50 Spirituality Studies 11-1 Spring 2025 8 When Rationality Meets Libido The book Psychological Types can be read as Jung’s response to the questions he had already been asking as a young man in his Zofingia Lectures at the University of Basel (Jung 1983, 95): How could Kant, who regarded God as a Ding an sich, as a ‘purely negative limiting concept,’ still have any religion, and how could he himself, as an unknowable Ding an sich, exist in the cheerless desert of this ‘negative limiting concept?’ How can Wundt wax enthusiastic over the ethical purpose of the world, when nothing exists that could achieve or enjoy this purpose? How can Hartmann attribute any kind of impulse for ethical action to the void and unfeeling unconscious? And finally, how can Albrecht Ritschl be a committed Christian, when his God is compelled to go through official channels whenever he wishes to do something good for man? What Jung questions is motivation from a psychological perspective. Can a philosophical truth about human nature be a sufficient impulse for action? According to Jung, the fundamental shortcoming of the German thinkers he critiques is that their “truth” lacks energy, a psychological relevance that could be connected to emotional experience. As he writes in Psychological Types (Jung CW6 1921, 435), “[j]ust as thinking organizes the contents of consciousness under concepts, feeling organizes them according to their value.” For Jung, no motivation for action is sufficient if it arises solely from reason and is not accompanied by emotional urgency. Jung argues that emotional intensity and truth become one on a psychological level – what is experienced with deep psychic intensity is, at the same time, subjectively true and motivating for action. For Kant, the instrument for registering truth is reason, which determines whether a given thought process successfully passes through logical function and is therefore true or false. For Jung, however, this binary system of truth against falsehood is insufficient in the field of psychology. A human being is subject to an incomprehensibly complex and ever-changing reality, within which they seek meaning, happiness, and fulfillment – things that are subjective, multifactorial, and deeply intertwined with both the past and the future. In such a case, orientation is not based on clear rational judgments, but rather on energy and emotion, which can be imagined as a kind of dosimeter, with its needle moving along a scale of perceived truth (perceived in the sense of “valid for me”). Thus, one can feel something as more or less true, and the indicator of this movement is the weakening or intensifying of emotion, which is further influenced by one’s personal disposition as well as the immediate situation. This introduction of emotional value marks the moment of psychologization. With this shift, the rationalist philosopher typically loses interest in the subject, whereas the phenomenologically oriented analytical psychologist takes it up as the core of their work. Armed with an emotional dosimeter, the psychologist ventures into the patient’s unconscious, observing when the needle registers the radiation of an “emotionally charged content” – what Jung calls a “complex” (Jung CW2 1904–1907). At its core, the psychologist uncovers an archetype. Thus, if psychological truth is to be sought anywhere, according to Jung, it is not in sensory entities, as nominalist philosophers and extraverts tend to believe, nor in introspective entities, as those realist philosophers and introverts lean toward, but rather in the very structure of the psyche itself, which bridges both realms. That is, in the study of the human psyche (Jung CW6 1921, 87–88): For its solution a third, mediating standpoint is needed. ‘Esse in intellectu’ lacks tangible reality, ‘esse in re’ lacks mind. Idea and thing come together, however, in the human psyche, which holds the balance between them. What would the idea amount to if the psyche did not provide its living value? What would the thing be worth if the psyche withheld from it the determining force of the sense-impression? What indeed is reality if it is not a reality in ourselves, an ‘esse in anima’? Living reality is the product neither of the actual, objective behaviour of things nor of the formulated idea exclusively, but rather of the combination of both in the living psychological process, through ‘esse in anima’. Jung asserts that the psyche is our reality. Philosophically, he traces the roots of his concept esse in anima back to Kant, this time in the Critique of Practical Reason, where God is introduced as a postulate of practical reason – arising from the idea that human beings a priori recognize “an intention directed toward the highest good, necessitated by reverence for the moral law, and from this follows the assumption of its objective reality” (Jung CW6 1921, 87). Jung interprets God on a psychological level as a complex in which the greatest sum of libido – psychic energy – is unified. Individual complexes, whose centers are archetypes, are arranged according to their energetic value, and thus their influence, forming our value system. The validity (or psychological truth) of this system is not founded on reason – rather, it
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