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War’s Attraction: Love or Fascination? A review of
A Terrible Love of War, In his
latest and perhaps final book, A Terrible
Love of War, James Hillman urges us to embrace war with a loving
imagination in order to understand it (p. 211). If we don’t, he claims, we will
never truly comprehend war, nor could we possibly speak of peace or
disarmament. Such an exploration is badly needed. Unfortunately,
Hillman’s imaginings are unlikely to resonate with most readers. His efforts to
convince us that deep down we all really love war, narrowly defined as actual
combat between nations, stretch the imagination to breaking point, for while
many of us feel a fascination with war, an actual love of war is exceptional
rather than universal.
Hillman
overstates his case and in doing so loses the reader: War, he writes, is “the
first of all norms, the standard by which all else be measured, permeating
existence and therefore our existence as individuals and as societies” (p 40);
“War presents the ultimate truth of the cosmos” (p. 41);
War is “the father of all things” (p. 76). These statements are
indicative less of an archetype than they are of a complex. Surely if a subject
in an association test responded with “war” to the phrases “the father of all
things,” “the first of all norms,” and “the ultimate truth of the cosmos,” the
tester would conclude that the subject was under the sway of a complex.
Hillman’s war complex will not resonate with many readers.
The
examples Hillman chooses of men supposedly loving war are hardly
representative, and sometimes misleading. He begins by quoting General George
Patton as he surveys the destruction after a battle scene: “I love it. God help
me I do love it so. I love it more than my life.” (pg 1) Hillman quickly extracts a universal tendency from this one highly unusual
individual’s experience. But for better or worse, most of us are not like
Patton. Hillman goes on to quote other soldiers extensively, but his sample and
his interpretation are skewed: his evidence does not support postulating the
love of war itself as a universal tendency.
Hillman
could have built a far more believable and effective argument if he had
distinguished the love of war from a fascination with war. Love knows its
object; fascination is based on a fantasy about something not truly known, and
it usually seeks an archetype more basic than the object of its fascination.
Love between partners can never really occur until the fascination with the
archetype is replaced by love of a real flesh and blood person. Hillman
interprets Aphrodite’s illicit affair with Ares as demonstrative of our love
for war. But she’s not dying to get into the trenches: she wants to be
penetrated by the feel of war, war once removed, someone who wars—not war
itself. Once caught in flagrante,
once the deception is revealed, the two are never seen together again. This was
a fascinating fling, not love.
Many
of us, most of us if we are honest, do have a fascination with war. War movies,
war history, war novels, and now war video games, command a huge market. But
this is not to say that we universally love war. This is voyeurism—a
comfortable curiosity from afar. Hillman, surprisingly, asks why men willingly
go to war but need coercion to remain there. Once they are exposed to the
reality, the fantasies about underlying archetypes are dispelled and another motivation
is needed to keep them on the front. He fails to contend with the
enormous discrepancy between what we imagine about war and its reality.
Hillman
argues that one reason we love war is because it is sublime—it holds a
terrifying form of beauty. This confuses the side
effects of war with war itself. War may “reveal the sublime,” as Hillman puts
it, but this is through contrast and bold relief rather than an aesthetic
appreciation for war itself. He writes about a German soldier decorating his
trench with trees and flowers, as if that indicated that the soldier felt that
war is beautiful (p. 117). It is more likely that it is the pure ugliness of
war and absence of beauty that compel men to seek out the sublime in the midst
of battle.
In fact, it is probably more accurate to say that we become numb
to war itself and focus on other things to buoy us in
such situations. Hillman quotes journalist Malcolm Muggeridge,
who wrote that during the 1940 bombing of London he felt “a terrible joy and
exaltation at the sight and sound and taste and smell of all this destruction.”
(pg 116) While it’s
possible to have more than one feeling at a time, this sort of aesthetic
enthrallment requires oblivion to the utter horror that people and their homes
and culture are being decimated. In reality, rather than achieving a
heightened aesthetic sense, most soldiers survive by numbing themselves, as did
a soldier at the end of the German film Stalingrad.. Stumbling
through snow-covered Russia with little hope of survival he says, “The good
thing about the cold is that you don’t feel anything.”
Hillman
also argues that war is inhuman, an autonomous force, a God to be respected. It
is true that an inhuman rage or ferocious passion may take over during battle
(p. 80) and it may well be understood as an autonomous force. But this force
also takes over in other circumstances and is not specific to war in the sense
that Hillman uses the term. People can be possessed by intense fury in
individual situations (which Hillman excludes from his definition of war), and
they can be possessed by it in the fight for many other causes. Warlike
behavior is evidence of archetypal energy manifest in just one particular way.
The energy is far more deep, pliable and profound than Hillman’s war. Just as
the intensity of the coniunctio (the sacred marriage) can find expression in alchemy, passionate sex, and the
analytic process, the archetypes that find expression in combat are also found
in a host of other situations. Hillman’s description of the ancient god of
war—(p. 82) wild, untamable, overpowering, excessive, insane, bloody,
assured, wanton--could just as well be applied to jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, abstract expressionist Wassily Kandinsky, or boxer Mike Tyson. This God does not need combat to show his face.
Yet
how are we to understand the experience of those soldiers whose experience did
yield meaning, who experienced courage, altruism, or a mystical connection with
something greater than themselves, and whose fascination seems to linger even
after they’ve been through the real thing? Hillman quotes one soldier who
wrote, “You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it
made me feel alive, as I have not felt alive before or since” (p. 11). Here as
elsewhere, Hillman confuses a love of war and a reaction to it. The
compassion that soldiers develop for their comrades is more likely born of
their mutual hatred of war as the enemy rather than their love for it. This
sense of being more alive has less to do with a love of war and more to do with
a forced appreciation of life.
For
some, war seems to engender an intensity which makes
peace seem painfully mundane. Veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges explores
this phenomenon in his powerful book War
Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, reaching far different conclusions than
Hillman. Hedges argues that what appears as a love of
war is actually an addiction to a substitute for true meaning in life. This
sort of addictive intensity is not limited exclusively to battle combat. Greg Henderson, a physician caught in New Orleans
during Hurricane Katrina and trying to administer medicine under horrific
conditions wrote, “This is an edifying
experience. One is rapidly focused away from the transient and material
to the bare necessities of life.” Further examples could be drawn
from firefighters, cancer survivors, and political campaigners, among others.
All of these gripping experiences say less about war, fire, cancer, and
politics, specifically, and more about what happens when the veils of the
trivial are removed.
Jung
expressed the same idea in 1939 when he spoke of the neurosis of a banal and
meaningless life. “They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that
banal life, and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war: They say,
‘Thank heaven, now something is going to happen—something bigger than
ourselves.’” v. 18 par 627
For a
small number, war may serve as the occasion for meaning, as an alchemical vas or vessel, an opportunity for
transformative experiences of more fundamental archetypes, many of them
described in alchemy: calcinatio,
burning away the impurities of banal and materialist life; solutio, dissolving old rigid
ways of being; mortificatio,
dying away of the old ruling attitudes; coincidentia oppositorum, the conflict of opposites which
potentially leads to a new beginning. Add to these the confusing possibility of
concretizing the hero’s journey, and it is no wonder that war is not only
fascinating but also transformative for some. But again, one should not
confound the vessel with the gold.
Hillman’s vision of Ares changes dramatically in the last 17 pages (pg 200).
After 200 pages as the beserk, furious and insane
god, Ares suddenly becomes a god of restraint and the protector of
civilization. Hillman suggests a homeopathic cure: worshipping Ares and asking
him for the courage to restrain from impulsive war. While this shift is quite
welcome and redeems Hillman from some of his earlier excesses, these final
pages also harbor a psychological approach questionable to many Jungians.
Hillman recommends that we “leash” the energies of war, and in so doing he
advocates sublimation, failing to differentiate it from the alchemical process
known as the sublimatio.
Sublimation is a Freudian concept, a higher level defense mechanism: channeling unacceptable id energies into socially acceptable
behavior. Sublimatio,
on the other hand, traces the energy back to the prima materia and raises it to its own
highest level, rather than allowing the energy to flow into less constructive
uses. Leashing war is sublimation, not an alchemical sublimatio. The energies that
serve as fuel in war’s hijackings have the natural and inherent capacity to
serve greater ends.
None of this is to say that it would be a waste to read Hillman’s book. He
points out, perhaps too broadly but with some justification, how war and
religion are destructively intertwined, and how monotheism in particular leads
to intolerance and war. He calls Christianity to task for its over-emphasis on
love and its failure to acknowledge the role that Ares plays in life. He helps
us to understand why some men would want to go to war and at the same time
reminds us why the rest of us abhor it.
But more importantly, while Hillman may fail as psychopomp for a collective imagining, he succeeds as provocateur. He consciously chooses
war as his method: he aims to “induct our minds into military service,” “to
disturb the peace”, to effect “shock therapy,” destabilize, desubjectivize,
and destroy, just as war itself does (p. 110). While on the surface he
invites you to imagine with him, underneath he is actually challenging you to
battle. So, rather than going with Hillman into his own active imagination, you
may choose to go against him into battle. Then your imagination can take you
where you actually need to go. You may have an experience of fascination with
war via an image less specific than Hillman’s prescription, and more to the
point. Hillman says that he likes to “set fire to the passions of thought (p.
111)”. In this he may be successful.
In fact, one of Hillman’s gifts to us have been his
provocations. He describes himself as a “child of Mars” who has “a native need
to be at war,” one who finds a deep resonance in the subject (p. 111). Because
he’s so passionate about his material, and because he is willing to stretch the
imagination as far as possible to fit his thesis, it’s hard to remain a passive
and innocent bystander as you read. Through his willingness to take a chance at
being wrong, he invites us to argue with him, and in doing so, we may become
aware of what we do imagine ourselves. He provokes us to reflect
imaginatively and seriously about war, which is, unfortunately, quite out of
fashion and much needed these days.
Hillman suspects that this will be his last book. If it is, it will be a loss
for us all. He’s often taunted us into war with him. Even when he is wrong, the
battle he engages us in often awakens us to more conscious living. And that is a loveable war.
Gary Trosclair is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in Manhattan and Westchester County,
New York.
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