Tag: Johannes Kepler

Can a Movie Excite an Unexpected Intellectual Adventure?

Consider the political thriller The Eagle Has Landed. There’s a scene where Col. Radl discusses Jung’s concept of synchronicity. For example, a man checking out drops a coin near the register and searches for it momentarily before giving up. Years later, he is at the same store and finds a similar coin. He rationalizes this with a mundane story, not some cosmic notion of fairness.

…Jung was working, in collaboration with Pauli, on his treatise on Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, which was published together with Pauli’s essay on Kepler in one volume. This was evidently meant as a symbolic act: one of the greatest physicists of the century joining forces with one of its greatest psychologists. The result was a stimulating exercise in unorthodox speculation, but at the same time sadly disappointing. It did not amount to a theory in the proper sense, but rather to a universal schema, both very bold and very vague.

Jung’s treatise hinges on his concept of “Synchronicity”. He defines it as “the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningfully but not causally connected events”;1 or alternatively as “a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning2…equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation”.3 This is an almost verbatim repetition of Kammerer’s definition of “Seriality” as “a recurrence of the same or similar things or events in time or space”—events which, as far as can be ascertained; “are not connected by the same acting cause”. The main difference appears to be that Kammerer emphasises serial happenings in time (though, of course, he includes contemporaneous coincidences in space), whereas Jung’s concept of synchronicity seems to refer only to simultaneous events—although he includes precognitive dreams which occurred sometimes several days before the events. He tried to get around the time paradox by saying that the unconscious mind functions outside of the physical framework of space-time; thus precognitive experiences are “evidently not synchronous but are synchronistic since they are experienced as psychic images in the present as though the objective event already existed”.4 One wonders why Jung created these unnecessary complications by coining a term which implies simultaneity, and then explaining that it does not mean what it means. But this kind of obscurity combined with verbosity runs through much of Jung’s writing.

Although Kammerer’s “Seriality” and Jung’s “Synchronicity” are as similar as a pair of gloves, each fits one hand only. Kammerer confined himself to analogies in naive physical terms, rejecting ESP and mentalistic explanations. Jung went to the opposite extreme and tried to explain all phenomena which could not be accounted for in terms of physical causality, as manifestations of the unconscious mind: “Synchronicity is a phenomenon that seems to be primarily connected with psychic conditions, that is to say with processes in the unconscious.”5 Its deepest strata, according to Jungian terminology, are formed by the “collective unconscious”, potentially shared by all members of the race. The “decisive factors” in the collective unconscious are the archetypes which “constitute its structure”.6 They are, as it were, the distilled memories of the human species, but cannot be represented in verbal terms, only in elusive symbols, shared by all mythologies. They also provide “patterns of behaviour”7 for all human beings in archetypal situations—confrontations with death, danger, love, conflict, etc. In such situations the unconscious archetypes invade consciousness, carrying strong emotions and—owing perhaps to the archetype’s indifference to physical space and time—facilitate the occurrence of “synchronistic” events. The appearance of the scarab while the patient was telling her archetypal dream is considered by Jung as an illustration of this nexus. The same applies to the detonations in Freud’s bookcase during Jung’s visit, indicating the explosive nature of their father-son relationship: “Meaningful coincidences which are to be distinguished from meaningless chance-groupings—therefore seem to rest on an archetypal foundation. At least all the cases in my experience and there is a large number of them—show this characteristic?”8

Elsewhere in the essay he writes:

Synchronistic events rest on the simultaneous occurrence of two different psychic states. One of them is the normal, probable state (i.e., the one that is causally explicable), and the other, the critical experience, is the one that cannot be derived causally from the first. In the case of sudden death, the critical experience cannot be recognised immediately as “extra-sensory perception” but can only be verified as such afterwards. …In all these cases, whether it is a question of spatial or of temporal ESP, we find a simultaneity of the normal or ordinary state with another state or experience which is not causally derivable from it, and whose objective existence can only be verified afterwards. …An unexpected [mental] content which is directly or indirectly connected with some objective external event coincides with the ordinary psychic state: this is what I call synchronicity.”9

  1. Jung (1960), p. 441 [ref]
  2. Jung (1960), p.551 [ref]
  3. Jung (1960), p. 435 [ref]
  4. Jung (1960), p. 445 [ref]
  5. Jung (1960), p. 511 [ref]
  6. Jung (1960), p. 436 [ref]
  7. Jung (1960), p. 438 [ref]
  8. Jung (1960), p. 440 [ref]
  9. Jung (1960), pp. 444-5 [ref]
Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence, Picador, 1974 (first published by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1972), pgs. 94-97.

Can a movie trigger an unexpected intellectual adventure?

Usually, when considering this question, you might see a film on a specific subject, then perhaps read an article or try to find a book about it.

In his essay on Synchronicity (Jung’s term for meaningful coincidences of events separated in space and/or in time,1 Jung examined some of the beliefs surrounding apparently related incidents which seem to have no causal connection. These incidents could be, for example, the coinciding of a patient’s dream with an actual event corresponding to its occurring at the same time some distance away, it could be ESP phenomena—response to some event that does not become known through any sense; it could be a horoscope reading which corresponds to the observed character of the individual or his self-image, or an astrological prediction which seems to be borne out in subsequent events. The possibility of finding meaning in these correspondences had tantalized Jung for many years. The beginning of his serious study goes back to the days when Albert Einstein was developing his first theory of relativity. During this time he was a guest on several occasions for dinner in Jung’s home. In a letter on Einstein and synchronicity, Jung wrote: “It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic synchronicity.”2

  1. In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, C. W. 8, pp. 417-531. [ref]
  2. Letter to Dr. Selig dated 25 February, 1953, in Spring, 1971, p. 127. [ref]
June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung’s Psychology, Anchor Books edition, 1973, p. 398.

The Eagle Has Landed begins with newsreel footage depicting Mussolini’s rescue by the Germans during the Gran Sasso raid. This probably inspires the plot to abduct Churchill. Come to the present. Did the operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, stem from this, or is there no causal connection? All of this is the intellectual adventure of Jung’s synchronicity.

Education and Ambiguity Awareness: A Polyvalent World

Sleepwalkers and sleepwalking are both destructive and constructive and show us the ambiguity in all phenomena.

The World War I chronicle of Professor Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, from 2012, is described this way:

On the morning of June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, arrived at Sarajevo railway station, Europe was at peace. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The conflict that resulted would kill more than fifteen million people, destroy three empires, and permanently alter world history.

The Sleepwalkers reveals in gripping detail how the crisis leading to World War I unfolded. Drawing on fresh sources, it traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts among the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade.

Distinguished historian Christopher Clark examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks.

How did the Balkans—a peripheral region far from Europe’s centers of power and wealth—come to be the center of a drama of such magnitude? How had European nations organized themselves into opposing alliances, and how did these nations manage to carry out foreign policy as a result? Clark reveals a Europe racked by chronic problems—a fractured world of instability and militancy that was, fatefully, saddled with a conspicuously ineffectual set of political leaders. These rulers, who prided themselves on their modernity and rationalism, stumbled through crisis after crisis and finally convinced themselves that war was the only answer.

On the other hand, the great science writer and intellectual Arthur Koestler (died in 1983) in his own book, The Sleepwalkers, (originally, 1959) argues that the revolution in cosmology associated with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, et al depended on visionary thinking, a kind of “sleepwalking.”

Lastly, the classic novel, The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch (died in 1851) condemns sleepwalking as the basis of Europe and Germany’s descent into nightmare.

Important works by Broch are The Sleepwalkers (German: “Die Schlafwandler,” 1932) and The Guiltless (German: “Die Schuldlosen,” 1950). The Sleepwalkers is a trilogy, where Broch takes “the degeneration of values” as his theme. Various generations are depicted as sleepwalking through their times and eras without any ability to “see past” their time, place, era. They were “sleepwalking.” This made them liable to demagogic deceptions and recruitment.

On the other hand, the experience and story of Kekulé (died 1896) and his scientific discoveries prodded by dreams and reveries and sleepwalking give us a story that argues against seeing sleepwalking as always negative:
Kekulé’s dream and “good kinds of sleepwalking.”

Friedrich August Kekulé, later Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz (7 September 1829 – 13 July 1896), was a German organic chemist. From the 1850s until his death, Kekulé was one of the most prominent chemists in Europe, especially in theoretical chemistry. He was the principal founder of the theory of chemical structure.

The new understanding of benzene (C6H6), and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be so important for both pure and applied chemistry after 1865 that in 1890 the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate appreciation in Kekulé’s honor, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first benzene paper.

Here Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory.

He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).

Kekulé’s story of “dreaming up” the structure of benzene (C6H6) gives us another historical example of Arthur Koestler-type “good sleepwalking” ie visionary dreams and reveries that really enhance “objective” concrete scientific analysis and not only art works.

It is educational to see the inner ambiguity of words and phenomena (such as sleepwalking) because this duality and “polyvalence” applies to many cases.