Encouraging metaphysics: a reply to the commentary by David Tresan

Abstract

David Tresan wrote a truly remarkable commentary to our article on the Pauli-Jung-conjecture and some of its ramifications, a very generous commentary which surely needs no further explanations. We could hardly appreciate more how, with concise insight and the elegance of an experienced writer, he made much of what we wanted to communicate better accessible or even accessible at all. So, nothing remains to be added, really, to this excellent introduction and reflection. However, his metaphor of 'skiing over rocky terrain with many moguls covered by a smooth surface of snow' turns out to be so apt that we cannot resist the temptation to expand a bit on it.The framework of thinking that we reconstructed from the exchange of Pauli and Jung is complex indeed, rocky terrain. And the resulting outline still grossly simplifies many of its more specific features-some difficult, some subtle, some both-for the purpose of endowing the big picture with just enough details to unveil those basic structures, without which enjoyable skiing would be very tough to do. We agree with David Tresan that a big picture with a scope like this is not accidentally metaphysical, it is inevitably metaphysical. Although large parts of the 20th century witnessed an often pejorative connotation with metaphysics, insights into the nature of reality would be impossible without metaphysical assumptions and regulative principles. We thank the editors of the JAP for the opportunity to say some more words about this, emphasizing features that are not so prominent in the original paper and picking up some ideas from Tresan's admirable amplifications.The Pauli-Jung version of dual-aspect monism merges an ontic monism, which is psychophysically neutral, with an epistemic dualism of the mental and the physical as perspectival aspects of the underlying ontic domain. There are important respects in which this framework differs from neutral monism à la Mach, James, or Russell. In neutral monism, the mental and the physical are reducible to the underlying domain, whereas they are irreducible in dual-aspect monism. The reason for this diffference is that neutral monism

A commentary on ‘Causality as individual essence: its bearing on synchronicity’

“…While Cecile Tougas was writing this essay, I was pondering the article by Atmanspacher and Fach recently published (, ). I had also been rereading Jung, Pauli, and von Franz (, also Gieser ) as I tried to understand better the issues the early atomic physicists were struggling with.…”

Causality as individual essence: its bearing on synchronicity

“…As scientists and thinkers, they experience and struggle with the differences between what is now called ‘mind’ and ‘matter’: mind tends towards meaning—perceives, remembers, anticipates, thinks, imagines, knows—while matter moves in spatial extension as vast quantities of units constituting what appears sensately as colour, sound, hardness. Forming a theory about existence as a whole, Atmanspacher and Fach hypothesize that mind and matter are distinctions in a whole and so are correlated and complementary, insofar as one has what the other does not yet is not independent of the other. While Atmanspacher and Fach hold that mind and matter have a common ground, it is also thinkable, as Edmund Husserl noted (1970), that the non‐independence of mind and matter is enough to constitute their unity, insofar as one cannot exist without the other.…”

“…Indeed, the acceptance of individual essence is affirmed by Pauli who spoke of ‘meaningful correspondences’ (‘ Sinnkorrespondenzen ’) as influenced by ‘archetypal “acausal ordering”’ and considered ‘both Jung's synchronicity and the old teleological idea of finality (in the general sense of a process oriented toward a goal) as particular instances of such an acausal ordering which cannot be set up intentionally’ (Atmanspacher and Fach 229). ‘Archetypal’ here may refer to a special ‘ eidos ’ or Idea or essence which holds great import and underlies not only psychological but also scientific and mathematical thinking, as von Franz indicates in referring to Pauli (von Franz 18, n10).…”

The controversy around the concept of archetypes

“…Harald Atmanspacher's research into this field, and its implications for analytical psychology is extensive (Atmanspacher ; Atmanspacher & Primas ; Atmanspacher and ; Atmanspacher & Fuchs ). In 2013 in collaboration with his Freiburg colleague, Wolfgang Fach, he published an overview of the dual aspect model in the Journal of Analytical Psychology with a commentary by David Tresan (Atmanspacher & Fach and ; Tresan ). During this same period Hogenson shifted attention to the underlying structural characteristics of symbolic patterns culminating in an argument for the importance of fractal geometry for understanding the significance of Jung's attention to mandala symbols as fundamental symbolic archetypal representations of individuation (Hogenson , , and ), working from research into the mathematics of symbols systems first developed by the Harvard linguist, George Kingsly Zipf (Zipf ) but more recently developed by research at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere (Ferrer i Cancho & Solé ; Ferrer i Cancho, Riordan, & Bollobás ; Serrano, Flammini, & Menczer ; Vogt and ).…”