Imagine the following scenario: you’re walking back home at night and pass through a dark alley; suddenly you see, a few steps ahead, an obscure figure lurking in a corner; you startle and freeze; you get somewhat frightened; for a second or two you’re certain there is a threatening presence over there, you’ll get mugged or worse …; and then you realize, with considerable relief, that it’s just...
Usener famously theorized that the idea of a new god could, in ancient times, appear spontaneously anywhere in human dealings with their surroundings. All that was needed was that a person suddenly felt the touch of the divine, and religious sensitivity invested the moment with the notion of a newly created deity. In Usener’s picture, these momentarily generated deifications merely formed a proto...
Jung’s suggestion, in the Grundproblem lecture, of a phenomenalist ontology runs counter to the proposal I have made earlier on this blog, where I suggested an ontological layout that would fit Jungian thought. This should not be surprising: if Jung’s own (admittedly rather sketchy) ontological views had been sufficient as a basis for his theories (and his methodology), there would be no need to...
In my last post, I have started critical discussion of Jung’s line of thought in the Grundproblem lecture, and particularly the first step: a statement of a philosophical view called phenomenalism. 3. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to pause for a moment and ask about the status of this argument. There’s a variety of ways we might understand it. We could read it as a sweeping metaphysical stance: the...
When I reconstructed the main line of argument in Jung’s Grundproblem lecture, I noted that it proceeds in two steps. The first is an endorsement of a version of phenomenalism: the view that only particular episodes of experience are real, whereas whatever content they purport to refer to is a later construct (and therefore systematically unknowable as such). If we take “the psychological” as the...
I have left off last week with a sketch (more detailed than earlier) of the ontological layout implicit in Jungian thought; and I have noted that there are several passages in Jung’s work where he outlines those same ontological categories. Let’s examine one of those more closely. 1. In his 1931 lecture on “Das Grundproblem der gegenwärtigen Psychologie” (GW VIII, §§ 649-688) Jung describes an...
I ended an earlier post deriving a (very rough) sketch of an ontological layout that would be consistent with Jungian thought. It would be consistent in the sense that it takes seriously both its methodological fundamental — starting with subjective experience — and its central idea — that our subjective experience is not fully transparent to our conscious personalities. Taking them seriously...
When I left my big-picture sketch of Jungian thought, I noted that the methodological fundamental (with subjectivity rather than objectivity as point of departure) was itself a theoretical choice; a choice that contrasts with the dominant preference for intersubjectively verifiable observation taken, paradigmatically, in a scientific approach. There is a certain temptation to assign this...
In contrast to objective science, which relies on intersubjectively verifiable observation, the Jungian tradition is based on a different methodological fundamental. It starts with subjective experience, which we know from our own personal introspection and from the reports and narration which others give us. Whereas scientific observation is stated in the third person, subjective experience as a...
What makes Jungian thought, although it is generally called “psychology”, really a philosophy of the unconscious are its speculative mode and its central idea: that our own psychological life is not transparent to us. The latter means that our thoughts, emotions, intuitions, memories, phantasies, and intentional behaviors — all of our psychological life — can at times be triggered or shaped by...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology. His recent interest is Jungian psychology, especially synchronicities and the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.