Marx's Ecology and the Left

Review of Considerations on Western Marxism by Perry Anderson.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Frankfurt School, as represented especially by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, was noted for developing a philosophical critique of the domination of nature. Critical theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt were heavily influenced by the writings of the early Karl Marx. Yet, their critique of the Enlightenment domination of nature was eventually extended to a critique of Marx himself as an Enlightenment figure, especially in relation to his mature work in Capital. This position was expressed most notably in the work of Horkheimer and Adorno’s student, Alfred Schmidt, author of The Concept of Nature in Marx (1970). Due largely to Schmidt’s book, the notion of Marx’s anti-ecological perspective came to be deeply rooted in Western Marxism. Moreover, such criticisms of Marx were closely related to questions raised regarding Fredrick Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, which was frequently said to have extended dialectical analysis improperly beyond the human-social realm. First generation ecosocialists, such as Ted Benton and Andre Gorz, furthered these criticisms, arguing that Marx and Engels had gone overboard in their alleged rejection of Malthusian natural limits.

Review of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, A Critical Study by Kevin Anderson.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The spread of humans worldwide, especially in the last two hundred years, has been associated with the growing human domination of the earth…. Such domination of the environment is expressed by… (1) the change in the flux of elements and substances on Earth…; (2) the growing threat of species extinction; and (3) the huge land cover change (LCC)—the substitution of natural habitats such as forests, swamps, and grasslands by cropland, pasture, roads, and urban areas. Modern natural sciences have made enormous inroads in understanding both ecological problems and the social drivers of LCC. However, they have been unable to generate a systematic understanding of how the regime of capital has governed LCC. Karl Marx developed more than 150 years ago, in the context of a social-science critique, an unparalleled theoretical approach to environmental crisis based on two concepts: differential land rent and the metabolic rift. Here, these concepts will be applied to the understanding of LCC.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy FosterThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

In his recent foreword to the second edition of Paul Burkett's Marx and Nature, John Bellamy Foster reflected on a significant change in left attitudes toward Marx's ecology: "Today Marx's understanding of the ecological problem is being studied in universities worldwide and is inspiring ecological actions around the globe." This worldwide recognition of Marx's ecological critique of capitalism without doubt owes much to Burkett's Marx and Nature (1999) and Foster's Marx's Ecology (2000). Yet the new interest in ecological Marxism did not originate solely with these books. Rather, as their new co-authored book Marx and the Earth documents, over the last fifteen years Burkett and Foster have meticulously refuted the many criticisms of Marx from so-called "first-stage ecosocialists"…. It should be noted that, whatever their disagreements with Marx, the first-stage ecosocialists were also deeply critical of capitalism. So why are Foster and Burkett arguing with their potential comrades? Furthermore, some of the issues taken up in Marx and the Earth might appear abstruse at first glance—why bother debating them at such length?… [A] patient reader will soon recognize the book's importance and the significance of the issues at stake.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

This is the first of an indefinite series of pieces on topics drawn from the natural sciences. Since they will have one author, and will be diverse in topic if unified in viewpoint, they will add up to a kind of "science column" for Monthly Review. It is my intention to make them long enough to convey the nature of the arguments and accurate enough to be reliable, but they will be neither monographs nor archival documents.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

» Notes from the EditorsEven regular readers of Monthly Review may be unaware that the magazine appears in Spanish, Greek, and Indian editions. Moreover, a Turkish edition is currently in the works. Analytical Monthly Review ("AMR"), published from Kharagpur in West Bengal, reproduces monthly all (or nearly all) the contents of MR in English, together with editorial comment on matters of current interest in India. It is in its tenth year of publication. Supported by longtime friends of Monthly Review from all over India, it is available at a small fraction of the cost of the edition printed in the United States. From the early '70s to the late '80s editions of Monthly Review appeared in Spanish, Italian, and Greek (the Greek edition was founded by Andreas Papandreou before he became prime minister of Greece). A small but cheering sign of ebbing global counter-revolution is the reappearance in the last two years of Spanish and Greek editions. The Spanish edition of MR—Monthly Review: Selecciones en castellano—published in Barcelona, appears twice a year with translations of selected articles. The Greek language Monthly Review translates several MR articles each month and also presents a range of political commentary of particular interest in Greece. In addition, they have released two books in their book-publishing arm, Monthly Review Imprint, one consisting mainly of Papandreou's writings in MR and another on Is Iraq Another Vietnam?—also drawing on the magazine. The very first Turkish language edition of Monthly Review is scheduled to appear by the end of this yearThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

One of the most remarkable—and the least remarked upon—features of the "radical" movement engaged in deconstructing natural science is how it ends up denying the unity (i.e., universality) of truth, reason, reality, and science precisely in the name of those who need these unities most urgently—the "people resisting despotism and its lies." This includes those of us from non-Western societies fighting against the despotism of some of our own cultural traditions, and the untested and untestable cosmologies that are used to justify these traditions. A loose and varied assortment of theories that bear the label of social constructivism have declared the very content of modern natural science to be justified, in the final instance, by "Western" cultural values and social interests.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Moshe Adler, Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science that Makes Life Dismal (New York: The New Press, 2009), 224 pages, $24.95, hardcover; David Orrell, Economyths: Ten Ways That Economics Get It Wrong (Mississauga, Ontario: John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd., 2010), 288 pages, $27.95, hardcover; Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi, and Nicholas J. Theocaratis, Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World (New York: Routledge, 2011, forthcoming), 536 pages, $165.00, hardcover, $65.00, paperback.Science is often thought to proceed from a theory to experiments that test its predictions. If new data are discovered that cannot be explained by the theory, eventually a new theory arises to replace it. If the new theory can explain everything the old one did plus the new phenomena, sooner or later every scientist will adhere to the new paradigm.… Neoclassical economics is taught in every college classroom in the United States and in almost every country in the world. Graduate students learn no other approach to economics. They are taught that neoclassical economics is a science, on a par with physics and the other natural sciences. There is even a joke that when good neoclassical economists die, they are reincarnated as physicists, but bad ones come back as sociologists.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

2005 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein and the centennial of the publication of five of his major scientific papers that transformed the study of physics. Einstein's insights were so revolutionary that they challenged not only established doctrine in the natural sciences, but even altered the way ordinary people saw their world. By the 1920s he had achieved international popular renown on a scale that would not become usual until the rise of the contemporary celebrity saturated tabloids and cable news channels. His recondite scientific papers as well as interviews with the popular press were front page news and fodder for the newsreels. Usually absent, however, was any sober discussion of his participation in the political life of his times as an outspoken radical-especially in profiles and biographies after his death.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

My starting point is a familiar, simple one: the natural sciences are simultaneously products of social forces and of individual scientists' curiosity awakened and channeled by these forces. Both of these facets must be kept in mind in analyzing the history of science and in planning for its future. In this paper I will explore this dual nature of science, at a general philosophical level and in the specific instance of modern biology, which in the past forty years, has seen a series of striking successes, with U.S. science playing a dominant role. Basic discoveries about the structure and function of genes, the immune system, brain function, biochemistry, etc., have provided both a new understanding of living systems and new abilities to manipulate them. The concrete results include new medical therapies, enhanced agricultural production, prenatal diagnosis of genetic diseases, and industrial uses of "engineered" bacteria and other microorganisms.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Introduction Capitalism is a production system established on the widening of commodity production. This means that it tries to transform everything possible into commodity forms and capital has an everlasting effort to succeed and render sustainable this transformation. Nowadays, what is happening in cultural production sphere indicates that capital has been expanded in this domain as well. Consequently, there is a widespread industry that mediates culture and posits it as a commodity. In order to understand this industry, it is necessary to comprehend the commodity production processes in it. This brings on an inevitable discussion on whether these cultural products and practices are commodities or not. In this study, it is discussed whether the cultural products and practices we consume on daily basis, such as music we listen; news, articles and books we read; television dramas and movies we watch, are commodities or not. The relationship between culture and commodity, shaped by the logic of capitalist production, is explored in the studies focusing on Marx's theoretical and conceptual set. The initial works related to cultural production were produced in the early 20th century by members of the Frankfurt School such as Walter Benjamin ([1936] 2010), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer ([1947] 2002). In addition to these works, between the 1970s and 1990s, the issue was also discussed by British communication theorists such as Nicholas Garnham (1977; 1990), Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (1973), as well as by French scholar Bernard Miège (1979; 1989), from the perspective of political economy of communication. Nowadays, the subject is discussed in the recent studies of these theorists (Miège, 2011, Murdock, 2006; 2011, Garnham, 2000; 2011; Wayne, 2003) and in some other works (Louw, 2001; Mosco, 2009; Hesmondhalgh, 2011; Bolin, 2011). In this discussion, Dallas Smythe's thesis is important from several perspectives. Smythe (1977), a Canadian communication theorist who had a background of economist, broke the ground in the field with his influential thesis of "audience commodity". The thesis has become the main discussion axis related to the subject since its appearance in the late 1970s. It sparked a vivid and important debate between Smythe (1978), Murdock (1978), Bill Livant (1979; 1982), Sut Jhally (1982) and Eileen R. Meehan (1984). Smythe's audience commodity thesis continues to be the case today. Contemporary studies on the commodification processes in communication regularly make reference to Smythe's work, as is the case in the works of Christian Fuchs (2012; 2013; 2015), Fernando Bermejo (2009), William H. J. Hebblewhite (2012), Brice Nixon (2014), Brett Caraway (2011), Micky Lee (2011), Philip M Napoli (2003), Robert Prey (2012), Earn Fisher (2012), Jernej A. Prodnik (2012). It must be stressed that new technologies of communication have played an important role in the revival of the commodification discussion in the field given that activities of users in the Internet or in social networks are subjected to commodification. Together with this, new concepts are emerging such as prosumption or prosumer. In this study, the commodification processes in communication will be investigated from a different perspective in order to contribute to the literature. Commodity in Marx's Theory There is a valid reason to have this discussion in commodity framework. Above all, commodity is the mean of production of the "surplus value", which is the anchor of the capitalist production system. Briefly, it can be said that accumulation in capitalist societies occurs with the transfer of a piece of this surplus value, which is acquired by means of commodity production and exchange, into production once again. Thus, it is extremely important for capitalism the commodity form of anything. In this framework, it is also essential whether cultural products and practices are commodities. Given the importance of commodity, Marx (1992: 125) starts his analysis in the Capital with commodity. Just after mentioning the importance of commodity, Marx stresses the qualities of a commodity. Accordingly, a commodity has simultaneously a use value and a value in exchange. This quality is mentioned as the necessary feature of any single commodity without giving further details. So, it is difficult to understand why commodity has to have these values. However, in subsequent chapters, rendering various concepts comprehensible, Marx offers a comprehensive analysis of capitalist production process. Thus, it becomes clear why and how a commodity has this quality. It must be noticed that Marx takes firstly a result of the capitalist production in the beginning of his analysis. In other words, commodity is the starting point in Marx's analysis but is not more than a result in the general framework. Behind this stress on commodity, whole capitalist production system is standing. It can be said that Marx starts first and foremost from a result, which is commodity, and analysis comprehensively the mode of production which creates it. This is the reason why commodity can only be understood in the framework of capitalist mode of production and by considering the wholeness of this production. In communication field, while discussing the commodity form of cultural products and practices, there is a general tendency that ignores this matter. In the literature, the wholeness of capitalist production, or the process that shapes "capitalist commodity", is usually ignored. Rather, qualities acquired by things after their commodification is brought into the forefront, and the commodity character of cultural products and practices is analyzed from this perspective. In this kind of analysis, the problem is not addressing these qualities. As a matter of fact, these are necessary qualities of any single commodity has to have. The main problem is paying no attention to the fact why and how a commodity has gained these qualities in the capitalist production process. As a result of this, cultural products and practices, at the first glance, seems to be commodities to researchers but why and how they are transformed into commodities stay in obscurity. Therefore, it can lead us to wrong conclusions. Given that commodity has more dimensions than it seems to have at the first glance, these kinds of conceptualizations must be addressed carefully. Hence, Marx (1992: 163) states that though commodity appears something that is easily comprehensible, a detailed analysis shows that it is more complex than it appears. In the light of Marx's analysis, we know that not all but some things can gain commodity form in capitalist societies. Why it is so? Marx (1992: 273) indicates certain necessary conditions to produce a product as a commodity. It is obvious that things can gain commodity form and have aforementioned qualities when some factors get together in the historical-social process of capitalist production. To determine these factors, we must first look at the whole capitalist production. Let's take Capital of Marx as an example of cultural product. While Marx was writing or producing Capital, any capitalist appropriated the value produced by him. As a matter of fact, Marx did not even produce a surplus value. He did not encounter a direct exploitation. His labor was qualitatively different; he was exerting an intellectual labor. Moreover, this intellectual labor was not commodified because it was not bought by a capitalist as a labor-power. At the same time, Capital was not the bearer of a surplus value, contrary to any commodity. From this perspective, instead of conceptualizing arbitrarily cultural products and practices in order to put them in commodity form, just like stretching them in "Procrustes bed", it is wiser to analyze them in the context of the peculiarity of their producers and their own "uniqueness". In this study, following this way, we will explore firstly why and how things acquire commodity forms by paying attention to whole capitalist production. Then, based on this first analysis, we will try to determine whether cultural products and practices gain commodity forms according to their production processes in different production relations. If it is so, we will also try to explain why and how they gain this form. Basically, it is argued that the idea of cultural products and practices as a commodity must be addressed cautiously. This is not a denial of the fact that they are commodities indeed. This is to say that not all but only some parts of this products and practices transform into commodities in some certain conditions. The reason of this is the production of these products and practices in very different relations of production and the fact that they are not general but special products and practices (Wayne, 2003: 21). Given that it is the main assumption of the study, this matter must be explained in detail. Commodification of Cultural Products and Practices Nowadays, cultural products and practices are mostly produced within cultural industry. First of all, we must consider these cultural products and practices produced in this industry through "content" and "medium" as a way of materialization and mediation for the content. In other words, the products and practices require certain type of medium for their production, distribution and consumption. For example, a piece of music can be listened with a radio or mp3 player; a television drama or movie can be watch with television or in a movie theater; news can be read on papers or internet; theatrical works are performed on stage that can be considered as a medium in that point. Content and medium cannot be separated easily from each other in "essence" and in "form". Content, which can exist in the absence of medium, can only transform into a general consumption object solely when it becomes "objectified" through medium. Similarly, medium can also exist in the absence of content but its transformation into a general consumption object requires content. Briefly, each one transforms the other into a consumption object by means of its existence; content provides internal object whereas medium constitutes external object of the consumption related to cultural products and practices. The medium that offers a milieu for cultural products and practices is commodity. Diversification and variation that come with the commodification mostly result from the content. It can be said that cultural products and practices have two different dimensions; on the one hand there is content and on the other hand there is the combination of the content with the medium. When we focus on content, commodity character of the majority of cultural products and practices is questionable. However, despite their differences they all become commodities peculiarly when they are combined with a medium, or a technology, that offers them a milieu. For instance, a piece of music turns into a commodity when it is finished by its composer and recorded afterwards on a CD or DVD. Likewise, a book becomes a commodity when it is send from the writer to the publisher to be published. Here, we can indicate a "two step production". In the study, this situation will be conceptualized as "dual production". The first step is the materialization of the content. In this step, mainly intellectual or "creative" labor is performed. In the second step, there is the combination of the first step product with a technological medium, causing mainly a commodity production. My argument is that cultural products and practices gain their commodity form in the second step, and turn into cultural commodities. I also argue that, in cultural production, the integration of the ideological (content) and the economical (medium) is materialized in this second step. If we take again the aforementioned example, the writing Capital corresponds to the first step. In this phase, the production process contains such a great diversity, to the point that we must have a Procrustean bed to qualify the end product as a commodity. However, the editorial process and the publication of Capital correspond to the second step. After this phase, there is no reason not to qualify the book as commodity. Notably, there is the production of use values in the first step and the production of exchange values in the second step. Conclusion This character of cultural products and practices underscores the reason why we must cautiously approach to the idea of cultural commodity. But it is important not to have a generalization on the issue. What is at stake here is just a general tendency. On the other hand, we must not consider the two steps of production as wholly separated and independent domains. In other words, it cannot be said that use values are always generated in the first step and their transformation into exchange values always happens in the second step. There can be other kind of transformations. It is important to emphasize here that capital tries to commodify these products and practices despite of all differences they have. References Benjamin, W. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, London: Penguin Books, [1936] 2010. Bermejo, F. "Audience manufacture in historical perspective: from broadcasting to Google", New Media & Society, 2009, V. 11, No. 1-2, pp. 133-154. Bolin, G. Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets, London: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. Caraway, B. "Audience Labor in the New Media Environment: A Marxian Revisiting of the Audience Commodity", Media, Culture & Society, 2011, V. 33, No. 5, pp. 693-708. Fisher, E. "How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation? Audience Labour on Social Network Sites", tripleC-Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 2012, V. 10, No. 2, pp. 171-183. Fuchs, C. "Dallas Smythe Today - The Audience Commodity, the Digital Labour Debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory. Prolegomena to a Digital Labour Theory of Value", tripleC-Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 2012, V. 10, No. 2, pp. 692-740. Fuchs, C. Digital Labour and Karl Marx, New York: Routledge, 2013. Fuchs, C. Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media, New York: Routledge, 2015. Garnham, N. "Towards a Political Economy of Culture", New University Quarterly, 1977, V. 31, No. 3, pp. 341-357. Garnham, N. Capitalism and Communication, London: SAGE Publications, 1990. Garnham, N. Emancipation, the Media and Modernity: Arguments about the Media and Social Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Garnham, N. "The Political Economy of Communication Revisited", in J. Wasko, G. Murdock and H. Sousa (eds.) The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011, pp. 41-61. Hebblewhite, H. J. W. "Means of Communication as Means of Production" Revisited", tripleC-Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 2012, V. 10, No. 2, pp. 203-213. Hesmondhalgh, D. The Cultural Industries, London: Sage, 2011. Horkheimer, M., Adorno, W. T., Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, California: Standford University Press, [1947] 2002. Jhally, S. "Probing The Blindspot: The Audience Commodity", Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1982, V. 6, No. 1-2, pp. 204-210. Lee, M. "Google Ads and the Blindspot Debate", Media, Culture and Society, 2011, V. 33, No. 3, pp. 433-447. Livant, B. "The Audience Commodity: On The 'Blindspot' Debate", Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1979, V. 3, No. 1, pp. 91-106. Livant, B. "Working At Watching: A Reply To Sut Jhally", Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1982, V. 6, No. 1-2, pp. 211-215. Louw, E. The Media and Cultural Production, London: SAGE Publication, 2001. Marx, K. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Meehan, E. R. "Ratings and the institutional approach: A third answer to the Commodity Question", Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1984, V. 1, No. 2, pp. 216-225. Miège, B. "The Cultural Commodity", Media Culture Society, 1979, V. 1, No. 3, pp. 297-311. Miège, B. The Capitalization of Cultural Production, New York: International General, 1989. Miège, B. "Principal Ongoing Mutations of Cultural and Informational Industries", in D. Winseck and D. Y. Jin (eds.) The Political Economies of Media: The Transformation of the Global Media Industries, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011, pp. 51-65. Mosco, V. The Political Economy of Communication, Los Angeles: Sage, 2009. Murdock, G. "Blindspot About Western Marxism: A Reply To Dallas Smythe", Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1978, V. 2, No. 2, pp. 109-119. Murdock, G. "Marx on Commodities, Contradictions and Globalisations Resources for a Critique of Marketised Culture", E-Compós, 2006, V. 7, pp. 1-23. Murdock, G. "Political Economies as Moral Economies: Commodities, Gifts and Public Goods", in J. Wasko, G. Murdock and H. Sousa (eds.), The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011, pp. 13-40. Murdock, G., Golding, P. 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The rediscovery over the last decade and a half of Marx's theory of metabolic rift has come to be seen by many on the left as offering a powerful critique of the relation between nature and contemporary capitalist society. The result has been the development of a more unified ecological world view transcending the divisions between natural and social science, and allowing us to perceive the concrete ways in which the contradictions of capital accumulation are generating ecological crises and catastrophes.… Yet, this recovery of Marx's ecological argument has given rise to further questions and criticisms.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

In a remarkable and unexpected way, the global coronavirus pandemic – still ongoing at the time of writing – has demonstrated the validity of many core theses of critical theory as propounded by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as of C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology. While some of Jung’s key tenets were discovered (if the transcriptions of his vision in The Red Book are to be believed) against the backdrop of the outbreak of World War I and Dialectic of Enlightenment was first published in Amsterdam in the final years of World War II, this chapter aims to show the continuing relevance of both intellectual traditions for the post-Covid-19 world and thereby to explore some of the points of affinity between them. Dialectic of Enlightenment as a whole and critical theory more generally involve the notion of “the totally administered society” or die verwaltete Welt, a reference to the society of late capitalism, in which a new form of fascism has taken root in the form of the self-legitimizing bureaucracy of administration. At a crucial point in their argument, Adorno and Horkheimer speak of the “remembrance of nature in the subject” as being the central point at which the Enlightenment is opposed to tyranny. This idea of an inner, primordial nature crops up time and again in the thinking of the first and second generations of the Frankfurt School (who, in their anti-Jungian outlook, attribute it solely to Freud), yet when in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) Freud writes that “a piece of unconquerable nature” forms “a part of our own psychical constitution,” he is echoing none other than Jung. Indeed, the notion of “inner nature” or “nature in the subject” forms the linchpin between analytical psychology and the Frankfurt School, and Adorno and Horkheimer’s insistence on the need for remembrance of nature within the subject is matched by Jung’s insistence on the reality of the psyche. For his part, Jung develops his own history of the Enlightenment, and analytical psychology presents itself as a program of recovery – above all, recovering a way of thinking that eschews non-ambiguity and non-contradiction as “one-sided” and thus as “unsuited to express the incomprehensible.” Like the Frankfurt School, Jung attaches the highest importance to philosophy and to art, and this is the reason for Jung’s interest in alchemy – as an “art,” since it “[felt] – and rightly so – that it was concerned with creative processes that can be truly grasped only by experience, though intellect may give them a name.”