Abstract
We live in a secular age. One way to grasp that is to say that the limits of experience are bounded by thought, and the question whether there is anything outside of thought becomes increasingly unaskable in the social imaginary and irrelevant within the psychology of the market economy. Thought becomes insular and “endogamous,” and its products the result of a particular kind of human experience and existence no longer moved by elements of the transcendental. This is not to suggest that private belief evaporates, but the possibility of faith-based ethics as a co-foundation for organizing community life and relations increasingly attenuates. This chapter examines the consequences of the privatization of faith.
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- 1.
The capitalization of thought can no longer afford references to an Outside as it is disruptive of the smoothness of the business model of existence.
- 2.
B. R. Ambedkar, Philosophy of Hinduism (New Delhi: Critical Quest, 2010), 8.
- 3.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 92.
- 4.
Ibid., 93.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Laing, The Politics of Experience, 144.
- 7.
Taylor, op.cit., 242. Italics mine.
- 8.
Ibid., 244.
- 9.
Ibid., 244–245. Text rearranged.
- 10.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
- 11.
Emile Durkheim, ed. Kenneth Thompson, Readings from Emile Durkheim (London: Routledge, 2004), 126.
- 12.
Carl Jung, “The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,” Collected Works, vol. 8. Trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), para 682.
- 13.
Freud admits this in Discontents of Civilization, referring to an “oceanic feeling” that survives in many humans despite the effects of civilization.
- 14.
Jung, “The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche” para 739.
- 15.
Carl Jung, Collected Works Vol 10: Civilization in Transition, trans., Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), paragraph 53.
- 16.
E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Random House, 2011).
- 17.
Ibid, 7.
- 18.
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, Transl. M. Lester & C. Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
- 19.
R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1988), 284.
- 20.
Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
- 21.
Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (London: McGraw-Hill Publishing Inc, 1939).
- 22.
Barry Commoner cited in., E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Random House, 2011), 17.
- 23.
S. Kierkegaard, cited in, E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Random House, 2011), 66.
- 24.
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), 107.
- 25.
Also, this notion of despair is peculiarly an elitist and bourgeois sentiment. The autochthon rarely has the luxury of such indulgence.
- 26.
Carl Jung, The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writings of C. G. Jung, ed. Meredith Sabini (California: North Atlantic Books, 2002), 142–143.
- 27.
In the Papal Bull of 1452, known as Romanus Pontifex, Pope Nicholas V directed King Alfonso to “capture, vanquish, and subdue the Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ,” to “put them into perpetual slavery,” and “to take all their possessions and property.” F. G. Davenport, European treaties bearing on the history of the United States and its dependencies to 1648 (Vol. 1). (Washington D. C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917), 23. This was one of the major declarations of the Church that established the right of Christians to “discover” non-Christian lands and take possession. The English crown, for example, commissioned John Cabot to fulfill the orders of the Papal bull.
- 28.
Carl Jung, Collected Works vol. 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East, trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), paragraph 867/962.
- 29.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, transl. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 256.
- 30.
Vine Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Golden CO, fulcrum Publishing, 1997).
- 31.
A term used by American expansionists to justify displacement of Native Americans.
- 32.
Carl Jung, Collected Works Vol. 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), paragraph 750.
- 33.
C. G. Jung, The Red Book- Liber Novus (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), vii.
- 34.
The production of rationality seems to be inextricably linked with the production of hierarchy and the bureaucratization of life. Hence, the need for limits.
- 35.
Secular goals have impoverished modern and not-so-modern societies in somewhat different ways. For the former, it has meant a comprehensive erosion of culture as discussed by Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, and for the latter, normally unprepossessing lives have been stricken by an acute sense of poverty and destitution.
- 36.
Bateson, Mind and Nature.
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Roy, K. (2017). Cogitogenic Disorders. In: Limits of the Secular. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48698-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48698-7_4
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