names that human speculation has given to that collective preconscious state from which the individual ego arose. Kinsman and stranger at once, it recognizes and yet does not recognize that unknown brother who steps towards it, intangible yet real.” When consciousness tries to assert itself, it is always held back in check. “And whenever the conscious mind clings hard and fast to concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations—as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness—nature pops up with her inescapable demands. Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit…. The lumen naturae is the natural spirit, whose strange and significant workings we can observe in the manifestations of the unconscious…. The unconscious is not just a “subconscious” appendage or the dustbin of consciousness, but is a largely autonomous psychic system for compensating the biases and aberrations of the conscious attitude…. The unconscious is not limited only to the instinctual and reflex processes of the cortical centres; it also extends beyond consciousness and, with its symbols, anticipates future conscious processes. It is therefore quite as much a “supra-consciousness.””

Jung next gets into the idea of the faulty dualism involved in the subject/object distinction. “In East and West alike, alchemy contains as it core the Gnostic doctrine of the Anthropos and by its very nature has the character of a peculiar doctrine of redemption…. It is almost impossible for our scientifically trained minds to feel their way back into that primitive state of participation mystique in which subject and object are identical…. Any prolonged preoccupation with an unknown object acts as an almost irresistible bait for the unconscious to project itself into the unknown nature of the object and to accept the resultant perception, and the interpretation deduced from it, as objective.” For Jung, the alchemists were doing the best to make sense of the unconscious with the tools available to their epoch. “Willy-nilly they had to submit to the overwhelming power of the numinous ideas that crowded into the empty darkness of their minds. From these depths a light gradually dawned upon them as to the nature of the process and its goal. Because they were ignorant of the laws of matter, its behaviour did not do anything to contradict their archetypal conception of it. Occasionally they made chemical discoveries in passing, as was only to be expected; but what they really discovered, and what was an endless source of fascination to them, was the symbolism of the individuation process…. The alchemists had unexpectedly blundered into the unconscious.”

Jung concludes with a word on how the psyche relates to both its conscious and unconscious parts. “The psyche needs to know the meaning of its existence—not just any meaning, but the meaning of those images and ideas which reflect its nature and which originate in the unconscious. The unconscious supplies as it were the archetypal form, which in itself is empty and irrepresentable. Consciousness immediately fills it with related or similar representational material so that it can be perceived. For this reason archetypal ideas are locally, temporally, and individually conditioned…. The great psychic systems of healing, the religions, likewise consist of universal myth motifs whose origin and content are collective and not personal…. The conscious psyche is certainly of a personal nature, but it is by no means the whole of the psyche. The foundation of consciousness, the psyche per se, is unconscious, and its structure, like that of the body, is common to all, its individual features being only insignificant variants.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Judges” (translated by Robert Alter)

In his introduction, Alter begins by guessing as to the date of compilation of the Book of Judges. “The redaction and final literary formulation of these stories are much later [than their setting]—perhaps, as some scholars have inferred, toward the end of the eighth century B.C.E., some years after the destruction of the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E. and before the reforms of King Josiah a century later.” Next, Alter gets into the nuance of the translation. “The word shofet, traditionally translated as “judge,” has two different meanings—“judge” in the judicial sense and “leader” or “chieftain.”… The narrative contexts make perfectly clear that these judges are ad hoc military leaders—in several instances, guerrilla commanders.” Finally, Alter describes the repetitive flow throughout the course of the narrative, “From the latter part of chapter 3 to the end of chapter 12, there is a formulaic rhythm of events: Israel’s disloyalty to its God, its oppression by enemies as punishment for the dereliction, the crying out to God by the Israelites, God’s raising up a judge to rescue them.”

In Judges 1:6, Alter suggests the foreshadowing of violence recurrent throughout the book, “they chopped off his thumbs and his big toes. The mutilation, which on evidence of Adoni-Bezek’s own words in the next verse was evidently a common practice, is both a humiliation and a means of permanently preventing the captured leader from becoming a combatant again because he would be unable to wield a bow or sword or run on the battlefield. It should be observed, moreover, that this grisly detail is an apt thematic and imagistic introduction to Judges, the most violent of all the books of the Bible…. The mutilation of the king, then, introduces us to a realm of political instability in which both people and groups are violently torn asunder.”

Alter always alerts the reader to the formulaic nature of biblical narrative. The form of the prose foreshadows the subject and structure of the story following. For good measure, he throws in a bit of history and semantics. He relates in Judges 5:1, “And Deborah sang, and Barak son of Abinoam with her. The use of a singular verb (feminine) followed by a compound subject is an indication in biblical grammar that the first of the subjects named is the primary actor and the second one ancillary to the action. Deborah is introduced as singer of the victory song, but that is not a claim of authorship, and elsewhere in the poem she is addressed in the second person. In any case, the scholarly consensus is that this is one of the oldest texts in the Bible, perhaps composed not long after the battle it reports, around 1100 B.C.E. Its language abounds in archaisms, many of them uncertain in meaning and probably some of them scrambled in scribal transmission.”

As always in the Bible’s more archaic bits, there is evidence of the continuing struggle between monotheism and the continued relevance of the plethora of pagan gods. In Judges 11:24, Alter notes, “Do you not take possession of what Chemosh your god gives you to possess? The theological assumption of this statement is perfectly characteristic of this early period of Israelite history. Israel has its own God, YHWH (“the Lord”), believed to be more powerful than other gods, but each nation has its guiding deity, assumed to look after the national destiny.”

In Judges 16:13, we get a description of Samson’s famous hair. Alter describes the multiple allusions involved with this account, “If you weave my head’s seven tresses together with the web. Only now do we learn how Samson wears his uncut hair (and one should note the magical number seven). In the third of his three false explanations, he edges toward the real secret because his hair is involved. This version also comes close to his actual predicament because it conjures up entanglement in a woman’s instrument, the loom.”

Finally, at the conclusion of the book, in Judges 21:25, Alter relates, “In those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes. This refrain is now inserted at the end as a kind of epilogue to the Book of Judges. The state of political anarchy has been especially manifest in the story of the concubine at Gibeah and the civil war it triggers, and perhaps in the war’s aftermath as well. The refrain sets the stage for the Book of Samuel, which will move in swift steps to the founding of the monarchy.”