CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

26 OCTOBER 1932
animal as it was in mÖlvdhvra. That is, we meet there all the power which
led us into life, into this conscious reality. But here it is not supporting
mÖlvdhvra, this earth. It is supporting those things which we assume to be
the most airy, the most unreal, and the most volatile, namely, human
thoughts. It is as if the elephant were now making realities out of concepts.
We admit that our concepts are nothing but our imagination,
products of our feeling or of our intellect—abstractions or analogies,
sustained by no physical phenomena.
The thing that unites them all, that expresses them all, is the concept
of energy. In philosophy, for instance, take the example of Plato in his
parable of the cave. 9 He tries by that rather clumsy parable to explain the
subjectivity of our judgment, which is really the same idea which was
called later on in the history of philosophy the theory of cognition. He
describes people sitting in a cave with their backs against the light, looking
at the shadows on the wall, cast by the moving figures outside. Now,
this is an exceedingly apt parable to explain the problem, but it needed
more than two thousand years until that problem was formulated in a
philosophically abstract way in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
We always have the impression that such philosophical or scientific
concepts as energy—call them theories or hypotheses—are perfectly futile
things that change tomorrow, like a breath of air that has no existence
whatever. Yet these are apparently the things sustained and
pushed by the elephant, as if the elephant were making a reality of such
concepts which are really the mere products of our mind. That is our
prejudice—to think that those products are not also realities.
But here is the hitch in the whole thing, this is not so simple. Your
speculations lead to abstractions, and these abstractions you very clearly
feel to be merely your conclusions. They are artificial; you are never sure
that they do exist in reality. But if perchance you should experience in
reality what you have concluded, then you say, “Now this is real, insofar
as my thought is real.” For example, you say, “Tomorrow we shall have a
thunderstorm.” It is not very likely at this time of the year, but from all
the meteorological data you make that conclusion though you yourself
think it rather improbable. And tomorrow we do actually have a thunderstorm,
and then you say, “Is it not marvelous that I came to such a
conclusion? My feeling must be right.” So you substantiate your thinking
in reality, and this reality affects the whole man. It affects you through
and through—you get drenched by the rain, you hear the thunder, and
you may be struck by the lightning—you get the whole thing.
9 Plato, The Republic, book 7, translated by D. Lee (London, 1955), 514ff.
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