[Buddha-l] Jung and Dignaga

[Dan Lusthaus]

Vincent,

This is the standard apologetic, but one has to seriously look behind it and
question what motivates it. That Henry Ford was a raving antisemite doesn't
legitimize Ford; nor that he shared that prejudice with other prominent
people (Lindburgh, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, et al., since you seem to think
listing Americans alongside Swiss and Germans somehow dissipates the
problem).

Blaming racism and antisemitism on Darwin... oh, please. Claiming

>The scientific roots are in the Darwinist apotheosis
> as the new explanation for the world, leaving behind theology.

Antisemitism (and ergo ethno-hatred a.k.a. racism) already had 20 centuries
of Church/theological history. Nineteenth c. racial theories (which are not
Darwinian, by the way), just repackaged them in new bottles, using such
dubious disciplines as phrenology to give these ideas the illusion of a
scientific veneer. See
http://www.victorianweb.org/science/phrenology/index.html
and
http://www.victorianweb.org/science/phrenology/rc3.htm

I agree with you it is important to try to understand, as fully as possible,
the mentality (or mentalities) at work in Europe in the 1930s-40s, not to
excuse them (Oh, everybody was doing it), but to acquire a clearer
understanding of the dangers and how this works. Yes, many were caught up in
the righteous exuberance of the day, partially fueled by fears of dangers
real and imagined; the Cultural Revolution involved a similar ecstatic élan,
with similarly disasterous consequences. The better we understand how this
works, the more possibility we will have for not succumbing to similar
disasterous exuberances in the future.

>We cannot demand seeing a social compromise in Jung which in
> fact was strange for any famous intellectual of that time.

Yes we can. That is what Freud demanded of him. For that reason alone, he
cannot be considered innocent or simply unaware, or swept up in the
Zeitgeist without warning lights. But even without Freud, the simple fact
that there were indeed others who did not succumb puts him in the company of
those who did.

> I don't have knowledge about Freud interest in Kabbalah. Btw, if you
> have some information I would be happy to know.

David Bakan devoted a book to the subject.
http://www.amazon.com/Sigmund-Freud-Jewish-Mystical-Tradition/dp/1853431427

For comment on that, see
http://www.newkabbalah.com/Freud.html

Also see Mathe Robert's _From Oedipus to Moses: Freud's Jewish Identity_,
which is more grounded in Freud's personal history as well as his ideas.

> Zarathustra papers you cited are named inside that PDF. Take a read,
> it is quite interesting and objective, I think.

The book is a two volume work (though Bollingen has since come out with a
drastically abridged one-volume paperback version that conveniently
expurgates all the problematic sections). There is also a partial on-line
version of the 2 vol. version, that also conveniently omits the problematic
sections -- as well as the introduction by the Jungian analyst. That
introduction is a good coming to terms with the basic issues (while still
obviously very sympathetic toward Jung). If you can find a copy of the full
2 vol. version, it is well worth reading.

Dan