Spirituality Studies 11-1 Spring 2025 43 Ivana Ryška Vajdová tion of Plato in The Birth of Tragedy (1967), where he portrays Plato as the “poisoner” of Western thought. According to Heidegger in his Contributions to Philosophy (1999), Plato’s philosophy laid the foundations for a mode of thinking that ultimately led to the forgetting of being (Ger. Seinsvergessenheit). In The Open Society, Popper presents Plato as a forerunner of totalitarian thought. Kant received similar treatment. Heidegger, in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), interpreted him as a “hidden metaphysician”, a reading entirely at odds with Kant’s own understanding of his work. None of these philosophical giants adhered strictly to what we might call “historical accuracy”, yet their interpretations remain fascinating and original. Why not extend the same tolerance to Jung, who, after all, never even claimed to have philosophical ambitions? Jung certainly did not lack direct knowledge of Kant’s work. His library in Küsnacht contains Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels nebst zwei Supplements (1884), Macht des Gemüths durch den bloßen Vorsatz seiner krankhaften Gefühle Meister zu seyn (1824) [1], Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (1888), Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), and Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). In this text, I will focus on Kant’s three Critiques. Although Paul Bishop, in his book, claims that Jung did not read the Critique of Judgment, I found a copy of it in Jung’s library, complete with his handwritten notes. Bishop was likely unaware of this fact or may have been influenced by the absence of any explicit references to the book in Jung’s Bollingen Series (Bishop 2000, 373). 2 Kant as the Unseen Wedge In June 1957, Jung wrote to his friend B. Lang that “all that I have written you is Kantian epistemology expressed in everyday psychological language” (Jung 1976, 379). He also wrote that Kant is “that threshold minds go their separate ways: those that have understood Kant, and the others that cannot follow him. I will not enter here into the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ but will try to make things clear to you from a different, more human standpoint” (Jung 1976, 375). Two years later, at the very end of his life, he revisited this statement. In one of his final interviews, conducted by John Freeman for the BBC in March 1959, the interviewer asked: “What sort of man was Freud?” Jung responded that Freud was an intricate person, though he liked him, and then highlighted one of the key differences between them: “He [note: Freud] had no philosophical education, particularly. You see, I was studying Kant, and I was steeped in it, and that was far from Freud. So from the very beginning, there was a discrepancy” (Jung 1959, 431). There are many well-known disputes between Jung and Freud, such as the nature of libido, the unconscious, and so on. However, at its core, their conflict stemmed from fundamental differences in the intellectual foundations from which these concepts emerged. Jung identified Kant’s philosophy as one of these key differences. To understand how Kant’s philosophy became a wedge between the two psychologists, we must delve deeper into history. In 1896, Sigmund Freud distinguished himself from Janet’s “psychological analysis” and named his system psychoanalysis (Ellenberger 1970, 669). In response to this, in a 1909 letter, Jung opposed Freud’s stance, writing that “if there is ‘psychoanalysis’, there must also be ‘psychosynthesis’, which shapes future events according to the same laws” (Freud and Jung 1974, 216). In his 1912 book Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, Jung (CW5 1912, 1137 n. 18) writes: But no more than the science of history bothers itself with future combinations of events, which are rather the object of political science, can the forward-pointing psychological combinations be the object of analysis; they would be much more the object of a refined psychological syntheticism that knew how to follow the natural currents of libido. Any attempt to analyze psychological processes is necessarily reductive if it tries to explain the present or even the future entirely through the past. A human being is an entity that follows an inner sense of meaning and develops not only by being pushed by historical determinism but also by being drawn forward by the significance that unfolds in the future. For this reason, Jung called his method synthetic, or constructive (Jung CW6 1921, 587). In his view, this approach corresponds to the nature of the psyche, whose ultimate synthetic process is psychological development, or individuation. Jung, both directly and indirectly, refers to Kant’s distinction between the synthetic and analytic principles – between the intelligible level of meaning (self-determination) and the causal level of effect (givenness). From this distinction, he constructs the fundamental framework of his psychology, which he never abandoned. Even a year before his death, he recalled Kant as the intellectual foundation of his psychology.
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