48 Spirituality Studies 11-1 Spring 2025 without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is thus just as necessary to make the mind’s concepts sensible (i.e., to add an object to them in intuition) as it is to make its intuitions understandable (i.e., to bring them under concepts). When we relate to the world, we do not observe it in itself but rather observe ourselves in relation to the world. According to Kant, there is no answer to the question of why we relate to the world through these particular forms, or why we are the kind of beings that we are – it is simply our givenness. Our ability to imagine the world in a particular way thus carries a limitation as well as a realization of reasoning through sensibility (Kant 1998, A 147). The domains of aesthetics and logic co-create a continuous description of the structure through which we grasp the world in a way that gives it meaning. Jung was deeply fascinated by this concept of a structure through which a person perceives and orients themselves, yet at the same time is inherently part of, because this structure itself constitutes their inner content. “What Kant demonstrated in relation to logical thinking applies to the entire spectrum of the psyche” (Jung CW6 1921, 304), Jung elaborating Kant’s reflections on the mind to encompass all aspects of human action, thought, dreaming, creativity, feeling, and emotion. The structure that serves as the foundation and common (aesthetic) denominator of these processes Jung identifies as an a priori factor which “represents the essence, origin, and method of modern psychology” (Jung CW9 1938, 77). Kant highlights the paradoxical nature of human beings – they strive to know the thing-in-itself, even though this is fundamentally impossible, thereby encountering the limits of their imagination. Similarly, Jung addresses the question of understanding the “a priori factor,” that is, the unconscious. Jung explicitly compares the unconscious to the “thing-in-itself” or a “negative borderline concept,” meaning a “notion without an object”, thus aligning with Kantian epistemology at the fundamental level of formulating the problem. However, the key difference between the two thinkers, lies in how they approach the solution of problem: while Kant remains within the realm of transcendental philosophy, establishing the limits of knowledge, Jung departs from a purely philosophical framework and seeks a psychological grasp of this unknowable principle through the analysis of the symbolic manifestations of the unconscious. The phenomenon is not the thing-in-itself, but merely the way it appears to us through the mediation of the senses and reason. Phenomena are not independent entities; rather, they result from the interaction between sensory perception and the a priori categories of reason. From a philosophical perspective, Kant strictly distinguishes between phenomenon (a knowable appearance) and noumenon (the thing-in-itself), which remains beyond the reach of human knowledge. Jung, by contrast, understands psychic phenomena as observable manifestations of unconscious processes. Whether these are healthy or pathological expressions, they point to a deeper psychic dynamic that remains unconscious. Jung’s approach suggests a certain continuity between conscious phenomena and unconscious processes, as conscious contents emerge from the unconscious as its symbolic manifestations. His method is dynamic and organic – conscious processes are not isolated but arise from unconscious structures and symbolic formations (Jung CW5 1913, 140): When the contents of our consciousness appear, they are already in a highly complex state; the constellation of our thoughts from the material contained in our memory is a predominantly unconscious process. We are therefore obliged to assume, whether we like it or not, the existence of a non-conscious psychic sphere, even if only as a ‘negative borderline concept,’ like Kant’s ‘Ding an sich’. Since we perceive effects, whose origin cannot be found in consciousness, we are compelled to allow hypothetical contents to the sphere of the non-conscious, which means presupposing that the origin of those effects lies in the unconscious precisely because it is not conscious. This conception of the unconscious can hardly be accused of ‘mysticism’. We do not pretend to know or to assert anything positive about the state of psychic elements in the unconscious. Instead, we have formulated symbolical concepts in a manner analogous to our formulation of conscious concepts. The problem of the unconscious is not its principled inaccessibility to consciousness – as in Kant’s strict separation between noumenon and phenomenon – but rather the limited capacity to bring its contents into awareness. This capacity varies from person to person, being shallower or deeper, and has a boundary, though not one that can be clearly or precisely defined. The unconscious “a priori factor” does not refer only to the collective constitution of the human species but also to the individual constitution of each person. When speaking about Jung’s psychological types, they can be defined positively, but a more faithful interpretation of Jung’s theory would involve a negative definition. For example, a feeling type is not simply someone with highly developed feeling, but rather someone whose thinking is not sufficiently developed. In this sense,
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