The Original Motorcycle Dog. VALIDATION - Short Comedy. Escher's Waterfall. "Faith" Religion - Pat Condell. Philosophy Videos. Carl Jung Ponders Death. On June 6, 1961, the great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung died at his villa at Küsnacht, on the shore of Lake Zurich, Switzerland. He was 86 years old. Jung viewed death as a fulfillment, rather than a negation, of life.
“As a doctor,” he wrote in his 1930 essay, The Stages of Life, “I am convinced that it is hygienic–if I may use the word–to discover in death a goal toward which one can strive, and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.” To this end, wrote Jung many years later in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a person should follow his instinct and embrace myth: “for reason shows him nothing but the dark pit into which he is descending.
Jung certainly embraced the myth of an afterlife, as evidenced in this excerpt from an October, 1959 interview with John Freeman for the BBC program Face to Face. Related Content: Free Psychology Courses from Top Universities. The Philosophy Teacher. No fear! Wittgenstein: Philosophical discussion in Cambridge. Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault. The Ideas of Chomsky. The Examined Life & the Task of Public Philosophy.
This phrase is over 2400 years old, dating back to 399 BC when Socrates first uttered the words at his infamous defense trial, and retold by his pupil Plato around 387 BC in the Platonic dialogue the Apology of Socrates. Beyond modeling the examined life himself, Socrates pressed ordinary Athenian citizens to question their notions of justice, virtue, piety, and love, and never held set definitions himself. Since Socrates, the aphorism of the “examined life” has given rise to analogous sayings such as “life of the mind,” vita contemplativa, and “learning for learning’s sake,” and is the subject of countless books and courses. One could even consider the project of philosophy, which itself began with Socrates, one of calling this phrase into question.
But the examined life, as fundamental to human life as it was for Socrates, has never been available for all human beings. As theoretical as Socrates’s philosophy can seem, it was always a practical, public project at heart. Examined Life.
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