Jung and Philosophy

Jon Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429537356
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Although the works of C.G. Jung have received worldwide attention, there has been surprisingly little engagement by philosophers. In this volume, internationally recognized philosophers, Jungian analysts, and scholars attempt to fill this void in the literature. Although Jung did not have a formalized, systematic philosophy, the philosophical implications of his thought are explored in relation to his key theoretical postulates on archetypes, the collective unconscious, the mind-body problem, phenomenology, epistemology, psychology of religion, alchemy, myth, ethics, aesthetics, and the question of transcendence. Through analyzing Jung philosophically, new vistas emerge for enhanced explication, theoretical refinement, revision, and redirecting shifts in emphasis that lend more proper cohesion to Jung's philosophy.

For the first time we may observe philosophers attempting to unpack the philosophical consequences of Jung's thought applied to many traditional topics covered in the humanities and the social sciences. Given that Jung has not been historically taken up by philosophers, critiqued, nor applied to contemporary theories of mind, culture, and human nature, this is the first book of its kind. It is argued that a new generation of research in analytical psychology can benefit from philosophical scrutiny and theoretical fortification.

Jung and Philosophy will be of interest to psychoanalysts, philosophers, cultural theorists, religious scholars, and the disciplines of depth psychology and post-Jungian studies.

Chapter 1

The Collective Unconscious

Jon Mills

What do Jung’s theories mean to Jungians? In The Wisdom of the Dream (Segaller, 1989), Robert Johnson says the following: “The collective unconscious is that set of building blocks in which human reality is made. It is as if there is this great reservoir outside time and space—patterned energy. Mankind struggles to give it definition, like this from which everything is drawn or everything is made.” This statement, I suggest, personifies what Jung means to the world and what Jung represents to Jungians. For Jung, all of psychic reality is conditioned on the bedrock of a collective unconscious mind that precedes each of us. We know the marbled instantiations of this generative “objective psyche” through the archetypes, which are symbolic forms that make their way into lived, personal (conscious) reality radiating from a timeless unconscious ground originating from a universal principle, yet awakened within the archaic life of mankind and passed along the aeons through encoded genetic transmutations and the transgenerational transmission of culture. Here Jung commands a very distinct philosophy in the history of ideas, one based on transpersonal supervenience from a collective unconscious agency, which I argue is a form of cosmic emanationism (Mills, 2014, p.16). If all psychic reality derives from or flows out of an original wellspring we call the archetypical collective, then we must ponder the metaphysical and mystical implications of this radical idea.

In this chapter I wish to examine a central notion of analytical psychology, if not the fulcrum on which Jung’s philosophy of mind and human culture rests. Here I will take up a very specific question with a narrow scope of analysis; namely, Is there a Collective Unconscious? And if so, What is it, exactly? Jung himself actually gives a very scant account of the collective unconscious throughout his Collected Works, instead focusing almost entirely on the archetypes, the presupposed contents of a collective psyche. Rather than focus on content, I wish to sustain the question of original ground, the metaphysical womb of all becoming. Indeed, although the archetype is purported to be its own original form (arché—origin, type—form), the collective unconscious is the original source of these innumerable self-instantiating forms, the foundation, wellspring, or encompassing principle in which archetypes originate—the ultimate cause and basis of appearances as such. Although this inquiry may amount to heresy within certain orthodox circles, in order to lend coherence and credibility to this theoretical postulate, it is incumbent upon us to offer a philosophical defense of this most important and radical concept that grounds the entire edifice of Jungian thought.

As a universal and necessary a priori condition for psychic life to exist and emerge, the collective unconscious becomes the most ontologically dependent force and locus of all human activity, perhaps even presupposing a transpersonal matrix that yields cosmic, if not supernatural, significance. But before we draw any conclusions, it becomes important for us to unpack Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and see if the philosophical implications of his theory bears plausibility and merit, if not pragmatic utility.

In the Jungian literature, there has been a great deal of critique on the notion of archetypes. In fact, this concept may very well be the most controversial aspect of Jung’s analytical psychology. But whatever analysis we derive at, we must not forget that archetypes are conditioned on something far more ontologically basic, that is, indispensably primordial.

Because archetypes are essentially the contents of the collective psyche that are said to be emitted into individual minds—itself a presumptive assertion that requires justification, this further challenges Kant’s formalism where only a priori categories for understanding and forms of sensibility exist, which are the formal mental structures that allow us to apprehend objects of experience; whereas Jung imports content (the archetypes) at the very beginning that constitutes the pre-subjective agent—that is, the ontological preconditions that make subjectivity possible, thus present at birth without the aid of sense perception, space, and time. This becomes problematic unless one is willing to grant that the contents of past ancestral experience become incorporated, organized, preserved, and recapitulated by humankind, is transmitted phylogenetically, and reemerges in subsequent transgenerational instantiations in future historical timelines of the human race. Here we must differentiate between an original source versus the forms, contents, and aims of manifestation. Recall that transitioning from the non-manifest to the manifest is realized and accomplished through the archetypes. Is the collective unconscious the true arché, the true beginning, or should this be more properly ascribed to the archetypes themselves, presuming they exist, which further needs an argument?

Perhaps the collective unconscious is merely a symbol, a metaphor for the Center, or does it have a distinct ontology—the “really real,” the zone of an absolute reality? If we push this issue further, boundaries quickly become blurred to the point that the collective unconscious could be synonymous with the concept of God, the actor and act of creation taking place in and at the center of the cosmos. If we adopt this point of view, viz., of deifying the collective unconscious as a supernatural macroanthropos, it would be disastrous for Jungian studies, as the theoretical foundation of analytical psychology would succumb to inventing unverifiable fictions that satisfy the wishful fantasies of imagination at the expense of reason, logic, and science.

Jung on the Collective Unconscious

Jung’s first use of the term appears in Symbols of Transformation (1912, CW, 5, p. 177n), what he initially referred to as a “supra-individual universality” (p. 177), “the archaic heritage of humanity” (p. 178), the birth of “spirit” (p. 413). Here Jung makes a bold claim: spirit (Geist) comes from a collective unconscious and appears as archetypes, both as “primordial images” and “primary forms” (p. 413). In his Foreword to the 4th Swiss Edition, Jung concludes that “The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years … from the perennial rhizome … the root matter” of the unconscious, “the mother of all things” (p. xxiv). In other words, mind and its contents come from a pre-ontological substrate that conditions the coming into being of all psychological events up to our current times.

Jung makes many statements in his writings that enlist a nativist view of the psyche derived from innate substructures that favor evolutionary explanations (Jung, 1961, p. 348), but he also conflates the contents of mind (archetypes) with the collective unconscious itself. He specifically says that “The collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited” (CW, 9i, p. 43). How is a collective unconscious belonging to archaic humanity inherited? How can an unconscious collective mind be congenital? This would seem to suggest that we actually inherit some other supraordinate mind that is operative in us and dominates us from the start as some foreign process superimposed on our consciousness. In other words, we inherit another Mind or many people’s minds that are lumped into a categorical abstraction called the world soul (anima mundi). How is this possible? Of course we inherit inborn structures, but to claim that “images” or supraordination is inborn is another matter.

How is the so-called collective unconscious “identical in all individuals” but does not develop individually? How could a suprapersonal configuration—a complex organization—be inborn? One way of interpreting these claims is to collapse the concept of a collective unconscious into a general abstract category subsumed within evolutionary biology, as Jung does when he first identifies the instincts (Triebe) with innate images and patterns of behavior derived from unconscious processes. Here the collective unconscious becomes merely a placeholder for something common in all people, our base embodiment that gives rise to conscious experience. So far there is no new thesis being advanced from that of classical psychoanalytic theory.

But Jung soon throws down the gauntlet. In his insistence that there are “universally present formal elements” in the psyche, he quickly jumps to posit the content of the archetypes and asks: “are there or are there not unconscious universal forms of this kind? If they exist, then there is a region of the psyche which one can call the collective unconscious” (CW, 9i, p. 44). But why this inferential leap? Why are universal forms equated with archetypal content? How is formalism the same as particularities? Is there a difference between unconscious structure, form, and content (as process, as the preconditions for cognition to transpire)? These differential classifications of explanation make a difference in how we come to conceptualize the notion of a collective unconscious. Jung’s hasty generalization is furthermore met with a disclaimer followed by an assertion that “the collective unconscious is neither a speculative nor a philosophical but an empirical matter” (Ibid.). What is “empirical” is the mere fact of our biological embodiment that is innately equipped with evolutionary pressures, drives, desires, affects, and a priori cognitive structures that allow all human beings to experience the world and their psychological realities, while positing a transcendental collective or objective (objectified) psyche is a “speculative” “philosophical” construct that must be justified with logical arguments and empirically demonstrated. So far Jung has failed to argue—let alone demonstrate—that just because there are universal structures of mind common to all people that they derive from a collective source or cosmic web of all becoming. Here becomes the first problem in grounding a theoretically justified transpersonal ontology, especially when it is inflated to the realm of cosmogony.

When Jung blurs his definition of the collective unconscious and makes it synonymous with the archetypes, he problematizes his project even further. He declares that the collective unconscious consists of instincts and their “correlates, the archetypes,” which everyone possesses, but they also possess “a stock of archetypal images” (CW, 8 ¶ 281, p. 138). This would mean that “images” are stored in a collective psyche and transmitted over the ages through the evolutionary mechanisms that have created or given shape to the emergence of modern day homo sapiens. Reductive implications aside, at the very least Jung believes (stipulated under the guise of a hypothesis) that images are experienced by humankind and evolutionarily stored in the brain, which are transgenerationally transmitted genetically and culturally, and that they have fixed universal meaning in their symbolism. This is a very deterministic model of evolutionary emergence where image and symbolic meaning appear to be prearranged, programmed, or encoded. There also appears to be no real distinction between the content of the collective unconscious and an agency that produces such content. Why presume a stockpile of images exuding from an archaic mind that is purported to be present at birth and spews forth in the psyche when the same phenomena can be explained from innate cognitive processes that we are evolutionarily engineered to have in order to experience and adapt to our world in which we are thrown?

On the Question of Agency

Jung explicitly states early on that “The instincts and the archetypes together form the ‘collective unconscious’” (CW, 8, pp. 133–134). Here he makes desire, as part of our drives, along with the formative role of imagoes, the substance of what comprises the collective unconscious. This means that our pulsions, which are part of our embodiment, as well as inborn images, form the organization and content of the collective unconscious. But what about agency? How are the drives and imagoes released or discharged into the psyche? How are the personal or subjective aspects of mind agentically constituted, let alone come from a collective provenance or supraordinance? Here Jung fails to answer to these basic theoretical elements.

To set out my first set of criticisms, we must establish that Jung does indeed at times conflate the collective unconscious and archetypes with agency, while at other times, even in some of his later writings, he is more careful in his theoretical propositions. Let us first look at some of his statements of reification. When discussing mythology, Jung explicitly says that “the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious;” and when referring to the astrological influence of the stars, he asserts that “these influences are nothing but unconscious, introspective perceptions of the activity of the collective unconscious” (CW, 8 ¶ 325, p. 152). Rather than situating these determinative perceptions and judgments within the subjective mind of an individual, here he objectifies them as a concrete thing performing cognitive acts. He commits the fallacy of treating an abstraction as though it is a real entity or thing. This type of theoretical concretization as hypostasis is philosophically problematic, if not simply untenable.

When Jung refers to the collective unconscious as “regulators and stimulators” or “dominants” (CW, 8 ¶ 403, p. 204), the notion of agency is further attributed to the collective unconscious as an organizer of mental processes; although he refers to this psychic constellation as “impersonal,” hence lacking selfhood, here presumably referring to its functions rather than an agent in its own right. But this is by no means clear and is open to interpretation, especially given that he refers to the archetypes as “entities” (CW, 8, p. 231) and “spontaneous agencies” (CW, 8, p. 216) elsewhere. Given Jung’s preoccupation with the archetypes, the collective unconscious appears at times to be presupposed without offering a philosophical argument or theoretical justification for why it is necessary to even posit such an entity in the first place. In his early work, Symbols of Transformation, when focusing on the content of the “stock of primordial images” as “inborn forms peculiar to the instincts,” hence collapsing imago within drive (rather than an agentic function that generates images and experiences internal impulses), he refers to “this ‘potential’ psyche the collective unconscious” (CW, 5, p. 408). Here the collective is only a potentiality. But “in this world of the collective unconscious spirit appears as an archetype” (CW, 5, p. 413). How do we go from potentiality to actuality, from the possible to the real? Jung is quick to suggest that spirit (Geist) emerges from a collective psyche and appears as content (archetypes). Collective or experiential universal images do not have to come from a collective mind. Why such a persistent (if not perfunctory) inferential leap? The psyche is obviously designed a priori to encounter, apprehend, and perceive images of experience, so why suggest they come from a suprastructural, transpersonal mind? There is no logical defense in making this claim other than being an intellectual intuition, which is paraded under the scientific language of a “hypothesis.” But here Jung’s hypothesis that there is a collective mind is rather suspect. Why is it needed to explain the phenomena of consciousness that are conditioned on unconscious processes that can be generalized to all human beings without the added theoretical onus of importing and justifying a suprapsyche that pulls all the strings behind the anthropic curtain? This would imply that the collective unconscious is a macroanthropos (Mills, 2013), a rather antiquated way of looking at the psychological diversity of socialization and cultural diffusion that springs from a so-called cosmic godhead. Let us return to Jung’s ambivalence in how he came to struggle with and advance his theory.

A Return to Basics

Jung was obsessed with the “activity of the psyche” (CW, 8, p. 233), but was quick to attribute it to a supreme cause. Here he cannot escape the influence of his theological inculcations and Christian upbringing. But let us examine more soberly his rational side. Although he flip-flops in his thoughts and writings in a rather haphazard manner, he is obviously struggling with what he wants to convey to his audience based on his mood or psychological temperament at the time, something akin to his theory of typology—as each psychological con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Introduction: Philosophizing Jung
• Chapter 1 The Collective Unconscious
• Chapter 2 The Archetype Debate
• Chapter 3 Jung and the Mind–Body Problem
• Chapter 4 Empiricism, Skepticism, and Belief in Jung’s Epistemology
• Chapter 5 A Critique of C.G. Jung’s Theoretical basis for Selfhood: Theory Vexed by an Incorporeal Ontology
• Chapter 6 Phenomenological Practices and Philosophical Insights in Jung
• Chapter 7 Jung’s Answer to Job: Toward a “Sensible” Mysticism
• Chapter 8 Jung, the Numinous, and the Philosophers: On Immanence and Transcendence in Religious Experience
• Chapter 9 Jung on Myth
• Chapter 10 What’s the Matter—with Alchemical Recipes?: Philosophy and Filth in the Forging of Jung’s Alchemical Psychology
• Chapter 11 Jung, Time, and Ethics
• Chapter 12 Jung, Literature, and Aesthetics
• Chapter 13 Jung, Science, and Technology
• Index