Robinson attributes "the sense of emptiness in the modern world" not to the decline of faith, nor to the advance of science -- she considers both religion and science to be poorly represented by the so-called modern debate between them -- but to "the exclusion of the felt life of the mind from the accounts of reality proposed by the oddly authoritative and deeply influential parascientific literature… and from the varieties of thought and art that reflect the influence of these accounts."
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Well. it beats the opposite ...
... PowellsBooks.Blog - Review-a-Day - The Importance of Being Conscious - Powell's Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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I think I agree with Robinson on many points. Especially that the contributions of art can't be ignored or dismissed in any discussion of human nature.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think Robinson's thoughts about the dismissal of subjectivity in our parascientific culture nowadays are profound when one thinks about how the dismissal of subjectivity contributes to the excessive claims of objectivity in literary criticism made all too often these days, that often come across as farcical.
it's interesting that Jung isn't mentioned, particularly in his breaking away from Freud, and his interest in the soul, in the sacred, in the deeper archetypes. Of course, Jung is not likely to have disputed much of what Robinson is saying, because he said some very similar things. His book "Flying Saucers" is a terrific analysis of both mass hysteria and the processes by which the religious impulse gets sublimated in non-religious times.
Carl Jung, part 1: Taking inner life seriously
ReplyDeleteAchieving the right balance between what Jung called the ego and self is central to his theory of personality development
Mark Vernon
Monday 30 May 2011 11.00 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/may/30/carl-jung-ego-self