A deep gaze proves itself by becoming doubly abysmal. Not only downward, which is the more easy, the more literal way to get into the ground. But there is also a depth upward and onward and that depth takes in the abyss from below.
Then, backward and forward are like the movement of a wheel that simultaneously immerses itself and scoops things up. The real depth happens in any case as an equivocal movement: “Sink then! I could also say rise! It doesn’t make a difference,” Mephisto shouts to Faust. He even shouts it where a delight in that which has long gone shall begin, with Helena. And it is not only Mephisto who shouts that, who is an intriguer, a dangerous master of the equivocal meaning; it is the ambivalent meaning itself that shouts through Mephisto: it is the archaic as well as the Utopian relation of pictures. Therefore, the Utopian function has quite often a double abyss, the abyss of contemplation amidst the one of hope. But this can only mean that, here, the archaic frame is in part prepared for hope. To be more precise, hope is in those archetypes still generating concern that remained from the time of a mythical consciousness as a category of imagination, hence a not-worked-through, non-mythical surplus. Consequently, hope has to take care in
a Utopian way, except
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for the continuously meaningful ideologies, for those archetypes wherein something still not-worked-through is around. Hope has to add those archetypes to Utopia in the way that, mutatis mutandis, meaningful progressive ideologies are added to it. Here it is clear that this cannot only be carried out from below, from sinking, but essentially from above, from the survey while ascending. This is certain time and again: that which has been exclusively pushed downward, that which can be found in the subconscious is in itself only the ground from which the night dreams emerge, and sometimes it is the poison that effects the neurotic symptoms: what is below can mostly be dissolved into what is known; it is not the rising drawn forward.
Therefore, it carries basically only an apathetic latency. In contrast, hope and presentiment contain the potential treasure from which the great daydreams come and that do not age over long periods of time.
That which is onward and above cannot be dissolved anywhere into the already known and the already developed. Therefore, it has basically an inexhaustible latency. When Faust, equipped with the elixir of youth, sees Helena in every woman, then the archetypal beauty Helena detaches herself totally from the archaic. She already moves upward in the archaic. But, the archetype can only be called upon from a Utopian standpoint, and only from the survey while ascending, not during pure meditation. The Utopian affinity in archetypes becomes visible if occasion arises. What Eurydice was in the Orcus of the past, the person who did not fully live her life, only Orpheus is able to find, and only for him is it Eurydice. It is only the Utopian in some archetypes that enables their fruitful citation when looking forward, not backward. That has already occurred in the apparent interlocking of the phantasmagorias and in the dissolution of that appearance. All those rationalisms concerning mothers, as those who are still giving birth, show a light shining in from Utopia, even during romanticism with the yearning graves and underworld lantern. The particular brooding in archetypes, and especially that, shows their incompleteness. But the warmth that realizes the business of maturation is not situated in regression. The archetypes themselves have been discussed already, with regard to C. G. Jung, but this arch-reactionary designated the whole thing in a false way, purely as darkness. The archaic appears like Timbuctoo in Zurich in Jung’s writing. The term archetypos itself is found first in Augustine, where it is still an explanatory paraphrase for the Platonic eidos, thus for
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every form of species. Romanticism was the first to relate the ancient expression to a conclusive and illuminating categorial system of a pictorial objective kind oriented toward specific, compact events. Thus, in Novalis’ works, Romeo and Juliet become the archetypes of young love; Antony and Cleopatra become the archetypes of the more mature, more interesting love; Philemon and Baucis, including their cottage, are seen as the group picture of the very old, irretrievable marriage. According to Novalis, the extraordinary harmony of all elements in those archetypes is decisive. In Philemon and Baucis, the harmony goes as far as “the smoked ham which hangs in the chimney.” But what was far more decisive was the peculiar nimbus that was added to the harmony of the elements, a nimbus like the one around landscapes, with a successful architecture of the situation and its meaning. The beginning attention to resemblances in fairy-tale
materials, in types of conflict, in types of salvation, in recurring “motifs” did a lot in pointing to the archetypes. The comparative history of literature opened up a plethora of such elements. There is, for instance, the extremely impressive motif of recognition (Anagnorisis), which archetypically unites subjects so far apart as Joseph and his brothers in the Bible with the encounter of Electra and Oreste in the Sophoclean tragedy. First of all, the mythology seemed to contain all the primeval situations (Ursituationen) and their ensemble. That is certainly a terrible exaggeration, in full accordance with what is reactionary about romantic archaism, but Karl Philipp Moritz’s or even Friedrich Creuzer’s studies in mythology contain indeed an abundance of archetypes by virtue of an attempted categorization of the “motifs.” Here the archetypes appear as symbols. Creuzer unmistakably categorizes their archetypal characteristics as four elements: “the momentary, the total, the unfathomable of their origins, the imperative.” And before this, he himself explains the momentary, also the pictoral-laconic, by an archetype: “That which is stimulating and
stunning at the same time is connected to another quality, to brevity. It is like a suddenly occurring specter or like a flash of lightning which, all of a sudden, illuminates the dark night, a moment which occupies all of our existence” (Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker, [The Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient Societies], I, 1819, pp. 118, 59). Creuzer called those laconisms symbols in a romantic sense, the appearance of an idea. It would have taken only little hypostasis of an already eternally evident idea to see the
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types also in the form of the allegory and not only in that of the symbol. The allegories are indeed, in their true form, i.e., before the classicism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not at all concretized definitions, that which one likes to call cold and abstract. Rather, the allegories also contain – in the Baroque period, unlike the Middle Ages – archetypes. They even contain their majority, namely, those of their impermanence and their multitude. The fullness of poetically operative archetypes dissolves right in the allegory that is still situated in the Alteritas of profane life, whereas the symbol is generally related to the Unitas of a meaning. That is the reason why the symbol essentially forms the religious archetypes, or why the archetypes are religiously formed. Bachofen, who was greater than Creuzer and an accomplished mythologist, not only discovered the nature of archetypes of the ancient peoples as being completely immersed in religion, but he also tried to organize them for the first time. They appeared sequentially in hetaerism, matriarchy, and patriarchy: in the hetaeric ornaments of reed and marsh, in the matriarchal ones of ears of corn and caves, in the patriarchal ones of laurel and solar orbit. The intent was to develop a social-historical as well as a nature-mythical order of all archetypes. Thus, they were not comprehensively catalogued – except in the hypothesis of the three sequences – neither in their allegorical nor in their religious-symbolic form and relationship. Nevertheless, that which is decisive in a Utopian way illuminated, particularly through the works of romanticism, the archetypes as having little or nothing in common with romanticism and their pure, ultimately even transcendent idealism, despite their original Augustinian affinity with the prototypes in the Platonic sense. As follows from the previous examples, the archetypes are predominantly essentially situational categories of condensation, predominantly in the realm of poetic depictive imagination, and they are not genetically hypostatized categories like the Platonic ideas. The archetypes of romanticism, or rather, archetypes as how they were understood by romanticism, were connected with the Platonic ideas solely by so-called recollection even if in a manner that makes the differences between unchangeable ideas noticeable too. In Plato, the recollection, the anamnesis, belonged to a primordial situation in which the soul found itself in primeval figurative heaven. In romanticism, on the other hand, the recollection moves historically, goes back into primeval times within time itself, becomes archaic regression. The
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fact that this could become possible shows how, even if there is no proximity to the Platonism of the heavenly ideas, romanticism misunderstood the archetypes in their relation to the Utopian function. It is only when they are completely kept in regression that the archetypes alter the Utopia into a backward, reactionary, and ultimately eventually into a diluvian one. Then they are more dangerous than the usual smoke screens of ideology. For while the latter only divert from an understanding of the present and its real driving force, the archetype prevents the development of an open attitude toward the future by expelling backward and by keeping everything in backward expulsion. Not all archetypes are ready for a Utopian treatment, even if this is a real treatment and not reactionary utopianism as so often in
romanticism. The entire sphere, which is often so vital and lucidly powerful on a grand scale in poetry, also in philosophy, is mistaken by the pathos of sheer archaism. As stated before, only those archtypes are ready for a Utopian treatment that still have something not-worked-out (Unausgearbeitetes), something relatively unfinished (Unabgelaufenes), something indelible (Unabgegoltenes). Characteristically, it was especially those archetypes used up during feudalism that were the most favored in the regression that corresponded to the political reaction, as if the archetype, the token, were merely the abandonment to the past and not also – like the storming of the Bastillean emblem of the future in accordance with the true Utopian function. As the romantics used to say, the archetype is something in which everyone who is poetic will recognize
oneself time and again as life moves on.
That is why, at this point, a new separation begins so that the true friends recognize each other and stay together. Only the Utopian sight can find what is congenial to it, and this is an important task in contrast to bleak capitalist murder of the ornament even within thinking. First, the putrefied archetypes have to be separated from the Utopian, the really indelible (unabgegoltenen) archetypes, i.e., by assigning them to the anachronistic past. But, it is obvious that the existing archetypes of the freedom situation or those of the pleasures of brightness are not bound to that kind of past. They have escaped it, or at least they are exterritorial in relation to it. This is not the place to examine the archetypes. As will be shown later, they belong to a new region of logic. They belong to the table of categories concerning imagination. As we have seen, they can be found in all great poetry, in
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myths, in religions. Indeed, they belong to a truth only with their unsatisfied part that is a veiled depiction of the Utopian tendencies within reality. The land of milk and honey is one archetype with an unsatisfied tendency-latency underneath the fantastic mask. So is the battle with the dragon (St. George, Apollo, Siegfried, Michael), the winter demon, who wants to kill the sun (the Fenriswolf, the Pharaoh, Herodes, Gessler). The liberation of the virgin – and of innocence in general – held captive by the dragon (Perseus and Andromeda) is a related archetype. The era of the dragon, the realm of the dragon itself is an archetype, when it appears as the necessary phase before the final triumph (Egypt, Canaan, the empire of the Antichrist before the beginning of the New Jerusalem). The trumpet signal in the last act of Fidelio is an archetype of superior Utopian rank. It is condensed in the Leonore overture, which announces the salvation: the arrival of the minister – he stands for the Messiah – embodies the archetype of the
revenging-redeeming apocalypse. It is the ancient thunderstorm and rainbow archetype. To be sure, this is an archetype in the very old manner, but in this instance it is still related completely in a concrete manner as in Marx’s statement, “When all inner conditions are fulfilled, the German day of resurrection will be announced through the blare of the Gallic rooster.” In these examples one can see in a purely immanent way that what is Utopian about archetypes is ultimately not at all determinable within archaism. Rather, it moves most usefully through history. And above all, not all archetypes have an archaic origin. Some of them only occur within the course of history like the dancing on the ruins of the Bastille – a new, touching original picture distinct from the archaic round dance of the departed by a totally new content. The music of that new dance is Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Therefore, it is none that sets the mood for the Asphodel meadow [which haunts the shades of the heroes]. It is also none that sets the mood for orgiastic celebrations of Spring and Dionysius. Even archetypes of obvious archaic origin have reinvigorated themselves and have changed time and again through historical transformations. Even the trumpet signal in Fidelio could have barely had its pervasive, genuine effect without the storming of the Bastille, which provided the model and the persistent background for the music of Fidelio. The thunderstorm and rainbow archetype, to which the signal and the salvation referred, was endowed with an
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entirely new origin only by that storming: the archetype changed from the astral myth to the history of revolution. Although an archetype, it had its effect without any trace of archaism. So, finally, not all archetypes are simply condensed images of archaic experience. Time and again, something productive arose from them that increased the existing content of the archetypes. This is like in the past, when the Utopian, the reutilization (Umfunktionierung), which understands how to liberate the archetypically capsulated hope, intruded in the ancient as well as in the historically new archetypes. If the archetypical were completely regressive, there would be no archetypes reaching for utopia while Utopia reaches back for them. Then poetry would have advanced in a way dedicated to light and dealing with the old symbols. Then
imagination would only be regression (Regressio). The imagination, destined for progress, would have to beware of all images, also of allegories, of symbols that spring from the old mythic ground of imagination.
Only the petty empiricist mind (Realschul-Intellekt) would stand up for the old mythic ground of
imagination, and since that is a dreamless mind, it would stand against the imagination. But The Magic Flute
– to use a piece of imagination that is unquestionably humanized – employs almost exclusively archaic allegories and symbols: the leader and king of the priests, the empire of the night, the empire of light, the water and fire ordeals, the magic of the flute, the transformation into a sun. Notwithstanding, all these allegories and symbols – among them those in which formerly no humanity was celebrated in their sacred halls – have proven useful for the enlightenment. Even in Mozart’s fairy-tale music, as a non-demonic temple, they truly came home. Thus, the productive Utopian function also draws images from the still valid past insofar as they are ambiguously fit for the future, despite all the spells within them, and it makes these images useful since they are the expression of what has still not happened. It makes them useful for sunrise. In this way, the Utopian function not only discovers the cultural surplus as something that belongs to it, but also fetches an element of itself from the ambiguous depth of the archetypes that is an
archaically stored-up anticipation of something not-yet-conscious, of something not-yet-accomplished. Or, to use a dialectical archetype, the anchor, which here sinks into the ground, is simultaneously the anchor of hope. That which sinks down contains that which comes up, or can contain it.
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The same twofold nature, characterized by all that which is mentioned above and qualified for utopia, finally reveals and proves itself when the archetypes clearly change into object-like ciphers. These ciphers have depicted the archetypes according to nature anyway, as in numerous condensed images (still waters run deep, it is lonely on the top), as in the thunderstorm-rainbow archetype, as, of course, in the light and sun image of The Magic Flute. These kinds of archetypes are not at all merely formed from human material, neither from archaism nor from later history. Rather they show a piece of the twofold scripture of nature itself, a kind of real-cipher (Realchiffre) or real-symbol (Realsymbol). A real-symbol is a symbol whose subject of meaning (Bedeutungsgegenstand) is still concealed from itself, concealed in the real object and not only from human perception. Therefore, it is an expression for what has not yet become manifest in the object itself, but is an expression for what is signified in the object and through the object. The human symbolic image is only a substitute depiction for that. The real-cipher is made recognizable by lines of motion (fire,
lightning, sound and so on), by shapes of outstanding objects (the shape of a palm tree, the shape of a cat, the human face, the Egyptian style in crystals, the Gothic style of woodlands, etc.). This way, a sharply formed part of the world appears as a group of symbols of an object-like kind whose mathematics and philosophy are both still missing. The so-called morphology is only an abstract caricature of that, for real-ciphers are not static. They are figures of tension. They are tendentious figures of the process, and above all, in this way, they are just symbolic. This touches on the problem of an object-like Utopian theory of figures. Therefore, it ultimately touches on the forgotten (Pythagorean) problem of a qualitative mathematics, of a renewed qualitative philosophy of nature. But here we can see already that even the
lightning, sound and so on), by shapes of outstanding objects (the shape of a palm tree, the shape of a cat, the human face, the Egyptian style in crystals, the Gothic style of woodlands, etc.). This way, a sharply formed part of the world appears as a group of symbols of an object-like kind whose mathematics and philosophy are both still missing. The so-called morphology is only an abstract caricature of that, for real-ciphers are not static. They are figures of tension. They are tendentious figures of the process, and above all, in this way, they are just symbolic. This touches on the problem of an object-like Utopian theory of figures. Therefore, it ultimately touches on the forgotten (Pythagorean) problem of a qualitative mathematics, of a renewed qualitative philosophy of nature. But here we can see already that even the