The validity of BK claiming Jung was an idealist
Posted: Wed May 26, 2021 5:03 pm
Hi all,
I'm curious to your opinions of BK's new book called 'Decoding Jung's Metaphysics'. Especially the claim that Jung was an idealist. I feel like BK kind of nitpicked a few quotes from Jung's work and interpreted as idealist. I think he might very well be biased because of course he himself is an idealist so he looks at it a certain way, but also because Jung has written thousands and thousands of pages. Surely there are a few things there that he has written that might be interpreted as idealism. But also sometimes I see BK twisting words for his own benefit. Such as in:
'For now, however, we must address some passages in Jung’s writings that, at first sight and out of context, may seem to contradict the idealist interpretation proposed above. For instance: Although there is no form of existence that is not mediated to us psychically and only psychically, it would hardly do to say that everything is merely psychic. (ONP: 149)
To properly interpret passages such as this, we must keep in mind that by ‘psychic’ Jung often means properly psychic—i.e. conscious. So he is simply acknowledging that not everything is a conscious experience, for there are also un conscious experiences—i.e. phenomenal states not accessible to the ego through introspection'.
How can BK possibly know this? It's merely a interpretation and highly speculative IMO. I feel like he is kind of bending words towards idealism to make it work.
'Indeed, when Jung is being more guarded and careful, trying not to antagonize the predominantly materialist views of his time, he seems to deliberately exploit the ambiguity of the word ‘psychic.’ Here is another example: in a letter written in March 1953, Pauli admonishes Jung to “not once again make too much of the psychic factor” (AA: 106, original emphasis). To which Jung replies, in a reconciliatory and accommodating tone: We can say of an object that it is psychic when it is ascertainable only as a concept. But if it has features that indicate its non-psychic autonomous existence, we naturally tend to accept it as non-psychic. (AA: 113, emphasis added). By associating the “non-psychic” with something “autonomous”—i.e. outside deliberate volitional control—Jung is using the qualifier ‘psychic’ in the more restrictive sense of properly psychic. So the statement does not contradict idealism, in that it only acknowledges that there is something beyond consciousness, not necessarily beyond experience. Yet, the wording is just ambiguous enough that it could be interpreted by Pauli as an acknowledgment of the possibility of a material world outside and independent of experience.'
Again I find this highly highly speculative, you can not know this and are again bending words IMO. How can he know that Jung is trying to sort of 'manipulate' Pauli here? I mean, if Jung was an idealist why bother exchanging letters with Pauli for 26 years about psyche and matter being equally made of 'a yet unknown substance'? Another example here:
'Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. (ONP: 148)
One might hastily conclude from reading this passage out of context that Jung’s favored metaphysics is dual-aspect monism: the notion that psyche and matter are merely two different aspects of a concealed, fundamental metaphysical substrate that, in turn, is neither psychic nor material in essence (cf. Stubenberg 2018: Section 8.3). This, of course, would contradict Jung’s stated position that the psychic is its own oὺσία—substance, essence, being—for in the case of dual-aspect monism the psychic would be merely a view or representation of a non-psychic substance. So what is going on?
Careful analysis reveals a very different point here than an appeal to dual-aspect monism. Allow me to elaborate.
First, let us clarify what Jung means by claiming that matter rests on “transcendental factors”: as recognized by Kant already in the 18th century, all we can become directly acquainted with are explicit perceptions —i.e. conscious contents of the psyche that merely represent an external world. The non-experiential, non-psychic, essentially material substrate that—according to mainstream materialism—supposedly causes these perceptions by stimulating our sense organs cannot be known as it is in itself. As such, insofar as it can be known for sure, matter is merely an inference, a theoretical abstraction of ego-consciousness (cf. e.g. Kastrup 2018). In Jung’s words:
the only form of existence we know of immediately is psychic. We might as well say … that physical existence is merely an inference, since we know of matter only in so far as we perceive psychic images transmitted by the senses. (PR: 11, emphasis added)
Jung then states that the psyche, like matter, also rests on “transcendental factors.” But since the experiential contents of ego-consciousness are precisely the only thing we can become directly acquainted with, what does he mean by that statement? Here again, the crux of the matter is Jung’s inconsistent usage of the term ‘psyche’ to refer sometimes to the psyche proper, other times to the foundation of the psyche—i.e. the collective unconscious—and yet other times to the psyche as a whole. The claim that the “psyche [rests on] transcendental factors” gives us the clue we need to figure out which denotation is meant in this particular context. Indeed, in the discussion that immediately precedes the passage wherein Jung seems to suggest dual-aspect monism, he focuses entirely on highlighting the unknowability of the psychoid realm of the psyche—i.e. the archetypes in the collective unconscious. Therefore, by claiming that the psyche rests on “transcendental factors,” he is alluding to the collective unconscious, a part of the psyche that transcends our ability to become directly acquainted with. The psyche proper —i.e. ego-consciousness—is, by definition, not transcendental; indeed, it’s the one thing we have direct access to! So the psyche proper doesn’t belong in the comparison with matter that Jung attempts to make—at any rate, not on the basis of the argument he puts forward to justify the comparison.'
Again I find BK way to confident in stating that Jung is sometimes using one thing to refer to 'psyche' and sometimes another thing to refer to 'psyche'. And that somehow BK can know exactly what Jung means with the words psyche in different contexts as if it is some kind of code language.
Then another thing I’d like to highlight is that BK barely talks about the Unus Mundus in his book, something that Jung talked a lot about. BK only uses the word mundus archetype once or maybe twice in his book. IMO the Unus Mundus that Jung talks about sounds a lot more like dual-aspect monism than idealism. Here are some quotes written by Jung about the Unus Mundus:
‘Humility is a not inconsiderable virtue which should prompt Christians, for the sake of charity—the greatest of all virtues—to set a good example and acknowledge that though there is only one truth it speaks in many tongues, and that if we still cannot see this it is simply due to lack of understanding. No one is so godlike that he alone knows the true word. All of us gaze into that “dark glass” in which the dark myth takes shape, adumbrating the invisible truth. In this glass the eyes of the spirit glimpse an image which we call the self, fully conscious of the fact that it is an anthropomorphic image which we have merely named but not explained. By “self” we mean psychic wholeness, but what realities underlie this concept we do not know, because psychic contents cannot be observed in their unconscious state, and moreover the psyche cannot know itself. The conscious can know the unconscious only so far as it has become conscious. We have only a very hazy idea of the changes an unconscious content undergoes in the process of becoming conscious, but no certain knowledge. The concept of psychic wholeness necessarily implies an element of transcendence on account of the existence of unconscious components. Transcendence in this sense is not equivalent to a metaphysical postulate or hypostasis; it claims to be no more than a borderline concept, to quote Kant.
That there is something beyond the borderline, beyond the frontiers of knowledge, is shown by the archetypes and, most clearly of all, by numbers, which this side of the border are quantities but on the other side are autonomous psychic entities, capable of making qualitative statements which manifest themselves in a priori patterns of order. These patterns include not only causally explicable phenomena like dream-symbols and such, but remarkable relativizations of time and space which simply cannot be explained causally. They are the parapsychological phenomena which I have summed up under the term “synchronicity” and which have been statistically investigated by Rhine. The positive results of his experiments elevate these phenomena to the rank of undeniable facts. This brings us a little nearer to understanding the mystery of psychophysical parallelism, for we now know that a factor exists which mediates between the apparent incommensurability of body and psyche, giving matter a kind of “psychic” faculty and the psyche a kind of “materiality,” by means of which the one can work on the other. That the body can work on the psyche seems to be a truism, but strictly speaking all we know is that any bodily defect or illness also expresses itself psychically. Naturally this assumption only holds good if, contrary to the popular materialistic view, the psyche is credited with an existence of its own. But materialism in its turn cannot explain how chemical changes can produce a psyche. Both views, the materialistic as well as the spiritualistic, are metaphysical prejudices. It accords better with experience to suppose that living matter has a psychic aspect, and the psyche a physical aspect.'
‘The psychoid nature of the archetype contains very much more than can be included in a psychological explanation. It points to the sphere of the unus mundus, the unitary world, towards which the psychologist and the atomic physicist are converging along separate paths, producing independently of one another certain analogous auxiliary concepts.’
‘Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say in what this relationship consists or how it is possible at all. Precisely because the psychic and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience, though this certainly does not justify the arbitrary hypothesis of either materialism or spiritualism. With this conjecture of the identity of the psychic and the physical we approach the alchemical view of the unus mundus, the potential world of the first day of creation, when there was as yet “no second.”
Apologies for the long text, I am very curious to your opinions
I'm curious to your opinions of BK's new book called 'Decoding Jung's Metaphysics'. Especially the claim that Jung was an idealist. I feel like BK kind of nitpicked a few quotes from Jung's work and interpreted as idealist. I think he might very well be biased because of course he himself is an idealist so he looks at it a certain way, but also because Jung has written thousands and thousands of pages. Surely there are a few things there that he has written that might be interpreted as idealism. But also sometimes I see BK twisting words for his own benefit. Such as in:
'For now, however, we must address some passages in Jung’s writings that, at first sight and out of context, may seem to contradict the idealist interpretation proposed above. For instance: Although there is no form of existence that is not mediated to us psychically and only psychically, it would hardly do to say that everything is merely psychic. (ONP: 149)
To properly interpret passages such as this, we must keep in mind that by ‘psychic’ Jung often means properly psychic—i.e. conscious. So he is simply acknowledging that not everything is a conscious experience, for there are also un conscious experiences—i.e. phenomenal states not accessible to the ego through introspection'.
How can BK possibly know this? It's merely a interpretation and highly speculative IMO. I feel like he is kind of bending words towards idealism to make it work.
'Indeed, when Jung is being more guarded and careful, trying not to antagonize the predominantly materialist views of his time, he seems to deliberately exploit the ambiguity of the word ‘psychic.’ Here is another example: in a letter written in March 1953, Pauli admonishes Jung to “not once again make too much of the psychic factor” (AA: 106, original emphasis). To which Jung replies, in a reconciliatory and accommodating tone: We can say of an object that it is psychic when it is ascertainable only as a concept. But if it has features that indicate its non-psychic autonomous existence, we naturally tend to accept it as non-psychic. (AA: 113, emphasis added). By associating the “non-psychic” with something “autonomous”—i.e. outside deliberate volitional control—Jung is using the qualifier ‘psychic’ in the more restrictive sense of properly psychic. So the statement does not contradict idealism, in that it only acknowledges that there is something beyond consciousness, not necessarily beyond experience. Yet, the wording is just ambiguous enough that it could be interpreted by Pauli as an acknowledgment of the possibility of a material world outside and independent of experience.'
Again I find this highly highly speculative, you can not know this and are again bending words IMO. How can he know that Jung is trying to sort of 'manipulate' Pauli here? I mean, if Jung was an idealist why bother exchanging letters with Pauli for 26 years about psyche and matter being equally made of 'a yet unknown substance'? Another example here:
'Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. (ONP: 148)
One might hastily conclude from reading this passage out of context that Jung’s favored metaphysics is dual-aspect monism: the notion that psyche and matter are merely two different aspects of a concealed, fundamental metaphysical substrate that, in turn, is neither psychic nor material in essence (cf. Stubenberg 2018: Section 8.3). This, of course, would contradict Jung’s stated position that the psychic is its own oὺσία—substance, essence, being—for in the case of dual-aspect monism the psychic would be merely a view or representation of a non-psychic substance. So what is going on?
Careful analysis reveals a very different point here than an appeal to dual-aspect monism. Allow me to elaborate.
First, let us clarify what Jung means by claiming that matter rests on “transcendental factors”: as recognized by Kant already in the 18th century, all we can become directly acquainted with are explicit perceptions —i.e. conscious contents of the psyche that merely represent an external world. The non-experiential, non-psychic, essentially material substrate that—according to mainstream materialism—supposedly causes these perceptions by stimulating our sense organs cannot be known as it is in itself. As such, insofar as it can be known for sure, matter is merely an inference, a theoretical abstraction of ego-consciousness (cf. e.g. Kastrup 2018). In Jung’s words:
the only form of existence we know of immediately is psychic. We might as well say … that physical existence is merely an inference, since we know of matter only in so far as we perceive psychic images transmitted by the senses. (PR: 11, emphasis added)
Jung then states that the psyche, like matter, also rests on “transcendental factors.” But since the experiential contents of ego-consciousness are precisely the only thing we can become directly acquainted with, what does he mean by that statement? Here again, the crux of the matter is Jung’s inconsistent usage of the term ‘psyche’ to refer sometimes to the psyche proper, other times to the foundation of the psyche—i.e. the collective unconscious—and yet other times to the psyche as a whole. The claim that the “psyche [rests on] transcendental factors” gives us the clue we need to figure out which denotation is meant in this particular context. Indeed, in the discussion that immediately precedes the passage wherein Jung seems to suggest dual-aspect monism, he focuses entirely on highlighting the unknowability of the psychoid realm of the psyche—i.e. the archetypes in the collective unconscious. Therefore, by claiming that the psyche rests on “transcendental factors,” he is alluding to the collective unconscious, a part of the psyche that transcends our ability to become directly acquainted with. The psyche proper —i.e. ego-consciousness—is, by definition, not transcendental; indeed, it’s the one thing we have direct access to! So the psyche proper doesn’t belong in the comparison with matter that Jung attempts to make—at any rate, not on the basis of the argument he puts forward to justify the comparison.'
Again I find BK way to confident in stating that Jung is sometimes using one thing to refer to 'psyche' and sometimes another thing to refer to 'psyche'. And that somehow BK can know exactly what Jung means with the words psyche in different contexts as if it is some kind of code language.
Then another thing I’d like to highlight is that BK barely talks about the Unus Mundus in his book, something that Jung talked a lot about. BK only uses the word mundus archetype once or maybe twice in his book. IMO the Unus Mundus that Jung talks about sounds a lot more like dual-aspect monism than idealism. Here are some quotes written by Jung about the Unus Mundus:
‘Humility is a not inconsiderable virtue which should prompt Christians, for the sake of charity—the greatest of all virtues—to set a good example and acknowledge that though there is only one truth it speaks in many tongues, and that if we still cannot see this it is simply due to lack of understanding. No one is so godlike that he alone knows the true word. All of us gaze into that “dark glass” in which the dark myth takes shape, adumbrating the invisible truth. In this glass the eyes of the spirit glimpse an image which we call the self, fully conscious of the fact that it is an anthropomorphic image which we have merely named but not explained. By “self” we mean psychic wholeness, but what realities underlie this concept we do not know, because psychic contents cannot be observed in their unconscious state, and moreover the psyche cannot know itself. The conscious can know the unconscious only so far as it has become conscious. We have only a very hazy idea of the changes an unconscious content undergoes in the process of becoming conscious, but no certain knowledge. The concept of psychic wholeness necessarily implies an element of transcendence on account of the existence of unconscious components. Transcendence in this sense is not equivalent to a metaphysical postulate or hypostasis; it claims to be no more than a borderline concept, to quote Kant.
That there is something beyond the borderline, beyond the frontiers of knowledge, is shown by the archetypes and, most clearly of all, by numbers, which this side of the border are quantities but on the other side are autonomous psychic entities, capable of making qualitative statements which manifest themselves in a priori patterns of order. These patterns include not only causally explicable phenomena like dream-symbols and such, but remarkable relativizations of time and space which simply cannot be explained causally. They are the parapsychological phenomena which I have summed up under the term “synchronicity” and which have been statistically investigated by Rhine. The positive results of his experiments elevate these phenomena to the rank of undeniable facts. This brings us a little nearer to understanding the mystery of psychophysical parallelism, for we now know that a factor exists which mediates between the apparent incommensurability of body and psyche, giving matter a kind of “psychic” faculty and the psyche a kind of “materiality,” by means of which the one can work on the other. That the body can work on the psyche seems to be a truism, but strictly speaking all we know is that any bodily defect or illness also expresses itself psychically. Naturally this assumption only holds good if, contrary to the popular materialistic view, the psyche is credited with an existence of its own. But materialism in its turn cannot explain how chemical changes can produce a psyche. Both views, the materialistic as well as the spiritualistic, are metaphysical prejudices. It accords better with experience to suppose that living matter has a psychic aspect, and the psyche a physical aspect.'
‘The psychoid nature of the archetype contains very much more than can be included in a psychological explanation. It points to the sphere of the unus mundus, the unitary world, towards which the psychologist and the atomic physicist are converging along separate paths, producing independently of one another certain analogous auxiliary concepts.’
‘Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say in what this relationship consists or how it is possible at all. Precisely because the psychic and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience, though this certainly does not justify the arbitrary hypothesis of either materialism or spiritualism. With this conjecture of the identity of the psychic and the physical we approach the alchemical view of the unus mundus, the potential world of the first day of creation, when there was as yet “no second.”
Apologies for the long text, I am very curious to your opinions