But is all such belief pathological? Is some - any - of it a good or in the service of a good? Is there an ultimate yardstick, measure, bottom line by which I may judge that guy over there a nutcase, him and his worth leaving to the professionals? — tim wood

Before anyone would have to make a judgment or decision about some one else's condition, there would have to be some period of time where they are perceived. Freud's and other psychologist's descriptions of pathology are systems of observation. The different points of view that separated Freud and Jung, for example, were expressed as contrary theories of development but were also divergent responses to the people they interacted with.

I think the bottom line is that people suffer and we try to make sense of what is going on. The attempt will always be problematic because it happens in an environment where judgments happen. That environment is not strictly the creation of psychologists.

Or is all ungrounded belief necessarily ultimately evil*. — tim wood

Hmmm.

What is existence for? What does all of our rationality aim at ?

Do 'we rational ones' have a good plan, tend to agree? Who's in the club?

Belief or reason does not automatically lead to good or evil, one or the other. We know of many bright intellectuals who turned to despotism and tyranny. Take Robespierre. He criticized the death penalty and inequality, yet instituted the reign of terror. Any man, believer or not, no matter what’s in his mind or heart, can be just and therefor good.

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In the club are the rational ones. And ideally we reconcile using reason. Against the unreasoning or the unreasonable, it seems that ultimately, it's force that's needed. A problem with that, among the many, is that unless the force is applied, the transgression against reason may very well prevail. — tim wood

That does sound reasonable. My concern on this issue is that most of us identify with reason. Even if all the 'religious' or unreasonable people were put away, would we not still have conflict?

I'm also concerned that human beings aren't essentially prudent. Notes From Underground is a great picture of human complexity.

There seems to be a background fantasy of the end of history, where everyone is rational and woke. But we knights of reason would lose our dragon and our purpose there. There is no joy in the tavern as on the road thereto ?

Most religion imo is just this kind of pathology. — tim wood

I think reading between the lines, your problem is that part of you wants to believe in God, but your rational intellect can’t figure out what it would mean to do so, so you’re striking out against it.

I studied a lot of Freud’s essays as an undergrad. He was brilliant but utterly committed to scientific rationalism. I remember some of his aphorisms, like ‘the task of psychoanalysis is to convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness’. I remember thinking at the time, nothing more than that?

This is why Jung broke with Freud. Jung was by no stretch conventionally religious (I don’t know if you’ve read his autobiography with the scatalogical dream about the Church.) But he really was a modern gnostic, who understood the role of spirituality in the formation of the individual.

He said

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook. — Jung

I think there’s a problem which I describe as ‘Westernitis’. It’s a deep-seated complex about religion, science and meaning, growing out of Enlightenment rationalism and the scientific worldview. It was originally caused by institutional Christianity itself, which put enormous emphasis on right belief, and there were wars fought over what that meant. It’s caused a shadow in the Western psyche, which manifests as a pathological hatred of religion. And yes, you do see a lot of it.

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Great response. I really don't know. I take the freedom (such as it is) of the US system for granted. My suspicion is that we're all a little mad, and that maybe life would be dreary without that madness.

I remember some of his aphorisms, like ‘the task of psychoanalysis is to convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness’. I remember thinking at the time, nothing more than that? — Wayfarer

I read that line as deadpan humor. Freud and Jung talked for 18 (?) hours when they first met. To me this suggests that Freud loved ideas, loved his system. Since he was a creator and inspired by Romantic thinkers, I'd lump him in with the artists. I'm guessing he knew intense joy.

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Freud and Jung talked for 18 (?) hours when they first met. To me this suggests that Freud loved ideas, loved his system. Since he was a creator and inspired by Romantic thinkers, I'd lump him in with the artists. I'm guessing he knew intense joy. — jellyfish

There was a famous episode where Jung broke with Freud for once and for all.

First few paragraphs of a review of a biography of Jung:

CARL JUNG'S relationship with Sigmund Freud was probably doomed from the start. They met in Vienna on March 3, 1907, after having corresponded for a year. Freud sought a gentile to champion his ''Jewish science.'' Jung yearned for an influential father figure; Freud anointed Jung ''his scientific 'son and heir.' '' In 1910 [at their last meeting] Freud made a request: ''Promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. . . . We must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.'' Against what?, asked Jung. ''Against the black tide of mud . . . of occultism.''

What did Jung's face look like at that moment? After all, not only did Jung have growing misgivings about Freud's theories of sexual repression, his past was a veritable cornucopia of occultism: as a child, he participated in family séances run by his cousin; his mother, a delusional hysteric with a split personality, believed their house was haunted by ghosts; and Jung's dissertation (''On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena'') was sympathetic to the paranormal. By 1913, the Freud-Jung friendship was over. ''The rest is silence,'' Jung wrote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/books/in-the-jung-archives.html

Chalk and cheese. Mind you, Freud, for all his fame, has been more or less relegated to history by the very science that he was so desperate to advance. And the 'Black tide of mud', an expression which I think signifies a kind of terror, included anything vaguely 'spiritual'; he was the hardest of hardcore materialists. Freud, Marx and Darwin are amongst the three greatest influences on 20th century thinking, all the more difficult to appreciate because we're used to looking through the spectacles they provided us, not at them.

I do have such a belief. But in nothing at all supernatural. Because for the supernatural to be, for God to be - other than as a regulative idea - means it is no longer supernatural, or God. That is, in my belief, God cannot be. — tim wood

I think I understand your point here, but please bear with me. First, the very word 'supernatural' can only be defined in terms of what it isn't - and what it isn't, is anything the natural sciences can't consider. Isn't it? The Latin 'supernatural' and the Greek 'metaphysical' are basically synonyms, and for Enlightenment rationalism, both are partitioned off from sensible discourse; matters of faith, or private belief, if of any import at all.

But, all that said, there's a kernel of an important point in what you've said. If you have a glance at these three paragraphs, which I might have mentioned previously, they make a very similar point; 'things accessible to the senses and the intellect are said to be, whereas anything which, ‘through the excellence of its nature’ (per excellentiam suae naturae), transcends our faculties are said not to be. According to this classification, God, because of his transcendence is said not to be; He is ‘nothingness through excellence’ (nihil per excellentiam). I think it's close in spirit to what you're saying.

We all have met people, even here on this site, that believe in in the unbelievable, adduce evidence that is not evidence, rely on "facts" that are not facts, truth that isn't true, unreal realities, etc., and anything else like that can be added. — tim wood

As opposed to the true truths and real realities that you yourself believe in?

Come on. I thought this was a philosophy forum.

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"Unbelievable" does not mean that in which I do not believe. The expression for that would be, "I do not believe in...". Instead, "unbelievable" is about the thing referred to. Similarly with the rest of the list. Being able to make that distinction is an elementary aspect of any thinking. — tim wood

Isn't calling something unbelievable akin to saying one doesn't believe in it?

Maybe I misunderstand what your point.

Unless you're such a person whose stance is that nothing is, except as it is believed by you, and not otherwise - belief-in and only belief-in being the sine qua non of (any) being at all.

As it happens, that is exactly how and only how gods exist: in as much and as so far as they're believed in. This is recognized, acknowledged, and understood in the fundamental prayer of Christians, which starts out, "We believe..." — tim wood

I'm not religious, if that is what you are hinting at.

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Fourth cousin six times removed? — tim wood

What?

I can say I do not believe that 2+2=4, and that would be a comment about me. Or I can say that 2+2=37 is unbelievable, and that would be a comment about the proposition. — tim wood

Sure, but isn't the sentiment underlying the second proposition that one doesn't believe 2+2=37?

If it is not believable, then all that's left is that someone believes it. — tim wood

Isn't the question whether something is believable or not based on one's subjective judgement?

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Which, if that is the case, then does it follow that if someone believes it then it must be so? — tim wood

No.

But a difficulty arises when we seek to prove or disprove it, though disproving is generally easier than proving.

I guess what I'm getting at is that one shouldn't speak too condescendingly about another's beliefs, considering we all hold beliefs, and beliefs merely conceal ignorance.

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I don't even understand what you're asking. Can you just ask a clear, "bottom line" question?

I was just using Freud as an example, not focusing on issues in psychology. — tim wood

It is confusing to set that comment against another one you made:

"But is all such belief pathological? Is some - any - of it a good or in the service of a good? Is there an ultimate yardstick, measure, bottom line by which I may judge that guy over there a nutcase, him and his worth leaving to the professionals?"

It is confusing from the point of view that Freud was a professional. Someone hired to address problems. It is one thing to argue that he got all his ideas wrong but to cast all those ideas as objects outside of all common rational experience is odd. The theory he formulated was an attempt to understand what was happening in front of him.

It is also confusing because you seem to be equating attempts to understand people with problems as judgments upon them. While it is true that these activities have a history of being conflated in many ways, one virtue of the appearance of psychological science and language is the opportunity to separate what in the past was all mixed up with each other.

The only way I find any God at all is within my ideas, my thinking. — tim wood

This is where I'm at too. With philosophy comes a self-consciousness that makes traditional religious belief more difficult. God as he exists for me is tautologically an object of my thinking and feeling.

'He' is, however, the object, in my opinion. The atheistic philosopher, it seems to me, just wants to become God. The philosopher wants knowledge, power, tranquility, self-sufficingness, coherence --all the stuff we have associated with God.

In art we often have God as a bearded king. To me our images of God are human for a reason. That's the only God we can care about and imagine caring about us. Humanism /enlightenment is the moment when the son (our species) takes over for the father (its essence projected).

As we discussed earlier, however, humanism is entangled with a corrosive reason and has its own problems.

one shouldn't speak too condescendingly about another's beliefs, considering we all hold beliefs — Tzeentch

I agree with you, basically. One things that occurs to me is that a community is more or less formed by unquestioned and even unquestionable beliefs and habits. So there's a limit to open-mindedness. We have no choice but to consider some people mad or be mad ourselves.

As philosophers, I think we are more dangerously open-minded than non-philosophers. We try to think and maybe even live on the frontier of the respectable and the sane. (This describes only one kind of philosopher, I guess. Others want to further make explicit and justify the culture's way of being, beliefs, etc.)

If a person converted to the correct religion, and then only had 10 days to live, i would argue you would be quite impressed with that religion's particular set of beliefs. Thus you would be impressed with religion or a set of beliefs.

Most people including myself, if given a little extended period of time on this earth will make serious mistakes or do wicked things.

Do you think atheists conduct themselves any better according to what you consider to be right and wrong?

I'm guessing he knew intense joy. — jellyfish

That's true: you're guessing.

Freud was famously moody and writes in the prelude of Civilization and Its Discontents that he has never had an oceanic moment.

Good observations regarding the points of view separating Freud and Jung.

Perhaps it would not be remiss to note that what they agreed upon is how "unconscious" elements are a major player in how conscious stuff comes about or not. They approached that element as phenomena, not as a possible interpretation of it.

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That's true: you're guessing. — ZzzoneiroCosm

He did a mountain of cocaine. It's better than coffee.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/payngv/a-brief-history-of-freuds-love-affair-with-cocaine

That doesn't mean the old man didn't ever get sad. I just find it implausible that he wasn't having a blast with all the coke he wanted while he worked. He was another wild soul who believed he solved the riddles of existence. To me that's 'the' 'spiritual' pleasure. It goes well with stimulants.

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