Is Jung's Red Book True as a Work of Art?

The following is an excerpt from Wolfgang Giegerich's book The Flight into the Unconscious (pp. 279-282):

About Blake's productions Jung remarked critically, "they are an artistic production rather than an authentic representation [i.e., a mere documentation or “report about..."] of unconscious processes" (Letters 2, pp. 513-4). This tells us that for Jung the art making process distorts that true authenticity which for him resides only in the immediacy of the original experience itself (Urerfahrung, Urerlebnis; "the most immediate experience" [CW11 S 396]). The ground of the truth and authenticity of a vision is kept external to its representation, such as in the Red Book, by being declared to have been an experience as factual event, "There was nothing of conscious structure in these fantasies, they were just events that happened" (Analytical Psychology 97). Happenings! The positivity of "events and experiences" (MDR 182)! The facticity of their occurrence!

But all art is of "conscious structure" through and through, otherwise dogs would be able to appreciate a statue or painting as art rather than as a mere thing. Fantasies, if they are consciously released into their fantasy character and not deliberately construed as reports about factual events, are in themselves thoroughly illumined, as artwork events of consciousness.

As we already heard, Jung insisted, concerning his fantasy material: "No, it is not art! On the contrary, it is nature" (MDR 186). This is, by the way, diametrically opposed to the thinking of the alchemists, for whom quod natura relinquit imperfectum ars perficit. According to this view, truth can only come about through the human processing of what is naturally given as mere raw material, as factual prima materia. Truth is the end-product of a long opus contra naturam. What is naturally given is ipso facto precisely not (yet) true. Art creates its own originas and within the work of art. But Jung wants to identify truth with factual existence, as if it were a piece of nature: "An elephant is true because it exists" (CW 11 S 5). Ultimately Jung's concept of psychic truth boils down to sheer overwhelmingness, brutal power: “the overpowering force of the original experiences" (360), "quite simply experiences" (365a), "The unshakeableness of the experience"(338b). Jung is here a positivist and, in a sense, existentialist. His truth has nothing to do any more with truth in its authentic sense. 

Jung is here committed to a logic of externality and otherness. For him, the Red Book as an object has its truth, origin, and reality in itself, but fundamentally outside of itself, in the literal experience that gave rise to it. Because the event of the overwhelming experience is what really counts, he could not radically release the fantasy substance itself of his experience into its own, into logically beine fantasy, having the form of fantasy, being art (or, another possibility being philosophy or Dichtung). He needed to emphatically reject the notion of art for his Red Book because what he wanted to cling to and preserve at all cost was the so-called "original" experience external to and underlying the Red Book: the experience which for him was supposed to be the sole locus of truth and authenticity. Unthinkable that he could have released the substance of his experiences from the facticity of the experiences as well as from himself as the subject who had such experience into the negativity of the form of fantasy. Rather than à corps perdu plunging into the fantasy world as fantasy world and thus as a mental, conscious reality, as speculation, that is, rather than relentlessly releasing his experience, and himself going under, into “the soul,” his whole project was precisely to extract from the fantasy the positivity of a literal external cause of it--ultimately "the primal world of the unconscious" (MDR 200) and posit it as its a priori. "The unconscious" is the objectified, literalized, externalized--and thus killed--soul: "the soul" by definition deprived of its "being of conscious structure" or its being thought.

The clinging to the factual event of one's experience over against the fantasy character of what has been experienced is at the same time the self-preservation (or initial self-institution) of the ego (the structure or definition of the subject as "the ego" in the sense of personalistic psychology). The I is not willing to let go of itself and go under into its fantasies, so that they might be released into their inherent truth. This is why Jung described this period of his life (his) "Confrontation with the Unconscious," focusing, rather than on the work to be produced, on the crisis he had to go through an on his tormenting doubts as to his own sanity. And it is why he tried to substitute for the suggestion that what he was doing was an following theory about the telos of the process: "Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not I" (199b). This is already in nuce the dogma of Jung's psychologistic “personality cult,” as one might term it. He circled around himself (which might, be contrasted with mental-illness-plagued van Gogh's dedication to his painting). The creative impulse, which without doubt was at work in Jung, was diverted from its own direction towards the production of truth (in works of art, literature, philosophy, music), i.e., towards soul-making, and abused for egoic purposes (self-development). The truth is not allowed to come home to itself, but is forced down into the human being as (a new) literal personality.

Cause and telos are in Jung's scheme dissociated and set up as literal and external (past event or future entity, respectively). Art, poetry, philosophical thought (in other words, soul), by contrast, would be what is in between those two: presence, because owing to the absolute-negative interiorization of the experienced fantasy into itself, into its truth, into its own internal ground and archê, it contains both its cause and its telos only within its absolute negativity.

Because the Red Book has the mystery and truth that it is about, fundamentally outside itself in Jung's factual "original experience, on the one hand, and in the "new personality" to be formed in the positively existing civil man Jung, on the other hand, it is really an unwritten book. In Plato scholarship one distinguishes between Plato's exoteric written dialogues made available to the general public and his "unwritten doctrine" (agrapha dogmata) made known only orally to the esoteric inner circle of his disciples. Jung's book is esoteric in a much more radical, namely absolute, sense. Plato logically fully released his unwritten doctrine out into the open, and thus logically "published" it, even if only orally to select disciples; he could do so because he obviously had relentlessly abandoned himself to the inner truth of his thought experience. Potentially he could therefore also have written down his agrapha dogmata. But Jung’s Red Book is the paradox of his “written unwritten (and on principle unwriteable) truth”: literally, factually written, but logically unwritten. It merely points to the mystery that is per definitionem solely his mystery and not ours. "The myth commences, the one that can only be lived, not sung, the one that sings itself" (286, tr.m.), we read at one point in the Red Book. The authentic locus of his truth is now the positivity of Existenz, real life: "first and exclusively and solely in one's own person" (CW 7, p. 5, re.m.), in man whose nature is now no longer comprehended as his theoretical I (classical metaphysics) or his poietic soul (Nietzsche) but as what Heidegger would later term his mere Dasein.

Just as the authentic locus of the Christian truth is not the church as cathedral, bur the human heart, so the authentic place of Jung’s truth is not the Red Book, which, as we know, he considered his church, his cathedral. His truth has its authenticity only in the factual events of his "immediate experiences” themselves.

Jung’s paintings and calligraphy are only secondary illustrations for the external purpose of satisfying his wish to show his subjective esteem. If they were art, they would shine from within themselves. The historistic imitation of a medieval illuminated book is the telltale sign that what the Red Book contains has its worth not in itself, but only in the feeling of the man C.G. Jung. "I always knew that these experiences contained something precious, and therefore I knew of nothing better than to write them down in a precious,' that is to say, costly book and to paint the images that emerged through reliving it all ..." (360). Decoration. Ego work. It had to be ego work because the fantasy had not been released into its truth, into the form of truth. Which is why its truth could not shine forth from it of its own accord. And the fact that the calligraphy and, to a lesser degree, the paintings imitate medieval forms of expression clearly reveals that the visual aspect of the Red Book is not the self-expression, i.e., not the intrinsic form, of the material presented itself. Superimposed. An accessory. Inauthentic. Thus Jung's cited critique of Blake ("an artistic production rather than an authentic representation of unconscious processes") reflects upon his own production, if we understand it in a different sense from his. (This is quite apart from the fact that the idea of an authentic representation of unconscious processes is in itself fallacious. Authenticity is never the gift of the unconscious processes themselves. of raw natural events, which inevitably come in the state of imperfection and inauthenticity. If at all, authenticity can only be the produced result of the artist's or adept's ars).

The Red Book has meanwhile been published. But published only the way art works can nowadays be technically reproduced. We can never get behind the reproduction to the “original"--because Jung's own volume is in itself not, and was not supposed to be the original. Dante's Divina Commedia, by contrast, does not need a costly leather binding. Even if it comes to us in a wretched, cheaply printed paperback copy we have nevertheless the original: because as art and philosophical thought it has its illumining and heart-warming truth absolute-negatively within itself, a truth that freely communicates itself to anybody capable and willing to abandon himself to it. It is everybody’s mystery, not only Dante’s.