The Relevance of Alan Watts in Contemporary Culture

Understanding Contributions and Controversies

Peter J. Columbus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367640354
• eBook ISBN: 9781000384994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy
• Index: Psychology

Whilst accounting for the present-day popularity and relevance of Alan Watts' contributions to psychology, religion, arts, and humanities, this interdisciplinary collection grapples with the ongoing criticisms which surround Watts' life and work.

Offering rich examination of as yet underexplored aspects of Watts' influence in 1960s counterculture, this volume offers unique application of Watts' thinking to contemporary issues and critically engages with controversies surrounding the commodification of Watts' ideas, his alleged misreading of Biblical texts, and his apparent distortion of Asian religions and spirituality. Featuring a broad range of international contributors and bringing Watts' ideas squarely into the contemporary context, the text provides a comprehensive, yet nuanced exploration of Watts' thinking on psychotherapy, Buddhism, language, music, and sexuality.

This text will benefit researchers, doctoral students, and academics in the fields of psychotherapy, phenomenology, and the philosophy of psychology more broadly. Those interested in Jungian psychotherapy, spirituality, and the self and social identity will also enjoy this volume.

Part I

Humanistic Psychology

1 Jung Watts

Notes on C. G. Jung’s Formative Influence on Alan Watts

Ellen F. Franklin and Peter J. Columbus

Looking back on his life and labor, Alan Watts (1973) observed: “Anyone who has read my books from The Legacy of Asia to Psychotherapy East and West will see what a vast influence Jung has had on my work” (p. 385). Watts acknowledged reading all of Jung’s writings immediately upon their translation into English and having access to many unpublished transcripts from private seminars in which Jung spoke freely about controversial topics such as “astrology, alchemy, and kundalini yoga” (p. 385) without fear for his reputation.

Jung’s influence dates to the adolescent Watts’ studies of psychology and Eastern philosophy while in “rebellion against the sterile Christianity” of his childhood (Watts, 1961/1985, p. 133). “From the beginning,” notes Watts (1973), “I was interested in the work of C. G. Jung” (p. 380). As vast as Jung’s influence on Watts may have been, however, the present chapter modestly notes three themes, including (1) the problem of interpretation and reflexivity vis-à-vis “the East,” (2) the possibility of understanding Buddhism, Taoism, and Vedanta via modern psychology, and (3) the shadow side of Alan Watts.

“Difficulties Encountered by a European in Trying to Understand the East”

Columbus and Rice (2017) note Watts’ transition from his 1940s–1950s perennial philosophy to hermeneutics in the 1960s, a shift reflecting larger trends in Western thinking as psychoanalytic theory, Marxist social theory, Indigenous peoples, and Asian cultures challenged the universality of Western religious and philosophical discourse. The present discussion notes Jung’s (1931/1975) interpretive influence on Watts’ early thinking about the Christian West vis-à-vis peoples and cultures of Asia, an influence preceding Watts’ perennial sensibilities but which, surviving as a kind of hermeneutic reflexivity, remained consequential throughout his life and work. (See Homans, 1969, for an early assessment of Jung’s contributions to hermeneutics, plus Barnaby & D’Acierno, 1990, and Gundry, 2006, for later considerations.)

Watts (1973) acknowledged that his “enthusiasm for Oriental wisdom has been disciplined” (p. 385) by Jung (1931/1975). There Jung laid out certain “difficulties encountered by a European in trying to understand the East” (pp. 77–82). The primary difficulty, wrote Jung, is that Europeans have overdeveloped since the Renaissance a one-sided, intellectual sensibility. A consequence of outsized Rationalism is scientism, the belief in science as the “one and only way of comprehending … and therefore we gladly dispose of Eastern ‘wisdom’ in quotation marks and push it away into the obscure territory of faith and superstition” (p. 78).

An early, perhaps the earliest, reference to Jung (1931/1975) by Watts is in a 1935 essay concerning Britain’s relations to India. The 20-year-old Watts (1935/1997b) wrote:

Serious interest in the philosophical and religious legacy of India is, for the most part, confined to academicians, to a certain species of scientist whose practice it is to kill everything he touches by dissecting, analyzing, and classifying it – and then putting it away on a shelf for the use of specialists only.

(p. 151)

Here Watts quoted Jung (1931/1975):

This, in fact, is the Western way of hiding one’s own heart under the cloak of so-called scientific understanding. We do it partly because of the miserable vanite des savants which fears and rejects with horror any sign of living sympathy, and partly because an understanding that reaches the feelings might allow contact with the foreign spirit to become a serious experience.

(Jung, cited in Watts, 1935/1997b, p. 151)

Watts subsequently developed the above theme in depth via The Legacy of Asia and Western Man (1937), exploring the problem of relations between Buddhism, Vedanta, Taoism, and Christianity, particularly Christian “ways of living” in light of the European Renaissance. The book’s intended audience was the “thoughtful [Western] person who feels uncertain of his roots, who has seen the replacement of Faith by Reason and has learnt the barrenness of Reason alone, whose head is satisfied but whose heart thirsts” (pp. xiii-xiv). Identifying Jung (1931/1975) as “one who has already begun to tackle this very problem,” The Legacy of A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Introduction: Alan Watts in the Twenty-first Century
• Part I: Humanistic Psychology
• Part II: Comparative Religion and Philosophy
• Part III: Arts & Humanities
• Editor’s Conclusion
• Alan Watts: A Revised Bibliographic Resource
• Index