A taste of what’s to come…

Two abstracts for the papers I am writing for courses on Carl Jung and the Philosophy of Relgion, respectively.
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“Uncovering the Unconscious: Psychology and the Soul”

William James credits W. H. Myers with the discovery of “subliminal consciousness” (i.e., the unconscious) in 1886, a discovery James’ suggests is psychology’s most important insight into human nature. But Carl Jung is still forced to admit more than half a century later that psychology is a long way from the mature state of other natural sciences: “Swamped by the knowledge of external objects, the subject of knowledge has been temporarily eclipsed” (OTNOTP, par. 357). Psychology, so long as it treats the soul or the unconscious as a natural object like any other, remains to this day in a sort of pre-Copernican state. Rather than a science seeking to explain and control the soul, psychology, I will argue, would be better served by seeking out reliable means of opening and sustaining imaginal dialogue with living psychic processes. The rational ego accesses and produces detailed scientific knowledge about the external cosmos, but it is precisely the alienating force of the ego’s outward-focused and divisive eye that pushes the psyche (and indeed the psyche-cosmu) into the shadows and the depths. My paper will ask: “How is the psychologist to develop and articulate a meaningful, systematic discourse concerning the soul if the greater part of her processes are unconscious?” Jung asked the same question, and may have been forced to re-imagine the traditional relation between self and cosmos in order to answer it. Following Jean Gebser’s rejection of a dualistic conception of consciousness and unconsciousness (see The Ever-Present Origin, p. 137, 204), I will attempt to develop Jung’s own intimations of a participatory and cosmocentric psychology.

Sources:
On the Nature of the Psyche by Carl Jung
The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung
The Red Book by Carl Jung
The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser
Jung and Steiner: The Birth of a New Psychology by Gerhard Wehr

Notes from Gebser’s EPO:

“After the heights of heaven have been lost, the sciences pose themselves the task of “‘exploring the depths.’” (p. 393)
“Since the super-terrestrial no longer affects man, the subterranean surges upwards.” (p. 394)
“If we are sufficiently bold as to consider the ‘unconscious’ as an acategorical element, which is suggested by the spacelessness of the psyche, then the emergent awareness of the unconscious is nothing other than the psychic form of time’s irruption into our consciousness.” (p. 396)
“There is no so-called Unconscious. There are only various modalities (or intensities) of consciousness; a one-dimensional magical, a two-dimensional mythical, a three-dimensional mental consciousness. And there will also be an integral four-dimensional consciousness of the whole.” (p. 204)
“The ‘unconscious,’ if one insists on using this misleading term at all, is the structure of consciousness one dimension less than a particular or given structure; and it is the next ‘higher’ or incremented consciousness structure which makes the unconscious amenable to its mode of understanding.” (p. 204)

Steiner on Jung:
“Everywhere we find important facts that can only be successfully dealt with by spiritual psychology (anthroposophy). At least psychoanalysis has made us aware that the reality of the soul is to be accepted as such, but the devil is at their heals. By that I mean that they are neither able nor willing to approach spiritual reality.” (JS, p. 83)

Sample writing (introduction):

“The hypothesis of the unconscious,” writes Jung, “puts a large question mark after the idea of the psyche” (OTNOTP, p. 77). Philosophers had for many centuries assumed that the structure and function of the soul was already known in every detail, but as the 19th century came to a close, the burgeoning discipline of psychology began to reveal a far more complex and even irrational subterranean source of conscious processes. Rather than the static and easily compartmentalized model of the soul constructed by Scholastic thinkers, Jung was forced by his experience as a clinician to develop a dynamic, living relationship with psychic processes. For him, the soul was not a scientific object; on the contrary, it is what makes such objectification possible: “every science is a function of the psyche, and all knowledge is rooted in it” (ibid.).

But how is psychology, the study of the soul, to proceed if its foundational hypothesis assumes the existence of an autonomously functioning unconscious? The cultural philosopher Jean Gebser recognized this difficultly, and though he had the highest respect for Jung’s groundbreaking work, he nonetheless called into question the concept of the unconscious: “There is no so-called unconscious. There are only various modalities (or intensities) of consciousness; a one-dimensional magical, a two-dimensional mythical, a three-dimensional mental consciousness. And there will also be an integral four-dimensional consciousness of the whole,” (EPO, p. 204). Gebser suggests that the concept may still be used to describe the relationship between a structure of consciousness one dimension less than the incremented structure above it, but rejects entirely the dualistic framework, wherein consciousness is opposed to an unconscious. Jung himself rarely if ever collapsed the psychic terrain into so neat a dichotomy, but Gebser’s phenomenology of consciousness in terms of an unfolding series of structures assures that such a rationalistic reduction is avoided.

In light of Gebser’s important critique of the notion of an unconscious, Jung’s work will be interpreted in what follows as the tentative beginnings of an integral psychology. Both Gebser and Rudolf Steiner will provide important additions and amendments to Jung’s psychology, so as to avoid the undue reduction of spiritual realities to psychic projections. The purpose of psychology, I will argue, is to enter conscious dialogue with the archetypal energies of the soul, so as to heal the split our mental-rational civilization has hewn between instinct and intelligence. Jung’s practice of “active imagination,” as artfully displayed in The Red Book, will provide a working example of how this dialogue can be initiated and sustained.

Outline
I. Introduction
a. The discovery of the Unconscious
b. What have Jung, Gebser, and Steiner to do with one another?
II. Gebser’s structures and critique of the unconscious
III. Steiner’s spiritual psychology
IV. Towards a neo-Jungian re-imagination of the psyche
V. Conclusion

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“Towards a Spiritual Science: An New Story of Human Nature”

The continuing and indeed growing influence of traditional religious modalities and New Age spiritual practices in the supposedly secular Western world has forced scholars to reconsider the role of such modalities and practices in human life at both the collective and the individual level. The inevitable decline of religion as a result of the march of technoscientific progress long theorized by sociologists has not materialized as expected. Instead, we live in a world both increasingly polarized by a diverse panoply of irreconcilable belief systems and increasingly unified by the planet-wide implications of ecology and the mind-bending revelations of physical cosmology.

In my paper, I’d like to explore the creative tension at the heart of the so-called culture war between science and religion, or more specifically, between New Atheism and what, after Sean Kelly, I’d like to call Gaian panentheism. The categories of “science” and “religion” as popularly understood serve as poor conceptual placeholders for a more complex philosophical terrain. Atheists and traditional believers alike tend to misunderstand the nature and scope of the scientific method; similarly, they over-literalize and so kill the spirit of religion. My goal is to unpack and deconstruct the categories of science and religion by way of a historical overview (with a focus on Platonic, Thomist, Cartesian, and Hegelian sources) and, then, to re-construct a more metaphysically nuanced account of their relation to human being and knowing in light of Barfield’s and Whitehead’s philosophical contributions. My research will focus especially on the rhetoric of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and PZ Myers, whose voices are cheered by a growing contingent of atheists who have begun calling themselves “confrontationists” to make clear their secular belief that religious belief “poisons everything,” as another outspoken New Atheist Christopher Hitchens has put it. (“Confrontationists” can be contrasted with “accommodationists,” or those who feel science and religion need not be in conflict).

My general thesis is that while New Atheism drastically oversimplifies both science and religion, its aggressive mode of discourse may in the end be providing the necessary intellectual and psychological impetus for a sort of second axial revolution. Such a revolution, I hope to show, must overcome the sharp divisions between ancient animism, medieval theism, and modern atheism/agnosticism by making transparent the evolutionary trajectory of our species toward a more wholesome integration of spirit and matter. A Gaian panentheism would preserve the rigor and empiricism of science and at the same time celebrate the participation of divinity in the course of earthly events.

Sources:

Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on Aquinas
A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield
Adventures of Ideas by Alfred North Whitehead
PZ Myers’ blog Pharyngula

Outline:

I. Theory and Theos in Western Thought
II. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science
III. Steiner’s conception of the Human
IV. A Third Option: Gaian Panentheism

Sample pages (introduction):

The last century has arguably brought more change to the Earth, measured either in terms of increased complexity (of culture and consciousness), or in terms of entropy release (as pollution), than any other 100 year period in the planet’s history. Human civilization, and the technoscientific mode of life which has come to dominate it, is largely responsible for this rapid transformation. Whether it be the population explosion and global poverty, the continued threat of world war, civil rights, feminist, and other social justice movements, peak oil, or the ecological crisis, ours’ is a world with much at stake for whom the fast approaching future may just as easily bring tragedy or triumph, or perhaps equal doses of each.

In such an unstable and uncertain context as this, how is humanity to orient itself cosmologically, and in the service of what ideals is it to direct its spiritual aspirations? These are not peripheral questions–they inevitably burn in the hearts of every individual faced with the aforementioned chaos. Answering them in an integral enough way so as to overcome political divisiveness while at the same time avoiding the subsumption of cultural difference is essential to assuring the future flourishing of our species and the planet. The possibility of a planetary civilization rests upon re-inventing our complex human identity, such that it is inclusive of our origins as embodied earthlings and our destiny as immortal spirits.

Whether our aim be scientific investigation of the cosmos, or religious worship of the divine, sooner or later we are going to have to articulate a conception of human nature. Are we creatures of God, or products of Nature? Or, is there an alternative conception of humanity (of God, of Nature) that overcomes this false dichotomy? The following essay is my attempt to provide such an alternative: an integral anthropology, or theory of the human, which is neither exclusively theological nor cosmological. After Pinnikar, my approach in what follows might be called “cosmotheandric,” in that I am attempting to tell a story about human origins and destiny that does justice to our traditional spiritual intuitions and is adequate to our modern scientific realizations. Contemporary debates, especially in popular media outlets, tend to collapse the complexity of the science/religion dialectic into easily digestible slogans derived from the most extreme ends of the spectrum of opinion. The cosmological options are typically dichotomously construed as atheistic scientific naturalism vs. literalistic creationism. These are not the only options.

The process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner will be the primary protagonists in the alternative narrative I hope to construct. Before beginning this reconstruction, however, I must deconstruct the popular conceptualizations of “science” and “religion” which pit them one against the other as if irreconcilably opposed. Only a new synthesis can provide humanity with a viable way forward.