137 - Arthur I. Miller [102]
He concludes that in the unconscious the place of concepts “is taken by images with strong emotional content”—that is, images of archetypes. Thus, the links between sense perceptions and concepts are archetypes—a word used in a similar sense by both Kepler and Jung. One of the forces driving a person to allow these ideas to bubble up from the collective unconscious is the “happiness that man feels in understanding” nature. Thus Kepler’s exuberance over Copernicus’s discovery of the sun-centered universe with its mandala-like quality. And thus Pauli also brings in the irrational, or nonlogical, element in scientific creativity, which he had sought for so passionately.
To put it in Jungian terms, Kepler understood the relation of the earth to the sun as being equivalent to the ego and Self. The ego is in psychological terms the center of gravity of the conscious with all its imperfections, while the Self, the totality of the conscious and unconscious, is superior to the ego and associated with archetypal images such as the mandala. No wonder, Pauli commented, that the “heliocentric theory received, in the mind of its adherents, an injection of strongly emotional content stemming from the unconscious.” Just as the mind gropes toward a state in which conscious and unconscious are balanced so, too, science gradually becomes more balanced between logic and feeling.
But full centering and the achievement of the Self can occur only when the mandala can rotate. As we saw in Chapter 5, Kepler’s mandala lacked the fourth element and therefore could not.
In psychological terms, Fludd offered a more complete view of nature based on the number four, which enabled him to see the world as more than simply a mechanical system governed by mathematics, as Kepler did. Pauli, an astute historian, was well aware of how difficult it would be to put oneself into the mind of Kepler or Fludd, living, as they did, in times radically different from our own. Jung’s work offered a way to understand them as different personality types, “a differentiation that can be traced throughout history,” wrote Pauli. Kepler was a thinking type, who focused on the parts rather than the whole, while Fludd was a feeling type who sought “a greater completeness of experience.” This meant including emotions and the “inner experience of the ‘observer’,” which Fludd did by taking into account the “power of this number”—namely four.
In the end, however, Fludd was on the wrong path. It was inevitable that modern science would develop as it did, in a way that did not bring about the fully rounded psyche. As Pauli wrote: “In my own view it is only a narrow passage of truth (no matter whether scientific or other truth) that passes between the Scylla of a blue fog of mysticism and the Charybdis of a sterile rationalism. This will always be full of pitfalls and one can fall down on both sides.”
Certainly, modern scientists could not possibly revert to the archaic and naive view of nature held by Fludd. Yet the current rationalistic view was also too narrow. The only way to broaden it would be “a flight from the merely rational.” Science is a product of Western thought. To achieve full understanding of the world about us, it requires an equal input of Eastern mysticism. It is necessary to bring together “the irrational-critical, which seeks to understand, and…the mystic-irrational, which looks for the redeeming experience of oneness.” These two forms of knowledge represent the struggle between opposites, which is at the basis of alchemy.
“Modern science,” wrote Pauli, “has brought us closer to this goal [with] the concept of complementarity,” a notion that went beyond the confines of a theory steeped in rational thought. Complementarity offered a view of irrationality and rationality as complementary aspects of the unity of thought.
Ultimately Pauli disagreed