Jung and Spinoza are both arguably ‘dual-aspect monists’, where mind and matter are seen not as separate substances as in dualism, nor is one reducible to the other as in materialism or idealism, but rather are two aspects of an underlying whole. I actually think there’s significant problems with assuming Jung or even Spinoza really fit this definition, but we’ll let that go for now. The main takeaway is that, considering their similarities, it is a bit of a riddle as to why Jung does not overtly acknowledge Spinoza in his written works. Even more bizarre, Jung will at times dismiss Spinoza before taking a position that is clearly Spinozist. The Jungian scholar Joe Cambray notes that Jung might have something of a ‘Spinoza Complex’.
Why? A few possibilities:
- Jung simply read Spinoza poorly, or not at all, and just didn’t get him.
Anyone who has read Jung knows he cites a shitload of people. And anyone who reads Jung knows he doesn’t always deploy those thinkers’ ideas accurately or honestly. For instance, despite his pledged loyalty to Kant he mangles the use of the phenomenal and the noumenal. He makes a caricature of Nietzsche and uses what he needs from Bergson’s philosophy until it is no longer in vogue. Might he have used Spinoza in a similar, selective way?
To a point, maybe. Certainly he was no Spinoza scholar. But Jung did deploy Spinozist terms and ideas in ways that Spinoza himself certainly intended: sub specie aeternitatis for instance (or ’the view of eternity’).
- Jung was an anti-semite.
No doubt Jung’s record here is bad—his letters from the 1930s read like your average X poster accusing liberals (or in Jung’s case, Jews) for being snowflakes because they don’t like the (awful) things he says. Not to mention Jung also warns one correspondent about the ‘danger’ of secular Jews–and what was Spinoza other than the original ‘Renegade Jew’?
And yet. Jung is even harsher towards a fellow Protestant-German in Hegel. There is, in fact, a lot of intellectual posturing when it comes to Jung and other thinkers with ’theories of everything’. At best, his prejudice seems to be an excuse, a loathsome one, to put Spinoza down.
So, that leaves us with 3) Something in Spinoza bothers Jung. Scares him even.
The fact Spinoza comes up in Jung’s writings at points where they SHOULD agree demonstrates that Jung is aware of these meeting points. Yet he runs from them. It is similar to how Pierre Macherey depicts Hegel’s duplicitous treatment of Spinoza in Hegel or Spinoza. In that book, Macherey charts points of tension where Hegel tries and distance himself from Spinoza, because there are things in the Spinozist system that threaten Hegel’s ideas.
Is it the same case with Jung? I think it is. The question then is what. What is in the Spinozist system that Jung both finds himself agreeing with, yet at the same he finds intolerable?