Jung on Knowledge, Intuition and Belief

Jung does not offer a formal and systematic theory of knowledge in the Red Book, but throughout this work he turns traditional epistemology on its head: placing his weight on the side of the imaginary as opposed to the real, the irrational as opposed to the rational, madness as opposed to sanity, and myth as opposed to science. We might say that Jung's view is not unlike the one that Jacques Derrida would develop 60 years later: that of redressing the imbalance resulting from the tradition’s “privileging” of certain critical ideas over their opposites.

In the Red Book, Jung is adamant that true knowledge must spring from a total engagement with life: “Scholarliness alone is not enough, there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight…You can attain this knowledge (of the heart) only by living your life to the full”(233)

Later in the Red Book, Jung has what he describes as a trite visionary encounter with an old man’s daughter, and asks for thoughts regarding “so-called ultimate truths.” Jung suggests that these truths “must be quite uncommon” to which she responds:

“The more uncommon these highest truths are, the more inhuman must they be and the less they speak to you as something valuable or meaningful concerning human essence and being. Only what is human and what you call banal and hackneyed contains the wisdom that you seek” (262).

On the other hand, truth and knowledge paradoxically spring from conditions that are opposite from those we might expect: from depression, unlearning and lack of intention. Jung tells us:

“…we do not love the condition of our being brought low, although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge of ourselves” (263).

Here Jung places himself squarely within an existential tradition which holds that knowledge of self arises through an encounter with one’s demonic or shadow self. Such knowledge is opposed to the “knowledge” that one learns from science, books and traditional models of learning. One of Jung’s inner figures, the Anchorite states: “I’ve spent many years alone with the process of unlearning. Have you ever unlearned anything” (269).

Knowledge is not something that one can intentionally seek or derive. Jung asks, “Do you still know that the way to truth stands open only to those without intentions?” (236).

This, of course, accords with Jung’s conception that “archetypal” knowledge arises spontaneously from the collective unconscious and can never be arrived at through the conscious workings of the ego.

In the Red Book, Jung suggests that intuitive knowledge (at least, his own intuitive knowledge) is superior to argument and reason. As we have seen when we considered Jung’s assertion that “Through uniting with the self we reach God,” Jung claimed that this realization was neither wished for nor expected, that indeed he consciously wished he could disown it as a deception, but that it “seized [him] beyond all measure, and that in spite of the fact that it left him bitter he was certain of its truth (338). Jung remarks, “No insight or objection …could surpass the strength of this experience,” and while Jung claimed that he himself could explain the experience away in terms that would “join it to the already known,” this “would be unable to remove even the smallest part of the knowledge…” (338)

Jung’s inner guide, Philemon, is also certain of his intuitions but perhaps not quite as certain as Jung himself. Philemon avers: “I do not know whether it is the best that one can know. But I know nothing better and therefore I am certain these things are as I say. If they were otherwise I would say something else, since I would know them to be otherwise. But these things are as I know them since my knowledge is precisely these things themselves” (349).

Neither Jung, nor Philemon, consider the possibility that their intuitions might simply be mistaken; this despite the fact that in other places in the Red Book, Jung holds that one who becomes enslaved to thinking vs. feeling or vice versa, ends up in error (247), that our concepts, unlike existing things, can yield and be in error (333), that (according to Philemon) “the overpowering essence of events in the universe and in the hearts of men,” (i.e. God), is no law, but “chance, irregularity, sin, error, stupidity {and] carelessness, (300), and that “yes and no are both true and untrue” (333).

Throughout his career Jung waivered between two conceptions of knowledge, a Platonic one, in which one can achieve certainty through an intuition of essences (i.e. the archetypes), and a dialectical or postmodern one, in which all so-called truths must be complemented by their opposites and in which so-called "knowledge" is always colored by the “personal equation” (or psychology) of the knower. This tension, already evident in the Red Book, was, I believe, never fullyresolved or even adequately recognized by Jung. Perhaps there is a coincidentia oppositorum between Jungian certainty and Jungian open-mindedness, but it is not one that is readily apparent from a reading of Jung himself.

Perhaps Jung’s Red Book comments on the subject of “belief” can put us on the road towards a resolution, or at least better understanding of this problem. On the one hand, Jung tells us:

The dead rejected Christian belief “Because the world, without these men knowing it, entered into that month of the great year where one should believe only what one knows” (349),

and,

“The childishness of belief breaks down in the face of our present necessities” (336),

and,

“…I believe that it is better in our time that belief is weak. We have outgrown that childhood where mere belief was the most suitable means to bring men to what is good and reasonable. Therefore if we wanted to have a strong belief again today, we would thus return to that earlier childhood. But we have so much knowledge and such a thirst for knowledge in us that we need knowledge more than belief. But the strength of belief would hinder us from attaining knowledge. Belief certainly may be something strong, but it is empty and too little of the whole man can be involved, if our life with God is grounded only on belief” (335).

However,

“Desiring knowledge sometimes takes away too much belief. Both must strike a balance” (336).