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
Spirit began to degenerate into intellect
Psychology and Religion: West and East (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 11)
In our Christian culture, spirit, and the passion of the spirit, were for a long time the greatest values and the things most worth striving for. Only after the decline of the Middle Ages, that is, in the course of the nineteenth century, when spirit began to degenerate into intellect, did a reaction set in against the unbearable dominance of intellectualism.
This movement, it is true, at first committed the pardonable mistake of confusing intellect with spirit, and blaming the latter for the misdeeds of the former.
Intellect does, in fact, harm the soul when it dares to possess itself of the heritage of the spirit. It is in no way fitted to do this, because spirit is something higher than intellect in that it includes not only the latter, but the feelings as well.
It is a direction, or principle, of life that strives towards shining, supra-human heights. In opposition to it stands the dark, the feminine, the earth-bound principle (yin), with its emotionality and instinctiveness that reach far back into the depths of time, and into the roots of physiological continuity.
Without a doubt, these concepts are purely intuitive insights, but one cannot very well dispense with them if one is trying to understand the nature of the human soul.
China could not do without them because, as the history of Chinese philosophy shows, it has never gone so far from central psychic facts as to lose itself in a one-sided over-development and over-valuation of a single psychic function.
Therefore, the Chinese have never failed to recognize the paradoxes and the polarity inherent in what is alive.
The opposites always balanced one another- a sign of high culture. One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism.
The reaction which is now beginning in the West against the intellect in favor of feeling, or in favor of intuition, seems to me a mark of cultural advance, a widening of consciousness beyond the too narrow limits of a tyrannical intellect. ~Carl Jung, Commentary The Secret of the Golden Flower. Carl Jung
