Corruption

Corruption occupies a productive ambiguity within the depth-psychology corpus, oscillating between its alchemical sense—putrefactio as necessary dissolution preceding transformation—and its theological-moral sense as ontological degradation of an originally good nature. Jung grounds the discussion in his critique of the privatio boni: if the soul was originally created good and has been genuinely corrupted, then evil possesses real psychic substance rather than being a mere negation of the good. Giegerich sharpens this alchemical reading, insisting that the fermenting corruption Hillman identifies in professional psychology’s institutional scandals is a comparatively trivial phenomenon, distinct from the rigorous ‘negative negation’ the alchemists intended—what Giegerich calls the corruption of an old notion in service of generating a genuinely new, non-positive concept of truth. Campbell deploys corruption as threshold imagery: the cross marks the point where spring’s blossom yields to corruption, yet that threshold is not terminus but passageway. The Philokalia tradition reads corruption cosmologically as the world’s subjection to flux following Adam’s fall, a condition reversible through sanctification. Hillman’s alchemical psychology frames blackening, putrefaction, and mortification as the operative agents of corruption in the soul’s opus. Across these registers, the term marks the indispensable moment of breakdown without which no genuine transformation occurs.

In the library 12 passages

what would have been needed instead of a positive elimination of truth as such is the (of course much more difficult and subtle) alchemical corruption (i. e., the negative negation) of its old notion

Giegerich argues that genuine alchemical corruption is a rigorous negative dialectical operation on an outmoded concept, not mere destruction or institutional scandal, and that only such corruption can generate a non-positive notion of truth.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

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The fermenting corruptions, which seem diversions from the main job of therapy, may actually be how the psyche is yellowing into the cosmos… But is every corruption that type of corruption that is meant when the alchemists speak of it?

Giegerich critically evaluates Hillman’s claim that institutional scandals represent alchemical corruption, insisting that not every dissolution qualifies as the transformative putrefaction the alchemists intended.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

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If the soul was originally created good, then it has really been corrupted and by something that is real, even if this is nothing more than carelessness, indifference, and frivolity

Jung argues that asserting the soul has been corrupted grants real ontological substance to evil, directly challenging the privatio boni doctrine by locating corruption on the plane of empirical psychic reality.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis

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Corruption crawls where before was the blossom of spring. Yet beyond this threshold of the cross—for the cross is a way (the sun door), not an end—is beatitude in God.

Campbell positions corruption as the necessary mythic nadir of the hero’s passage, a threshold condition that precedes and enables the movement toward transcendence.

Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting

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The two processes most relevant for producing blackness – putrefaction and mortification – break down the inner cohesion of any fixed state. Putrefaction, by decomposition or falling apart; mortification, by grinding down

Hillman identifies putrefaction and mortification as the operative alchemical mechanisms of corruption in the soul’s nigredo work, framing dissolution of fixed states as psychologically necessary.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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It is said that when the world was first created it was not subject to flux and corruption. According to Scripture it was only later corrupted and ‘made subject to vanity’—that is, to man—not by its own choice

The Philokalia tradition presents corruption as the cosmos’s secondary, historically contingent condition following Adam’s fall, understood as reversible through man’s renewal and sanctification.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting

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every place under the sphere of the moon is a place of generation and corruption, for it is a place of conflict and action and passion, from which generation and corruption invariably come

Von Franz’s commentary on Aurora Consurgens locates corruption within the Aristotelian sublunary cosmology, where the cycle of generation and corruption constitutes the ontological condition of material existence.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting

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Have the techniques and natural sciences we have attained brought us bad luck? Have they just corrupted man’s original state, or are they an indication of progress?

Von Franz raises the question of whether the expansion of consciousness through science represents a corruption of humanity’s original paradisal state or a necessary advancement, linking alchemical myth to the problem of technological modernity.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting

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they make war upon whatsoever in the body keeps orderly array and stays at its post; so they spread corruption and dissolution.

Plato’s Timaeus presents corruption as the physiological result of humoral elements falling into discord, disrupting the body’s ordered integrity and spreading dissolution.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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Although these forms of dishonesty and corruption reduce the conformity of free-market society to its own ideals, they do not really red

Alexander treats corruption here in its sociopolitical sense—elite misconduct within free-market institutions—noting that it undermines the system’s stated ideals without fundamentally altering its structural logic.

Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008aside

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plenty of people see the truth but cannot attain it, but there are few who do not know that the purity of religion is contrary to our corruption.

Pascal invokes corruption as the broadly acknowledged moral condition of fallen human nature that stands in antithesis to religious purity, framing it as a widely recognized if rarely overcome condition.

Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 1670aside

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Man is created incorruptible, without bodily humors, and thus he will be when resurrected. Yet he is not created either immutable or mutable, since he possesses the power to choose at will whether to be subject

Gregory of Sinai presents the human being as originally constituted in incorruptibility, with corruption entering not by nature but through the exercise of free choice, making it an anthropological rather than ontological given.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995aside

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