Thursday, April 14, 2005

Carl Jung on Logos & Eros

Logos is a certain peculiar quality in a man's being which leads him to discriminate, to reason, to judge, to divide, to understand in a particular way.

And one cannot understand all this without also thinking of its antithesis, the equally intuitive concept of Eros, which would be then a principle of relatedness, seeing things together, gathering things together, establishing relations between things, not judging things, not looking at them properly, but rather attracting or repelling them.

Logos also contains the idea of the word; legein means to talk, to speak. It is another characteristic of man that he insists upon giving voice to an idea, designating it, giving a name, making a concept, expressing it, while woman, chracterized more by Eros, can leave things in suspens; they have not necessarily to be SAID. A man says, "Why the devil don't you say so?" but a woman doesn't need to say so, and usually she doesn't. Or she says something else, and a man is always convinced that she has said just the thing she should not have said. Therefore, men's ideas about women --- about their talk, you know: gossip and afternoon tea, that intricate talk, the indirect vague way of women. If he carefully follows up such a conversation, however, he sees that she is like a spider weaving a web. The talk of women, being round-about, doesn't consist of words but of spider webs, and they have a purpose different from that of a man.

A woman's world is strange to a man.

Nonetheless, Anatole France is quite right when he says that when men have worked things up to a fix, they must call in an intelligent woman.

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