On Jung's "Answer to Job" (dialogue with Timothy Jackson, part 1)
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- Опубліковано 10 лип 2024
- footnotes2plato.substack.com/...
Introduction to Jung's Answer to Job, published in 1952 after Jung's heart attack and encounter with mortality. Discussion of Jung's attempt to mediate between secular and religious worldviews.
Themes discussed:
The role of the feminine (Sophia) in Jung's interpretation of the Book of Job. Jung identifies Sophia with the Holy Spirit in a Gnostic way. Importance of the feminine for bringing God's ego into relationship with his shadow.
The nature of psychic facts and psychic truth as distinguished from just physical facts/truth. Beliefs are psychological facts that need to be accounted for. Job as an allegory for the human condition and instinct for justice.
The relationship between Yahweh and Satan, and the ambiguity between figures like Ahriman and Lucifer representing evil. The question of the status of evil as a positive aspect of the Godhead rather than just a privation.
Yahweh's unconsciousness and need to project onto Job in order to develop self-awareness. Parallels to Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Job's development of moral consciousness in the face of an amoral God.
The importance of doubt and questioning in Jung's approach, as opposed to blind faith in dogma or omniscience. Doubt as perturbation necessary for individuation and the creative process. God's need to act in creation to elicit knowledge.
The nature of the "nothing" (unformed matter, chaos) from which creation emerges, and whether the archetypes pre-exist in the mind of God prior to creation. The progressive differentiation, determinacy and contingency that emerges through the process of creation.
The uniqueness of Christ and the problem of demythologization by comparing Christ to other religious figures like Buddha and Muhammad. The retroactive significance of the incarnation for the dead and the living. Christianity as one contingent manifestation of a universal archetypal pattern.
The evolution of consciousness through the Father (Yahweh), Son (Christ) and Holy Spirit. The need to understand this in a pluralistic, post-colonial context beyond just the "West." Internal vs external forms of doubt in relation to Christianity.
The role of narrative and myth in understanding the self and its relationship to others. The importance of inter-religious dialogue for self-understanding. The necessity of some form of "threat" or challenge for the development of consciousness.
Wonderful to see you tackling Jung. Can't wait until you dig into The Red Book and both the back story as well as the highly Christian content.
IMO Gerhard Wehr's book on Steiner and Jung needs to be updated, augmented and integrated with insights from key Jungian texts.
Hey guys, thank you for sharing a brilliant conversation on an incredibly potent subject.
Your flexible dynamic has extended an invitation for me to participate in the conversation, which I felt was beautiful.
On the subject, I wanted to remark some ideas which seemed important to me during the conversation, and to which I wanted to refer to.
About God's undermined omniscience in Job:
God's absence of omniscience in an incarnated or distinct form is, as I understand it, accounted for exactly in the ontological transition between a pleromatic potential of locus, and a particualrly distinct actual location.
In the pleromatic state of locational potentiality, God *is* everywhere all at once, that is, omnipresent, and is *cognizant* of all potential locations across all axes of dimension, that is, omniscient.
I wonder if an analogy can be drawn, though carefully, to the collapse of the wave function into a particular event when a frame of reference, that is, an observing factor is introduced to the system, wherein now it is in relation to the potentiality of the particular event, that is, to its wave form. God, hence, can be analogised to an obsever of his own process, collapsing, as it were, his own pleromatic state of locational potentiality into a particularly distinct actual location, by a process of self-observation. In the total event comprised of the two procceses, that is, the process of pleromatic potentiality and particular actuality, and the relation between the two mediated by an obsever, God's pleromatic quality persists as a of residue of being, a sort of memory of the pleromatic state, which, as I understand it in Jung's, is directly related to the his concept of the transcendental function to which, Timothy, you referred to around 1:39:00. That is, the transcendent function is the mediumistic category of the self, not only insofar as it mediates, but that it is that in which the particular inheres, both in its infintely many locational potentials, and in its particularly distinct actual locations.
The independance of the pleromatic potentiality of locations, and those being infinitely inter-related to one another in an eternal process, still bears the indellible problematic mark of the non-distinct actuality. Which is to say, to conceive of pure pleromatic interrelation of locational potentialities, implies and in fact presupposes a distinct actuality which permits their relationships. A problem which, as I understand it, is at the basis of any inference from the distinctly actual ontology to a pleromatic potential ontology. To then retroactively get rid of the presupposition of the non-descript actuality of the infinitely many pleromatic potentials and their interrelations, one must collapse it into a static unity, in fact, to the Parmenidesian One. Which is to say, a second collapse occurs and a one which is distinct from the collapse to the particular, namely, the collapse from the infinite potential locations in the pleroma to a unity of potentiality; or from a pleromatic process, to a pleromatic stasis, which is something you've touched upon maybe midway through the conversation.
Around 1:21:00, you've discussed the "completing" aspect of the fourth element, which Jung discusses rigorously in Aion, that is, the quaternion. One of his strongest quaternian psychograms is the fourfold marriage of the four aspects of the Self.
Which relates directly to the psychological efficacy of the transcendent function and its functional proximity to the "divine counterpart", that is Anima and Animus respective of the person's "objective" character. The Anima/Animus function is often conceived by Jung as that of the psychpomp. Which I think sits very comfortably with the Kantian epistemology which concludes that the knowing subject can only know that which knowing permits, that is, that which is knowable. And Jung refers on multiple occasions that the psyche can never know its own substance, as it it lacks the archemdian point from which to leverage itself. This is where the transcendent function comes into play in the reality of the psyche. An apt representation for the veridical efficacy of the quaternion is in the Taijitu, wherein Yin is distinct from and opposed to the Yang, yet in their apotheosis as individuated entities, their opposite rises within them as complementation. The transcendent function, is in that sense the unrepresented medium in which both Yin and Yang inhere, and which, in actuality, is represented by a containing complementation. Same could be said about the incompatible and opposing natures of the conscious and the unconscious- Yang and Yin repsectively. Without the mediation of the Self through its transcendent function, the conscious would have no relationship to the unconscious, but because they also inhere in one another, they not only oppose each other, but complement, and thus constitute an image of totality, or a God Image.
Around 1:29:00, Timothy, as regards the demythologisation of Christ, which may result in a reduction to a generic identification with other mythological figures, I think Mathew has already alluded to the solution earlier in the conversation in quoting how "Prefigurations, however, are not in themselves creative events but are only stages in the process of becoming conscious". That is, that which is supposed to become conscious is the God Image, or the Self, and the variations in figurations of this God Image, as a function of becoming conscious, are not discrete instances of "completely" conscious Self Image, and in that way they exist relative to each other in a historical evolutinary process, yet, at the same time, as you, Timothy, has stated, they also innately refer to an archetypal state which is complete and replete with all possible figurations, thus the identification of Christ with other prefigurations is reconcilable, insofar as all figurative instances are figurations of the God Image.
Around 1:36:00.
I thought the idea of "threat" or "challange" as a catalyst or even prerequiste for consciousness is fascinating.
I think this idea can be tied neatly to the aforementioned idea of the collapse of the pleromatic state.
The fundemental threat to "God" would then be, not the anthropomorphised notion of finitude, which is to say the death of God, but the collapse of the pleromatic potentiality of locations into a singular and distinct actualities, which are interrelated to one another, thus, comprising the integrity of God, though fundementally inhere in a sort of transcendental medium of totality.
Again, thank you for this conversation! Looking forward to more of those..
Thanks for these extremely thoughtful reflections. I think we can certainly draw this quantum-pleroma analogy, not because the mystical images “anticipate” quantum mechanics/QFT, but in terms of operational equivalences (Simondon’s allagmatics, which Matt and I have discussed before), or, in more contemporary terms, scale free dynamics. We’re all trying to think the same reality. That said, non-locality really is a mind-bender, eh? I’d say that the quantum-pleroma is not static, but is not extended (because “pre-space”). That’s a paradoxical thought for beings who conceive of dynamicity as motion in space. This view of non-locality may lead us to a further paradoxical image of the “indefinite particular”. And that’s an image of the (properly ineffable) “nothing”, that Matt asked me about.
Your discussions of the fourth and the transcendent function are also really stimulating, thanks again! Maybe we’ll get to Aion at some point…. Another book that makes a big impression. I think Matt and I are at the very beginning of a long series of Jung-related dialogues.
Highly informative and the essence of Jung’s deepest struggles.
Faith without doubt is the mere assertion of belief--Martin Luther
Edward Brothers, Robert Moore turned me on to him. I really enjoyed this conversation,thanks.
Fabulous conversation fellas
33:55 I Loved Kingsley's book on Parmenidies "Reality", and I just barely gotten in to "Cataflaque" (about Jung) when this semester got busy, but im just about to the point when i can get back to my own reading list. I cant wait to get back into Cataflaque this summer!
“Reality” is great! “Catafalque” is my favourite secondary text on Jung, as mentioned towards the end - very much worth the read, including the extensive footnotes!
There's something kafkaesque about the book of job. Certainly not in the way it ended but in the way that a man finds himself in unnavigable circumstances imposed by a vague authority as is the case in the novels 'the castle' or 'the trial'. It's as if kafka's letters lacked the postscript of the book of job.
kafka expressed that his work should be burned. it's estimated that he burned 90 percent of his total work. speaking of psychoanalysis, was this impulse characterized primarily by a literary perfectionist disposition, or did kafka feel guilty?
Really like this comparison….
Maybe the difference in epilogue had to do with a tribal versus a post-tribal perspective.
The hebrews were led out of egypt by yahweh, arguably a tribal manifestation of consciousness. The author of job had in mind the preservation of a specific ethnic identity. he felt compelled to paint an imaginal horizon of a promised land, following in the tradition of the prophets preceding him.
kafka follows this tradition in the wake of the death of god and writes through a postmodern lens for a broader audience, and i think that he intuited that the science of the time didn't properly interpret experience. Perhaps his critique of the dystopic socio-bureaucratic powers in his letters, however exaggerated, reveal an insufficient scientific worldview in the culture. Anyway, without a telos directed by a divine other he didn't sugar-coat his Job.
Imo Jungian theory may possibly be explained without the cultural influence of God by understanding that consciousness is energy. Piggybacking on how energy is neither created nor destroyed, it follows, imo, that: If the universe was once One, and broke apart, the consciousness which ALWAYS EXISTED may have, as well. If this were true, wouldn't every piece of this form of energy (which we think of as Life, or Life-force) seek a vessel in which to express it's own life, and life-force?
Your point at ca 12:00 about the position of Christ for other religions is interesting, but is revealed in a very different light when The Red Book is also assimilated as a key late work of Jung.
....
17:00 Radical empiricism! (Pure perception?). I feel my Englishness and German nature reconciling :)
The Red Book was written quite early, though (between 1914 and 30), relative to Answer to Job.
@@Footnotes2Plato Thanks for correcting me. An interesting point for me is that the Red Book wasn't published until 2009, nearly 50 years after Jung's death- This raises the question as to whether this was at Jung's request or because of other considerations.
@@TheExceptionalState
My understanding is that there was not an explicit request by Jung for the Red Book to be published. Which doesn't mean he was against it, but I think it required considerable deliberation among scholars, Jungian analysts, and his family.
Is Timothy, s sweater on back-to-front?
Has this meaning? 😊
Haha no, I don’t think so. But it’s funny because when I put this sweater on I often think it is back to front and have to check the label. It has a peculiarly high front collar 🤷♂️
@@timothyjackson4272 well there you go!
Thanks fr the vid.