Ernst Bernhard

[Daniele Mancrasso]

I would like to point out to this list the name of Ernst Bernhard
(1896-1965), whose "Mitobiografia" (“Mith-biography”: actually, I haven't
found any English edition in the web) could have some analogies, in my
opinion, with the total drawing of Gravity’s Rainbow (and just some topics
of Pynchon’s novel).
Few words about him: Berliner psychologist, exile in Italy since 1936, in
this notes collection (published posthumous) links the Jung problem of the
“Integration of personality“ with parts of orientalism came from the Tao and
the I-King, in a syncretism of biology and physics whose first and
independent principle he calls, as also Aristotle says, Entelechy: it leads
the Being in that phases that, passing at first from the inorganic state,
then from the vegetable, then from the animal one, would allow it to reach
the “Adam Kadmon”, the whole-man who participates of eternity.

I wrote these lines just to introduce you the passage I’m interesting in;
I've translated it by myself from an Italian version (“Mitobiografia”, Ed.
Adelphi, pag. 29), and I’m sorry for all the mistakes I did (and I’m doing,
probably):

“We could represent some entelechy’s peculiarities comparing them to a
rocket’s course (although this example is not fit at all to understand the
entelechyal’s whole). The rocket’s top, charged of energy, is always
(considered in the time) the last point in the entelechy’s development. The
streak of light following the rocket would be the leaved development phases,
that in the lower layer fades out in the nothing.
The lower layer of this genre would be the inorganic nature. In the
following layer, the vegetable one, still lives a part of the entelechyal
power. This one is able to stop in an entelechyal way the inorganic course
and works against the Degradation of the heat. About it inorganic is as
danger as nourishment. That is a low, perhaps: the entelechy’s previous
states, just leaved, are every time the task, the conflict the progressive
tendency is bound to face and solve, namely they represent as a danger as a
nourishment and the process depends from their assimilation.
They want to swallow, to draw back the higher following state, or to be
assimilated themselves too. This one would be the conflict between the past
and what is towards the future, in which is the primary reason of suffering,
of tragic, that as mainspring has compelled all the greater thinkers to the
fight whit the mystery of the world”. (1943)

What do you think about it?

Best
Daniele