Metaphysical Catastrophe

To confuse Being with a being is the metaphysical catastrophe. It is the ‘death of Being’ to confuse the unity of Being (Esse) with a pseudo-unity of beings (ens) which is essentially multiple.

Corbin, via Miller, furnishes the term’s canonical definition: the metaphysical catastrophe is the ontological error of collapsing Being into a supreme being, an error he identifies as constitutive of official monotheism and destructive of the mystery of Esse.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis

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the new universe that eventually emerged into the light of common day was a spiritually empty vastness, impersonal, neutral, indifferent to human concerns, governed by random processes devoid of purpose or meaning. At a deep level human consciousness was thereby radically estranged and decentered.

Tarnas describes the Copernican revolution as the modern mind’s prototypical cosmological catastrophe, structurally analogous to the metaphysical catastrophe: a world stripped of intrinsic meaning in which consciousness loses its ontological grounding.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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Once metaphysical ideas have lost their capacity to recall and evoke the original experience they have not only become useless but prove to be actual impediments on the road to wider development.

Jung identifies a psychological dimension of metaphysical catastrophe: when metaphysical concepts sever their root connection to living experience, they become not merely inert but actively obstructive to psychic development.

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

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the human self too is inevitably disenchanted. Ultimately it becomes, like everything else, a mere object of material forces and efficient causes: a sociobiological pawn, a selfish gene, a meme machine, a biotechnological artifact.

Tarnas traces the downstream psychological consequence of the metaphysical catastrophe: a civilization whose cosmology reduces the self to mere mechanism, mirroring at the personal level the ontological evacuation Corbin diagnosed at the level of Being.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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in our strangely unique modern commitment to restrict all meaning and purposive intelligence to ourselves, and refusing these to the great cosmos within which we have emerged, we might in fact be drastically underestimating and misperceiving that cosmos.

Tarnas diagnoses a residual anthropocentric bias as an unresolved legacy of metaphysical catastrophe, arguing that the restriction of meaning to the human subject perpetuates the original ontological error in a new register.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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even with all its untenable shortcomings, classical metaphysics preserved some indispensable positions under adverse conditions. We have to see through to the ultimate soul issues that are at stake in metaphysics.

Giegerich argues that even a catastrophically flawed metaphysical tradition preserved indispensable psychological functions, and that post-modern deconstruction must be weighed against the soul needs that metaphysics, however inadequately, once served.

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

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The mechanism of one part of the ego annihilating other parts which, I suggest, underlies ‘world catastrophe’ phantasy.

Klein’s ‘world catastrophe’ phantasy, rooted in early ego-splitting rather than ontological confusion, represents a psychoanalytic analogue to the metaphysical catastrophe concept, locating the destructive collapse within intrapsychic rather than philosophical structure.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957aside

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The revolution in our conscious outlook, brought about by the catastrophic results of the World War, shows itself in our inner life by the shattering of our faith in ourselves and our own worth.

Jung links historical catastrophe to the collapse of psychological certainty, tracing the shattering of collective self-confidence to a civilizational rupture that parallels, at the historical level, the metaphysical collapse Corbin diagnosed philosophically.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Civilization in Transition, 1964aside

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Without the notion of Truth, the images are inevitably ‘nothing but’ images — despite all conscious disclaimers.

Giegerich warns that abandoning the question of truth in imaginal psychology reproduces, at the methodological level, the evacuating gesture of the metaphysical catastrophe — reducing depth to surface, being to mere image.

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

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