The Seba library treats Ruin in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Plato, Jung, Carl Gustav, Moore, Thomas).
The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy — the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction.
Plato argues that ruin is the structural consequence of unrestrained excess in any political or psychic form, operating as an immanent law of reversal rather than an external misfortune.
, Republic, -380thesis
a green tree grew from the ruins of the temple. They had not withstood life, but, seduced by life, had become their own monkey business.
Jung presents ruin as the generative soil from which transformed life emerges, distinguishing those who are destroyed by unconscious seduction from the new growth that becomes possible precisely at the site of collapse.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
Old buildings remind us of a past we were not part of. If we are identified with ego, then those past times are an affront to our desire for immortality.
Moore reads architectural ruin as a soul-affirming counter to ego’s demand for immortality, arguing that the psyche’s estrangement from ruined or ancient things signals a deeper alienation from soul’s temporal nature.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis
Up till now, the boat of his life has retained its buoyancy. Most of us, as Tomas Tranströmer mentions, transfer weights from one pocket to the other in order to keep the boat balanced. Suddenly, the boat turns over.
Bly maps ruin onto the katabasis mythology of masculine initiation, treating the sudden and catastrophic capsizing of one’s stable life as the necessary threshold of descent into genuine selfhood.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting
To fall from being a king’s son to being a cook is the step the story asks for. Carrying wood and water, working in the basement of the castle — where the kitchen is — stands for the Drop Through the Floor, the Descent, the humiliation.
Bly interprets the fairy-tale fall from nobility to servitude as a psychologically required ruin of social persona, the humiliation that precedes authentic masculine maturation.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting
whether he will measure A and ruin B or ruin A and measure B. It does not rest with him, however, to gain only insights and not lose any.
Jung, via Pauli’s complementarity principle, invokes ruin as epistemological necessity — every act of knowing entails a corresponding destruction, making ruin intrinsic to the structure of consciousness itself.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting
one is often chagrined, even humiliated, at the mistakes, the naivete, the projections. But such is the first adulthood: full of blunders, shyness, inhibitions, mistaken assumptions.
Hollis frames the retrospective recognition of one’s first-half failures as a form of psychological ruin that is constitutive of midlife passage rather than merely regrettable.
, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, 1993supporting
one blunders into the work of redemption unintentionally, so to speak, if one wants to avoid what appears to be the unbearable evil of an insurmountable feeling of needing redemption.
Jung suggests that the work of psychic transformation is entered through a kind of stumbling ruin of intentionality rather than through heroic will, aligning the experience of redemption with involuntary collapse.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009aside