I posted this on FaceBook on my personal page, but I want to expand on it.
“The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is ‘man’ in a higher sense – he is ‘collective man,’ a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind.”
(Carl Jung, Psychology and Literature, 1930)
I think Jung is understating the role of the individual or he assumes it is obvious. The artist is tapping into the collective unconscious of humanity as the primary source of art. She is contributing back to the unconscious psychic life of mankind. She is a unique and vital conduit actively adding her own personal experience and knowing into her art in the service to her and our evolution. It is an intimate dance with the collective unconscious in which the artist creates. Both her individuality and the collective unconscious are necessary.
Art is a manifestation of one’s personal experience with the collective unconscious. Art is a solitary activity, but one that is intimately involved with humanity as a whole. Two sides of the same coin. Carl Jung knew and communicated the value of art – infinite.
I think that free will is central to our lives and to evolution. A deterministic life course makes absolutely no sense to me. A fixed path determined by forces outside of our control makes us redundant. Why bother having human beings who think they have free will? You could just run the program and see how things turn out at the end. If we’re just robots, why not use robots?
So I think that artists bring their free will to their art just like we all do to every aspect of our lives. Jung seems to say in the quote above, that the artist is under the control of the collective unconscious. I understand that he is stressing the importance of that collective unconscious to the creation of art. I’m no artist in the conventional sense, but my ideas and my writing comes from a place outside of myself for sure.
I often wake up, sometimes in the middle of the night, with new ideas and a compulsion to write them down. I also get the compulsion to read something, which leads to more writing and more ideas. As I read more Jung and become more open to all of this, it is happening more and more. I have no doubt that these ideas come from the collective unconscious outside of me, as well as from my own unconscious.
Many artists and scientists acknowledge that they don’t know the source of their inspirations and creations. But I think that the person receiving these signals and ideas from outside of them, are still not passive channels. That is my intuition and it makes sense to me. An artist is receiving something from the collective unconsciousness to inspire their art, but the art is unique to that person because of their contribution through their own actions and their own free will.
The few hours before the inspiration must be important. I can’t believe that free will is not operative then. And prior experiences and thoughts of the days and weeks preceding the flash of inspiration must also be important. So if free will is not operative during the creation process, when does it become derailed or overwhelmed by the collective unconscious? I believe that free will is always operative, at least to some degree.
I cannot deny the overwhelming feeling of inspiration from the outside that can make us seem like we are lacking in free will. I think that was what Jung was referring to. I’m just so big on free will as a determinant of our lives that I cannot let it go. But Jung may be right, or I may be over-confident of free will in all circumstances. I am just now reading about Jung’s ideas on the shadow and the anima, where he stresses the role of the unconscious – the source of the shadow and the anima. If we are not conscious enough, we can lose our freedom of choice. I can understand and see that. And I have experienced it.
For now, I think the artist retains at least some free will in the creative process despite the power of the unconscious. There is lots more to explore here, and we will.