1. INTRODUCTION
1.3. M ETHODOLOGY
I my research I will use qualitative methodology, that is intercultural hermeneutic methodology as defined by Jos de Mul18. He defines three different types of intercultural hermeneutics: widening of horizons (Schleiermacher and Dilthey), a fusion of horizons (Heidegger and Gadamer) and a dissemination of horizons (Derrida). I will use the second kind of hermeneutics, that is fusion of horizons or constructive hermeneutics, as defined by Heidegger and Gadamer. In contrast to Dilthey’s monological model of understanding,
17 Jung Carl G.: The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 14: Mysterium Coniunctionis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974; p. 419 (footnote).
18 De Mul, Jos: “Horizons of Hermeneutics: Intercultural Hermeneutics in a Globalizing World”, in Frontiers of Philosophy in China, 2011, 6 (4); 628 – 655.
Gadamer supports dialogical model and emphasizes the practicality of hermeneutics. It can be understood as finding a common language or a common understanding between two different cultures.
In this research I will interpret Jung’s synchronicity principle using the theoretical framework of Mou Zongsan’s Yi-ology. As I mentioned in the beginning, Jung was not able to find a suitable framework in Western culture, which would be able to integrate synchronicity principle. And even in years to come, scholars of Jung’s thought were unable to integrate it into the academic world successfully; it remains on marginal position.
Therefore, we have to look broader, which Jung did through studying different cultures, and found the synchronicity at work in Yi Jing. But since Jung’s knowledge about Chinese thought was not satisfactory, he was unable to explain the significance of synchronicity principle using the framework of Chinese thought. This study would like to show that synchronicity principle is not just Jung’s own isolate idea, that was a product of the specific environment, but is actually present in other cultures for thousands of years, therefore is a universal concept.
My research consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, named ‘In Search for The Holistic Paradigm’ I will display the historical, cultural context of Jung’s time and Jung’s personal factors in order to understand the circumstances, which contributed to the shaping of synchronicity principle. There are three main works dealing with the context of Jung’s synchronicity principle: Paul Bishop’s Synchronicity and Intellectual Intuition in Kant, Swedenborg, and Jung (2000), F.X. Charet’s Spiritualism and the Foundations of C.G.
Jung’s Psychology (1993) and Roderick Main’s The Rupture of Time (2004). In my opinion
Main offers the most extensive study on this topic. Comparing to Main, Bishop and Charet limit themselves only to one perspective of the context of synchronicity principle, that is Bishop’s is philosophical and Charet’s is spiritual. Main uses eight major contexts, which influenced Jung. These were paranormal experience and spiritualism, philosophy, astrology, Yi Jing, analytical psychological theory and practice, psychical research and parapsychology, physics, and history of religions and western esotericism. In the last two chapters he adds social, religious, and science influences on Jung as well. I will consider Main’s eight contexts through my own interpretation of contextual factors, which consist of critique of modern western science and spiritual revival of the West. I will also consider the contextual studies by Peter Homans and Sonu Shamdasani. Although studies by Homans and Shamdasani deal with the context of Jung’s psychology in general, it is nonetheless closely connected to his development of synchronicity principle and offer important information about the background on Jung’s notion of synchronicity.
As for Jung’s personal factors I will consider his psychology and synchronicity principle inside the context of Jung’s own “soul searching”. After reading Jung’s work, which is usually labeled as psychological, I perceive Jung and his work as going beyond the existing fields of studies, implementing holistic approach to the understanding of man an nature.
Although his theory started developing from the field of psychology, his studies extended beyond it and reached into the fields of religion, physics, paranormal phenomena, philosophy, anthropology etc. His approach to study of man and nature is holistic, therefore
I perceive him as a kind of shaman of modern era as described by Michael Smith19 in his work Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue (2007).
In the second chapter, ‘Synchronicity as Psychophysical Event’, I will introduce Jung’s definition of synchronicity principle (his later definition) and its main characteristics.
I have to point out the difference between Jung’s earlier and later definition of synchronicity. Robert Aziz20 in his study of Jung’s psychology C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity mentions that Jung’s position on synchronicity principle moved from “intrapsychical model” to “synchronistic model”. At first Jung claimed that symbols are derived "ultimately" from the archetypal unconscious. But in synchronistic model the archetype is not only an intrapsychic reality, it is viewed as being active in nature as well.
Jung's notion of synchronicity does not supersede his individual psychology but extends the archetypal structures of the mind to all of being, which Jung perceived as unitary, a unus mundus, which both suggest the interrelatedness of the individual, through the psychoid factor, with the events of nature as a whole. The inner, archetypal life of the individual as microcosmos participates in these "acausal patternings of events in nature”, which represent
19 C. Michael Smith, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, certified Focusing Trainer, and Member of the American Psychological Association, in private practice in Niles and Dowagiac, Michigan. For nearly 25 years he has been seeking to integrate his own shamanic path of the heart with his depth psychological practice. While his formal education in psychology took place at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Theological Seminary, the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago, and The Focusing Institute of New York, his initiation into the shamanic path began long before with an awakening and the receiving a vision for his life and work in 1969. For the past 9 years he has been in shamanic apprenticeship with the Kichwa Elder and Taita Iachak don Alverto Taxo, from the High Andes of Ecuador. His shamanic experiences also took him deep into the world of Jungian analysis in an effort to understand his own calling and to address his own personal wounds and seek a way to integrate shamanic wisdom with modern depth psychotherapy.
20 Robert Aziz Ph.D. is a psychoanalytical therapist, author and executive consultant within the business sector. He is a Clinical Member of the Ontario Society of Psychotherapists. He is also a full member of the Canadian Psychological Association and the Canadian Psychological Association Section on Psychoanalysis. He is the author of two scholarly books: C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity (1990) and The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung (2007).
macrocosmos. Individuation is no longer to be seen as a personalized quest but as a spiritual challenge to an encounter and integration with nature in its entirety. I will therefore focus on Jung’s Synchronicity model, which interprets synchronicity principle as unifying nature and man into one entity.
It is important to mention Aziz’s change of perspective on Jung’s psychology in his later work The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung, where he accuses Jung of employing strictly a closed system of self-regulating psyche, so-called
“Jungian Paradigm”. In contrast to “Jungian Paradigm” Aziz offers a new “Syndetic21 Paradigm”, which is defined as an open-system model of a psyche in a self-organizing totality, which takes the psyche a part of the wholeness, that is “nature in its entirety is bound together in a highly complex whole through an on going process of spontaneous self-organization”22.
First of all, I do not approve Aziz’s usage of Jungian Paradigm, since Jung was never trapped in a so-called Jungian Paradigm. His thought on psychology kept evolving in his later years. As Richard Tarnas writes:
“Jung’s thought is extremely complex, and in the course of his very long intellectually active life his conception of the archetypes went through significant evolution. . . . In his later work . . . and particularly in relation to his study of synchronicity, Jung began to
21 Syndetic in Greek means bound together.
22 Aziz, Robert: The Syndetic Paradigm. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007; p. 19.
move toward a conception of archetypes as autonomous patterns of meaning that appear to structure and inhere in both psyche and matter.”23
Secondly, Aziz’s later work The Syndetic Paradigm is a complete reverse to his earlier conclusion in C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity, where according to Aziz, Jung with the synchronicity principle acknowledged the interrelatedness of psychic and physical on the way to self-realization:
“The major finding concerns Jung’s concept of ‘immediate religious experience’24, which is now to be taken to refer not merely to an encounter with the compensatory contents of the unconscious, but to a direct encounter with the compensatory patterning of events in nature as a whole, both inwardly and outwardly. With the introduction of the synchronicity concept, therefore, Jung’s notion of ‘immediate religious experience’ is dramatically transformed.”25
Moreover in The Syndetic Paradigm Aziz accuses that “no serious attempts were made, either by Jung himself or Jungians, to incorporate that most significant theoretical step into mainstream Jungian psychology”26. Therefore he completely excluded the revolutionary influence the concept of synchronicity had on Jung’s psychology throughout his work and even more, Aziz fails to mention the important fact of close collaboration between Jung and
23 Tarnas, Richard: The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View. New York: Harmony Books, 1991, p. 425.
24 “Immediate religious experience” as understood by Jung is not confined inside any religious system, but is of individual nature and derived from the archetypal level of collective unconscious of the psyche (and also nature in its entirety if we take into consideration the synchronicity principle).
25 Aziz (1990), p. 222.
26 Ibid, p. 50.
physicist Wolfgang Pauli in searching the point where psychic and physical interact. Aziz in contrast to his earlier work in The Syndetic Paradigm accuses Jung of splitting the inner and outer worlds and focusing only on the inner. He labels this “an impassioned withdrawal into the inner world of the psyche and a Romantic splitting of Reality”:
“Largely as a consequence of its radical, inner- world orientation, largely as a consequence of its disconnection from the outer world, largely as a consequence of its archetypal Romanticism, what the Jungian Paradigm remains, in spite of all stated ambitions to the contrary, is merely a vehicle of aesthetic, rather than ethical engagement with unfolding Reality.”27
This is a strange charge to make against Jung, who on the basis of synchronicity principle suggested the common ground of psyche and matter. In my opinion Aziz’s accusation of Jung’s so called withdrawal to the inner world and Aziz’s own emphasis on “Reality” is an overly simplified contrast.
Aziz in the above quote charges Jung for not providing a finished and consistent theoretical system. I think Jung should be understood in terms of a courageous explorer.
After all, his life work corresponds more to those of the early explorers, discovering vast new regions of the world. Jung devoted his life to the vast unexplored area of the unconscious, developing and revising his understanding as he proceeded. He never claimed to have explored the whole or to have mapped it exhaustively with complete accuracy, and
27 Ibid, p. 81.
he was clearly pushing on into new areas and modifying his understanding in his later years with his writing on synchronicity and the unus mundus.
Even accusing Jungians not developing Jung’s idea of synchronicity further is not justifiable. For example, one of the most known Jungians, Marie Louise von Franz extended and published a number of works on synchronicity and psyche and matter (1974, 1980, 1992). In addition, as of March, 23, 2013, Amazon lists 906 books with synchronicity in the title or subtitle. Given this, how can it be said that Jung’s idea of synchronicity was not developed further?
Throughout the book, Aziz labels Jung’s position solipsistic, archetypal reductionism, pathological subjectivism, and a Romantic attachment to inner worlds:
“In the form of its radical inner-world orientation, in the form of its abandonment of self-regulatory dynamics and, not least of all, in the form of its extreme archetypalism, the Jungian Paradigm, in its treatment of both symbol and life, became /…/ inextricably enmeshed in what I would term a Romantic trap.”28
The charges of archetypal reductionism and a Romantic attachment to the inner world are the result of Aziz’s outmoded, positivistic realism. From this perspective Jung uses more contemporary epistemology.
Another important detail Aziz fails to mention is Jung’s engagement into study of Yi Jing, which gave Jung a theoretical framework for discussing the synchronicity principle.
28 Aziz (2007), p. 12.
Although Jung’s knowledge was not satisfactory to discuss the synchronicity principle from the perspective of Chinese thought, I would suggest Aziz to follow Jung’s vision towards unifying world of psyche and physics through theoretical framework of Chinese thought, where Jung through Yi Jing and other classical texts such as The Secret of the Golden Flower, The Great Liberation, The Awakening of Faith, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, found the foundation for holistic paradigm.
Returning back to the content of the second chapter, that is Jung’s definition of synchronicity principle, I will extract it first from Jung’s own publications on synchronicity. I will also consider Main’s and Aziz’s observations about synchronicity principle and its main characteristics. Secondly, I will also explain the concept of “psychoid archetype”, which was developed by Jung in collaboration with physicist Wolfgang Pauli in order to scientifically explain the unity of psychic and physical on psychophysical point.
In the third chapter, ‘Mantic Method of Yi Jing’, I will focus on Jung’s encounter with Yi Jing. Yi Jing was an important discovery for Jung, because it offered him a method through which he was able to explain his synchronicity principle. That is mantic method. One wonders why Jung did not consider western mantic methods to interpret synchronicity principle at work. He actually did consider Ars Geomantica or the Art of Punctation, which can be found in Robert Fludd’s De arte geomantica. But this method is harder to understand, because its usage was strictly mantic and not philosophical as in Yi Jing, and there are no commentaries like there are in Yi Jing. Another Western mantic method Jung tried is astrology, which in contrast to Ars Geomantica offers commentaries. But his
“Astrological Experiment” described in his essay “Synchronicity: An acausal connecting
principle” did not give him the results he hoped for. Therefore, Yi Jing was considered by Jung as a proof for existence of cultural framework, which is able to accept synchronicity in everyday life, because of its holistic world-view.
At first I will describe how Jung got into contact with Yi Jing, which was through his engagement into Eastern thought and encounter with Sinologist Richard Wilhelm.
Secondly, I will describe his experimenting with Yi Jing, using the method of three coins, and his observations during the experiments. Thirdly, I will also elaborate upon the Young’s critique on Jung and Yi Jing. In his doctoral dissertation Synchronicity and Creativity: A Comparison Between C. G. Jung and The Book of Changes on Causality, Young Woon Ko warns about etic points of view of Yi Jing, as understood by Jung. Last but not the least, I will describe the notion of synchronicity in Yi Jing. Here are relevant the article of Zhang Xian 彰賢29 , where is pointed out that the Chinese principle of ganying 感 應 is similar to the Jung’s synchronicity principle. Another important article is written by Yang Rubin 楊儒賓30, where author among other things on the basis of Yi Zhuan, explains the notion of synchronicity, which is present in the act of divination.
In the fourth chapter, called “Mou Zongsan’s Yi-ology”, I will discuss the content and main characteristic of Yi Jing as interpreted by Modern Neo-Confucian Mou Zongsan.
29 彰賢：〈榮格與《易經》〉，《周易研究》，2003年第2期，頁19－27。
30 楊儒賓：〈從氣之感通到貞一之道 ──《易傳》對占卜現象的解釋與轉化）〉，《中國古代思維方式探素》。
臺北：正中書局，民國85年11月，135 － 182 。
According to Zheng Jixiong 鄭 吉 雄 31, 20th century Yi-ology (Yixue 《 易 》 學 ) represents a new approach to interpretation of Yi Jing, which is not based on traditional interpretation of “respecting the old”, but because of influence of the West became more independent and broke with the limitations of tradition. Author describes three different academic approaches to Yi-ology32: traditional, scientific, and study based on thought. The traditional studies and interpretation of Yi Jing followed two schools, School of Meanings and Interpretations (Yili 義理) and School of Images and Numbers (Xiangshu 象數).
Representative of this approach is Hang Xinzhai 杭辛齊. The second, scientific approach has to directions of development, one is based on historical facts supported by archeological discoveries and historical reading of texts represented by Wang Guowei 王國 維 and his “method of double evidence” (erchong zhengjufa 二重證據法), and the other on interpreting Yi Jing using natural sciences, such as mathematics and physics. In the last academic approach, study based on thought, author points out three different methods of interpretation: derivation method, linking method and integrative method. The representative of the derivation method is Xiong Shili 熊十力 (1885-1968) with his work Evolution of the Cosmos (Qian Kun Yan 《乾坤衍》) where he derives onto-cosmological aspect of Yi Jing. Many considered his work as lacking argumentation and treated it rather
31 In his article Zheng Ji Xiong focuses on 20th century studies and interpretation of Yi Jing which he presented on the Symposium ‘Classics’ Interpretative Tradition in Contemporary East Asia Confucianism’ in year 2000, and was issued in the article under the title “The Periodization and Classification of Twentieth Century Yi Jing Hermeneutics as Observed from Hermeneutical Traditions on the Classics”.
32 鄭吉雄：〈從經典詮釋傳統論二十世紀《易》詮釋的分期與類型〉，《易圖象與易詮釋》。臺北：臺灣大學出
版中心，2004年6月, 13－81；頁 49 – 81。
as manifestation of the content of Yi Jing. And since many interpretations of Confucian Classics by Xiong Shili do not match with the results obtained from factual analysis of texts, many scholars keep distance from his interpretations of classics. The second, linking method, is represented by Zhu Bokun’s 朱伯崑 work The History of Philosophy of Yi-ology (Yixue Zhexue Shi《易學哲學史》), where he makes a research on the formation and development of Yi-ology of different schools through history, focusing on their thought.
The third interpretation method is integrative method, which on the basis of Yi-ology and Chinese thought in general developed new concepts, such as for example Harmony Studies by Zhang Liwen 張立文and the suggestion that Yi Jing’s original thought comes from Daoism by Chen Guying 陳鼓應.
Most of the Modern Neo-Confucians emphasized the content of Yi Zhuan. Yi Zhuan is the
Most of the Modern Neo-Confucians emphasized the content of Yi Zhuan. Yi Zhuan is the