Jung's Understanding of God
Jung sought to establish a connection between the inner psychic processes of human beings and the idea of God. In an interview he stated that he did not take God's 'existence on belief_ I know that he exists.' To avoid misunderstanding following his 1959 interview, he wrote a letter to 'The Listener', in which he explained,
'I did not say in the broadcast, "There is a God." I said, "I do not need to believe; I know which does not mean: I do know a certain God.. but rather that I am confronted with a certain factor unknown in itself which I call God.'
In other words, he was not actually claiming that God exists. He was aware of a force which he felt able to call God but he was unable to say whether this force represented the reality of God beyond his own consciousness.
Jung said that he learned 'the deadly sin of hypostatising a metaphysical assertion from Kant's theory of knowledge. Jung was attracted to two points in Kant's theory: first, his distinction between the world as it appears to us (the phenomenal world) and the world as it is in itself(the noumenal), and, secondly, Kant's insistence that the noumenal world are inaccessible to human thought. Jung wrote,
"epistemologically I take my stand on Kant, which means that an assertion doesn't posit its object.'
Jung's understanding is that we cannot know of God except through images in the human psyche.
He was particularly interested in the religious experience, but his ideas have come under some criticism, especially by the theologian Victor White, who maintained that we cannot reduce God to images in the human psyche. I am interested in how Jung's understanding contributes to the philosophy of religion and I am asking to what extent his approach is useful for analysis?
'I did not say in the broadcast, "There is a God." I said, "I do not need to believe; I know which does not mean: I do know a certain God.. but rather that I am confronted with a certain factor unknown in itself which I call God.'
In other words, he was not actually claiming that God exists. He was aware of a force which he felt able to call God but he was unable to say whether this force represented the reality of God beyond his own consciousness.
Jung said that he learned 'the deadly sin of hypostatising a metaphysical assertion from Kant's theory of knowledge. Jung was attracted to two points in Kant's theory: first, his distinction between the world as it appears to us (the phenomenal world) and the world as it is in itself(the noumenal), and, secondly, Kant's insistence that the noumenal world are inaccessible to human thought. Jung wrote,
"epistemologically I take my stand on Kant, which means that an assertion doesn't posit its object.'
Jung's understanding is that we cannot know of God except through images in the human psyche.
He was particularly interested in the religious experience, but his ideas have come under some criticism, especially by the theologian Victor White, who maintained that we cannot reduce God to images in the human psyche. I am interested in how Jung's understanding contributes to the philosophy of religion and I am asking to what extent his approach is useful for analysis?
Comments (139)
Jung doesn't really give us much to go on except speculative interpretations. Jung was essentially a mystic (a description he rejected) who coveted the ineffable and the symbolic and filled the void with his own take on Gnosticism. Despite this he thought of himself as an empiricist uncovering spiritual and religious facts - a kind of syncretism where all roads led back to Jung himself.
Fundamental to Jung's project was a preference for mystery and incomprehension over reason. I personally find his work almost entirely without use but I know many people find idea of the collective unconscious beguiling. Jordan B Peterson has certainly done a lot to revive interest in this and in Jung more generally. Curiously Peterson talks about God in similar, indirect ways to Jung. If he could get away with saying, 'I don't need to believe, I know' I'm pretty sure he would.
Jung was not the avuncular, sweet old fellow of so much popular imagination. He could also be pretty strident and probably would have hated the New Age cult of Obi Wan Jung that emerged from the 1970's.
It is common for very infantile people to have a mystical, religious feeling, they enjoy this atmosphere in which they can admire their beautiful feelings, but they are simply indulging their auto-eroticism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 11Jan1935.
I think this may be looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope. What Jung is rejecting is the function of a Credo where one says something like: "I believe God exists." The problem with it is that the ground of self awareness that such a proposition requires is under investigation.
In his book, On The Nature Of the Psyche, the boundary of what is "his own consciousness" is what is part of the unknown. Consciousness and Unconsciousness play a part in each others processes simultaneously as well as relate to each other as potentials that may or may not happen to connect experiences across stretches of time. The role of archetypes is presented in the context of instincts developed by all animals that emerges through their evolutionary development. To wit:
This paragraph is followed by a long discussion of how he developed his view through his experience as a clinical doctor and is at least one of the ways he has to be heard as saying "he knows something about the unknown."
From this point of view, I suggest that Victor White doesn't understand the role of the images in Jung's project but does realize that it somehow challenges his understanding of the "image" of God.
I have found Jung's ideas particularly helpful, since I first discovered him at school. However, I am aware that he remains on the fringe, and is probably not taken seriously within psychiatry and probably not within philosophy.
Strangely, I did work with a consultant psychiatrist who took the idea of the collective unconscious seriously. When I mentioned Jung to some of the junior psychiatrists some of them had not even heard of him. I would imagine that is because they come from a medical and sciences background. Even on my mental health nurse training course, his name was not mentioned at all, and Freud's ideas were only mentioned in a very basic way. It does seem that Jung's ideas are given more credibility in the arts.
My main interest in Jung has been for understanding religious and the symbolic dimensions of experience. I found his writing to be a way of being able to overcome the tensions between literal interpretation of religious experience and scientific understanding. I do believe that others are able to do so, and there is a big section on him in the esoteric bookshops I go to in London. Also, it does seem that new books are being written on him continuously.
Yet, I am aware that Jung's particular point of view is probably not seen as important within philosophy circles. I see his understanding of God as a way of overcoming the clear distinction as to whether God exists or not. I don't think Jung's view is identical to an agnostic position because he is not simply saying I don't know. He is saying that we know of the experience of God, but he just gives flexibility as to what that signifies in an absolute sense.
From my reading of Jung, there seems to be a fair amount of ambiguity ranging from that which could be seen as supportive of traditional religious experience and that which is more in line with science. It is hard to disentangle it all because of the sheer amount which he wrote, including the many volumes of the Collected Works, and many other writings.
One writer who seemed to interpret his writings more in line with evolutionary biology, and instincts is Anthony Samuels. I was impressed by that interpretation but I do not think that the ideas of Victor White can be dismissed because White had lengthy correspondence with Jung, which resulted in Victor White's book, 'God and the Unconscious.'
In the passages I was referring to, I read him to be saying that the ambiguity encountered is not a disavowal of instinct in relation to the interactions between the conscious and unconscious as fundamental elements of the Psyche. The line between science and expressions of traditional religious experience is precisely what is being challenged as sources of information about what Jung is always approaching as a matter of phenomena. Is the use of such information a reduction or negation of experience outside of the context of the project? That is a charge that is often leveled against Jung but I don't recall any text where he claimed it to be the case.
To that point, I take issue with your opening statement: "Jung sought to establish a connection between the inner psychic processes of human beings and the idea of God" I don't dismiss either your approach or the challenge Victor White may have confronted Jung with but would like to see them as taking exception with what Jung says in his own words.
As you say, there are so many of them to choose from.
You specify that you 'take issue' with my opening statement about establishing a connection between inner psychic processes and the idea of God, but you have not told me why.
The why is what I meant when I said:
What Jung is rejecting is the function of a Credo where one says something like: "I believe God exists." The problem with it is that the ground of self awareness that such a proposition requires is under investigation.
Framing it as an "idea of God" puts words in Jung's mouth.
I think that it becomes clearer that it becomes clearer that Jung developed his views into an idea or ideas about God is in his book ' Answer to Job' .In this, he explores the development of the God-image from the Old Testament image of Jahweh, and the New Testament figure of God, in Christ. I am sure that many Christians may see this as a reductive analysis. It seems ambiguous to me, because he believes in the reality of the psyche. When I read, 'Answer to Job,' it appears to raise the possibility that God is evolving through human consciousness. It does seem that he doesn't spell out the implications exactly, but leaves that to the readers' own interpretations.
I have been thinking through what I wrote to you an hour ago and wonder if I am stretching Jung's idea too far in suggesting that it could be that God is actually evolving through human consciousness. My actual basis for suggesting that Jung could be interpreted in that way was because I remember when I was reading from his Collected Works that he was interested in the ideas of Bergson on 'creative evolution.' However, I was trying to make the parallel, but there is no reason to say that Jung made this parallel himself.
I am thinking that if one wishes to read Jung's understanding of the development of the ideas of God in line with a Christian perspective, he is seeing the difference from the God-image from the Old Testament to that in the New Testament, it would not mean that God is changing. That is consistent with his emphasis on the inner realisation of God, as the God-image. So, as far as I can see, Jung's understanding of God could be seen as reductive, or in line with one's choice to fit with the possibility of a belief in God, if one chose to. He simply doesn't go as far as to say that the image of God points to the existence of God. That is where he limits his perspective to a psychological level.
I think you are right that he limits his perspective to a psychological level. Establishing what that boundary entails involves considering that Jung has different sorts of models that are used for different kinds of questions. Addressing whether "the image of God points to the existence of God." requires seeing how Jung doesn't turn all his models into a model that rules them all. To consider this, let's start with the Lectori Benevolo that precedes Answer to Job.
555 The fact that religious statements frequently conflict with the observed physical phenomena proves that in contrast to physical perception the spirit is autonomous, and that psychic experience is to a certain extent independent of physical data. The psyche is an autonomous factor, and religious statements are psychic confessions which in the last resort are based on unconscious, i.e., on transcendental, processes. These processes are not accessible to physical perception but demonstrate their existence through the confessions of the psyche. The resultant statements are filtered through the medium of human consciousness: that is to say, they are given visible forms which in their turn are subject to manifold influences from within and without. That is why whenever we speak of religious contents we move in a world of images that point to something ineffable. We do not know how clear or unclear these images, metaphors, and concepts are in respect of their transcendental object. If, for instance, we say “God,” we give expression to an image or verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course of time. We are, however, unable to say with any degree of certainty—unless it be by faith—whether these changes affect only the images and concepts, or the Unspeakable itself. After all, we can imagine God as an eternally flowing current of vital energy that endlessly changes shape just as easily as we can imagine him as an eternally unmoved, unchangeable essence. Our reason is sure only of one thing: that it manipulates images and ideas which are dependent on human imagination and its temporal and local conditions, and which have therefore changed innumerable times in the course of their long history. There is no doubt that there is something behind these images that transcends consciousness and operates in such a way that the statements do not vary limitlessly and chaotically, but clearly all relate to a few basic principles or archetypes. These, like the psyche itself, or like matter, are unknowable as such. All we can do is to construct models of them which we know to be inadequate, a fact which is confirmed again and again by religious statements.
Jung, C. G.. Answer to Job: 11 (Jung Extracts) . Princeton University Press.
According to the above explanation, the question of the "changeable potential" of God is a part of the possibility of many different conceptions. The only "existential" claim being made here is saying: "There is no doubt that there is something behind these images that transcends consciousness and operates in such a way that the statements do not vary limitlessly and chaotically, but clearly all relate to a few basic principles or archetypes."The lack of doubt" does not concern the outcome of how the images may be understood one way or another. The domain of the psychological is marked out by the conditions the images are understood to be happening within.
To look at it that way returns us to the models where the difference described in The Nature of the Psyche between "conscious" and "unconscious" are not based upon having a clear view of what is personal or not. You would need a story for that. In looking at the instincts, it can't be a matter of reduction because of the observation:
" For the organ with which we might apprehend them - consciousness - is not only itself a transformation of the original instinctual image, but also is its transformer."
The "lack of doubt" seems to start with this as the point of departure.
I'm not sure it matters much who venerates him. The question is: Are Jung's ideas more than one man's subjective experiment? The fact that some people get things from Jung does not shift his status. The fact that Jung is seen as a scientist who flirted with occult and religious matters makes him very attractive to a certain cohort. I guess I am wondering if I am being unfair to his ideas.
I'd be interested Jack, and if you are willing, what it is you think you have gained from Jung? Is there a specific insight you can point to? Just in a sentence or two.
For the record I don't think Jung believed in God - not as we would describe belief in standard terms. I knew a man who worked closely with Jung for many years. He said that Jung thought God was a necessary idea that provided the compass points to human behaviour and had to be believed in as a functional necessity.
I seem to remember that Jung greatly disliked Nietzsche (perhaps because Freud venerated N as a great psychologist) but he may have taken a similar view of God as that dramatised in The Gay Science. If secularism has killed God, look out! All of human history has been built on this idea (archetype) and with it suddenly gone we are missing our compass points and may be truly lost. Hence Hitler, Stalin, Mao and... pop art. (sorry that last was a poor joke).
I think again this is Jordan B Peterson's crusade. The archetypes are not necessarily 'true' and God is not a real entity. But the divine is built in or hard wired into human experience over time and therefore may as well be real. Like the hunting instinct, it is simply there.
Which leads many to Dostoyevsky's little gem - without God anything is permissible. If we remove God, we lose ourselves. I have always felt this was the wrong interpretation. In truth it is with God that anything is permissible - suicide bombers, holy wars, terror, throwing acid in the face of a young girl for daring to learn to read. But that's another story.
I don't understand how the "status" you report relates to comprehending what was proposed by Jung. You have dismissed him as a kook and are asking someone to talk you out of that conclusion. If it is so unimportant, why bother challenging others about it?
You make this sound like a bad thing...
I have dismissed him for me - I am genuinely interested in what others get from him as I am with many ideas. I am also, unlike some, open to changing my mind. I actually enjoy hearing that I should have considered X or Y. I also think the notion fo God not existing but being a 'necessary' construct in some way (for want of better wording) is interesting and wonder if others read Jung in this way.
I have edited my earlier post to tone it down. Thanks for the feedback.
As far as Jung goes, both the philosophical symbolism of Ernst Cassirer / Susanne Langer and theological noncognitivism of Don Cupitt (or Paul Tillich) are far less nonsensical and traffic in far less woo-woo than stuff like "archetypes" & "collective unconsciousness". What Jung "understands" ... has always been unintelligible to me. (vide Feuerbach)
[quote=Jung]
Just as primitive man was able, with the aid of religious and philosophical symbol, to free himself from his original state, so, too, the neurotic can shake off his illness in a similar way. It is hardly necessary for me to say, that I do not mean by this, that the belief in a religious or philosophical dogma should be thrust upon the patient; I mean simply that he has to reassume that psychological attitude which, in an earlier civilisation, was characterised by the living belief in a religious or philosophical dogma. But the religious-philosophical attitude does not necessarily correspond to the belief in a dogma. A dogma is a transitory intellectual formulation; it is the result of the religious-philosophical attitude, and is dependent upon time and circumstances. This attitude is itself an achievement of civilization; it is a function that is exceedingly valuable from a biological point of view, for it gives rise to the incentives that force human beings to do creative work for the benefit of a future age, and, if necessary, to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the species.
Thus the human being attains the same sense of unity and totality, the same confidence, the same capacity for self-sacrifice in his conscious existence that belongs unconsciously and instinctively to wild animals. Every reduction, every digression from the course that has been laid down for the development of civilisation does nothing more than turn the human being into a crippled animal; it never makes a so-called natural man of him. My numerous successes and failures in the course of my analytic practice have convinced me of the invariable correctness of this psychological orientation. We do not help the neurotic patient by freeing him from the demand made by civilisation; we can only help him[225] by inducing him to take an active part in the strenuous task of carrying on the development of civilisation. The suffering which he undergoes in performing this duty takes the place of his neurosis. But, whereas the neurosis and the complaints that accompany it are never followed by the delicious feeling of good work well done, of duty fearlessly performed, the suffering that comes from useful work, and from victory over real difficulties, brings with it those moments of peace and satisfaction which give the human being the priceless feeling that he has really lived his life.
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http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48225/48225-h/48225-h.htm
You can find this kind of talk in Freud too. I like such passages for offering a glimpse into the big-picture stance of a thinker on existence and society. I added emphasis to some words that stuck out for me. That 'religious-philosophical' attitude is IMO related somehow to getting over our default infantile egoism ('negative narcissism',etc.) I think Jung is correct in looking behind dogma (mere surface phenomena) to something vaguer but more alive.
Nice quote. Or as Jordan Peterson might frame it - 'first clean up your room.'
Yes, that would be something like the very first step. I also recall J P talking about a craving for responsibility in alienated young men, which seems even more to the point. The 'attitude' that Jung mentions seems flexibly vague and hints perhaps at connection with something bigger than one's boring little self (called 'God' or 'the right side of history' or 'scientific progress' or ...)
That sounds like a tough but meaningful job. I have some personal experience with addiction and mental illness (a troubled in-law, who didn't make it.) I like the phrase 'stop talking about their problems and start doing something meaningful.' And I suppose they have to feel its meaning, whatever it is. I also get the caution about sounding reductive. It's too easy to talk about people as if they were lab rats or puzzles.
Yes, although there is an element of 'fake it till you make it'. Meaning can have a funny way of arriving when you are not expecting it. Sometimes it sits with you for a while before you recognise you have been transformed.
[quote=Jung]
If this is so, one may certainly expect to meet the same[290] contrast between psychological temperaments outside the sphere of pathology. It is moreover easy to cull from literature numerous examples which bear witness to the actual existence of these two opposite types of mentality. Without pretending to exhaust the subject, I will give a few striking examples.
In my opinion, we owe the best observations on this subject to the philosophy of William James.[185] He lays down the principle that no matter what may be the temperament of a "professional philosopher," it is this temperament which he feels himself forced to express and to justify in his philosophy. And starting from this idea, which is altogether in accord with the spirit of psychoanalysis, divides philosophers into two classes: the "tender-minded," who are only interested in the inner life and spiritual things; and the "tough-minded," who lay most stress on material things and objective reality. We see that these two classes are actuated by exactly opposite tendencies of the libido: the "tender-minded" represent introversion, the "tough-minded" extroversion.
James says that the tender-minded are characterised by rationalism; they are men of principles and of systems, they aspire to dominate experience and to transcend it by abstract reasoning, by their logical deductions, and purely rational conceptions. They care little for facts, and the multiplicity of phenomena hardly embarrasses them at all: they forcibly fit data into their ideal constructions, and reduce everything to their a priori premises. This was the method of Hegel in settling beforehand the number of the planets. In the domain of mental pathology we again meet this kind of philosopher in paranoiacs, who, without being disquieted by the flat contradictions presented by experience, impose their delirious conceptions on the universe, and find means of interpreting everything, and according to Adler "arranging" everything, in conformity with their morbidly preconceived system.
The other traits which James depicts in this type follow[291] naturally from its fundamental character. The tender-minded man, he says, is intellectual, idealist, optimist, religious, partisan of free-will, a monist, and a dogmatist. All these qualities betray the almost exclusive concentration of the libido upon the intellectual life. This concentration upon the inner world of thought is nothing else than introversion. In so far as experience plays a rôle with these philosophers, it serves only as an allurement or fillip to abstraction, in response to the imperative need to fit forcibly all the chaos of the universe within well-defined limits, which are, in the last resort, the creation of a spirit obedient to its subjective values.
The tough-minded man is positivist and empiricist. He regards only matters of fact. Experience is his master, his exclusive guide and inspiration. It is only empirical phenomena demonstrable in the outside world which count. Thought is merely a reaction to external experience. In the eyes of these philosophers principles are never of such value as facts; they can only reflect and describe the sequence of phenomena and cannot construct a system. Thus their theories are exposed to contradiction under the overwhelming accumulation of empirical material. Psychic reality for the positivist limits itself to the observation and experience of pleasure and pain; he does not go beyond that, nor does he recognise the rights of philosophical thought. Remaining on the ever-changing surface of the phenomenal world, he partakes himself of its instability; carried away in the chaotic tumult of the universe, he sees all its aspects, all its theoretical and practical possibilities, but he never arrives at the unity or the fixity of a settled system, which alone could satisfy the idealist or tender-minded. The positivist depreciates all values in reducing them to elements lower than themselves; he explains the higher by the lower, and dethrones it, by showing that it is "nothing but such another thing," which has no value in itself.
From these general characteristics, the others which James points out logically follow. The positivist is a sensualist, giving greater value to the specific realm of the[292] senses than to reflection which transcends it. He is a materialist and a pessimist, for he knows only too well the hopeless uncertainty of the course of things. He is irreligious, not being in a state to hold firmly to the realities of the inner world as opposed to the pressure of external facts; he is a determinist and fatalist, only able to show resignation; a pluralist, incapable of all synthesis; and finally a sceptic, as a last and inevitable consequence of all the rest.
The expressions, therefore, used by James, show clearly that the diversity of types is the result of a different localisation of the libido; this libido is the magic power in the depth of our being, which, following the personality, carries it sometimes towards internal life, and sometimes towards the objective world. James compares, for example, the religious subjectivism of the idealist, and the quasi-religious attitude of the contemporary empiricist: "Our esteem for facts has not neutralised in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout."[186]
A second parallel is furnished by Wilhelm Ostwald,[187] who divides "savants" and men of genius into classics and romantics. The latter are distinguished by their rapid reactions, their extremely prompt and abundant production of ideas and projects, some of which are badly digested and of doubtful value. They are admirable and brilliant masters, loving to teach, of a contagious ardour and enthusiasm, which attracts many pupils, and makes them founders of schools, exercising great personal influence. Herein our type of extroversion is easily recognised. The classics of Ostwald are, on the contrary, slow to react; they produce with much difficulty, are little capable of teaching or of exercising direct personal influence, and lacking enthusiasm are paralysed by their own severe criticism, living apart and absorbed in themselves, making scarcely any disciples, but[293] producing works of finished perfection which often bring them posthumous fame. All these characteristics correspond to introversion.
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I find this to be a rich passage. The recognition that 'our scientific temper is devout' stands out for me. It's also hard not to think of this forum as one reads the passage.
That also makes sense. I think it was William James who said we are sad because we cry (and not the reverse.) Also the hands of the clock come to mind. Or you see and old photo and are surprised at how you used to look.
I was reading a criticism yesterday which said that Jung was a greater enemy of religion that Freud.
— In Quest of Catholicity: Malachi Martin Responds to Wolfgang Smith by Malachi Martin, Wolfgang Smith
https://amzn.asia/7S9QFIf
Which is an interesting comment - Catholicism finds Jung a greater threat because he’s ‘subtly mistaken’ rather than just ‘bluntly atheistic’ - which I think would be typical of Catholic critics of Jung.
Great passage with many acute observations.
I’ve always thought of Jung as part of the broader Gnostic tradition in Western culture - a modern gnostic, in fact (another example being Edward Conze, a slightly younger contemporary who was a noted Buddhist scholar and translator). From the first time I read Jung I saw a parallel between his archetypes and the ‘domain of forms’ - his ‘archetypes’ being a type of form (or ‘formal type’ which is almost an exact translation.)
incidentally comparisons are often made between Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ and a Buddhist principle called the ?l?yavijñ?na which is the ‘storehouse consciousness’ of Yog?c?ra Buddhism, one of the principle sects of Mah?y?na (see here).
Don’t forget Jung’s elliptical re-telling of the legend that he might - or might not! - have been the grandson of Faust (per the introduction to Memories Dreams and Reflections. Another striking image from the same source is the one involving the dream about the Cathedral....)
Your extract from Jung's 'Answer to Job' contains some particularly relevant points which he makes and they do really raise the question of whether the God which human nature are having a relationship is changing. The statement, 'we can imagine God as an eternally flowing current of vital energy that endlessly changes shape just as we can imagine him as an eternally unmoved, unchangeable essence' is extremely important and I am not sure really to what extent theologians or philosophers have discussed this generally.
I have also found a quote in 'Answer to Job' which suggests that Jahweh changed as a result of interaction with Job. He argued that Jahweh 'raises himself above his earlier primitive level of consciousness by indirectly acknowledging that Job is morally superior to him and that therefore he has to catch up and become human himself'. In holding this belief, Jung is maintaining that human beings are necessary for God's consciousness. The idea of Jahweh being dependent on humanity for his own development leads to the question: if God is dependent on human beings is God simply a product of the human mind?
However, he does go on to query if there is some underlying force involved in the drama between God and humanity as revealed in the drama between Job and Jahweh, by saying, ' the miracle of reflecting consciousness is so great that one cannot help suspecting an element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within all the biological turmoil.' Here, he does appear to be going beyond an anthropomorphic picture and suggesting that there is some ultimate reality, God, behind the scenes of the drama. But, it does seem that humanity is central to the development of God, which is an extremely radical view.
Really, as far as I can see, what Jung is saying is of central importance to theological and philosophical debate. The book may not have been given as much attention as it should have done, because it is so radical, or perhaps, the issues arising from it were seen as too contentious.
You asked me what specific insight I gained from Jung. I think that is that there is some underlying source from which our ideas and images come from. Some have called it the collective unconscious and religious people have referred to as God or the divine. It may be that spark which triggered the big bang, the process of evolution and consciousness.
Since Jung uses his concept of the collective unconscious to encompass many unexplained aspects, I can see why some regard him as a mystic. I do wonder if the idea of the collective unconscious is too fuzzy, however, and I do believe that the concept does need a lot more analysis within philosophy. I don't know whether that will ever happen. In saying that it needs more analysis, I am not saying that this would mean analysing whether the term means but trying to become more conscious of what remains unconscious, which may involve depth psychology. This probably involves some of the insights of the transpersonal school of psychology and philosophy.
I wonder if the way we are drawn to certain writing is to do with how we shape our ideas autobiographically and with language. I began reading Jung during adolescence, so his ideas, such as archetypes and the shadow, are at the core of my thinking. If I had discovered a different writer at the time I my whole architecture of thinking might have been different. I would like to read Cassirer at some point, and I definitely wish to make interconnections between the various perspectives.
Yes, it does seem that the scientific pursuit of knowledge can be seen as 'devout' and it is probably because that has become the main paradigm of 'truth'. It is a whole different model for seeing reality, but as a structure it has as much of a hold on people for directing meaning. Perhaps, really, the main difference is language in concepts used for understanding reality.
I read Jung before Plato, but I also see a parallel between the idea of archetypes and forms.
I think that in many ways, Jung's ideas on religion are far more challenging potentially to religion. I see that being related to how his critique is far more detailed. It is easy to interpret Jung's ideas to a reductive analysis of God. However, I think that if one reads his writing and steps back and reflects, it becomes possible to see that he is not really dismissing the idea of God , and related ideas.
Also, Jung does incorporate Eastern metaphysical ideas and, in doing so, when he speaks of God as being in the psyche, he is seeing psyche a bit differently to most thinkers within Western philosophy.
I like 19th century philosophy, and again and again I find talk of something like 'spiritual 'maturity manifested through participation in intellectual and technical progress. I found it, for instance, in Hegel and Lange (the otherwise quite different 'History of Materialism' guy.) I think those were more optimistic times. Now there's as much fear about technology as there is hope, perhaps. Of course the need to transcend petty egoism is also found in religion.
On this religious front, it's been argued that personal immortality is antithetical to this as the supreme expression of egoism (in Feuerbach and Nietzsche.) We can understand this IMO in terms of a another quote:
[quote=Jung]
From this standpoint, the conscious personality seems to be a more or less arbitrary excerpt of the collective psyche. It appears to consist of a number of universal basic human qualities of which it is à priori unconscious, and further of a series of impulses and forms which might just as well have been conscious, but were more or less arbitrarily repressed, in order to attain that excerpt of the collective psyche, which we call personality. The term persona is really an excellent one, for persona was originally the mask which an actor wore, that served to indicate the character in which he appeared. For if we really venture to undertake to decide what psychic material must be accounted personal and what impersonal, we shall soon reach a state of great perplexity; for, in truth, we must make the same assertion regarding the contents of the personality as we have already made with respect to the impersonal unconscious, that is to say that it is collective, whereas we can only concede individuality to the bounds of the persona, that is to the particular choice of personal elements, and that only to a very limited extent.
[/quote]
In other words, the self that's supposed to be immortal is mere persona or mask. It's the species that's (relatively) immortal, precisely through the generation and destruction of individuals (which can be viewed as cells in a larger organism.)
That seems reasonable. Perhaps what makes Jung stand out is a self-consciousness about the process (or perhaps his lingo is just easier for us.) I found some relevant passages that I remember reading and being moved by many years ago.
[quote=Jung]
The second way would be that of identification with the collective psyche. That would mean the symptom of "God-Almightiness" developed into a system; in other words, one would be the fortunate possessor of the absolute truth, that had yet to be discovered; of the conclusive knowledge, which would be the people's salvation. This attitude is not necessarily megalomania ("Grössenwahn") in a direct form, but the well-known milder form of having a prophetic mission. Weak minds which, as is so often the case, have correspondingly an undue share of vanity and misplaced naïveté at their disposal, run a considerable risk of succumbing to this temptation. The obtaining access to the collective psyche signifies a renewal of life for the individual, whether this renewal of life be felt as something pleasant or unpleasant. It would seem desirable to retain a hold upon this renewal: for one person, because it increases his feeling for life ("Lebensgefühl"); for another, because it promises a great accretion to his knowledge. Therefore both of them, not wishing to deprive themselves of the rich values that lie buried in the collective psyche, will endeavour by every means possible to retain their newly gained union with the primal cause of life. Identification appears to be the nearest way to it, for the merging of the persona in the collective psyche is a veritable lure to unite one's self with this "ocean of divinity," and, oblivious of the past, to become absorbed in it. This piece of mysticism belongs to every finer individual, just as the "yearning for the mother"—the looking back to the source whence one originated—is innate in every one.
As I have demonstrated explicitly before,[254] there is a special value and a special necessity hidden in the regressive longing—which, as is well-known, Freud conceives as "infantile fixation" or as "incest-wish." This necessity and longing is particularly emphasized in myths, where it is always the strongest and best of people, in other words, the hero, who[463] follows the regressive longing and deliberately runs into danger of letting himself be devoured by the monster of the maternal first cause. But he is a hero only because, instead of letting himself be finally devoured by the monster, he conquers it, and that not only once but several times. It is only through the conquest of the collective psyche that its true value can be attained, whether it be under the symbol of capture of treasure, of an invincible weapon, of a magical means of defence, or whatever else the myth devises as the most desirable possession. Hence whoever identifies himself with the collective psyche, also reaches the treasure which the dragon guards, but against his will and to his own great injury, by thus allowing himself (mythologically speaking) to be devoured by the monster and merged with it.
[/quote]
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48225/48225-h/48225-h.htm#Page_449
Merging with the monster sounds like 'individuation' or the assimilation of irrational and otherwise destructive forces.
This is, no doubt, derivative of Schopenhauer's [ 'gnostic' unconsciousness-noumenon-will ] of which 'individuals' are merely masks/maya.
That sounds right, and then he got it from somewhere, which is support for the idea itself, I guess.
[quote=Sch]
In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death.
[/quote]
It's interesting you say this. I think Catholicism may be more diverse. I attended an elective on Myths and Symbols (A Jungian Perspective) taught by a practicing Catholic and Jung nut - the course also had as students a couple of Brigidine nuns. They said Jung was very popular with the sisters. Years later I attended a conference in mental health with a day devoted to Jung - a Catholic nun leading the session. I have always associated Jung with the best of the enquiring Catholic tradition. But I also recognize that there are dark, reactionary focus in the Church which are at odds with anything that isn't conservative doctrine.
Quoting Jack Cummins
Before 1916 and Jung's use of the term Collective Unconscious (which is a beauty) he fumbled with less auspicious names - 'the spirit world' and 'land of the dead' - which would never have resonated with as many people and had far less scientific appeal. But perhaps these gives us more of a sense of what he was actually thinking. Collective Unconscious provided a more dignified, less superphysical orientation for his scientific colleagues to relate to and was a master stroke of branding, if you ask me.
Quoting Tom Storm
Absolutely. There's a reactionary element in Catholicism, but also very progressive elements. I only mentioned that, because I happened to read it at the time this thread was posted (although I think he makes a valid point.)
If the interpretation I put forward earlier is correct, the "human mind" is the result of a condition that predates the appearance of humans. The evolutionary dimension of instincts, whereby new forms of life appear, happens because the "pattern" or image of instincts can change. However that environment is made possible is what is being marked out as "going beyond an anthropomorphic picture." Human reality emerges from another reality. While that is a biological view, it is also an eminently Gnostic perspective. What is startling in Jung's project is that he sees those very different scenes as entangled with each other while also not letting one narrative be absorbed by the other. That separation is "anti-anthropomorphic" in itself. Whatever "transcendent" something that allowed for this potential is not a part of any story we can tell about ourselves or the gods we talk about.
In various Gnostic creation stories, there is a boundary toward which one can never get closer or further away from but it is always introduced as the possibility for what can be talked about. That is not the same kind of boundary Jung is drawing around "physical existence." The models we use to describe natural phenomena are not incorporated (pardon the pun) into the model where humans and "God" are interacting and changing through the interaction. If the "God" we can talk about cannot be identified as the agent that allowed the potential for consciousness to appear at all, that points to something that is not only not human but can barely be gestured at. Any theologian who wants to frame reality so that our experience of the natural world is addressed as a part of the story will naturally be pissed off by such a set up. It is sort of a reversal from other ways the psychological is commonly objected to as a frame for religious experience. In the case of "Victor White, who maintained that we cannot reduce God to images in the human psyche", none of those terms mean what Jung developed them to mean.
Quoting Jack Cummins
If the argument I have made about his use of models is correct, this line smacks of finding what he assumed at the beginning. Jung removed the element of meaning from the physical as a point of departure.
Quoting Jack Cummins
That is interesting. I have always preferred Jung as a teller of stories than an explainer of everything.
You might be interested in reading the Lion and the Ass by Robert Sacks. The conversation between Creator and the Created takes center stage. Wrestling with God has many different iterations.
That is similar to the criticism I mentioned, from Wolfgang Smith, an advocate of the 'perennial tradition'. He too says that what Jung is exploring is what is known to the various esoteric traditions as the intermediary realm - 'intermediate' between the physical/human and the spiritual realm, in his understanding. I think there might be some truth in that, but it's a very esoteric distinction.
Actually this might be a good place for this graphic, which I think originated with Huston Smith, a scholar of comparitive religion (or possibly Ken Wilber's comments on him).
So what White and Smith both are saying is that Jung's 'theatre of operations' is the second from the centre.
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't think that's a fair description. Jung thought of himself as scientific, even though his subject matter was naturally one which was not always amenable to any kind of scientific reduction. I think compared to Freud's blatant scientism, Jung's multifaceted approach was much more truly humanist in scope. I perfectly admit I don't know Jung's writing that well - I've read Man and his Symbols, Memories Dreams and Reflections, and the forwards to Eastern classics. But I think he's an under-rated genius in 20th century arts and sciences, due to his distance from the standard-issue Darwinian materialism which dominates secular culture. I noticed when I was an undergrad the only dept. he was mentioned in was Comparative Religion (never in pyschology, they were too busy pulling habits out of rats.)
:clap:
Love that joke!
I can relate to annoying certain instructors with philosophical questions. I didn't major in philosophy, probably because (then as now) I saw it largely in terms of expression of personality. There's something bogus about the academic power dynamic (prof and student, I mean, but maybe not only that), and we both know that certain thinkers are allergic to certain other thinkers. Then, as Hegel writes somewhere, everyone thinks they can do philosophy, that it's nothing, so it's also dicey in that sense. Something technical, however, will get even your philosophical ramblings taken more seriously.
Not wanting to be offensive, but it sometimes sounds to me like you will elevate almost anyone if they share the same 'enemies' as you. If a particular thinker is against what you have determined to be reductionist scientism, or if they hold unverifiable theories - it seems they get an immediate pass, maybe even a high distinction. :razz:
It was the old nun teaching me about the collective unconscious who alerted me to the fact that most of Jung's prose is almost indecipherable (apart from his popular works) and that even Jungians struggle to understand or agree on what he means. Not so much a function of the thoughts as a function of the writing. This has probably rendered Jung mostly harmless as all he is remembered for is some work on dreams and the not very well understood collective unconscious as hawked by Joseph Campbell for so many years and, of course, an influence on the Star Wars cycle.
Interesting. Can you expand on this a little?
When we lost touch with nature, with the universe, with the clouds, lakes and birds, when we lost touch with all that, the priests came in. Then the superstition, fears and exploitation began. The priest became the mediator between the human and the so-called divine.
~ J. Krishnamurti
I’ll cop to that.
I don’t idolize Jung, what I said was that I think he’s underrated.
[quote=A Priest]And then Krishnamurti came along and put us all on the street.[/quote]
:rofl: :rofl:
They didn't let a nun – old or not – teach philosophy at my Catholic high school back in the day; maybe because they were less ponderous and more practical expositors than the priests ... :chin:
[quote=The Gay Science, 173]Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.[/quote]
Yeah, Jung is just as guilty of this as Heidegger, who clearly confesses:
[quote=Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Notes 1936-1938]Those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by ‘facts,’ i.e., by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.[/quote]
(Emphasis is mine.)
Sure. For context, I went to school as an older student than most, not because I was a dunce but rather because I was an alienated autodidact, and I was reading and agreeing with stuff like this.
[quote=link]
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey are in agreement that the notion of knowledge of accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation, needs to be abandoned. For all three, the notions of "foundations of knowledge" and of philosophy as revolving around the Cartesian attempt to answer the epistemological skeptic are set aside. Further, they set aside the notion of "the mind" common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant — as a special subject of study, located in inner space, containing elements or processes which make knowledge possible. This is not to say that they have alternative "theories of knowledge" or "philosophies of mind." They set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines. I say "set aside" rather than "argue against" because their attitude toward the traditional problematic is like the attitude of seventeenth century philosophers toward the scholastic problematic. They do not devote themselves to discovering false propositions or bad arguments in the works of their predecessors (though they occasionally do that too). Rather, they glimpse the possibility of a form of intellectual life in which the vocabulary of philosophical reflection inherited from the seventeenth century would seem as pointless as the thirteenth-century philosophical vocabulary had seemed to the Enlightenment. To assert the possibility of a post-Kantian culture, one in which there is no all-encompassing discipline which legitimizes or grounds the others, is not necessarily to argue against any particular Kantian doctrine, any more than to glimpse the possibility of a culture in which religion either did not exist, or had no connection with science or politics, was necessarily to argue against Aquinas's claim that God's existence can be proved by natural reason. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey have brought us into a period of "revolutionary" philosophy (in the sense of Kuhn's "revolutionary" science) by introducing new maps of the terrain (viz., of the whole panorama of human activities) which simply do not include those features which previously seemed to dominate.
[/quote]
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/rorty/
In other words, philosophy was dead (but long live philosophy!)
But there's also what I discovered in books as an autodidact, that Russell hated Hegel and Nietzsche, and gave them crude and bogus entries in his History of Western Philosophy. That's the prototype. People take this stuff personally. It's basically religion for atheists (though there are a few theists in the game.) Or the exciting stuff is. For instance, I think Schopenhauer's great. That says as much about me as it does about Schopenhauer. I had a prof who disliked thinker X, the author of the first quote, while I thought thinker X was great. Is it a coincidence that thinker X was a critic of my prof's approach? It was in that class that I learned that the present king of France is bald. But I didn't think much of my prof. He was no dummy, but at the same time he was just another guy who had read some books and formed some opinions about them. Another anecdote: I looked up the work of a teacher whose class I considered taking. Not bad, but not at all beyond the level of the good posts I see by others on this forum, and very much expressing a personality. There are technical realms (like medical ethics or the philosophy of QM) that I've never looked into, so I can't speak about them, and those didn't tempt me in terms of majors. I wanted to talk about Wittgenstein & Hegel & Nietzsche & maybe even Freud and Jung, which seems pretty close to wanting to talk about Jane Austen or Homer. It's hard to get paid for such pleasures. That too was a factor. I had a knack for technical thinking, and a mixture of prudence and vanity led me that way instead. (In another life, I can imagine getting into the right school with the right profs and really enjoying that path, however ultimately personal the whole game is. )
On my atheism point:
[quote=link]
A 2014 survey by David Chalmers and David Bourget on nearly 1,000 professional philosophers from 99 leading departments of philosophy shows that 72.8% considered themselves as atheists, 14.6% considered themselves as theist, and 12.6% as something else.
[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#:~:text=A%202014%20survey%20by%20David,and%2012.6%25%20as%20something%20else.
I'm an atheist myself, so I'm not complaining about that. I'm just speculating that the philosophy I like tends to be so personal and entwined with heroic self-image partially because of that.
And you can just imagine how embattled theists must feel.
I thought he was a wizard, like Freud.
Thank you for that explanation. I relate to much of it and agree for the most part. However, over the years I have found most philosophy laborious and unpleasant to read and, as an atheist, I didn't really see any need for examining any given thinker's subjectivist rantings just because it had made it into the pantheon - endorsed by some, negated by others. Who can tell what is important? I can't. So I have tended to focus on the quotidian and tried to make that as rewarding as possible. What fascinates me on this site are the choices people make and why.
The 'laborious to read' caught my eye. Bad philosophy and maybe even mediocre philosophy is worse than no philosophy. I mean that it's actively annoying and boring, of negative value. I'm also of the opinion that boredom with a book should be trusted. Put it down and find something that grabs you.
For whatever reason, I did take to certain philosophers like a duck to water (Nietzsche.) I have the disease, and the primary symptom is a compulsion to make general and hopefully profound statements about existence. I also took to Freud as a newly minted atheist (at around 18), and I read him 'philosophically,' as a dirty old man stained with experience who cast a dispassionate eye on human nature. The Future of an Illusion. Civilization and its Discontents. It doesn't matter so much to me whether this or that Freudian hypothesis was/is correct. The approach, style, and subject matter were already worth the price of admission. I read his last book first, the one he never finished, the one that summed it all up, The Outline.
As you may know, Schopenhauer talks about seeing through the veil of the principle of individuality. Now that I'm on the lookout, I find versions of this idea in many thinkers. Definitely the tone and context vary, and the transpersonal entity isn't always eternal. It might be as fragile as a way of life.
I think it would be fascinating to talk with a pro, but my default position is that we can't help doing self-analysis after reading psychoanalysts (and I'd count certain philosophers as such.) The 'shadow' was definitely one of the concepts I valued/value in Jung. If persona is mask, then it's all (the wicked stuff) at least dormant in us all.
Regarding therapists - if they’re any good they will show you things about yourself you would never otherwise find out, or at least they will greatly expedite it.
The particular book which @Valentinus and I were discussing by Jung, 'Answer to Job' focuses on the shadow specifically. It looks at it on a collective level, because while integrating the shadow is personal, and relevant in personal level, Jung is concerned about the shadow as a force which is involved as a source of mass destruction. In 'Answer to Job', Jung spoke of the danger of the 'dark side' of God being unleashed, with reference to nuclear weapons. His book was written in the 1950s, and of course, nuclear weapons have become more sophisticated and there are so many ecological threats too.
I spent over 3 years in Jungian analysis, although the therapist did use other psychodynamic techniques. However, I do think that it is possible to work upon understanding the personal shadow based on reading Jung. It is about understanding one's personal demons and avoiding destructive tendencies. However, integrating the shadow is not easy, because there is the danger of integration of the shadow becoming acting out one's shadow. It can be a fine line, which is why therapy is useful in this respect. Nevertheless, awareness of the shadow is probably important because, without awareness of this aspect of the psyche, the shadow functions on an unconscious basis.
I read Answer to Job a long time ago and remember being quite impressed by it. I already liked Job, but Jung gave me new perspectives on that ancient and profound book.
I agree. Freud was careful not to read too much philosophy as a young student, as I found from his bio. But he did credit Nietzsche with exceptional self-knowledge ('more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live').
Something I don't recall seeing in Kant or Schop is anything to do with dream interpretation, slips of the tongue, or free association. I also don't see much of a direct Kantian influence. I think Freud fits in the 'tough minded' category. He constantly reworked theories, had a nose for detail (his case studies are vivid), and had a pessimist's sense of humor.
[quote=Freud]
By Weltanschauung, then, I mean an intellectual construction which gives a unified solution of all the problems of our existence in virtue of a comprehensive hypothesis, a construction, therefore, in which no question is left open and in which everything in which we are interested finds a place. It is easy to see that the possession of such a Weltanschauung is one of the ideal wishes of mankind. When one believes in such a thing, one feels secure in life, one knows what one ought to strive after, and how one ought to organise one’s emotions and interests to the best purpose.
If that is what is meant by a Weltanschauung, then the question is an easy one for psychoanalysis to answer. As a specialised science, a branch of psychology – ‘depth-psychology’ or psychology of the unconscious – it is quite unsuited to form a Weltanschauung of its own; it must accept that of science in general. The scientific Weltanschauung is, however, markedly at variance with our definition. The unified nature of the explanation of the universe is, it is true, accepted by science, but only as a programme whose fulfilment is postponed to the future. Otherwise it is distinguished by negative characteristics, by a limitation to what is, at any given time, knowable, and a categorical rejection of certain elements which are alien to it. It asserts that there is no other source of knowledge of the universe but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations, in fact, what is called research, and that no knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition or inspiration. It appears that this way of looking at things came very near to receiving general acceptance during the last century or two. It has been reserved for the present century to raise the objection that such a Weltanschauung is both empty and unsatisfying, that it overlooks all the spiritual demands of man, and all the needs of the human mind.
This objection cannot be too strongly repudiated. It cannot be supported for a moment, for the spirit and the mind are the subject of scientific investigation in exactly the same way as any non-human entities. Psycho-analysis has a peculiar right to speak on behalf of the scientific Weltanschauung in this connection, because it cannot be accused of neglecting the part occupied by the mind in the universe. The contribution of psychoanalysis to science consists precisely in having extended research to the region of the mind. Certainly without such a psychology science would be very incomplete. But if we add to science the investigation of the intellectual and emotional functions of men (and animals), we find that nothing has been altered as regards the general position of science, that there are no new sources of knowledge or methods of research. Intuition and inspiration would be such, if they existed; but they can safely be counted as illusions, as fulfilments of wishes. It is easy to see, moreover, that the qualities which, as we have shown, are expected of a Weltanschauung have a purely emotional basis. Science takes account of the fact that the mind of man creates such demands and is ready to trace their source, but it has not the slightest ground for thinking them justified. On the contrary, it does well to distinguish carefully between illusion (the results of emotional demands of that kind) and knowledge.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/freud.htm
Quoting Wayfarer
I suppose you must be right about a really good one. I prefer the idea of daringly honest friendship.
Jung, likes to take accepted ideas and twist them. It's a nice touch bringing us an idea of God who also has an evil dimension. This certainly explains The Book of Job's devious Yahweh in a way no orthodox theologian ever could. The fourth face of God is not so much 'evil' as Mafia Boss, but I get Jung's point. But fun as this is, it always struck me that Jung was doing a bit of fan fiction with the Old Testament rather than uncovering something. It strikes me as embroidery rather than analysis.
You do make me wonder how I'd experience it now. It's been about 20 years since my Jung phase. On the other hand, I had a second Freud phase a few months ago. He did age quite well for me. I'd recommend the case study of the rat man. The details! Because he protected their identity, he could expose the secret, complicated lives of neurotic and often brilliant strangers.
I think Freud saw himself in this tradition and along with the influence of Schopenhauer and Goethe probably fancied himself as a poet and literary critic as much as a scientist. My understanding of Freud's works (which I have only perused in English) are they are written in an exceptionally beautiful literary prose style.
As I understand it from the Peter Gay bio, he embraced that role more as he aged. As a student he was somewhat anti-philosophical or anti-metaphysical. He did read and appreciate Feuerbach (one of my favorites). IMO, his prose style (at least in translation) is great. As you may know, he loved the English language but never quite mastered it. I'm sure that helped him pick a good translator. He comes off as a good man in the bio (hard-working family man and earnest scientist.) He really had to push and endure to get his ideas taken seriously. His peers could only think in terms of brain abnormality when it came to mental illness (atheistic scientistic Sigmund was too flaky for them. Fun.)
Figures. Have you read about hermeneutics of suspicion? They're both given as examples of it. I disagree with Freud about everything other than his specific discoveries.
I can't see why Jung wouldn't be included in this too. I guess his are the hermeneutics of faith.
This is so redolent with irony that it's hard to know where to start. But a good start might be the fact that Freud's 'scientific' theories came to be almost universally rejected within a couple of generations of his passing. Secondly, the 'role of the mind in the universe' was hardly discovered by psychoanalysis, so much as by the alarming implications of quantum mechanics, which gave a pivotal role to the observing scientist. 'A physicist', said Bohr, 'is just an atom's way of looking at itself'.
Because he was not reductionist in the sense Freud was. Jung broke with Freud because he felt Freud's outlook was too constrained by emphasis on the single factor of libido. You surely remember that account of their fateful last conversation, the final break between the two?
[quote=Memories, Dreams and Reflections]There was no mistaking the fact that Freud was emotionally involved in his sexual theory to an extraordinary degree.
When he spoke of it, his tone became urgent, almost anxious, and all signs of his normally critical and skeptical manner vanished.
A strange, deeply moved expression came over his face, the cause of which I was at a loss to understand.
I had a strong intuition that for him sexuality was a sort of numinosum.
This was confirmed by a conversation which took place some three years later (in 1910), again in Vienna.
I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, “My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.”
He said that to me with great emotion, in the tone of a father saying, “And promise me this one thing, my dear son: that you will go to church every Sunday.”
In some astonishment I asked him, “A bulwark against what?”
To which he replied, “Against the black tide of mud” and here he hesitated for a moment, then added “of occultism.”[/quote]
The image of the 'black tide of mud' associated, not only with occultism but indeed with 'the spiritual', speaks volumes in my reading.
No question and I'm not sure many take Freud's theories seriously except Freudian psychoanalysts. My hermeneutics of suspicion say there is a great deal of money in witchdoctory. I used this incorrect appellation in the same sense that E Fuller Torrey did in his book Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists.
I guess Jung is an expansionist.
Sorry, but your Soul just Died.
Someone who worked with Jung for 25 years was very close to my family and I heard this story in much greater detail from someone who heard if directly from Jung.
No, Freud was also a psychoanalyst
It is interesting to read that you went to a Catholic school and that you weren't taught philosophy. It was not on the school curriculum but I had some fairly interesting teachers, including an English teacher who was interested in mythology and a physics teacher who was training to an acupuncturist. My sixth form tutor was not a Catholic and used to have long discussions with me about the 'Book of Revelation' in the Bible. I also found many interesting and fairly subversive books in the school library, and the school librarian told me that many of the books which I was reading were in a box which had been ordered by error.
I notice that you remarked about the obscurity of some of Jung's writing and I do think that does put some people off reading him. It reflects his wide reading life, and in many ways his writings fall within the scope of philosophy rather than psychology. However, that is also true of Freud in many ways. Some people describe Jung as a mystic, but I prefer to see hm as more of an esoteric thinker, because he was not trying to think about areas which many just gloss over. I think that what is significant about Jung was how he delved into ideas, such as those of Jacob Boehme, alchemy, Gnostic ideas and Eastern metaphysics. Many writers in the late twentieth century and in this one speak of such ideas but I think that he was radical for his time in touching upon all these traditions.
I guess that boils down to Carl Jung being, like some of us, unsure whether god is real or a figment of his/our imagination. This inability to distinguish reality from make-belief is open to a dual interpretation. A theist-turned-atheist would consider it as faer first steps towards freedom, liberation from a falsehood that has huge swathes of people in its grips. On the other hand, an atheist-turned-theist will regard it (also) as faer first steps towards freedom, liberation from a falsehood that has huge swathes of people in its grips. You get the idea.
In a way, I think that you are right to say that Jung was not really sure whether he believed in God, but he said a lot more than that. He went into such depth in exploring religious experience, but just did not seem sure how far that should be interpreted. I wonder if his views shifted from time to time. My own perspective alters, but it may be that I have read too much Jung.
The question as to whether believing or not believing being a greater step towards freedom, is slightly different. I am not sure which position I prefer, but it is probably more important to think which is the most accurate. However, I do wonder if our own psychology does affect belief. The arguments for or against believing in God being so complec may mea that we can swing it one way or other according to some kind of subconscious preference.
They're the same thing, god (theism) and no god (atheism). " :chin:
It is questionable to what extent Jung can be seen as an 'explainer of everything'. I can see problems in some of the ways he tries to piece together the various models. It sometimes feels like he is forcing bits of a jigsaw puzzle into parts where they probably do not fit. The problem I am left with is wondering who can explain it all?. Can any one individual even attempt to do so? I would like to find such a person. However, I do think that Jung raises some very interesting areas for debate and reflection, but I do believe that the philosophers do tend to steer clear of him, and, perhaps, he is seen as creating tangents.
Yes, I am inclined to agree. Perhaps theism and atheism are like the two sides of the same coin. It just depends which side a person views it from. I think that we may be talking about the biggest paradox in philosophy.
We seek truth but hope gets in the way [theism]. We hope but truth gets in the way [atheism].
That is our Easter revelation idea for anyone to contemplate if they log into this thread. The startling conclusion may remain lost and buried in this tomb, like an esoteric truth, or rise up for further critical evaluation, or condemnation. Happy Easter!
Yes, and I've read quite a few suspicious minds.
I didn't mean to give that impression. I took Philosophy my senior year since I was able to opt out of the mandatory fourth year of Religious Studies having earned an A grade in each of the previous three years. I'd started reading philosophy on my own a couple of years before high school because I had a full encyclopedia at home and stumbled upon the ancient Greeks when reading articles about Greek mythology (& others) inspired by references or characters in 70s era Marvel comics. I read philosophy informally on my own straight through high school until I took the senior survey course which was taught by a Jesuit who spent far too much time on the damn Scholastics and not enough time, for my tastes, on the Hellenic or Renaissance or Modern philosophers.
Quoting Jack Cummins
How it is we can talk about, or intend, nonexistent things (e.g. Meinong, Husserl)?
Quoting TheMadFool
Like being blonde and being bald? Do explain.
I think 'part' is not intended in the sense of role. It's more like the human mind is part of the universe, of the territory which science can and should conquer.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not so sure about this. It's politically expedient to bash Freud, but having really studied him lately, I think he functions as a cartoon in people's minds.
Quoting Wayfarer
You do touch on an important difference between them, but Jung was the crown prince, the younger brilliant man with whom the aging Freud hoped to trust his legacy. He didn't want to lose it to some kind of new-age occultism, which, as he accurately saw, is always a threat in this realm. I think you are playing both sides here. As you celebrate Jung, you want to drag Freud down as pseudo-science ignoring the fact anyone who finds the old atheist Freud too flaky is likely to consider Jung an outright crypto-fascist fraud. You mention lithium, and that's just the same stuff Freud was up against from the very beginning, the idea that the psyche was something like an epiphenomenon of the brain. The idea that phrenology is more respectable...that seems counter to your general attitude. Compared to his hyper-materialistic peers, Freud was counter-reductionist.
:100: :up:
So, do you think that the idea of the paradox of
theism and atheism is a bit way out? One problem which I have thought of is that it could end up pointing to 'paradox' as ultimate reality, and almost enthroning and inflating it to God-like status. You are not a religious believer, so may just see the idea as a bit absurd, but readers who are religious might be horrified with Madfool and I for such a suggestion.
Sorry I don't see a "paradox". I once had a big afro and now I'm bald. No paradox. With g/G. Without g/G. What paradox? (I think 'agnosticism' is paradoxical, even patently incoherent, btw.)
I see your point but I am not sure if paradoxes in ideas are the same as in daily life. After all, ideas are mental constructs. However, in saying that, I might be reducing the notion of God to an idea. But, of course, that would depend on the nature of God, and may be incompatible with certain ways of seeing the ultimate reality, but it could fit with such an understanding as the Tao.
Perhaps I am just thinking too much. Anyway, I think that you were lucky to be able to study philosophy at school. I only got to do religious studies and we only got to study Christianity and no comparative religion at all. I was still very Catholic after I left school, but I believe that many of those at my school had stepped outside that perspective, and they probably have not read Jung.
The essays I read of Freud were his general humanistic works - Civilization and its Discontents, Totem and Taboo, and others of that series. I recognise them as important culturally, in fact I thought them brilliant essays, and would always recommend them as part of a liberal arts education. So I never saw Freud as 'flaky' - I recognise his brilliance, but I thought he was philosophically shallow and part of the general 'death of God' attitude that I myself never identified with (even if I was not conventionally religious). But by this time - late 70's - Freud's influence had already waned (except for in popular culture where it remains enormous in my view).
But philosophically speaking, Freud's views were highly circumscribed by his rejection of religion (although there was something of a re-evaluation in his later life). I remember his remark about the aim of psychoanalysis being the conversion of hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness - I think that was from a letter - and asked myself something along the lines, 'is that it'? But then, Freud was a doctor, his role was in curing illness. What I was studying was the 'etiology of spiritual illumination'. Freud had nothing significant to say about that, while Jung did.
//ps// regarding Jung's obscurities - I read Gary Lachman's bio of Jung recently - he remarked that Jung would from time to time lapse into his 'Herr Professor Doktor' persona, when his writing became overburdened with jargon, difficult arguments and obscure references, which is a fair criticism. But that doesn't describe all of his output.//
IMO, you shouldn't miss the humor in this joke about ordinary misery. In some ways, your position is embattled like Freud's. I'm sure that you recognize how crude and superstitious religion can be and often has been. But you don't throw out the baby with the water. In the same way, Freud was well aware that dream interpretation was strongly associated with superstition. But he saw a new terrain for scientific investigation.
Also, the idea that troubled people can (sometimes) be fixed or helped by talking to them,as opposed to stuffing them with chemicals or cutting on their brain, seems to show a respect for the psyche. The causality runs both ways. Words affect human beings. They are not just babbling meat. They are linguistic beings.
From that Moses book:
[quote=Freud]
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.
[/quote]
It is unfair of me to say he attempted to explain everything. On the other hand, he certainly did try to explain a vast number of things.
It is very interesting how each of the people responding to your OP came to the writings of Jung from different points of view and circumstances. My first introduction to him was through the lens of a clinical psychologist I was engaged with for a decade in a galaxy far away and long ago. The primary concern from that perspective is to understand how persons develop or not and what can be done to help them. The Jungian approach was considered side by side with many others. Practitioners who would work in the art had to pass unscathed through the Boulder Model. There needed to be a way to confirm the value of an approach outside of just asserting this or that was happening. The first work I read was The Nature of the Psyche and I was mostly focused on how his "practice" related to his picture of consciousness and unconsciousness being a dynamic relationship rather than a fixed structure of experience. I tried to understand how that shaped his observation as the one who listened to a patient.
It was only much later that I read other works by Jung that involve the esoteric dimensions of alchemy and the cross-cultural psychology that collides with other philosophies and theological claims. So, when I speak of the discontinuity of models, I admit that I cannot make all these different points of view about a single thesis. My comments are less a critique than a pointing to where I stopped understanding the lecture.
With all that said, I want to acknowledge an appreciation for what Jung presented to me that I did not have words for before him saying it. We cannot be responsible for what we are if we don't become more aware of what we dismiss. An Archimedes lever of personal experience.
[quote=Eclipse][i]All that you touch
And all that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
And all that you love
And all that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
And all that you give
And all that you deal
And all that you buy
Beg, borrow or steal
And all you create
And all you destroy
And all that you do
And all that you say
And all that you eat
And everyone you meet
(everyone you meet)
And all that you slight
And everyone you fight
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that's to come[/i]
[b]And everything under the sun
is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed
by the moon[/b][/quote]
Well, okay, then let's talk "ultimate reality".
Whatever it is, or that is, I think "ultimate reality" is unknowable in the way random events are unpredictable. We are proximal beings limited to ap/proximate knowledge and understanding. "Ultimate reality" can't mean anything to us in the sense of informing or empowering our lives. It's completely alien to human experience, encompassing our reason and intuitions and, therefore, necessarily cannot be encompassed by our reasoning or intuitions (Jaspers). Whatever there is presupposes this encompassing, ever-receding horizon. "What is it exactly?" That question makes no sense to me.
And if you call this encompassing "God" then "God" doesn't matter to human existence, its the farthest away from us an entity can possibly be. If you don't call the encompassing "God" then it too is encompassed and not "ultimately real" (or is just a Feuerbachian figment of our mass-anxiety/hallucinations). So, I suppose, that's the paradox of theism.
As for atheism, it resolves the paradox by rejecting theism, or theistic deities. I'm sure you've heard the maxim, Jack: a theist is an inconsistent atheist; the latter just believes in one less deity than the former. Lacking belief in a deity does not, however, entail denying there is an "ultimate reality" that is ineluctable and yet a matter of the most profound indifference ...
[quote=The WASP][i]Some call it heavenly in its brilliance
Others, mean and rueful of the Western dream
I love the friends I have gathered together on this thin raft
We have constructed pyramids in honor of our escaping
This is the land where the Pharaoh died
The Negroes in the forest brightly feathered
They are saying, "forget the night
Live with us in forests of azure[/i]
[b]Out here on the perimeter there are no stars
Out here we is stoned, immaculate"[/b][i]
[ ... ]
I'll tell you this[/i]
No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn[/quote]
"We invented the blues; Europeans invented psycho-analysis. You invent what you need." ~Albert Murray
It’s perfectly true that Biblical religions originated in the ‘childhood of humanity’ and are full of ‘bronze-age tropes’. But they can be re-intepreted, there are layers of meaning. That is what hermeneutics are for. Rather than just written off.
Einstein is an interesting contrast. Equally dismissive of religion as Freud, and on just the same grounds, but was never an atheist in the philosophical sense.
I am glad you replied, but I would rather discuss ultimate reality tomorrow as I am getting ready for bed. So, I will read what you wrote and reply then. I love' An American Prayer' album by Jim Morrison.
Don't give up!
'Illumination' or 'enlightenment' is a transformation of perception, such that what is real becomes clear to that percipient - usually suddenly - who often then declares that humanity is delusional.
I'm exploring the books of a scholar I've just discovered, Arnold Hermann who has published an edition of Plato's Parmenides, with commentary, and another on Parmenides and Pythagoras. (I've realised that I really to need to study the Parmenides in more depth.)
From the jacket copy of the latter:
The key point is that any consideration of a philosophical absolute or ultimate, has to be predicated on a radical shift in perception, a completely different frame of reference than the human - hence the title of that book. Modern science still attempts to arrive at a perfectly detached and objective viewpoint, but due to the loss of the ethical dimension, it has become Promethean, 'stealing fire from the Gods'.
It seems to me that Nietzsche did an excellent job of making fun of other people's attempts at revolutions of thought but applied none of that wisdom to his own project. I am still waiting for the Gay Science to kick in.
At our best we strive to be worthy of calling ourselves "Promethean". I can't imagine a more ethical struggle than stealing fire from heaven. As for "ultimate reality" I've not given up; I told Jack that it ineluctably encompasses us as it ever-recedes from our comprehension and draws – calls – us inside-out in all directions in a kenosis-like process of civilizational hubris to the very utmost end of everything. Down Heraclitus' river and over the falls into Epicurus' atomic void: I'm an ecstatic materialist, Wayf :point: *apotheosis or extinction!*
I certainly hope this is possible and will happen. I remain a non-believer but it would make me sleep easier at night knowing that Abrahamic religions can be rehabilitated. I don't recognise the notion of God as it simply doesn't resonate with me. But if people need it, I have no problem as long as they are not using bronze age tropes to influence politics and legislation. If all believers were like David Bentley Hart (they might be a little smug) but they would be close to secular humanism in matters of social and economic policy.
We have ideas like individual rights, the common good, democracy, etc. I'm not saying this is perfect, but I don't think humans need God or gods to have communities. I think we both live in secular societies (I imagine rightly or wrongly that Australia is more like the US than any other nation that comes to mind.)
IMV, Nietzsche noticed that God was already dead. So did Feuerbach. People mouthed the words, stuck to certain rituals, but they weren't religious in any deep way. They were very 'of this world.' What's strange is that yourself are expressing Nietzschean concerns. What's going to happen if people let go of God? Will they collapse into nihilism? As I've mentioned before, politics replaces religion, and religion was largely politics all along. Is Tucker Carlson a knight of faith, or is it AOC? Is God even foremost in the conversation? AFAIK, even you don't believe in any typical sense (spiritual but not religious? student of religion? seeker rather than a finder?). When [s]the revolution[/s] theocracy comes, we'll both be up against the same wall. IMO, your position only makes sense in a secular context. The right to be hermeneutic about the sacred texts was hard-won.
I think you know that we completely agree on this.
Yep. Unlike America, God is almost totally absent from Australian cultural life. There are small pockets of 'faith' within conservative politics. But the idea may be metastasising in the national psyche (to use Gore Vidal's expression).
It's not like historical religion produced a culture that was morally superior. There is no golden era of religious moral virtue we can point to in the West.
Quoting T H E
Assuming belief in God doesn't lead to a form of moral nihilism of its own.
I had the impression that Australia was more secular. (I respect your nation's resistance to Starbucks and your coffee shop culture. I think I'd like it there.)
Quoting Tom Storm
Exactly. It hasn't been that long since we stopped dropping dead from gum disease on a regular basis. Nor has it been that long since the Inquisition, witch-trials, etc. It's easy to take for granted our current, relative sanity.
This is pretty much how I see things. A related thought: whatever I thought or felt about God (what I could know of God) was 'in' my 'mind' or 'experience,' a mere part of it. The attempted escape is to make God everything, the encompassing, but we run into the issue you mention. I like Job because the voice that speaks from the whirlwind suggests this amoral or trans-moral encompassing infinity in its concrete richness (pagan glory of nature and its magnificent beasts.)
I'd even go further, with a kind of Feyerbendian 'anything goes.' I don't mind if citizens recontextualize bronze-age tropes to push with their individual votes in this or that direction. But it does seem that we need and largely have a vague civic religion where we respect the rights and consciences of others. IMO, this is our current meta-religion (democracy with individual rights.)
Yes. Of course folk like Nietzsche and sophisticated Christians like David Bentley Hart would argue that those individual rights are simply the ghostly shadows of Christianity playing out, are not founded on anything solid, and are doomed to fail.
I think such rights are fragile, and it's easy to imagine our rational civic religion melting away. If you watched the Trump disaster, you can see how bad things are in the US. We have 'conspirituality' here (Q-Anon and whatever will replace it.) As strange as Q-anon is, it's not so far off from the Apocalypse of St. John, which I understand to be the first text of untamed, primitive Christianity. I wonder: have you ever read Nietzsche's The Antichrist? The book can be shrill, but the concepts are solid. His portrait of Christ is impressive, while he gives what was made of Christ by Saul/Paul the Hell it would give to others.
[quote=Jung]
Freud's theory of repression does, indeed, seem to postulate the existence only of people who, being too moral, are continually repressing the immorality of their natural instincts. According to this idea, the immoral man who allows his natural instincts an unbridled existence should be proof against neurosis. But daily experience proves this is obviously not the case; he may be just as neurotic as other men. If we analyse him, we find that it is simply his decency that has been repressed. Therefore, when an immoral man is neurotic, he represents what Nietzsche appropriately described as "the pale criminal," a man who does not stand upon the same level as his deed.[232]
The opinion may be held, that in such a case the repressed remnants of decency are merely infantile traditional legacies, that impose unnecessary fetters upon natural instincts, for which reason they should be eradicated. The principle "écraser l'infâme" would be the natural culmination of such an absolute let-instinct-live theory.[233] That would obviously be quite phantastic and nonsensical. It should, indeed, never be forgotten—and the Freudian School needs this reminder—that morality was not brought down upon tables of stone from Sinai and forced upon the people, but that morality is a function of the human soul, which is as old as humanity itself. Morality is not inculcated from without. Man has it primarily within himself—not the law indeed, but the essence of morals.
After all, does a more moral view-point exist than the let-instinct-live theory? Is there a more heroic morality than this? That is why Nietzsche, the heroic, is especially partial to it. It is natural and inborn cowardice that makes people say, "God preserve me from following my instincts," thinking that they thus prove their high moral standard. They do not understand that following one's bent is really much too costly for them, too strenuous, too dangerous, and finally it cuts somewhat against that sense of decency which most people associate rather with taste than with a categorical imperative. The unpardonable fault of the let-instinct-live theory is, that it is much too heroic, too idealogic for the multitude.
There is, therefore, probably no other way for the immoral man but to accept the moral corrective of his unconscious, just as he who is moral must come to terms as best he may, with his demons of the netherworld.
[/quote]
IMO, this is a cartoon Nietzsche, but then there are quotes when taken out of context....
On the Peterson thing: Jung is talking about hardwired, built-in morality (a 'function of the soul'.) This is highly plausible. We're primates, not blankslates. In this same context Jung gives the Freudian's what-for for being 'liberals' on sexual matters. He makes sure to paint himself as not an absolutist, as someone who cares about the details of the unwed mother. Is she a good girl, all things considered?
I do find it plausible that a neurosis can be an expression of repressed/ignored conscience, but one can also get a whiff of what might smell to some like crytpofacism. It's small step from 'there's god in our blood' to something less pleasant. Not only that, it's also a strange fusion of Darwinian-biological grounds for ethics and spiritual traditions.
:up:
Clearly not a knight of anything. Master of deception would be nearer. I think US Evangelical Christianity has on the whole become corrupted. There are evangelical Christians that are not corrupt but they seem the exception rather than the norm. Religion gone bad is an awful thing, but it's not the only thing.
Quoting T H E
All of which originated with Christian social philosophy. Take a look at how human rights is regarded iin the Peoples Republic of China, where there is no constitutional recognition of individual rights in the system whatever. And the concept we have of individual rights originated with the Christian principle of the equality of all before God, a concept which was utterly alien to classical culture and is likewise alien to the Chinese version of communism. That is no a coincidence.
Quoting T H E
Perfectly true! My opposition is to philosophical atheism. I am not trying to convert, I understand perfectly well that many people nowadays are atheist, most of my friends would describe themselves in those terms.
It is more that when religion is rejected, then the spiritual or metaphysical dimension of philosophy is rejected with it. 'What is that?' you might ask. Well, it can't be said! That's part of the point! If it could be easily said, easily stated, easily found, then it would never have become lost in the first place.
It's possible that I'm what many religious believers would take to be an atheist anyway. For instance, I find a lot of meaning in Schopenhauer's philosophy, and he was scathingly critical of Biblical religion. But at the end of the day, he also said that religious ascesis was the only real path to peace.
Actually on that very point, one of the books on my all-time list is by the sociological theorist, Peter Berger, (of 'construction of reality' fame). He wrote a book called the 'heretical imperative' which was about the fact that in the ancient world, 'having an opinion' about religion was the root of heresy. The supplicant (i.e. me) was supposed to simply turn up and trust the process. Whereas in the modern world with its plethora of cultures and choices, a choice has to be made - which he posed as a choice between Jerusalem and Benares. (Breif overview here.)
Quoting T H E
It is true that there are apparently crazy or far-out ideas captured in some of the Biblical texts, but I'm sure Q-Anon is simply common delusion, the consequence of very badly informed and malformed minds. (In fact I read recently that there's a very high occurence of mental illness associated with this kind of conspiracy mongering.)
Quoting 180 Proof
for the record:
I'd love to read Jung's exegesis of that, if there was one.
I agree. I'm not at all in the 'if only we could get rid of religion camp.' Conspirituality and Tucker-talk can just as easily fill in the void, not to mention that madness one can find on the far left.
Quoting Wayfarer
I haven't studied this closely, but it sounds about right. To be fair, though, slavery wasn't that long ago , and Trump loves the bible in his hands when the camera is around.
Quoting Wayfarer
I've been reading him lately. Great stuff! Such a clear style, such a focus on the goal. But, yeah, you are safer with the atheists, being our foil or gadfly. Quoting Wayfarer
Nice. I might check that one out. I liked his 'social construction' book. That's what I mean about the essential impiety of reasoning about religion, which is a form of piety in some other, errant direction (humanism, us making sense of things ourselves, judging gods by our standards.)
Quoting Wayfarer
But what is common delusion? Any delusion has content, a structure. As I understand it, the early Christians were not sophisticated drivers of SUVs enjoying abstract gnosis but more like a cult expecting the imminent destruction of the world. In Gibbon, it's emphasized that their monotheism was especially offensive. Religion was ritualistic and multifarious, a buffet. But along comes a new cult whose God wouldn't tolerate others and whose followers would submit to many things but not idolatry. Before Q-anon, there was already David Icke and his ilk, with wild stuff about lizardmen aliens ritually abusing children to create delta-force killing machines. The sex and violence were extreme, like a bad action movie, but both were projected on the bad guys of course. Q-Anon's image of children being abused in tunnels seems archetypal or mythological somehow. Having looked at Jung and Campbell, it's hard not to think that this is how religions are created, crowd-sourced resonating myths that spurt from a volcanic unconscious.
Do both sides, even as belligerently opposed as they are, not claim to be right, to know the truth? They're indistinguishable in that sense. The two, atheism and theism, may differ in particulars, in fact they're contradictory, but the overall image each projects - each insisting that it's in possession of fact about reality - is identical...at least in spirit.
I actually agree that 'both sides' have some vision of the way things are, with one side believing there's a god and the other side disagreeing. That's a massive oversimplification, since God-talk is highly complex and some positions are hard to classify (was Hegel a theist? and wtf is negative theology?).
The problem for me with this insight is (not to be rude) its triviality. It's like saying scholastic nominalism and realism are the same thing because they are opposed to one another.Any philosophical worldview tries to be factual, tell the truth. So what gets left out of this bin? Even your idea of this bin seems to belongs there.
You're absolutely right of course. I only meant to draw your attention to the fact that both atheism and theism claim to know what the truth is but, the catch is, their claims contradict each other. Since atheism and theism are mutually contradictory, both can't be true i.e. one of them has to be false but both claim to be the true. Both claim truth but that's impossible. Hence, the paradox.
[quote=S]
Whoever seriously thinks that superhuman beings have ever given our race information as to the aim of its existence and that of the world, is still in his childhood. There is no other revelation than the thoughts of the wise, even though these thoughts, liable to error as is the lot of everything human, are often clothed in strange allegories and myths under the name of religion. So far, then, it is a matter of indifference whether a man lives and dies in reliance on his own or another's thoughts; for it is never more than human thought, human opinion, which he trusts.
[/quote]
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Christian_System
I also found another Jung quote on Nietzsche.
[quote=J]
When he cried his "ecce homo" over himself, it was again too late, and the crucifixion of the soul began even before the body was dead. He who thus taught yea-saying to the instincts of life, must have his own career looked at critically, in order to discover the effects of this teaching upon the teacher. But if we consider his life from[382] this point of view, we must say that Nietzsche lived beyond instinct, in the lofty atmosphere of heroic "sublimity." This height could only be maintained by means of most careful diet, choice climate and above all by many opiates. Finally, the tension of this living shattered his brain. He spoke of yea-saying, but lived the nay. His horror of people, especially of the animal man, who lives by instinct, was too great. He could not swallow the toad of which he so often dreamt, and which he feared he must yet gulp down. The Zarathustrian lion roared all the "higher" men, who craved for life, back into the cavernous depths of the unconscious. That is why his life does not convince us of the truth of his teaching. The "higher man" should be able to sleep without chloral, and be competent to live in Naumburg or Basle despite "the fogs and shadows." He wants woman and offspring; he needs to feel he has some value and position in the herd, he longs for innumerable commonplaces, and not least for what is humdrum: it is this instinct that Nietzsche did not recognise; it is, in other words, the natural animal instinct for life.
But how did he live if it was not from natural impulse? Should Nietzsche really be accused of a practical denial of his natural instincts? He would hardly agree to that; indeed he might even prove, and that without difficulty, that he really was following his instincts in the highest sense. But we may well ask how is it possible that human instincts could have led him so far from humanity, into absolute isolation, into an aloofness from the herd which he supported with loathing and disgust? One would have thought that instinct would have united, would have coupled and begot, that it would tend towards pleasure and good cheer, towards gratification of all sensual desires. But we have quite overlooked the fact that this is only one of the possible directions of instinct. There exists not only the instinct for the preservation of the species (the sexual instinct), but also the instinct for the preservation of the self.
Nietzsche obviously speaks of this latter instinct, that is of the will to power. Whatever other kinds of instinct may exist are for him only a consequence of the will to power. Viewed from the standpoint of Freud's sexual-psychology this is a gross error, a misconception of biology, a bad choice made by a decadent neurotic human being. For it would be easy for any adherent of sexual psychology to prove that all that was too lofty, too heroic, in Nietzsche's conception of the world and of life, was nothing but a consequence of the repression and misconception of "instinct," that is of the instinct that this psychology considers fundamental.
[/quote]
This is a surprising reversal. Nietzsche is the morbid ascetic (or beat junkie), while Jung is the hale and hearty man of the world, who wants women and offspring (temptations of the flesh) and self-cleaning ovens. It's OK if Jung wants 'value and position in the herd' (crude will-to-power), but if Nietzsche holds himself aloof & ascetic, that's going to far. FWIW, Jung married a rich woman, who funded his project. He comes off as Shaun to Nietzsche's Shem. (Finnegans Wake.) "Shaun is portrayed as a dull postman, conforming to society's expectations, while Shem is a bright artist and sinister experimenter." The whole 'truth of his teaching' line seems wrong to me, as it seems to cast Nietzsche as a guru with a Message or 'A Teaching' rather than as a sinister experimenter who really can't be pinned down (who, of course, had his manic manifesto moments....) What exactly is Nietzsche's teaching ?
Clean your room, Nietzsche! And when am I going to have grandchildren?
[quote = Nietzsche]
The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.
[/quote]
Schopenhauer said he admired Eastern religions, namely Vedic Hinduism and Buddhism. It is said that later in life he read the Upanisads every evening. Strange he did not say the same about them as they’re both revealed religions.
Quoting T H E
I though Nietzsche hated asceticism, he polemicised against it.
Nietzsche is no sacred cow. He's too easy to criticize, cherry pick. The man kept writing as he lost his mind from some kind of brain disease. If I didn't think his good stuff was very good, I'd be less annoyed, but I also just don't like sloppy thinking. For instance, my feelings toward Jordan Peterson went from neutral-curious to negative-dismissive when he started barfing up middle-brow fears of 'cultural marxism' & shitting on thinkers he didn't seem to have actually studied, along with this guy, who was an ally at some point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hicks
[quote=Wiki]
Hicks is the author of five books and a documentary. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy, 2004) argues that postmodernism is best understood as a rhetorical strategy of the academic left developed in reaction to the failure of anarchism, socialism and communism.[2] However, his work on postmodernism has been the subject of criticism, with some arguing that it is full of misreadings, suppositions, rhetorical hyperbole and even flat out factual errors.[3][4]
[/quote]
Complex tradition, vaguely specified, 'best understood' as incredibly crude etc. The battle is against stupidity, against crude oversimplification, dissolution into tribal prejudices, and so on. We're up against the Stupidity Industrial Complex.
I think what annoys me (and why I say 'middlebrow') is because the impression I get is that such books are created to provide a mediated and falsified experience of difficult thinkers, to save consumers the trouble of actually wrestling with such texts.
To me it seemed that Jung was being nasty, incorrect, inconsistent. I think your own bias against Nietzsche kept you from noticing how anti-ascetic and anti-spiritual Jung came off. He's the 'gnostic' with the big house, living on wifey's money, playing the sage. It's not so far from megachurch materialism with a candy Christ coating, albeit more conceptually sophisticated, for a more discerning crowd. It's eye-opening to read this fucker again! :starstruck:
I think it's clear that Schopenhauer 'didn't believe in' such revelation. He talked of metempsychoses, for instance, in terms of an analogy fit for the less intellectual, while those who could handle it got the truth in conceptual form. I'd quote the passage if I had it online, but that's a paraphrase from a recent reading.
Also, continuing the quote:
[quote=S]
Still, instead of trusting what their own minds tell them, men have as a rule a weakness for trusting others who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge. And in view of the enormous intellectual inequality between man and man, it is easy to see that the thoughts of one mind might appear as in some sense a revelation to another.
[/quote]
Obviously, but I'll say it anyway, Schopenhauer is no authority. It's just that the man could write and that we both find him fascinating.
I agree that the matter is far more complex than I've made it out to be. Nevertheless, I noticed something viz. the identical nature of the two with respect to truth - both sides claim it - and thought it would be nice to bring it to people's attention.
I'm not making an argument. Just reporting on what caught my eye.
I have done a bit more thinking on the paradox of theism and atheism, as well as reading the interaction between you and @180 Proof. I can see that, to a large extent, we are in the position of talking about both the theist and the atheist striving to find the 'truth' , and making claims about it. The paradox of this is one which makes sense to you and I, because we seem to be happy sitting on the fence. I think that Jung seems to be in this position, more or less, although, unfortunately, we can't really ask him to clarify.
I think what it does come down to is whether it is possible to answer the question of the ultimate reality absolutely. I think that @180 Proof seems to be suggesting that knowing ultimate reality, such as God is rather futile. However, I am aware that many have strived to do so. I am interested in exploring the possibilities but I think that it is so hard to grasp fully. I think that it is partly a matter of language but also about limitations of conception, and the two are connected because we think in language. Of course, there is mathematics, which is not my favourite area, and images.
Jung is interesting in images and symbols in particular, in dreams or in the arts. So, for Jung symbolic ways of understanding truth about reality was important too, especially the idea of archetypes, especially those within religious experience. Another aspect which I do see as essential to the Jungian view is his whole interest in Eastern philosophy, especially Taoism. The understanding of God in Taoism is different from that described by many Christian thinkers. However, I have not much theology, because what I tried reading I found a bit insular and not approaching the wider philosophical picture.
Nietzsche didn't oppose the ascetic ideal itself but said it is not sufficient for our life. Nor is it the only source of meaning.
In the Genealogy of Morals, he says:
Go on, Friedrich, tell us how you really feel.
"You damn right, I've got the blues" ~Buddy Guy :cool:
Yes, I want to know, in the here and now. I don't wish to have to spend time searching in the foggy mist. To some extent, it can be worthwhile, but if the truth cannot be found it could be futile, despite my enjoyment of reading the rich and imaginative insights offered by Jung.
I do appreciate Graves, Borges and Graves l do have read Jung and have found him worthwhile, but would not wish to put him on a pedestal. I am particularly aware of aspects of his work which are open to critical attack, especially his failure to speak against the ideas of Nazi Germany at a critical time in history.
A lot of Jung's ideas seem unfalsifiable to me. Pseudoscience seems to have a negative connotation. Plenty of philosophy would fit the definition as unfalsifiable, but that doesn't mean it lacks analytical value.
As someone who studied neuroscience in college, the emphasis on dreams in particular hits a discordant note, as evidence for dreams as a "voice of the unconcious" has failed to materialize. That said, I certainly have gotten benefits from recording and reflecting on my dreams, during which I relive old relationships and experiences. The weird confusion of time and relations had helped me relate to my father in law who suffers from Alzheimer's.
I did just start Jung's autobiography, which is very interesting as a highly, intensely reflective work by someone at the end of his life who put a lot of work into self analysis. Apparently this is actually the work where Jung gets most into his own religious convictions, but I'm just starting out and I actually think I'm going to put it down and read Man's Search for Meaning first since I see it so highly recommend and Frankl's logo therapy sounds interesting.
The idea of conceiving the Bible as a psychological took is deeply interesting to me. So much of Christian theology is centered around doctrine and applying logic to a humanist text. It seems backwards in some ways. The idea of a God that develops psychologically also makes a good deal of sense, although I know this predates Jung by over a century in the German pietists that influenced Hegel.
For me, Jung's work is all worth it just for the work of his student Robert A. Johnson. His books are a mixture of literary criticism and reader directed psychology and I've found them very helpful. They're also all about 100 pages so they are quick to get through.
I am glad that some one else on the site finds Jung's work reading. He is on the fringe of psychology, but I do believe that he explores many philosophical questions, although in a unique way. Certainly, I have found his work makes a lot of sense, in exploring religious experience and in considering belief in God.