Part 3

Where Roosevelt presents the picture of a man at home in the world, Nietzsche is seen as a stranger in it, an alien. Where Roosevelt went straight out and acted, Nietzsche withdrew into his shell. Where Roosevelt forgot himself in others, in causes, in the glamour and absorption of _things_, Nietzsche remained in a state of _acute self-consciousness_. A Roosevelt glories in the world and thinks it is good and the people in it excellent and interesting; a Nietzsche sees it as full of horrible and terrible things and is filled with revulsion at the sight of human cowardice, slothfulness and depravity. Where a Roosevelt spreads himself all over, interested in a multitude of objects, a Nietzsche concentrates more and more on a few things, a few ideas, a life which shuts out as much as possible anything that will disturb his predetermined path.

This is the normal attitude of the introvert. He is ill adapted to the outer world, because he is absorbed in the inner world. And this absorption leads, in the case of a Nietzsche, to great discoveries and great works.

If we remember Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious as the summation of the past, the storehouse of wisdom, the creative source, we may readily understand that the collective unconscious is the psychic stream of life itself and that it not only bears the past in it, but also the budding future. That which is to be lies creatively within it, and is revealed to the great artist, the great thinker in majestic symbols and so-called visions. That is why we say that great art and great thought are always ahead of the world. For the extreme introvert, absorbed in himself, lives in that world of imagination where the products of the collective unconscious become known to him. He has deep intuitions, he actually may have symbols and ideas presented to him in dream and phantasy, even in hallucination. The English mystic, Blake, actually saw the forms and shapes which he drew, and claimed, also, that some of his poems were dictated to him by a voice. I have already spoken of Moses’ experience with the burning bush and the voice of God.

It was quite natural therefore that Nietzsche should have been a forerunner. Out of his years of solitude there came at last an eruption from the unconscious which was nothing short of amazing. Each part of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and each part is about a hundred pages long, was written in ten days. The thoughts and words came so fast that Nietzsche could not keep up with them. If he was walking, he had to write on scraps of paper. The experience was so overwhelming that he compared it with that of the Biblical prophets, and said that not in two thousand years had there been another such case of inspiration.

What is Thus Spake Zarathustra? It is an incomparable picture of the collective unconscious, as Jung points out, and foreshadows the new psychology, which by the slow, painfully cumulative method of science has come to some of the same discoveries that Nietzsche grasped intuitively. It also is an indictment of Christian civilization and foreshadows its breaking up by the erection of a new principle, the Anti-Christ, the principle of power.

It is, therefore, a revolutionary document, so far in advance of the time when it was written that Nietzsche dared to show it only to seven people, most of whom rejected it. He felt that he was in utter isolation, a “voice crying in the wilderness.”

What Nietzsche celebrates (as shown in the section on Adler) is _will-to-power_. The doctrine of Christianity is love, and the rule of love has certain implications. It means that everyone is included, for in the eyes of love the object is always valuable. To a loving mother the child who is an idiot is as precious (if not more so) than his more normal brothers and sisters. She loves him: that gives him value. Hence the rule of love means equality, fraternity, democracy. It leads to the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number. It leads, in short, to the idea of numbers; the rule of the many.

Its dangers are obvious. Everything new, original, different is pulled down to the common level. It breeds the spirit of conformity, and finally eventuates in the Babbitts, the ideals of Main Street, the formation of Ku Klux Klans. Such are the final fruits of a rampant rule of love. If your neighbors are as valuable (really more valuable) than yourself (for love always places the object above oneself) then you should submit to your neighbors, live and do as they live and do, and give up your own individual path, your own way, and anything original or new that may be created by you.

It is against this that Nietzsche comes with a voice which is far deeper than a personal voice. It is the protest of the collective unconscious itself; it is a deep racial movement against a violation of man’s own future. Hence, Nietzsche sets the individual against the race; he raises an aristocratic ideal against the democratic; he celebrates new values, original things, the exceptional and the different. As against love, he rears the doctrine of power. And by power he means the setting of oneself against the race, and the triumph of oneself, for in this triumph, the new is born, the new art, new idea, new thinking, and the race is forced into new paths of greatness.

But, seen in another light, the meaning of Zarathustra is the _revolt of the introvert against the extravert_.

Western civilization is the civilization of the extravert. A civilization built up on the principle of love is one which puts the accent on others, on things outside ourself. As the saying goes, it takes two to love; there is always the other, and that other is more important than oneself, if it is really love. Hence, love is the root of the extraverted attitude. As I said of Roosevelt, he might have put it of himself: “I am--what I love.”

Such a civilization, therefore, tends toward action, democracy, the rule of the many, invention, business (the exchange between people), and since the power of a civilization over the individual is almost overwhelming, it means that a Christian civilization has thwarted, twisted, deformed all those whose natures were not in accord with it. Christianity has been a violation of the introvert.

For, naturally, what Nietzsche depicts in his superman and his will-to-power, is himself. He depicts the psychology of the introvert. The introvert is governed by the power principle. Where the extravert finds relief, and only functions happily, by losing himself in others, by giving himself to the world outside him; the introvert finds relief only by remembering himself, by refusing to allow others to absorb him, by withdrawing from the outer world. The introvert is constantly striving to preserve the integrity of his ego. He seeks an inner freedom. He feels bound by the demands of others. Action takes him away from the stream of his ideas, his inner brooding, and he will not have much of it. Serving others often seems to him a shallow thing, a waste of time, compared with the great discovery he is tracking, or the art he is aiming to achieve.

Power vs. love--introvert vs. extravert.

And how is it that two such dissimilar human beings appear in the same world? We have only to go back to the root-instincts in man to come to some sort of understanding. As we know, the two great instincts are that of self-preservation and that of race-preservation. Self-preservation leads us to think of ourselves, to turn the eye inward. It is selfish, hence, it is power, not love. Race-preservation leads us to think of others, of wife and family, of neighbors, of the world, to turn the eye outward. It concerns interest in others; hence, it is more love than power.

The symbol of self-preservation is eating, devouring (we eat just for ourselves); the symbol of race-preservation is sexuality (the motive in sexuality is, unconsciously, to beget offspring).

One sees now how this discovery of the types by Jung settles the question as to the puzzling opposition between the theories of Freud and Adler.

Freud’s theory is the sexual, Adler’s the will-to-power. In other words, as Jung has pointed out, Freud is an extravert, and his theory reflects himself; Adler is an introvert, and his theory is typical of his type.

Both theories are, in a sense, true; only we must never apply the Freudian theory to an introvert, nor the Adler theory to an extravert.

It will be seen now how the theory of the collective unconscious includes both the theory of Freud and the theory of Adler and transcends them both. In the collective unconscious are both the summed up wisdom of the race with its creative forward push and also the instincts. The roots of both ego and sex are to be found there, flowering in one individual more along the ego path, in another more along the sex path.

The trouble with both Freud and Adler, according to Jung, is that they stop at this point. Their theories are _reductive_. The one reduces human nature back to sex, the other to power. We are _nothing but_--this or that. But, actually, we are also all we have experienced, and not only that, but also all the race has experienced. We are also creative. We cannot explain man only in terms of the past, in the things from which he originated (finally, the instincts), we must also explain him in terms of the future, his possibilities, the new life he is seeking, the greatness which is to be.

In short, we cannot cure a neurosis merely by explaining to a man that he has an Oedipus complex or a homosexual tendency; neither can we cure him by showing him that he has an inferiority complex and hence an abnormal will-to-power. We can only cure him by giving him a future to live; he must go out and feel that he has something to live for.

Just how psycho-analysis arrives at such a result must be reserved for a later chapter.

VI.

TYPES.

In picturing Roosevelt as an extravert and Nietzsche as an introvert, I did not mean to imply, of course, that either lacked the opposite mechanism. All of us are born with both the sexual-instinct and the ego-instinct, the gift of love and the will-to-power. However, because we are loaded more one way than the other, the one tendency tends to suppress the other, and the other remains therefore, not erased, but relatively undeveloped, and shows itself in inadequate and perhaps twisted expression.

There was, of course, an extravert in Nietzsche. But that extravert lived a shadowy life beside the great introvert, and showed himself in a clumsy relationship with others, an inadequate response to the world, an inability to get along. So too was there an introvert in Roosevelt, but he was a poor one, with doubtless strange ideas sometimes breaking forth into impulsive and wrong-headed action.

All that we can say is that life forces us to accept one side more than the other, until we become, as it were, specialists along the side of extraversion or of introversion.

This specialization, of course, makes us one-sided, and this one-sidedness reaches an even greater narrowness through a still further specialization, which is that of _function_.

According to Jung, the human psyche is composed of four functions. These are _thinking_, _feeling_, _intuition_ and _sensation_.

I do not intend to burden the reader with explanations of these terms, for we would go far afield in a maze of technicalities. I will merely try to give a hint of their meaning.

_Thinking_ is readily recognizable. It is, in its pure form, an act of will, and it may begin with an idea, which it proceeds to illustrate and to prove, or it may begin with many separated facts and proceeds to bind them together into a theory or idea.

_Feeling_ is a reaction of like or dislike to an object. It must not be confused with _emotion_. Both thinking and feeling, according to Jung, are adapted functions; that is, functions which have developed through the discipline of life, and which did not exist in their pure forms when we were born. _Emotion_, however, is something allied to our instinctive life and something we share with the animals. It is psychologically what Jung calls a feeling-sensation; that is to say, it is partly physical and partly mental. We see this clearly when we find an emotion of shame bringing a blush to the cheek, or one of fear setting the heart pounding, or one of joy making the pulses leap. In each case we were aware of something mental, sense of joy, fear, etc., and something physical, heart pounding, cheeks blushing, etc.

Feeling is separated from sensation and developed into something by itself. The feeling person is one who has a highly developed sense of the values of things registered through reactions of like and dislike. His immediate liking is not accidental, but due to a high sensitiveness to the really good qualities of the object; his disliking is equally a deep and a true thing.

If thinking and feeling are conscious functions, that is, more or less under the direction of the will (one makes oneself think, one learns to like and dislike), intuition and sensation are unconscious functions. There is no control of them. They simply happen.

_Intuition_ is a sort of instant insight. It has something of the lightning flash in it. It is a seeing-into. And this seeing-into may be of something near or of something far. A man may have a hunch that a certain horse is going to win a race; a woman may have an intuition that her husband, in spite of his protests, has been untrue to her. Intuitions may also be of a deeper sort. The intuition of the painter leads him to paint the soul, the inner life of the sitter. The intuition of the inventor by a blinding flash reveals the solution of the problem.

_Sensation_, according to Jung, is sensing, a function which transmits a physical stimulus to perception. We see, hear, feel (contact), etc. It is our conscious sensing of the world about us through images, sounds, etc., just as intuition is an unconscious sensing of the world about us. Hence, sensation relates more closely to the physical life, the body, than any of the other functions.

Now what Jung maintains, and amply proves in his great work on Psychological Types, is that each of us is not only either an introvert or an extravert, but also that each of us _develops one of these four functions at the expense of the others_. There are therefore thinking types, feeling types, intuitive types and sensational types, and since any of these types is also either extraverted or introverted we have eight types.

I will merely give a few examples to show what the types are like:

_Extraverted thinking type._ A good example is Darwin. He was a slow, patient thinker; thinking was most obviously his most highly developed function; but this function was extraverted. That is to say, like all extraverts his attention and interest was in outer things and the ideas of others. Hence he was one who built up a theory on observed data, whether this was a direct study of plants and animals or in reading the works of others. His thoughts proceeded from the outside in.

_Introverted thinking type._ Kant is a good example. He was a great philosopher. Instead of proceeding from facts to theory, he proceeded from ideas to facts. That is to say, through his introversion, he received ideas from the unconscious, great ideas of a timeless nature, conceptions of time, space, etc., and these he proceeded to elaborate and prove.

_Extraverted feeling type._ A good example of this type is Mary Pickford. It is obvious that she is not a thinker; neither is she one of those intuitive persons who see into others and know life deeply. She feels others. She responds by like and dislike; and by the fitness of things. She is well extraverted and well adapted.

_Introverted feeling type._ Eleanore Duse is an example. She was a great actress; but one felt her to be one of those silent women whose feelings are all within, who nurse deep moods, who cannot express their personal selves, who have great difficulty in their relationships and tend, as a rule, to shun the world and live in seclusion.

According to Jung thinking is more a masculine function; both extraverted and introverted it is found more in men than in women; feeling is more feminine, and is usually found in women.

_Extraverted intuitive type._ Lloyd George, of England, is of this type. A friend of mine who met him during the war said that as soon as Lloyd George looked at him, he felt he was completely understood, that the statesman saw through him. His gift has been to see the tide even before it turned, to see the possibilities in the people about them, to leap to his conclusions with a sure agility. If the thinking and feeling types are more or less steady, pursuing a definite and logical course, the intuitive type (and sensational) is changeable, erratic, swift, fickle. This is due to the fact that wherever they see a new possibility, they leap to it, forgetting what they hitherto pursued.

_Introverted intuitive type._ An excellent example is that given in the last chapter, that of Nietzsche. His intuitions were of the introverted kind. He saw inwardly, into the unconscious. This type is usually very badly adapted to the world. It is close to the unconscious, and its great intuitions of change, disaster and the new order of the future put it at variance with society to such an extent as to make life very difficult. Undoubtedly such men have always been the great mystics, the great prophets, as Jung quotes, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”

_Extraverted sensation type._ We see examples of this type very often among actors, dancers, circus people. They are people of a very sensuous nature, depending more on the sharp stimulus of sensation than on any other function. We also see examples among men who are epicures at eating, spend much of their time on fine dressing, and who seek sensation for its own sake, sensuous surroundings, the more sybaritic forms of sexuality, etc. Among women we see an inordinate love of luxury, a theatrical exhibitionism, and self-indulgence in many forms. Since this type is the least noble (as the intuitive is the most noble) examples need not be given.

_Introverted sensation type._ This is a type extremely hard to define. I will merely suggest it. It is probable that the poet Poe was of this type. He was certainly introverted, but his work is not marked specifically by deep thought, by feeling or by intuition. If we consider his poetry we see that he gives us strange pictures of a No Man’s Land of the imagination; and that he senses these imaginative realms of the dead and the ghostly. We feel a reality in these dark pictures. But they have no meaning in the way of giving us to understand life more deeply or leading us to great ideas or high flights of feeling. What they do give us is a sense of “out of space, out of time,” as he himself put it. Introverted sensation gives us just that. It is a sensing of the eternal images of the unconscious.

Such, by a series of swift strokes, are the eight types. I cannot, of course, in this space, do full justice to them. They are included in this survey because they represent an important element in Jung’s work and serve to show how dark and deep are the psychological problems of the race. With eight types (possibly more) living in the world about us, there is indeed much room for misunderstanding and for human conflict.

It is also obvious that Nietzsche was psychologically correct when he said that he saw only fragments of human beings about him, and nowhere a man. Here he saw an arm, there a leg, there an eye and here an ear, there a mouth and here a breast. In short, he saw a world of specialization, where one man becomes, like Darwin, a good thinker, but also is callous to art and to the beauty and joy of life; and where another develops neither his thinking nor his insight, but spends his existence in a vain round of the senses.

It is no wonder, then, that there is so much mental sickness. Too great a one-sidedness is a violation of man’s nature, which is full of various needs and must, if it develops freely, live a rounded life. Hence, according to Jung, the basis of the neurosis is not merely a sexual problem or a problem of power; it is due to the conflict between the developed and the undeveloped functions. There comes a time for the thinker, for instance, when his outraged feeling life must manifest itself. It is at such a moment that the neurosis begins.

VII.

THE CONFLICT AND ITS SOLUTION.

If we want to put the matter in its broadest sense, we can say that the great conflict of this age is between the extraverted attitude and the introverted, between Christ and Anti-Christ, between Christianity with its democracy, its insistence on good works, its life of activity and service, its concentration, actually, on business, machinery and getting on, and on the other hand, the claims of the individual and the demands of the inner life for an enhancement of art, of research, of philosophy, of spiritual development, of freedom.

It is a conflict between the principle of love and the principle of power, and naturally, it is not only an external thing, but something that takes place in every individual who has made any sort of high development. For it is a psychic law that if we carry anything to an extreme, we meet the opposite.

This is clearly illustrated in Goethe’s Faust. The hero, Faust, has carried his introverted side to a very high development; indeed, so far, that everything he studied and all that he knows now appears lifeless and uninteresting. He is sick of himself, sick of life. It is all nothing. His search for knowledge has led nowhere. In the end all that we know is--that we cannot know. What a pity then that he has squandered his youth on study and meditation and medicine. A kind of death comes over him; which means, psychologically, that he has reached the end of one line of development, and is preparing himself to change over to another and new line.

This soon appears, in the form of a poodle dog who soon shows himself as the Devil. Both these symbols are inevitable. A dog, as shown before, relates to our more extraverted side, and it is this side for which Faust now longs. He has reached the end of his development (for the time being) as an introvert; the longing that now is awakened is for _life_--that is, for youth, activity, sexuality, love, ardent adventure, etc. Hence, the symbol of the dog as representing the side of himself he has not developed. But this really is also the Devil. That is to say that which is undeveloped is still in a primitive state, and through its long repression, bears the aspect of something ugly and evil. In order, therefore, to reach the “other side,” in order to begin to live out the unlived possibilities of his nature, he must sell himself to the Devil.

That is to say, that when the undeveloped side shows itself and takes command, it cannot be lived unless one is willing to go a path which may often appear evil and which is in direct defiance to what one has previously lived and thought good.

This selling out to the Devil appears as a great danger. It means that he will never be “saved,” never go to heaven. But actually in the prologue of the play, God allows the Devil to make this compact with Faust because the Devil is “a part of that power which wills the bad, but somehow works the good.” That is to say, if one is willing to step over into the undeveloped side, and live it in spite of its evil beginnings, one can only develop oneself and finally come to a higher good.