Carl Jung: “The Curse of the Intellect”
The author has kindly given me a chance of reading his book in manuscript.
I must say, I have read it with the greatest interest and pleasure.
It is most refreshing, after the whole nineteenth century and a stretch of the twentieth, to see the intellect once more turned loose upon herself, not exactly in the dispassionate form of a “Critique of Pure Reason,” but in the rather impassioned way of a most temperamental onslaught on herself.
As a matter of fact, it is a wholesome and vitalizing tearing into sorry shreds of what all “healthy-minded” people believed in as their most cherished securities.
I am human enough to enjoy a juicy piece of injustice when it comes in the right moment and in the right place.
Sure enough, Intellect has done her worst in our “Western Civilization,” and she is still at it with undoubted force.
Kant could still afford to deal with the contemporaneous intellect in a polite, careful, and gentle way, because she then was but a mere fledgling.
But our time is concerned with a monster completely grown up and so fat that it can easily begin to devour itself.
At the funeral somebody will be allowed to say only something nice about the deceased.
In anticipation of that future event I will say it now: The chief trouble seems to be that the intellect escaped the control of man and became his obsession, instead of remaining the obedient tool in the hands of a creator, shaping his world, adorning it with the colourful images of his mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 767