Spirituality Studies 11-1 Spring 2025 49 Ivana Ryška Vajdová when Jung classified humanity in line with four psychological functions in the first half of his career, he did so more on the basis of their deficits rather than their strengths. This brings us back to the question of structure, which not only defines a person but also limits them. Kant views human thought as a universal faculty shared equally by all individuals. He assumes that the initial aesthetic component of sensibility is just as universal as the logical structure of thinking, which creates the identical experience of meaning for all individuals. Jung, however, introduces a psychological perspective, within which this initial component can no longer be universal, because it differs based on an individual’s unique psychic structure, which determines how sensory material is processed. For Jung, value plays a key role, validated through its immediate emotional impact. As a result, different psychological types may fundamentally differ in how they experience and interpret reality – what is meaningful and essential to one person may be entirely irrelevant or even imperceptible to another. 7 Clash of Meanings Not all interpersonal conflicts are merely a case of material competition; they can also be clashes between different psychic “a priori structures,” which shape meaning in fundamentally different ways. Our individual constitution determines how we find meaning in life, yet, at the same time, it limits our ability to understand and emotionally attune to how others derive meaning in their own way. The thinking, feeling, intuitive, and perceptive types, as Jung distinguished them in Psychological Types (1921), represent possible individual configurations of the “a priori structure”. These can be understood positively – as a person’s unique quality – but also, as we have already mentioned, negatively, as a form of distortion, for which Jung borrows the term “personal equation” [2]. Jung further categorizes the basic structure of individuality into extraverted and introverted orientations, giving rise to the well-known combinations such as “introverted thinking,” “extraverted sensing,” etc. [3]. The personal equation, as Jung attempts to demonstrate in Psychological Types, is, in his view, the underlying cause of ideological conflicts that have persisted for thousands of years. The battle between idealism and realism – whether ideas or essences exist as eternal patterns of things in their multiplicity, or whether we generalize and categorize things according to our needs, making ideas artificially constructed typologies – is, according to Jung, not ultimately a philosophical dispute, but a psychological one. It is a conflict of personality poles. This personal factor also manifests in debates between monism and pluralism, dogmatism and skepticism, and similar oppositions. In Psychological Types, Jung elaborates on a wide range of historical examples from philosophy, poetry, aesthetics, and theology, attempting to show how various theories are shaped by an a priori yet inherently personal mental disposition. Jung presents realism (idealism) and nominalism (empiricism) in Psychological Types as extreme and one-sided positions, which may be internally logical and consistent for a given psychological type but become neurotic when confronted with their opposite – which they attempt to suppress, despite the fact that neither can be fully proven. The fact that nominalism and empiricism have come to dominate Western civilization is, according to Jung, not proof of their truth, but rather evidence that the extraverted psychological type, which tends toward nominalism and empiricism, is better suited for the technological grasp of the world (Jung CW6 1921, 307). At the same time, the personal equation, which predisposes an individual toward a particular intellectual orientation, also prevents the awareness that this truth is only partial. According to Jung, individuals cling to their limited version of truth because of its subjective emotional significance. Jung argues that the greater the emotional significance of a given issue, the more passionately the various components of personality, including reason, serve its cause. He illustrates this with Anselm’s argument for the existence of God, which, from the perspective of Jungian psychology, represents an archetype with the strongest psychological charge. Jung focuses on the moment when the thought of God transforms into the reality of God (Jung CW6 1921, 40–41) [4]. For Kant, any such hypostasis is a logical fallacy. However, for Jung, this logical error “committed even by such a mind as Anselm’s was” is a psychological manifestation of the personal equation that leads us to perceive what is “most valuable and significant” to us as real. In the case of God, “the invisibility of the idea mattered little in comparison with its extraordinary effectiveness” (Jung CW6 1921, 40).
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