The first question is about Leibniz’s perceptions insensibles 83 and asks for a concrete psychological equivalent to Leibniz’s experiment with the blue and yellow powder. Seen from some distance, the blue and yellow powder appears to be green.
Our daily life abounds in concrete psychological examples of Leibniz’s “unconscious perceptions” as illustrated by the above experiment. These are the many things we do unconsciously. We look, for instance, at our watch, but we have to consult it again if asked the time a minute later, yet we perceived it unconsciously. There are other cases, such as riding a bicycle, where the process is almost wholly unconscious and if, while actually riding a bicycle, we suddenly become aware of the unconscious perceptions by which we keep our balance, it may prove actually dangerous. These petites perceptions become visible and invisible in a manner analogous to the blue and yellow particles in the green powder.
The second question concerns Catholicism. The correspondent has written to inquire whether I would argue that Catholicism is not a psychology. “Why did you argue in your last lecture that psychology is so modern?”
Healing used to be considered the prerogative of Christ. It was a religious matter. In this sense, it is new to regard the human psyche as a whole and to experience ourselves as a suffering totality. I have never disputed the fact, however, that people possessed a soul already in those times. Psychic problems have always existed, but people were not yet ready to develop a science about this. Thus, religions were the method applied to overcome these difficulties. Jesus was a “savior” after all, a doctor. He could heal illnesses. The sufferings of the soul were supposed to be healed in this way. If total faith is possible within a religious system, then adequate healing of the suffering soul, too, can occur within this system. Nervous disorders arise from disturbances of the soul life—and not, for instance, from poor sleep or eating too many potatoes. Thus, an infantry captain suffering from foot pain once came to see me. 84 In the case of a roofer, it would have been vertigo; in the scholar’s case, perhaps an affliction of the eye. Body and soul are one being. We do not suffer in just an isolated corner of the whole. If a part suffers, the whole suffers. So the question was why no psychology yet existed in the Middle Ages. This is a misuse of the term “psychology”: people sometimes speak of “Mr. Jones’s psychology” when they actually mean the psyche of Mr. Jones. 85
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Now, let us return to the topic of today’s lecture. As we have heard, the age of the critique of knowledge began towards the end of the eighteenth century, with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) as its leading figure. His [concept of] “obscure representations” 86 follows Leibniz’s train of thought and carries his ideas further. In the first volume of his Anthropology, he speaks of “representations that we have without being conscious of them.” 87 We could also refer to perceptions. “Representations,” however, is the more general term. The famous statement that there is nothing in the mind that was not previously in the sensations 88 has in fact not been proven.
Kant adduces the following example: From afar, he sees a person standing in a meadow. What he sees, however, is in actual fact merely a shadow, because he cannot discern any details—limbs, eyes, nose, and so forth. Yet he nonetheless has the idea or representation that the figure is a person. This is essentially Leibniz’s idea. Kant’s conclusion, however, reaches far beyond the latter’s, and it affects the field of psychology much more profoundly—namely, that “only a few places on the vast map of our mind are illuminated,” and “the field of obscure representations is the largest in the human being”:
The field of sensuous intuitions and sensations of which we are not conscious, even though we can undoubtedly conclude that we have them; that is, obscure representations in the human being (and thus also in animals), is immense. Clear representations, on the other hand, contain only infinitely few points of this field which lie open to consciousness; so that as it were only a few places on the vast map of our mind are illuminated. This can inspire us with wonder over our own being, for a higher being need only call “Let there be light!” and then, without the slightest cooperation on our part . . . as it were set half a world before his eyes. . . . Thus the field of obscure representations is the largest in the human being. 89
These reflections cast the subject matter of psychology in an entirely different light and delineate it more sharply. For it could be argued that all psyches are individual psyches, that no such thing as a collective psyche exists, and that the psyche is nothing other than consciousness, as Professor Krüger claimed at the last Congress of Psychology. 90 Consciousness is after all an individual phenomenon. But if you ask a primitive whether he has an individual psyche, whether he is distinct from his fellow man or from his surroundings, he will not be at all certain. When you are among primitives you hardly dare to kill a crocodile, for the primitive says: “I am also that crocodile.” Kant thus initially assumes that our consciousness, that is to say, that which we are clearly conscious of, corresponds solely to some few illuminated points, and everything else lies in darkness. Just as a scholar may remark: “If I knew everything that I have already forgotten, I would be the most learned of all men.” The circumference of consciousness is thus very limited, and that of the unconscious is consequently all the greater. Kant was thus the first to recognize this fundamental truth in psychology.
After Kant, the epoch of empirical psychology in Germany came to a temporary end. There followed a period of great metaphysical speculation, in which the principle of imagination or fantasy reacted against the critique of pure reason. Hegel and Schelling were in reality metaphysical speculators, but when you examine their writings carefully—particularly those of Hegel—you will see that they are full of projected psychology.
Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831) 91 allowed fantasy to become outrageously speculative. There is no doubt at all that today Hegel would not be a philosopher, but a psychologist. He himself was not aware of this, however, and referred to his work as “philosophy.” 92 But in effect it constituted a psychology of the unconscious. Essentially, he deduced a psychology of the dark field, and in certain theses he actually talked about the psychology of the unconscious.
Likewise, Schelling (1775–1854) 93 espoused a positive stance toward the unconscious, whereas for Kant this remained a negative boundary concept. Schelling maintained that this “eternally Unconscious, which, as were it the eternal sun in the kingdom of spirits, is hidden by its own untroubled light,” is the absolute ground of consciousness. The unconscious thus becomes the primordial motherly foundation. This field is not some shadowy Hades but, as Schelling states, the sun from which consciousness emerges, being hardly more than a reflection. He adds:
and although itself never becoming Object, [it] impresses its identity on all free actions, is withal the same for all intelligences, the invisible root of which all intelligences are only the powers, and the eternal mediator between the self-determining subjective in us and the objective or intuited, at once the ground of conformity to law in freedom, and of freedom in conformity to law. 94
Schelling thus places complete emphasis on the unconscious. I would like to draw your attention particularly to the passage, “it is the same for all intelligences”: whereas intelligences are single, the ultimate basis is the same everywhere. The ultimate basis is not differential, but universal. Major philosophical systems later emerged from this very idea of Schelling’s.
While empirical psychology was in a sorry state in Germany for the time being, it rose to prominence in England where modern science espoused it as an important mode of thinking from early on, and particularly after Kant.
George Berkeley (1685–1753) 95 is the first English empirical psychologist. As an empiricist, he made sensations his starting point, like Christian Wolff. When one neither sees, hears, nor feels anything, one assumes that there is nothing in the mind either, true to the Latin saying: Nihil est in intellectu, quod non antea fuerit in sensu. 96 Berkeley realized, however, that sensations do not remain disparate, but coalesce into a whole, and discovered the perception of one’s own senses as a factor equal to the object perceived. Out of this fusion of subject and object Berkeley constructed the psychological concept of space.
David Hume (1711–1776) 97 argued along similar lines. He considered for the first time the relation between representations and sensations, and derived the former from the latter. He espoused Berkeley’s idea of coalescence for his representations and enquired into the law of coalescence. He argued that their association occurs on account of similarity, coexistence in time and space, and causality. 98 Association occurs by means of a “gentle force,” 99 similar to the law of gravity and its effect on heavenly bodies. Representations thus reciprocally attract each other.
David Hartley (1705–1757), 100 one of Hume’s contemporaries, ventured to explore more complex psychic phenomena on this basis. He applied this fusion principle to the highest complexities of the mind, which he also explained in terms of the fusion into a whole of rapidly recurring or simultaneous sensations.
In the work of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), 101 this mechanistic attempt shifted towards materialism through his identification of these psychic processes with processes in the brain. Such identification obviously had consequences for psychology.
The concept of instinct, or so-called common sense, appeared with the Scottish School of philosophy, whose leading exponents included Thomas Reid (1710–1796) 102 and William Hamilton (1788–1856). 103 Reid defined “common sense” as “that upon which all agree.” For him, common sense is the indubitable source of knowledge, through which we also become acquainted with complex psychic processes. Consequently, psychology could limit itself in essence to simply describing what is established by common sense. The idea of looking at everything simply and objectively may sound frightfully banal at first sight, but this is the empirical point of view par excellence, and can only be reached by a complete sacrifice of judgements and opinions. So this way of looking at things is an invaluable contribution to psychology.
This is Rudyard Kipling’s attitude in his Just So Stories, a book comprising a selection of outright silly stories. 104 It is in its place when applied to the fearful complexities of the human psyche. If we are able to say “it is just so,” there is nothing to be done about it, and then we must confine ourselves to simply have a look at the whole of psychology and forget about our previous judgement. This involves a self-sacrifice as well as limiting ourselves to the objective. You will have the right attitude to psychology in general and to the difficult things that you will hear in the course of these lectures, if you can treat them as a “Just So Stories,” as mere descriptions. Thus, English “common sense” is very warranted.
Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), 105 Reid’s student and follower, was convinced that this descriptive method could turn psychology into a natural science, through its objective description of psychic processes, by the sacrifice of all opinions and by making no foregone conclusions. And this is a very good idea, because once we are able to separate a theory from an opinion, it begins to become a science. Confusion abounds today, because everyone believes that psychology is identical with his opinion about it. But this is just his own psyche, and by no means psychology!
Stewart postulated two laws of association, and this discrimination is important for pathology. First, there are voluntary, arbitrary associations arising from the active interference of consciousness. Second, there are involuntary, spontaneous, and simple associations that follow certain a priori laws, such as resemblance, contrariety, and vicinity in place, or vicinity in time. 106 Some processes of the psyche obey the will, others do not, but follow laws of their own. People incline to identify with one of these views, but both are equally true. Great truths, such as the existence of voluntary and involuntary actions, are lost time and again, only to be rediscovered over and over again.
83. At the beginning of the first question, the lecture notes read: “Leibniz: dispersion insensible.” Very probably, this is a hearing mistake for “die [the] perceptions insensibles,” because the question is precisely about that.
84. Jung was an officer in the Reserve in the Swiss army, and was—like every able-bodied male Swiss citizen—drafted once a year for military service, in his case, as an army doctor.
85. In fact, throughout his work—and also in these lectures—Jung often himself uses “psychology” for both the psyche, or mental make-up, of somebody, and the theory or science of the psyche.
87. Ibid., p. 23.
89. Ibid., pp. 24–25.
90. Felix Krüger (1874–1948), professor of psychology at the University of Leipzig. Krüger, who had been a member of a “National-Socialist combat group for German culture” since 1930, was appointed Rector of the University of Leipzig in 1935. In 1937, however, he was suspended on account of his Jewish ancestry. He retired in 1938, and emigrated to Switzerland in 1944.—Jung is probably referring to the Thirteenth Congress of the German Psychological Society in Leipzig of October 16–19, 1933, that is, just before Jung began his lectures. Cf. Klemm, 1934.
91. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), the famous German philosopher and pre-eminent representative of German (philosophical) Idealism.
92. A view that Jung expressed also elsewhere: “Hegel, that great psychologist in philosopher’s garb” (Jung, 1935a, § 1734); or “Hegel was a psychologist in disguise who projected great truths out of the subjective sphere into a cosmos he himself had created” (Jung, 1946b, § 358). To Friedrich Seifert he wrote in 1935: “I have always been of the opinion that Hegel is a psychologist in disguise, just like I am a philosopher in disguise” (1973, p. 194).—In Memories, Jung says that when he first encountered his writings in his adolescence, “Hegel put me off by his language, as arrogant as it was laborious; I regarded him with downright mistrust. He seemed to me like a man who was caged in the edifice of his own words and was pompously gesticulating in his prison” (p. 87).
93. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Ritter von Schelling (1775–1854), another main representative of German Idealism. His philosophy is situated between Fichte, his mentor prior to 1800, and Hegel, his former university roommate and erstwhile friend.
94. Dieses ewig Unbewußte, was, gleichsam die ewige Sonne im Reich der Geister, durch sein eigenes ungetrübtes Licht sich verbirgt, und obgleich es nie Object wird, doch allen freyen Handlungen seine Identität aufdrückt, ist zugleich dasselbe für alle Intelligenzen, die unsichtbare Wurzel, wovon alle Intelligenzen nur die Potenzen sind, und das ewig Vermittelnde des sich selbst bestimmenden Subjectiven in uns, und des Objectiven, oder Anschauenden, zugleich der Grund der Gesetzmäßigkeit in der Freyheit, und der Freyheit in der Gesetzmäßigkeit des Objectiven (Schelling, 1800, p. 434; also in Sämmtliche Werke, I, 3, p. 600). Jung had already referred to this passage in a lecture at the ETH about two years earlier: “In Schelling the ‘eternally unconscious’ is the absolute ground of consciousness” (Jung, 1932, § 1223).
95. George Berkeley (1695–1753), or Bishop Berkeley, Anglo-Irish philosopher, known for his radicalization of Locke’s sensualism and his immaterialism, as summarized in his notion that “to be is to be perceived” [esse est percipi]: “For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them” (Berkeley, 1710, part 1, § 3). His philosophy is at the basis of the well-known thought experiment: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Incidentally, the city of Berkeley, California, was named after him, while the pronunciation was Americanized.
96. Latin, there is nothing in the intellect (mind) that was not previously in the sense (the sensations). This maxim of the philosophical doctrine of sensualism is found in various slightly different versions (e.g., in Thomas Aquinas, 1256–59, quaestio 2, articulus 3, arg. 19; or, most famously, in John Locke). Jung uses the wording quoted by Schopenhauer (1819 [1887], p. 258), who attributed this judgement to Aristotle.
97. David Hume (1711–1776), very influential Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist; like John Locke and George Berkeley a main representative of British Empiricism. Kant, for instance, credits him with being the one who “many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber, and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy quite a new direction” (1783 [1902], p. 7).
98. “It is evident that there is a principle of connexion between the different thoughts or ideas of the mind, and that in their appearance to the memory or imagination, they introduce each other with a certain degree of method and regularity. . . . To me, there appear to be only three principles of connexion among ideas, namely, Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect” (Hume, 1748 [1993], Section III, p. 14; ital. in orig.).
99. We should regard the three principles of association “as a gentle force, which commonly prevails” (Hume, 1739–1740, Book I, Part 1, Section 4).
101. Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), English polymath—theologian, Dissenting (Unitarian) clergyman, natural philosopher, chemist, educator, and political theorist. He was the foremost British scientist of his age (for example, he is usually credited with the discovery of oxygen and other gases), although he himself viewed his scientific work as only secondary to his theological work. He published over 150 books on a wide range of topics, on science, philosophy, theology, history, grammar and language, politics, education, etc. Priestley supported David Hartley, and claimed that the book that influenced him the most, save the Bible, was the latter’s Observations on Man (1749). Priestley abandoned dualism and considered perception and other mental powers to be properties of matter. His materialism involved assimilating the attributes of mind to matter as a natural extension of Hartley’s correlation of mental associations with vibrations in the brain.
102. Thomas Reid (1710–1796) was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, and played an important role in the Scottish Enlightenment; critic of John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. For Reid, common sense or sensus communis—the opinions of “the vulgar,” those tenets that we cannot help but believe, given that we are constructed the way we are constructed—are at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry and knowledge.
103. William Hamilton (1788–1856), Scottish philosopher of enormous erudition; although largely forgotten today, he was at his time regarded as a major intellectual figure of international importance. After visits to Germany, he brought German philosophy, above all the work of Kant, to the British Isles. He was an enthusiastic exponent of Reid, whose collected works he edited and annotated (1846). In 1854/1855 he also published a re-edition of the works of Dugald Stewart (see below.)
104. Kipling, 1902. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), the very popular English writer and poet, now mostly known for his tales for children (e.g., the Jungle Books [1894, 1895]), but also (in)famous for his celebration of British imperialism. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1907.
105. Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and mathematician. He upheld Reid’s psychological method and expounded the “common-sense” doctrine, but was also an original and influential philosopher of his own, being co-responsible for making the “Scottish philosophy” predominant in early nineteenth-century Europe.
106. For the latter associations Stewart listed “the relations of Resemblance and Analogy, of Contrariety, and Vicinity in time and place, and those which arise from accidental coincidence in the sound of different words. These, in general, connect our thoughts together, when they are suffered to take their natural course.” For the former associations, there “are the relations of Cause and Effect, of Means and End, of Premises and Conclusion; and those others, which regulate the train of thought in the mind of the Philosopher” (1792, pp. 213–214).