The Scientist Carl Jung On Science
Science, scientism, and anti-science
- “All science is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all miracles. It is the conditio sine qua non of the world as an object.”
- “Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.”
- “Science is not… a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when taken as an end in itself.”
What is and is not science?
I was talking with someone who, at least initially, offered a relatively nuanced and balanced take on science. He argued that, “It is a good way to solve certain kinds of problems and answer certain kinds of questions. It is a poor approach for others. Assuming that science is a universal good is a fallacy. When you eliminate things that cannot be objectively measured, you often lose important information. Similarly, when you reduce reality to numbers, by definition, you are losing information. For some problems, reducing the problem to numbers is a useful tool. For other problems, it means that you are missing the necessary information.” That’s reasonable. Generally, I agree with that take, but I already can sense in it where my own view diverges, specifically in not defining science as a mere numerical project, as if it’s seeking to turn all the world into bits of data like The Matrix. Plus, he comes across as overly confident. He goes on to say that, “there are few people who understand how paradigm-shifts occur in the hard sciences.” His claim is based on having read one book, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Many people have read that book, as it’s widely known among scientists and the well-educated in general. But this guy seems to think that almost no one else knows about this issue or has thought about it, that he has some special insight that others lack. He believes himself to have, unlike so many who study and practice science, justified confidence in “understand[ing] how it operates, and its shortcomings.” This seems hubristic, possibly exemplifying the smart idiot effect of thinking he knows more than he does.
Going by other comments, I even sense he might be flirting with the anti-intellectual. If with significant nuance as shown in the above quote, he too dismissively criticizes science as nothing other than data collection and analysis that is inherently and inevitably simplistic, as well as often misguided beyond the most mundane applications, the only areas where he deemed it valid and worthy as “one source of knowledge.” He argued that, by definition, it couldn’t be anything more than a statistical product and so it was severely limited in its usefulness, hence not to be held up with praise “as the ultimate ideal,” rather to be taken with automatic suspicion. When I offered a larger conception and vision of science as a counter-argument, he adamantly declared, “What you are really talking about is not science, it is philosophy — it is philosophy that puts science on a pedestal. It sounds like we have a different view of religion, as well. Too much of “science” today is more of a religion than a science. What science can and cannot do is narrowly defined.” Where did he get this paltry, uninspiring notion of large swaths of science as mere faith-based scientism? Anyway, science and philosophy are closely related, as science originated as natural philosophy and as there are philosophers of science. I don’t see the problem. The two have always been intertwined.
This is where our two perspectives diverge even more greatly. He wrote that, “I define science more narrowly than you do, and don’t hold it up as an ideal.” Well, I don’t hold it up as an ideal, yet neither do I disparage it. His worldview seems a bit polarized — science is to be treated as either reductionism or religion, nothing else. From what I can tell, that is what narrows down his mentality in limiting what he can take in. “When I read Abraham Maslow’s writings about his Hierarchy of Needs,” he comments, “I was a Senior in High School. My reaction was that it wasn’t science, but he was correct.” That is not a justified claim. Abraham Maslow was a scientist; specifically a psychologist who researched primate dominance hierarchies, human sexuality, social behavior, self-actualization, peak experiences, being-values, meta-motivation, eupsychia, and organizational behavior and management. His scientific theory about needs has also been scientifically studied by other scientists, with some concluding it was partly correct and partly wrong. But if one dismisses science out of hand, then one doesn’t have to wrangle with such complexities. Rather one just declares something is ‘true’ from an inner knowing. “Some things are a science and some things are an art. Trying to turn an art into a science destroys it. It is clear to me that intuition was involved in the creation of Jungian Typology and the Meyers-Briggs Personality Types. Every attempt to create a science of personality type that I have run into has one thing in common — it den[ies] the existence of my Primary Cognitive Function. It denies the existence of intuition because it is not measurable! That is not a step forward!” According to Jungian typology, he identifies as an intuition type and, apparently, he assumes all of reality must conform to his psychological profile. Anything that contradicts the privileged revelation of his intuitive self-certainty is to be taken as false.
As someone with broad knowledge, I sometimes forget or fail to appreciate how unusual is my wide-ranging curiosity and reading. It can take me by surprise, this kind of narrow-minded view and partly-informed response. Anyone familiar with the long history of science, especially in relation to the lives of scientists and their practices, would know it has always included a broad and diverse set of motivations and mentalities, means and methods: awe, wonder, possibility-mindedness, observation, interviews, contemplation, curiosity, inquiry, exploration, experimentation, innovation, invention, technological development, problem solving, questioning, skepticism, critical thinking, associative thinking, systems thinking, pattern recognition, cognitive complexity, synthesis, imagination, speculation, philosophizing, hypothesis formation, theorizing, model building, argumentation, persuasion, debate, interdisciplinary dialogue, competing interpretations, perspective shifting, paradigm challenging, thought experiments (Albert Einstein), and much else. That’s simply a fair and objective description of what various scientists, as part of a normal human tendency of inquiry, have expressed and done; especially beginning with citizen science as a product of the Enlightenment Age (Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air), such as how the American founders took a scientific approach of study, analysis, and experimentation (Federalist Papers & Anti-Federalist Papers). Most scientists don’t treat science as a religion, if science at its best has an underlying impulse in common with spirituality at its best, that of a humbling openness toward the world.
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Yet I’m not unsympathetic to the concern behind the criticism, if I’d push back against the unhelpful caricature of all science as nothing but numbers and scientific data as problematic in and of itself. Since datasets are just information, one source of scientific evidence among many others, it’s always a matter of how we treat them and what we do with them (Tim Harford, The Data Detective). There are problems, without a doubt. In the formal institutions of scientific authority and power within late modernity, science often has been, unfortunately, reduced to mere materialistic and mechanistic research — maybe that is akin to religion with its Vatican-like structure and clerical hierarchy. Plus, it’s largely funded by and therefore in service to oligarchic big money interests, from transnational corporations to the military-industrial complex (e.g., alliance of big tech and big gov pushing for AI and data centers to further strengthen perception management and centralize social control). But beyond that malignant sphere of anti-humanistic research and development, there are also scientists who sincerely study zoology, archaeology, ethnography, culture studies, political science, cognitive behavior, human development, psycholinguistics, media studies, human and social ecology, synergetics (Buckminster Fuller), ecosystems science, Gaia hypothesis, public health, moral psychology (prosociality), humanistic psychology (potential), positive psychology (thriving), green psychology (holism), 4E cognition, and a thousand other areas — often simply seeking knowledge for its own sake or else genuinely aspiring to human betterment for all.
Many of these other kinds of scientists practice their scientific research and theorizing through diverse approaches, far from limited to only crude numerical measurements and calculations. Some scientists don’t work with data at all, such as many anthropologists living in communities they’re immersively studying and sometimes interactively engaged with through firsthand observation, dialogue, and involvement (e.g., Boasian school of cultural anthropology). Yet when it comes to those like the critic I met, there is no way to argue with them about a topic they apparently know little about nor care to know about nor even is willing to acknowledge. What is most shocking is the critic in question claims to have “loved science” in school and had a talent for it, from which they assert authority to judge all of science. He states that, “Science was one of my favorite subjects in school. That is probably why I understand its limitations so well. Too many people don’t.” He seems to think that taking some science classes when he was younger has given him a special understanding of and secret insight into the entire scientific methodology and paradigm that, to his mind, has fallen into a mire of soul-sucking scientistic dogma. Sure, I might share his downcast attitude about certain areas of science (e.g., replication crisis of nutrition studies), even as I wouldn’t overgeneralize in reducing all of science to reductionism.
What is and is not Jungian thought?
Here is what amuses me. It’s not merely the scientific critic in question is influenced by an early exposure to science but is entirely devoted to studying a particular field of science, that of personality theory. Specifically, his Substack writings are solely focused on Jungian typology, especially that of Myers-Briggs with his favorite thinker apparently being Dario Nardi. Carl Jung, one might note, first worked as a research scientist at a psychiatric hospital, long before having developed his theory of personality types as partly based on his decades of professional work with patients. The MBTI is one of a number of tests, if now the most well known, developed to operationalize this personality typology. It’s been further improved with the MBTI Step II that structures it’s data-based measurements on a gradient similar to trait theory research (OCEAN, HEXACO, etc) and so offers more detailed perspective, as compared to a dichotomous approach that indeed can be reductionistic — ironically, the critic of Jungian typology as reductionist science prefers the far more reductionist early model. If not as common, the MBTI has been used in numerous scientific studies. For example, Dario Nardi is a neuroscientist who, in studies using brain scans, has further developed Myers-Briggs theory in formulating sub-types. Whatever one thinks of Jungian typology and what’s been spawned from it, this area of study is entirely within the scientific fold.
Even before it was formalized as a test, Jungian typology was a scientific theory or else hypothesis. After all, Jung was a scientist, if of an old school variety, who was shaped by the late 19th to early 20th century when his chosen field — medicine, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychology — was still young. He was the perfect example of the promiscuous intermingling of science, philosophy, and art. Over his lifetime, he was influenced and inspired by, sometimes in dialogue with, a wide variety of thinkers — besides those in his own area of expertise, there were: philosophers (Herodotus, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer), philologists (Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Friedrich Max Müller, Albrecht Dieterich, Friedrich Nietzsche), anthropologists (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Johann Jakob Bachofen), ethnologists (Adolf Bastian), mythologists (Karl Kerényi, Joseph Campbell), religious scholars (Rudolf Otto, D.T. Suzuki), Sinologists (Richard Wilhelm), physicists (Wolfgang Pauli, Albert Einstein, Pascual Jordan, Max Knoll, Niels Bohr, Marcus Fierz), etc; including an author (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), a classical scholar (Richard Payne Knight), some mystics (Meister Eckhart, Emanuel Swedenborg), and a priest (Victor White). He also closely followed archaeology, his earliest intellectual love and the field he originally wanted to study, but the University of Basel he attended didn’t offer a degree in it.
As an intellectual slut or, if you prefer, a polymathic visionary, Jung’s brand of science included all of that and he credited these various thinkers in helping to shape his own thought. Even his typological theory was based on ideas and understandings from diverse sources. Certainly, Jung didn’t limit science to only what came from the data of formal research, even as neither did he exclude it. He took his insights from anywhere he could find them. Jung was a scientist who held to that broad vision of scientific inquiry as an overarching human quest for understanding the world and our place within it. Accordingly, he aspired to the practice of studying, learning, and exploring topics for himself. As a case in point, rather than being satisfied by reading accounts of particular tribes, from the New Mexican Taos Pueblo to the East African Elgonyi, he visited them in person to find out for himself. That basic drive of curiosity and inquiry is the heart of science. Considering he very much wasn’t an elitist, one suspects Jung leaned toward an egalitarian sense of who could be a scientist, as opposed to limiting this role to only those high in Ivy League towers and deep within the laboratory bowels of research institutions. After all, it was precisely his no-holds-barred approach in refusing official respectability that has led so many reputable scientists to dismiss him.
So, it’s strange for this critic portraying a strictly data-based science to simultaneously ascribe to Jungian-related thought when Jung himself, in having studied what he deemed the real and autonomous facts of an objective psyche, did not conflate science with scientism. Jung was always one to uphold a greater scientific impulse and worldview, if he also was quick to critique excessively rationalist science that trampled upon religion, spirituality, myth and art. He too was concerned about the misleading consequences of statistical reductionism while, nonetheless, maintaining a distinction. Jung eschewed a strict determinism of statistical cause-and-effect, and he did so precisely on a scientific basis. Partly, he took his lead from the new physics research and theory, involving quantum mechanics, that was arising during his lifetime (first proposed by Max Planck in 1900 when Jung was 25 years old). That is why he was specifically so interested in seeking out the leading physicists of his day, as he wanted to find scientific explanation for what he perceived and conceived of as an acausal connecting principle. In his scientific study of subjective and intersubjective reality, he would’ve found it shocking that, according to this critic, science completely disallowed anything that can’t be reduced to numbers. Without the slightest doubt and uncertainty, Jung asserted that, “psychology is a science and not an opinion.” That would equally apply to his personality theory.
So, why the bad attitude toward science? The critic has dedicated his life to Jungian-influenced science, but he doesn’t recognize it as science and he won’t admit it’s a science, even when one of the main Jungian thinkers he draws upon, Dario Nardi, is a scientist. What is this bizarre schizoid disconnect? As far as I can tell, according to him, all or nearly all science is scientistic in being data-dependent and therefore, since his own preferred field of study is deemed to not be scientistic, the personality theory he has devoted his life to can’t be science — it’s circular reasoning. This seems like a pseudo-intellectual self-defense against anyone who might attempt a scientific critique of his own belief system (scientism?), as he can simply fall back onto it somehow possessing an inherent, unquestioning certainty that is above, beyond, or otherwise outside of all scientific claims of authority and challenge. These are psychological insights that magically transcend or evade any possibility of scientific inquiry and interrogation. One just intuitively and directly knows they’re true. The idea that only other people’s theories are science and thus scientistic is a weird version of claiming only other people’s religion is mythology. [In response to those trying to turn his thoughts into a finalized dogmatic ideology, Jung stated with a sense of relief that, “Thank God, I’m Jung, and not a Jungian.”]
This feels like a person who has become a victim of the anti-scientific rhetoric that floats around these days, as part of politicized and weaponized culture war that has spread mistrust of all official expertise other than whatever authority figures one perceives as legitimate. For MAGA evangelicals, they only trust Donald Trump as their in-house authority figure, with God-like infallibility, upon whose every word they hang. But in the case of this guy’s totalizing faith in a Jungian typological creed around which he has formed his life, he only submits to the aura of authority he projects upon the leading thinkers in MBTI-related theory, taken as an unerring proponents of a doctrine of truth. His denunciation of science, or much of it, as religion sounds awfully a lot like the far right’s own attack on science as religion, since they understand everything as religion. Instead of going further into Jungian typology, he might be better off studying the scholarship, much of it scientific, on rhetoric, persuasion, cognitive biases, and logical errors. But that would first require him to admit, as did Jung and as have many Jungian typologists, that science has legitimacy in understanding the psyche. Maybe first off, he simply needs to go back to the original source of his own model of human reality, that of Carl Jung’s writings. That would help set him straight.
My strong response here comes from having read Jung and studied Jungian thought, including typology, going back to the late 1990s. I cut my intellectual teeth on such scholarship, as Jung and all things Jungian can be challenging material. This area of thought was the first major focus I had when, in my 21st year, I got my own internet connection and a world of knowledge opened up to me. Before doing anything else, I joined a Myers-Briggs typology forum, that of INFP Global Chatter, and thus began a period of deep dive and dialogue. But it was also a time when my interests increasingly broadened toward the scientific, if it was never my forte in formal education. Having been raised in liberal and progressive religion that was critical-minded and science-friendly (Science of Mind, Unity Church), I’ve never perceived that science, intellect, analysis, and thought was in conflict with philosophy, spirituality, religion, mythology, art, intuition, and feeling. In my holistic mentality, it’s all of one fabric (From Associative Thinking to an Associative Society); and such an attitude was very much influenced by a broad, inclusive Jungian approach. I just don’t get what’s to be gained by ideologically enforcing a stark divide. Like Jung, I have no dogmatic loyalty to any single theory or model, always considering any insight or understanding to be provisional and so to held tentatively, to be handled with a light touch.
