Carl Jung, and the realm of knowing beyond knowing

In a famous quote from an interview with the BBC the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God, he responded “Now? It’s difficult to answer… I know… I don’t need to believe, I know”, a shorter response to one he had given several years earlier, “All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take his existence on belief — I know that he exists”.

In spite of this Jung was always reticent to make any such claims within the realm of his work. We see Jung as somewhat of a maverick and a mystic, but Jung saw himself as a scientist, and as such he recognised that the realm of science contains an epistemology that cannot make claims about belief. For Jung there was simply a limit to what psychological forms could ‘prove’ outside of simply what they show, and showing that God exists as a psychological motif proves nothing, and for science to be science it must remain so. Science by necessity limits kinds of personal or subjective truth or knowledge, allows us to only speak of truth as the empirical. Such an approach is what enables science to be universal, to have a kind of heuristic use that is not limited by dogma or faith.

However, Jung clearly, like many others recognised that such an approach is not enough. To build an entire worldview on such an epistemology is shallow, if not impossible. Beyond this is a realm where other kinds of truth must be encountered. Science cannot prove music to a deaf person outside of notation, sound vibrations, correlations in the brain, descriptions of culture and tradition, yet none of those are what music is, music is an irreducible encounter with something, and clearly some truth must and can only be encountered. When Jung said “I don’t need to believe, I know”, he was not referring to something demonstrable, yet by the very statement he recognised that ‘belief’ is an inadequate term.

Interestingly, while the idea that science can pretty much answer everything has taken hold for a period in modernity many public thinkers are emerging who find themselves in a position of awakening to the inadequacies of empirical knowledge, yet also paralysed by the uncertainty produced at what comes beyond such knowledge. A few examples include the historian Tom Holland, whose book ‘Dominion’ charts the influence of Christianity on the modern world, who says he came to realise the cross as a ‘true myth’, that most of his values were essentially Christian, and even that looking at the historical Jesus caused him to see that something extraordinary had taken place. Yet when asked about how this effects him personally he says he cannot cross a line into personal faith, he has too many hesitations or doubts. Likewise the writer Douglas Murray has spoken of the recognition of how much we have lost by abandoning the values that have given birth to our society, and the loss of meaning, asking “are we meaning-seeking beings, or is there meaning?” Controversial psychologist and public academic Jordan Peterson has spent hours of lectures talking about the importance of biblical myths, of the idea and need for belief in God, yet again when he is asked about his personal faith he seems profoundly conflicted and lacks the ability to actually cross a line into personal faith beyond the speculative nature of his academic work.

The emergence of these figures on the public stage tells us something significant about the changing of prevailing winds in public thought, but the question they ask is how then have we lost this realm of the personal? Clearly science has its profound use when it comes to forms of knowledge, but it is also not enough to integrate us into a meaningful world of truth. There must be a place for us to step out of analytical reasoning as a way to truth, and find that strange place that Jung cannot quite call ‘belief’.

In his book “The Matter with Things” the psychiatrist and scholar Iain McGilchrist proposes that this problem in modern society can be understood by the perspective of the brain hemispheres. He proposes the hemispheres of the brain are not equal, they have distinct specialisation, and due to their roles, in order to reach a healthy grasp of reality the left hemisphere should be subordinate to the right. McGilchrist proposes that in recent centuries into the modern world we have entered an age that reflects a drift from this balance to one where the left hemisphere dominates, and that this has warped our view of truth, and diminished our experience of the richness of existence. McGilchrist uses two particular analogies for this, one in which a ‘Master’ cannot oversee everything going on in his estate, and so hires an ‘emissary’ in order to undertake certain tasks. The emissary comes to believe that because he undertakes certain tasks he can take over the role of master, usurps the position and the estate comes to ruin because he was deluded into thinking undertaking particular tasks gave him the ability to manage the whole. The second story is one that appears widely in cultures, that of a trainee magician whose apprentice overhears him using a spell that, say, brings brooms to life to clean the room. The apprentice repeats the words but cannot undo it, because his partial knowledge led him to believe he possessed a power he did not, he merely repeated a spell without fully knowing its wider context. These both give you something of the idea of how McGilchrist proposes hemispheric specialisation works. The left hemisphere deals with small focus attention, rationality, certain kinds of language, ‘grasping’ and particulars. The right with broad picture context, with metaphor, poetry and music. The left hemisphere cannot ‘see’ beyond its limited field of attention, and must rely on the right for context and whole picture analysis, without which the view of the world becomes fragmented.

Such a perspective, while to some extent reliant on the transference of it as a ‘metaphor’ for society at large, provides a hugely illuminating perspective on the problems we have with epistemology. The view that science as an epistemology excludes other kinds of truth has become so ingrained in our public view of truth that all other kinds become reduced not just to the subjective but to the arbitrarily subjective. Religion or spirituality thus becomes your truth rather than a reflection of the truth and the extent to which we can actually connect with its forms of truth leaves us with a kind of uncertainty we cannot overcome unless we give up the insistence of analytics, reasoning and empiricism as the only way to reality.

This is of course a reflection of a prevailing public world. Public figures and thinkers are rarely representative of where we are so much as transitions that forms of public thought move through. The ‘new atheists’ of recent decades represented an aspect of a world who found their rejection of religion convenient, but it did not mean we all were or became atheists. Likewise the struggles of the public world with belief beyond empiricism clearly reflects a turn, a change in direction to a realisation that materialism and reductionism are woefully inadequate as world-views. The way beyond this realisation remains open to all of us.