Jung and the Question of Science

Raya A. Jones, Raya A. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317932680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Jung and the Question of Science brings to the foreground a controversial issue at the heart of contemporary Jungian studies. The perennial debate echoes Jung's own ambivalence. While Jung defined his analytical psychology as a science, he was aware that it did not conform to the conventional criteria for a scientific study in general psychology. This ambivalence is carried into twenty-first century analytical psychology, as well as affecting perceptions of Jung in the academia. Here, eight scholars and practitioners have pooled their expertise to examine both the history and present-day ramifications of the 'science' issue in the Jungian context. Behind the question of whether it is scientific or not there lie deeper issues: the credibility of Jung's theory, personal identity as a 'Jungian', and conceptions of science, wisdom, and truth.

The book comprises a collection of erudite essays (Part I) and linked dialogues in which the authors discuss each other's ideas (Part II). The authors of Jung and the Question of Science share the conviction that the question of science is important, but differ in their understanding of its applicability. Drawing upon their different backgrounds, the authors integrate Jung's insights with bodies of knowledge as diverse as neuroscience, literary theory, theology, and political science. Clinical practitioners, psychoanalysts, psychologists, scholars and students interested in the Jungian perspective and the philosophy of science will find this book to be insightful and valuable.

Part I

ESSAYS

1

ROMANTICISM AND REVOLUTION IN JUNG’S SCIENCE

Joe Cambray

Defining science

At numerous points in his long career, Carl Gustav Jung identified his approach as scientific and referred to his work as ‘science’. While some of his publications such as the researches on the word association experiment do readily fall into what is commonly understood by science, other activities especially of an internal, introspective nature are more difficult to classify in this way. However, as a broad elastic category, ‘science’ is neither a unitary endeavour, definitions proliferate, nor do the activities of its practitioners occur outside historical and cultural frameworks even if one holds an idealistic goal of obtaining truths that transcend these conditions. In the most general terms, science refers to systematized knowledge, though frequently this has focused more narrowly on the physical and natural world, in an effort to maximize objectivity. This effort has in the past led to a distinction between the ‘hard sciences’ versus those associated with the human, social and cultural realms with their inherent subjectivity being seen pejoratively as ‘softer’. Reframing the division in terms of increasing complexity, as the matters under investigation contain more numerous elements with more elaborate interactions, the ability to rigorously (mathematically) describe such systems diminishes, leading to the classical hierarchy of sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology and anthropology.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the humanities seemed nearly irreconcilably separate from the sciences, with very little dialogue between them possible. C. P. Snow’s famous 1959 Rede lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’ brought attention to this gap and the sad consequences for humanity. However, as recent biographies of scientists are beginning to reveal, the history of science may need significant revision at least in terms of the retrospective polarizations which have traditionally been read into it. As will be discussed later in this chapter, alternative strands of scientific practice and theorizing are being recovered after being abandoned, often because of inabilities to adequately test them with the equipment, methods and theories available at the time they were first articulated. One prominent example is the notion of emergence from complexity theory that required high-speed computation devices to perform simulations that could only be intuited in the past and hence were treated as untestable speculations. However, before turning to the contemporary world, it will be useful to identify some nearly forgotten trends in sciences that had significant influence on Jung, and that are experiencing something of a renaissance presently.

In exploring sources for Jung’s implicit views on science, I will not be attempting to provide systematic documentation of his direct, conscious incorporation of these views, though when possible I will try to note these. Instead, I am interested in more fully identifying unacknowledged sources, including elements that were in his cultural milieu and likely a part of his general education but not specifically referenced in his own published works. By filling in these missing elements, for example the artistically rendered marine biological portraits of Ernst Haeckel which profoundly influenced some of the imagery of Jung’s Red Book (Cambray 2011a), I hope to better locate a selection of Jung’s use of science within alternative traditions and assess the relevance of these traditions in the post-Jungian world. Because he employed his creative, intuitive genius in ways that absorbed and used these traditions, even if unacknowledged and perhaps unconsciously, Jung can be seen to have anticipated certain contemporary developments in science that I believe are worthy of consideration and perhaps may offer new insights to these emerging areas of science.

The rise of science

Although our Eurocentric scientific traditions have roots in antiquity, the direct origins of modern science are usually associated with the new attitudes and activities about nature and the world arising from the age of discovery (from the early fifteenth into the seventeenth centuries). Long distance maritime travel had opened up vast new regions filled with previous unknown flora, fauna, minerals, and peoples as the Europeans developed ships and navigational tools capable of oceanic voyages.¹ The welter of novel information as well as the need to enhance technologies stimulated the cultures of exploration to organize and systematize the knowledge they were acquiring.

As the pursuit of knowledge gained socio-political importance, the individuals who most helped this advance became cultural heroes. Thus the rise of science is often told in terms of key figures such as in astronomy: Copernicus (1473–1543), Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), Galileo (1564–1642), and Kepler (1571–1630). More generally, those who articulated basic, universal laws of physics are generally heralded as the founders of the Western scientific view of the cosmos. Thus Isaac Newton (1642–1727) as the greatest exponent of the mathematical approach to physics during this inaugural period has tended to be given preeminence in standard history of modern science. Through his conception of universal gravitation and laws of motion, Newton was able to provide an accurate theoretical account for Kepler’s strictly observational ‘laws’ of planetary motion. The subsequent success of Newtonian physics resulted in a reductive, mechanistic worldview that held sway for several centuries, but this achievement was troubled on two major points. First, an understanding of the mechanism of gravity: while Newton’s laws gave accurate mathematical description of gravitational forces and the movement of bodies, the means by which this force was transmitted remained enigmatic, as action at a distance without a discernible medium. Second, the model implicitly held space to be empty and absolute, a three dimensional Cartesian framework through which bodies moved. Time was likewise seen in absolute terms, a constant one-way flow from past through the present to the future which could be arbitrarily subdivided into units using mechanical devices such as clocks. The first serious challenges to the Newtonian model came during the nineteenth century, from scientists whose orientation was marked by an interest in Romanticism as we shall see later.

Furthermore, the interests of these early figures were more complex than can be derived from their scientific accomplishments. Newton, for example, wrote far more on alchemy than on mathematical physics (Dobbs 1975 and 1991). Leibniz (1646–1716), the co-discoverer of calculus alongside Newton, and a major precursor/source for Jung’s synchronicity hypothesis, was deeply concerned with symbolic thought – for him mathematics was part of a search for a universal language. Frances Yates (1966) placed Leibniz firmly within the hermetic tradition. Similarly, Robert Boyle (1627–1691), considered one of the founders of chemistry, had a lifelong interest in transmutation and alchemy (Principe 1998). Most of the scientists and mathematicians of the period had strong philosophical interests that went well beyond the bounds of what could be quantified but these views were edited out of the subsequent Enlightenment’s reductionistic reading of nature. The qualitative, descriptive and holistic elements in their thinking have been downplayed if not expurgated.

In the following century, the pursuit of scientific knowledge increasingly became associated with the state, as the methods and results had practical, economic, military and political uses. One of the more significant of the eighteenth century forms of collecting knowledge was through state sponsored expeditions exemplified by those of Captain James Cook. Cook’s three Pacific voyages (1768–71; 1772–75; 1776–79) were acknowledged as a great boon by the scientific community and brought fame to some of the scientists who accompanied Cook, especially the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, and to a lesser degree the German scientists Johann Reinhold Forster and his adolescent son Georg Forster. For this chapter’s purposes, the influence of these scientists on the Romantic Movement in literature and science is key.

Banks, an Enlightenment gentleman, was also a skilled writer and captured the public imagination with his account of Cook’s first voyage, on which he was a participant. Scientifically his botanical collecting dramatically increased the known number of plant species, by about 25 per cent, but he also made writing about exploration into a form of scientific discourse. According to Tim Fulford and colleagues, Banks subsequently developed a network of explorers and gardeners emanating out of his Soho Square home but encircling the globe. This network allowed him to shape ‘the course of botany, natural history and race theory, as well as influencing colonial trade and administration’ (Fulford et al. 2004: 45). Banks’ influence went far beyond his own intention and his ‘projects helped give rise to literary Romanticism (inflecting its political concerns, its symbolism, its very content)’ (ibid.). The explorers in Banks’ network were a stimulus for poets who internalized and metaphorized the reports, seeing in them moral allegories (Keats and Shelley), and ways to reflect on their own inner development (e.g. Wordsworth’s The Prelude), which Fulford et al. see ‘not in rejection of but in reflexive relation to the exploration of men such as Cook’ (ibid.: 21). The Romantics’ shift of focus into the inner world is essential to understanding Jung’s view of what constitutes science. However, to better understand and appreciate this it will be useful to look to the German Romantic tradition especially in its early days as it was articulated by those doing both science and art albeit in a less differentiated manner.

German Romanticism and science

In response to the French and English domination in science during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which as noted was increasingly aligned with national agendas, German scientists developed a more individual, less state oriented form of science. During the initial rise of science, the Germans, excepting Leibniz, seemed to inhabit a collection of backward provinces having limited contact with the centres of scientific thought in France and England. This may have been partially a result of the decimation of the German population during the Thirty Years War (Berlin 1999: 34–5). In the German lands, there was a ‘retreat in depth’ and a move into pietism, which Berlin sees as the root of Romanticism (ibid.: 36). In contradistinction to the analytic, reductive methods of the Enlightenment, the German scientists retained a holistic viewpoint congruent with the emerging Romantic Movement.

Closer to Jung’s education and cultural affinity, the scientific aspects of German Romanticism have generally not been considered in his works beyond the practitioners’ impact as philosophers. The scientific contributions themselves have largely been ignored, or demeaned until recently. With a small but growing scholarly interest in the German Romantics’ intertwining of science and art in ways that generate intuitive knowledge about systems of nature, an alternative vision of their approach to the science of wholes is forming. As Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine note in their introduction to their edited volume Romanticism and the Sciences:

[T]he stereotype of the Romantic sciences as speculative, fantastic, mystical and ill-disciplined, and their alleged defeat by the empirical natural sciences, are polemical constructs rather than the fruits of unbiased historical research.

(Cunningham & Jardine 1990: 7–8)

The collection of essays they offer provides a useful, broad introduction to the range of accomplishments of the Romantic scientists; I will select a few examples as I proceed.

Goethe (1749–1832)

While the most renowned of the German Romantic scientists is Goethe, his literary influence on Jung overshadows that of his scientific contributions. Like other Romantics Goethe treated the sciences as hermeneutical; an attitude absorbed by Jung. Goethe’s theory of colour, which drew upon physiological research and had affinities with the wave theory of light which was being articulated in the early nineteenth century,² was a blend of aesthetics and science. His phenomenological stance included a blending of the subjective with objectivity:

Goethe’s great merit, recognized clearly by none of his contemporaries except Hegel, was that he remained faithful to the way things are, while avoiding positivism, and laid the groundwork for a science that preserved objectivity … while giving subjective variety, the diversity of human ways of conceiving things, its due.

(Sepper 1990: 196–7)

For him understanding of nature required a method that did not artificially separate science and art:

Goethe not only rejected this dichotomy of poetry and science, he also tried to show that quite the opposite was true, that the more science divorces itself from the all-embracing contexts of human life and nature the more the scientific imagination became trapped in a particular and sometimes even abstractively fantastic way of conceiving things. … He saw both science and poetry, each in its own way, as having the ultimate intention of being faithful to nature, to its actualities and its possibilities.

(Ibid.: 197)

It is this mind-set that I think comes closer to Jung’s views of science, which incidentally is also in better alignment with psychoanalytic thinkers such as Jonathan Lear, who in his book on therapeutic action, based on his reading of the work of Hans Loewald, argues for ‘a subjective conception of objectivity’ (2003: 103).

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859)³

To return to the theme of scientific exploration through travel to and through unknown realms, there is a particular German Romantic tradition worth explicating, that pioneered by Alexander von Humboldt. Both he and his brother Wilhelm, a renowned linguist and humanist, are memorialized by Humboldt University in Berlin. Alexander, however, was the traveller and scientist. Born in 1769 he developed personal friendships with numerous scientists and philosophers, including Goethe who was twenty years his senior. When Alexander was twenty years old and studying at Göttingen, he met Georg Forster, who by now was a bestselling author with his 1777 travelogue and scientific narrative, A Voyage Round the World, based on sailing with James Cook on his second Pacific voyage. Forster brought the young Humboldt along with him on a trip across Europe to London, where they met with Sir Joseph Banks. This trip was life altering for Humboldt and a prelude to his great adventure in Latin America (Helferich 2004: 10–11).

Before turning to his trek in South America, it should be noted that although Humboldt is only mentioned once in Jung’s Collected Works (Vol. 5: par. 481 n.17) where Jung makes reference to a South American Indian libido symbol (meteors as the ‘piss of the stars’) that he found in Humboldt’s final work Cosmos, there is good reason to consider deeper influence. As discussed in chapter one of Bair’s (2003) biography of Jung, Alexander von Humboldt is the person responsible for the Jung family living in Switzerland. Briefly, Karl Gustav Jung-Frey a native of Mannheim Germany arrived in Basel via Paris in 1822 to take up a professorship in medicine at the University there, becoming Swiss in the process, due to a letter from Humboldt to the Burgermeister of Basel recommending him for the post (ibid.: 10). More recently, Andreas Jung, C. G. Jung’s grandson, has provided a more detailed account of how this occurred: as a young man Karl Jung was involved in German unification politics and was unjustly imprisoned then exiled without trial; he went to Paris where he found Humboldt who ‘wanted to make up for what his government did to me in a series of injustices. The unforgotten, gracious man kept his word!’ which was to help Karl Jung obtain the professorship (A. Jung 2011: 661). With such a family story directly tied to his namesake, it is not much of a leap to imagine Humboldt’s life and works may have held attractions for Jung in unreported ways. One path by which this may have occurred is through Humboldt’s scientific travel narrative, itself a clear work of German Romantic science.

Before travelling to Latin America Humboldt had already established himself as a plant geographer wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Essays
• PART II Dialogues
• Name index
• Subject index