Blitzed/Ohler

"Voluntary dependence is the finest state". Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To understand the historical relevance of methamphetamine and other substances to the Nazi state, we must go back before the beginning of the Third Reich. The development of modern societies is bound as tightly with the creation and distribution of drugs as the economy is with advances in technology. In 1805 Goethe wrote Faust in classicist Weimar and by poetic means perfected one of his theses, that the genesis of man is itself drug-induced: I change my brain, therefore I am. At the same time, in the rather less glamorous town of Paderbom in Westphalia, the pharmaceutical assistant Friedrich Wilhelm Serturner performed experiments with opium poppies, whose thickened sap anesthetized pain more effectively than anything else. Goethe wanted to explore through artistic and dramatic channels what it is that holds the core of the world together Serturner, on the other hand, wanted to solve a major, millennium-old problem that has plagued our species to a parallel degree.

It was a concrete challenge for the brilliant twenty-one-year-old chemist: depending on the conditions they are grown in, the active ingredient in opium poppies is present in varying concentrations. Sometimes the bitter sap does not ease the pain quite strongly enough, and other times it can lead to an unintended overdose and fatal poisoning. Thrown back entirely on his own devices, just as the opiate laudanum consumed Goethe in his study, Serturmer made an astonishing discovery: he succeeded in isolating morphine, the crucial alkaloid in opium, a kind of pharmacological Mephistopheles that instantly magics pain away. Not only a turning point in the history of pharmacology, this was also one of the most important events of the early nineteenth century, not to mention human history as a whole. Pain, that imitable companion, could now be assuaged, indeed removed, in precise doses. All over Europe, apothecaries had to the best of their ability (and their consciences) pressed pills from the ingredients of their own herb gardens or from the deliveries of women who foraged in hedgerows. These homegrown chemists now developed within only a few years into veritable factories, with established pharmacological standards" Morphine was not only a method of easing life’s woes; it was also big business. 

In Darmstadt the owner of the Engel-Apotheke, Emanuel Merck, stood out as a pioneer of this development. In 1827 he set out his business model of supplying alkaloids and other medications in unvarying quality.This was the birth not only of the Merck Company, which still thrives today. but of the modern pharmaceutical industry as a whole. When injections were invented in 1850, there was no stopping the victory parade of morphine.The painkiller was used in the American Civil War of 1861-65 and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.Soon morphine fixes were doing the rounds as normal procedure. The change was crucial; the pain of even seriously injured soldiers could now be kept within bounds.This made a different scale of war possible: fighters who before would have been ruled out for a long time by an injury were soon coddled back to health and thrust onto the front line once again.

With morphine, also known as “morphium,” the development of pain relief and anesthesia reached a crucial climax, both in the army and in civil society. From the worker to the nobleman, the supposed panacea took the whole world by storm, from Europe via Asia and all the way to America. In drugstores across the United States, two active ingredients were available without prescription: fluids containing morphine calmed people down, while drinks containing cocaine, such as in the early days Vin Mariani, a Bordeaux containing coca extract, and even Coca-Cola, were used to counter low moods, as a hedonistic source of euphoria, and also as a local anesthetic.This was only the start. The industry soon needed to diversify; it craved new products. On August 10, 1897, Felix Hoffmann, a chemist with the Bayer Company, synthesized acetylsalicylic acid from willow bark; it went on sale as Aspirin and conquered the globe. Eleven days later the same man invented another substance that was also to become world famous: diacetyl morphine, a derivative of morphine -the first designer drug. Trademarked as Heroin, it entered the market and began its own campaign. “Heroin is a fine business" the directors of Bayer announced.

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While France and Great Britain were able to acquire natural stimulants such as coffee, tea. vanilla, pepper, and other natural medicines from colonies overseas, Germany, which lost its (comparatively sparse) colonial possessions under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, had to find other ways stimulants had to be produced synthetically. In fact, Germany was in dire need of artificial assistance: the war had inflicted deep wounds and caused the nation both physical and psychic pain. In the 1920s drugs became more and more important for the despondent population between the Baltic Sea and the Alps The desire for sedation led to self-education and there soon emerged no shortage of know-how for the production of a remedy.

The course was set for a thriving pharmaceutical industry. Many of the chemical substances that we know today were developed and patented within a very short period of time. German companies became leaders in the global market. Not only did they produce the most medicines. but they also provided the lion‘s share of chemical raw materials for their manufacture throughout the world. A new economy came into being. and the picturesque Rhine Valley became a Chemical Valley of sorts. Previously unknown little outfits prospered overnight and grew into influential players. In 1925 the bigger chemical factories joined together to form IG Farben, one of the most powerful companies in the world, with headquarters in Frankfurt. Opiates above all were still a German specialty. In 1926 the country was top of the morphine-producing states and world champion when it came to exporting heroin: 98 percent of the production went abroad. Between 1925 and 1930, 91 tons of morphine were produced, 40 percent of global production. Under the obligations of the Versailles Treaty, Germany reluctantly signed the League of Nations International Opium Convention in 1925, which regulated the trade. It was not ratified in Berlin until 1929. The local alkaloid industry still processed just over 200 tons of opium in 1928. The Germans were world leaders in another class of substances as well: the companies Merck, Boehringer, and Knoll controlled 80 percent of the global cocaine market. Merck’s cocaine, from the city of Darmstadt, was seen as the best product in the world, and commercial pirates in China printed fake Merck labels by the million. Hamburg was the major European marketplace for raw cocaine: every year thousands of pounds were imported legally through its port. Peru sold its entire annual production of raw cocaine, over five tons, almost exclusively to Germany for further processing. 

Jung/Bair

In 1925 Jung gave a series of talks with an overtly biographical content that were published many years later as the book Analytical Psychology. His talks, often extemporaneous and highly personal, told of the years of creative foment that followed the publication of Symbols and the break with Freud. He recalled ‘a particularly lucid moment“ sometime around 1915, when he perceived that he did indeed have the answer to the questions he had scrawled at the end of the manuscript. Writing the book gave him the “key” to comparative mythology, and henceforth he could use its “power to unlock all doors” in psychoanalysis. But at that point he remembered stopping short and asking himself, what would be the point, what would he really accomplish? He had already written a book about the myth of the hero and, by extension, the myths of past societies and cultures. He had already questioned whether or not his own had its particular myth and decided it did not. Most of all, by writing that book he was forced to admit that neither he nor anyone else truly understood the workings of the unconscious. “Around these reflections,” he wrote, “as around a central core, grew all the ideas that came to partial expression in the book on types.”

The research eventually coalesced into the 1921 book Psychological Types, an examination of personality as an attempt to explain how consciousness operates within different people. Jung’s starting point was with insights gleaned from his own patients that he applied to all of history, beginning with classical thought, ranging through medieval society to romanticism, and ending with what was for him the contemporary era, as exemplified by the philosophy of William James and works by Carl Spitteler, Friedrich Schiller, and Goethe. Jung divided personality into two basic groups, coining the terms “introvert” and “extravert” to describe them. According to his system, the introvert sees the world in terms of his own situation within it, whereas the extravert defines himself in terms of What is happening in the world around him. To these two basic ways of perceiving the world, Jung added four basic functions that can be found in differing combinations within both types: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. He added a further division within the four functions, the rational pair of thinking and feeling, and the irrational pair of sensation and intuition. Such divisions and pairings gave Jung the model for how an individual both situated and adjusted himself or herself toward both the inner self and the external world. The book shows his extraordinary erudition, as he ranged through detailed analyses of -to name only some- comparative religion, philosophy, educational theory, literature, biography, and psychology.

Jung's interest in how one’s personality type affects one’s being in the world was but one of many ideas that grew to expression around 1915, when Zurich became the fixed center where he formulated and disseminated the “technique’” he now referred to more and more frequently as “analytical” psychology. Zurich had become the destination for all manner of people interested in his psychology, and these were the years when the confluence of people with place occasioned the historical moment in which it became both founded and grounded, as the book on Types so clearly demonstrated. This period of Jung’s personal history has become the subject of both contradictory and controversial analysis, as critics and partisans have used the same generally available biographical information to interpret it in widely differing ways.

To take but one example, descriptions of Jung’s mental state veer from the oxymoronic “creative illness” to the vague “ ‘fallow,’ inactive, empty” to the stridently dogmatic “years of psychic disturbance, even psychosis.” Both the inner workings of Jung’s mind and his external life have been described as “deep introversion and disorientation,” or, at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, as “constructively engaged and surely in [self-]control.” Varying degrees of absolute truth lie in all these depictions, but like most explanations of character and personality, fact and event, some have more validity than others.

One way to assess these persistent criticisms is to consider several areas of Jung’s professional activity: first, his roster of patients, that is, the stature and situation of those who sought his counsel; then, his own speaking and writing, both its quantity and quality; and lastly, how everything coalesced in the founding of that curious entity- anomaly, perhaps -the Psychological Club Of Zurich, which from this time onward played such a large role in Jung’s life.

IF Freud expected (or even hoped) that the Zurich Psychoanalytical Association would dissolve into fractious fragments after he denounced Jung, he was mistaken. If anything, the Swiss contingent became stronger, better organized. and more determined to follow the original bent of analytic inquiry that they believed Freud had forbidden. When they read his History of Psychoanalysis, they could not accept his decree that he was the sole originator and final authority for all doctrinal pronouncements in the field. These independent-minded psychiatrists could trace their group’s origin to late 1911, when Bleuler called an informal gathering in the Burgholzli and they began to meet on a fairly regular basis to study all theory, not just Freud‘s. 

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From time to time, Bowditch Katz still consulted Jung, but always with a sharply critical eye for his foibles and failings. The diaries she kept of their meetings (as well as of hers with Moltzer) provide fascinating insights into the actions and interactions of those who participated in the formulation of analytical psychology in its early years.

No boundaries had yet been defined; there were no rules, no standards of behavior. Therapists were often teachers, friends, or lovers of their patients;30 socializing and entertaimnent often existed in tandem with therapeutic treatment; massive egos frequently collided, as theoreticians sought dominance for pet theories and sometimes even pet analysands. It was a heady time, with everything new and in flux for those involved in trying to make order and sense of the new mind doctors and their talking cures. Zurich may have been “the tense and often claustrophobic dead center of the war in Europe . . . a virtual container, neatly sealed off and protected from all the turmoil,” but everyone felt so very modern, and it was, indeed, a grand time to be alive.

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WHEN JUNG published Psychological Types in 1921, Freud was among the first to read it -and to dismiss it as “the work of a snob and a mystic, no new idea in it. . . . No great harm to be expected from this quarter.” The book is, as Freud also noted, “of enormous size 700 pages thick.” His main objection was that Jung was still insisting, as he had done since he published Symbols in 1913, that there could be no “objective truth” in psychology because of “personal differences in the observer’s constitution,” or, as Jung now defined it, “typology.” Jung wrote Types with Freud’s primacy of sex and Adler’s power firmly in mind and eagerly expressed his differences with both.

In a very real sense, the book’s genesis occurred around 1913, when Jung separated from Freudian orthodoxy; arguably, his entire oeuvre leading to the 1921 publication can be read as notes toward a gradually emerging unified theory of typology. Freud’s shadow  looms over this work, as Freud’s extraversion and Jung’s own introversion provide a convenient explanation for why they were unable to harness their differences. Extrapolating from himself and Freud and seeking to explain how individuals perceived the world and related to it, Jung offered other famous historical feuds that originated in intellectual disagreement. His examples were religio-philosophical, among them St. Augustine and Pelagius. Tertullian and Origen, and Luther and Zwingli. From philosophy and literature he employed Nietzsche’s distinctions of Apollonian and Dionysian; Wilhelm Ostwald‘s classical and romantic attitudes, Carl Spiteler's differentiations of Prometheus and Epimetheus; and Goethe’s diastole and systole, terms coined to indicate expansion and contraction.

The book is a stunning compilation of Jung’s extensive reading, but there are no references to anything he had not read before he wrote Symbols. He simply examines the type problem as it occurs in the many writings that would serve as his workhorse: for many years to come, the standard references he would trot out repeatedly to support theoretical positions. Fortunately, he chose well, for he culled works that are the finest in (among others) poetry, psychopathology, aesthetics, modern philosophy, and biography. He devoted a chapter to William James’s types, particularly the characteristic pairs of “tough” and “tenderminded” opposites, which he examined in many different ways. He acknowledged that the type problem had fascinated humankind forever, from ancient astrology to palmistry, phrenology, physiognomy, and graphology, and to those most recently as Wilhelm Ostwald and Otto Weininger. Jung admitted that he had chosen to write only of those theories that supported his own but did not insist that his was “the only true or possible type-theory.” Admitting this allowed him to fault James’s typology as “almost exclusively concerned with the thinking qualities of the types“ His criticism of James drew heavily on the views he had expressed in his earliest letters to Schmid and that he continued to hold: of Pragmatism, “which restricts the value of ‘truth’ ”; of Bergson and the “intuitive method,” “élan vital,” and “durée créatrice”; of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; and of Schopenhauer and Hegel, who since his school days had provided Jung with corroboration for whatever idea he sought to prove.

Jung saved his own typology for the last chapter, which comprised the final 150 or so pages of his text. To the “attitudes” of introvert and extravert, he added four further differentiations called functions. To “feeling" and “thinking," he now adopted Schmid’s and Toni Wolff’s suggestions and gave equal status to “intuition” and “sensation.” Feeling and thinking he grouped under the rubric of “rational,” while sensation and intuition became “nonrational.” He now acknowledged the importance of nonrational functions to the development of the psyche, because they allowed for a priori knowledge, something he had stabbed at but could not spear in the dialogue with Schmid. “A type theory must be more subtle,” he believed, and in his schema, the two attitudes and the four functions thus permitted a grand total of eight possible psychological types.

In the years following the 1921 publication, Jung was asked repeatedly why he had proposed a system composed of two types, four functions, and eight possible types. “That there are exactly four is a matter of empirical fact,” was his consistent response:

"The four functions are somewhat like the four points of the compass, they are just as arbitrary and just as indispensable. Nothing prevents our shifting the cardinal points as many degrees as we like in one direction or the other, nor are we precluded from giving them different names. It is merely a question of convention and comprehensibility."

But few persons, it seemed, read the book as Jung intended. By the time it had gone through multiple printings in many languages, he felt compelled to address the “regrettable misunderstanding[s]” that had turned the book into “nothing but a childish parlour game.”" He complained that even within ch: medical profession his typology was used to slot patients into his system and give them corresponding “advice.” He insisted that his “typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people on first sight: It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”

He believed the primary value of his book was “not merely for the obvious, all too human reason that everyone is in love with his own ideas,” but rather “for the objective reason that it offers a system of comparison and orientation which makes possible something that has long been lacking: a critical psychology.”

IT had been a long trek from Freud’s 1913 ostracism to the 1921 publication of the book that signaled Jung’s formulation of his own “unique system of psychological thought.” He now had his own vocabulary to describe and his own method to treat the “inner processes of the lives of all men and women.” Jung had survived professional exile and, through formulating analytical psychology, had prevailed if not triumphed. He was forty-six years old, and “the unbearable age” of youth and young manhood had given way to “the period of maturity” wherein “a man in middle life still feels young, and age and death lie far ahead of him.” Jung made these observations many years later, when the fullness of life was mostly behind him, and old age and the idea of death were daily companions. But in the years when World War I and the isolation it imposed upon him were ending, several of his writings besides Psychological Types were piquing interest and gaining the attention of the larger world.

Having bested all local rivals, he emerged within his own community as the leading representative of psychoanalysis. Internationally, he was deemed the only theorist worthy to be seen as Freud’s rival. “All these moments in the individual’s life, when the universal laws of human fate break in upon the purposes, expectations, and opinions of the personal consciousness, are stations along the road of the individuation process,” was another passage Jung wrote late in life.

He called these moments the process through which the spontaneous realization of the whole man would evolve.

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More Leroi

The problem is that here. as so often. Aristotle's technical vocabulary is underdetermined He's very reluctant to coin new terms even When he badly needs them. He's not entirely oblivious to the problem, He’ll often say that a given term is used in several different senses, and even tell us what they are but then. as often as not, leaves us guessing which one he means. 

Indeed. there’s a third sense in which Aristotle uses tides. It’s related to the other two. but goes much deeper, and is much more surprising It's the appearance of an organism, but if this is not too paradoxical its appearance when it cannot yet be seen. It is the ‘information’ or the formula’ which was transmitted to it by its parents, from which it built itself in the egg or womb, and which it will, in turn, transmit to its progeny It is in this sense that Aristotle thinks that the nature of a thing resides primarily in its form. 

To speak of eidos as ‘information’ risks anachronism. Aristotle certainly does not conceive of information in the general sense that we do. Yet this interpretation is supported by passages in which he draws a parallel between the transmission of animal form and the transmission of knowledge. In The Parts of Animals Aristotle considers how a woodcarver might explain his art. He clearly wouldn’t just talk about the wood that’s merely the matter out of which it’s built. Nor would he just talk about his axe and auger -they’re merely tools, Nor would he just talk about the strokes that he makes -that’s mere technique. No, if he is really to convey the origin of the thing he's making, he has to talk about the idea that he had when he began his work the process by which it will unfold in his hands, its final design and ultimate purpose he must talk about its eidos. In the same way, when a scientist seeks to explain why living things have the features they do, he must talk about their aide. It’s just that the forms of living things are not. Plato held, located in the mind of some divine craftsman, but rather located in their patents' seeds. 

There's a passage in the Metaphysics where Aristotle gives another metaphor for the relationship between material and formal natures. Rather marvellously, he compares the components of a body to a symbolic system. Some things he says. are compounds. The syllable ab is a compound of the letters a and b, But putting a and b together is not enough to give you that particular syllable; you need something else: you need to specify the order of the letters (lest you get ba instead) or, as we would now say, you need information. In the same way, flesh is a compound of Fire and earth and something else: the way in which they are ordered. And that order is the form and nature of flesh. 

Aristotle's belief that we should attend less to the matter than to the 
informational structure of living things makes him seem like a molecular geneticist avant la lettre. He did not somehow miraculously anticipate the discovery of DNA: it’s mere coincidence that he used an ordered alphabetical sequence ab v. ba to describe forms as we describe nucleotides. Yet, in retrieving forms from the Platonic realm-beyond-the-senses, Aristotle answered, and answered correctly, the question: what is the immediate source of the design that we see in living things? It is the information that they inherit from their parents.

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Aristotle distinguishes the rules for debating opinions from the rules for constructing scientific explanations. The first he called ‘dialectic’, the latter ‘demonstration‘ (the Greek is apodeixis). By ‘demonstration' he mean“ exactly what a modem scientist means when he says, ‘we have demonstrated that A is the cause of B’ -that is, he and his collaborators have shown that the presence of A is a necessary and sufficient condition for B. He had a high notion of the power of scientific demonstrations: he thought that they delivered truth. That’s because they are the products of logical operations. Aristotle invented the theory of inferential logic known as his syllogistic. It was his greatest technical achievement and dominated the subject for millennia even if it was incomplete and, in parts, wrong. His syllogistic aimed to deduce new conclusions from established premises where the premises are propositions that contain a subject and a predicate. e.g. ‘All octopuses [subject] are eight legged [predicate].’ To analyse such statements he invented a formalism that substituted letters for the terms, e.g. ‘All A are B.’ This formalism allowed him to speak generally of all propositions of a given form, manipulate them and derive the many results that he did. 

For Aristotle, a scientific demonstration rests upon a syllogism. But to qualify as a demonstration a syllogism must meet certain conditions. First, the premises of the syllogism must obviously be true. Second, the premises of the syllogism must be more immediate, more empirically apparent, than its conclusion (at least in natural science as distinct from geometry). Third, it must concern universals rather than particulars. In fact, Aristotle thinks that it’s impossible to have scientific knowledge of individuals. To say that this octopus has eight legs gets us nowhere; scientific knowledge can only 
begin once we‘ve established that all octopuses have eight legs or at least that all normal octopuses do. Finally only universal, assertive and assertoric propositions can form the basis of demonstrations: ‘All A are B; all B are C; therefore all A are C.’ Logicians refer to such syllogisms as being in the 'mood' of‘Barbara’. Such logical strictures may seem remote from the modern scientific 

method and so, in a way, they are. But Aristotle’s reason for grounding scientific knowledge in his syllogistic is, I believe, one familiar to any modern scientist. I suggested that, far from being a natural history or a taxonomy, Historia animalum is a search for associations among the traits that animals possess; that it is, in fact, a data trawl. His syllogistic, then, provides a powerful way of securing those associations of showing that they are true. Secure associations, in turn, demand causal explanations which his syllogistic also identifies. 

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I have been speaking of Aristotle’s ‘theory of demonstration’ as if there is just one of them. In the Posterior Analytics he certainly devote; most space to the method I have sketched. But he also allows that there are other modes of demonstration though he’s quite vague about how they work. In The Parts of Animals he says that the methods of demonstration in natural science are actually different from those in ‘theoretical sciences’ such as geometry. In biology, he suggests that we should start with the end the teleological purpose of an animal and work our way deductively back to infer how the animal’s various parts serve that purpose. Such demonstrations can also, with some twisting, be couched in syllogistic terms. 

Although demonstration is the beating heart of his scientific method Aristotle acknowledges that science rests on various indemonstrable statements. These include the axioms of his syllogistic as well as various Primary definitions. For example, geometry requires a definition of‘spatial magnitude and arithmetic a definition of ‘unit'. The axioms and primary definitions of biology are less obvious but include statements such as ‘nature does nothing in vain‘ an apophthegm that he puts to hard use. Aristotle isn’t clear how such ideas can be justified, and suggests that their truth is just apparent by induction (epagoge), but argues nonetheless that they're needed if science is to get off the ground. 

This is certainly right. In our day there are people who think, all evidence to the contrary, that science is just one system of beliefs among many. Aristotle had to contend with them too. Some people, he says, claim that scientific knowledge is impossible because any inference we make must rely on some previous inference, and that must rely on another, and so on to infinity so that, ultimately, we can know nothing. Other people. he continues, claim that anything can be demonstrated: everything is true hence nothing is true. 

Aristotle recognizes that both thoughts are lethal to the possibility of science, and he deals with them briskly. No, there isn’t an infinite regress of inferences, nor is it true that everything can be demonstrated. because our arguments ultimately begin with axioms and our perception of the empirical world. His language is combative. It has to be. He has to show against his opponents, not just Plato but the sophists with their razorsharp dialectic, that it is possible to extract real knowledge from the sensible world. We may wonder whether he succeeded. Modem science rests on fundamental axioms no less than Aristotelian science. and scientists mostly justify them by the fact that they work. But Aristotle could hardly defend his assumptions, as a modern scientist can, by flicking on a light.‘