Carl Jung: Here epistemology sets us absolute limits
To Robert Dietrich
Dear Herr Dietrich, 27 March 1957
If a person knows something, or thinks he does, he can and will speak of his knowledge regardless of whether the object of his knowledge is thereby devalued or not.
Compensatory contents rise up from the unconscious precisely because they possess healing power and are necessary to consciousness.
There is no reason why whole numbers possess certain meanings or qualities, and no reason why elephants or men should exist.
These arrangements are simply there as given facts, like the crystalline systems or the discontinuities of physics, even as the whole of creation is a “just-so story.”
Your remark that “the real discoveries in the field of knowledge become ever fewer” astounds me.
I have the impression that there are more and more of them, and that they become more and more difficult.
Where the determinants of all being come from is an unanswerable question before which I come to a halt, without pretending to know better or a feeling of sacred awe.
Here epistemology sets us absolute limits.
With best regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 355.
