World Views (1)
- Feb 4
- 4 min read
By George Elder, 2/4/26
When I wrote in my earlier post on “Fundamentalism” that the “clash between Christian ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘modernists’ is pointless” because they are “trying to live inside a world view that has disappeared,” I was speaking from my own different world view. I could have said they are in conflict inside the same Christian view of the world that still works for them—even though it is no longer meaningful for an increasing number of persons.
Let us acknowledge the obvious, that we all live in the same physical world. The photograph of the “blue marble” of earth taken by astronauts comes to mind as do the spectacular images of our apparently endless universe sent by the new space telescopes. Closer to home, I physically live in the same town as do other people, and you are reading an essay that I actually wrote. That is what our senses tell us.
It is true, nevertheless, that none of us “sees” or experiences the external or physical world in the same way. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said (in the eighteenth century) that we don’t see it at all—oh, it is there as a real “thing-in-itself” but we are always interpreting what we see in order to experience it. We do so by imposing upon sensory data the “rational categories” of the mind—space, time, cause and effect, etc.—that, for all we know, are not actually part of reality itself.
Explaining this as a major shift in epistemology (i.e., how we know anything), Barzun has said Kant is positing a “mind that acts like a waffle iron on batter”—always shaping into a pattern what it cannot know otherwise. Put differently, Kant is positing a subjective “world view” (a term he himself coined as Weltanschauung). He likened his point of view to the cosmological shift of Copernicus—turning everything around from what was previously assumed to be true. It was previously assumed (by the likes of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Locke—not to mention common sense) that the mind passively receives sensory data from the world. Kant says the mind actively contributes to that experience. (See Critique of Pure Reason, “Preface to the Second Edition”)
Jung so valued Kant’s breakthrough that he wrote it is a “threshold which separates two epochs”—"On that threshold minds go their separate ways: those that have understood Kant, and the others that cannot follow him.” (Letters 2.375; see Edward Edinger, The New God-Image, for a thorough discussion.) The point is that a subjective world view is really a psychological world view. And Jung would go so far as to say that, “Psychologically, ‘world’ means how I see the world, my attitude to the world.” (CW 6, par. 322)
That attitude, however, consists of more than Kant’s rational categories of consciousness. There are also nonrational categories within the unconscious mind. Indeed, an unconscious shadow can so distort sensory data that it sees a snake where there is only a rope—or a certain group of people who are a threat when they are only different. The deeper unconscious has its own archetypal categories with what appears to be their own active agenda. They make of us, as we have already heard Jung say, their “involuntary exponent,” like pawns in a great game of chess that we sometimes call Fate.
The Gnostic Monoïmos experienced that agenda as “waking though one would not, and sleeping though one would not, and getting angry though one would not, and falling in love though one would not.” And he called that influence God. Jung calls it the collective unconscious, with its archetypal contents, that we used to call “the gods.” (Elder, The Snake and the Rope, 158)
One can overstate subjectivity, of course. As Jung quips, if somebody loses his money, “he will not be consoled by intellectual profundity.” (Letters 2.595) And even Kant had to look both ways before crossing the street. We have to admit, however, that our bias is almost always the other way around. We think we are entirely objective when we encounter this or that object or thing, engage in relationship, express our likes and dislikes, our politics, our religion or lack thereof. But we are, at the very same time, being subjective—perhaps mostly subjective—and injecting a human psychological dimension that we all know is variable, complex, even unpredictable.
On reflection, we can see that the image of the mind as a “waffle iron” is inadequate, although useful as a start. Because the actual iron is receiving batter from outside and from within, is cooking at different levels, and even changing its patterns in the process! The ostensibly determined rational categories are themselves subject to individual temperament or choice: Freud preferred “cause” to explain his patients’ symptoms while Jung preferred to consider their “goal” or purpose.
This means that—as we cross over the “threshold” toward Kant (and Jung)—there can be no such thing as absolute truth. Our thoughts and statements are always relative. That does not mean, however, that they are arbitrary. As we have just observed, there are still patterns and laws within which we are “contained” (a favorite word in the works of Edinger), constraining us and with which we had best cooperate to live as we are required. Jungian psychology itself is a world view and a container.
Here is a “relative” thought on the subject from Jung (i.e., he may be wrong!):
To make absolute statements is beyond man’s reach, although it is ethically indispensable that he give all the credit to his subjective truth which means that he admits being bound by his conviction to apply it as a principle of his actions. (CW 18, par. 1584)
To the frustration of his critics, Jung is trying here to be “objective” about our “subjectivity”—even though epistemologically impossible since the mind is looking at itself. Nevertheless, if we acknowledge that there is such a thing as subjectivity, it will give us pause. We will not proclaim our truths but merely state them as our subjective “conviction” to which we have arrived given our Fate. We will also find it “ethically indispensable” to live by this conviction, whether it coincides with that of others or not.
Jung is assuming good faith, however, and that the persons he is addressing have sat in solitude with sufficient seriousness and reflected—What is my world view? How has my attitude toward the world been shaped, and is it authentically my own or borrowed? Am I being honest?