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By Root 834 0

Jung’s new book led Pauli into a discussion of religion, philosophy, and the meaning of life. Pauli was well-read, particularly in Schopenhauer and Lao-tse on the philosophical side. Indian and Chinese philosophy were much read in Pauli’s circle and Bohr often mentioned Lao-tse, while Eastern philosophy formed part of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s view that Pauli admired. But it was Jung who had really sparked his interest in Chinese philosophy and in mysticism. In Pauli’s view Bohr’s complementarity principle—that the world of elementary particles can be understood in terms of apparently opposing entities, such as waves and particles, actually complementing each other—had been discovered centuries earlier by mystics who believed that reality—though it cannot be seen—can be experienced through the meeting of opposing phenomena. Both the Buddha and Lao-tse taught that one could have a mystical experience without the need for any belief in God. Lao-tse’s invisible reality—the Tao (the Way)—possesses neither good nor evil. Pauli approved this lack of duality, which he deemed very un-Western.

He added, “I must confess that specifically Christian religiousness—especially its concept of God—has always left me emotionally and intellectually out on a limb. (I have no emotional resistance to the idea of an unpredictable tyrant such as Yahweh, but the excessive arbitrariness in the cosmos implied in this idea strikes me as an untenable anthropomorphism.)” To Pauli it was distasteful to attribute human qualities such as consciousness to God or to postulate a fundamentally evil nature in human beings: “I have a Jewish heritage of psychic capabilities, together with a Catholic sense of ritual and ceremony, together with a definite opinion, that the entire ideology of Judeo-Christian monotheism is of no use to me,” he wrote sternly to Jung’s assistant Aniela Jaffé.

Pauli was attracted by Schopenhauer’s inclusion of Eastern religion, particularly Buddhism, in his writings, especially in his meditations on suffering and desire. In Aion Jung speaks of the wheel as symbolizing the cycle of life, an idea “akin to Buddhism.” He criticizes the Christian notion of privatio boni—of evil as the absence of good. Pauli agreed with this, punningly describing privatio boni as “the hole theory of evil” (alluding to Dirac’s early view that antielectrons [positrons] are holes in a sea of negative-energy states). While privatio boni might be acceptable in Catholicism, Jung believed that analytical psychologists had to “take evil rather more substantially….” He points out that “the Christ symbol lacks wholeness in the modern psychological sense…since it excludes the power of evil.”

Both Jung and Pauli steadfastly disagreed with people who rejected God only to replace the concept with another name. Thus Schopenhauer replaced God by the unconscious Will, while Hegel employed “intellectual juggling” to raise the issue to the level of philosophical criticism, thus opening the arena of discussion to a myriad of ideas framed in “the megalomaniac language of schizophrenics.” All this, wrote Jung, led to the hubris of Nietzsche’s superman and “to the catastrophe that bears the name of Germany.”

“‘The world as will and representation’ means nothing else to me than the world as complementary pairs of opposites,” Pauli wrote to Marie-Louise von Franz. Von Franz was a close associate of Jung’s who also sometimes worked as Pauli’s analyst and became his close friend. What Pauli was looking for was a basis for a system of morals that transcended belief in any deity. He looked to Schopenhauer and Jung for how to proceed. Schopenhauer believed that, at a deep level, all individuals were identical—a precursor of Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. If that were the case surely there could be a theory of ethics and morals that cut across cultures. For both Pauli and Jung this topic was more than academic. It was a matter of urgent concern, fired by the terrible war crimes that had been and were being committed against humanity