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. — TheMadFool

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.

Still no paradox. Atheism claims 'theism is false' is true and theism claims 'g/G exists' is true. If the latter (1st order claim – independent variable) is false, then the former (2nd order claim – dependent variable) is true; if theism is true, then atheism is false. (The inverse, of course, is nonsense.) Show me what I'm missing, Fool. — 180 Proof

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.

This Schop quote gets at something like the essence of 'atheistic' worldview. Note that 'strange allegories' are not exclude and even 'the wise' are fallible.

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. — S

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Christian_System


I also found another Jung quote on Nietzsche.

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. — J

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?

The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit. — Nietzsche

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. — Schopenhauer

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.

Strange how someone who became famous for attacking sacred cows ended up becoming one.

Nietzsche is the morbid ascetic — T H E

I though Nietzsche hated asceticism, he polemicised against it.

Strange how someone who became famous for attacking sacred cows ended up becoming one. — Wayfarer

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

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] — Wiki

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:

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. — Wayfarer

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:

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. — S

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 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. — T H E

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.

To reiterate myself, Carl Jung seems to have been unable to tell whether his feelings about god pointed to something real and objective outside instead of being merely imaginary and subjective inside. This state of doubt and uncertainty is of great significance and Jung may not have been the first in this regard but nevertheless the quote you referenced indicates that he qualifies as someone deeply concerned about it and if not that, at the very least, had experienced it. Why is this of "...great significance..."? It highlights something important about our attitude viz. that a thing is worthwhile if and only if it's real and objective and that a thing that's only imaginary and subjective is worthless. This issue lies at the core of Jung's predicament. Whatever the truth maybe about whether or not such a system of valuation is well-justified or not, it can't be denied that such a scheme totally ignores an important aspect of the human mind viz. the worlds that it can construct that may be vastly different and even, mostly, inconsistent with what we've been told is the "real" world. My take on this is simple: the matter of consistency as regards imagined vs "real" worlds is definitely something we have to take seriously but the only reason why the so-called "real" world is given a preference over, takes precedence over, the imagined world is that we spend most of our lives in it. Had it been the other way round and we lived out most or all of our lives in the worlds of fantasy that each and everyone of us is capable of creating, we would, in an instant, redefine what is real and what is not. Thereby hangs a tale, I believe.

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:

All honor to the ascetic ideal insofar it is honest! so long as it believes in itself and does not play tricks on us! But I do not like all these coquettish bedbugs with their insatiable ambition to smell out the infinite, until at last the infinite smells of bedbugs; I do not like these whited sepulchers who imitate life; I do not like these weary played-out people who wrap themselves in wisdom and look "objective"; I do not like these agitators dressed up as heroes who wear the magic cap of ideals on their straw heads; I do not like these ambitious artists who like to pose as ascetics and priest but who are at bottom only tragic buffoons; and I also do not like these latest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites who today roll their eyes in a Christian-Aryan-bourgeois manner and exhaust one's patience by trying to rouse up all the horned-beast elements in the people by a brazen abuse of the cheapest of all agitator's tricks, moral attitudinizing (that no kind of swindle fails to succeed in Germany today is connected with the undeniable and palpable stagnation of the German spirit; and the cause of that I seek in a too exclusive diet of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, together with the presupposition of such a diet: first, national constriction and vanity, the strong but narrow principle "Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles," and then the paralysis agitans of modern ideas. — Translated by Walter Kaufman, 3rd essay, section 26

Go on, Friedrich, tell us how you really feel.

Well said. To my mind, however, I suspect theists (like other "believers" in supernaturalia & ultimate realities) are more interested in anti-anxiety self-consolation than seeking indifferent, cold, truth(es) that remain so regardless of them being believed or not. To paraphrase Camus: I want to live only by what I can know here and now. Or Carl Sagan: I do not want to believe, I want to know. In both cases "know" connotes ... learn what we do not know (and unlearn our many and varied 'illusions of knowledge'). The only "truth" atheists as such "seek", it can be said with some confidence, is that 'theism is false' (and by implication too deism, pantheism, panentheism, panendeism, animism/panpsychism ...) as demonstrated by sound, defeasible, reasoning; otherwise, they (we) are as liable to indulge themselves (ourselves) in self-serving, fatuous, confabulation as any other loquacious primate (which is why, though a professed antitheist-atheist, my preferred 'truth-seeking' designation during business hours is freethinker (and after hours, and especially on weekends, i'm undeniably an absurdist.))

"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 prefer e.g. Tolkien, Graves, Borges et al ... to Jung (& his ilk) for "rich and imaginative insights", but that's me. :smirk:

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.

:up:

Fascinating thread. I don't have much to add, having only read Man and his Symbols and a good deal of Psychology and Alchemy.

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.