Was C.G. Jung a Mystic ?
C.G. Jung did not like to be regarded as a mystic: he preferred to be recognized as an empiricist, i.e., a scientist whose research is based on a careful observation of facts.
In this sense, he thought of himself as a natural scientist.
One can understand why Jung disliked being included in the ranks of mystics when one considers that in his time, and essentially also today, to characterize a scientific author as “mystic” casts a doubt on the reliability or validity of his ideas and his work.
Mystical statements are not to be included in the natural sciences.
Nevertheless, the clear analogies that exist between mysticism and Jungian psychology cannot be overlooked, and this fact in no way denies its scientific basis.
If the concept “mystic” suggests the immediate experience of the numinous or the perceiving of an originally hidden transcendent reality, the “other side”, then it involves an experience which also plays a central role in Jung’s approach to analytical psychology; that is, the consideration of images and contents which enter into consciousness from the hidden background of the psyche, the collective unconscious.
Nevertheless one must bear in mind that Jung’s language and his scientific ideas differ from the language of the mystics, and this difference is significant.
Whereas the mystic is content with his belief in the objectivity of his experience, these experiences are subjected by Jung to a critical examination.
By taking into account the fundamental science of knowledge (Immanuel Kant’s erkenntnis-theoretische Differenzierung), he established the basis for the inclusion of his observations in the science of psychology.
According to this view, one proceeds from the fact that the background of the
psyche, the collective unconscious, must be conceived of as a realm with neither space nor time that eludes any objective knowledge.
What we perceive are its effects.
In itself, it remains concealed, unknowable. “The concept of the unconscious posits nothing, it designates only my unknowing,” wrote Jung in a letter[1] and elsewhere he states, “The unconscious is a piece of Nature our mind cannot comprehend.”[2]
The concept of the collective unconscious has passed into general usage, just as the concept of its contents, the archetypes.
So let us stress one fact essential to our questioning but which is often overlooked and has therefore become a source of misunderstanding.
Jung distinguished between the unknowable archetypes in the hidden impenetrable realm of the unconscious and the comprehensible archetypal images and contents structured by them that can be recognized in dreams, fairy tales, works of art, religions and so forth.
It was the similarity or inner relatedness of such images in myths and in cultures of all times that had originally led him to presuppose the existence of a common transpersonal denominator: the archetypes.
By this he meant inborn dispositions that play a role in the realm of the psychic, in the same way as the structuring instincts in the realm of the biological.
One could also say the archetypes are “spiritual instincts.”
Scientific psychology is limited to the observation and study of accessible archetypal images and contents, in other words, human assertions that nevertheless may not be taken to be objective knowledge about what transcends consciousness: the metaphysical.
They remain in the humanpsychic realm. Jung spoke of “psychic facts.”
He restricted his research to these, and in so doing continually stressed the importance of the epistemological limitation formulated by Kant.
Insofar as his research was limited to these “facts,” he was justified in calling himself an empiricist.
The archetypes as such, contents of the collective unconscious, remain unknowable and removed from the reach of objective scientific research.
Still, it is a valid hypothesis that the archetypal images, as symbols, refer to the incognizable transcendental archetypes, by which they are themselves structured.
In this way they build a bridge between consciousness and the unconscious.
It is known that the natural sciences have also arrived at the boundary of the objectively knowable.[3]
They also recognize a “boundless mysterious field” behind all life (Adolf Portmann),
a “transcendental and autonomous order,” to which “the psyche of the observer, as well as that which can be observed” are subordinate. (W. Pauli)
The strict and conscious observance of the epistemological limitation leads the natural sciences as well as psychology to the acceptance of an incomprehensible background realm that is without space and time.
Throughout the ages human beings have longed to penetrate its secret and make it accessible.
Thus the splendid body of metaphysical thought, the content of mysticism, and of religions came into being.
As images and contents created by man they bear witness to an immeasurable richness of the soul.
Thus, according to Jung, “It is the psyche which, by the divine creative power inherent in it, makes the metaphysical assertion … not only is it the condition of all metaphysical reality, it is that reality.”[4]
Jung himself refused to make any statement about the transcendental background, except to say that it exists.
In his words, “That the world inside and outside ourselves rests on a transcendental background is as certain as our own existence.”[5]
That this background remains hidden does not reduce its significance.
One could say: quite the contrary.
For Jung, precisely the inability to “know” in this connection signified, in his own words, a richness and a treasure that he sought always to preserve. An ethical researcher can acknowledge when he reaches the end of his knowledge, as this end is “the beginning of a higher wisdom.”
The incomprehensible nature of something that is nevertheless effective imparts the sense of a Mysterium that transcends the human and simultaneously encompasses him.
These brief comments serve only as a necessary sketch of the psychic structure.
The real question posed here is: how does the individual experience the unconscious? And how does he experience the archetypes or the archetypal contents, the symbols?
The immediate experience of archetypal contents is by no means an everyday event, and in most cases the individual reacts with deepest emotion, occasionally with fear.
Two examples will show that the emotion springs from a feeling of helplessness on the part of the individual or egopersonality with respect to forces that arise from his own psyche, but which he none the less cannot control.
Without his cooperation, without his willing it, archetypal images emerge from a
realm that transcends consciousness and work their powerful effects.
They seem to be characterized by an intentionality, a dynamism or an autonomy, and it is this which lends to them the deeply moving character of the numinous, comparable to the experience of a demonic or godly might.
Jung once described “A Protestant theologian (who) dreamt repeatedly that he stood on a cliff; below lay a deep valley and in it a dark lake.
He knew in the dream, that until now something had always prevented him from approaching the lake.
This time, however, he decided to go down to the water.
As he neared the shore, it became dark and uncanny, and suddenly a gust of wind blew over the surface of the water.
A panic fear gripped him then, and he awoke.”[6]
Jung interpreted the dream in the following way: the climbing down to the lake means that the dreamer has descended into his own depths.
What grips him and causes him to panic is hardly the dream image as such, as it is a very simple one: a gust of wind blows over the water.
The numinosity of the picture corresponds much more to the autonomous dynamism of the effective but unknowable archetype. In the dream it manifests itself as a breath of the spirit “that bloweth where it listeth,” (John 3:8) “But this is uncanny, like everything of which we are not the cause nor know the cause.
It hints at an unseen presence, a numen to which neither human expectations
nor the machinations of the will have given life.
It lives of itself, and a shudder runs through the man who thought that ‘spirit’ was merely what he believes, what he makes himself, what is said in books, or what people talk about. But when it happens spontaneously it is a spookish thing, and primitive fear seizes the naive mind.”
The fear associated with the experience is a frequent first reaction to an encounter with the archetypal contents.
Because of their autonomy, also perhaps because of their strangeness, they cannot be accepted by consciousness as a content of one’s own psyche.
Man experiences fear when confronted with something overpowering, which in the deepest sense is part of him, and to which he belongs.
The second example shows the autonomous nature of contents emerging from the
unconscious.
It is the story of a patient, an academic, who was afflicted with severe anxiety
neurosis.
He suffered from an imaginary carcinoma, even though the best doctors had assured him again and again that he was completely healthy.
The man knew that the doctors were right, still, the “invader,” the autonomous agent, proved itself to be stronger than objective medical truth and his own reason.
The fear always returned, so that one had to ask: what demonic power was at work here? And, why was he chastened by this fear of death?
In the course of therapy the unconscious psychic and religious sources of his fear were raised to consciousness, whereupon the tormenting fantasy disappeared.
These examples show the effect of archetypal forces arising out of the unconscious: the egopersonality is gripped by them and experiences the autonomous sovereignty of the non-ego.
Because of this numinous autonomy Jung attributed a fundamental significance to such experiences.
Ultimately they are not distinguishable from that superiority or that “compelling
numinosity” that man since time immemorial has called “God,” or the “Godhead.”
In numerous places in his work, Jung discussed the indistinguishability of the godhead and the unconscious. His thoughts on this subject build the bridge to mysticism.
Two quotations might serve as illustration.
The first more or less deals with the designation of the autonomous agent as
“God.”
It comes from a letter written when Jung was 85 years old in connection with the BBC Face to Face.”
Jung was asked by the interviewer whether he believed in God, whereupon, after a slight hesitation, he answered, “I do not believe, I know.”
As a result of this he received a flood of letters that referred to the words, “I know,” and wanted to learn more about this.
The following quotation is taken from one of his replies:
“The experience which I call God is the experience of my own will with respect to another often very much stronger will that crosses my path with apparently disastrous results, in that it puts strange thoughts in my head, occasionally determines or defines my fate in most unwished-for ways, or, gives it an unexpectedly favorable turn quite independent of my own knowledge and my intentions.
This strange force intervening against or for my conscious intentions is well known to me. For this reason I say, ‘I know Him.’
But why do you want to call this thing ‘God?’ To that I ask: ‘Why not?’ It was always called ‘God.’
Truly an excellent and suitable name.
Who could in complete seriousness maintain that his fate and his life proceed entirely according to his own conscious plans?
Do we possess a complete picture of the world?
In reality there are a million assumptions and situations that are removed from our control.
There are innumerable opportunities for our life to take another direction.
Those who claim to be masters of their own destinies are as a rule slaves of fate … what I would like, that I know; but I hesitate and doubt whether that ‘something’
shares in my intention or not.”[7]
It is no contradiction when Jung in another place said that he did not associate that superior and autonomous power, which he here termed “God,” with any specific confession, nor ascribe to it any definite characteristic at all.
It is neither good nor evil, neither active nor passive, neither personal nor impersonal.
Man attributes such characteristics to the archetypal image of God.
God is not touched by them. God was and remained for Jung a “transcendental mystery,” the “mystery of all mysteries.”[8]
He formulated somewhat drastically in a letter, “When I say God I mean an anthropo-morphic (archetypal) God-image and do not imagine I have said anything
about God.”[9]
To a young woman he wrote, “One must always remember that God is a mystery,
and everything we say on the subject is said and believed by human beings. We make images and concepts, and when I speak of God I always mean the image man has made of Him. But no one knows what He is like or he would be a god himself.”[10]
In spite of this epistemological limitation Jung consistently professed the acceptance of a metaphysical although unknowable God.
“I don’t by any means dispute the existence of a metaphysical God. I permit myself, however, to put human statements under the microscope.”[11]
As a scientist and empiricist he confined himself to the investigation of human assertions about the religious, about God, and grounded his psychology of religion on the interpretation and comparison of these facts.
The metaphysical God, “God Himself,” remained untouched.
It might serve here to summarize what has been said up until now: the unconscious is a hidden, transcendental realm of being, an incognizable reality.
It is the autonomy and sovereignty of the forces arising out of it that lend numinosity to them, with the result that man labels them “godly.”
“Recognizing that they do not spring from his conscious personality, he calls them mana, daimon, or God. Science employs the term ‘the unconscious,’ thus admitting that it knows nothing about it, for it can know nothing about the substance of the psyche when the sole means of knowing anything is the psyche.
Therefore the validity of such terms as mana, daimon, or God can be neither disproved nor affirmed.
We can, however, establish that the sense of strangeness connected with the experience of something objective, apparently outside the psyche, is indeed
authentic … However I prefer the term ‘the unconscious’ knowing that I might equally well speak of ‘God’ or ‘daimon’ if I wished to express myself in mythic language.
When I do use such mythic language, I am aware that ‘mana,’ ‘daimon,’ and ‘God’ are synonyms for the unconscious – that is to say, we know just as much or just as little about them.’” ~Aniela Jaffe, Was Jung a Mystic, Page 6-9
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