Carl Jung on Einstein Anthology
It was above all the simplicity and directness of his[Einstein] genius as a thinker that impressed me mightily and exerted a lasting influence on my own intellectual work. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages108-109.
It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages108-109.
With Einstein’s departure from Zurich my relation with him ceased, and I hardly think he has any recollection of me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages108-109.
It was above all the simplicity and directness of his[Einstein] genius as a thinker that impressed me mightily and exerted a lasting influence on my own intellectual work. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages108-109.
It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages108-109.
With Einstein’s departure from Zurich my relation with him ceased, and I hardly think he has any recollection of me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages108-109.
Thoughts are real, they are the consciousness. People can’t see that. Einstein could not. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Pages 90-95
[From: The Innermost Kernel by Suzanne Gieser]:
Pauli is portrayed as a brilliant genius, indeed even as the greatest physicist of his time.
His colleague Max Born compares him with Einstein and says that in certain respects he has to be considered even greater than Einstein. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 6
At the age of 21 Pauli made his name known with an article on the theory of relativity that he wrote at the request of Sommerfeld. This article was so well written that it earned the admiration of Einstein himself. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 16
Einstein wrote a brief review of Pauli’s article: One does not know what to admire most, the psychological grasp of the development of the ideas, the assurance of the mathematical deduction, the deep physical insight, the capacity for lucid and systematic presentation, the knowledge of the literature, the technical integrity, the confidence of the criticism. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 17
During the period 1940–46 Pauli was employed at The Institute for Advanced Study, where he worked in close proximity to Einstein. It was in many ways a difficult period for Pauli. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 18
To him true science was still linked with a contemplation of the structure of existence, closely associated with man’s religious function. The ambition of science must be to discover connections and to place man in a context that is greater than man himself. On the other hand the same can be said of Einstein’s attitude, a fact that did not deter him from participation in the Manhattan Project. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 20
In 1945 the Nobel Prize was awarded to Pauli for the exclusion principle, which he had formulated in 1924. At the banquet that was held at the Institute for Advanced Study on 10 December 1945 to honour this occasion, Einstein gave an emotional speech in which he called Pauli his ‘spiritual son’, who was to complete the work he had begun. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 21
When Pauli receives news of Einstein’s death in 1955 he writes to Max Born recalling this occasion:
Einstein’s death has also touched me personally.
A friend so well disposed to me, so paternal, is now no more. I shall never forget the speech that he gave in 1945 in Princeton about me and for me, after I had been awarded the Nobel Prize. It was like a king abdicating and naming me as a kind of ‘chosen son’ as his successor. Sadly there are no notes for this speech of Einstein’s (it was improvised and there is no manuscript at all). ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 21
Both Pauli and Jung began as brilliant exponents of the work of their famous mentors, but later turned away from their way of thinking. However it must be emphasized that in many other respects the relationships between Jung and Freud and between Pauli and Einstein show more differences than similarities. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 22
Pauli was of course never a ‘pupil’ of Einstein in the same sense. However he acquired a thorough understanding of Einstein’s theories at a very early stage and was considered one of the few who really understood Einstein. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 22
According to Pauli, Einstein tried to the last to win Pauli over to his side, because he felt that Pauli was the physicist who understood him best and who was nearest to his own thinking on physics. Pauli also asserted that he was fully aware of what Einstein wanted and that he understood why Einstein could not accept the quantum theory as complete. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 22
Pauli was even inclined to agree with Einstein that the quantum theory is incomplete, but on grounds different from Einstein’s. Pauli also believed that he understood the non-scientific reasons behind Einstein’s refusal to accept quantum physics. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 22
What is interesting in this comparison, however, is the type of criticism that Pauli and Jung levelled against their ‘mentors’. The stumbling block, to both Pauli and Jung, was that the models of their ‘mentors’ could not cope with the irrational, an element which they associated with the occurrence of the ‘unique’, the ever present creative act of nature, which cannot be grasped within a rational scheme. They also criticized them for their lack of understanding of the role of the observer in science. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 22
I remarked to Bohr at the time that Einstein was regarding as an imperfection of wave mechanics within physics what is in fact was an imperfection of physics within life.
Mr. Bohr readily agreed with this statement.
Nevertheless, I had to admit that there was an imperfection or incompleteness somewhere, even if it was outside the realm of physics, and since then Einstein has never stopped trying to bring me around to his way of thinking.’ Pauli to Jung, 27 May 1953 [62P], PJL, 121. ~Wolfgang Pauli, The Innermost Kernel, Page 22, fn 70
There was another reason for Pauli’s reluctance to stay in the USA. He suspected that research policy in America would not remain free but would come increasingly to be controlled by the government and the military. He speaks of this in a letter to Einstein: In addition there was the consideration that it is perhaps in any case a good thing if quite a few physicists remain in Europe. So at last my decision was reached, although in the short term working conditions for scientific physics in America may be very favourable.
In the more distant future (say in about 5 years), however, I do see the big danger of an intervention of the military in physics (with or without the subterfuge of the plain-clothes commission of non-physicists). Certain indications appear unfavourable. The extensive suspension of purely scientific publishing and the ‘under cover’ work in the university laboratory at Berkeley. By ‘intervention’ I do not only mean censorship, but also an influencing of the direction of investigation in experimental work. Even without legal force it is impossible to imagine a united front of physicists against such tendencies; it is too easy to entice young people with good positions and career prospects. . . ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 23
If we are to identify the concept of positivism with Comte’s positivism, the epistemological position taken by Einstein in his old age must also be designated positivist. For his battle cry against the Copenhagen School was: ‘Physics is the description of reality as opposed to what one simply imagines!’ ~Wolfgang Pauli, The Innermost Kernel, Page 43
Just like Einstein, he [Pauli] longed for a uniform view of the universe. The difference between him and Einstein was that Sommerfeld felt obliged to accept the viewpoints of modern physics, which Einstein was never willing to do. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 59
I am not very happy with ‘vague physics’, especially when young enthusiasts or formalists talk about it in the department for hours, although I must acknowledge the legitimacy of the whole way of looking at it.
But perhaps it can still be overcome by some ‘metaphysics’ (all physics is metaphysics according to Einstein).
How inelegant, for example, the general theory of relativity would become, if one were to take into account the precision of measurement there too! ~Arnold Sommerfield, The Innermost Kernel, Page 59
We find the same distinction between different kinds of ‘mysticism’ or ‘religion’ in many representatives of modern physics: in Niels Bohr, Oskar Klein, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein, to mention a few. ~Wolfgang Pauli, The Innermost Kernel, Page 59
The emphasis on acausality and ‘revolution’ in physics only emerged after 1925 and as a direct response to Schrödinger and Einstein’s challenge to the Göttingen-Copenhagen version. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 60
As we have already seen, Pauli rejected the use of concepts that do not correspond to observable or measurable quantities. Just as Einstein’s work on the theory of relativity started from Mach’s criticism of the concepts of time and space, so a questioning of physical concepts which do not relate to measurable quantities formed the core of Pauli’s epistemological criticism. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 76-77
However the fact is that Einstein had never given his unqualified support to positivism even while young: ‘I do not curse the little Machian steed; […]. But it cannot bring forth anything living, only trample down harmful vermin.’ ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 80
Pauli had in the summer of 1954 published a revised version of his 1952 lecture entitled ‘Probability and Physics’, in which he describes the approach of Einstein and of classical physics as ‘the ideal of the detached observer’. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 131
In 1928 Jung cited Einstein’s theory of relativity as an example of the way in which for modern man the old absolute explanations were dissolving into the inconceivable. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page
Jung’s knowledge of modern physics prior to meeting Pauli was rather superficial.
In 1911 Einstein had indeed been his dinner guest and talked about his ‘electrical theory of light’.
Jung later states in a letter to Carl Seelig that this conversation caused him to start thinking about the possible relativity of time and space, and the psychic preconditions of these concepts. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 155
Similarly Pauli considered that Plato, Kepler, Descartes and, in modern times, Einstein could be called trinitarian thinkers, while Pythagoras, Kant, Schopenhauer, Fludd and Bohr could be called quaternarian. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 194
The conflict between Einstein and Bohr may thus also be seen as a conflict between Parmenides and Heraclitus. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 218
However there is in all people a third stage of religious experience, albeit only seldom a very pure one; I would call it cosmic religiosity. This is difficult to make clear to the person who possesses nothing of it, no human concept of God corresponds to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human wishes and purposes and the sublimity and wondrous order which is revealed in nature and in the world of ideas.
He feels individual existence as a kind of prison and wishes to experience the wholeness of being as a uniform and meaningful one. [. . . ] The religious geniuses of all times were distinguished by this cosmic religiosity, which knows no dogma and no God, conceived in the image of man. [. . . ] It seems to met hat the most important function of art and science is to arouse this feeling in those who are receptive and to keep it alive. [. . . ] On the other hand I maintain that cosmic religiosity is the strongest and most noble driving force behind scientific research. ~Wolfgang Pauli, The Innermost Kernel, Page 150
The way Einstein contrasts the confinement in the chaotic world of phenomena and the longing for a liberating clear, elevated rational order was a leitmotif which Pauli considered fundamental to understanding the difference between the complementarity perspective of the Copenhagen School and the worldview of classical physics. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 150
The statistical character of natural laws already was an answer to the question about the nature of cosmic order – an answer given to us by nature herself. Einstein could not accept this ‘open’ order – an order that eludes our rational categories. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 154
Fludd proceeded from the number four. Pauli wished however also to apply the same approach to the latter-day conflict between Einstein and Bohr. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 259
Pauli also used this psychological perspective when assessing his colleagues in science. For instance, he felt that he had fully understood Einstein’s position, which he labelled metaphysical realism. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 263
Consequently, what chiefly annoyed Einstein in quantum physics was ‘. . . that the state of a system is defined only by specification of an experimental arrangement.’ ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 263
From Einstein’s point of view the statistical description of reality in quantum mechanics must be incomplete, because it makes it impossible to determine the real state of an object. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 263
Einstein’s worldview was not ‘the observer’s’ but assumed the existence of certain exactly defined relationships which exist whether we observe them or not. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 263
Pauli called Einstein a ‘Spinozist’, because Einstein had told him that his image of God largely agreed with Spinoza’s. Spinoza saw all existence as a single systematic unit which he called God or nature. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 263
In this situation it was fortunate that a third person intervened and acted as intermediary: Wolfgang Pauli. [–––] He became a close friend of Einstein’s and regarded himself, probably with some justification, as the designated ‘successor’ in theoretical physics. ~Max Born, The Innermost Kernel, Page 264
What annoyed Einstein was that ‘In quantum physics the state of the physical system depends on how one sees it’, as he put it. The fact that this would be just as true of macrophysics as of microphysics does not fit in well with Einstein’s worldview. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 264
Pauli asserted that Einstein’s Spinozism thus lay on a level other than determinism. It is the wish to be able to understand the context of everything on an objective level – to be able to see reality as it really is. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 264
Einstein’s opinion irreversibility has to be considered an illusion created by ‘improbable’ initial conditions. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 265
Pauli believed that Parmenides’ beautiful resting cosmic sphere expressed a flight from reality. He also called the striving of Einstein, Schrödinger and others back to a classical worldview ‘regressive hopes’. 266
Pauli accepts Jung’s definition of reality: ‘Only that which acts upon me do I recognize as real and actual. But that which has no effect on me might as well not exist.’ ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 266
In a letter to Carl Seelig, Jung says that the very first seeds of the principle came from Einstein. In 1911 Einstein had been at a dinner given by Jung and told him about his theory of relativity. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 274
It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. More than thirty years later this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity. It was a long time before Jung dared to publish anything extensive on synchronicity. The ‘strange psychic parallelisms’ of which Jung speaks are part of the everyday experience of most people, but because of their strangeness they are at best brushed aside as curiosities.
As such occurrences go beyond our cherished view of reality, most people choose to ignore them or to dismiss them by labelling them ‘chance’. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 274-275
Cf Ira Progoff, Jung, Synchronicity and Human Destiny (New York, 1973), 151 f. Progoff claims that Jung told him that Einstein had often visited him and that they had had many long discussions. He also implies that these discussions were of importance to Einstein, because Einstein’s papers have shown that dreams and mental images also played a large role in Einstein’s thinking.
This statement should be taken with pinch of salt. We certainly know that Einstein visited Jung with other guests on two or three occasions. In a letter to Freud in 1911 Jung mentions that he has had a dinner at which he spent the whole evening talking to a physicist about the ‘electrical theory of light’. (Jung to Freud, 18 Jan. 1911 (230 J), The Freud-Jung Letters, 384.)
If Jung had made any great impression on Einstein, or if the discussions between them were of any significance, this would surely have come out in the correspondence with Pauli.
Not once does Jung mention his ‘many long’ discussions with Einstein to Pauli.
Nor does Pauli seem to have discussed Jung with Einstein, which he would quite certainly have done had Einstein showed the slightest interest in dreams and suchlike. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 274, fn 842
However I am, like Jung, of the opinion that the production of balance between the spirit and physical matter necessitates an elevation of the feminine principle or symbol and that this at the same time has to correct the one-sidedness of a purely patriarchal age. This seems to be the mood of our time (of which it may perhaps also be said that it has no chivalry). Insofar as science is a product of masculine consciousness, the ‘eternal feminine’ in terms of natural philosophy means the consciousness-transcending unity beyond the opposing pair. [–––].
Classical science from Galileo-Kepler-Newton right down to Einstein stands on the other hand for the trinitarian-patriarchal view. Only modern physics has again recognized that in this world actual phenomena of necessity form and remain complementary opposing pairs and that they at the same time allow the observer freedom. It has not yet been officially admitted that he psychic state of an involved observer may also have an influence on the natural process. I should like to attempt here to make a comparison with the ancient Chinese way of thinking (comm
unicated to me by R. Wilhelm), in order to express what I cannot yet grasp in exact concepts: the two signs of the I Ching, Yang (male) and Yin (female), originally signify a mountain in the sun (south side) and a mountain in the shade (north side).
We must learn to realize in our occidental manner and with the aid of our mathematics (which the ancient Chinese did not know) that there is only one X (one ‘mountain’, one ‘content’, one ‘real’, one ‘essence’, or whatever one may call the element of a still unknown and invisible reality) that according to the ‘illumination’ for us mortals i.e. according to how it appears in our human consciousness (this divides and distinguishes), appears either spiritual or material. ~Wolfgang Pauli, The Innermost Kernel, Page 323
What began to happen around the turn of the century must according to Pauli be interpreted as the return of the feminine principle. Einstein’s theory of relativity showed that neither time nor space are absolute categories but that they are intertwined. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 342
Man, the observer, immediately returns to the world of science when Einstein states that space has to be defined from the position of the observer in a movable system of reference. ~Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, Page 342
