Jung’s The Undiscovered Self

I had forgotten how alternately illuminating, infuriating and amusing it can be to read Jung. It takes a definite kind of brilliant mind to be able to go from deep and penetrating to bizarre and odd-ball without blinking.

But when he’s on target, he’s on target, and the questions he asks can trouble you and gnaw at you for hours and days. I like some of his take on religion. Jung defines religion and creed as separate things — religion is, to Jung “dependence upon and submission to the irrational facts of existence.” Creed is the simplistic formulation of beliefs, attitudes, ideas, imposed by churches. “Creed” is a mechanistic thing that does violence to the individual, defines their worth as only coming from a relation to a body of Received Truth. It turns subjective experience into a rigid set of Things to Accept. It denies individual agency and experience in favor of submission to the group.

As an artsy person, I’m interested in that non-rational side of things, the experience of the world: the emotional side. I think Jung is right in one important respect: we need, all of us, to feel gripped by something larger than ourselves (“ourselves” being, here,  our conscious, thinking selves), while still retaining our individuality. For me, I don’t need the structures of religion, though I grok what Jung means by “religious experience.” I find mine in other sources, including in what we have learned from the sciences. My “dependence” upon the irrational facts of existence includes the deep-seated feeling of connection to the rest of animal life, to other humans. It is not an image of myself as an insignificant instance in the long history of life, but rather how each and every life form is a unique instance* in that history. If you take humans alone, of all the billions of humans that have existed there has been only one me. I am unique, and yet also related to all others. That, when I stop to contemplate it, is a wonderful thing. (*yes, an overstatement, given all the asexual reproduction out there, and clones — bees, say. But you know what I mean)

My beef with religion (Jung’s “Creeds”) and literal belief in things like deities is that it denigrates individual subjective experience, attempts to make it conform to the group formula. The same can be said of many secular creeds, as Jung notes. As a result, one of the ways that I part with Jung is in contemplating the utility of religions as they exist — just to take one example, “God” is a metaphor in Jung’s conception, not a real, existing entity. Sadly, in a world where literal belief is so rampant, the metaphorical possibilities of such words is dampened. If we need metaphors for those “irrational facts of existence,” I think we need to look elsewhere. Maybe that’s why I’m more comfortable with Sagan’s metaphorical use of the word “Cosmos” than I am with the word “God.” Keep using a word like God and it doesn’t matter how metaphorical you are being — people are going to hear what they mean by the word, not what you mean, and your point will be lost.

But still, I have a weak spot for ol’ Jung. Even when he starts drifting a bit into batty territory and talking about paranormal phenomena.

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Tags: Atheism, Jung, psychology, religion