JUNG AND SPINOZA: GOD, AFFECT, DESTINY
Instructor: Robert h. Langan
Format: Archived 4-week seminar (Zoom sessions/introduction recording not included)
Total Runtime: ~8 hours
Original Dates: October 4th – October 25th, 2026
Although separated by centuries of history and thought, the work of Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung (1875–1961) has deep and consequential ties with 17th-century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677). This is most evident in the similarity between Spinoza's theory of God and the monism implicit in Jung's writings, but it extends to their shared notions of knowledge and affect — namely, that our ideas of things cannot be separated from how they make us feel. Both thinkers offer strikingly similar prescriptions for transmuting everyday sorrows into active joys, and for how doing so leads to a higher understanding.
Jung and Spinoza: God, Affect, Destiny charts the three concepts these thinkers share: God, or the transcendental immanence in which all things inhere; Affect, or the nature of affective knowledge; and Destiny, or what Jung calls individuation and Spinoza calls blessedness. Beginning with an introductory overview, the course moves through the pair's respective ontologies, takes up their unification of knowledge and feeling, and concludes with the question of the psyche, synchronicity, and salvation. Ultimately, for both Jung and Spinoza, to know oneself is inseparable from knowing the Divine — an insight that makes us all, in a sense, alchemists.
Readings draw on Spinoza's Ethics and Jung's Collected Works (including "On the Nature of the Psyche," "The Transcendent Function," Symbols of Transformation, and Mysterium Coniunctionis), alongside Langan, Lloyd, and Storr.
Instructor Bio
Bob Langan holds a doctorate in Psychoanalytic Studies from the University of Essex. A scholar of Jung and Spinoza, he also specializes in speculative metaphysics and psychological types. He co-runs Univocity Drift, a blog about depth psychology, theory, and more. His book Jung and Spinoza: Passage Through the Blessed Self is available through Routledge. He can be reached at bob.langan@gmail.com or on the Acid Horizon Discord in the class channel.