“… as a doctor and scientist, I proceed from facts which everyone is at liberty to verify.”[1]
“Science is not indeed a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when it is taken as an end in itself.”[2]
” A genuinely scientific attitude must be unprejudiced. The sole criterion for the validity of an hypothesis is whether or not it possesses an heuristic – i.e., explanatory – value.”[3]
” For it is out of himself and out of his peculiar constitution that man has produced his sciences. They are symptoms of his psyche.”[4]
“… the much needed broadening of the mind by science has only replaced medieval one-sidedness … by a new one-sidedness, the overvaluation of “scientifically” attested views.”[5]
” In the nineteenth century science was laboring under the illusion that science could establish a truth. No science can establish a truth.”[6]
” Scientific materialism has merely introduced a new hypostasis, and that is an intellectual sin. It has given another name to the supreme principle of reality and has assumed that this created a new thing and destroyed an old thing.”[7]
” Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, …What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him.”[8]
“Whenever science inclines towards dogma and shows a tendency to be impatient and fanatical, it is concealing a doubt which in all probability is justified and explaining away an uncertainty which is all too well founded.”[9]
As a teenager preparing to apply to college, Jung had to choose either the humanities or science route, and he chose science,[10] following in his grandfather’s steps to become a doctor.[11] Later in life, he called himself “a doctor and scientist.”[12] This essay examines Jung’s views of science, beginning with some definitions and how science evolved and then considering the features, positive aspects and problems with modern science. A final section considers Jung’s warnings about science.
Definitions of Science
Our word “science” comes from the present participle of the Latin verb scio-ire, “to know, knowing.”[13]Science is a way of knowing, specifically “knowledge of facts and laws arranged in an orderly system; a branch of such knowledge;” as well as, more broadly, “the search for truth; skill; technique.”[14]
Jung had much to say about science, which he defined as “knowledge,”[15] “a superb and valuable tool,”[16]“the tool of the Western mind,”[17] “an affair of the intellect,”[18] “a language of metaphor,”[19] “an honest-to-God attempt to get at the truth,”[20] and “the catchword that seems to carry the weight of absolute conviction in the contemporary world.”[21] All these meanings, drawn from all over Jung’s oeuvre, reflect his valuation of science and his recognition that modern people have “tremendous faith… in anything which bears the label ‘scientific’.”[22] The scientist and engineer, Willis Harman, shared Jung’s assessment of the prime place of science in our society when he called science “the knowledge base” of our society.[23]
How Jung Perceived the Evolution of Science
As a student of history and philosophy,[24] Jung was aware of how knowledge evolves. Millennia ago, humans lived in a world that seemed magical, but
“through the development of magic into science, that is, through the advance from the stage of mere expectation to real technical work on the object, … we [have] acquired that mastery over the forces of nature of which the age of magic dreamed.”[25]
While Jung had great respect for many of the ancient Greek philosophers (especially Heraclitus),[26] he recognized that, in many ways, they operated within a “primitive mental condition”[27] that gave “substantiality” to “their Logos only by attributing it to a mystical value.”[28] This is a far cry from our modern “scientific objectivity and conscious knowledge.”[29]
Jung credits the medieval scholastics for advancing science beyond the ancients’ mysticism, to the point of giving rise to modern science:
“… the scholastic spirit in which man of the intellectual caliber of St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Abelard, William of Ockham, and others worked is the mother of our modern scientific method, and future generations will see clearly how far scholasticism still nourishes the science of today with living undercurrents. …The great achievement of scholasticism was that it laid the foundations of a solidly built intellectual function, the sine qua non of modern science and technology.”[30]
While he recognized the achievements of medieval philosophers, he knew they had fallen into the “fundamental error”[31] of projection, an error that “has lingered on into modern times,”[32] and caused a reaction that led to 19th century “scientism.”[33] Jung credits Freud with giving “due prominence”[34] to “the immense importance of subjective factors in the development of objective mental processes,”[35] a key development in science that made possible an “objective” psychology of the individual.[36]
As European science developed from the Renaissance through the nineteenth centuries, an “historically inevitable” split developed in the Western mind.[37] Philosophy was separated from the “hard” sciences, and “psychology… though formerly counted a discipline of philosophy”[38] became “a natural science and its subject-matter is not a mental product but a natural phenomenon, i.e. the psyche.”[39]
Science continues to evolve as “one theory is soon superseded by another,”[40] as methods change with the development of new techniques and technologies, to the point that in our 21st century world “anything… labeled ‘scientific … will be given a welcome hearing by everyone who values his intelligence and his intellectual reputation.”[41] Jung recognized this, and, while he valued science and its advances, he was not entirely positive in his assessment of modern science. Why the criticism? We can explain this when we consider the features of modern science and scientism.
Features of Modern Science and Scientism
Jung did not hesitate to call himself a “scientist” because he appreciated many of the features of science, e.g. its appeals to logic and honesty,[42] its skeptical and critical attitude,[43] its exacting standards and demands for scientific proofs,[44] its directed thinking[45] and avoidance of dogmatism and fanaticism,[46] how it insists on freedom of research[47] and posits the uncertainty of human knowledge.[48] In his investigations as an empiricist, Jung exemplified these features.
Jung’s criticisms related to the values, methods and implications of science, especially in the context of psychology. We’ll consider values first.
Most of Jung’s problems with the values of science were due to one-sidedness,[49] i.e. modern science carries positives like logic, reason, objectivity and exactitude too far, resulting in “exclusively rational”[50] and abstract attitudes which foster “rootless intellectualism,”[51] and an objectivity carried to the point of barring and denigrating anything subjective, excluding “the feeling and fantasy”[52] that are part of being human. Exactitude carried too far often turned into a materialism that dismisses anything that cannot be weighed or measured.[53]
In its methodology, science makes conditions,”[54] setting so many laboratory conditions that the methods restrict too narrowly the possibilities and parameters within which Nature works:
“Experiment, however, consists in asking a definite question which excludes as far as possible anything disturbing and irrelevant. It makes conditions, imposes them on Nature, and in this way forces her to give an answer to a question devised by man. She is prevented from answering out of the fullness of her possibilities since these possibilities are restricted as far as practicable. For this purpose there is created in the laboratory a situation which is artificially restricted to the question and which compels Nature to give an unequivocal answer. The workings of Nature in her unrestricted wholeness are completely excluded.” [55]
Jung also recognized that science is unrealistic in its reliance on statistical truths and abstract knowledge,[56] which shut out some important provinces of life, and its silos–hard and fast divisions of science into various disciplines[57]–make collaboration and cross-fertilization difficult, if not impossible.
Jung reserved some of his most caustic criticisms for the implications of modern science, e.g. how it has led to the “death of universality”[58] (thanks to the silo mentality); how its materialism had fostered the “despiritualization of the world;”[59] how its concretism and rationalism are unable to do justice to symbolical truth;[60] how its “new one-sidedness, the overvaluation of “scientifically attested views,”[61] has led to “the backwardness of psychic development in general and self-knowledge in particular”[62]–a situation that Jung regarded as “one of the most pressing contemporary problems.”[63]
In many ways, Jung knew, “science” has turned into “scientism,” a degenerate form of investigation characterized by a host o f “-isms,” e.g. materialism, objectivism, rationalism, positivism, intellectualism,[64] etc. None of these got Jung’s approval, because they all are theoretical[65] and therefore impersonal (theories being “the very devil,”[66] according to Jung). They also bespeak a worldview that threatens our future.[67]
Jung’s Warnings about Science
How might science be threatening our future? Jung was explicit about the dangers we now face:
from “-isms:”
“The current ‘isms’ are the most serious threat in this respect, because they are nothing but dangerous identifications of the subjective with the collective unconscious. Such an identity infallibly produces a mass psyche with its irresistible urge to catastrophe….”.[68] This “urge” is intensified because we have forgotten “the ‘timelessness’ of our psychic foundations… in that way we succumb to the greatest psychic danger that now threatens us–rootless intellectualisms which one and all reckon without their host, i.e. without the real man.”[69]
from the technologist:
Jung wondered just who the “real man” is who is “applying the technical skills”[70] modern science has developed. Jung recognized that
“Our technical skill has grown to be so dangerous that the most urgent question today is not what more can be done in this line, but how the man who is entrusted with the control of this skill should be constituted, or how to alter the mind of Western man so that he would renounce his terrible skill. It is infinitely more important to strip him of the illusion of his power than to strengthen him still further in the mistaken idea that he can do everything he wills.”[71]
Jung was skeptical that scientific training would incline scientists and technologists to refrain from the temptations of power,[72] and this, in part, because of another warning he gave us:
from devaluation of the individual:
“the individual is by definition something unique that cannot be compared with anything else.” “… the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or “normal” man to whom …scientific statements refer.”[73]
Jung understood that “our modern consciousness… has become hopelessly fragmented. The consequence is that people … become tools themselves.”[74]
from desecration of Nature:
“Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whether outside or inside. He has both in almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him. He does not know that his own soul is rebelling against him in a suicidal way.”[75]
We have become so used to regarding Nature as a “gigantic toolshed”[76] from which we can extract all the “natural resources” we need, regardless of the rending of the myriad ecological connections such abuse involves. Jung reminds us that this disregard is leading to a form of collective suicide.
from a profound spiritual malaise:
“Much as the achievements of science deserve our admiration, the psychic consequences of this greatest of human triumphs are equally terrible. Unfortunately, there is in this world no good thing that does not have to be paid for by an evil at least equally great. People still do not know that the greatest step forward is balanced by an equally great step back. They still have no notion of what it means to live in a de-psychized world. They believe, on the contrary, that it is a tremendous advance, which can only be profitable, for man to have conquered Nature and seized the helm, in order to steer the ship according to his will.”[77]
When science becomes “an end in itself,”[78] Jung knew, it “becomes an evil”[79] by thwarting life’s demand for development.
Conclusion
On the subject of science, as with so many other topics, Jung would “hold the tensions”[80] of opposites, seeing both the positive and negative potentials in modern science. He appreciated the manifold benefits of medical research in improving human life and public safety, but as much as he felt appreciative, he felt ambivalent about whither science was developing.
Many of the trends he spotted–arrogance,[81] a focus on technologies,[82] lack of reflection,[83] and disparagement of the “soft” aspects of our human endeavor[84]–have only become more pronounced and problematic in the forty years since Jung died. We only have to look at the numerous concerns voiced even by some scientists and technologists themselves–e.g. about artificial intelligence[85]–to see how Jung was spot on in warning us about modern science.
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[1] Collected Works 11 ¶461. Hereafter Collected Works will be abbreviated CW.
[2] CW 13 ¶2.
[3] CW 7 ¶216.
[4] CW 8 ¶752.
[5] Ibid. ¶426.
[6] CW 8 ¶694.
[7] CW 11 ¶763.
[8] Ibid. ¶869.
[9] CW 4 ¶746.
[10] Jung (1965), 72-73.
[11] Ibid. 86.
[12] CW 11 ¶461.
[13] Lewis & Short (1969), 1643.
[14] World Book Encyclopedia Dictionary, II, 1735.
[15] CW 8 ¶731.
[16] CW 13 ¶2.
[17] Ibid.
[18] CW 6 ¶84.
[19] Ibid. ¶428.
[20] CW 18 ¶1671.
[21] CW 8 ¶790.
[22] CW 11 ¶81.
[23] Harman (1988), 101.
[24] Jung (1965), 61, 68-70.
[25] CW 8 ¶90.
[26] Cf. Edinger (1999a&b) for in-depth discussions of how Jung drew on the Greek philosophers.
[27] CW 11 ¶763.
[28] CW 5 ¶22.
[29] CW 8 ¶426.
[30] CW 5 ¶22.
[31] CW 3 ¶406.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid.
[37] CW 11 ¶863.
[38] CW 17 ¶165.
[39] Ibid.
[40] CW 11 ¶81.
[41] CW 18 ¶1373.
[42] CW 4 ¶613.
[43] CW 7 ¶216.
[44] CW 8 ¶790.
[45] CW 5 ¶21.
[46] CW 4 ¶s613 & 746.
[47] CW 4 ¶613.
[48] CW 5 ¶95.
[49] CW 8 ¶426.
[50] CW 11 ¶81.
[51] CW 10 ¶701.
[52] CW 6 ¶84.
[53] CW 3 ¶320.
[54] CW 8 ¶864.
[55] Ibid.
[56] CW 10 ¶498.
[57] CW 6 ¶85.
[58] Ibid. ¶516.
[59] CW 11 ¶140.
[60] CW 5 ¶339.
[61] CW 8 ¶426.
[62] Ibid.
[63] Ibid.
[64] Needleman (1996), 35-36.
[65] CW 5 ¶95.
[66] CW 17, p. 7.
[67] CW 18 ¶1374.
[68] CW 8 ¶426.
[69] CW 10 ¶701.
[70] CW 11 ¶869.
[71] Ibid.
[72] Ibid.
[73] CW 7 ¶484.
[74] CW 8 ¶731.
[75] CW 11 ¶870.
[76] The term is Clarence Glacken’s, quoted in Ehrenfeld (1981), 177.
[77] CW 18 ¶1366
[78] CW 8 ¶731.
[79] CW 6 ¶86.
[80] CW 5 ¶460.
[81] CW 11 ¶869.
[82] CW 5 ¶21.
[83] CW 8 ¶650.
[84] CW 5 ¶339.
[85] Isaacson (2023), 29-33. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis are some tech savants who have raised concerns.
