Thinkers: Dangerous Reductions vs Tools
Insincere Questions
Many of us could argue understanding a thinker is well worth pursuing to which I am not opposed. For any thinker must be encountered in a repetitive cycle of death and rebirth. But my concern does not lie there, it lies elsewhere. It reveals itself most clearly when have we labeled a thinker and reduced his concepts to such a name.
The Freud and Jung debate is always a provocative, sometimes personal or as Andrew Sweeney put it, a “characterological one”. I must admit, I adore them both and always prefer not to choose. I often feel the necessity to “defend” one when I feel that the conversation has swayed to one side or the other. More than not, I am simply uninterested and find it frivolous.
You cannot reduce a thinker to his concepts, but we must instead acquire them as tools. This is where I am most Deleuzian in nature, for it is with great tendency that we say “well Jung, can’t explain this” when rather we should act like a handyman in the attempt at fixing a sink. Indeed, you are correct, a shovel’s utility will fail in solving the leaky sink.
To translate back to Jung, it is not him that fails to answer the problems/questions you raise but instead one of his concepts. It could also be the case that the questions you are asking will not correspond to the utility of the concept (leaky sink vs shovel). The mode and how the question is asked will always demand within itself the nature or lineage of the concepts/tools that are required.
For example, if we ask how do you change a tire? The very nature of the question already implies the necessary tool/concept, meaning car jack. However, this is still an inadequate example because philosophy raises concerns that even the concepts/tools themselves have become a necessary subsequent question.
But not all hope is lost, for this is the creative litmus test of a true thinker. The only insincerity that I am attempting to root out here, are for example, people that are asking “Freudian” or “Jungian” questions that are disguised as a “real question” only to prove the validity and use of their concepts. Therefore, as thinkers we must with great effort avoid such tendencies that deter our striving towards Truth.
Andrew Sweeney’s article: Freud Literalists vs Carl Jung Obscurantists
