(Article changed on April 11, 2014 at 09:28)
Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) April 10, 2014: Recently Martin Heidegger's anti-Semitism has been back in the news, because of the recent publication in German of his philosophical notebooks in which his anti-Semitism is explicit. See, for example, Jennifer Schuessler's article "Heidegger's Notebooks Renew Focus in Anti-Semitism" in the New York Times dated March 30, 2014.
As we work our way toward adjudicating Heidegger's anti-Semitism, we might find it helpful to read Jay Sherry's painstakingly thorough book Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (2010; paperback 2012), because Jung's anti-Semitism is one theme in his fine book. In addition to being a historian of psychoanalysis, Dr. Sherry is a scholar trained in Germany in German intellectual history
Dr. Sherry portrays Jung (1875-1961) as what we in the United States today would call a likely Republican voter. However, even though Jung once ran for a minor elective position in Switzerland -- and lost -- he usually claimed to be non-political because he did not tend to advocate specific political policies.
But Dr. Sherry says, "Jung's sensibilities were essentially those of a conservative humanist rather than a liberal humanitarian" (page 210). As Dr. Sherry makes clear, the humanists whose thought most influenced Jung were Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), both of whom lived in Basel, where Jung grew up. Earlier, for a long period of time, the Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) also lived in Basel, as Dr. Sherry notes (page 22). But Jung was not especially influenced by Erasmus's thought, probably because Erasmus was a Roman Catholic but Jung was not. Jung "was raised in the Swiss Reformed Church" (page 20).
However, in his mature years Jung was also a critic of Christianity, criticizing "'the four exclusions of Christianity'" -- "the repression of nature, animals, primitives, and creative fantasy" (page 64).
As Dr. Sherry notes, "Jung held an English-language seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra from 1934 to 1939" (page 151). Because Dr. Sherry does not happen to mention it, we should note that Nietzsche was enthusiastic about Ralph Waldo Emerson's idea of self-reliance, as Lawrence Buell points out in his book Emerson (2003). So we could say that Emerson's idea of self-reliance contributed indirectly, via Nietzsche, to Jung's development of the idea of psychological individuation (the Freudian equivalent idea is ego-integrity).
Buell says, "John Dewey admired Emerson immoderately. . . . Dewey's Emerson was 'the Philosopher of Democracy'" (page 158).
By contrast, Nietzsche could be described as the Philosopher of the Nazis. As is well known, a streamlined version of Nietzsche's thought was popularized among the Germans and influenced Adolf Hitler's thought.
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