Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:11 -0500

Written by Jordan Peterson’s daddy himself this book was really quite enjoyable. I preferred it over some of the books I’ve read from Freud. It is a collection of 11 essays that cover various topics from dreams to metaphysics. Opening the book, the reader is asked to make two assumptions. Assumption one, the subconscious exists. While this doesn’t seem like a big deal in a post Freud world (which Jung is post Freud) there is still some debate. The second assumption is that there exists in humans a soul. This is still up for heated debate today, but if you accept these two assumptions daddy Jung takes you on a ride, explaining his approach to psychoanalysis, modern man vs primitive man and the overlap between the two. The waning effectiveness of the church to treat psychoses due to the approach of the education system. This is one of those books like a C.S Lewis book where everything he says just makes sense. Made for an enjoyable read but I also know whenever I am feeling that comfortable with what someone is saying it means that I have not been educated enough in contra-ideas. Overall, I’d highly recommend, it’s given me much to think about and I will definitely be returning to re-read later on.

Ethics

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:27:57 -0500

So, Spinoza is an interesting guy. He was brought up Jewish but ended up coming up with his own philosophy of God which didn’t really agree with anyone that was around him at the time. This book wasn’t published during his life but shortly after his death by his friends. He did this because there were a lot of “burn the witch” things going on so I guess he didn’t want his beans burned. The book itself reads like a mathematical book of proofs where he lays out his Axioms, Propositions, Lemmas and proofs. Due to this it was sometimes difficult to keep up, but there were still many interesting ideas picked up. His two cornerstone ideas (IMO) were his definition of “Substance” and his idea of “God”. To him substance was something that can be explained independent of anything else. With this definition it is really difficult to figure out even one thing that can have this label. (This is a fun mental exercise). His definition of God is linked to his idea of substance in that God is absolute infinite substance. He expands on this idea throughout the whole book as a foundation to his ethics. This could be viewed as a form or inspiration for the following transcendentalism movement.

Metaphysics on George's Blog

Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Ethics