Answer to Job
Posted: Wed May 02, 2018 6:13 pm
In this amazing book, written in the early 1950s, the great analytical psychologist Carl Jung provides a psychoanalytical deconstruction of the Biblical theory of God. Rather than the conventional theory of God as a personal entity, Jung sees God as a psychological construction, an emergent function of the order of the universe, existing only through nature. This means that God only becomes conscious through the existence of mind, specifically through human thought.
Jung is immensely sympathetic to spirituality, as the core of human identity, but approaches the whole field of religion with an unrelenting rigorous philosophical focus, looking at how the theory of God evolved in relation to human consciousness.
There is a triple irony here, with layers of irony piled upon metaphor piled upon analysis. Firstly, Jung’s approach will be regarded by pious religious believers as atheist, grounded in empirical materialist philosophy. The irony is that Jung probably does a better job than anyone of showing how Biblical texts deserve respect. Secondly, the doyen of modern atheism, Richard Dawkins, showed himself clueless in The God Delusion about this whole topic of spiritual psychology by pronouncing Jung a religious extremist on the atheism-believer spectrum, although Jung completely rejects literal supernatural claims. The third irony is the twinkle in Jung’s eye when he told the TV interviewer that he knew God existed, which was the reason Dawkins mislabeled him. Jung was using ‘exist’ in a rather metaphorical constructed sense here, which seems to have escaped Dawkins’ narrowly scientifically trained reading.
An online copy of Answer to Job is at https://archive.org/stream/ThePortableJ ... g_djvu.txt I am presenting a talk about this book at the Canberra Jung Society in July, so will use this thread to help sort my thoughts, welcoming any discussion.
To open this discussion, I will respond to Harry Marks’ astute comments at the recent Evolution of God thread.
As philosophy developed in Europe, a key question of debate was the status and meaning of religion. One of the most important writers on this topic in the nineteenth century was Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued in The Essence of Christianity that God is a projection of human imagination, a fantasy created in man's image. While atheist secular philosophers such as Marx took Feuerbach’s analysis as an attack on religion, Jung used such ideas to transform religion to recognise spiritual construction as essential to human identity.
My view is that climate change is fundamentally a religious problem, and that only with a transformation of religious consciousness, recognising our apocalyptic situation in the analytic way that Jung advocated, does humanity have a chance to escape collapse or extinction. Treating climate only in the terrains of politics and science and economics fails to engage the psychology of religion that produces the blindness to the problem.
Jung is immensely sympathetic to spirituality, as the core of human identity, but approaches the whole field of religion with an unrelenting rigorous philosophical focus, looking at how the theory of God evolved in relation to human consciousness.
There is a triple irony here, with layers of irony piled upon metaphor piled upon analysis. Firstly, Jung’s approach will be regarded by pious religious believers as atheist, grounded in empirical materialist philosophy. The irony is that Jung probably does a better job than anyone of showing how Biblical texts deserve respect. Secondly, the doyen of modern atheism, Richard Dawkins, showed himself clueless in The God Delusion about this whole topic of spiritual psychology by pronouncing Jung a religious extremist on the atheism-believer spectrum, although Jung completely rejects literal supernatural claims. The third irony is the twinkle in Jung’s eye when he told the TV interviewer that he knew God existed, which was the reason Dawkins mislabeled him. Jung was using ‘exist’ in a rather metaphorical constructed sense here, which seems to have escaped Dawkins’ narrowly scientifically trained reading.
An online copy of Answer to Job is at https://archive.org/stream/ThePortableJ ... g_djvu.txt I am presenting a talk about this book at the Canberra Jung Society in July, so will use this thread to help sort my thoughts, welcoming any discussion.
To open this discussion, I will respond to Harry Marks’ astute comments at the recent Evolution of God thread.
Jung’s starting point for his analysis of religion was his scientific training as a medical doctor, combined with his deeply intimate knowledge of the philosophy of the modern scientific enlightenment.Harry Marks wrote:This strikes me as just as amazing as when I first read your post.Robert Tulip wrote:Canberra Jung Society asked me to give a talk in July on Carl Jung’s book Answer to Job, which explores this very question. I will start a thread on it here. Jung has an amazing take on this point about the consciousness of God, arguing that God only became conscious through man, and that before the rise of human thought there was no meaning to the idea of a conscious God.DWill wrote: defining God as external consciousness, the against side created a "so what?"
As philosophy developed in Europe, a key question of debate was the status and meaning of religion. One of the most important writers on this topic in the nineteenth century was Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued in The Essence of Christianity that God is a projection of human imagination, a fantasy created in man's image. While atheist secular philosophers such as Marx took Feuerbach’s analysis as an attack on religion, Jung used such ideas to transform religion to recognise spiritual construction as essential to human identity.
The “spirit between us” is the principle of connection that emerges in language and dialogue. And yet this connection is not only between people, but with nature itself. It is possible to conceive of God more broadly as the stable order of the cosmos, while also recognising that cosmic order is reflected in language, with scientific knowledge in its descriptions of natural order providing a primary site of the presence of divine energy in the world.Harry Marks wrote: Not because it is somehow mind-bending to think of God as not-conscious before humans: as you may recall I have been conceptualizing God as a spirit between us all for quite a while now.
I am having trouble understanding exactly what you mean here. An example might help explain.Harry Marks wrote: Rather because Jung is "taking the direct route" and explaining spiritual truths in mythical language, without packing and unpacking all the correspondences a person could use to check on them.
This sense of Jung as a modern prophet is very helpful, given that the concept of prophecy has such a bad reputation. Your point about learning to study on what God wanted is key. Where I think Jung has an advantage is his scientific philosophy, which gives a far stronger grounding in truth than any religious assumptions about supernatural entities actually existing. A ‘mythical force’ in this context is primarily psychological, the emotional and social power that any symbol gains through being believed or used. The prophetic dimension in Jung emerges in his analysis of zodiac ages, which provide an empirical framework for the structure of time, as I argue in my recent paper on The Precessional Structure of Time.Harry Marks wrote: I rather suspect the prophets were skilled in this practice. By learning to study on what God wanted, rather than what they wanted, (thereby gaining a certain distance from the reflection), they gained access to the complex but systematic process of understanding mythical forces directly. I don't know if Jung did that or just hid the packing and unpacking.
I agree. In my conversations with secular scholars, I have encountered an emotional repugnance toward religious practice and belief, a methodological view that anyone who participates in religion is thereby barred from commenting on religion. There is a view, in your terms, that ‘talking to the mystery’ through prayer and worship contaminates scholarship with bias. The root of that view is a proper rejection of fundamentalism, but the problem is that the secular rejection becomes a religion itself, when it involves unquestioned emotional belief that a life of prayer and worship excludes a person from objective scholarship.Harry Marks wrote:Yet talking "about" the mystery is never the same social and psychological process as talking "to" the mystery.Robert Tulip wrote:This is a really central problem for atheism. It is fine for individuals to hold the logical argument that the universe consists of matter in motion, but that entirely misses the point of the social function of religion, how the concept of God serves an essential purpose of recognising that reality is mysterious, and yet we can talk about the mystery anyway.DWill wrote: Might we be missing something essential if our answer is to kick spirituality out of the picture?
The nub here is “more likely”. Jung’s Answer to Job is entirely talking about God and the social function of religion, and serves as an excellent guide into the mystery of life. However, Jung is not adopting the common methodology of psychological disdain for religion that is often seen in sociology and some other academic fields.Harry Marks wrote: I am beginning to suspect that talking about God, and about the social function of religion, is more likely to be an escape from engagement with the mystery of life than a guide into it.
More worrying really. The 1960s predictions of resource depletion by the Club of Rome turned out not to be well based, and instead the primary world problem is that carbon emissions are cooking the planet. This process of growth through fossil fuels has induced a psychological complacency, even though the simple linear trend line of increase in emissions is spectacularly dangerous. The primary security risk for our planet is that we now add three parts per million of CO2 to the air every year, compared to just 0.4 ppm added in 1950, increasing the cooking rate like the proverbial frog in the pot.Harry Marks wrote:In sheer biological terms, the disruption caused by humanity is as worrying as the Club of Rome scenario of Malthusian overreach.Robert Tulip wrote:I ... found myself disturbed by the impression of a shared excessive level of optimism about moral evolution. We certainly have become less advanced on the criterion of biodiversity, with the great genetic inheritance of our planet under sustained concerted assault by our species. I see this as crucial, since if we can’t protect our nest our children have little prospect.
My view is that climate change is fundamentally a religious problem, and that only with a transformation of religious consciousness, recognising our apocalyptic situation in the analytic way that Jung advocated, does humanity have a chance to escape collapse or extinction. Treating climate only in the terrains of politics and science and economics fails to engage the psychology of religion that produces the blindness to the problem.