Carl Jung: Therefore I prefer to cling on to the deed
C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950
To Arnold Kunzli
Dear Herr Kunzli, 13 February 1943
Many thanks for your friendly answer.
One must certainly grant it the predicate “common sense.”
I now see more clearly the terminological possibilities of a Babylonian confusion of tongues when one seriously sets about studying science as an object instead of practicing it.
It goes without saying that every age has its presuppositions, which are the more difficult to lay by the heels the more one tries to jump over one’s own head.
I don’t believe in such a futile philosophical undertaking.
Even Kant, for all his critiques, constantly employs the concepts that were current in his century.
Poring over such work, a future age may find entertainment in a past one.
Therefore I prefer to cling on to the deed, to what we can achieve with the means at hand.
If it should later turn out that these means were not as good as those we shall have in a hundred years’ time, this is no reason for mortification today, since we know quite well that the better which
is to come would never have hatched out had we not begotten the best that is possible now, however imperfect it may be.
I regard all speculations that exceed our capacities as sterile griping and at the same time a pretext for covering up one’s own infertility.
This kind of criticism leads only to the mastery of complicated banalities, the Platonic exemplar of which is embodied for me in the philosopher Heidegger.
With best regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 330.
