Why Can’t We Paint Like the Romantics?
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume I, 1906-1950 (Vol 1)
To Arnold Kubler
Dear Herr Kubler, 10 April 1942
I have been mulling over your question about the Romantics art but have come to the conclusion that, fully occupied as I am with my own work at present, I could hardly muster the necessary patience to expatiate on such a contemplative theme as “Why Can’t We Paint Like the Romantics Any More?” with the contemplativeness this requires.
For that is what we lack at the present time-contemplativeness.
If one is sitting on a volcano and can be contemplative to boot, this is a superhuman heroism which is itself a contradiction in terms.
Nowadays it’s no longer any use appealing to any certainties.
Deep down we know that everything is tottering.
When the earth quakes, there are only abrupt and disjointed fragments, but no closely woven and harmonious flower carpet.
A Romantic ideal in our time would be like a figment from a feverish dream.
Therefore it is much better for modern art to paint the thousand-hued debris of the shattered crockery than to try to spread a deceptive quietness over the bottomless
disquiet.
The grotesque, the ugly, the distorted, the revolting perfectly fit our time, and if a new certainty does not start up somewhere, art will continue to express disquiet and inhumanity.
That is all I have to say on this question. It is abrupt and disjointed, like what we are talking about.
Yours truly,
C.G. Jung [Letters Volume 1, Page 316]
The Unconscious as a Romantic philosophy or Empirical science
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume I, 1906-1950 (Vol 1)
[Carl Jung on the “Unconscious” as a “Romantic” philosophy or “Empirical” science]
To Arnold Kunzli
Dear Herr Kunzli, 4 February 1943
Many thanks for kindly sending me your well-meaning review of my little book.
Believing as I do that you are endeavouring to do justice to my conceptions, I venture to draw your attention to one questionable item which has often enough been the object of my curiosity and occasional investigation.
I cannot, to be sure, maintain that the latter has ever been crowned with success.
Permit me, therefore, to molest you also with my questions.
They have to do with that general fault-finding with my scientific attitude which is customary in Switzerland.
Supposing that my attitude really does exhibit such easily recognizable faults, how do you square this with the fact that I unite at least seven honorary doctorates upon my unscientific and/or benighted head?
I am, by your leave, an honorary member of the Academy of German Scientists and Physicians, a Fellow of the Royal Society, Doctor Scientiae of Oxford and Harvard University, and was one of the four guests of honour and representatives of Swiss science at the Tercentenary of the latter University.
Do these august bodies really consist of nothing but simpletons incapable of judgment, and is the Philosophical Faculty of Zurich University the brain of the world?
I would be sincerely grateful to you if you could enlighten me how it comes that the conception of science prevalent in Germany, England, America, and India, by virtue of which I was awarded degrees as a scientist, does not satisfy the scientific and theoretical requirements of the Philosophical Faculty of Zurich.
I would be all the more obliged for your kind information since I have never yet succeeded in discovering in what way my theories or methods run counter to the nature of empirical science and must therefore be condemned by the undisputed authority of the last-named worshipful corporation.
I reject the term “romantic” for my conception of the unconscious because this is an empirical and anything but a philosophical concept.
This is not altered by the fact that I share the initials “C.G.” with Carus and like him use the word “unconscious.”
He was a philosopher, I am not. I do not “posit” the unconscious.
My concept is a nomen which covers empirical facts that can be verified at any time.
If I posited the archetypes, for instance, I would not be a scientist but a Platonist.
Philosophically I am old-fashioned enough not to have got beyond Kant, so I have no use for romantic hypostases and am strictly “not at horne” for philosophical opinions.
People can only prove to me that certain facts do not exist. But I am still waiting for this proof.
Since your goodwill is apparent from your review I would expressly like to emphasize that I am not saddling you personally with the attitude of the Philosophical Faculty.
Your review was only the indirect cause of a renewed stirring of curiosity, combined with the hope of hearing something that would help to counteract my evidently only
local scientific inferiority.
With best thanks,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung [Letters Volume 1, Pages 328-329]
Carl Jung on Science
Why is psychology the youngest of the empirical sciences?
Why have we not long since discovered the unconscious and raised up its treasure-house of eternal images?
Simply because we had a religious formula for everything psychic — and one that is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate experience.
Though the Christian view of the world has paled for many people, the symbolic treasure-rooms of the East are still full of marvels that can nourish for a long me to come the passion for show and new clothes.
What is more, these images — are they Christian or Buddhist or what you will — are lovely, mysterious, and richly intuitive. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious p.7-8
This grasping of the whole is obviously the aim of science as well, but it is a goal that necessarily lies very far off because science, whenever possible, proceeds experimentally and in all cases statistically.
Experiment, however, consists in asking a definite question which excludes as far as possible anything disturbing and irrelevant.
It makes conditions, imposes them on Nature, and in this way forces her to give an answer to a question devised by man.
She is prevented from answering out of the fullness of her possibilities since these possibilities are restricted as far as partible.
For this purpose there is created in the laboratory a situation which is artificially restricted to the queson which compels Nature to give an unequivocal answer.
The workings of Nature in her unrestricted wholeness are completely excluded.
If we want to know what these workings are, we need a method of inquiry which imposes the fewest possible conditions, or if possible no conditions at all, and then leave Nature to answer out of her fullness. Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle p. 35
My interests drew me in different directions.
On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. […]
In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism. Memories, Dreams, Reflections p. 72
All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality.
For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us. ”The Structure of the Psyche” (1927). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.342
