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"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Thus warned Shakespeare, but we tend to forget it. In an era where algorithms are mistaken for wisdom, and a motivational podcast is enough to feel reformed, we continue to believe that humanity can be re-educated and that reason is, all things considered, winning.
I found James Hillman's book, The Soul's Code, in my library after four relocations and troubled events. I hadn't bought it (I never buy Italian translations of English books, out of a snobbish and grammatical principle), nor borrowed it. Appeared out of nowhere, like a forgotten B-side spinning back on the turntable. A sign, perhaps. I read it.
Even if I didn't think it was my genre, Hillman surprised me. He kills two birds with one stone, and he does it without too much new age rhetoric: starting from Plato, he proposes that the soul—a acorn, Hillman calls it—preexists the body and arrives in the world with an innate vocation, guided by a daimon. Our task is to grow the soul by following the right path.
If we accept the idea, the implications are quite intriguing:
- Parents are not to blame for everything. They didn't create anything: they simply received an acorn already furnished with an instruction manual. Their task is to water it, not to bend it into a bonsai.
- Every life has a meaning. We don't make it up, it has it. It’s up to us to discover what it is.
It doesn’t have to be a grand purpose. Not everyone can write The Dark Side of the Moon or win a Nobel. It could also be becoming the best electrician in the neighborhood or the most honest grocer in the province. What matters is that it's your path. Thus parents can finally stop feeling guilty, and we can abandon the beloved existential void in exchange for a more concrete task.
Here, however, the thorny question arises: what daimon did Hitler have? Or serial killers? Or that idiot who double-parks? Hillman responds that they also have one. But it's a perverse daimon, and the soul—poor thing—couldn't offer enough resistance. Does it seem like an elegant way out? Perhaps. But it remains less nonsensical than some theories that seek the origin of evil in the quality of breast milk or the color of the bedroom curtains.
Perhaps, however, the real reason why this theory hasn't caught on is another, much more melancholic one we don't want to hear. It's more comforting to think that life has no meaning than to suspect, even for a moment, that it had one, and we missed it. That the daimon was talking to us… but we had headphones on or were playing with the PlayStation.
And so it's better now: downhill, hand in hand with nihilism, as we whistle and follow the pied piper into the abyss.
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