Jung's metaphysics

Abstract

Despite it being the focal point of his theoretical system, I argue that Jung's notion of the archetypes is one of his least understood concepts because it was nebulous to Jung himself. Jung vacillated between viewing archetypes as analogous to primordial images and ideas inherited from our ancestral past, formal a priori categories of mind, cosmic projections, emotional and valuational agencies, and numinous mystical experience, but the question remains whether a ‘suprapersonal’ or ‘transubjective’ psyche exists. In what follows, I will be preoccupied with tracing the theoretical development of Jung's thesis on the collective unconscious, with a special emphasis on the archetypes, and hence pointing out the metaphysical implications of his thought. It is not possible to critique his entire body of work in the context of this abbreviated article; therefore, the reader should be aware that I am limiting myself to a narrow scope of interest in explicating and analyzing the philosophical viability of his major concepts. The greater question is whether the archetypes adequately answer to the question of origins, of an omnipresent and eternal dimension to the nature and structure of psychic reality.

Keywords:

• Jung
• metaphysics
• collective unconscious
• archetypes
• transcendence

Notes

1. Because the term ‘metaphysics’ was such an explosive issue for Jung, and remains so today for his apologists, it becomes important to offer an adumbrated explanation of its philosophical usage. Metaphysics signifies Being, existence and reality, that which is. It is often contrasted with empiricism as a scientific endeavor and phenomenology as an experiential factor, when metaphysics subsumes these categories within a unifying perspective that accounts for all facets of human subjectivity including the nature of the psychological or spiritual, as well as religion as a naturalized human inquiry. Therefore, when we speak of metaphysics, we do not need to bifurcate the empirical from the phenomenological, for speculative propositions about psychic reality are simultaneously metaphysical phenomena.

2. In many ways the collective unconscious is anticipated by Hegel's conception of Absolute Spirit (Geist) as the sum totality or self-articulated complex holism that defines psychic process (see Kelly, 1993; Mills, 2002). Specifically, refer to Hegel's (1807) discussion of ‘unconscious universality’ within the context of collective spirit in the Phenomenology of Spirit (PS §§ 460–462, 474).

3. Although ontologists from Heidegger to Sartre wish to make phenomenology the ground of Being, here I wish to retain their categorical distinction, for Jung was attempting to highlight lived experience while privileging the greater metaphysical conditions that make experience possible.

4. Particularly see I. Part 1, Sec. 1–2; Part 2, Bk 1, Sec. 3.

5. Freud's notion of Trieb is usually interpreted as a ‘borderline concept’ between the somatic and the psychical, which, it could be argued, Jung substituted for archetype, with the psychoid further being an intervening animating principle that straddles the two spheres and institutes a unifying function. This is particularly relevant to the nature of synchronicity, where the psychoid function gathers the material world into the psychic domain and forms a meaningful unity.

6. Hegel (1807) is concerned not only about explaining individual psychology, but also about providing a universal, anthropological account of humankind. For Hegel, individuality is ultimately subordinated to higher social orders constituted in society by participating in the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) of a collective community. This participation rests on the development of a continuous psychosocial matrix of relations that has its origin in the family. The communal spirit and the ethical law embodied within the family of communal consciousness arises from ‘the power of the nether world’ (PS § 462) – what one might not inappropriately call the collective unconscious. For Hegel, collective spirit ‘binds all into one, solely in the mute unconscious substance of all’ (PS § 474). This ‘unconscious universality’ contains the ethical order as divine law as well as the ‘pathos’ of humanity, the ‘darkness’ of the ‘underworld’ (PS § 474).

7. Personal communication (2010).

8. In his memoir, Jung (1961) expresses the idealist pole of his thinking this way: ‘Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being’ (p. 256).

9. John Freeman, the BBC reporter and deputy editor of the New Statesman, recorded an interview with Jung in March 1959 that was first broadcast on the radio later that year and afterwards as a film. Jung's biographer, Gerhard Wehr (1985), tells us:

The interview contained the remarkable passage in which the reporter swung from Jung's childhood experiences and religious upbringing in the Jung family parsonage to the present, posing the direct question of whether he believed in God now. ‘Now?’ Jung replied, and paused for a moment like a subject in one of his association experiments on the hot seat. Then he admitted that it was really quite a difficult question. And to the surprise of his listeners he added very definitely: ‘I know. I don't need to believe. I know.’ (p. 440)

This sentiment echoes Jung's earlier view in ‘Spirit and Life’ where he says that ‘God is a psychic fact of immediate experience, otherwise there would never have been any talk of God’ (1926, p. 328).

10. ‘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’ (Jung, 1961, pp. 336–337).

11. Contra Kant, who believed that there was always a firm epistemological limit to pure reason or absolute knowing, Hegel believed that mind readily grasps the Ding un sich by virtue of the fact that we posit it. In the act of positing, we have already breached the limit. Here he employs an argument similar to Anselm's ontological proof for the existence of God; however, just because we can conceive of an idea does not mean that we can think something into existence.