About four or five years ago, prying on my father's library, I came across a book entitled Fez, City of Islam. The author, unknown to me at the time, was Titus Burckhardt. Because in the back cover it read that Titus was the grandnephew of Jacob Burckhardt, the author of The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, a work of unspeakable value; and since an interest for Christian and Muslim theology had fostered in me around that time; and due to a preexisting curiosity for the customs and the people of the great Maghreb—For all these reasons, I confess, I was practically forced, nay, felt it was my duty that I should condescend to the capital sin of robbery—A sin, I should say, to which I succumbed often before my father's library, and gladly so as well, and which was not only unpunished, nor solely tolerated, but deliberately encouraged by the very victim!
My reading of Fez, City of Islam was sweet as only very few can be. Its prose I found delicious; its content, of the highest culture; and I felt as if, by virtue of a prodigy, I'd been induced to dream and walk myself the labyrinthine Fez. I should very well say that, as I was reading it, I was not at home, nor in my very country, not even in the present time, nor even was myself, but lived sequestered in a century and a place I never knew, and enjoyed in peace the life of a happier, but to me quite exotic, man—one that existed not but by a fabrication of that book; that ceased to exist when it was shut, and was reborn when I opened it back again.
Whether the book is truly as remarkable as I recall, it is difficult to say. It is often not its content, nor its delicacies and subtleties, what makes memorable a work of art, but the alchemy incurred upon opposing to these things our very peculiar state of conscience. I content myself to say that, in memory, the book is exquisite.
I recently acquired perchance another work by Titus Burckhardt, entitled Cosmology and modern science. It is a general critique of scientific knowledge as a whole, with emphasis on mathematical modeling, and contains an extensive section combating what then was modern psychology—namely, psychoanalysis—with particular stress over the work of Jung. The attempted critique, however, was a total disappointment. Only the most general comments were somewhat satisfactory or true; whenever a particular point was brought about, its justification was foul and arbitrary, and its claim backwards and medieval.
The foulness of the book is circumscribed into the category of dull fanaticism—or, as it is more commonly known, theology. As I mentioned briefly in the first paragraph, I once felt some interest for theology. Under such stimulation, I inquired the works of, among others, the Christians Origen of Alexandria, Saint Augustine, Dionysious the Aeropagite, and Meister Eckhart, which were delightful readings; as well as the Muslims Ibn Arabi, Avicena, and the exquisite Persian poet Al-Hallaj. Harder to categorize are Scotus Eriugena, extraordinary in so many ways that it would deserve an entire writing of its own, and Spinoza, which I reluctantly include here as a theologian, and who lives, with Pascal, the closest to my heart among all continental philosophers. The majority of the other readings were dull and barely tolerable, with arguments that never followed a straight path, but like a serpent meandered in search of a conclusion that agreed with the Scriptures or the particular inclination of the author. In the authors I enjoyed, I valued originality, and at least a dosis of independence and irreverence, perhaps the hardest things to find in theology. But even these delightful and exquisite readings were so only in a literary sense, a sense within which I circunscribe the curious and exciting art of exegesis. One may argue that such sense is enough to make them great, and this I should not wish to refute, but in what comes to philosophical matters, at least if philosophy is to have something to do with truth, however remotely, I was very rapidly disenchanted. In truth, except for Scotus and Spinoza, and some pages of the Aeropagite, I found no philosophy at all: Every conclusion was beforehand an assumption, and the most problematic questions were checked and answered by finding some clever sophistry that proved the presupposed conclusion. I discovered the most arbitrary manners of thought, the most peculiar attempts at proof, the most extravagant arguments that human mind is capable of bearing. Metaphysics is often like this, but theology has in general the added component of a dogma, which is distasteful to anyone possessing at least a spark of sensitivity.
The work Cosmology and modern science, coming back to our subject, is no exception to the sins I described above. For example, at a certain point, the following chain of thought is exposed: Firstly, the notion of form, as understood by Greek philosophy, is defined. By form, the author correctly says, we understand the aggregation or association of the qualities of a thing or a being, its immutable essence. This is so that the individual world is the formal world in the following sense: Namely, that by form we understand a principle of individuation that, while in itself being nothing but an archetype, is to become manifest in connection to a matter or substance. (So far, Burckhardt only follows Dionysious the Aeropagite.) After providing and commenting on such definition, and objecting some critiques of the notion, the author states:
From what was just said follows that a species is itself an immutable "form"; it could not evolve and transform into another species, although it may contain variations, which are diverse "projections" of a unique essential form of which they will never be separated—like the branches are never separated from the trunk.
The whole thesis of Darwin, he says, is based on a confusion (sic) between the concepts of species and variation. For the sake of humor I add a sentence that appears shortly after:
One may certainly find some fishes that use their fines to crawl in the sand, but in vain one would expect to find the least beginning of a joint, which is the only thing that would make the forming of a leg or an arm possible.
Yes, indeed: This is a critique of Darwin based on the metaphysical concept of form, as understood by an Athenian convert that lived in the first century!
Only in metaphysics one can expect to find such bold attempts at arm-chair reasoning. None of it, needless to say, even hints at an interest for reality. First, a purely abstract concept is assumed to capture the true nature of things; then the desired conclusion is drawn from such assumption. It would be equally valid to assume the Pythagorean notion that all numbers are rational to prove that π is a rational number. Nay, even this would be a superior reasoning, at least in that the premise, all numbers are rational, is falsifiable and refutable, while the platonic assumptions of our author are, I dare to say, almost a mater of taste! But this, if any, seems to be the method of theology, with counted exceptions: Take an arbitrary assumption, base it if possible either on ancient knowledge or primitive speculation, and use it only to derive a ridicule conclusion. The enterprise is to be judged depending on the degree in which that conclusion, however obscene or stupid, agrees with whatever faith you happen to profess.
The book is filled with segments similar to the one described above, which I care not to reproduce. The reader may read the book himself if curious. I grant that some observations in the book excited my curiosity and were, at least to me, intelligent; but they were at the same time quite general comments either on certain limits of the modern and scientific conception of the world, which amounted to no critique on themselves, or the general differences between a certain cosmology and another. As soon as something specific was to be discussed, the reasoning became vicious and the book rendered itself vexing and fanatic.
After reading this book, and considering what I remember from Fez, City of Islam, I see that Burckhardt was indeed a very brilliant man—sophisticated and in possession of an outstanding education—but dogmatic and fanatic. I should add that these flaws are not unique to religious people: Intelligence and education are in general not sufficient to acquire even the most elementary scientific intuition. Perhaps the greatest example of this is Aristotle, who undoubtedly was one of the finest intellects ever witnessed by mankind, and whose non-natural works are of the deepest intelligence, but whose natural philosophy and treatment of the Φύσις were, on their entirety, nonsensical and wrong! It would have sufficed to him, as well to most of the so-called natural philosophers, to have even the most primitive embryo of an experimental method, to find that most of his claims were wrong, and to reorient him towards truth—or at least something more approximate to it. Anecdotally, I may comment that I know a few atheist academics with truly mighty intellects, far surpassing that of most men, not to mention my own, that still devote their lives to showing that a certain idea is true, all when, because their personalities inclined them to it, or by virtue of a personal obsession, they have assumed it to be true from the very beginning! Vanity, fanaticism, the esteem of originality over truth, all disturb even the greatest minds from honest investigation. In this sense, so I believe, the conditio sine qua non for the making of a good scientist in modern times, when the scientific method has already been developed, lies not in his intellect, but on his personality.
In what comes to the author's critique of Jung, it's nothing but the indignation of a fanatical mind. Some readers of Jung mistakenly see in his work a mystical component. But in fact, Jung's hypothesis on a collective unconscious categorically desacralizes religious experience. From supernatural phenomenon, Jungian psychology renders religious experience to an expression of archaic psychological tendencies rooted in our evolutionary history. In this sense, a decent comprehension of the work of Jung leads not to mysticism, but quite the opposite, and this was rightly understood, though not at all appreciated, by Titus Burckhardt. In this reduction of religion to psychological process, he saw a flagrant mistake, but by virtue of which arguments, we are not to know. For every one of his critiques of the Jungian thesis boiled down to the assumption that the thesis is wrong; this is, to the assumption that the Abrahamic god is the true god, and the consequential proposition that religious experience is a supernatural phenomenon. He says, among other things, that if the mind were merely a consequence of a special organization of matter, then it could not be termed to be intelligent—but why this claim is made, I do not know, though why it makes no sense I do—. He also states that, because the mind is capable of perceiving the essence of things, whatever is meant by this, then there must be something essential and immutable to it—And that such eternal faculties of the mind are what Jung confuses with evolutionary endowments.
I care not to dispute the author's claims on this regard. I suppose this is sufficient record of my disappointment. I do not think it happened to me before that two books by the same author deserved so radically contrary opinions, except perhaps the case of Julio Cortázar.