Saturday, December 29, 2018

Hmm …

 Resurrecting the Soul in a Secular Age - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

That C. G. Jung pops up in only one passage might suggest that Edmundson has no great liking for him, yet he is deeply relevant to the argument in Self and Soul. In 1933, Jung published Modern Man in Search of a Soul, a collection of lectures and essays. As this collection attests, he believed in the soul, believed perhaps too much, particularly for Freudians. Jung’s absence seems a missed opportunity, given that he nominally shared Edmundson’s goal of resurrecting the soul.
That Plato doesn't pop up at all in this article is also a missed opportunity, since ideal derives from idea in the Platonic sense. For Plato, idea wasn't just a word, and if soul is just a word, then — to recall what Flannery O'Connor said to Mary McCarthy about the eucharist as just a symbol — I say to hell with it.

No comments:

Post a Comment