| RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR
Carl Gustav Jung was a seer and visionary
nonpareil. He was also a thinker who was truly ahead of his
time. More importantly, he was his own shadow -- a manifestation
he did not repress, or overlook. Rather, he only fostered
and expanded its powers: for the higher purposes of his own,
and others', existence.
This also explains
why Carl Jung -- a protégé of Sigmund Freud --
broke away from his 'mentor,' and explored his own destiny:
the world of dreams, psychic wholeness, the nature of God,
oriental philosophy, alchemy, astrology etc., That's not all.
With his great postulate of synchronicity, Jung has now emerged
as the philosopher-favourite in our age of spiritual
'renascence.'
To understand Jung is to comprehend the
great unconscious, or his native Switzerland -- a social perplexity
that matches the opprobrious complexity of his own theories.
For a man whose adolescence was troubled, Jung inquisitively
did not view people kindly. Reason? Neurosis ran -- sort of
-- in his family; his mother being the most affected by it.
Strangely, it also brought in him a sense of alienation, but
without infringement on his colossal intuitive chemistry.
Born on July 26, 1875, Jung, to whom the
Alps was a parallel of perfection, was just not the proponent
supreme of analytical psychology. He was also a sublime philosopher
-- a refined one at that -- in his own right and write.
He registered as a medical student at the University of Basel
in 1895. Soon after, he became interested in the possibilities
of auto-suggestion, reincarnation, and even sensual fantasy.
Come 1897, he delivered a mélange of posits culled
from his 'idols' Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Strauss et
al… Needless to say, his thought has been applied to fields from
physics to eco-psychology may now be part of scientific connotation,
all right. So also his seminal thinking constructs in psychoanalysis.
It, therefore, comes as a big surprise that his contributions
to philosophy have generally remained preclusive, and even
eerie.
It goes without saying that Jungian thought
can provide us with an illuminating standpoint on contemporary
philosophy. His psychological types can serve as a good signpost
for us to examine his own philosophy: that typology is clearly
applicable to epistemology, in spite of its pertinence to
ontology. As Jung himself wrote of psychological types: "This
work sprang originally from my need to define the ways in
which my outlook differed from Freud's and Adler's."
Philosophy is going through a fruitless
spell, at present. Well, almost! It is not like how it blossomed
forth from the buoyant French sagacity of Descartes, and the
hardy British experientialism of Hume, to the exalted insights
of Kant, and Hegel -- the last great integrator. Yes, Jung
was a pioneer. He took the role of a trail-blazer very earnestly.
What he said is of stupendous interest at the cutting-edge
of philosophical thought today, albeit he was quite cognisant
that his ideas could be endorsed, admired, contradicted, and
also thrown into the back portals of history.
If Kant accepted Hume's rather onerous
shortcomings of human knowledge, that all we can know are
observations of the senses, and operations of pure logic,
he also had to deal with the fact that there are certain things
people identify to be true: those that cannot be proved by
either logic, or observation. Kant distinguished between things
as we know them, and of the thing itself as the real thing
a la Indian philosopher, Madhva, of an earlier epoch.
Kant also held that our sensory observations do not necessarily
mirror, and unquestionably do not expend, actual reality,
which is unknowable, but true in the most abstruse sense.
Jung used this distinction to salvage us from definitive contradictions.
Jung, like Kant, accepted the existence
of cause-and-effect in a 'Spinozistic' sense. He observed
that resolute causality leaves no space for human freedom,
even though human freedom is a cardinal appropriation of all
societies and a nuclear experience of all people. Disapproval
of human freedom contravenes human trustworthiness and exterminates
some ideas that all people treasure as upright. Jung's Kantianism
presents itself in its elevated esteem for the objective reality
of the inward life, not to speak of its transparent, consistent
accent on human continuity with the rest of nature and cosmic
laws.
Jung's theory of synchronicity, 'an a-causal
connecting principle,' is not so much cryptic or mystical.
It is based on Kant's distinction between phenomena and things-in-themselves.
Kant also said that causality does not operate among things-in-themselves
in exactly the same way it does in perceived eventualities.
Jung may have had his limitations vis-à-vis his understanding
of the whole human psyche to extraverted [object], sensing
[perception of a physical stimulus] for data gathering and
thinking [linking ideas derived from perceptions in logical
order] for evaluation, yes. But, he saw that we do experience
at least one thing itself directly: we experience our own
existence. He also presaged the philosophy of phenomenology
of Husserl, and/or the one that was cultivated, and made enormously
popular, by his more celebrated disciple, Heidegger.
Jung, like the cognitive psychologists
of today, thought of the human mind as not a simple, quiescent,
externally programmed contrivance. He said that it was neither
with its internal structure entirely distinct from, and unrelated
to the universe, as many of us would presume. Our minds are
part, Jung contended, of the universe, and participants in
the same laws that created the Universe. He, therefore, described
the process of introverted sensation as the senses turned
inward. This inner construct, he added, is clearly not a personal,
individual matter of observing one's own body or feelings,
but rather turning one's mindfulness to the personal experience
of being itself. To this he connoted cross-cultural
and historical observations. His classification of the experience
of existence was, therefore, lucidly allegorical and aesthetic.
He beheld the collective unconscious, symbols, and exemplars
as much as Heidegger recognised with being and time, understanding,
the context of objectives, relationships, mood, and discourse
[symbols/language].
Kant is principally essential to enlightening
Jung's distinction between introversion and extroversion.
Introversion, according to Jung, was not mere subjectivity.
How well do we all know that our neurology is matter and electricity:
that our brains are also a direct, physical experience in
the actual universe. We are just not simple subjects perceiving
objects, even if we are ourselves included as objects. We
are participant-observers in the Reality Web itself. Extroversion,
therefore, as Jung explained, emphasises observation as much
as introversion emphasises co-operation. This Kantian perspective
explains why Jung could so powerfully discard the allegation
of psychologism -- the reproof that he reduced God, for instance,
to a psychic relic.
Jung's definition of the psychic function,
called intuition, is profoundly Kantian. He also affirmed
that the human unconscious, expressed spontaneously in religious
practice, myth, and literature, transcends mere subjectivity.
It is a kind of perception, through us, as a thing-in-itself
-- of things. They really are, and by flowing into consciousness,
he concurred, it is the personality of the universe becoming
self-cognisant.
Jung was a
multifaceted, reflective thinker. Central to his contributions
are possibility syntheses that correct contemporary
philosophy:
- Jung points out the weakness of any
truth-discovering inventory that systematically precludes
one, or another, part of human experience
- His constant, inescapable stress on
our direct participation in the universe by means of introversion/intuition,
and the archetypes
- His recognition of feeling, a conscientiously
evaluative function, as equal in importance and realistic
to thinking, including logic, mathematics, analysis, and
so on.
Jung's psychoanalysis puts the patient
in touch with the unconscious. It's a build-up of, and to,
a kind of do-it-yourself therapy, or inner journey/s. It's
the way to find the self -- that level of the unconsciousness
where the individual consciousness merged with the psyche…
like a river flowing into a mighty ocean. That unconscious,
Jung reckoned, was collective. Such a collective nature of
the human mind, he emphasised, was predisposed to respond
to situations through fixed behaviour patterns -- archetypes
-- a concept manifested by way of images and symbols, found
in dreams, fantasies, and myths.
"An archetype," as Jung put
it, "is like an old watercourse along which the water
of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for
itself -- the longer it's flowed in this channel the more likely
it is that, sooner or later, the water will return to its
old bed." It conjures up a classy metaphor: nuclear physics
and the psychology of the unconscious, sooner than later,
will tug closer together and independently of one another,
and from contrasting points of the compass. They will, with
a detached sense of attachment, push forward into transcendental
confines -- one with the characteristic of the atom, the other
with that of Jung's archetype.
The deduction: Jung's silhouette, which
reflects the Platonic idea of Timaeus, or 'world-soul,' not
to speak of the totality of one's psyche as being cognate
to the 'world-mind,' is not only appropriate, but revolutionary.
It may also, in effect, be best epitomised as the unfolding
of collective [un]consciousness not only in individuals, but
also in every aspect of life.
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