Robert Tulip wrote: Heidegger used Kierkegaard as his primary inspiration for his core idea that care is the meaning of being, that existential ontology requires a 'jump into the circle' of what science critiques as the circular reasoning of faith.
For Heidegger, this focus on care is a faith statement, like your most recent comment that your "system" conceptualizes God as the Spirit of Caring. Care is what Heidegger calls the basis for a ‘fundamental ontology’, a primary concern that grounds any thinking about ethics and beauty.
A lot of misleading commentary has been generated around Kierkegaard's famous "leap of faith." Heidegger put things more accessibly, abstract though his writing may have been. Kierkegaard was a master ironist, and I can't help thinking that his choice of "leap" (or the Danish equivalent) was irony. It is a leap in the sense that Achilles catching the tortoise is a leap, or perhaps Alexander's cutting of the Gordian knot. It is a natural step, made to seem unnatural only by some bizarre side considerations raised by the difficulties of formal philosophy.
Modern interpretations have made it sound as though Kierkegaard advocated belief in a supernatural deity as a blindfolded step out into an abyss, like Indiana Jones trusting that an invisible bridge will hold him up. Not at all his idea of faith. Only if you take a Cartesian (or Hume-ian) approach of trying to radically doubt everything you cannot prove does faith take on any problematic aspect. From a Cartesian standpoint, we have no reason to care about anything, much less about that which most evokes our caring.
But once you see that caring is a fundamental ontology, like motion (which Zeno found so divertingly perplexing), the problems are considerably simplified. Kierkegaard was refuting Anselm's argument that an existing deity was better than a non-existing one so God's perfection required God's existence (or, perhaps more relevantly, he was refuting Berkeley). This insight was formalized in Sartre's dictum that existence precedes essence. One might generalize in a more Heideggerian vocabulary by arguing that caring precedes right caring.
Robert Tulip wrote: Without such systematic logic, our moral and aesthetic ideas are bereft, drifting without anchor. The sense of wholeness achieved through care illustrates a shared goal between Heidegger and Jung.
It has only just now occurred to me, thinking through these matters, that the "fundamental ontology" recognized by Heidegger could be the real referent to Tillich's idea of the "ground of Being." That is, I had been thinking that Tillich was working out of a philosophical concept of the fundamental status of being itself, and so he may have been, but one could as well find the ground of Being in caring. Hmm. I will give it more thought.
Robert Tulip wrote:Kant’s ethical maxim, which equally influenced Jung and Heidegger as giants of twentieth century thought, was to treat other people as ends and never as means. Kant called this the categorical imperative, our highest duty. It is a rather fraught and messianic teaching, since worldly success is so thoroughly enmeshed with the conflicting ethical view that we should use other people as means to further our own interests.
Kant's formulation certainly rules out unethical behavior nicely. However, it does not have to make ethics incompatible with worldly success. In the simplified way you have stated it here, perhaps so, because commerce always entails relating to other people as a means to our ends. But that statement neglects the weighty matter of common goals, or as the sociologists say, common projects.
Adam Smith (whose main other book was "The Theory of Moral Sentiments") famously argued that we owe the exertions of the baker not to the baker's concern for us but to the effects of self-interest, mediated by the Invisible Hand of the market. This sounds like treating others as an end is foolhardy and quixotic, impossibly separated from the relevant processes of work and earning. But now consider that in a typical household the exertions of each are consciously part of a system with goals such as raising children or providing mutual companionship. It is easy to see that meeting material needs is part of achieving these common goals, and for many households, perhaps most, that is how things actually work.
In a similar way the baker may see his exertions as part of a system which achieves common goals, such as meeting people's material needs so that they may be more effective at democracy. The market merely provides information about which needs are most exigent. The baker taking such a view would not be treating others as a means simply to his own private goals, and indeed would be treating them as ends, as part of common goals. Such a baker, in fact, would have every reason to resist a temptation to cheat others even if he thought he could get away with it. The well-being of others has become part of his goals and the subsidiary matter of what to devote his time to is a matter of bringing that common project down to earth as a practical process.
The Invisible Hand is morally neutral - it is an observation about information, and perhaps about how motivation works - but it does not exclude people treating others as both end and means in the same way that we treat our bodies as both end and means.
Robert Tulip wrote:The spiritual rejection of worldly amorality creates a sort of enlightened detachment that gives less priority to traction and engagement, preferring instead to see things under the eye of eternity. The Gospels present this problem in terms of Jesus Christ returning from the mountain of transfiguration to the plain of worldly suffering, from divine contemplation to the confrontation of the cross.
Preferring to see things under the eye of eternity is, spiritually speaking, equivalent to preferring to breathe. There is no alternative. When we are young we are properly focused on our own ability to formulate and pursue goals, and that is normal. But in a healthy system we are able to move on to begin recognizing the vision of the eye of eternity. By the time we are in a position of explaining life to the young, we should be able to give some account of life in terms of common goals and systems to achieve them.
The return to the world of suffering is a constant movement from contemplation of ideals to the tasks of implementation. I will give a simple (or not) example which has been on my mind lately.
The rich, meaning the people with high six figure incomes, prefer to engage in partnerships with other rich people, or with those who understand and agree with the goals of money-making. This is understandable, as a defensive reaction against the distractions and competing goals which a person might be subject to, such as personal recognition or sympathy to workers. A person with such divided loyalties cannot be trusted to make a joint venture go the way that will make the most money. I have seen a similar dynamic in Africa, where the elite and the cosmopolitan hang around mainly with others who are elite or cosmopolitan, mainly as a way of avoiding the unbearable pressure of educated young people seeking productive work. The piranha bites of the job-seekers eventually force insiders to avoid them.
How is the Christ of mountaintop exaltation of peace to deal with such a system, pernicious yet fundamentally innocent? Well, I don't know, but avoiding the problem is not the way of peace. Of that I'm sure. Design a better system? Craft doorways and doorkeepers who have some more complex algorithm for dealing with the matter? I don't know. But the declarations for peace in the solemn assemblies count for far less than any practical steps for dealing with such fragmentation.
Robert Tulip wrote:Dr Google gives me these definitions of absolute:
“adjective 1. not qualified or diminished in any way; total. "absolute secrecy" synonyms: complete, total, utter, out-and-out, outright, entire, perfect, pure, decided; 2. viewed or existing independently and not in relation to other things; not relative or comparative. "absolute moral standards" synonyms: universal, fixed, independent, non-relative, non-variable, absolutist;
noun PHILOSOPHY 1. a value or principle which is regarded as universally valid or which may be viewed without relation to other things. "good and evil are presented as absolutes"
Well, my thanks to Dr. Google for a more careful definition. I think "not subject to qualifications" is what I was essentially trying to get at with my idea of "than which one cannot go beyond." "Not relative" is certainly at the heart of the matter, and so one would say "not conditional on relation to other things" is the essential meaning, at least in the context of Kierkegaard's issues around transcendence.
Robert Tulip wrote:I think of the absolute in terms of fate, an inexorable causality. For example, the absolute fate of the sun is described by the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram of stellar evolution.
Yet the average person has very little interest in or acquaintance with such inexorable fates in material terms. Maybe that accounts for their dismal response to the information about global warming.
Robert Tulip wrote:God can be defined as the absolute fate of the earth, in a way that opens Jung’s problem of how the Christian moral vision of a God of love can be reconciled with the old ideas of fear and wrath. If human civilization departs from a path of compatibility with the natural fate of the earth, then the absolute end result of this departure can be experienced as the wrath of God.
Maybe, but as a rhetorical strategy this suffers from the subjectivity of claims about the wrath of God. I prefer a neutral argument based on evidence, with perhaps a little self-consciously metaphorical comparison to give it pungency and traction.
Robert Tulip wrote:Calling modern psychology ‘Jesuitical’ (using dissembling, oversubtle, crafty or sly reasoning) may be old fashioned, but in this case, the existence and nature of moral absolutes, the deception is as bad on both sides.
Religious traditions justify moral absolutes by reference to an absolute God, while modern relativists deny absolutes for the opposite reason, that there is no God. Jung seeks to wade through this morass, exploring how the origin of the tradition in books such as Job may actually be quite different from how traditionalists portray it, even while the tradition responds to the unconscious meaning.
Yes, I agree that both sides are deceiving themselves, mainly in an attempt to manipulate others. In the modern world it is much easier to see the deception at the heart of the Absolutist Religious Authoritarian approach. Not so easy to see the nihilism in operation in the contrasting effort to pursue "adjustment" by avoiding moral obligation. In the context of a patient who is struggling with neurotic inner fragmentation, that way may be easier than to explain a more forgiving moral framework than the one bedeviling them. But when it is willfully taken up as one's map and compass for life, the result is people who have lost their way. The fundamental ontology at the core of meaning is no longer accessible to them, and they are at the mercy of whatever system of self-deception comes down the road.
Robert Tulip wrote:Acknowledging Saint Leonard of the Chelsea Hotel is a nice way to look at how faith transcends ethics. Cohen was an expert in finding meaning in fragmentation and pain. So often people prefer to pretend we can ignore and avoid brokenness, creating deluded and unbalanced ideologies such as all resurrection and no cross, all love and no fear, all light and no dark.
There's a blaze of light in every word, and it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy, or the broken, "Alleluia".
Robert Tulip wrote:This is where Jung’s focus on the psychology of the apocalypse in Answer to Job is interesting. His sober recognition that the world does face apocalyptic risks, and that the ideas in the Bible can be helpful in addressing such risks, seems to me the best way to confront denial.
There certainly are absolutes for the fate of the earth. In Answer to Job Jung uses the risks of nuclear and chemical warfare as examples. Today we could focus on climate change.
I think I am coming around to agreeing with this. I have seen, over and over in my life, practical considerations trumping idealistic ones. To some extent that is as it should be, and an "Ought" presumes a "Can." (But Brueggemann's "The Prophetic Imagination" argues, essentially, "take another look at that claim of what is impossible. And then take still another look.")
In the apocalyptic case we have to get past our sense that individual effort is helpless before the inexorable will of the crowd or operation of the system, because the results of the blind crowd or the uncurtailed system are too devastating to be accepted. In a strange kind of reversal, what was seen as idealistic becomes the dominant aspect of reality.
Robert Tulip wrote:Religion is different from physics – the objective certainty of physical observations like the H-R star map is quantitative, whereas moral obligations and religious symbols are always qualitative, carrying a high level of uncertainty.
The moral obligations that engage our attention tend to be the ones that have some ambiguity in them, like Haidt's Trolley. But the ones we have well integrated and understand through and through are no less important.
But I am not invested in arguing absoluteness of moral rules, but rather in arguing the importance of a structure of meaning which is flexible enough to accept that some types of moral ambiguity are part of the way values work. The Cohen/Jung recognition of shadows and cracks is a vantage point from which to see the operation of the ambiguity, but it would be a mistake to give up on maps of meaning just because they have to work with shadows and cracks. That is the same fallacy as that of refusing forgiveness because only God can forgive.
Robert Tulip wrote:Harry Marks wrote:Okay, here things get really messy.
I prefer to argue that these technical definitions of God operate with abstract precision rather than mess. For Jung, his philosophical heritage combined a respect for the logical tradition from Spinoza that equated God with nature together with a psychological openness to mystery, seen in weird ideas like synchronicity, alchemy and cabala.
There is a slightly autistic aspect to a pure Spinozist faith, since the Deist logic of God as Nature lacks the personal qualities that are central to actual functioning mythology such as Christianity. The messiness comes in as we try to marry the logic with actual religion, as seen in the moral dilemmas arising from study of Job.
It is critical that we recognize the different operation of concepts in what Popper called "World Three", where the concept refers to something entirely created by human thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds
It isn't just epistemology that works differently for such topics: different questions matter.
There is a very, very different quality in the question "Which is truly more democratic?" than in the question, "Which is more truly a tree?" The second is about words, the first is about the constructions that can be created using words. Agreeing on the meaning of "democratic" is, in part, an agreement about what we will value.
As a result, the longing for abstract precision in defining the content of our "Ultimate Concern" (or even agreeing on whether such a thing as ultimate concern exists) is misplaced. It may not be as misguided as the fundamentalist's longing for absolute supernatural authority for their beliefs, but there is a kinship. The "slightly autistic" lack of personal qualities is a distraction: it is not hard to get a fundamentalist to agree that our conceptualizations of God are all inadequate. Try it sometime and you will see.
I see the Jungian (and New Age) openness to weirdness "within nature" as basically a set of ways to access our relationship to our archetypal psychological structures. Tarot cards and astrology basically work with projection, where our fears and other shadowy emotional forces are given a chance to emerge despite our efforts to repress them. Any psychologist working with personalities will find the same thing in Rohrschach methodology and Thematic apperception tests, for example.
Robert Tulip wrote: From our point of view as a species living on earth, the ultimate question is what we must do to survive, based on understanding of what features of reality affect us.
Well, I think the question of what makes life worthwhile is even more fundamental. But the two questions will line up remarkably well, since one cannot do species survival as a game against other human beings.
Robert Tulip wrote:It means a step back from the sense that our God is the ultimate creator of the universe, toward a view that our God is the aspects of the universe that are relevant to us. This helps to put care at the focus of faith.
Or we could just put the questions of care at the focus of faith. Of course that is essentially what you do when you ask for "the aspects of the universe that are relevant to us."
Robert Tulip wrote:My starting point for faith is to say we should aim only to have faith in things that are real and true.
Dealing with world three objects, "real" and "true" are ambiguous issues.
Robert Tulip wrote:That engages with a big tradition in theology, the proof of the existence of God. That tradition has been badly corrupted by the church assumption that the God of the Bible is the creator of the universe.
That tradition is motivated by a corrupt question: how to manipulate people into living a caring life by threats from the other world.
Robert Tulip wrote:I prefer to look at that problem in a more humble way, starting with what we know actually exists, asking what about existence is good from a human perspective, and defining that as God. Then the messy integration task starts of reconciling knowledge and logic with tradition and mythology, which is where Jung is such an invaluable guide to the perplexed.
Yes, the question of what about existence is good is a proper starting place for integrating knowledge with values. But given that Jung and others, like the entire profession of anthropology, has shown that the mythological represents to us the complexity of our relationship to life, it takes a lot of faith in human reason to suppose that we can construct a great society without reference to the forces shown by mythology.