I recently received a book on various Western philosophers that I'm finding quite interesting. It's not very in-depth, it contains a blurb on each philosopher, but it definitely is useful for getting better acquainted with a wide range of philosophers. Some of the philosophies that are laid out are quite interesting, although some of these people are just full of shit (Saint Thomas Aquinas, I'm looking at you). One of the more interesting, though, is this idea of the collective unconscious espoused by Jung and Hegel. I actually invoked this idea in a paper concerning Karl Marx. Since Marx, in his 1848 manuscripts, seems to indicate that what he refers to as crude communism is a necessary step between capitalism and pure communism, the question thus posed was concerning whether or not Marx's theories were deterministic; whether these regrettable stages between capitalism and pure communism could be averted, or their consequences at least mitigated. My answer was that yes, in fact, they could be in a sense. Because the world has already witnessed the crude stage of communism in the form of the Soviet Union, not every society had to pass through this crude phase in order to arrive at a more functional one. Thinking a bit more deeply into the matter, I begin to wonder if this is true.
I do not doubt that it could be true, we do have the capability of tapping into this collective unconscious via study of history. Whether or not we will take advantage of such an opportunity, however, is a different question entirely. It takes little observation of history before one realizes that a people as a whole very rarely learn from their past. In Europe the secularist congratulates himself on his own triumph of overcoming petty religious disputes. The secularist remembers the violence perpetuated in his country because of religion decades and even centuries ago, and it is for this reason that he is a secularist. However, the European secularist fails to realize his own follies, fails to realize that religious infighting exists under the guise of secularism. The American citizen is overjoyed by the passing of his country into a post-racial phase (for the third or fourth time), and yet in his bliss he is ignorant of many of the details of how this civil rights movement unfolded. Soren Kierkegaard wrote in the early nineteenth century that, "Each age has its depravity. Ours is...a dissolute pantheistic contempt for individual man." I do not doubt whether that was true of his age, although it could be true simply of the environment that Kierkegaard was in. One of the primary failings of existentialism is that one examines one's own place in the universe failing to take into account how many other individuals occupy their own unique space with its own unique properties. However, if that was true of Kierkegaard's time I feel that the reverse is true of ours. We have taken individuality and turned it into a cult, drawn it out to its extreme conclusions.
Granted, it is hard to find anything wrong with individuality, even more so working within the context of a culture that glorifies it, but it is also easy to find fault with almost anything when it disregards its opposite. When individuality is glorified to a point where community is reviled then the task of finding fault with individuality becomes infinitely simpler. An African proverb says that it takes a village to raise a child, but how many villages today assist in this manner? It seems that everywhere we have become more and more isolated from those in physical proximity to us, to the point where mistrust is more familiar than trust, much less a trust that extends to such individuals being a major part of a child's life. Furthermore, take Emile Durkheim's study on suicide. Durkheim, after comparing suicide rates among different religious, ethnic, gender, and economic groups, and conducting qualitative analysis, concluded that where a group stressed individuality suicide rates were higher; where it stressed community suicide rates were lower.
We have lost this respect for community due to our worship of individuality. It is becoming pathological in some segments, to the point where even institutions such as public education are under attack. Perhaps, too, there is an element of alienation that Marx described as inherent to capitalism. While relevant to the larger picture, that holds little relevance here. The point that must be addressed is that the dialectical process on which all of society progresses has regressed. How did Kierkegaard's age come to despise the individual? Through the glorification of the community, everything done for the greater good, for industry. It is good that the dialectical process led to the reverence of the individual eventually, but in the process the reverence for the community was lost as well. This brings me back to the original point, will we ever truly progress in such a manner without losing that which is admirable about what we already have? I believe it is possible, but it will not be an easy endeavor.
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