This is such a timely and poignant essay. To add to this work, one of the things that has kept me returning to the poetic tradition of the Psalmists is this katabatic/anabatic pattern. Most famously — in biblical scholarly circles — Walter Brueggemann framed the movement as follows: orientation --> disorientation --> new orientation. (Echoes of Riceour's pre-critical, critical, post-critical frame are definitely shaping Brueggemann's schema.) The human tendency, in the face of disorientation, is either to want to go back to the prior orientation in which the world was experienced as stable and sustaining or to rush prematurely to the new orientation. I would often advise students who often experienced a form of disorientation as they commenced with critical biblical scholarship that they should resist the temptation to want to climb out of the pit, that something significant is playing out in this moment of disorientation, that staying with it enables us to confront what needs to be confronted, and to eventually, when the time is right, emerge changed. Here, change doesn't look like outgrowing the old, but rather carrying it with us as a kind of ontological enlargement of identity. Disorientation, in Rosa's terms, would be something akin to an openness to the moment, a relinquishment of control. Thank you for yet another provocative invitation to explore parts of life that often go unnamed.
I am reflecting here, and speculating and exploring and finding my way in the ideas that have been seeded by this essay, please bear with me…
More thoughtful and profound deep thinking in our age that rewards the ephemeral Jonathan. 🙏
I am intrigued by the Shadow and its integral part in our existence and remember reading Jung’s ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’ back in 1993 while backpacking around Australia & SE Asia (I still have that book despite multiple house moves, including between Scotland and Australia numerous times) – the concept landed then, and does yet again. And it does thanks to this thought provoking essay.
I have been conscious of my Shadow since then, however perhaps not as often as I should, or needed to - which fits the pattern... Reflection raises the question wondering what if I had embraced my Shadow more? It is a highly speculative question on every level. I am here now, and here now works very well. However, that speculation is a wonderful luxury.
With the essay anchored in Education, I can’t help but translate it into my own field of safety leadership, and how the unacknowledged, the exiled Shadow is played out every day in construction. Yet often in construction it is not the Shadow banished but routinely (and theatrically) embraced and embraced at much cost.
As Boymal writes: “What [Hans Christian] Andersen grasped, and what Jung would later frame clinically, is that the shadow does not wait indefinitely: denied long enough, given room to develop its own autonomous life while the conscious self weakens, it eventually turns around and owns you instead.” This explains so much.
In construction then, where does The Self actually exist? In fact, where would The Self be allowed to exist?
As much of the global construction industry is recognized as being in a mental health crisis, perhaps there is a distinct opportunity to explore the crisis of Self in the construction industry. How a philosophy of self could be integrated is worth exploring, because at the moment the rates of self-harm and suicide in the construction industry is truly terrifying.
Perhaps a starting point would be here “…the leader whose shadow around failure is unexamined will shape the culture around them in ways they cannot see and may never intend. Shadow work, in this light, is professional development in the most literal sense.”
And that for me is the next step, it is how to look at those individuals, those leaders, those who are the loudest, the brashest – and consider their perspective, their rationale for their Shadow as dominant in the workplace. And whether that work, is the first steps to understanding, and as Jonathan challenges us, to step towards what we need to address but with the appreciation that… “None of this is straightforward, and none of it is comfortable, but to meet the shadow, individually and together, is the work that remains.”
It is the work that remains.
--o0o--
Another wonderful essay. Thank you. 🙏
And I didn't even get a chance to integrate my reflection on this with Murakami's 'The City & Its Uncertain Walls'!
Apollo and Dionysus. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen shortly before they were due to be married. Though he loved her he chose to sacrifice their relationship to fully dedicate himself to his religious and philosophical calling. What a twit. Philosophers are generally twits - threaded throughout their history has been this shadow desire to serve something greater - to turn their back on Dionysus in service to Apollo and pure reason... Wittgenstein, Descartes, Kant - and in so doing inflict their silliness on the rest of us. And here we are. I have to remind myself daily not to fall victim to the temptations of abstraction: to congratulate myself on ascending above my fellow men by succumbing to the seductions of rationality - climbing heaven-ward on a chariot pulled by reason. It's a good essay: by and large a philosopher's shadow is his (it generally is a he) closeted emotion, his entire philosophy an elaborate device intended to keep his shameful mortality concealed (as Nietzsche often remarked). What a circus! I would only add this - change is not always the product of profound reflection. Sometimes it's seeing your friend mauled by a bear. Change is always a product of enduring sentiments - sometimes these come to us through reflection, more often by car-crashes: visceral moments that transform us.
This is such a timely and poignant essay. To add to this work, one of the things that has kept me returning to the poetic tradition of the Psalmists is this katabatic/anabatic pattern. Most famously — in biblical scholarly circles — Walter Brueggemann framed the movement as follows: orientation --> disorientation --> new orientation. (Echoes of Riceour's pre-critical, critical, post-critical frame are definitely shaping Brueggemann's schema.) The human tendency, in the face of disorientation, is either to want to go back to the prior orientation in which the world was experienced as stable and sustaining or to rush prematurely to the new orientation. I would often advise students who often experienced a form of disorientation as they commenced with critical biblical scholarship that they should resist the temptation to want to climb out of the pit, that something significant is playing out in this moment of disorientation, that staying with it enables us to confront what needs to be confronted, and to eventually, when the time is right, emerge changed. Here, change doesn't look like outgrowing the old, but rather carrying it with us as a kind of ontological enlargement of identity. Disorientation, in Rosa's terms, would be something akin to an openness to the moment, a relinquishment of control. Thank you for yet another provocative invitation to explore parts of life that often go unnamed.
Thank you for navigating us through this landscape, Jonathan. Not to say that we have found our way out, but that we are here. Now.
I am reflecting here, and speculating and exploring and finding my way in the ideas that have been seeded by this essay, please bear with me…
More thoughtful and profound deep thinking in our age that rewards the ephemeral Jonathan. 🙏
I am intrigued by the Shadow and its integral part in our existence and remember reading Jung’s ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’ back in 1993 while backpacking around Australia & SE Asia (I still have that book despite multiple house moves, including between Scotland and Australia numerous times) – the concept landed then, and does yet again. And it does thanks to this thought provoking essay.
I have been conscious of my Shadow since then, however perhaps not as often as I should, or needed to - which fits the pattern... Reflection raises the question wondering what if I had embraced my Shadow more? It is a highly speculative question on every level. I am here now, and here now works very well. However, that speculation is a wonderful luxury.
With the essay anchored in Education, I can’t help but translate it into my own field of safety leadership, and how the unacknowledged, the exiled Shadow is played out every day in construction. Yet often in construction it is not the Shadow banished but routinely (and theatrically) embraced and embraced at much cost.
As Boymal writes: “What [Hans Christian] Andersen grasped, and what Jung would later frame clinically, is that the shadow does not wait indefinitely: denied long enough, given room to develop its own autonomous life while the conscious self weakens, it eventually turns around and owns you instead.” This explains so much.
In construction then, where does The Self actually exist? In fact, where would The Self be allowed to exist?
As much of the global construction industry is recognized as being in a mental health crisis, perhaps there is a distinct opportunity to explore the crisis of Self in the construction industry. How a philosophy of self could be integrated is worth exploring, because at the moment the rates of self-harm and suicide in the construction industry is truly terrifying.
Perhaps a starting point would be here “…the leader whose shadow around failure is unexamined will shape the culture around them in ways they cannot see and may never intend. Shadow work, in this light, is professional development in the most literal sense.”
And that for me is the next step, it is how to look at those individuals, those leaders, those who are the loudest, the brashest – and consider their perspective, their rationale for their Shadow as dominant in the workplace. And whether that work, is the first steps to understanding, and as Jonathan challenges us, to step towards what we need to address but with the appreciation that… “None of this is straightforward, and none of it is comfortable, but to meet the shadow, individually and together, is the work that remains.”
It is the work that remains.
--o0o--
Another wonderful essay. Thank you. 🙏
And I didn't even get a chance to integrate my reflection on this with Murakami's 'The City & Its Uncertain Walls'!
Apollo and Dionysus. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen shortly before they were due to be married. Though he loved her he chose to sacrifice their relationship to fully dedicate himself to his religious and philosophical calling. What a twit. Philosophers are generally twits - threaded throughout their history has been this shadow desire to serve something greater - to turn their back on Dionysus in service to Apollo and pure reason... Wittgenstein, Descartes, Kant - and in so doing inflict their silliness on the rest of us. And here we are. I have to remind myself daily not to fall victim to the temptations of abstraction: to congratulate myself on ascending above my fellow men by succumbing to the seductions of rationality - climbing heaven-ward on a chariot pulled by reason. It's a good essay: by and large a philosopher's shadow is his (it generally is a he) closeted emotion, his entire philosophy an elaborate device intended to keep his shameful mortality concealed (as Nietzsche often remarked). What a circus! I would only add this - change is not always the product of profound reflection. Sometimes it's seeing your friend mauled by a bear. Change is always a product of enduring sentiments - sometimes these come to us through reflection, more often by car-crashes: visceral moments that transform us.