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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Philosophy & theory of psychology > General
We rely on two different conceptions of morality. On the one hand,
we think of morality as a correct action guide. Morality is
accessed by taking up a critical, reflective point of view where
our concern is with identifying the moral rules that would be the
focus of the requiring activities of persons in a hypothetical
social world whose participants were capable of accessing the
justifications for everyone's endorsing just this set of rules. On
the other hand, in doing virtually anything connected with
morality-making demands, offering excuses, justifying choices,
expressing moral attitudes, getting uptake on our resentments, and
the like-we rely on social practices of morality and shared moral
understandings that make our moral activities and attitudes
intelligible to others. This second conception of morality, unlike
the first, is not shaped by the aim of getting it right or the
contrast between correct and merely supposed moral requirements. It
is shaped by the moral aim of practicing morality with others
within an actual, not merely hypothetical, scheme of social
cooperation. If practices based on misguided moral norms seem not
to be genuine morality under the first conception, merely
hypothetical practices seem not to be the genuine article under the
second conception. The premise of this book, which collects
together nine previously published essay and a new introduction, is
that both conceptions are indispensable. But exactly how is the
moral theorist to go about working simultaneously with two such
different conceptions of morality? The book's project is not to
construct an overarching methodology for handling the two
conceptions of morality. Instead, it is to provide case studies of
that work being done.
The Red Book, published to wide acclaim in 2009, contains the
nucleus of C. G. Jung's later works. It was here that he developed
his principal theories of the archetypes, the collective
unconscious, and the process of individuation that would transform
psychotherapy from treatment of the sick into a means for the
higher development of the personality. As Sara Corbett wrote in the
New York Times, "The creation of one of modern history's true
visionaries, The Red Book is a singular work, outside of
categorization. As an inquiry into what it means to be human, it
transcends the history of psychoanalysis and underscores Jung's
place among revolutionary thinkers like Marx, Orwell and, of
course, Freud." The Red Book: A Reader's Edition features Sonu
Shamdasani's introductory essay and the full translation of Jung's
vital work in one volume.
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