Carl Jung: We have no idea of absolute reality
To J. Allen Gilbert
My dear Dr. Gilbert, 2 January 1929
Please be kind to your fellow beings!
Don’t think that they are all damned fools, even if they say excitingly foolish things, even if they are the most inconsistent idiots.
Allow for one grain of wisdom in all their foolishness.
Can’t you conceive of a physicist that thinks and speaks of atoms, yet is convinced that those are merely his own abstractions?
That would be my case.
I have not the faintest idea what “psyche” is in itself, yet, when I come to think and speak of it, I must speak of my abstractions, concepts, views, figures, knowing that they are our specific illusions.
That is what I call “nonconcretization.”
And know that I am by no means the first and only man who speaks of anima, etc.
Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the Unknowable.
Don’t you see that it is life too to paint the world with divine colours?
You never will know more than you can know, and if you proudly refuse to go by the available “knowledge” (or whatever you like to call it) you are bound to produce a better “theory” or “truth,” and if you should not succeed in doing so, you are left on the bank high and dry and life runs away from you.
You deny the living and creative God in man and you will be like the Wandering Jew.
All things are as if they were Real things are effects of something unknown.
The same is true of anima, ego, etc. and moreover, there are no real things that are not relatively real.
We have no idea of absolute reality, because “reality” is always something “observed.”
And so on.
I am sure all this stuff gets your goat, but that’s not the point.
The point is that if you create a better theory, then I shall cock my ears.
Cordially yours,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 56-57
Dreams as another type of Reality
Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 8)
As in our waking state, real people and things enter our field of vision, so the dream-images enter like another kind of reality into the field of consciousness of the dream-ego. We do not feel as if we were producing the dreams, it is rather as if the dreams came to us.
They are not subject to our control but obey their own laws.
They are obviously autonomous psychic complexes which form themselves out of their own material.
We do not know the source of their motives, and we therefore say that dreams come from the unconscious.
In saying this, we assume that there are independent psychic complexes which elude our conscious control and come and go according to their own laws. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 580.
Aniela Jaffe: Appearance and Reality
The distinction insisted on by Jung between that which is subjectively experienced or perceived (the archetypal content in consciousness) and that which subsists in itself (the archetype per se) characterises the epistemological foundation of his work from its beginnings.
Time and again he referred to Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason, which states that “there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition”.
Jung saw in Kant’s theory of categories a renascence of the Platonic spirit.
The modern physicist admits the same epistemological limitations, particularly since the researches into subatomic processes. In a passage that has become famous, Heisenberg declares that “we can no longer consider in themselves those buildingstones of matter which we originally held to be the ultimate objective reality.
This is because they defy all forms of objective location in space and time, and since basically it is always our knowledge of these particles alone which we make the object of science … the object of research is no longer nature, but nature exposed to human questioning.
Here, again, man confronts himself alone.”
Likewise C. F. von Weizsäcker: “Man tries to penetrate into the factual truth of nature, but in her last, unfathomable reaches suddenly, as in a mirror, he meets himself.”
Man can observe neither God, nor nature, nor the unconscious “in themselves”.
“We are fully aware that we have no more knowledge of the various states and processes of the unconscious as such than the physicist has of the process underlying physical phenomena.
Of what lies beyond the phenomenal world we can have absolutely no idea…
”The only thing of which we have immediate knowledge is the psychic image reflected in consciousness.
“To the extent that the world does not assume the form of a psychic image, it is virtually nonexistent.”
The “objectivability of nature” fails when it comes to observing the atom.
It is no longer possible to speak of the behaviour of an atomic particle independently of the process of observation, any more than we can speak of the behaviour of the unconscious independently of the observer.
As in nuclear physics observation alters the behaviour of the particles, so in psychology “the archetype is altered by becoming conscious and being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear”.
“Between the conscious and the unconscious there is a kind of ‘uncertainty relationship’, because the observer is inseparable from the
observed and always disturbs it by the act of observation.”
The same is true of all the humanities and the social sciences: here as well the observation of particular processes is restricted by the uncertainty relationship.
Even the science of history is incapable of telling us “what really happened”, for again subject and object, observer and observed, are not completely separated.
For this reason history, as Theodor Lessing (1872-1933) puts it, is the “assignment of meaning to the meaningless”.
Niels Bohr’s statement that “the present situation in physics is a forcible reminder of the old truth that we are as much spectators as protagonists of the great drama of existence” can be applied with equal right to the present situation of the humanities and social sciences, and above all the psychology of the unconscious.
From the beginning, Jung concentrated on the analysis and interpretation of what presents itself to us as knowledge, as appearance, as a psychic image, knowing quite well that the “transcendental reality” beyond “the world inside and outside ourselves… is as certain as our own existence” but nevertheless remains an unfathomable mystery.
Hence the indistinguishability of God and the unconscious applies merely to the subjective experience and so has to be considered in interpreting the spontaneous religious assertions of individuals and in analysing myths and dogmas.
In religious experiences too ‘man meets himself”, or rather, he meets the self.
The distinction between appearance (the subjectively experienced psychic image or content) and an “objective” reality hidden behind it calls for deepened insight and heightened consciousness.
A new dimension is added to the experience by reflecting upon what has been experienced.
Very often, however, this is felt as a loss of its immediacy or as a diminution and actual devaluation of its content, especially when this content pertains to the sphere of religion.
The differentiation between the hidden reality and its appearance in consciousness formed for Jung the essential epistemological foundation of his psychological thinking and his work. ~Aniela Jaffe, The Myth of Meaning, Page 86-92
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