There always are and there always will be the two standpoints
To Samuel D. Schmalhausen
Dear Sir, 19 October 1934
Thank you very much for kindly sending me your interesting book.
From the psychological point of view it is important to look at the problem of further development of man from the standpoint of collective influences as well as from his individual standpoint.
Being a doctor I’m naturally concerned with the suffering individual and not with the Marx movement.
What the Marx movement can do to man you can only study where this movement really influences the individual, as f.i. in Russia or in Germany or in Italy.
There always are and there always will be the two standpo!nts, the standpoint of the social leader who, if he is an idealist at all. seeks salvation in a more or less complete suppression of the individual, and the leader of minds who seeks improvement in the individual only.
I don’t see the way to a reconciliation between the two since they are necessary pairs of opposites which keep the world in balance.
Sincerely yours,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 174.
Matter and Psyche terminal points of a polarity
Letters Volume II
To Werner Nowacki
Dear Professor Nowacki, 22 March 1957
I don’t want to miss the chance of thanking you for your thoughtfulness in sending me your interesting article.
Your ideas go back, in modern form, to the familiar world of Plato’s Timaeus, which was a sacrosanct authority for medieval science-and rightly so!
Our modern attempts at a unitary view, to which your article makes very important contributions, do indeed lead to the question of the cosmic demiurge and the psychic aspect of whole numbers.
From the fact that matter has a mainly quantitative aspect and at the same time a qualitative one, even though this appears to be secondary, you draw the weighty conclusion, which I heartily applaud, that, besides its obviously qualitative nature, the psyche has an as yet hidden quantitative aspect.
Matter and psyche are thus the terminal points of a polarity.
The still largely unexplored area between them forms the terra incognita of future research.
Here tremendous problems open out which you have approached from the physical side.
It seems to me that for the time being I have exhausted my psychological ammunition.
I have got stuck, on the one hand, in the a causality (or “synchronicity”) of certain phenomena of unconscious provenance and, on the other hand, in the qualitative statements of numbers, for here I set foot on territories where I cannot advance without the help and understanding of the other disciplines.
In this respect your article is uncommonly valuable and stimulating.
I am particularly grateful to you for your appreciation of the transcendent “arranger.”
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 351-352.
Carl Jung and “Most writers hate this point of view.”
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume I, 1906-1950 (Vol 1)
To Herbert Read
Dear Mr. Read, Pro tempore on Rigi, 17 October 1948
As I have read your Green Child I feel under a certain moral obligation to thank you for kindly calling my attention to its existence.
I feel not naturally drawn to what one calls “literature,” but I am strangely attracted by genuine fiction, i.e., fantastical invention.
Inasmuch as fantasy is not forced and violated by and subjugated to an intellectually preconceived bastard of an idea, it is a legitimate and authentic offspring of the unconscious mind and thus far it provided me with unadulterated information about the things that transcend the writer’s conscious mind.
Most writers hate this point of view.
But I assume that you do not, otherwise you would not have shoved your book anywhere near my vicinity.
have read it right through in one day and it gave me a rumbling in the depths that kept me awake for the better part of the night.
It is, above all, wonderfully English: you go to bed without any particular forebodings and with no plans or intuitions whatever and you wake up in the morning being the unaccountable proprietor of 30,000 square miles of virgin country, where you can’t help being immensely useful and efficient.
Happily enough you don’t know that you never were really there, since you discover after 20-30 years that the thing you really meant has been left behind in your native village.
What you rediscover is a compensation for all the things you have professed and lived for a lifetime.
This green folk-helas-was real enough, but had a hell of an existence during your absence.
What lovely unconventional things you have missed!
From most enjoyable promiscuous baths up to the highest regions of wisdom!
Here my Acheron began to shake.
You touched upon the alchemical arcanum par excellence, the philosophers’ stone, a really enormous problem that is actually very much on my mind indeed.
The shocking thing is that the Stone symbolizes a most highly spiritual idea, namely that age-old and universal image of the Anthropos (f.i. Christus.)
What does it mean that Spirit itself, even the divine 1rV£vtta is stone, or that stone’s spirit?
Such ideas are by no means intellectual inventions, on the contrary they are authentic products, natural growths of the unconscious.
There is nothing arbitrary about them.
In your story the two worlds don’t touch each other, i.e., their point of contact is rather painful.
It is a case of either/or.
This is quite true, even immensely so.
The right hand does not know what the left is groping for.
This is our worldwide “psychologie a compartiment.”
An old alchemist reading your novel would have wept for sheer joy.
It did not make me weep, but it tricked my mind into action and I had to solve all the riddles you have dished out.
So f.i. your number 5,3 where there ought to be a 4, and why is this underworld so green and moldy and so circular and so purgatory-like?
I don’t want to submerge you with the outbursts of my funny mind.
I just wished to give you at least a taste of the reactions your book has released. They are meant to be a small token of my gratitude for a day of intense enjoyment and interest.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 509-510.
Carl Jung: I write for unbelievers
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951-1961
To Bernhard Martin
Dear Dr. Martin, 7 December 1954
It is very kind of you to submit your manuscript to me for an opinion.
I have taken the liberty of marking it with numbers in pencil where a change in the text seems necessary.
You “know” of that which is beyond the psyche only through belief, not through knowledge.
I do not write for believers who already possess the whole truth, rather for unbelieving but intelligent people who want to understand something.
Without the psyche you can neither know nor believe.
Therefore everything about which we can speak at all lies in the psychic realm; even the atom is in this sense a psychic model.
I grant you that the believer will learn nothing from my Answer to Job since he already has everything.
I write only for unbelievers.
Thanks to your belief, you know much more than I do.
Since my earliest youth I have been made to feel how rich and how knowing the believers are, and how disinclined even to listen to anything else.
I do not hesitate to admit my extreme poverty in knowing through believing, and would therefore advise you to shut my book with a bang and inscribe on the inside of the jacket: “Nothing here for the believing Christian” -a sentiment with which I am in complete agreement.
I am not concerned with what is “believable” but simply with what is knowable.
It seems to me that we are not in a position to “generate” or “uphold” belief, for belief is a charisma which God giveth or taketh away.
It would be presumptuous to imagine that we can command it at will.
For the sake of brevity my comments are rather direct and outspoken.
I hope you won’t mind this, but will see how different are the two planes on which the discussion is moving.
Without in any way impugning belief, I confine myself to its assertions.
As you see, I even take the highly controversial new dogma at its face value.
I do not consider myself competent to judge the metaphysical truth of these assertions; I only try to elucidate their content and their psychological associations.
The assertions are, as you yourself admit, anthropomorphic and therefore can hardly be considered reliable with respect to their metaphysical truth.
You as a believer take the stand that the proposition “God is” has as its inevitable corollary God’s Existence in reality, whereas Kant irrefutably pointed out long ago (in his critique of Anselm’s proof of God) that the little word “is” can denote no more than a “copula in the judgment.”
Other religions make equally absolute assertions, but quite different ones.
But as a psychologist on the one hand and a human being on the other I must acknowledge that my brother may be right too.
I do not belong to the elect and the beati possidentes of the sole truth, but must give fair consideration to all human assertions, even the denial of God.
So when you confront me as a Christian apologist you are standing on a different plane from me.
You cling to “believing is knowing,” and I must always be the loser because de fide non est disputandum any more than one can argue about taste.
One cannot argue with the possessor of the truth.
Only the seeker after truth needs to reflect, to inquire, to deliberate, for he admits that he does not know.
As a believer you can only dismiss me out of hand and declare that I am no Christian and what I say is useless, indeed harmful.
Well, gunpowder was a dangerous invention, but it also has its useful applications.
It is notorious that everything can be used for a good or a bad purpose.
Hence there was no valid reason for me to keep silence, quite apart from the fact that the present state of “Christendom” arouses a host of doubts in people’s minds.
As a doctor I have to provide the answers which for many of my patients are not forthcoming from the theologian.
I myself have politely requested the theologians to explain to me what the attitude of modern Protestantism is as regards the identity of the Old and the New Testament concept of God.
Two didn’t answer at all and the third said that nobody bothers any more about God-concepts nowadays.
But for the religious-minded person this is a matter of burning interest, which was one of my motives for
writing Answer to Job.
I would like to recommend Prof. Volz’s Das Daemonische in Jahwe to your attention, and as for the New Testament I pose the question: Is it necessary to placate a “loving Father” with the martyr’s death of his son?
What is the relation here between love and vindictiveness?
And what would I feel about it if my own father exhibited that kind of phenomenology?
Such are the questions of the unbelieving religious man for whom I write.
To him applies the amiable (predestinarian) principle of Matt. 13: 12: “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given,” etc.
But “illis non est datum,” these lost sheep of which another, equally authentic logion says that Christ was sent only to them.
Those who cannot believe would at least like to understand: “Putasne intelligis quae legis?” (Acts 8:30).
But understanding begins at the bottom of the mountain on top of which the believer sits.
He already knows everything much better and can therefore say: “Lord, I thank thee that I am not so dumb and ignorant as those down below, who want to understand” (cf. Luke 18:11).
I cannot anticipate a thing by believing it but must be content with my unbelief until my efforts meet with the grace of illumination, that is, with religious experience.
I cannot make-believe.
To conclude with an indiscreet question: Don’t you think that the angel of the Lord, wrestling with Jacob, also got a few hefty cuffs and kicks? (So much for my “scandalous” criticism of Yahweh!)
I know my Answer to Job is a shocker for which I ought to offer a civil apology (hence my motto).
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 197-199.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
8cf2b 62bfour2bcontacts2bwith2bjung2binterview2band2bencounters
