The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche

The work of Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli

C. G. Jung, Wolfgang Pauli, Roderick Main, Roderick Main

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781351589550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book includes essays that emphasize the part played by pre-existing images or archetypes in the development of concepts and scientific theories and stress the need for complementary principles in nature. It is a translation of "Synchronizitat als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhange". In 1952 Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, both at the height of their reputations, co-wrote The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. It contained one essay by each author: Jung's presents a challenge to mainstream science and advances the principle of synchronicity and Pauli's argues for a more holistic conception of modern science. Roderick Main presents the original essays here with a brand-new introduction and commentary which reviews how the original text was viewed, and which traces the subsequent influences of both the essays and the two authors.

The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler

W. PAULI

Translated from the German by PRISCILLA SILZ

PREFATORY NOTE

It is my pleasant duty to express my warmest thanks to all those who have given me assistance and encouragement in the writing and publication of this essay.

In particular I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Erwin Panofsky, of the Institute for Advanced Study, at Princeton, for many discussions of the problems here concerned in the light of the history of ideas, also for his procurement and critical appraisal of original texts and for several translations from the Latin; to Professor C. G. Jung and Dr. C. A. Meier for detailed and essential discussions connected with the psychological aspect of the formation of scientific concepts and their archetypal basis; and to Dr. M.-L. von Franz for her translations from the Latin, the most numerous and most important in the essay, as well as for a painstaking and often wearisome examination of different original texts. In the English edition, her translations have been revised by Professor Panofsky. I may add that the English edition embodies a few minor corrections.

THE INFLUENCE OF ARCHETYPAL IDEAS ON THE SCIENTIFIC THEORIES OF KEPLER1

Although the subject of this study is an historical one, its purpose is not merely to enumerate facts concerning scientific history or even primarily to present an appraisal of a great scientist, but rather to illustrate particular views on the origin and development of concepts and theories of natural science in the light of one historic example. In so doing we shall also have occasion to discuss the significance for modern science of the problems which arose in the period under consideration, the seventeenth century.

In contrast to the purely empirical conception according to which natural laws can with virtual certainty, be derived from the material of experience alone, many physicists have recently emphasized anew the fact that intuition and the direction of attention play a considerable role in the development of the concepts and ideas, generally far transcending mere experience, that are necessary for the erection of a system of natural laws (that is, a scientific theory). From the standpoint of this not purely empiristic conception, which we also accept, there arises the question, What is the nature of the bridge between the sense perceptions and the concepts? All logical thinkers have arrived at the conclusion that pure logic is fundamentally incapable of constructing such a link. It seems most satisfactory to introduce at this point the postulate of a cosmic order independent of our choice and distinct from the world of phenomena. Whether one speaks of the “participation of natural things in ideas” or of a “behaviour of metaphysical things—those, that is, which are in themselves real,” the relation between sense perception and idea remains predicated upon the fact that both the soul of the perceiver and that which is recognized by perception are subject to an order thought to be objective.

Every partial recognition of this order in nature leads to the formulation of statements that, on the one hand, concern the world of phenomena and, on the other, transcend it by employing, “idealizingly,” general logical concepts. The process of understanding nature as well as the happiness that man feels in understanding, that is, in the conscious realization of new knowledge, seems thus to be based on a correspondence, a “matching” of inner images pre-existent in the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. This interpretation of scientific knowledge, of course, goes back to Plato and is, as we shall see, very clearly advocated by Kepler. He speaks in fact of ideas that are pre-existent in the mind of God and were implanted in the soul, the image of God, at the time of creation. These primary images which the soul can perceive with the aid of an innate “instinct” are called by Kepler archetypal (“archetypalis”). Their agreement with the “primordial images” or archetypes introduced into modern psychology by C. G. Jung and functioning as “instincts of imagination” is very extensive. When modern psychology brings proof to show that all understanding is a long-drawn-out process initiated by processes in the unconscious long before the content of consciousness can be rationally formulated, it has directed attention again to the preconscious, archaic level of cognition. On this level the place of clear concepts is taken by images with strong emotional content, not thought out but beheld, as it were, while being painted. Inasmuch as these images are an “expression of a dimly suspected but still unknown state of affairs” they can also be termed symbolical, in accordance with the definition of the symbol proposed by C. G. Jung. As ordering operators and image-formers in this world of symbolical images, the archetypes thus function as the sought-for bridge between the sense perceptions and the ideas and are, accordingly, a necessary presupposition even for evolving a scientific theory of nature. However, one must guard against transferring this a priori of knowledge into the conscious mind and relating it to definite ideas capable of rational formulation.

2

As a consequence of the rationalistic attitude of scientists since the eighteenth century, the background processes that accompany the development of the natural sciences, although present as always and of decisive effect, remained to a large extent unheeded, that is to say, confined to the unconscious. On the other hand, in the Middle Ages down to the beginning of modern times, we have no natural science in the present-day sense but merely that prescientific stage, just mentioned, of a magical-symbolical description of nature. This, of course, is also to be found in alchemy, the psychological significance of which has been the subject of intensive investigation by C. G. Jung. My attention was therefore directed especially to the seventeenth century, when, as the fruit of a great intellectual effort, a truly scientific way of thinking, quite new at the time, grew out of the nourishing soil of a magicalanimistic conception of nature. For the purpose of illustrating the relationship between archetypal ideas and scientific theories of nature Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) seemed to me especially suitable, since his ideas represent a remarkable intermediary stage between the earlier, magical-symbolical and the modern, quantitive-mathematical descriptions of nature.¹

¹ The chief writings of Kepler are:

• Mysterium cosmographicum (Tüubingen, 1st edn., 1596; 2nd edn., 1621).
• Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, quibus astronomiae pars optica traditur (Frankfort on the Main, 1604).
• De Stella nova in pede serpentarii (Prague, 1606).
• De motibus stellae Martis (Prague, 1609).
• Tertius interveniens (Frankfort on the Main, 1610).
• Dioptrice (Augsburg, 1611).
• Harmonices mundi (in five books, Augsburg, 1619).
• Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae (Linz and Frankfort on the Main, 1618-21).
• It should be noted that Newton’s chief work, Philosophiae naturalis Principia mathematica, appeared in 1687.

In that age many things that, later on, were to be divided by a critical effort were still closely interrelated: the view of the universe was not as yet split into a religious one and a scientific one. Religious meditations, an almost mathematical symbol of the Trinity, modern optical theorems, essential discoveries in the theory of vision and the physiology of the eye (such as the proof that the retina is the sensitive organ of the eye), are all to be found in the same book, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena. Kepler is a passionate adherent of the Copernican heliocentric system, on which he wrote the first coherent textbook (Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae). The connection of his heliocentric creed—as I should like to call it, in intentional allusion to religious creeds—with the particular form of his Protestant-Christian religion in general and with his archetypal ideas and symbols in particular will be examined in detail on the following pages.

On the basis of the heliocentric conception, Kepler discovered his three famous laws of planetary motion: 1. Revolution in ellipses, the sun being located in one of the foci, in De modbus stellae Martis. 2. Radius vector of each planet covering equal areas in equal time, in De modbus stellae Martis. 3. Time of revolution τ proportional to a^3/2, a being half the major axis, in Harmonices mundi, Book V. Not very long after their discovery, these laws that today have a place in all text-books were to become one of the pillars upon which Newton ² based his theory of gravitation, namely, the law of the diminution of the force of gravitation in inverse proportion to the square of the distance of the heavy masses from each other.

² Principia.

But these laws that Kepler discovered—the third after years of effort—are not what he was originally seeking. He was fascinated by the old Pythagorean idea of the music of the spheres (which, incidentally, also played no small part in contemporary alchemy) and was trying to find in the movement of the planets the same proportions that appear in the harmonious sounds of tones and in the regular polyhedra. For him, a true spiritual descendant of the Pythagoreans, all beauty lies in the correct proportion, for “Geometria est archetypus pulchritudinis mundi” (Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world). This axiom of his is at once his strength and his limitation: his ideas on regular bodies and harmonious proportions did, after all, not quite work out in the planetary system, and a trend of research, like that of his contemporary Galileo, which directed attention to the constant acceleration of freely falling bodies, was quite foreign to Kepler’s attitude, since for such a trend the de-animation of the physical world, which was to be completed only with Newton’s Principia, had not as yet progressed far enough. In Kepler’s view the planets are still living entities endowed with individual souls. Since the earth had lost its unique position among the planets he had to postulate also an anima terrae. We shall see how the souls of the heavenly bodies play an essential role in Kepler’s particular views on astrology. Yet the de-animation of the physical world had already begun to operate in Kepler’s thought. He does, to be sure, occasionally mention the alchemical world-soul, the anima mundi, that sleeps in matter, is made responsible for the origin of a new star (De Stella nova, Ch. 24), and is said to have its seat— that is, its special concentration—in the sun. But it can be seen clearly that the anima mundi is no more than a kind of relic in Kepler’s mind and plays a subordinate role compared to the individual souls of the various heavenly bodies. Although Kepler’s ideas reveal quite unmistakably the influence of Paracelsus and his pupils, the contrast between his scientific method of approach and the magical-symbolical attitude of alchemy was nevertheless so strong that Fludd, in his day a famous alchemist and Rosicrucian, composed a violent polemic against Kepler’s chief work, Harmonices mundi. In Section 6 we shall revert to this polemic, in which two opposing intellectual worlds collided.

Before I go into detail regarding Kepler’s ideas, I shall furnish some brief biographical data to illuminate the historical background of his life. Kepler was bom in 1571 in the town of Weil in Wiirttemberg. He was brought up in the Protestant faith; indeed, his parents originally intended him for the clergy. But early, because of his profession of the Copernican doctrine, he came into conflict with the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• C. G. JUNG Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
• I. EXPOSITION
• II. AN ASTROLOGICAL EXPERIMENT
• III. FORERUNNERS OF THE IDEA OF SYNCHRONICITY
• IV. CONCLUSION
• W. PAULI The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler
• Appendix I. Fludd’s Rejection of the Proposition That the Soul of Man Is a Part of Nature
• Appendix II. Fludd on the Quaternary
• Appendix III The Platonic and Hermetic Trends: Johannes Scotus Eriugena (810?—?877)
• Index