aesthetics+Hillman
Hillman:
The term “archetypal,” in contrast to “analytical” which is the usual appellation for Jung’s psychology, was preferred not only because it reflected “the deepening theory of Jung’s later work which attempts to solve psychological problems beyond scientific models” (Hillman 1970b); it was preferred more importantly because “archetypal” belongs to all culture, all forms of human activity, and not only to professional practitioners of modern therapeutics. By traditional definition, archetypes are the primary forms that govern the psyche. But they cannot be contained only by the psyche, since they manifest as well in physical, social, linguistic, aesthetic, and spiritual modes. Thus, archetypal psychology’s first links are with culture and imagination rather than with medical and empirical psychologies, which tend to confine psychology to the positivistic manifestations of the nineteenth-century condition of the soul. (Archetypal Psych. 1)
James Hillman (Terrible Love of War 95) and Dan Noel (In a Wayward Mood 45) both refer to the “Disneyfication” of American culture in the context of a culture-wide deadening of the aesthetic sense.
While living and working in Dallas, Hillman suggested to an audience there that “human beings adapt to their surroundings, and we shall have human beings of gold and silver and glass, with hollowed atriums, uniformly illumined by shadowless light, without upper orientation, and with only the crassest, simplest right-angled norms and straight rules for connecting the principles of the heavens with the ways of the earth. These shall be the inhabitants if these be our habitations. [. . .] Today the repressed is outside of us, and we are anaesthetized and tranquilized to the world we inhabit” (Hillman "Interiors" 83).
It is culture, as a perspective, which brings the means of production together with the meanness of production, offering an ideal place to consider the consequences of unethical choices. Hillman:
All day long there is a continuing subtle aesthetic response to the world. We notice its images, we smell its sensations, and we imperceptibly adjust to its face. These adjustments, because they are subliminal, are where “the unconscious” lies hidden today. We are unconscious of our aesthetic responses. Although therapy’s main task remains what it has been all through the twentieth century, that is, the effort of awakening, the focus of this awakened consciousness has changed. To become conscious now means more specifically—not of our feelings and our memories—but of our personal responses to beauty and ugliness. (City & Soul 143)
Hillman sees “Aesthetic Response as Political Action” because “we have become unconscious of the impact of the world and our souls have become immured against it” (City & Soul 143). He suggests “the soul of our civilization depends on the civilization of our soul. The imagination of our culture calls for a culture of the imagination” (Re-Visioning 225). It seems to me that, in many ways, Hillman uses “culture” to refer to the outward and visible signs by which the part of the process of soul that is collective becomes sensible—accessible as aesthetic experience. A full involvement in questions of cultural ethics, the relationship of individual and collective behavior to a moral sense or lack thereof, requires what Hillman calls “psychological activism” (City & Soul 146) wherein, rather than “deny[ing] our aesthetic responses by closing down our senses, our perceptions, and anesthetiz[ing] ourselves,” we recognize that in the face of true ugliness, in every way that can be meant, “our aesthetic responses come as outrage, as repulsion, as insult, if not assault” (147). He means by “psychological activism” the cultivation of an “aesthetic response” (146) which reverses psychology’s “internalization,” the attribution “of the emotions to my inner problems” (148), for instance the attribution of frustration with daily stimulus overload to inner repression rather than concrete circumstances and the political choices behind them. Whereas “therapy says ‘connect, only connect,’” Hillman recommends instead “sense, see, notice, react, only react,” because “no amount of relating and community building will restore us to the world, and restore the world, unless we trust our aesthetic responses”. Thereby, we are “redefin[ing] ‘aesthetic,’ connect[ing] it with ethics, and finally, connect[ing] aesthetics more profoundly with the cosmos itself” (149).
As a parting note, departing from Hillman but staying in our area of interest, an idea like "aesthetics" must refer not only to surface appearance and the philosophical implications of perception but also to the meaning making process that is Soul. Ronald Schenk suggests that something like this is what Alexander Baumgarten meant when he coined the term in the mid 18th century: aesthetics must also refer to “the arena where states of feeling could be taken as facts to be subject to measurement” (Schenk Soul of Beauty 102).