Topics
of Carl Jung, Darwin of the Mind
Jung
and the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis.
Carl
Jung, Darwin of the Mind is addressed to the general intellectual
reader. It is both for readers who want to know more about
Carl Jung’s psychology and for those who are skeptical of
it. One of its objectives is to convince such readers, as
well as psychologists and philosophers, to take Jung’s work
seriously -- not in the woolly way one often finds in pop-psychological
treatments of Jung, but philosophically, and particularly
with respect to the plausibility of the idea that the Modern
Evolutionary Synthesis supports the notion of a collective
unconscious.
The
Evolution of Consciousness.
But
what about consciousness? According to Jung it developed out
of the collective unconscious; yet, unlike the collective
unconscious, it is too late an arrival upon the scene to have
a genetic base, developed through natural selection. Jung’s
brilliant successor, Erich Neumann, was able to trace the
advance of consciousness through successive expressions of
Jungian archetypes, as recorded in the myth and ritual of
culture, through history. Pursuing these findings, Carl Jung,
Darwin of the Mind proposes that consciousness evolved non-genetically
through a special sort natural selection -- that among cultural
styles.
Jung
and the Spiritual Void.
Finally,
this book suggests an intellectual platform upon which a person
sensible of a spiritual void in the modern world might build.
Science is not intended to, nor will it in its present form,
afford a predicate for spiritual fulfillment, and the present
state of organized religion worldwide leaves hungry many educated,
reflective people. This is to say that the encounter between
the power to convince of secular science and the literalism
of religious doctrine has left the spirit in an uncertain
place in our times.
In consequence there appears widely to be
a desire, and indeed a need, for a spiritual element, a sense
of meaning, presently missing in many peoples’ lives. Anyone
sensible of this need might be warranted in looking to psychology
-- as such a need is a psychological fact -- both to probe
the ground of the contemporary malaise and perhaps to come
upon a more relevant cosmology.
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