Archetypal Panpsychism: Jung and Whitehead

Notes from a workshop for the Idaho "Friends of Jung" on January 20-21, 2017.

I’ve been packing up my home here in Sebastopol. I’m excited to be moving back down to Oakland at the end of the month—the city that first welcomed me to the Bay Area from Florida in 2008. While sorting through old files (I mean the paper kind), I dug up some notes from a workshop that I led with Becca Tarnas for the “Friends of Jung” group in Boise, Idaho back in 2017. We titled the workshop “Archetypal Panpsychism: Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman.” Becca and I were both inspired by Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman (1989), an anthology edited by the late David Ray Griffin that originally emerged from a conference organized by the Center for Process Studies back in 1983. Below are my lightly edited notes written in preparation for my remarks. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a recording of this event.

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Part 1 - History of the Idea of the Unconscious

Sean McGrath argues that Jung underestimates the importance of German Idealism, and particularly Schelling, in laying the groundwork for depth psychology and the idea of the unconscious (The Dark Ground of Spirit, p. 1). But in “A Review of the Complex Theory” (CW 8, p. 212), Jung credits Leibniz, Kant, Schelling, Carus and von Hartmann with the philosophical formulation of the unconscious. Jung of course goes on to sharply distinguish Freud's and his own “medico-psychological theory” of the unconscious from what these philosophers had to say about it. We can at least say in some of his later thought, the Jungian unconscious, viewed from an individuated perspective, comes to mean the same as what the German Idealists, and particularly Schelling, meant by the Absolute (i.e., a subject-object identity, or the identity of identity and difference). McGrath also points to the German cobbler and mystic Jakob Böhme as “the first depth psychologist.” Jung, too, acknowledges the origins of depth psychology in Western esotericism.

We might also christen St. Augustine the first depth psychologist (even if he still spoke in theological terms): in his Confessions he journeys into the depths of his own psyche, there discovering that God lives “interior intimo meo,” i.e., more intimate to me than I am to myself. Augustine asked “what in me is large enough for God to enter?” (book 1, ch. 1).

“Who could plumb the depths of memory [the collective unconscious] to their bottom? Even though this is a power of my own mind, it is what I am, still I cannot take it all in. The mind [or conscious ego] is too limited to contain itself— yet where could the uncontained part of itself be? Outside itself, and not in itself? Then how is it itself? Over and over I wonder at this, dumbfounded by it. We go out to wonder at mountain heights, at immense sea surges, the sweep of wide rivers, the ocean’s range, the stars revolving—and neglect the spectacle of ourselves."

-St. Augustine (book 10, ch 3, sec 15).

Prior to the formulation of psychoanalysis and depth psychology, it was primarily theologians and mystics who struggled to bring the unconscious to awareness. The “God” image is the pre-scientific/pre-psychological notion for a central aspect of what Freud, Jung, and others came to refer to as the unconscious psyche. Pre-modern, pre-psychological thinkers referred to “God” because the conscious mind can only turn to look at its own unconscious roots as a creature does to its Creator. The finite ego cannot comprehend its own infinite and so non-rational origins. The ground of its own becoming is beyond the ego’s ability to reflect upon, since this unconscious ground is, somehow, more intimate to ourselves than the ego is. The ego’s anxious search for its own ground is akin to wielding a flashlight in search of darkness.

Modern philosophy could be described as the shift away from relating to the God-image via mystical revelation (codified into theological dogma) to an attempt to master “God” rationally, to, in effect, replace the creative power of God with the analytical power of the human ego. Descartes and Locke, Spinoza and Hume, led to Kant, who attempted to rethink epistemology relative to the unconscious, to uncover the transcendental limits of human knowing by showing how consciousness transforms unconscious contents (noumena) into phenomenal, law-abiding objects of a mechanical nature. Kant was unwilling to accept the possibility of non-rational ways of knowing (mystical, intuitive, symbolic, imaginative, aesthetic, etc.), so he placed the unconscious out of reach, a noumenal “thing in itself” forever beyond our cognition and conscious experience. But the post-Kantian German Idealists went beyond Kant by arguing we can experience the archetypal depths of the psyche and the cosmos. Jung, in his more esoteric moods, also goes beyond Kant. With Jung, we can regret that Kant “reduced archetypes to a limited number of categories of understanding” (CW 8, 276).

Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) built on Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer’s work to begin laying some groundwork for depth psychology. Jung also credits Nietzsche (who “foresaw with prophetic insight the discovery of the psyche as a new fact” CW 4: 748), Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Carus.

For Schelling, the human soul is not outside of nature (supernatural, unnatural, etc.), but the inside of nature: “Nature begins as unconscious and ends as conscious...unconscious activity operates through the conscious” (System of Transcendental Idealism, p. 219).

Freud pathologized and personalized the unconscious, reducing its contents to repressed personal experiences. But Jung dashed “Freud's hope that the unconscious could be ‘exhausted’” (CW 8, 141). Jung rediscovered the unconscious to be an ancient wellspring and potential source of healing and wholeness.

At what point does psychology spill over into ontology? At what point does the healing work of the physician require the metaphysical speculations of the philosopher? Jung often argues that his approach to psychology is empirical, but can empirical psychology really be granted metaphysical neutrality? Isn’t the supposed neutrality of modern ‘empirical science’ just a crypto-Cartesian metaphysics? Jung’s method has more in common with William James’ radical empiricism—which includes relations, feelings, and values among our empirical perceptions—than it does with positivistic empiricism (which still bifurcates nature into primary and secondary qualities).

Jung says psychology has “not yet been able to shake off the trammels of philosophy” (as if the other sciences of astronomy, particle physics, chemistry, and biology have). Here he betrays a lack of appreciation for the philosophical issues involved (he should know better, and does in some places). He may be correct when he argues that “Hegel was a psychologist in disguise who projected great truths out of the subjective sphere into a cosmos he himself had created” (CW 8, 169), but this statement should not be extended to all great philosophers.

Stephanie de Voogd argues that Jung often retreats back into Kantian epistemology, when it should be obvious that his “empirical psychology” itself requires an entirely new epistemological (and ontological, cosmological) foundation.

“Jung himself was so philosophically steeped in the Kantian world view that he could not or in any case did not regard it in the light of his own revolution... Thus he was and remained a Kantian even while steadily undoing Kant and never, never putting Kant on the couch as he did Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Augustine, Plotinus, Tertullian, and Origen.”

-de Voogd

Whitehead's philosophy can help us achieve what Jung the psychologist could not do for himself. De Voogd says Kant deliteralized the dogmatic metaphysicians, but did so in a literal way. Jung’s psychology needs a non-literal epistemology that acknowledges the poetic basis of mind (and not just in epistemology, but in ontology, since knowing and being are reciprocally entangled in a poetic onto-epistemology).

Jung argued repeatedly that the soul is available to experience; in contrast, Kant strictly denied us experience of the soul, which he deemed a transcendent thing-in-itself. What we experience and know, for Kant, is a spatiotemporal, causally inter-related web of phenomena. The “soul” may be an ideal of Reason that we are justified in believing in, and indeed that we are morally compelled to believe in by our own conscience. But it is not an object of possible experience, as Kant understood it. Jung's “experience” of the soul, his “empirical psychology,” is thus very different from the “empirical realism” Kant describes in his Critique of Pure Reason.

Jung in The Red Book cries out to his lost soul in an attempt to heal this inner conflict between his own naive Kantian reductionism and his deeper intuition of psychic reality:

“I labored misguidedly under the spirit of the this time, and thought differently about the human soul. I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew many learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object. I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul.

Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being... I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system.” (p. 129).

Kant did not acknowledge the soul as a living self-existing being; he denied we could ever rationally prove that such a soul exists. He did argue, however, that we are justified in believing in such a soul. Despite his own protests, in affirming that the soul is a living and self-existing being who we are in constant experiential communion with, Jung must be understood as having definitively gone beyond Kant.

Jung, despite his bolder moments, continually retreats into Kantianism. For example, in “On the Nature of the Psyche” (CW 8, p. 360):

“I think it is obvious that all philosophical statements which transgress the bounds of reason are anthropomorphic and have no validity beyond that which falls to psychically conditioned statements. A philosophy like Hegel’s is a self-revelation of the psychic background and, philosophically, a presumption. Psychologically, it amounts to an invasion by the unconscious. The peculiar high-flown language Hegel uses bears out this view: it is reminiscent of the megalomanic language of schizophrenics, who use terrific spellbinding words to reduce the transcendent to subjective form, to give banalities the charm of novelty, or pass off commonplaces as searching wisdom. So bombastic a terminology is a symptom of weakness, ineptitude, and lack of substance. But that does not prevent the latest German philosophy from using the same crackpot power-words and pretending that it is not unintentional psychology.”

Jung continues a few paragraphs later:

“...all knowledge is the result of imposing some kind of order upon the reactions of the psychic system as they flow into our consciousness— an order which reflects the behavior of a metapsychic reality, of that which is in itself real.”

It is not that much insight cannot be gained by putting philosophers on the couch, thereby revealing the unconscious attitudes shaping their metaphysical speculations. But it is just as important to sit the psychologist down in a philosophical arm chair so that the metaphysical bones of their diagnoses can be laid bare. Every psychologist interprets the world with a certain set of metaphysical categories that need to be made as explicit as possible. As Alan Watts said, psychologists tend to be blind to their fundamental metaphysical assumptions, since they bend over backwards to be considered “scientific,” because science is fashionable in our age (the spirit of the times). Watts: “The philosopher is very grateful to the psychoanalyst for revealing to him his unconscious and its emotional contents; but the psychoanalyst must in turn await a revelation from the philosopher as to his philosophical unconscious and the unexamined assumptions which lie in it.”

Jung’s tendency to reduce all knowledge to psychological projection leads to difficulties, which Whitehead here describes:

“The modern doctrine of ‘private psychological fields’ raises a great difficulty in the interpretation of modern science [Whitehead is here talking about the Cartesian assumption of a domain of subjectivity entirely distinct from objects, what Jung might call ‘psychic reality’]. For all exact observation is made in these private psychological fields. It is then no use talking about instruments and laboratories and physical energy. What is really being observed are narrow bands of color-sensa in the private psychological space of color-vision. The impressions of sensation which collectively form this entirely private experience ‘arise in the soul from unknown causes.’ The spectroscope is a myth, the radiant energy is a myth, the observer’s eye is a myth, the observer’s brain is a myth, and the observer’s record of his experiment on a sheet of paper is a myth... All exact measurements are, on this theory, observations in such private psychological fields” (Process and Reality, p. 326).

Part 2: From Archetypal Psychology and Synchronicity to Process Philosophy and Panpsychism

From personal to collective unconscious (Freud to Jung); from collective unconscious to cosmic unconscious/world-soul (from Jung the physician to Jung the alchemist: here Whitehead's panpsychist cosmology offers assistance).

The evolution of Western consciousness has been a process of subjective interiorization and objective exteriorization: while the subject became increasingly inward, the “outside,” the physical world of nature, became objectified and increasingly disenchanted, deanimated. Jung at first participates in this Western trend toward the interiorization of the subject. This same subject also went to work objectifying the world as a compensation for its own feeling of alienation from it. As the older Jung became increasingly fascinated by synchronicity, his psychology began to widen so as to include the cosmos again. Psyche is not just “inside,” it is everywhere. Whitehead's panpsychism helps us heal the human psyche’s split from its physical ground in non-human nature. He shows us that the “physical” is not at all the sort of “stuff” 19th century materialists had been imagining. It turns out that 20th century physics lends itself to a more organic interpretation. Psyche is no longer a peripheral anomaly in the universe, but the very matrix of cosmogenesis.

Cosmogenesis is psychogenetic; individuation is not unique to human subjects but drives the life of every participant in the evolutionary process of nature. As Whitehead says, “we find ourselves in a buzzing world amid a democracy of fellow creatures.”

Augustine inaugurates the turn inward in Western thought. Descartes and Kant continue this turn toward the subject. Jungian depth psychology may at first seem to root us even deeper in the subjective, but Jung’s later work on the phenomenon of synchronicity brings his attention back to the cosmos in search of psyche’s deep structural origins. Jung’s archetypal psychology begins to root the psyche back in the cosmos. Whitehead’s panpsychist cosmology provides a more appropriate metaphysical and epistemological foundation for Jung’s psychology than does Kant’s transcendentalism.

The conscious ego is accustomed to saying of experience that “I have it,” as though experience is one of my inner properties as an autonomous, rational agent, something I exist independently of just by virtue of thinking that I do (“I think therefore I am”) and that I have some degree of control over and can progressively strive to master. Our modern common sense is that I am a subject separate from a material world of objects that knows those objects through experience, which again, is something that I have and that is not the whole of me. From a Whiteheadian or a depth psychological perspective, I do not “have” experience of the soul; rather, the soul experiences me. Experience is the primary process of reality, and the conscious self-reflective ego is one of its products. It follows that experience is only very partially a conscious activity; consciousness is embedded within a vast and all-encompassing backdrop of instinctual and intuitive activity. Our personal souls and collective human unconsciousness are rooted in the soul of the world.

“The secret participation of the unconscious is everywhere present without our having to search for it.”

-Carl Jung (CW 8, p. 158).

Jung quotes Paracelsus, whose perspective reveals “the starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected...the archetypes” (CW 8, p. 195). But, in some sense, the human psyche is also a projection of the stars!

Jung was very interested in 20th century quantum and relativistic physics (CW 8, p. 417). He says modern physics teaches that the phenomenal world cannot explain itself in the objective terms required by science. Instead, modern physics asserts that objective reality has an unrepresentable, non-phenomenal mathematical shape. Because psychology’s attempts to describe the unconscious can never be reduced to mathematical formalisms, there can be no verifiable scientific knowledge of the unconscious (here, Jung is like Kant, who said there can be no science of life for the same reason).

Jung writes (CW 8, p. 417-20):

“Just as physics...can do no more than establish the existence of an observer without being able to assert anything about its nature, so psychology can only indicate the relation of psyche to matter without being able to make out the least thing about its nature. Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. The synchronicity phenomena point, it seems to me, in this direction...Matter and spirit both appear in the psychic realm as distinctive qualities of conscious contents. The ultimate nature of both is transcendental, that is, irrepresentable, since the psyche and its contents are the only reality which is given to us without a medium.”

Jung admits he is astonished by the findings of his own supposedly “empirical” and “scientific” psychology. His findings have led him far beyond the accepted boundaries of natural science and “ramify into the fields of philosophy, theology, comparative religion, and Geistwissenshaft” (CW 8, p. 421). Jung worries about his “transgression” beyond science into philosophy and theology, and about his “personal incompetence” in these fields. He complains that psychology “has no self-consistent mathematics at its disposal, but only a calculus of subjective prejudices.” He says psychology, unlike physics, has no Archimedean point:

“Physics observes the physical world from the psychic standpoint and can translate it into psychic terms. The psyche, on the other hand, observes itself and can only translate the psychic back into the psychic...There is no medium for psychology to reflect itself in: it can only portray itself in itself, and describe itself.”

But what if turning our attention back to the cosmos and observing the psyche, as it were, from a physical standpoint through archetypal cosmology, gives psychology the medium it needs to become ontological? Jung writes (CW 8, p. 437):

“as a living phenomenon, the psychic lies embedded in something that appears to be of a nonpsychic nature. Although we perceive the latter as a psychic datum only, there are sufficient reasons for believing in its objective reality This reality, so far as it lies outside our body’s limits, is mediated to us chiefly by particles of light impinging on the retina of the eye. The organization of these particles produces a picture of the phenomenal world which depends essentially upon the constitution of the apperceiving psyche on the one hand, and upon that of the light medium on the other.”

Physicist Wolfgang Pauli:

“the new physics can supplement the purely subjective psychology of consciousness by postulating the existence of an unconscious that possesses a large measure of objective reality” (quoted by Jung CW 8, p. 439n130).

Relevant Quotes:

Jung: “Our psychology starts with observable facts and not with philosophical speculations” (CW 8, p. 436).

Jung: “a connection necessarily exists between the psyche to be explained and the objective space-time continuum...the assumption of a psychically relative space-time continuum... As soon as a psychic content crosses the threshold of consciousness, the synchronistic marginal phenomena disappear, time and space resume their accustomed sway, and consciousness is once more isolated in its subjectivity.” (CW 8, p. 440).

Jung: “There are indications that psychic processes stand in some sort of energy relation to the physiological substrate. In so far as they are objective events, they can hardly be interpreted as anything but energy processes...the perceptible changes effected by the psyche cannot possibly be understood except as a phenomenon of energy” (CW 8, p. 441).

Whitehead: “the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life” (Modes of Thought, p. 168).

James Hillman: “If energy were the underlying substrate of the universe, i.e., its ‘truth,’ and if emotion were the way in which it manifested itself to the mind, then the creative artist through his emotion would be apprehending this truth from within.”

Whitehead's cosmology is such that the most basic metaphysical activity or realization, Concrescence, amounts to a description of the eternally recurring synchronicity of every moment.