Jung’s metaphysic and epistemology: Platonism or Phenomenology?

[Mlw]

This short article discusses, among other things, Paul Natorp’s (1854-1924) version of Platonism. It also criticizes Freud's and Jung's Kantian epistemology and claims that the concept of the noumenon is passé.

Jung’s metaphysic and epistemology: Platonism or Phenomenology?

Mats Winther

[Actioninmind23]

Far, therefore, from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even “unreal” ideas and thoughts which refer to nothing “external.” We may call them “imagination” or “delusion,” but that does not detract in any way from their effectiveness. (CW 8, para. 747)

there is an abstraction to all kind of forms inside the material world that accomplish their nature by scoping their physic, which it is the essence of the form, unlike the external reflection of the object that a priori we don't distinguish from the reality itself.

The psyche creates reality every day. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy […] Sometimes it appears in primordial form, sometimes it is the ultimate and boldest product of all our faculties combined. Fantasy, therefore, seems to me the clearest expression of the specific activity of the psyche. (CW 6, para. 78)
For all practical matters, then, it seems that Jung belongs to an existentialist branch of phenomenological philosophy, because it is easy to forget about a noumenal reality which is forever beyond our grasp (vid. Brooke, 2015). It was for the same reason that Kant’s transcendental idealism turned into abstruse German idealism. Jungian psychology predictably underwent a regression in Hillman’s ‘archetypal psychology’, which may rightly be called a form of controlled madness.

In my opinion Jung express reality according their psyche which is part of our transformation of the reality, for me that it is part as well of definition of our intellectual grasp, being beyond imagination the psyche is fantasy but need a degradation of our process of interpretation.

[Terrapin Station]

Far, therefore, from being a material world, this is a psychic world

The "psychic world" is a subset of the material world.

[Hereandnow]

Mlw

This short article discusses, among other things, Paul Natorp’s (1854-1924) version of Platonism. It also criticizes Freud's and Jung's Kantian epistemology and claims that the concept of the noumenon is passé.

Well Mlw, after you: do you think Jung is passe? Do you think Kantian epistemology that destroys God and religion as well as any knowledge claims to what exists beyond perception is critically sustainable? The transcendental ego: nonsense? Or grounded in Jungian speculations about dreams and culture and intimations of internal structures, archetypes.

BUT. I did bother to read some of this. This early paragraph:
This won’t do because phenomenology runs counter to science. For one thing, Kant’s postulate of a noumenal reality has been refuted. In the Prolegomena he explains that the warmth of a stone is a mere judgment of perception, subjectively constructed, and that we will never come to know the internal constitution of the stone (the thing-in-itself) which gives rise to the appearance. Today, quantum physicists can explain everything about the warmth of the stone. Quantum physics has laid bare the thing-in-itself, the inner workings of which we cannot directly perceive. Through experiment and mathematical theory we have better knowledge about this realm than anything else (cf. Winther, 2000). It appears that the world as noumenal reality is a figment of mind.

'...demonstrates the author has not even read Kant. Quantum physics and Kant? Quantum physics is an observational science filled with analytic thinking. S/he needs to read what Kant says about this: from whence comes analysis? How does nature of judgment escape the conditions of reason that makes judgment possible? Those conditions are not "out there". They are us.

Then this:

It means that we do not live in a mere phenomenal reality. Our perception of outer reality is more or less authentic, because it’s not a disparate realm. Rather, the world is wholly reachable, but depends on the mind to make sense of it. It requires some kind of realist epistemology; and thus phenomenology, and all other forms of idealism, are out of the question. Phenomenology is no way out for Jungian psychology.


The world is reachable. Of course it is. The question that is not registering in the mind of this limited thesis is what IS reachability? How do understand the world to be the world? Explain how this works when I reach out to apprehend a thing. You will run directly into Kant and wonder why you had not read this before writing.

As to the rest, I will engage only if you or anyone has an interest.