A Psychological Approach to Ethics

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO ETHICS

ABSTRACT This article has the purpose of calling attention to C.G. Jung's archetypal concept of the Self as an approach to ethics. The distinction between simple morality and transcendent ethics is established. Comparison is made between the archetype of the Self and Kant's Categorical Imperative. Freud's Superego, however. is assimilated to a "natural" outlook on morality, such as the notion of Altruism in sociobiology. The Superego is only the psychic effect of the current moral code, which could be explained either culturally or as a Lamarckian acquired characteristic of the Unconscious. Jung's transcendent ethics is expressed in an "ethical mandala.

This article has the simple purpose of calling attention to the possibility of an approach to ethics from Jung's archetypal conception of the Self. The whole of Jung's psychology is, of course, up to a certain point, ethical. It is not only a theoretical conception of the psyche and a method of cure, but it also teaches a way of life. Yet there are few essays in which Jung deals specifically with the mystery of moral and ethical behavior. The fundamental work in this connection is a small essay, "A Psychological View of Conscience", published in 1958 â„-.

Of all the theories published on the subject by Jung's disciples, the best known is Neumann's Depth Psychology and New Ethics.2 I confess, however, that I am often incapable of understanding exactly what, from the point of view of ethics, the concept of "acceptance of evil" or 4'integration of the shadow" means. No clear explanation exists, to my knowledge, of what "aceptance of evil" really entails, nor is there a clear distinction between the two types of evil, the evil we suffer (malum poenae or malum quod patimur of St. Augustine), and evil we do or cause (malum culpae or malum quod agimus). The first type is a central issue in religion, as we know. Jung dealt with it in his controversial "Answer to Job"3 . But only the second type of evil is the direct concern of ethics.

We may ask, then, what does it mean to "accept evil," for instance, in Auschwitz? How could you? Brother Maximilian Kolbe perhaps did accept the malum poenae when he voluntarily offered himself for suffering and death, to replace another prisoner who was condemned to die of hunger in a dark cell. That is how he became a saint. On the other hand, the man who "accepts" the evil that is in himself is simply a criminal. The SS warden for instance, if you take the expression to its full significance. The problem of ethics deals precisely with the inner struggle between opposites, the evil we may suffer and the evil we may cause. Such is the inner struggle that fills an essential and eternal part of the human condition. No amount of lucubration around the "integration of the shadow" as proposed in the process of individuation, seems satisfactory to clarify the issue. If this is not so, then I really never understood the implications of Jung's conception of the dynamics of the psyche.

Another point I would like to challenge is whether or not there is indeed such a thing as "new ethics." The growth of ethics in the perennial philosophy has been a slow and difficult process that started with the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers of the Socratic school; was developed by the Roman stoics, and found its highest expression in the Christian Founding Fathers from St. Paul to St. Augustine. Then it impregnated the whole of Western society at the time of the Protestant Reformation, and became a metaphysical obsession with the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Finally, ethics turned into a renewed issue among modern existentialists and depth psychologists. The questions of ethics are more than 2,500 years old. I find no merit whatsoever in pretending that there could be "new ethics" that would "integrate" evil and "combine" the opposing forces of good and evil in a "new structure." How could you "combine," for instance, a Nazi SS. with a Jewish prisoner at Buchenwald? Or "integrate" an inhabitant of Hiroshima with an exploding atomic bomb? Or a dissident with a warden in the Gulag. Or a dying man with his cancer? Or, for that matter, any innocent child that dies - precisely that type of evil that tormented Dostoievsky and has become a kind of central skandalon in contemporary "existential" literature? Speculations on the "integration of evil" seem often to forget what Jung himself had to say about "absolute evil" in the world. Such meaningless chatter is a sort of psychological alibi for permissiveness, with as little significance as the Scholastic notion of privatio boni that used to irritate Jung so much. Perhaps analytical psychology needs a new Voltaire and a new Candide to disperse the haze of the new euphemisms.

I am not proposing any new approach to ethics, but only suggesting that Jung's concept of the Transcendent Function does not deviate from the lofty tradition of the perennial philosophy. This path to the mystery of ethics in a world contaminated by evil is trodden for the first time by such Hebrew prophets as Jeremiah and such Greek philosophers as Plato and his followers. It postulates an inner moral law which is not imposed from the outside but grows within the heart of the psyche. Let us recall Jeremiah in Chapter 1 - where the soul is built as a fortified city; or where the Lord says, "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts" (Jeremiah 32:33).

Truly, the only issue of ethics is, to my mind, that which opposes the "natural" or positivistic hypothesis of an "altruistic" inclination grafted to the genetic code, as against the idea that the Categorical Imperative has no possible empirical explanation, but arises out of the Transcendent Function of the psyche. The transcendence of the ethical imperative arises logically from the postulate of the substantial existence of evil in this world. It is, therefore, a point of issue between the sociobiologists or "natural" philosophers, and those who cannot accept such an easy and improvised shortcut. Psychologically, the opposition is that which differentiates Freud's concept of Superego from Jung's Self as a mouthpiece of the Deity, a vox Dei.

This is the gist of my necessarily short argument.

Jung has made an important distinction between the moral conscience and the ethical The first type of conscience refers to the psychic reaction that occurs when the conscious mind decides to abandon the usual path of customs, of habits, and of the mores. In this sense,