Prof. Stephen Palmquist,
D.Phil. (Oxon)
Department of Religion and Philosophy
Hong Kong Baptist University
Synchronicity
andIntellectual Intuition in Kant, Swedenborg, and Jung, by Paul Bishop.Lewiston,
NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. xvi
+ 465pp. $129.95 (cloth). ISBN0-7734-7593-1.
“TheKant-Jung Book” (or KJB) is a project I have had
in mind for some twodecades, ever since I began
reading Jung as a hobby to complement my scholarlyresearch
on Kant. In his autobiography, Jung openly confesses the significantinfluence
Kant had on his intellectual development. For example, he expresseshis
frustration at how busy he was during his “clinical semesters”by
recalling: “I was able to study Kant only on Sundays” (Memories,Dreams, Reflections,p.122)! As Paul
Bishop notes, tantalizing references to Kant and/or variousKantian
concepts “pepper Jung’s psychological writings”(p.297).
Not being or claiming to be a philosopher, Jung leaves thesereferences
undeveloped, claiming no more than to be developing depth psychologywithin
essentially Kantian parameters.
Theprojected goal
of KJB is to explore how far Jung’s analytical psychologyand
Kant’s critical philosophy can function as complementary intellectualsystems,
like yin and yang manifestations of one Tao: entirely different(indeed, opposing)forces
that nevertheless work together toward the same unified goal, originallyexpressed by the inscription over the entrance to
the temple at Delphi as knowthyself.Whereas
Kant developed a transcendental philosophy grounded in a logicallystructured
set of 12 a priori categories of consciousness that give form to themanifold aggregate of human knowledge, Jung developed an
empirical psychologygrounded in a haphazard
collection of “archetypes” (categories ofthe unconscious)whose
flowering produces a fixed set of psychological types that exhibits a logicalpattern virtually identical to that of Kant’s
categories: Jung’sfour functions (sensation,
intuition, thought, and feeling) correspond directlyto
Kant’s four main categories (quantity, quality, relation, andmodality),
while Jung’s three ways of experiencing each function(introvert, extravert, and
their combination in the integrated personality)correspond directly to Kant’s
three manifestations of each category(e.g., the three moments of quantity:
unity, plurality, and totality). Likewise,Kant’s
doctrine of the unknowability of the thing in itself resonatesdeeply with Jung’s doctrine of the Self as the
mysterious totality of thehuman psyche, knowable only
in the differentiated form of archetypal images andideas.
These examples merely touch the tip of the iceberg of connections thatexist between Kant’s philosophy and Jung’s psychology, asexpressions of two sides of one and the same worldview –
a worldview Ihave elsewhere dubbed “Critical
Mysticism” (see Kant’sCritical Religion[Ashgate, 2000], Part Four).
When
I firstlearned of Paul Bishop’s book on Kant and
Jung, focusing on themes asobviously “mystical” as
Jung’s “synchronicity”,Kant’s
“intellectual intuition”, and Swedenborg (the Swedishmystic who fascinated both Kant and Jung), I thought
this could be one of thoserare opportunities when,
rather than fanning the flames of urgency, readinganother
author’s book satisfies one’s scholarly “calling” tocontribute
to that particular area. “Perhaps this is it;” I mused;“maybe I won’t have to write KJB after all!” Inthis hope, however, I could hardly have been more
mistaken.
Paul
Bishopmakes his bias clear at the outset: he starts the
Acknowledgements byexplaining how this book extends
his doctoral research on Jung, which placedJung
firmly within “the specific context” of “GermanRomanticism”
(p.xiii). That Bishop will treat “Romanticism”and
“Romantic” as dirty words had already been hinted in theForeword,
where the “Germanist”, Raymond Furness, says (p. xi) this“book is, basically, a history of an error [i.e., Jung’s
error, in RomanticizingKant], and … a salutary (and
daunting) reminder of how frequently reasonmay be
transformed into unreason.” Accordingly, Bishop pays no attentioneven
to the possibility that there may be meaningful connections between Kant
andJung, that the two scholars may have been
constructing two sides of the sameintellectual Way.
From the point of view of Kant-scholarship, the book’smost
interesting discussions center around the popular
nineteenth centuryspiritualist scholar, Carl du Prel (1839-1899), who
portrayed Kant as a closetmystic, heavily influenced
by Swedenborg. Bishop’s thesis is that Jungwas duped by du Prel, and by his allegedly “Romantic” tendencies,to misinterpret Kant.
Unfortunately,Bishop never defends
his anti-Romantic bias with anything like a reasonedargument.
Rather, he merely assumes anyone who exhibits goals similar to thoseof nineteenth-century Romantics is not worthy of
serious consideration. And hisKant-scholarship is no
more impressive: he merely assumes that Kant, thephilosopher
who marked the transition-point between theEnlightenment
and German Romanticism, had affinities only with the formermovement.
Bishop’s underlying argument seems to run like this: (1)Romanticism
and all motifs typically associated with it are obviouslyirrational
and untenable; (2) Jung’s works exhibit numerous motifstypically
associated with Romanticism; therefore (3) Jung’s works areobviously
irrational and untenable. A corollary to this argument, it seems, isthat Kant, being a pre-Romantic philosopher, was
eminently rational, and therefore shouldnot be
associated with the likes of Jung. In this context, the main theme ofBishop’s book is to show that Jung’s “concept ofsynchronicity only makes sense in terms of” Kant’s theory
ofintellectual intuition, even though Jung himself
never employed Kant’sterm (p.2).Correspondingly,
the main theme of this review is to argue that Bishop isthoroughly
mistaken.
Bishop’sgreatest strength is probably also the greatest
danger of his approach: heexhibits erudite
scholarship on virtually every page. For example, the text providesboth
German and English for most of its numerous, often lengthy, quotations– a
tedious practice that adds significantly to the book’s length.Having
done an impressive breadth of research, the author refers to a widespectrum of books on numerous relevant topics. To
begin, the Introductionprovides a brief overview of
the references Jung makes to Kant and of all“eight
articles” and “five books” (p.6) that addressthe
Kant-Jung relationship. Yet the reader is left with no idea of whatJung’s interest in Kant was all about – except that it hadsomething to do with Swedenborg.
The Introduction also makes an initial attemptto
argue that “synchronicity” meant for Jung what“intellectual
intuition” meant for Kant, and that Jung’sacceptance
of a concept Kant so resolutely rejected proves that Jung was not aKantian, but a “post-Kantian” – i.e., a“Romantic”
(p.20), with all the nastiness Bishop believes thatentails.
Here, as elsewhere, Bishop reveals he is not a Kant scholar.
Chapter1
examines Jung’s theory of synchronicity more closely. After discussingpossible
connections Jung saw between synchronicity and modern physics, Bishopcites “four definitions” (pp.33-34) Jung gives the
term in hisbook, Synchronicity. What escapes
Bishop’s notice is that these fourcorrespond to
Kant’s four categories: as regards quantity, synchronicity appearsas “meaningful parallels” between a “psychic state” and“external events”; its quality appears as “the simultaneousoccurrence of two different psychic states”;
its relation is a person’sawareness of a
connection between “[a]n unconscious image” and“[a]n objective situation”; and
its modality (its definition proper) is a uniquecombination
of possibility, actuality, and necessity that Jung calls“meaningful
coincidence” (p.34). Bishop dutifully quotesJung’s
claim that synchronicity must be understood from a strictly“hypothetical”
perspective (p.34), yet shows no awareness of whatthis
meansin a Kantian context: it is a heuristic
fiction used to regulate our inquiries, ratherthan
a concrete (categorial) claim to have discovered
something that constitutes human knowledge.Intellectual
intuition, for Kant, is always and only the latter. SoBishop’s
attempt to identify Jungian synchronicity with this Kantiannotion
only highlights his limited understanding of Kant. Instead of beinggrounded in Kant’s philosophy, Bishop’s section entitled“Philosophical Implications of Synchronicity”
(pp.36-51) describeshow a wide variety of other
scholars used the relevant terms, ranging fromAvicenna
and Albertus Magnus to Geulincx,
Leibniz, and Schopenhauer. Jung, bycontrast,
hadstudied Kant – even if (for a time) “only
on Sundays” –so he had good reason for steering clear of any attempt to
connect synchronicitywith intellectual intuition.
In short, Bishop’s argument here is grosslyunfair to
both Kant and Jung.
WhereJung mentions Kant in Synchronicity, he agrees
with Kant’s theorythat the a priori conditions of
knowledge, space and time, are products ofthe mind(p.42). From
this, Jung infers that the unconscious mind is capable of puttingasidethese conscious forms and viewing the
world differently, in a manner that isnot subject to
normal categorial restrictions, such as causality.
Bishop thinksJung is
perverting Kant at this point; but he forgets that Kant wasconstructing
a philosophy of conscious knowledge, whereas Jung wasexplicitly
constructing a psychology of unconscious ideas. Much of Bishop’sscholarly footwork in this initial chapter is of
immense value to the perceptivereader;
disappointingly, Bishop himself seems unaware of that value, believinginstead he has proved Jung’s theory to be
anti-Kantian (p.49). His maincomplaint is that Jung
tends to refer to synchronicity as a way of obtaining“absolute
knowledge”; yet he fails to recognize that Jung wasreferring
here only to a hypothetical apprehension of something that always remains
amystery to the conscious mind, and therefore
has no relation whatsoeverto Kantian intellectual
intuition (which entails knowing or even creating the absolute as anempirical object,merely by thinking it).
That the products of our unconscious are not incompatiblewith
the Critical restriction of conscious knowledge to space and time is shownnowhere more profoundly than in Kant’s own Dreams
of a Spirit-Seer, where he assessesSwedenborg’s
mystical visions from a philosophical perspective. (SeeChapter II of Kant’s Critical Religion for a
thorough argumentalong these lines.) Here, if
anywhere, Kant showed he was capable of the samealleged
“conceptual recklessness” Bishop attributes to Jung (p.54).
Insteadof moving directly to an examination of Kant’s
approach to Swedenborg,Bishop
devotes the next three chapters to three stages in Jung’sdevelopment:
his early interest in philosophy; the use of Kant in his earlywritings;
and the use of Kant in his writings after 1921. The upshot of Chapter2 is that
(p.77) “Jung’s attitude towards Kant was a highlypersonal
one.” Although there are no great surprises in this chapter,Bishop’s survey benefits greatly, here and
throughout the book, by thefact that he had access to
Jung’s personal library and carefullyinspected all
the (relevant) books Jung possessed. In this regard, Appendix A(“Editions of Kant in C.G. Jung’s Library”) provides avaluable resource for anyone interested in the Jung-Kant
relationship, andBishop’s endnotes make ample (often
instructive) references toJung’s marginal markings
and comments. Again, Bishop has done hishomework on
this point, and done it well.
By
contrast,one wishes Bishop’s reading of contemporary
Kant-scholarship had extendedbeyond the few works
included in his otherwise massive Bibliography; he baseshis
entire view of Kant’s philosophy of science, for example, solely onRobert Butts’ 1986 book. As a result, Bishop chides Jung
for being“highly unKantian”
(p.81) merely because Jung observed what manyKant
scholars recognize Kant himself observed, that “there might be eventswhich overstepped the limited categories of space,
time and causality” (Memories,Dreams,
Reflections,p.120). For Kant (as Jung and many Kant scholars have
recognized), such“overstepping” is possible,
but cannot produce knowledge for us human beings,simply because we do not have access to
intellectual intuition. Contrary to theimpression
Bishop wants his readers to take from his book, Jung nevercontradicted
this basic tenet of Kantian philosophy, but understood and agreedwith
it far more accurately than Bishop does. Most of Bishop’s othercriticisms
of Jung’s views on Kant in Chapter 2 are similarly half-baked,as
when he claims Jung went through a period of viewing Kant“negatively”,
when the negativity Bishop describes was focusedprimarily
on Ritschl’s interpretation of Kant
(pp.92-93).
Thelongest, and possibly most interesting, section of
Bishop’s book comes atthe end of Chapter 2:
“Excursus: Freud’s Interest in theOccult”
(pp.102-129). Here Bishop provides an excellent contextualizationfor
anyone who wishes to understand Jung’s interest in the occult, for hedemonstrates that Freud was fascinated by many of the
same issues Jung was, yethe was unable to integrate
them as consistently into his psychoanalytic theory.As
Bishop puts it (p.106): “Read against Freud’s remarks about hisintellectual
development, Jung’s seems far less eccentric than it usuallydoes.”
Bishop’s conclusion, however, is typically biased (p.127):Freud’s
approach to the occult was superior to Jung’s because atleast
“Freud was keen to reject any method that involved [that devilishscourge
of the Romantic era!] intuition.”
Chapters3
and 4 are the shortest, most straightforward, and least objectionable of thebook’s six main chapters. The former begins with a
helpful summary of howJung employed Kant’s
distinction between analysis and synthesis in hisearly
work on word-association, leading eventually to the split with Freud,which Jung himself expressed
in terms of a need to complement Freudian analysis with psychic synthesis
(p.145). (Unhappily,Jung
abandoned his initial idea of calling his new approach“psychosynthesis”,
and replaced it with the less distinctive name,“analytic
psychology”.) The next section argues that Jung’swork
on symbols, as a path beyond faith to knowledge, betrays“Jung’s
divergence from Kant” (p.147), since the Preface toKant’s
first Critique denied knowledge in order to make room for
faith. But hereBishop allows a semantic similarity to
becloud the deep and intentional difference instandpoint
Jung adopted in his effort to complement Kant’sphilosophy.
Kant’s goal was to deny objective knowledge of God (etc.) in orderto make room for rational (practical) faith,
grounded in our moralnature. Jung’s goal was to deny blind
faith in God in order to make roomfor psychological
knowledge, grounded in the realities of our religiousexperience.
These goals are not in conflict, as Bishop claims.
The
thirdand fourth sections of Chapter 3 examine Jung’s Psychological
Types. In the former, Bishopdraws some clear
correlations between Jung’s view of“phantasy” and
Kant’s theory of “imagination”.Here is one of the few
places where Bishop suggests a potential area of genuinecompatibility,though
he does so in a manner that furthers his main agenda (namely, to portrayJung negatively), by emphasizing Jung’s failure to
relate phantasy toKant’s
third Critique. (Interestingly, Bishop himself had earliercommitted
the same error by referring to Kant’s “two Critiques” [p.87], callingthem, along with Prolegomena, “the key texts
of the criticalphilosophy” [p.82]. And later, Bishop
complains about Jung’s“apparent ignorance of the
third Critique” [p.173], eventhough Appendix A
clearly states [p.412] that Jung’s own copy of thatbook
did containmarginal
markings!) The chapter ends with a section assessing (negatively, ofcourse) Jung’s attempt to relate his theory of “archetypes”to Kant’s distinction between “idea” and “image”;once again, the apparent conflicts Bishop finds are
due more to his ownsuperficial understanding of Kant
than to any real incompatibility.
Chapter4
begins by assessing Jung’s portrayal of the archetypes as“categories
of the imagination” (p.176) in his later writings. HereBishop
continues his effort to persuade the reader that Jung’s real intention
is to claim knowledge of the sort Kantregarded
as impossible, due to human beings’ lack of intellectualintuition.
He offers the legitimate criticisms that Jung seems to use“category”
in an imprecise way, and that some attention to thethird
Critiquewould have been helpful [pp.187,192]. However, he fails to provide anythingmore
than a “hint” that Jung’s terminology sometimes“closely
resembles that of intellectual intuition” (p.178); indeed,Bishop
seems unaware of the obvious Kantian implications of numerous texts hehimself quotes,where Jung warns (for example)
that the archetype “is in itselfirrepresentable”
(quoted on p.179) or that “[t]he archetype as suchis
a hypothetical and irrepresentable model” (quoted on
p.180), so thatall we can know(scientifically)
about it must be based on the ideas and images we observe (e.g., in our
dreams).This is vintage Kant; yet Bishop misconstrues it as an implicit
acceptance ofintellectual intuition. Moreover, Bishop
claims that because “Kant sawhis task as complete”
(p.184), he would never have approved of Jung’sattempt
to complement it. Yet Kant’s bold claim refers only to his establishment
ofa transcendental foundation for all further
scientific and metaphysicalinquiry; he fully
recognized that the task of building on that foundation anenduring
system of metaphysical principles and/or scientific knowledge was atask that would have to be fulfilled by future
generations. And Kant was keenlyaware of his own
generation’s limited accomplishments in areas such aspsychology.
Chapter4
ends with a section entitled “Why did Jung think he was aKantian?”
Bishop states at the outset that his aim here is to explainJung’s
“confused use of Kant”. He cites several examples ofsuch
usage from Jung’s later writings and claims Jung believedKant’s
philosophy gave him “license” to make “claimsabout a
transcendent realm” [p.189]. This section, unfortunately, ismostly
made up of quotations and is virtually devoid of any real argument. The
conclusion, thatJung’s “philosophical imprecision”
enabled this“self-styled empiricist” to “entangl[e] himself in preciselythose
transcendent notions of mysticism that Kant himself unequivocallycondemned”
(p.192) really just restates Bishop’s presupposition. IfKant’s
philosophical system was meant as a foundation for a newway
of interpretingmystical
experiences such as those of Swedenborg, then the single pillar thatholds
up the whole edifice of Bishop’s argument collapses in a heap.
Assuch, the “make or break” argument of this book comes in
Chapter 5,where Bishop examines Kant’s view of Swedenborg, and of all thingsmystical.
The chapter begins by detailing the eighteenth-century’srejection
of “enthusiasm” as “an epistemologicaldisease”
(p.201), then outlines Kant’s own position on the subject.What
Bishop neglects here is that, especially in the highly negativecontext of the Enlightenment, Kant’s view of
enthusiasm was not asentirely dismissive as it is
often portrayed to be, because the enthusiast andthe
philosopher share a common personality type, and that this accounts
(at least in part) forthe tendency philosophers have
to let their minds run wild in the realm ofspeculation.
(An excellent elaboration of this point is given in GregoryJohnson’s
contribution to Kant’s Philosophy of ReligionReconsidered—Again
[Indiana University Press, forthcoming].) In other words,Kant’s concern about enthusiasm was so great not
because it was somethingfar awayfrom the
truth, but because it was so close to the truth, yetmisrepresents
it. This is precisely the reason Kant became interested inSwedenborg,
to whom Bishop devotes the remainder of Chapter 5.
Afterfour relatively short but helpful sections introducing
Swedenborg, overviewinghis
reception in Germany, recounting the famous stories of Swedenborg’spowers
that fascinated both Kant and Jung, and sketching the context inKant’s life of his interest in Swedenborg,
the core section of thischapter provides a detailed
summary of Kant’s 1766 book, Dreams of aSpirit-Seer,
Illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics. (Kant wrote this afterbeing
one of only four persons who purchased all eight volumes ofSwedenborg’s
Arcana coelestia
(p.220) – another of the seeminglyendless string of
trivial yet fascinating tidbits Bishop has dredged from hiscareful
research.) The four introductory sections present a curious mix ofstatements depicting Kant’s philosophy as a “campaign againstmysticism” (p.224) and confessions that Kant nevertheless“persist[ed] in deploying a quasi-mystical
vocabulary” (p.225) thatled avowed mystics to align
themselves with Kant even within his own lifetime.Toward
the end of his life, as Bishop fully admits, Kant’s writingscontained
at one and the same time, more and more “biblical and theologicalmetaphors [that] ran the risk of bringing him
closer to those who professedmysticism” and harsher andharsher
warnings against the dangers ofmysticism
(p.227-228). How could this be? The clue [see Chapter II of Kant’sCritical
Religion] is that Kantcontinued interpreting
mysticism through the lens of his early assessment of Swedenborg,which itself oddly exhibits this same twofold
emphasis.
Kant’sDreamsuses the problem of how to assess the
validity of alleged experiences ofspirits (or of a
hidden, spiritual world) as an analogy to guide philosophersin
understanding the more general problem of how to assess the validity of allmetaphysical claims. Kant employs athoroughly Critical methodology by first adopting one
perspective (defendingthe mystic’s claims by
explaining how such experiences are possible), then adopting the
opposite perspective (showing howknowledge of
any such experiencesis quite impossible), and finallyadopting a “middle way” – one that focuses on the“practical” and emphasizes the need to honor the limits
of humanknowledge. The perceptive reader of Dreams
who is already familiar with Kant’s mature philosophy can seemany
“seeds” of the latter in the former. Bishop’s 20-pagesummary of the book does
fairly well in this regard. However, he falls prey tothe
tendency many interpreters have had, to view the book primarily as a pieceof sarcastic skepticism, rather than as a serious
attempt to prepare for agenuinely Critical
solution to theproblem of mysticism. Bishop rightly
concludes that for Kant,“Swedenborg’s
work is the product of the wrong kind of intuition”– namely, “fanatical intuition”
(p.244); what he fails tonote that (in keeping with
the analogy in its title), just as Dreams prepares the way for Critical
philosophy by making adistinction between right
and wrong kinds of metaphysics (i.e., based on whether it restson a critique of the limits of human reason), so
also there must be rightand wrong forms of mysticism.
SinceKant believed his philosophy was the foundation
for all future developments ofa correct
metaphysics, he mustalso have regarded his philosophy
as the foundation for all correctinterpretations of mystical
experience. Bishop totally misses this crucial nuance of Kant’s earlyproject. Instead, he ends this section with an
all-too-typical put-down ofJung: after claiming Jung
“entirely overlooked” the three mainaspects of Dreams
(how itforeshadowed Critical philosophy, united
mechanistic and teleologicalexplanations, and
employed a nuanced style), Bishop surmises that “Jungwas unable to follow [Kant], perhaps because he did not
fully understand, thepath of the critical philosophy”
(pp.250-251). Yet Jung did understand a fourth and crucial aspect of Dreams
that Bishop misses: it forges a new path forexamining the nature of mystical experience, a Critical
Mysticism that avoids the pitfalls ofSwedenborg’s
fanatical enthusiasm.
Chapter5
closes with a lengthy and very informative, four-part summary of Kant’sLectures on Psychology, as published in
1889 by the mystic, Carl du Prel.
ThatKant’s main purpose in Dreams was to
provide the foundation for a CriticalMysticism, and
that this aim is fully consistent with his mature Criticalphilosophy,
is demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt in these Lectures, for here Kant
dropsthe stylistic (and self-protective, given the
bias of Enlightenment thinkersagainst mysticism)
sarcasm of Dreams and explicitly honors Swedenborg
as one whopresents the philosopher with experiences
that call for explanation in aphilosophically
responsible way (unlike Swedenborg’s own, fanaticalexplanations). Being an honest scholar, Bishop
does not hide Kant’spositive portrayal of Swedenborg; on the contrary, he openly explains howKant’s theory of “symbolic knowledge” attempted to accountfor such experiences (pp.257-259). He rightly
stresses that for Kant suchknowledge is
epistemologically “inferior” to ordinary knowledge,since
it is a type of conception, not intuition (p.260); but he doesnot draw from this the obvious conclusion, that for
Kant a measured(“Critical”) form of mysticism is acceptable, without requiring
intellectualintuition.
Havingbacktracked from his initial emphasis on Jung all the
way to Kant andSwedenborg, Bishop devotes Chapter 6
to an examination of developments between Kant and Jung, withspecial emphasis given to the origins of scientific
psychology (especially itsrelation to Neo-Kantianism
in Germany) and the parallel development of interestin
experimenting with the occult, both mystically and scientifically. Here, asthroughout this book whenever encyclopedic knowledge of a
broad spectrum oftheories is required, Bishop is at
his best, providing the reader withindispensable
contextualization for understanding Jung’s intellectualdevelopment.
Unfortunately, as elsewhere, this service to the reader is compromisedby
Bishop’s uncharitable assumptions that anything mystical must be“diseased and unhealthy” (p.320), that anything“Romantic” is for that very reason untenable, and
that Kant (unlikeJung) was never really
interested in spiritual experience. That Jung himselfexplicitly
rejected the label “Romantic” as a way of accounting forhis
interest in the spiritual realm (p.331) carries no weight for Bishop;instead, failing to make any distinction between “spiritism” and“mysticism” (see
e.g., p.332), and overlooking Jung’s carefuluse of
Kantian hypothetical (“as if”) language when describingspiritual
experiences (e.g., p.341), Bishop never considers the possibilitythat
Jung might have been constructing the psychological side of the same CriticalMysticismthat Kant had already developed
philosophically.
Thatthe “conclusions” of Jungian psychology “go well beyondKant” (p.350) is only to be expected if, as Jung
repeatedly claimed, hewas attempting to complement
Kant’s worldview by applying it to theempirical field
of depth psychology. The reason “Jung’s world isfull
of mysteries” is not that it stands in “contrast withKant’s
universe” (p.351) – at least, not in Bishop’ssense of
being incompatible with it – but that the two perspectivesexamine
the same reality from two sides, each having the other’s seed atits core.
Bishop’sConclusion begins
by recapitulating his conviction that Jung took over from duPrel
an untenable interpretation of Kant as a mystic, then sketches howJung’s analytical psychology relates to each of six
major developments inphilosophy of science since
Kant’s day. The final section traces theinfluence of
Jung’s notion of synchronicity in recent (post-Jungian)literature,
treating the reader to a veritable feast of some of the mostprofound
and interesting books published over the past 35 years. Because Bishopadopts his usual posture of making fun of Jung
throughout thissection, he must repeatedly confess
the “surprising” (e.g., p.393)fact that most of these
modern classics have regarded Jung’s ideas as supportingtheirown
insights! Again, such overviews of the literature are where thisbook’s
true value rests. The reader looks in vain for the proverbial“forest”
that unites in one idea this myriad of interesting trees.Such
a grand overview is necessary if one is to appreciate how it makes
sense that Jung and Kantcould be such happy
bedfellows; yet one will not find such“Romance” in
Bishop’s work. For better or worse, this is not the long-awaited Kant-JungBook.
Stephen
R. Palmquist
AssociateProfessor, Dept.
of Religion and Philosophy,
HongKong
Baptist University,
Kowloon,Hong Kong
Stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk
This
etext is based on a prepublication draft of the
published version of this essay.
Send
comments to: StevePq@hkbu.edu.hk
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