137 - Arthur I. Miller [98]
In some ways the “stranger” seems to represent Pauli himself—not surprisingly, for he springs from the collective unconscious, which, according to Pauli, has now been given “a new lease on life.”
Of the stranger, he wrote to Aniela Jaffé, Jung’s secretary:
Like Merlin, he knows the future, but cannot change it…. In my opinion, however, man can alter the “future.”…I want to recognize [Merlin], talk to him again, bring his redemption a little nearer. That, I believe, is the myth of my life.
For Pauli rational methods had reached a dead end and were no longer the tools that would enable him to change the world. Rather, the magical world of Merlin with its search for the quaternity held the key. If Pauli could only come face to face with him, he could “bring his redemption a little nearer” and so, too, with the “stranger” who could not speak a language that could be understood by everyone. Pauli believed that to move forward in examining the human psyche he needed to fuse physics with psychology. This was the “myth of [his] life,” no less heroic than that of Merlin.
In Pauli’s dream, an airplane lands and some foreigners step out, among them the stranger. He tells Pauli, “You should not exaggerate your difficulties with the notion of time. The dark girl has only to make a short journey, in order to determine the time!”
Jung’s interpretation of this dream was that the airplane represented Pauli’s intuition and the foreigners his “not-yet-assimilated thoughts.” The dark girl is Pauli’s anima. She has to “make a short journey,” that is, change her place in order to achieve definite time. At present “she has no definite time,” meaning that she lives in the unconscious. She has to transplant herself “into consciousness in order to be able to define time.” The stranger wants Pauli’s anima—the feminine side of his personality—to study the mathematics of whole numbers which are the “archetypes of order,” in order to understand synchronicity. In this way, Pauli will be able to move toward a unification of physics and psychology, the reverse of Kepler’s materialistic worldview so deplored by Fludd.
Jung concluded his letter with a new quaternary diagram:
Jung’s response to Pauli’s mandala.
In this, Jung takes space and time as complementary. Opposite the causality of physics he places “correspondentia”—the correspondence between the psychological and the physical view of life, including synchronicity.
Back to Bohr’s complementarity principle
Bohr, too, in his view of complementarity had something to say about causality:
The very nature of the quantum theory…forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical physical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and definition respectively.
Classical physics combines how a system develops in space and time with causality (meaning a logical chain of cause and effect). The mathematical structure of Newton’s laws of motion permitted the path of an object to be traced in space and time with, in principle, perfect accuracy, that is, to predict the paths of cannonballs, falling objects, and planets. This is the law of causality. To use it the scientist needs only two pieces of information: where the object was and how fast it was moving when the process began. Knowing that a stone was six feet off the ground and dropped from a resting position, we can predict where it will be as it is falling and when it will hit the ground.
Yet Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle asserts that it is impossible to make exact measurements of an electron’s position and its momentum in the same experiment. Thus according to quantum theory it is an impossibility—an idealization, as Bohr puts it—to combine a description in space and time with causality.
According to Bohr’s complementarity principle, the description in space and time of a physical system