Hal Childs ©2021 ISPDI Soul’s Logical Life Virtual Conference July 2021

Integrity: The Human Side of Soul’s Logical Life

or, the Impact of Truth

I hope these remarks will prove helpful as an introduction to some of the characteristics
of psychology as the discipline of interiority and soul’s logical life.

I distinguish between two kinds of integrity: human integrity and soul integrity. To
illustrate soul integrity, I will present four very condensed “biographies” to show the effect of the
logical life of soul on a human person. They also show the human person’s role in the emergence
of a new truth that was at stake in the unfolding of soul’s logical life. I view human integrity as
the personal, or ego, choice to take a stand for an ethical value. I view soul integrity as the claim
and obligation to serve a newly emergent logical form of consciousness.

The four biographies are of two fictional biblical persons and two historical persons:
Jacob the son of Isaac (son of Abraham), the biblical Job, Francis Bacon, and Carl Jung. The
point of these particular biographies is also to illustrate the historical nature of soul and the
historical unfolding of the logical life of soul, in contrast to a personalistic or humanistic and
nonhistorical notion of soul. Soul has undergone major transformations of its form over the
approximately three-thousand-year span these biographies encompass.
Hal Childs ©2021 ISPDI Soul’s Logical Life Virtual Conference July 2021

Jacob and Esau (ca. 1,000 BCE)

Dating this story is purely symbolic. The stories of Abraham and his sons are origin
myths about a late stone age group of nomadic Hebrew tribes that predate Israel’s existence as a
nation. For me they represent an early intimation of the move of soul from its identification with
the nature gods and goddesses of polytheism. Polytheism represents the status of soul as pre-
literate and pre-historic; soul bound to specific locations in its identification with natural
phenomena. Yahweh was a newly emergent god who was the manifestation of soul moving
toward literacy, abstraction, transcendence, and history. The Jacob and Esau drama contains
archaic themes that have been brought, anachronistically, into the service of soul’s story about
the emergence of Yahweh. Yahweh, who is clearly in charge of this story, is fully contra
naturam, and it is Jacob’s integrity that unwittingly serves soul’s self-transformation. Jacob and
Esau represent soul in conflict with itself.

Rebekah, Isaac’s wife, is pregnant with twins, and there is such a violent struggle
between them in her womb, that she would rather die. (Gen. 25:22) Yahweh tells her there are
two nations in her womb, and that the elder shall serve the younger. (Gen. 25:23) Right away we
know this story will overturn the natural order when we hear “the elder shall serve the younger.”

At birth Esau comes out first, he is red and covered with hair. As his brother comes out
he is gripping Esau’s heel; so, he was named Jacob, which means “he supplants.” (Gen. 25:25-
26) Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the field, and Jacob a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac
loved Esau because he was fond of game, but Rebekah loved Jacob. (Gen 25:27)

The human-centered interpretation views the brothers’ conflict as a cultural one between
rival ways of life, the hunter vs. the shepherd. However, from the point of view of soul, Esau
represents a status of consciousness that is embedded in nature, a consciousness identified with
the rhythms of the earthy gods and goddesses of polytheism, while Jacob, as an intellectual, a
man of quiet and thought, represents a new emerging status of consciousness that seeks to
emancipate itself from its identification with the natural world. This is the essential conflict soul
is working with in this story (and throughout the entire Old Testament).

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Manipulation, trickery and deceit are soul’s methods. Once Esau came in from the field
famished while Jacob was cooking. When he asked for some food, Jacob first demanded Esau’s
birthright in exchange. Esau, in the face of starvation saw his birthright as worthless, and swore
it to Jacob for bread and lentils. (Gen. 25:29-34) The natural order of the birthright (leadership of
family and double inheritance) which belongs to the eldest son is subverted. The quiet
intellectual is supplanting the earthy hunter.

Isaac, old and blind, at the end of his life, wants to give his final blessing to his oldest son
Esau. But, Jacob conspires to steal the father’s blessing through a trick devised by his mother.
Jacob is disguised as Esau and gets the blessing, which is irrevocable. Again, the natural way of
things is broken.

The deceit is discovered and both Isaac and Esau are outraged. (Gen. 27:35) Esau vows
to kill his brother. The tension is building for a dramatic confrontation between the brothers, as
soul wrestles with itself for the ascendancy of a new consciousness.

After many years away building his own life, Jacob must return home and face Esau.
Jacob knows he wronged his brother and fears for his life. The conflict between these two
aspects of soul remains unresolved. He learns that Esau is coming to meet him with four hundred
of his own men, and fearing the worst, Jacob is terrified.

Jacob attempts to appease his brother with gifts of animals from his herds. He sends his
family on in two separate groups. But, ultimately he is alone and must confront his truth. Jacob
spends the night alone at the ford of the Jabbok river, and here the final confrontation takes
place:

Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man
saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and
Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then the man said, “Let
me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you
bless me.” So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then
the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have
striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him,
“Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And
then he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen

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God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” The sun rose upon him as he
passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. (Gen. 32:24-31)

Here soul wrestles with itself. Jacob must face his own other, that other which preceded
him, but which he is destined to succeed. It is never clear who or what Jacob wrestles with, but
even though it was the middle of the night and pitch dark, Jacob states, “I have seen God face to
face,” when his whole being was expecting, in fear and trembling, a confrontation with Esau.
The prevailing identity of soul with polytheistic nature worship and immersion in nature is
negated. The new name, Israel, is wounded, signaling the penetration of soul’s new logic, as the
Jacob-Esau conflict is sublated into a new logic of consciousness. Jacob, now Israel, symbolizes,
along with the new god Yahweh, the move out of fusion with nature and into literacy and history
as a new mode of being, a new status of soul.

Where is integrity in this story? Although Jacob is a literary character he models for us
facing necessity, circumstance and history with his whole being. He is the whole man who meets
his own totality, his trickery, his deceit, his twin other, and his destiny, and wrestles it to a new
identity, a new truth.

This story is, of course, not an historical event, but it grounds itself in place and time with
named characters, the drama and tension of a life-long conflict, and the geographical specificity
of the Jabbok ford. The literary form of the story is itself soul’s way of working on itself, and
this psychological interpretation of the historical development of soul, is itself a new event of
soul—soul speaking about itself today.

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Hal Childs ©2021 ISPDI Soul’s Logical Life Virtual Conference July 2021

Job (ca. 6th and 5th centuries BCE)

Job, as a model of soul-integrity, represents a change in the logical form of consciousness

that was indeed beginning in antiquity. The absolute power and value of the universals was
beginning to decrease and the power and value of the particulars was beginning to increase. Soul
was negating itself in shifting its location from divine substance to human subject.

Here are the main points to grasp in the Job drama:

1. God (who symbolizes soul’s status) is fully transcendent and good: he treats human
subjects justly, reasonably and fairly. If you are good you are blessed, and if you are bad,
you are cursed.
2. Job is a perfectly good person who is true to God and whom God admires.
3. However, Job’s wealth, family and his health are destroyed, and therefore, according to
the prevailing logic, he must be guilty of sin, and must admit his guilt. Within the
prevailing logical form of consciousness that God is just, such tragedy just does not
happen to good people.
4. Job’s integrity, his conviction in his absolute innocence, forces him to reject the
prevailing logic that God is just, and puts him on a collision course with this logic.

How does this come about?

God has great admiration for Job’s goodness and integrity, but God also begins to doubt
that Job will continue to admire and praise God if Job loses everything. This doubt in God’s
mind appears in the guise of “the satan” who dares God to destroy Job, for surely Job will curse
God if his wealth, family and health are destroyed. Amazingly, God goes along with this obscene
wager, and destroys everything Job has except his life.

God wants to prove his doubt wrong and that Job will stay true to God regardless of his
circumstances.
Job has no idea that God is divided within himself, and he stays true to God.
Job’s friends visit to console him, and then accuse him of sin, evil, and wrong-doing,
because his terrible misfortune is obviously punishment and discipline for sin. Job’s friends

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represent the prevailing logic of consciousness that God is right and human persons are sinful
and guilty, by definition.
Job rejects his friends’ advice as lies, and takes his innocence directly to a confrontation
with God. Job is so certain of his innocence he lays himself naked before God and declares that
any court of law would acquit him over and against God. Job asks God directly, why did you do
this to a perfectly innocent man? Job accuses God of murder. Job’s integrity stands unmoving as
an unflinching moral charge over against the idea that God is perfectly just.

Then God addresses Job, in the form of a powerful storm (the voice from the whirlwind),
and towering over him in might and power, tells Job he does not know what he is talking about.
God justifies himself as all-knowing and all-powerful, the creator and Lord of all creation, and
Job, as a small, weak, mortal cannot possibly know the ways of God. God asserts his dominion
and domination, that might makes right.

God’s power tirade ignores Job’s moral question, and Job’s integrity and conviction in
his innocence will not budge. Even though Job never curses God, he does back God into a tight
corner with his moral charge. God cannot admit he is in the wrong, and resorts to bullying,
attempting to shout down Job’s concerns.

The argument between Job and the prevailing logic of consciousness ends rather quickly
with just a few words from Job. It is worth a look at Job’s final words found in all bibles, in
contrast with an alternate translation, because my interpretation hinges on the presence or
absence of one word:

Traditional: Alternate

I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, Word of you had reached my ears,
but now my eye sees you; But now that my eyes have seen you,

therefore I despise myself, I shudder with sorrow for mortal clay.

and repent in dust and ashes.

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Hal Childs ©2021 ISPDI Soul’s Logical Life Virtual Conference July 2021

In the traditional translation, Job backs down and acquiesces to God’s superior power.
This, of course, is the complete abdication of his integrity which has informed Job’s entire
argument, indeed, his own ultimate logical status. Traditional commentators have to jump
through theological hoops to justify this reading. But, the alternate reading is based on the actual
Hebrew text, in which the word myself is missing. Job is profoundly disturbed and distressed, but
it is not with himself; it is with God.1

Here at the end of his ordeal, Job has seen it all. Now he knows the truth about God. He
has experienced God’s magnificent beneficence and God’s horrible cruelty, and he now knows it
is all arbitrary. God cannot be trusted. He is the source of justice and injustice, he is the source of
good and evil, and there is no rhyme or reason. Here is my paraphrase of Job’s last words:

I had heard about you second hand [it is assumed you are fair], but now I have
experienced your terrible truth directly [your unreasonable cruelty]. You are a
cruel and savage monster, and I am terrified and grieve for humankind.

It is Job who knows this new truth about God, about ultimate reality in the ancient world,
and because Job knows it, God knows it too, and cannot avoid it anymore. The innocence of both
God and Job has been shattered by Job bringing the satan to consciousness. The power that had
been exclusively God’s is now diminished and some of this power is transferred to Job, to
humankind. The premise that “God is only just,” is cracked, and the status of humankind, of
human consciousness, is now stronger and wiser. Job represents the logic of human
consciousness beginning to outgrow its “child of God” status, moving toward becoming an adult
on its own terms (which will take another two-thousand years).

1
Miles, Jack. (1995). God: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp.323ff.

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Hal Childs ©2021 ISPDI Soul’s Logical Life Virtual Conference July 2021

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Francis Bacon stands on the threshold of the Enlightenment at the turn of the seventeenth
century, a major figure in the history of Western thought, who became seriously misunderstood.2
Bacon was important to soul’s movement because his introduction of the inductive process of
reasoning was another indication of the self-negation of soul out of its primary identification
with the universals on the way toward infusing the particulars. It is another indication that the
significance of God was decreasing and humankind’s significance was increasing. Up until
Bacon’s time, the tradition for deriving knowledge was based on deduction from universal
principles, metaphysical givens, and divine revelation. The universal principles of philosophy,
and God’s divine revelation, the Bible, were the source of truth, and thus knowledge had to be
derived from these higher principles. This basic assumption had guided thought through
antiquity and into the Elizabethan era (1558-1603). In that framework, knowing began in heaven,
descending from on high by way of abstract argument. Bacon’s process of induction reverses
this direction of thinking, and insists that scientific reasoning should begin with the careful
observation of natural phenomenon. From the thorough gathering of data, on the ground, as it
were, generalizations and principles are built from the bottom up, grounded in the empirical
observation of nature.

In Bacon’s time, the Bible was the source for understanding the natural world as divinely
created and ordered. The natural world was taken for granted as a given and basically ignored as
a source of knowledge itself. Nor was it possible to consider that humankind could improve upon
the natural world. By the sixteenth century soul, in its medieval Christian form, had exhausted
itself; the Christian form of consciousness in Europe had done its work, and a new status of
consciousness was beginning to unfold. Through Bacon’s integrity, soul entered culture as an
idea that expressed a new soul-truth, which gripped him and could not be denied.

Christianity had its version of the eternally fixed and stable character of nature as God’s
created order, and Greek thought too had its version of the eternal fixity of nature, governed not
by observation but by the absolute essence of general principles, the universals.

2
Eiseley, Loren. (1973). The Man Who Saw Through Time. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

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Aristotle was a keen observer of nature3 and it was clear to him that individual organisms
went through transformations, birth to death, but he could not consider the notion of evolution
because his consciousness was governed by the general form of consciousness of antiquity: the
predominance of universal truths, which in the case of nature meant the eternal unchanging form
of species. Aristotle knew it was impossible for the form of species to change, because his
knowing was rooted in the foundational logic of a consciousness that knew general principles and
universal ideas were absolute truths! Bacon challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that species
were eternally unchanging.

Today, the idea of the “transmutation of species” has become commonplace. But given
the prevailing logic of consciousness of Bacon’s time, it was a radical, even revolutionary idea
because it shattered the very logic of consciousness within which the idea of “impossibility” was
embedded. Bacon does not represent a merely intellectual controversy; he was one of the
spokespersons for a transformation of the logic of consciousness. These shifts in the foundation
and syntax of consciousness are major earthquakes that change everything on the surface.

Bacon is but one representative of soul’s transformation during the Enlightenment, when
humankind becomes the location for soul’s subjective sense of self. Humankind begins to
become an I am, feeling and knowing itself as an agent in its own right, whereas in antiquity the
universals, the gods, were the ultimate agents. Along with proposing the process of induction as
the new principle of reasoning, Bacon realized this approach gave humankind the means to
improve upon nature and culture through the process of discovery. Soul, as this new form of
mind, gained a new independence, engaging the natural world through curiosity and practicality,
as well as new powers for social and cultural self-improvement. Here, the trend of soul toward
freedom and independence is at work.

3
Stott, Rebecca. (2012). Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

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C. G. Jung (1875-1961)
Jung represents the revolutionary move of soul, at the turn of the 20th century, to negate
the Cartesian metaphysics of the subject and the scientific empirical rationality of late Modernity
after the death of God. For the modern era, the individual person is the only valid historical agent
(it is no longer God), and scientific materialism (the ability to measure everything known by the
senses) is the only source of truth. According to Cartesian metaphysics, ideas, principles, and
thoughts are produced in the individual mind and are intellectual abstractions; they have no
reality or autonomy in themselves. Cartesian metaphysics is also founded on radical skepticism
which alienates and isolates all subjects (people are no longer embraced by Father God or
Mother Church).

Karl Kerényi stated that what was most characteristic about Jung was his “taking the soul
for real. For no psychologist of our time, the psyche possessed such a concreteness and
importance as for him.”4 Giegerich concurs, stating, Jung had a real Notion or Concept of
“soul.”5 Giegerich wants to emphasize that for Jung the Notion or Concept of soul had a real
living quality; it was not merely an abstract idea. It was not an idea that he thought up himself in
the conventional personalistic mode of thinking, but rather it was an idea that gripped him. Again
Giegerich:

Jung had been reached and touched, indeed “gripped,” by the notion of the soul.
And because he had been touched and gripped by it, he had a grasp, ... a Notion,
of it and he could grasp it. Both oppositional aspects (active and passive) belong
together. The living Notion that we are concerned with here is the dialectical unity
of “being gripped” and of “grasping,” ....6

We are all probably familiar with Jung’s unusual experiences of soul, his visions and
emotional encounters with paranormal phenomena, his active imaginations, and so on. But, the
point Giegerich wants to drive home is that because Jung was gripped by the Notion, “it was a
logical, not emotional, having been reached by the Notion and a status (not a psychological

4
Quoted in The Soul’s Logical Life (SLL), p. 39.
5
SLL, p. 41.
6
SLL, p. 41.

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state) of the mind.”7 Giegerich, referring to Jung learning about “psychic objectivity” from the
figure Philemon, states:

It is not the (irrational) event that Jung has had this experience from the
unconscious that is crucial here. Rather it is the fact that the rational notion of
“soul,” of the “reality of soul,” dawned on him, and became the inalienable
insight within which he experienced and thought from then on. Jung had
comprehended what “soul” means, and he had been “placed” into this concept, so
that it became his arché, his standpoint. It had become the center and the
circumference of his vision and reflection.8

Jung was reached by a new truth, the Notion of soul, and it placed him outside the
consensus gentium of his time. The intellectual rationalism and the materialistic reductionism,
which defined prevailing truth, were no longer intelligible for him, and he was compelled to
articulate soul. Soul was not simply a new idea, it was an entirely new way to know and
understand reality. Jung was profoundly misunderstood and deeply lonely. Reflecting on his
“confrontation with the unconscious” Jung realized that his life had been deeply changed:
It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do
so. From then on, my life belonged to the generality. The knowledge I was
concerned with, or was seeking, still could not be found in the science of those
days. I myself had to undergo the original experience, and, moreover, try to plant
the results of my experience in the soil of reality; otherwise they would have
remained subjective assumptions without validity. It was then that I dedicated
myself to service of the [soul]. I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest
wealth.9

Jung’s soul-integrity is marked by the dialectical movement of being gripped by and, of

grasping in turn, the Notion of soul. An apt metaphor would be soul wrestling with itself,
competing notions of truth wrestling to a new logical conclusion.
With Jung and the notion of soul, all the rigid separating categories of Cartesian
metaphysics that elevate the subject and object into opposing epistemological realms, are
overcome in the all-inclusive dialectic of ouroboric consciousness that claims all metaphysical
and epistemological discourse for itself. Everything that once was hard and fast has now
dissolved in self-contradicting flow, movement and self-creating entanglement.

7
SLL, p. 41.
8
SLL, p. 42.
9
MDR, p. 192.

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Review

The Four Biographies and Soul’s Historical Movement

Jacob and Esau (ca. 1,000 BCE)

Soul moves from polytheism to monotheism
from preliterate, concrete and earth-bound identity with natural phenomena;

to literacy, abstraction, heaven bound transcendence.

Job (ca. 6th and 5th centuries BCE)

Soul moves from the all-powerful and all-good transcendent God;

to Job’s complex and self-contradicting moral consciousness (humankind).

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Soul moves further from identification with Divine Substance, the universals;

to the human subject as agent and separate from the object of nature.

C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

Soul moves from identification with the fixed boundaries of the Cartesian subject, as well as the
either/or dualism and absolute division between subject and object;

to the dialectic of both-and, and the dissolution of subject and object in pure fluidity.

There are several quotations from the Soul’s Logical Life appended to this paper which speak to
this theme of the impact of truth. Here is one:

One’s entire being (totus homo) must be dissolved and reconstituted by Truth from within or
assimilated to it. ... The subject must itself become, be Truth: the existing Notion. (SLL, 256)

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Truth and Logical Transformation

A true transformation, a real being affected, thus cannot be emotional. ... It implies the change
of oneself in one’s “substance” or identity, or the revolution of the logic of oneself (and of
course, since the logic is indivisible, also the logic of the world and life). (SLL, 255)

It is inherent in Truth from the outset to be a full-fledged (not merely formal) adequation or
assimilation of the mind to the “object.” Truth does not want to be left in a beyond.... It does not
want to be a mere emotional experience or feeling in the subject, and not only a “content” of his
consciousness. It wants to come home to the subject and actually reside in this life. (SLL, 255)

[Truth] must permeate and determine his entire being: the logic of his existence. (SLL, 256)

Cognition of truth ... is the process in which you rise to the level of consciousness on which the
insight dawns on you that you have unwittingly been it all along. (SLL, 256)

Dionysian dismemberment is the image for one being permeated by a truth, a knowledge, an
insight, that revolutionizes my consciousness, my whole being. (SLL, 256)

Dionysian dismemberment: to be in the wilderness as wilderness means to experience the

dissolution of one’s being “a being,” the dissolution of ontology into logic and of anthropology
into psycho-logic. (SLL, 257-58)

The Notion is existing notion. It is “pre-existing” or nonexisting logical life having found a real
existence in this life, in us, as us. (SLL, 262)

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