A Brief Remark on the Actual Thoughts of C. G. Jung: Human Participation in the Creation

I'll give a comparatively brief summary of Jung's thoughts, without quoting his words since I do not think quoting is really a good device, in contrary to what most of the "creative" people think. It should certainly be my interpretation, and even with some proposal for refinement which is purely of my own thoughts at that, but in the business of mysticism and occult, while I'll without any hesitance reject all sorts of superficial elements, I am, at least I believe, certainly capable of diving into the deepest ocean and extract those essence of thoughts.

This essay was written on a whim and I spent only like 3 hours (actually 2.5 hours) on writing it, so readers should not expect any precise characterization of Jung's thoughts, but rather extract a general intuition about it. Also, time and again I need to stress that I do not write objective articles, the tone might seem overtly polemical.

Apporaching the thoughts of Carl Gustave Jung is not an easy business. It requires one to possess sufficient stock of hermenuetic techniques, to read most of his works, to know the thoughts contemporary or those that would have served as a soil from which his thoughts grew and blossomed, to have a device to develop and refine Jung's thoughts in one's own mind with the help of recent developments in anthropology and philosophy and physics and even mathematics, and moreover, crucially, to have an ability to read and understand people, that is to say, some sort of awareness to literature, a savvy on exegesis. While certainly Jung is not a philosopher, he is a thinker, and is far more difficult to understand than Nietzsche, who is already awfully misunderstood by brainless readers. By misunderstanding I don't mean there is a certain, given, interpretation of the thoughts of a thinker, but I suppose that we shall agree on that, say, when Kierkegaard ridiculed Hegel, he was certainly not indicating that Hegel is a complete moron.

Jung is often associated with a movement now called New Age, which irreversibly bears the stigma for being superstitious and somehow hilarious, which is more or less not a mere stigma, while this shouldn't prevent a thoughtful person to try to understand what the movement is for. Meanwhile I should firmly hold that he is not what the New Age movement deems him to be, and his so-called followers, those members of the Jungian school, do not really represent his thoughts, even if this member is an Erich Neumann. It might be, to some degree, appropriate to say that Jung is one of the initiators of various new religious movements in the contemporary world, but to characterize his thoughts in this manner would be similar to saying that Kierkegaard is a forerunner of Sartre; every sufficiently thoughtful person knows that Wittgenstein is much closer than Sartre to Kierkegaard, even if it doesn't seem so.

Jung enjoyed an absolute spiritual freedom in the small realm he had control over, meaning that there was no concern for dogmas in his thoughts. Enjoying an absolute spiritual freedom is not something most people can think of even if they themselves think they are open-minded and so and so. Frequently, or, always, it means, when in public, one needs to hide oneself, to conceal the true meaning and intention behind a curtain of being normal, rational, decent etc. (or the antithesis, depending on the millieu); in particular in our modern age of so-called freedom of speech where there is no inquisition or official rules for thought given by a higher authority like Teilhard de Chardin was subjected to, one needs to be extremely careful in his presentation of his thoughts, since no orthodoxy in thoughts means no one cares about thoughts whatsoever. Jung, while certainly not a charlatan, played a rather cunning game to sow the seed he discovered in the barren soil of the spiritual death of the modern age. He disguised himself as a completely scientific man and a normal psychiatrist, while factually he was a complete mystic, much like Teilhard de Chardin. Meanwhile it is not the case that he was not a scientific man: he was a scientific man, albeit an extremely revolutionary one, to the extent that even in this 21st century it is nearly impossible for one to find an easy and complete introduction to his thoughts that doesn't distort his thoughts. Mystical theology and philosophy were regarded as sciences before the dawn of the Enlightenment, mysticism is not fantasy but a science, those who want to listen to fairy tales should concentrate on fairy tales proper. Psychological studies of mysticism is not something outrageous: every age has its own mysticism, and those who do not have the right apparatus to comprehend mysticism should not even try to, but restrict themselves in the empirical.

In the past when I gave advice for people who want to approach Jung's thoughts, I've always told them to read his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections first, especially the last three chapters, and in particular the last chapter Late Thoughts, since Answer to Job and Aion are far too difficult for those not familiar with theological introspection and archetypal analysis. For those who have read loads of literary criticism in the style of, say, Northrop Frye, some Eliade, and again tons of theologians like Henri de Lubac, it might be possible to skip the autobiography and straightforwardly read Answer to Job, but others should first acquaint themselves with the mode of thought Jung presents in the chapter Late Thoughts. But even this might be a mistake, since what I found later was that no one really wanted to understand the crucial chapter. To understand the chapter, one needs to be open not only to all sorts of "fantastic" manner of thinking characterized by quoting Christian dogmatic definitions and myths and talking about life after death, but also to those heavily materialistic ways of looking at matters, an example of which can be to look at human beings evolutionarily, which certainly is reprehensible to many religious people and those that are attracted to New-Age and Tarot and occult in the oft-seen, fairly bourgeoisie, way. That is to say, one needs to be analytical, skeptical and at the same time willing to dive into the chaos of irrationality and insanity, but it is certainly not the case for most people, even if they think they are, just like those who do not have the ability to appreciate any avant-garde art and music, or even black metal, always want to present themselves as "creative" and "open-minded" and such.

What is central to Jung's thoughts is a verbally-rejected metaphysical statement concerning the world: the psyche is real. While this shouldn't sound bizarre to anyone who actually tried to understand German idealism, since those who read German idealism seldom really take it seriously, apart from its academic jargon and its political influcence, most people do not get the implication of the statement. There is no mere feeling or mere hallucination, since psychic phenomena are real. In Jung's writings, psychic phenomena and physical phenomena are sometimes separated and sometimes thought of as intermingled, and for his whole life he tried to find instances of the latter while conceding to the former to stay at least scientific and acceptable. To be as empirical as possible, in his early and relatively popular writings discussions concerning psychic phenomena are always framed in a language that pertains to concrete everyday-life implications of psychic events, say, someone ignored the warnings of his unconscious that manifest themselves in his dreams, thus he fell into this or that misfortune, or that seen as archetypal symbols this or that image means something corresponding to some real-life event or thing. Certainly, this sort of psychic phenomena might be interesting to those who are concerned with their well-beings, who want to live a balanced and happy life, to search for some "wisdom" in its New Age sense, but no profound thinker really cares about these things, and Jung is in particular utterly unconcerned about these mundane - especially when the issues are not that of life or death but some so-called "health" associated to practicing some yoga in its Californian variety - issues, while he is still open and receptive to other people's profound concern with all kinds of boring things; he was, after all, a psychiatrist, since the present age do not acknowledge anything similar to a mystic or a prophet.

Psyche is real, and people do not have a control over it, even for those parts of the Psyche - by using capital P we are merely supposing purely semantically a sum total psychic entity which do not need to actually exist - that are regarded as being the constituent to a human being, one cannot take control over or even recognize it. The part that is, in a particular circumstance, not in the sight of consciousness, which is the part that is controlled and recognized, is called the unconscious. Now human being as a species is biologically unified. Of course one can even disagree about this and argue that there is no discernible single substratum that renders an entity a human and engage himself with an avant-garde biological metaphysics, but there is no need for that single substratum to be known since what it is to be a human being should not be attacked by analyzing a well-defined concept of a metaphysical human being but rather by enlarging one's horizon and learn about some truth about being human via actually living it while not abandoning thoughts. The biological unity can be seen in the light of evolution. This was extremely fashionable in the late 19th and early 20th century Germany and Russia. Goethe and Schelling should be seen as examples, and Freud himself came up with his psychoanalysis when studying the phylogenetic path of spinal cord and spinal ganglion cells of primitive fish, it is not and should not be seen as something peculiar to Jung; it is a pity that all those who read German idealism and in particular Novalis do not comprehend the fact that Jung is a culmination of the philosophical tradition of their interest. This biological unity, in the light of evolution, is amalgamated into the concept of the collective unconscious. While ethologists and biological system theorists etc. might concern themselves with the characterization and description of animal psyche - without actually establishing the existence of this entity called psyche - by external behaviors and environments, what Jung is doing is simply probing animal - but really human - psyche with the contents of psyche manifesting themselves in dreams and religious and artistic works in the form of archetypal symbols. Archetypal symbols are actually patterns that might take the form of visual images but can in fact be anything that are endowed meaning in a certain discourse; they are roughly speaking formal principles, and their manifestations, of possible human discourses and narratives. This is what is meant by phenomenology in the titles of his several works. Eliade concerned himself with religious phenomena without reducing them to other entities, and Jung concerned himself with psychic phenomena without reducing them to other entities, while sometimes other phenomena are reduced to psychic substrata. Most of his works are empirical and phenomenological studies of this sort, which are not really interesting for those who want to know his thoughts rather than his empirical discoveries.

Regarding his thoughts proper, as presented in the chapter Late Thoughts, there are roughly two strands:

A quasi-Hegelian picture of unfolding and incarnation of psychic contents in the collective unconscious in the physical, or rather tangible, world.
A semi-Schellingian mystical and metaphysical vision of the reality as a process through which Consciousness is generated from the Unconscious and thus actualizing the creation of the Universe.

I have to mention that there is an unsettled problem, a gap, from his phenomenological studies on psyche, to his thoughts as is presented in the chapter Late Thoughts. There is no description of the mechanism regarding how archetypal symbols transform and are realized in tangible reality. This Jung simply said is basically unknowable since they happen in the unconscious and only present themselves to consciousness nearly arbitrary: one can only observe and take note and then try to understand the meaning without trying to come up with a causal theory of unconscious contents. I'll not try to give a remedy or apology to that, while as a remark article I maybe should, I agree with him on that sometimes one simply needs to learn to hear rather than develop a theory of which the telos is not understanding but control.

The second strand presented above should be seen as a metaphysical thesis, and the first strand should be seen as the phenomenological manifestation of the metaphysical thesis. Hence I'll be focusing on the second strand in the following. But one might better keep in mind that the first strand gives "actual" content that is meaningful to most people to the metaphysical thesis which doesn't really interest most except for philosophers and in particular metaphysicians, and Jung himself is not a metaphysician. Jung devoted most of his energy in the first strand, only giving a vague hint for the second strand, which really needs to be refined; I'll give some indications for refinements alongside expositions, since I am a metaphysician.

While Jung simply held that for something to exist in its fullest sense it needs to be recognized and acknowledged by consciousness, since what is is first known to be is, I might remark that there is a whole line of anti-realist meaning-theory a la Dummett that might support the claim. The word consciousness is ambiguous, coupled with the panpsychist metaphysics of A. N. Whitehead that is centered on event and experience, everything in the world can be regarded as conscious to some degree; we should also not forget that the question what is life is still unsolved, and there are potentials for hylozoic biological metaphysics in various now-developing disciplines of sciences such as cybernetics, evolutionary biology and systems theory. Now, with certain instance of hylozoism or panpsychism, it is a easy business to consider quantum mechanical measurements as faithfully reflecting the anti-realist metaphysics that is grounded upon a proper meaning-theory; reflecting, i.e. what is is is in a certain manner is because it is only logically possible to be in that manner. So in an asymptotically physical language, the metaphysical thesis is that the Universe is in a process of continuous generation, where measurements made by consciousness actually create the events and the measured results; measurements even increase some entity called entropy, while which entropy is unclear, time, properly conceived as the manifestation of irreversiblity, is also generated by the increase of entropy. Since the whole reality thus conceived has a intuitionistic semantics, the continuum is intuitionistic, and the statement that time is generated is not really a strange one.

While we cannot give a concise or even non-concise definition of consciousness, we might agree that those bare matters are largely unconscious: their capacity for interaction with other objects are mostly limited to those that can be described by modern physics, their psyches are of the most primitive sort. Similarly, animals are often deemed as more unconscious than human beings, so we have an ascending tower of beings ordered by degree of consciousness. The more consciousness there are, the more complex entities are capable of being created, and even the most banal objects come into existence by a consciousness acknowledging its existence. This process itself is the continuous creation of the Universe. It is the second cosmogony, heading toward a completed Universe which is the completion of consciousness and the end of time that corresponds to the Omega Point of Teilhard de Chardin. Making analogies to Bergsonism and Teilhardian thoughts on Cosmogenesis is an effective way to comprehend the thesis. Hence evolution is, approximately, a shadow, a projection, of transformations of archetypes in the psychic reality that are still unconscious, together with their realization, and a segment of the cosmogenesis that might further be interpreted as being perpetuated by other forms of evolution and inheritance, e.g. epigenetic, behavioral, symbolic, as Jablonka and Lamb have sketched. The emergence of reflective faculties now endows something that might rightly be called freedom and responsibility in human, since now archetypes in the collective unconscious do not have full control over the creation process, and Anthropos needs to take part in the creation, by acknowledging the archetypes and bringing them into consciousness.

Jung's metaphysical-cosmological thesis inevitably has a strong Gnostic undertone without proper modifications. The Creator of the unconscious Universe, which is still deemed existent by Jung with his Kantian concept of the Reality, is at best an unconscious demiurge, and the Universe is a prison where still largely unconscious human beings are trapped. By generating more consciousness, these divine sparks - since consciousness is nearly always symbolized by light and flame - amalgamate into a treasury of consciousness similar to deposit of faith and communion of saints in Catholic theology, which will one day completely reign over the matter Universe and return to the benevolent Father. This is the reason why Yahweh is depicted as an outrageously "evil", or rather ignorant, God in the book Answer to Job. Sophia, emanating from the Father, can only be recognized by those that are conscious, thus the Father should be conscious - in fact fully conscious in His wholeness - , while the creator-God, behaving like a child with no self-control, as in Jung's exegesis is not at all conscious. Answer to Job embodies a gnostic myth. It is invaluable, but it is still in heart a gnostic myth. Note that when I use the word myth I have no indication of disdain or ridicule. A myth is simply a narrative that gives a telos to those who are into it; everyone needs a narrative, even if the myth itself is that all myths are false. Meanwhile, one shouldn't regard Jung as completely a gnostic, since he didn't regard matter - unconscious - as evil, but rather via his phenomenological studies strongly held that for consciousness to develop and be generated, the connection to the unconscious, where all the potencies a la Aristotle are hidden, is indispensable, and many of his writings that are distorted as "complete the Self and lead a balanced life" by later Jungians are focused on the mechanism of this consciousness generation called individuation by him. Individuation for Jung is a cosmic process, it is not about "lead a happy life", and he repeatedly stressed, by quoting Hoederlin, that where there is danger there is salvation, the danger here being losing oneself in the storm of the collective unconscious.

In this process of, say, Jungian Cosmogenesis, human beings are central, since God Himself, at least His psychological image, wants to become man so that He can become conscious of Himself. There are rooms for scrunities and reinterpretations to be made, so I shall not go into details of how Jung conceived of the religious contents of Cosmogensis, that is, what's his notion of God and what's his theology. But one thing is clear: here, as in Karl Rahner, human beings are hearers. They need to hear and decide how to act, since the whole process of the Creation is now a cooperation between the Godhead and human beings, and furthermore human being itself as an image of God transforms since the God-image transforms, and vice versa. Any labor similar to speculations, to try to love and to try to do something meaningful, is a striving for consciousness, a labor in the vineyard of the Lord. That's the core of Jung's thoughts: a premotion of a grand scheme for human existence that endows meaning to it, and futher a conscious grasp of this scheme which was merely accepted by faith before and hence faded. It is a grand myth: human beings need to learn to take part in and be responsible for the whole process of Creation.

Let me, finally, give a quotation of Jung, to finish this essay:

That is the goal, or one goal, which fits man meaningfully into the scheme of creation, and at the same time confers meaning upon it. It is an explanatory myth which has slowly taken shape within me in the course of the decades. It is a goal I can acknowledge and esteem, and which therefore satisfies me. By virtue of his reflective faculties, man is raised out of the animal world, and by his mind he demonstrates that nature has put a high premium precisely upon the developmerit of consciousness. Through consciousness he takes possession of nature by recognizing the existence of the world and thus, as it were, confirming the Creator. The world becomes the phenomenal world, for without conscious reflection it would not be. If the Creator were conscious of Himself, He would not need conscious creatures; nor is it probable that the extremely indirect methods of creation, which squander millions of years upon the development of countless species and creatures, are the outcome of purposeful intention. Natural history tells us of a haphazard and casual transformation of species over hundreds of millions of years of devouring and being devoured. The biological and political history of man is an elaborate repetition of the same thing. But the history of the mind offers a different picture. Here the miracle of reflecting consciousness intervenes the second cosmogony. The importance of consciousness is so great that one cannot help suspecting the element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within all the monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that the road to its manifestation was ultimately found on the level of warmblooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain found as if by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed, felt and groped for out of some dark urge.

2023-05-28