Knowledge & Understanding - Jung's Distinction Towards the Individual
Concerning the Ongoing Creep of Social Collectivism
"I reject your reality and substitute my own." -Adam Savage
Should we toss aside our autonomy in favor of an ever-changing reality-by-social-majority, in an almost implied-at-socialization contract as written by the normative institutions and establishments, we lay to waste our abilities as individuals to question social norms, to think thoughts of our own, to live our own lives, pure.
Carl Jung, in his The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society, argues for the distinction between knowledge and understanding, in an effort to demonstrate the pitfalls of deserting the attempt to understand our logos in favor of a blind pursuit of reason in knowledge: "We ought not to underestimate the psychological effect of the statistical world picture: it displaces the individual in favor of anonymous units that pile up into mass formations"1.
Here, Jung argues that operating (as an individual, as a group, or as a society at large) from a worldview built strictly upon scientific knowledge, or from enrollment to the authority of scientific “fact” as synthesized along sociological fault-lines, carries with it the risk of "falsify[ing] the actual truth in a most misleading way". Jung goes on to suggest that "the facts [of the individual] in the light of the ideal average” (now defined as our knowledge of the individual) do not give us a “picture of [the individual’s] empirical reality" when attempting to instantiate such knowledge across each unique individual2. In other words, knowledge cannot completely describe that which makes each individual wholly unique.
Should society embolden it’s predilection towards the installment of knowledge as arbiter of all things past, present, and future, the divinity of the individual consciousness, and our recognition of the historical logos to which our ‘Humanness’ owes thanks, begins to wither. Subscription to this theory of an authoritarian summative knowledge lording over each individual within society echoes the doctrines of fundamentalist papal supremacy that once sought similar levels of control over each life. In this case, the creed is as dogmatic — our newly unveiled empirical understanding of humanity (within our social construct) somehow has determinative control over the input, our special, some would argue divine, nature as wholly unique individuals. More neatly put: not if, then; but instead then, if.
Using this flawed fundamentalism, we may then be meant to accept the implication that we are the mere results of the function of the average of humanity, as modeled in the fields of study we assume to have mastered. An aloof idea, as cocky as it is dangerous.
Jung describes submission this idea, and the inevitable consequences at-large, as the atomization of the individual. With each person having become a completely understood, interchangeable and unfoldable, entirely catalogued piece, all can be deployed towards whatever means is desired by whichever heavy hand who wields control of this new age Philosopher’s stone, saved in .xlsx format.
This alchemy of sorts suggests we've discovered the equation to turn to gold our society and it’s belabored individuals through a stoichiometry of scientific reason, so simply calculated by the thought leaders of modernity whenever a social crisis of identity arises. And were that not enough, it only took a few centuries of Enlightenment to achieve (as the inconvenient history of the surviving logos of humanity predating philosophical, social, and political constructs is subtly swept under the rug).
Building off the supposition that our statistical knowledge as such would enable society to invite-through-explanation an outward source of paradise, it becomes evident that paradise-through-knowledge would only then require each individual to yield to this form of normative, social-majority-fiefdom.
Yet, to employ the theatre of our daily lives, and even the legitimate empirical descriptions of social structures across the relatively short timespans that they’ve existed, let alone been understood, as rationale for the belief that knowledge has tamed the Divine Universe at large (and our place within it) is no small task, nor is it without danger. Still, we are social creatures.
Such a task as to package and sell the world to it’s inhabitants happens by way of prolonged and tenuous cultural massaging, of the atomizing of each individual, with society's eventual submission to self-declared masteries of such fields of knowledge as the end goal. The idea of individuality becomes placed under pressure, leveraged to be dislodged from each human’s being through the collective exaltation of knowledge. Now supplied by reason-based caches of social capital able to be exerted along these nexi of knowledge, "the moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitably replaced by the policy of the State [as demanded by society] . . . The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State"3.
In sum, statistical knowledge and it's heavy-handed application by the state or social-leviathan will have brought the meaning of life to all, which, for whatever reason, those rolled up in the millennia of history seemed incapable of finding, or even drawing a circle around, should commonplace views of the simplicity of pre-Enlightenment minds be reflected in language.
It is a wistful, forgetful twist of the fabric of reality, an ignorance of history, to leverage this new construct of reason towards deconstruction of the individual consciousness, and the ancestral hypostasis to which it owes thanks, through fundamentalizing knowledge, superimposing "trust the science" where "papal authority" once stood, persecuting those within society who fail to fall in line with what knowledge the institutions have ordained and imposed (without even beginning to entertain the notion of corruption within these institutions).
The circle remains unbroken and the lesson appears unlearned, mass-mindedness once again rears its head under the new guise of scientific sovereignty. What then, fills in the blanks where the knowledge of the ideal average of man fails to color?
Carl Jung responds with pointing out that the act of “careful observation and taking account of certain invisible and uncontrollable factors, is an instinctive attitude peculiar to man, and its manifestations can be followed all through human history”4. But how do you measure invisible and uncontrollable factors? How do you quantify, or qualify, such manifestations? What are their source? How can they be understood?
It is in even engaging with such questions that the thinker may then realize — in order to grapple with such questions, there must first be something to grasp for. There must be something to be understood. There must be something of our consciousness which is neither quantifiable nor qualifiable using the tools of knowledge.
This, in essence, is what Jung argues towards — that there exists an essential understanding of life, of man, which helps, and has helped, guide our decision-making across time. Predating concepts such as game-theory, microeconomics, and bookkeeping - predating universities, cities, villages, and language.
It is then this “inner, transcendent experience”5, which Jung ascribes to understanding, that fills in the blanks where our knowledge of the ideal average of humanity fails to color. Where consciousness remains a comfortable mystery, nested within our souls.
Jung suggests that understanding, as a critical component of individual consciousness, is that “which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass"6, the otherwise inevitable collective submission to the seductive reason of knowledge. The general supposition being: There is much more of the ancestral logos packed within our modern consciousness than any of us are aware of, or perhaps even capable of understanding. This makes us divinely unique, an unpackageable individual.
Through honoring the role which understanding plays (and has played) as the staging ground for our capacity to create and destroy, to look and change inwards, to speak freely and even to reason against the current consensus of knowledge (geocentrism! Hah!), we reclaim our sovereign individualism through ancestral logos. This form of understanding is suggested to lie deeply embedded in our consciousness, to be harkened forth through the use of mythological tools and chambers or reflection. Yes, there are even medically demonstrated ways in which the individual can enact consciousness-altering change through spiritual exploration. Jung continues to suggest that such abstract self-understanding, as stored through transpersonal means, may prove as necessary to galvanize the individual against a momentous State which seeks to embolden the role that knowledge plays within each life.
Following the logic that a certain and meaningful understanding of humanity lies outside of the social constructivist’s purview as reckoned in our knowledge, perhaps Jung would argue that we must invigorate a communal recognition of the divinity of the individual spirit. Of the consideration of consciousness and the meaning of myth. Of the discovery of the self.
As such, in closing, it becomes evident that each individual within society (and as a result, society at large) will benefit from encouraging themselves and their network to: cease the pervading creep of intentional or unintentional social engineering, discourage thoughtless submission to collective social authority, consider ways to empower themselves outside of the constructs of cultural institutions, and forfeit no ground in the battlefield of free speech. Lest you’d rather be sent the way of Socrates…
Jung, C. G. The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society. (New York, NY: Berkley Books, 2006), 8.
Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 5.
Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 8.
Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 17.
Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 16
Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 16.
“I know people who read interminably, book after book, from page to page, and yet I
should not call them 'well-read people'. Of course they 'know' an immense amount; but
their brain seems incapable of assorting and classifying the material which they have
gathered from books." - Some dude in the past