Since Jung and Spinoza is coming out in a few weeks, I thought I’d share some stories about the challenges in writing it. I suspect a lot of you reading this might also be writers or academics, and might relate to or appreciate some of the writing process. Also, yes, I am proud of how it came out, even though it was a big faff to get done.
First of all, why Jung and Spinoza? This is something I discussed a bit on the LEPHT HAND podcast I did a few weeks ago, but basically I remember when I first started reading Jung seriously it struck me how much the notion of the ‘unus mundus’ resonated with the God of Spinoza. Of course as I dug deeper I saw Jung might have been inspired by countless thinkers with a similar monism: Schopenhauer, Schelling, etc. And so maybe the resemblance between Jung and Spinoza is just a neat convergence without much deeper importance.
But then that doesn’t explain the strange way Jung treats Spinoza: double-handed. Hypocritical. Often critical of Spinoza on points where they clearly agree! Hence the problem that I set out to write on: why Jung treats Spinoza the way he does, and what this says about their shared metaphysics.
This book is based off my PhD Thesis. I started the PhD in 2012. I passed my viva last January. You see, I dropped out for a few years. Why? Well, a lot of reasons (finances, career-choices, etc). But mostly I had no clue how to tackle the problem I posed above.
Yes, Jung treats Spinoza strangely. And there’s good reason to think it is not just a case of Jung ’not getting’ Spinoza, or being indifferent to him. The handful of times Jung does discuss Spinoza show a clear pattern: Jung will prop up Spinoza as a villain, someone contrary to Jung’s position . . . and then Jung will go on to make a point that is quintessentially Spinozist. The most glaring example of this is in ‘The Phenomenology of the Spirit of Fairy Tales’ (1948). Jung casts Spinoza as the chief villain in the history of thought in regards to misuse of the concept of ‘spirit’ before, in the next paragraph, Jung depicts the Divine in a way that is the same way Spinoza would, where spirit and matter are two aspects of the same being!
Jung’s bizarre treatment of Spinoza here was obvious to me as a Masters student way back in 2011-12. it would also be noted by the Jungian scholar and therapist, Joe Cambray, in a book chapter from 2014. In that paper, Cambray reviews Jung’s treatment of Spinoza and concludes that Jung had some sort of ‘Spinoza complex’ that flared up whenever he came across a topic he and Spinoza agreed upon.
Jung can’t give Spinoza credit.
OK, great. So Spinoza is not just one of the myriad figures Jung cites in his writing. There’s something significant to him in relation to Jung’s own thought.
But how do you bridge that gap when, for all their similarities, there are glaring differences between Jung and Spinoza in terms of how they treat ‘access’ to the Divine? I’ll admit, I can be a world-class procrastinator. But that question is the one that made me take my student debt seriously.