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SLOW_JUNG

                                             July 15, 2011


   Three decades ago, I had an odd conversation with
   a guy running a fast food joint in Pocatello, Idaho.

   I didn't have time to answer his point,
   and the way these things go, I find myself
   still thinking about it.

      This fellow, appropros of nothing, was ranting about
      how ignorant people are, how they've never even heard
      of Carl Jung, and he added that if they haven't heard
      of him, then we can't move beyond him.

      I commented that I'd like to talk to him about it,
      but I really had to run.

      His response: "That's what I get for running
      a fast food place."



      What I thought at the time was two fold:

      (a) It may be true that few have heard of Jung, but
      it's certainly not true that the common understanding
      of things is completely devoid of Jung's influence.

      "Introvert" and "extrovert" are widely
      understood terms, and you can't read many
      movie reviews without stumbling across
      talk of "the collective unconscious" and
      "archetypes".



      (a) it isn't really true that you need to know
      Jung's name in order to move beyond Jung's ideas.
      If you look at an intro physics class, it has
      little to do with things like "Goethe thought
      this, but Newton thought that".  Classical physics
      is a tightly worked out logical edifice where
      the names of the original developers survive only
      (and only sometimes) as names, e.g. "Newton's Laws".
      There's no real discussion of what Newton thought
      and how he arrived at those laws.

      An intro Psych class has to take a historical
      approach, because they never succeeded in developing
      anything like that logical edifice.

      And that is comparable to some advanced physics
      subjects like Quantum Mechanics, where the
      historical approach returns again, along with
      the interpretations that different thinkers have
      applied to some very puzzling facts.

               We return to history,
               when all else fails.





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