The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire by James Hillman

Author:James Hillman [Hillman, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781317799603
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-10-31T07:00:00+00:00

CULTURAL DISORDER

Culture takes place in closed, even closeted places, involving the alchemical putrefactio, or decadence as the body of fermentation. Generation and decay happen together; and they are not always easy to distinguish. What goes with civilization are irrigation systems, monuments, victories, historical endurance, wealth, and power as a cohesive force with common purpose. Civilization works; culture flowers. Civilization looks ahead, culture looks back. Civilization is historical record; culture a mythic enterprise.

They may interrelate, but they also seem able to do without each other. Civilization without culture is all around us. Culture without civilization? I think of the Tierra del Fuego Indians found by Westerners in the eighteenth century, with hardly fire, clothes, shelter, tools or vessels, always starving, always sick, yet whose vocabulary was more numerous than Shakespeare's or Joyce's, and whose culture was altogether myths of every sort.

Culture, as I have been speaking of it, looks backward and reaches back as a nostalgia for invisibilities, to make them present and to found human life upon them. The cultural enterprise attempts to peel, flail, excite individual sensitivity so that it can again—notice the again—be in touch with these invisibles and orient life by their compass. The key syllable in culture is the prefix re.

To build an argument upon a pun, the back wards display the backwards toward which culture reaches. For here is a display of recurring forms that do not change through time and which repeat in every age and society. (All societies, by the way, have some sort of psychopathology.) This universality and chronicity is expressed by both the physical view, backward as “genetic defectives” and the moral view, backward as sin, fall, or eternal damnation. If the gods have become diseases, then these forms of chronic disorder are the gods in disguise; they are occulted in these misshapen, inhuman forms, and our seeing through to them there—in all forms of chronic disorder in ourselves and our city—is a grounding act of culture. The education of sensitivity begins right here in trying to see through the manifestations of time into the eternal patterns within time. We may regard the discontents of civilization as if they are fundamentals of culture.

It may be surprising to associate the diseased with the divine and culture with deformity. We do so want the gods to be pristine, models in marble on Olympus, pure as driven snow. But they are not without their shadows, their afflictions and infirmities. As they are beyond time (atbnetos, “immortal”), so these shadows of disorder that they portray in their myths reappear in those human events that are not affected by time, that is, in chronic disorders. Since we are created in their images, we can only do in time what they do in eternity. Their eternal afflictions are our human infirmities.

So, my point is coming clearer: it is in dealing with the back ward that culture grows. I do not mean going off to apprentice oneself in an asylum, to become a therapist—although I understand what students are asking for by wanting to enter a training program.

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