Jung As a Writer by Rowland Susan;

Author:Rowland, Susan; [Susan Rowland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317710462
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

James Hillman is suggesting something similar in the other quotation at the start of this chapter. He declares rhetoric to be part of the ‘nature’ of being human (Hillman 1989: 295). Of course the core importance of rhetoric to the human psyche was one of the themes of Chapter 4. When Jung posits a continuum between psyche and matter in that essay, he is implying that psyche is part of the ecosystem. An intrinsically rhetorical psyche cannot therefore be seen as distinct from the phenomenal world.

Certainly, it is axiomatic that ecocritics are paying careful attention to the extent that humans, as biological beings, demonstrate a continuity (rather than transcendent separation) with nature and the environment. Neil Evernden explains that interrelatedness of the ecosystem, including the human animal, is actually more deeply involved than hitherto believed (Evernden 1996: 93). Humans do more than walk upon the earth; they contain within themselves other life that they cannot do without.

In this analysis, the biosphere does not consist of discrete beings. Even the western conception of interrelatedness as causal connections turns out to be too modest or too predicated upon an ethos of individualism. Rather living beings dwell in a state of interpenetration just as a forest soil is a delicate margin instead of a firm boundary. Humans, for example, could not survive without countless inner bacteria, let alone the animals that we breathe in and out. It is possible, Evernden says, to see animism return via this acute ecological insight:

For once we engage in the extension of the boundary of the self into the ‘environment,’ then of course we imbue it with life and can quite properly regard it as animate – it is animate because we are part of it.

(ibid.: 101)

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