C. G. JUNG: PSYCHOLOGIST OF THE FUTURE
“PHILOSOPHER” OF THE PAST
The walls of his study were white, but it was the kind of white that betrayed his habit of smoking a good deal at his desk. The only decoration on the walls was a portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The large window offered a view of a nearby church. Over the years, a tree grew up between the house and the church. It prospered so well that its crown reached as high as the church and blocked the latter from his accustomed view. He ordered the tree cut down. It was. He suffered from constipation and carefully noted, in writing, the effects of the prescribed medicine as well as the effects of taking half or twice the prescribed dosage. He never loved a single human being. He would not dine if there were fewer than three or more than nine people at the dinner table. His penmanship was atrocious; his genius, thought. Friedrich Nietzsche despised him. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe often wondered out loud why the good man troubled himself so with these awkward questions. Carl Gustav Jung relied on him absolutely. Standing before you in all his Saturnian gloom is the Enlightenment’s profoundest thinker, Professor Immanuel Kant.1
“Buber does not understand what psychic reality is,” wrote Jung in a letter to someone, Martin Buber having previously voiced the complaint that Jung reduced God to a “psychic entity.”2 Beleaguered on all sides by scientists and theologians and Freudians and fools (whose respective charges were that he was a metaphysician, a Gnostic, C. G. Jung, and a fool), Jung retreated time and again to his Kantian temenos to bellow away for the umpteenth time in that leonine fashion which I now paraphrase:
I am not now nor have I ever been either a metaphysician or a Gnostic. I am and always will be a psychologist and as such I am fully aware of the theory of knowledge and the boundaries it draws between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world, or the world where knowledge is possible and the world where it is not. When I speak of God I speak only of the human experience of God. Such experience is composed of psychic phenomena which are not less real for being psychic. The only charge against me, therefore, is that I am simply doing my job. God as such, God considered apart from human experience, is a noumenal entity as I well know. But that entity is in no sense my concern since, as Immanuel Kant has irrefutably shown in his Critique of Pure Reason, human knowledge of such entities is impossible.
Note the expression “the theory of knowledge.”3 If Kant thought his theory of knowledge was the last word in epistemological thought (and he did), Jung was not about to quarrel with him. Jung thought himself a Kantian; what I hope to show is that he was, in fact, a most un-Kantian Kantian and that if the scientists and the theologians and the Freudians and the fools had listened more and talked less, Jung might have been in a position to allow himself to see what I now think I see.
Jung’s way of relying on Kant sometimes makes it appear as if Kant wrote his Critique somehow in anticipation of Jung, or with Jung in mind. Of course, nothing is less true. Kant worried about David Hume’s treatment of causality, about Swedenborg’s “utter nonsense” and about how to re-vision metaphysics (with which, as he said, “it is my fate to be in love”).4
Kant sensed that Hume was wrong about causality but it took him a long time to decide why. Hume’s point had been that causal relations do not exist: we say that water boils because it has been heated, but we observe no such link. All we observe is the “constant conjunction” of event A (the heating of water) and event B (its boiling), and it is this constant conjunction which gives us the illusory idea that A causes B.
The trouble with metaphysics was considerably more complex. There was the whole Scholastic tradition in which metaphysicians had cheerfully established chains of reasoning between here-and-now reality and the “transcendent” world of God and his angels, proving God’s existence and coming to all sorts of conclusions about him. Here is, to quote a famous example, St. Anselm’s proof of the existence of God. Major Premise: I have the idea of a perfect Being; Minor Premise: if that Being did not exist it would not be perfect; Conclusion: God exists. What is wrong here, said Kant, is the second step which treats “existence” as though it were just another predicate like “perfection.” But I cannot predicate anything whatsoever of a substance unless that substance exists: existence is nothing but the ground for the possibility of predication. It is not itself a predicate.
Exit transcendent metaphysics, enter the Kantian revolution. It started with a brand-new question: given the existence of humans and the existence of a world, what makes human experience of that world possible? Remember how, before Kant, Descartes had been agonized by the question how he could be sure that the world and even his own body were real and not just his hallucinations. But Descartes had been able to spirit the question away by saying that God who loved his creation could not so deceive us. Kant went about it differently. Never mind about God, he said in effect, that’s another book.”5 We must first settle the question of what constitutes the agreement between the pictures in our heads and the things out there that they are pictures of. I want to know what has to be the case in order for that agreement to exist. Mind you, I am not talking about your experience or mine but about the fact of experience as such, Erfahrung überhaupt. And I call this the transcendental approach, as against both the empirical one (in which experience as such is never at issue but taken for granted) and the transcendent approach which produces nothing but illusions.
What had to be the case, Kant decided, is that everything begins with visual and auditory and tactile stimuli impinging on our sense organs, giving rise to a chaotic confusion of sense data. Next, the “Understanding”6 steps in to structure this chaos by means of its innate categories. An example of such a category is “substance and accident”: this organizes one particular confusion of sense data into the experience “thing with properties”; another example is causality: this organizes another such confusion into the experience of a time sequence in which event A is seen necessarily to precede event B, and thus to entail it. Both these categories come under the rubric “Relation.” Kant lists four such rubrics and declares the list exhaustive for all time. It is not but that, too, is another book.
Two points are to be noted. The first is that Kant places the starting-point of human experience in the world. Our senses receive impressions and that triggers off the structuring activity of the Understanding. Kant emphasizes over and over again (since he cannot conceive of another point of contact between ourselves and the world than the senses) that experience is always and necessarily sense experience to begin with, or it is not experience but non-sense. The second point is more subtle but no less important. Remember how Kant pondered, his gaze resting on the church, about just where Hume went wrong in his treatment of causality. His answer emerges as he explains the categories. In my paraphrase it reads as follows: Hume’s observation was correct but he drew the wrong conclusion from it. What Hume did not see is that if a notion such as causality cannot be inductively obtained then we have no choice but to explain it as an innate category or structure—that is, that notion must then be in our heads. (The same reasoning is behind all the categories. Their innateness is “what has to be the case.”) How else could it ever occur to us to say that A causes B when all we ever witness is that A steadily precedes B? Whence should we derive the notion of cause if it isn’t anywhere?
Human experience, then, arises out of the Understanding’s structuring of sense data. Kant had now found at least part of the answer to his own question about what constitutes the agreement between the pictures in our heads and the things out there. We structure the world in accordance with the picture models in our heads, we impose these models on the world. Note what follows from this insight: that we do not know the world as it is, but only as we structure it. Kant was fully aware of this. The world as it is, he said, is forever beyond our reach. It is a “noumenon.”
And something else follows as well. The categories enable us to experience a space-time world but that experience is always determined by these particular sense data structured on that particular occasion. Realize what this means: we cannot have knowledge of God or the soul since these are noumena; we cannot determine whether the world had a beginning since we cannot step outside time to decide the question. God and the soul and immortality and similar notions are noumena or “Ideas created by Reason” (Vernunft). However, Kant said, Ideas of Reason cannot be objects of knowledge but only of belief. Such, in briefest outline, is what Jung referred to as “the” theory of knowledge.
But it is time for a more cheery paragraph. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who read no more than twenty pages or so of Kant’s Critique, leafed through the rest and then put it aside exclaiming “Good heavens no!,” nonetheless produced a comment on it which may be the best one ever made. Goethe one day received a letter from a lady-friend who asked him to please explain to her what this strange book that had just appeared was all about. Goethe replied that he could only tell her what he understood himself: that Kant was saying human experience was a matter of sense perception and of the structuring activity of the human intelligence; that human Reason produced what Kant called Ideas and that Ideas could be objects of belief but not of knowledge. But, Goethe went on,
what is omitted here is the imagination [hier wird aber die Phantasie vergessen] and that omission strikes me as irreversibly disastrous [wodurch eine unheilbare Lücke entsteht]. Imagination is the fourth faculty [die vierte Hauptkraft] in addition to the sense, the Understanding and Reason.7
Well, yes indeed. But this splendid observation, hidden away for two centuries in a letter by a largely forgotten genius, introduces a drastic change in the Kantian picture. For if we allow the imagination its proper place in that picture (and Kant never said we should not, nor could he do so since Kant had no conception of what we, since Jung, call imagination; Goethe, for his part, was speaking from personal experience of his own creative imagination which was of a kind wholly lacking in Kant) then we can no longer regard the world as the starting-point of human experience. Instead, we must now regard that experience as always embedded in an imaginal context. But this in turn has drastic consequences. Consider again the Kantian distinction between the world we experience and the world as such (the world as noumenon), and pay heed for a moment to a tiny fact: that “the world” exists only for beings who imagine such a thing. It follows that there exists no world “apart from us,” apart from the way we imagine and sense and structure that which we call “the world.”
I now invite those readers I have not yet lost to look again at Kant’s quarrel with Scholastic metaphysics. As you look, bear Goethe in mind and recall the lesson contained in James Hillman’s Re-visioning Psychology. Unless I am very much mistaken you will see something of interest emerge: that the real issue was one of literalism versus deliteralization, not of “transcendence yes or no.” Kant opposed the positing of literal transcendent worlds literally peopled by literal transcendent entities. In his own epistemology Kant turns these worlds and entities into “Ideas of Reason” in which we may “believe,” that is, which we may treat as if they existed. In so doing he killed two birds with one stone: 1) by declaring these worlds and entities noumenal he got rid not only of the need but also of the possibility of “proving” anything about them; 2) he deliteralized the notion of transcendence.
The crucial point, however, is that this deliteralization was itself of a literal nature. Think of yourself and someone else playing a game together: the you that will be in your office again tomorrow morning knows that the game is “not real,” but the you that plays it treats it as real while you are playing. In precisely this fashion Kant declared transcendent worlds and entities unreal as objects of knowledge but real as objects of belief. That is to say, Kant did not disprove their existence: he only proved the impossibility of proving that they do exist. That was his first step (see previous paragraph). Next, he changed their status from “transcendently real” to “as-if-real”: he deliteralized them, but in a literal way. And this is where Jung got caught. For while Jung the psychologist introduced the genuine deliteralization of the worlds and entities posited by Scholastic metaphysics (and religions in general) by founding all reality and knowledge of it in psychic images, Jung the “philosopher” relied for his defense on Kant’s literal deliteralization.
Seen in this light, the Jungian emphasis on “psychic reality” is nothing if not counterproductive. For as long as the distinction is maintained between a noumenal X and a psychic X, the noumenal X is going to sound like the real thing and the psychic X like its poor copy: no amount of emphasis or explanation can remedy that. So long as images are regarded as contingent upon (or the variable manifestations of) “irrepresentable archetypes-as-such,” so long will images be thought of as somehow inferior or second-hand. Noumenal (with its connotations of “unknowable,” hence “mysterious” and “otherworldly”) always carries more word magic than does phenomenal which evokes a bread-and-butter, here-and-now atmosphere. But the fact is that Jung’s archetypal psychology implies an epistemological stance which renders the noumena-phenomena distinction wholly unnecessary. Or, to give the same point the much wider scope it deserves, the fact is that the Jungian world view dissolved rather than developed its Kantian counterpart. Jung himself, however, was philosophically so “steeped” (his own word in the Freeman interview) in the Kantian world view that he could not or in any case did not regard it in the light of his own revolution (which he was forever having to defend). Thus he was and remained a Kantian even while steadily undoing Kant and never, never putting Kant on the couch as he did Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Augustine, Plotinus, Tertullian, Origen.
The question is, however, where all this leaves us. My proposal is a simple one. Let us who try to follow Jung do so without following Jung’s defense of Jung because that defense turns out to be both self-contradictory and unnecessary. Let us follow Jung the Jungian not Jung the (non-)Kantian. Perhaps the psychologists among us will want to deliteralize and psychologize Jung’s everlasting appeal to Kant; perhaps philosophers who feel themselves inspired by Jung will want to delve into the many ways in which the Jungian world view supersedes that of Kant. (We are in need, for example, of a brand-new epistemology which takes Jung into account.) However this may be, it is clear that there is work to be done.
By way of conclusion, let us imagine Jung and Kant having a chat about archetypes (Goethe is there too and listens attentively, watching Jung with keen interest). Jung explains his theory to Kant the way he explained it to the world during his lifetime. When Jung is done Kant shakes his head and says, “I don’t think I follow you. You tell me that you called your archetypes noumena insofar as they are psychic structures and phenomena insofar as they are images. But in terms of my theory you should have called the structures categories (which are not noumena but “what has to be the case”) and the images noumena. For if I have understood you correctly these images are not things encountered in sense experience. Well, so long as that is the case they are either what I was fond of calling Hirngespinste or blosses Geschwätz during my life on earth, just plain nonsense that is, or they are noumena presented to or out of belief. However the real issue between us, it seems to me, is that for me the soul is also a noumenon whereas I heard you say most emphatically that for you it is empirically real. That is a fundamental difference between us from which all sorts of other differences follow, and that is also what makes it impossible, logically and otherwise, to cast a psychology like yours into the mold of an epistemology like mine. And to be quite frank about it, I do not really understand why you tried so very hard to do it anyway.”
NOTES
1. See Ernst Cassirer, Kants Leben und Lehre (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1918), and Uwe Schultz, Kant (Reinbeck: Rowohlt Verlag, 1965).
2. C. G. Jung, Briefe, 3 vols. edited by Aniela Jaffé (Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau: Walther-Verlag, 1972–1980), 2: 272.
3. Jung actually uses it in CW 8, §362.
4. In Träume eines Geistersehers.
5. The Critique of Practical Reason.
6. This awkward term is the standard translation of Verstand.
7. See Karl Vorländer, Kant – Schiller – Goethe: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Leipzig: Verlag der Dürr’schen Buchhandlung, 1907), 212–13.
Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1977): 175–82
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