Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Whitehead was a mathematician and then a philosopher, spending his career working with abstractions from the physical world and the conceptual world, ultimately building a cosmology. Jung was a psychiatrist and then an alchemist, spending his career working with experiences he himself had with dreams, fantasies and visions, with experiences recounted by patients and alchemists. The raw material is always experience but for Whitehead it was formulaic and logical experience, and for Jung it was mythical and poetic experience. Often the most vivid experiences came from educated but non-academic individuals. 

These two forms of knowing, the rational and mythical, are produced by the same Cosmos and so are sources that can be explored from entirely different perspectives by different temperaments. Indeed, the disposition required for one often precludes exploration of the other. This may be one reason why the hard sciences naturally select for individuals with temperaments unsuited for mythical ideas, and social sciences select for those with a love of narrative. Compare evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists – the former relying on observation with a concrete object of study and the latter relying upon imagination for a purely narrative construct. 

Of course, a myth, such as scientific materialism, is required to tell us what is important to be rational about, and rationality is required to make a narrative, such as the Archetypal Organism, have explanatory value, be self-consistent and judged adequate to our experience.