This is certainly radical (insofar as it is understandable)—but is it friendly to religion or blasphemous? This is the problem with Jung. He thought his concept of the collective unconscious was as important as quantum theory, but many people failed to grasp it. (No doubt many fail to follow quantum theory, but enough do to construct a technology based on it.) Critics point out that archetypes are as metaphysical as Plato’s ideas and that although, after Jung, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky found “deep structures” in anthropology and linguistics, they have not produced a transformation in our understanding, as quantum theory has done.
Jung was convinced that the modern world is in a spiritual crisis brought about by secularization, materialism and extraversion. But he did not seek a return to the church—he saw organized religion as “spiritual death.” He thought we needed a “massive reinvestment in spiritual life,” to be achieved by reconnecting with the mythical world. “Myths express life more precisely than science,” he said. “Man cannot stand a meaningless life . . . meaning comes from an unequivocal affirmation of the self. . . . The decisive question is: is man related to something infinite or not? . . . The cosmic question is a fundamental requirement of the self.” As Anthony Stevens puts it, Jung himself had a reverence for the unconscious, the imagination, transcendence and gnosis (by which he meant knowledge through experience, not book-learning or belief), and he wanted others to experience the same. As Erich Fromm characterized it, Freud’s unconscious contains mainly man’s vices, Jung’s contains mainly man’s wisdom.24
At the same time, Jung insisted that the existence of a God-archetype was a psychological truth, not a theological one: it said nothing about the existence or otherwise of God or his/her/its form. This is why Jung has proved so controversial, and why his work so perplexes religious writers. His ideas are so ambiguous that we cannot be totally sure what he meant. At root he is saying—or seems to be saying—that man has an innate disposition to conceive of God (but not necessarily to believe in him), and that without coming to terms in some way with this disposition we can never feel whole or complete, or in balance; we cannot be spiritually healthy. We need to express the God-archetype to avoid neurosis.
Jung said that he “abhorred metaphysics,” yet his own thinking is even more metaphysical, less grounded in empiricism, than Freud’s. And he finished by saying the exact opposite to Freud. Whereas Freud argued that religion was a form of collective neurosis, grounded in repressed sexual energy wrapped up in the oedipal dilemma, Jung said religious feelings helped cure neurosis. Whatever else it is, and however successful or unsuccessful his opaque theories may be, Jung’s is the most elaborate attempt yet to marry theology and psychology.
THE MYTH OF WHOLENESS
Were this book to follow a strictly chronological approach, this chapter would have begun with Franz Kafka. But there is a point in placing him here. His oeuvre is famously incomplete, his three more important books being unfinished when tuberculosis claimed him in 1924 at the age of forty; they were then published posthumously, having been put into order by his friend the author and composer Max Brod. Any attempt at interpretation is, therefore, fraught with difficulty and to be treated with circumspection. That said, enough of his work remains in its original form for us to reconstruct at least some of Kafka’s intentions; and from this we can see that those intentions were quite unlike those of any other author of modern times.
W. H. Auden said, “Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe do to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.” Interpretation was the main concern of Kafka, in particular our search for wholeness, which, he felt, was a legacy, an impossible legacy of traditional religion.
Each of his unfinished novels, Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared, The Trial and The Castle, begins with the arrival of the main character in a complex social world where he is totally ignorant of the rules: America for Karl Rossmann, the law courts for Joseph K. and the village and castle for K. In each case, a variety of adventures follows but they notably fail to lead the protagonists to greater wisdom or understanding. These are not examples or symbols just of modern anomie, but more broadly of the human condition of “natality,” “in which we all find ourselves confronted by [being born into] a world created by others according to a logic we do not intuitively understand.”25 Karl Rossmann is seventeen, Joseph K. is thirty and K. is in his mid-thirties; none of them is a child but, equally, none of them has reached any kind of mature understanding of how the social world works. Nor will they make any progress in the course of the stories.
In these worlds of notable ambiguity, the most explicit of Kafka’s stories is, perhaps (an inevitable qualifier), The Castle. To the main character, K., the castle is less imposing than the church where he grew up, distant and inscrutable, just as the Judeo-Christian God is distant and inscrutable. Even if we prefer the interpretation of The Castle as a parable of the modern phenomenon of bureaucracy, it, too, is often distant and inscrutable. This would appear to suggest that Kafka is describing the main problem of living in a secular world—people simply cannot believe or accept the faith of their childhoods, when they thought the church magnificent (recalling Freud’s arguments), but do not know what to replace it with. In the modern world we live without rules. We are forced to make interpretative judgments without sufficient information to base them on.
And this is the crux, the sediment left by the great monotheisms: that the mind of God can never be known, we shall never solve the mystery of God because God is the name we give to the mystery itself. Therefore, all we are left with in life is interpretation. We must construct our own interpretations of the world, and live with them. We never mature, as Freud anticipated, because we don’t know the rules.
Any summary of a Kafka plot is, inevitably, more or less bloodless, for the point of his stories is to convey to the reader the unbalanced, uncomfortable, bewildering feeling that is the modern condition. Kafka exaggerates, but only in order to make his argument. And he lays before us his profound skepticism about interpretation itself. In 1970, Paul Ricoeur, the French Protestant professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, identified what he called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” In Freud and Philosophy he said that Marx, Nietzsche and Freud were the “masters of suspicion” because what they had in common was “the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as ‘false’ consciousness.” In particular, they were all suspicious, skeptical, of religious consciousness.
Each applied his theory to various aspects of contemporary life, including ideology, morality, art, literature and sexuality, but their core arguments were characterized by a suspicion of religion as myth—whether understood as “an opiate that prevents the masses from awakening to their condition [Marx, whose ideas were at last being put into practice in the 1920s in Soviet Russia], a systematic form of ressentiment that subjects the great individual to a herd morality [Nietzsche], or a comforting illusion that allows civilized people to ignore their own repressed instincts [Freud].” In rejecting religion as mere myth, if with a latent function, each of these masters had created his own alternative mythology, says Ricoeur, “risking the accusation of having slain the Minotaur only to become himself the monster at the center of the labyrinth.” They had, in effect, established their own new form of sacred myth, and this, too, was Kafka’s point.26
Hermeneutics had developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in large part as an effort to understand Scripture as the word of God, whether in the Jewish tradition of the Talmud or the Christian tradition of allegorical interpretation. By this account, the all-important element in hermeneutics is that it is an outgrowth of monotheistic thought “in which the apparent variety and heterogeneity of the world are understood to have a unified, underlying meaning, known only to God (or, in modern variants, to the skilled interpreter) [italics added].”
And this is Kafka’s ultimate concern, except that, like a good novelist, what he does is not tell us his argument but show us; he takes us into this new suspicious realm, he invites us to be suspicious of all interpretation, modern as much as traditional, by giving us a form of literature that resists interpretation.27
THE MODERN TRADE-OFF
Some critics have seen The Castle as resembling the Bible, others have called it an allegory. K. is known only by his initial, other characters are known only by their professions or occupations; and the settings—the Castle, the Inn, the Schoolhouse—are drawn only in the most general terms, are given no proper names. This generality is broken from time to time by vivid detail. When K. sleeps on a straw mattress in the taproom of an inn, this echoes Christ’s birth in the manger, but in the very next room the peasants are carousing—realistic details that strike a very different note. “The effect is to leave the reader unbalanced,” says Pericles Lewis, “threatening constantly to slip from one register to another, feeling increasingly as though some stabilizing level is just out of grasp.”
K.’s position as a secular outsider carries with it the task of bringing secular reason to his dealings with the sacred mystique of the Castle. The officials maintain this mystique in part through an elaborate hierarchy, in part through secrecy reminiscent of the bureaucrats in The Trial. In The Castle, one figure in particular may be seen as close to being a God. This is Klamm, who seems on occasion to be an alter ego for K., whose initial he shares, at other times to be not dissimilar to Samuel Beckett’s Godot. Klamm, in some ways, is “God imagined as a senior bureaucrat.”28
What Kafka was most trying to do was to show his suspicion of hermeneutics. Indeed, as noted, his works frustrate attempts at interpretation. Invariably, they rebuff all attempts to give them a single meaning. Harold Bloom here expresses the opinion of many critics: “[W]hat most needs and demands interpretation in Kafka’s writing is its perversely deliberate evasion of interpretation.” His recourse to multiple meanings “challenges attempts to find a single latent truth but leaves open the (never confirmed) possibility of a higher revelation standing behind his texts. It is this quality that gives many of Kafka’s texts the air of scriptural authority.”29
Moreover, interpretation for Kafka, as for Freud, offered opportunities for belonging to a community. Neither writer was fully assimilated, and Kafka in particular was aware that he would always find it difficult to be anything other than “a community of one.” But he seems to have felt that the way to a “balanced” life—one without bewilderment, comfortable rather than uncomfortable—was to become a member of an “interpretative community.” This coincides, to an extent, with Henry James’s idea of “shared fictions.”
For Kafka, then, the modern condition is a trade-off. The most authentic course is to live as an outsider. Otherwise, one is a member of an interpretative community in which one finds the comfort of numbers and the illusion of certainty but at the cost of hostility toward—and from—others who do not share the community’s beliefs: there is no happy medium. Culture wars will replace—or add to—religious wars (how right he was about that).
What Kafka is showing us, then, is that religious belief is itself an interpretation, one centered on the idea of unity and latency, the idea that there is an ultimate meaning. And this is a notion that no longer suffices, not because it is wrong in its details (if God could ever be called a detail) but because our basic predicament is “natality,” profound ignorance. We don’t know the rules of existence, we don’t even know if there are any. All we can do is make the most of it. Other interpretations of life—Marxism, Nietzscheanism, Freudianism, for example—may seem to have a handle on reality, for a time at least; but the real legacy of the great monotheisms is to leave us with the conviction that there is an underlying unity to reality. Kafka’s stories show us that we have no way of knowing whether that is true, not even in principle. There is no such thing as wholeness, because wholeness, too, is an interpretation. Kafka seemed to take delight in creating disturbing societies where the rules of existence are unfathomable.
15
The Faiths of the Philosophers
A
s has often been pointed out, the God of the philosophers of the past—Boethius, Hume, Spinoza—differed in the glosses placed on his divinity, as to whether and to what extent he (usually “he”) was omniscient, omnipresent and all-powerful, or co-ruled with nature. This book has already explored what such figures as Edmund Husserl, the American pragmatists and Martin Heidegger thought should be the main philosophical concerns in the post-Nietzschean, post-Christian world, but in the interwar years—with the painful memories of the Great War still so vivid, with Russia and Germany in thrall to totalitarianism and with the West disfigured by depression—philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic regrouped, to assess recent political and scientific developments and to offer their thoughts on the way forward.
DEWEY’S COMMON FAITH
The American philosopher and psychologist John Dewey, born in Burlington, Vermont, held that “democracy begins in conversation.” “Conversation” is a gentle word, but then Dewey was a gentle man for whom democracy, what it meant, how it might be better achieved, was all-consuming. And it naturally affected his thinking about God.
For him it was possible to experience religious feelings without metaphysical commitments to anything supernatural. Born in 1859, by the time he was thirty-five he had dispensed with much of the doctrine unique to Christianity, though he kept to Christianity’s ethical concerns. He never gave up entirely on the idea of God, though he abandoned it in its traditional theological form. For Dewey, in A Common Faith (1934), there is no privileged standpoint (such as science or theology) from which the fundamental metaphysical structure of nature “in itself” can be determined. Such entities as “values,” “freedom,” “purposiveness,” which distinguish us from other animals, “belong to our human nature.”1
For Dewey, “Any activity pursued on behalf of an ideal and against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality.” “The religious must be liberated from the supernatural commitments of actual historical religions, from dogmas and doctrines that are, pragmatically, unnecessary. The values and ideals belonging to the religious attitude are not imaginary but real; they are ‘made out of the hard stuff of the world of physical and social experience.’” The religious feeling is, by this account, a natural part of nature. The problems arise when we become entangled in the supernatural. “Religion must be brought down to Earth, to what is ‘common’ between us. Supernaturalism—especially the claim that religions have a monopoly of supernatural means to further human ideals—is an obstacle in pursuing the natural changes that are in our power to bring about; hence religious values need emancipation.”
For Dewey the crux of the matter lies in the distinction between religion and “religious.” A religion is “a special body of beliefs and practices having some kind of institutional organization,” whereas “religious,” an adjective, “does not denote any specific entity but ‘attitudes that may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal.’”
Dewey is focusing on religious experience as a common faith or attitude rather than an individual one. “Religious” can be connected with aesthetic, scientific, moral or political experience, as well as companionship and friendship. Whenever we experience the plenitude of life, a religious attitude, outlook or function is in play. And “the paradigmatic case of a social enterprise carrying religious qualities is science,” whose methods he actively sought to introduce into political society. “Faith in the continued disclosing of truth through directed cooperative human endeavor is more religious in quality than is any faith in a completed revelation.”
He insists there can be no return to pre-scientific revealed religion. Rather, we must understand faith as “the unification of the self thr
ough allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices.” Again, he underlines that these ideal ends are not supernatural. “The assumption that the objects of religion exist already in some realm of Being seems to add nothing to their force, while it weakens their claim over us as ideals, insofar as it bases that claim upon matters that are intellectually dubious.” The aims and ideals that move us are generated through imagination. “But they are not made out of imaginary stuff. They are made out of the hard stuff of the world of physical and social experience.”2
“Use of the words ‘God’ or ‘divine’ to convey the union of actual with the ideal may protect man from a sense of isolation and from consequent despair or defiance.” In other words, if people want to use the word “God” for this feeling they have, that is okay by Dewey; but he himself has no need of it—it is a psychological matter, not a supernatural one.
More important, this way of conceptualizing God enables him to promote his view of continuous growth as our highest goal. The growth of knowledge stemming from scientific inquiry, or “growth in understanding of nature,” may be regarded as religious, and insofar as it liberates religious ideas from narrow supernaturalism it is ethically, socially and politically relevant: “I cannot understand how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the concept of the basic division to which supernatural Christianity is committed. Whether or not we are, save in some metaphorical sense, all brothers, we are at least all in the same boat traversing the same turbulent ocean. The potential religious significance of this fact is infinite.”3
The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God Page 35