Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics

The archetypal semantics of an experiential universe

Bernardo Kastrup

Iff Books 2021

Pb, 141 pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781789045659

Jung might have been horrified by this book. He steadfastly denied that he was a philosopher, insisting instead that he was a rigorous empiricist. Yet many of his conclusions, as Bernardo Kastrup adroitly demonstrates in this important and invigorating book, have unavoidable metaphysical consequences. But Jung was certainly not a systematic philosopher. His metaphysical speculations evolve and are constantly re-cast in often confusing ways. That’s why Kastrup’s careful exegesis, which shows a consistent and thrilling theme, is so valuable.

Jung posited that the Universe was alive – throbbing with meaning. The collective unconscious (which in later life he increasingly identified with God) spawned and cradled both the personal unconscious and the ego-consciousness with which we usually identify.

The architecture of the collective unconscious was, for him, defined by the primordial templates that he called archetypes. Those archetypes affect the organisation of the physical world: the commonly recognised chains of cause and effect aren’t the whole story. This different kind of organisation accounts for the phenomenon we all know as “synchronicity”. Along with many physicists on the frontiers of research, you might well think that it’s a more coherent account of the quantum world than the tired old canons of Newtonian causation. This supplementary explanation for the behaviour of the natural world might, says Kastrup, entail not “relationships of strict necessity, but tendencies, affinities or dispositions instead.” I can see Rupert Sheldrake nodding and saying: “Yes, morphic resonance.”

Jung’s archetypes are closely akin to Plato’s forms. Unembodied abstractions relate in a clear but weird way to the physical world. Human population trends, for instance, are well modelled by equations that include the value pi. Why should the ratio of a circumference of a circle to its diameter relate to the way that humans behave? It’s very odd.

Anyone who knows Kastrup’s work will realise where he’s going with this. Kastrup is the most articulate modern exponent of philosophical idealism – the notion, very roughly, that all is Mind. And he wants to have Jung on his side. But there is no misrepresentation of Jung. For Jung was an idealist too. He believed that spirit, matter and psyche were essentially forms of the same thing – the transcendental being: the cosmic Mind that is the ground and substance of all being.

This doesn’t mean that there is no “real” material world. There is, but it is composed of Mind. In modern parlance, Jung was an objective realist. Nor does it mean – as Don Cupitt and many others have said it does – that Jung thought that religion was “all in the mind”. Religion is indeed about the Mind – but so is everything else, including “matter”. Kastrup’s rehabilitation of the metaphysical coherence of religion might well prove to be this book’s most lasting contribution.

Kastrup’s book won’t be easy for non-philosophers. But it’s well worth the effort.

Charles Foster

★★★★