Willy Obrist
Willy Obrist (* 1918 in Langenthal ; † 2013 ) was a Swiss doctor and psychologist who published a series of works on the subject of "evolution of consciousness" (mutation of consciousness). The central theme in Obrist's work is the change in the (European) view of the world and of man, which led to the current crisis of religious orientation.
Life and scientific work
Willy Obrist joined as a teenager in the Jesuit order in order there philosophy and history to study. And he was not satisfied with the religious life, he left the Order after a few years to medicine to study. After completing his medical degree , he opened a medical practice as an internist and angiologist in Zurich . At the age of about 40, Obrist studied the writings of CG Jung in depth . As a result, he decided to give up his practice in order to complete an apprenticeship at the CG Jung Institute in Zurich. After completing his training, he became a lecturer there himself . In addition, he became a member of the Foundation for Basic Research in Human Sciences (SHG), a transdisciplinary working group for lecturers from Swiss universities. In the following, Obrist saw it as his life's task to research the fundamental change in the image of man and the world that had taken place in the course of modern times. In the 1970s he worked on a synthesis between the complete works of CG Jung and the latest findings from evolutionary research , ethnology and religious studies . This led to the publication of his first book "The Mutation of Consciousness" (1980). In the following, Obrist expanded his theory of the evolution of consciousness to include total evolution, which led to his book on evolution "Nature - Source of Ethics and Sense" (1999). Willy Obrist died in 2013.
Methodical approach
Obrist's central theme is the evolution of consciousness . He himself defines consciousness in two respects: As the ability to differentiate between I ( subject ) and not-I ( object ) and, based on this, the ego's ability to find more and more details in the non-I, that is, in objective reality to distinguish. For the first part of the definition, Obrist refers to mirror experiments with chimpanzees , the Russell Tuttle had carried out and in which seemed to recognize even the chimpanzees in the mirror. Obrist sees in this behavior the first dawn of "awareness". Obrist defines evolution in the sense of a higher development: the proof that an evolution took place is provided when it is proven that the system to be examined has progressively increased in complexity over long periods of time . Obrist builds his theory of the mutation of consciousness on these definitions .
Mutation of consciousness
To explain the change in worldview in Europe, Obrist uses the ideal-typical sequence of three worldviews: the archaic worldview (with this world / hereafter; the time of the "high religions", the religions of the Greeks, Romans, Jews, Christians, Muslims; the archaic worldview remains to this day in the form of the church (s)). As a movement away from the archaic worldview, the empirical sciences gradually developed ( positivism / materialism , with the increasing elimination of the supernatural world, beginning since the Renaissance until today). At the end of the 19th century there was a fundamental tension between the Church and materialistic science, whereupon a change occurred with the merging of the two worldviews into a "completely new time" and "new worldview". Obrist sees the progress (the sequence: wholeness -> splitting -> oppositional tension and the resultant emergence of something new) in parallel to the regularity of psychic change as it (according to CG Jung ) takes place in individual psychic development: the regularity of “Opposite tension and transcendent function” (also called “fulguration” by Obrist), which brings about a higher level of awareness in the process of becoming conscious. The concrete, historical process took place as follows: When tradition (church) lost its radiance (reasons from the late Middle Ages: secularization of the church, scientificization of theology, externalization of piety), pioneers in modern times created a counter-position (positivism). The traditionalists resisted this. There was bitter fighting between traditionalists and positivists (tension between old and new). The peak was reached at the end of the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was an excess of contrasts. A synthesis became possible by integrating the opposites. Humanity is on the threshold of an entirely new age.
Archaic worldview
The development “in primeval times” was based on a detachment of being integrated and surrendered to the environment of the people living at the time. In a long-lasting process, "the sky" was lifted further and further from the "visible things". Obrist refers to this process as “pushing up heaven”. During this process, two levels were gradually lifted from one another, the physical branch (world) and the metaphysical branch (beyond). The dualistic worldview of this world / hereafter that was characteristic of the late archaic period emerged ever more clearly.
The otherworldly realm was believed to be inhabited by invisible beings who have the ability to influence this world (appearances in dreams, visions; miracles, revelation). Since it was assumed of the otherworldly beings that they were superior to humans and could do good or bad to them, humans confronted them with rituals (magic, sacrifices, rites). Over time, the originally very large metaphysical populations were tightened. While there were still hosts of spirits at the animistic level, in classical polytheism there are only relatively few gods with a clearly defined character. Finally, developments towards monotheism emerged. Parallel to the process of pushing up heaven, there was a tendency to understand the otherworldly beings as less and less material or as consisting of an ever finer material. The evolutionary gain of development was that through this “dematerialization of the hereafter” the idea of the spiritual as opposed to the material came into the world: the conceptual pair of matter and spirit arose. With this dematerialization a limit was reached in the European High and Late Middle Ages. The mutation of consciousness, which until then had taken place almost exclusively on the metaphysical branch (religion), threatened to come to a standstill.
positivism
In this situation, a "course setting" occurred, which took place in the European High Middle Ages in the form of a final separation of the metaphysical branch (religion) and the physical branch (world). The progress of the evolution of consciousness shifted to the physical, empirical branch (exploration of this world). The metaphysical branch remained as a powerful block. The empirical sciences developed over the centuries in a laborious process. Obrist summarizes the development of modern science under the term positivism . According to Obrist, positivism was a spiritual movement away from the archaic worldview (especially its metaphysical branch), which, via the development of modern science, first led to methodical positivism ( 17th century : Cartesianism ) , then to ideological positivism ( 18th century : Age of Enlightenment ) and then to ideological positivism ( atheism / materialism of the 19th century ) . Obrist regards the world view of positivism / materialism merely as a world view of transition. According to this understanding, positivism was necessary in order to build up the opposite position to the archaic worldview. Its character as a movement away from the archaic worldview explains the fact that - for reasons of spiritual hygiene - the idea of a supernatural world has been largely eliminated from the worldview of positivism. Obrist therefore also calls this worldview "eliminatory materialism"
The development was heading towards what Obrist expresses in his basic idea of the principle of "tension in opposites and transcendent function". At the end of the 19th century (in the phase of the Kulturkampf ), two completely incompatible ways of understanding the world and self faced each other: the church, still clinging to the archaic worldview, on the one hand, and positivism / materialism, the notion of an otherworldly World had eliminated from his worldview on the other. There was a fundamental tension between religion / church and science.
Integration of opposites
Discoveries in the field of depth psychology were decisive for further development. CG Jung developed the projection process in his “Theory of Vision” . He came to the conviction that visions do not open up a view of the otherworldly world, but that what is seen is concretely perceived forms of the unconscious in the projection . This indicated that all ideas of concrete beings on the other side had resulted from the only possible concrete understanding of the formations of the unconscious at earlier stages of the evolution of consciousness.
When integrating the opposing views of archaic worldview and positivism, both were relativized in their area of validity: the area of validity of the archaic worldview was narrowed by the " internalization of the metaphysical world" (Obrist also pictorially refers to this internalization as "collapsing the metaphysical world"), the area of validity Positivism, on the other hand, was expanded. Obrist calls the result of this process the "New World View". Obrist's theory thus results in the following sequence: archaic worldview; Positivism as a movement away from this archaic worldview; Integration of the two world views into a "new world view" on a higher level.
Evolutionary steps of consciousness take place over long periods of time. The evolutionary step that led from the separation of the earthly / supernatural world to the tension between belief and science at the end of the 19th century lasted, if one counts from 1500 to 1900, at least 400 years. The process in which a new, unified worldview results or will result from the integration of the two opposing worldviews will also take a longer period of time. That means: the process is not finished, today's humanity is in the middle of this process.
On the threshold of a new age
According to Obrist, the concept of the spiritual in the “New Worldview” is such that humanity is returning to a unistic worldview, in which “the spiritual” is no longer concretely understood in the form of “otherworldly, spiritual beings”, but reality is seen as a unitary experience reality that has two sides, a spiritual (spirit aspect) and a material one. Obrist starts from the definition of matter as "formed energy". This definition contains two statements: on the one hand, the statement that matter "consists" of energy, on the other hand the statement that the energy in a structure is "formed" in a certain way, d. H. is arranged or designed. From this Obrist deduces: what is arranged in a structure is its material aspect. However, if one looks at how this what is arranged, then its spiritual aspect (spirit aspect) is revealed to us. Obrist uses the term energy as a distinguishing feature. Obrist defines energy (among other things) as follows: Energy has the tendency to fall into the sink, i.e. H. decrease in intensity. Everything that can be explained with the concept of energy falls under the material aspect, everything that cannot be explained with the concept of energy falls under the spiritual. The task is therefore to scrutinize the course of evolution and thereby separate the spirit aspect from the material aspect at every stage of evolution for every situation. As a result, Obrist identifies a number of terms that cannot be explained with the energy term and therefore can be assigned to the spirit aspect, e.g. B .: Wholeness, complexity, system, form, process, information, inwardness, communication, behavior, etc. a.
From this train of thought, Willy Obrist's view arises that the spirit did not first come into the world with the human brain, but that something was realized with the human spirit that was already present in a much more comprehensive sense or vice versa : the human spirit is only a copy of the objectively spiritual. On the question of what this “spiritual” is ultimately about, Obrist is forced to remain silent. He vaguely speaks of a kind of creativity, of "something dynamic that drives the process of becoming".
The evolution did not proceed smoothly all over the world
According to Obrist, the evolution of consciousness did not proceed uniformly worldwide, but on four main axes : the Mesoamerican region, the Indian region , the Chinese - East Asian region and "with us", that is, beginning in Mesopotamia and Egypt , across the Mediterranean region and finally north of the Alps. Around these central axes there is a horizontal staggering : the further away from the focal points of the evolution of consciousness, the more "backward". According to Obrist, the advantage of this is that in those peripheral areas, ethnographers in vivo have recently been able to collect material in which earlier phases of the evolution of consciousness are expressed (the people living there are, so to speak, “walking fossils”).
Stages of consciousness evolution
The stages of the evolution of consciousness are reflected in the change in the image of God.
The change in the image of God
If you look at the entire process of the evolution of consciousness, the development went from being integrated and surrendered to the “powers” around people (experience of participation) to ever further distancing from them (becoming conscious). Evolution is such that I-consciousness increases, while the idea of participation decreases.
In the early days, humans recognized numinous powers in things (animism: hosts of spirits); archaic humans experienced these spirits genuinely and concretely, which is why he confronted them with ritual evocation (magic, rite, sacrifice). In the course of evolution, the good spirits rose to heaven, while the bad spirits wandered under the ground (into hell), but continued to maintain contact with humans (influences, revelations, incarnations). The “pushing up of heaven” is shown in the fact that the gods are first around us in nature, then on Mount Olympus or in heaven, then they are continuously stripped of their materiality, which ultimately leads to the abstract concept of God in modern times. In positivism, God was increasingly declared dead by the “intellectuals” (in contrast, the courts in particular tried to promote religion, “in the correct recognition that with belief in God also reverence for those who exercise their power 'Derived from God's grace, had to wither'). The insight into the meaning of the unconscious (intuition, dreams, visions) led to the fact that the entire divine and diabolical upper and lower world was recognized as a projection of the soul (as early as Feuerbach in the 19th century, then Freud / Jung around 1900) . Through this knowledge the projection was taken back into the psyche, as it were "folded in" inside. Hans Küng refutes the projection theory (with reference to Feuerbach) with a very simple argument: "The fact of the projection does not in any way decide whether the object to which it relates exists or not". In other words: The question of God is independent of whether man is projecting or not. From this point of view, the projection theory turns out to be a building block on the positivist line (dismantling of the afterlife religion). It precedes the "integration of opposites" and therefore cannot be the solution. Projection theory was not Obrist's last word either. Obrist sees the world as a unitary experience that has two sides, one material and one spiritual. Matter and spirit are inextricably woven into one unit. The spirit aspect of nature does not work beyond the world, but in this world. The material aspect is one side of nature, the spiritual aspect the other, both complement each other. There is no matter without spirit. If one carefully approaches the spiritual side of reality to the concept of the divine, then with the "old" colonel the divine is somehow anchored again in objective reality.
In the religious question, Obrist differentiates between religion (theological system) and individual religiosity. On the level of individual lifestyle, Obrist paints a positive image of people. The “I” is guided by the “self”, the “inner master”. The self only wants what is good for people; it wants to realize itself as the “good core” of people. The conscious ego should be based on the self. Religiousness therefore means tying the ego back to the self. If the ego refuses to do this, neurosis can arise. The healing consists in submitting to the self as the "inner master". In the field of religion, the picture is ambiguous: on the one hand, mass exits from the church, on the other hand, an audience of millions at church days. Obrist's prognosis of the “withering away of religion”, that religion as a theological system will be overtaken by the evolution of consciousness, seems premature today, “we are also experiencing a violent dialectical reaction in Western countries, not only through Islam, but also through that Christianity, which in countries like Poland or Russia, which have had decades of atheist upbringing behind them, is resurrecting in an aggressively fundamentalist form and partly with state support (persecution of homosexuals in Russia, attacks on abortion clinics in the USA, all with biblical motivation) "
A measure to determine the height of evolution
The sequence of worldviews, which represents a higher development, results in a measure for determining the height of evolution. According to Obrist, as can be seen in his conception of the “spiritual”, the development went from the concrete to the abstract (this is of course not a singular insight from Willy Obrist, but a general consensus, cf. e.g. the famous expression by Max Weber of the “ Disenchantment of the world "): the more concretely something spiritual (e.g. a religious idea) is presented (personalism: acting persons / beings; concretism: thinginess; corporeality), the further down the evolutionary scale it is, the more abstract something spiritual is presented, the “further up” on the evolutionary scale it is to be located. For illustration: in Nordic mythology there is the myth of the creation of the world of the giant Ymir: the earth is created from Ymir's flesh, the sea from his blood, the mountains from his bones, the trees from his hair, the sky from his skull. This myth of the origins of the world was formulated from the mythical (archaic) worldview. In contrast, z. B. today's big bang theory: It is a theory of the origin of the world and was formulated from today's empirical world view. The abstraction process can already be seen in the fact that the Big Bang theory is not a verbally formulated myth, but a mathematical theory that was, so to speak, only verbalized after it was mathematically secured.
reception
At the end of his book “The Foreign Middle Ages” (2006), the medieval historian Peter Dinzelbacher examines the extent to which research results from the disciplines of ethnology, folklore and psychology could be used for historical anthropology, and comes to Obrist with regard to the field of psychology to speak: 'The works of Willy Obrist seem to me to be quite generally fundamental for the understanding of the mental development of European people, who, coming from Jungian depth psychology, describes the "mutation of consciousness, from the archaic to the present-day self and world understanding" " has presented understandably. "
literature
- The Mutation of Consciousness (1980);
- New Consciousness and Religiosity (1988);
- Nature - Source of Ethics and Sense (1999), ISBN 3-530-40058-0
- The Mutation of European Consciousness (2006), ISBN 978-3-939322-01-6
- Archetypes (1990), ISBN 3-530-62083-1
- Depth Psychology and Theology (1993), ISBN 978-3-939322-17-7
Web links
- Literature by and about Willy Obrist in the catalog of the German National Library
- Willy Obrist at the publishing house opus magnum
- Short biography and reviews of works by Willy Obrist at perlentaucher.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ The illustration is taken from Obrist's own biographical note in Obrist (2006), pp. 139–150
- ↑ Obrist (1999), p. 57
- ↑ Obrist (1999), p. 42ff.
- ↑ Obrist (1999), p. 58
- ↑ Obrist (1988), p. 120
- ↑ Obrist (2006), p. 41f.
- ↑ Obrist (2006), p. 43
- ↑ Obrist (1988), p. 127f.
- ↑ Obrist (2006), p. 56 ff.
- ↑ Obrist (1999), p. 93
- ↑ Obrist (1999), p. 97
- ↑ Obrist (2006), p. 106
- ↑ Obrist (1999), p. 35
- ↑ The following from: P. Dinzelbacher, Psychological Explanation Models of Historical Culture Change (2015), p. 10 ff. As well as an excellent, but anonymous review of W. Obrist: Die Natur, Quelle von… , www.amazon.de/Natur-Quelle ...
- ↑ Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeier Period , Vol. I (1970), p. 144
- ↑ H. Küng: Das Christianentum (1994), p. 36.
- ↑ Obrist indirectly confirms this view with his distinction between “God close to man” and “God the Creator”: only God close to man was “folded in”, in the sense of a power that can be directly experienced in God's experiences; the question of whether there is also a “world creator” remains unaffected. Obrist (1988), pp. 134-136.
- ↑ The Colonel student and friend Rolf Kaufmann, theologian in Zurich, says that Colonel agreed to the question of whether one could call the spirit side of reality “God”, cf. www.theologiekurse.ch, interview with Rolf Kaufmann, course newspaper, December (2006)
- ↑ P. Dinzelbacher, Psychological Explanation Models of Historical Culture Change (2015), p. 11; similar to Hans Küng, Das Christentum (1994), p. 37
- ↑ Obrist (2006), p. 145
- ↑ This example is taken from: Karen Gloy, The History of Scientific Thinking (1995), p. 63. Obrist gives appropriate examples.
- ↑ P. Dinzelbacher, Das Fremde Mittelalter (2006), p. 228 or similar: P. Dinzelbacher, Deutsche und Dutchische Mystik des Mittelalters (2012), p. 370, footnote 3
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Colonel, Willy |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swiss doctor and psychologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1918 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Langenthal |
| DATE OF DEATH | 2013 |