17

Jung and Whitehead: An Interplay of Psychological

and Philosophical Perspectives on Rationality and Intuition

farzad mahootian and tara-marie linn

. . .the unconscious is the residue of unconquered nature in us, just as it is

also the matrix of our unborn future.
(Jung, Psychological Types §907)

introduction
Our approach to Rational Intuition reflects the shared purpose of other
chapters in this volume: to explore and articulate the relationship between
rationality and intuition. Both Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred North
Whitehead were conversant with the history of these terms. In Jung’s
view, thinking and feeling are aspects of what he called the “rational
functions,” while intuition and sensation are aspects of the nonrational, or
what he called the “irrational functions” of the psyche – where psyche refers
to “the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious”
(Jung, 1921, p. 463 §797). Whitehead’s philosophy emphasized feeling over
the other functions. In their discussion of traditional mental functions, both
followed the general direction laid out by Aristotle and the epistemological
traditions that grew out of his writings on logic and rhetoric.1 However, each
introduced innovations in order to address specific philosophical issues of
interest to them.
Terms such as intuition, sensation, feeling, and thinking have a very long
history in both common language and the technical discourse of philoso-
phy. A comparison of Jung and Whitehead on the issue of rational intuition
in the span of a single chapter is challenging, given the divergence of their
original and sometimes idiosyncratic use of terms. Looking beyond obvious
differences, certain features of their intellectual stance reveal agreement in
spirit: both delighted in openly exploring a given topic in the course of
explaining it; their thoughts often recurred to the unresolved complexities

395

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 396 Farzad Mahootian and Tara-Marie Linné

they have created in framing the topic; and both were unrelentingly empiri-
cal. Both men were concerned about the polarities generated by the
European Enlightenment, both strove to heal the bifurcation of human
life into mental and physical realms.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) began as a theoretical mathematician
whose Principia Mathematica marked the end of a line in early 20th-century
logic, philosophy, and mathematics.2 He crossed oceans of discourse and
academic culture, leaving a Cambridge post in mathematics in the United
Kingdom to join the philosophy faculty of Harvard in Boston. He then turned
his attention to speculative philosophy of science to explicate a process-based
metaphysics and cosmology as an alternative to the dominant substance-
based cosmology that has held sway in philosophy and science since the
17th century. Even though the leaders of the scientific revolution believed that
they had overturned ancient thought, Whitehead’s analysis of the history of
science proposed that substance metaphysics continued to shape the most
basic categories of modern thought. His outlook, like Jung’s, balanced an
adventurous speculative spirit with a radical empiricism that admitted the full
spectrum of experience, no matter how seemingly insignificant or strange.
Whitehead’s “organic” philosophy is based in the universal applicability of a
metaphysics of experience.3
Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), a Swiss psychotherapist and psychiatrist,
was one of the early founders of psychoanalysis along with Sigmund Freud.
Jung’s research demonstrated the existence and importance of the uncon-
scious dimensions of the human mind. Jung was interested in exploring
religion, mythology, philosophy, literature, art, dreams, mysticism, and
nontraditional areas of psychic functioning. As a forerunner of interdisci-
plinary thinking, he challenged empirical science to expand its preconcep-
tions of the limits of knowledge by traversing the terrain between
established disciplines. Eventually, Jung broke from Freud’s tradition to
develop his own school of thought, which he named analytical psychology.
Jung provided a larger paradigm and wider conceptual stratum of the
psyche through an archetypal context. Carl Jung was an extraordinary
explorer of the human psyche, and studied extensively his own psycholog-
ical processes.4 His theoretical psychology assumed a radical monism
underlying the apparent split of psyche and matter.
Both Jung and Whitehead believed that higher and more complex
mental functions emerged from lower, simpler forms and that consciousness
and cognitive functions are outgrowths of unconscious, noncognitive pro-
cesses. Though they used the terms differently, both gave feeling and
intuition central roles in their systems of thought. For Jung, intuition was

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 Jung and Whitehead 397

central in that it is one among the four main psychological functions of

consciousness and at the same time plays a key role in the balance and
integration of consciousness with the unconscious in order to fulfill what for
Jung was the highest state of psychological health via the process of indivi-
duation. In Whitehead’s case, feeling was the central concept: it is the basic
activity common to all entities, living and nonliving, conscious or not. His
extension of the term beyond its normal usage enabled a process-based
metaphysical integration of entities at every scale of organization.
As we shall see, Jung and Whitehead believed that feeling is an evalua-
tive, selective, and thus rational function. Regarding intuition, both agreed
that it does in some sense precede logical inference and discursive thinking.
However, Jung’s innovations with regard to his theory of psychological
types and the process of individuation gave intuition additional capacities
that cause it to deviate somewhat from standard usage in interesting ways.
Whitehead, on the other hand, followed the classical usage and spent less
time on intuition but distinguished its active and passive modes in ways and
for reasons that are significantly similar to Jung’s approach.

carl jung and analytical psychology

In broadening the parameters of the unconscious to include “collective”
contents in addition to Freud’s personal unconscious (Jung, 1960, pp. 133–134,
§270), Jung’s ideas went beyond neurosis to the envisagement of universal
psychic processes ranging from psychopathology to psychological integra-
tion. Jung’s work culminated in his belief that we are on a psychological
journey evolving toward “wholeness,” a concept he introduced into modern
psychology as the “process of individuation” (Jung, 1954, p. 102, §219; Jung,
1960, p. 292, §557). One of his greatest achievements was the recognition
that mental health necessitates the integration of the dynamic and inter-
dependent relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. He
posited that “the unconscious is. . . the basis and precondition of all
consciousness. . .It is psychic life before, during, and after consciousness”
(Jung, 1954, p. 34, §61). Jung had essentially discovered and began to explore
the unconscious energetic constellations5 that dwell in the deeper recesses of
the human psyche. He recognized that these complexes, or “archetypes,”
shape perception and action, and are richly expressed in world mythology.
Jung stated, “The unconscious psyche must consist of inherited instincts,
functions, and forms that are peculiar to the ancestral psyche. This collective
heritage is by no means made up of inherited ideas, but rather of the
possibilities of such ideas – in other words, of a priori categories of possible

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 398 Farzad Mahootian and Tara-Marie Linné

functioning” (Jung, 1954, p. 34, §61). Although its general epistemic function
is similar, Jung’s sense of a priori categories went far beyond Kant’s original
sense of the term.6
Jung asserted that what Freud referred to as the “ego” is only a small
aspect of the psyche. Furthermore, he purported that transformative expe-
riences that involve a loosening or even dissolution of ego consciousness can
lead to reconstruction, expansion, and rebalancing of the psyche. In Jung’s
model, the Self is the center and circumference of the total personality,
conscious and unconscious (Jung, 1954, p. 102, §219), and self-actualization
is the apex of psychological development (Jung, 1921, p. 460 §789; Jung,
1961, p. 398).
Jung held that certain processes such as psychotherapy help one along
the path of psychological development by changing and expanding con-
sciousness. Although Jung relegated the ego to a smaller portion of the
overall psyche, he believed that optimum personality integration was further
achieved by creating communication between the conscious and uncon-
scious via the ego complex. As such, he encouraged therapeutic methods
that give expression to intrapsychic complexes and engender interactional
dialogue. His specific techniques of active imagination and dream interpre-
tation help foster the ongoing transformative dialogue between the uncon-
scious and conscious aspects of the psyche (Jung, 1961, p. 161). This process
evokes the transcendent function that establishes an emergent third per-
spective within egoic consciousness, issuing from the dynamic balance
between dualities. According to Jung, the process of individuation involves
integrating complementary opposites for the purpose of achieving an opti-
mum state of balance and harmony7 between, for example, persona and
the shadow, unconscious gender qualities and one’s conscious gender traits,
more developed egoic function and the inferior egoic functions, and so
forth, as will be discussed.
According to Jung’s model of the psyche (Jung, 1968: 49), the four
typological functions interact in dynamic equilibrium, operating as a per-
meable membrane between a person’s inner and outer worlds. Jung called
this the “ectopsychic” sphere of egoic consciousness. “[T]he four orienting
functions naturally do not contain everything that is in the conscious
psyche. Will and memory, for instance, are not included” (Jung, 1921,
p. 554, §984). Other functions, such as memory, body awareness, processes
of judgment, emotions, and so on, comprise the “endopsychic” sphere,
which is also considered an egoic dimension. Beyond the ego complex we
encounter material residing in the personal and collective unconscious. As
such, the endopsychic and ectopsychic spheres comprise the conscious

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 Jung and Whitehead 399

(egoic) dimension, and the personal and collective unconscious domains

together comprise the unconscious. All models are necessarily partial and
hide as much as (and usually more than) they show. It serves us well to
understand that this is a static model of a dynamic system. In other words,
these are only potentially conscious functions, especially when one consid-
ers the eruptive, sometimes disruptive effect of the inferior function.

jung’s typology
Jung’s division of the psyche into dualities led him to produce a typology
framework of personality characteristics that are present in all persons to
varying degrees. In his classic, Psychological Types (1921), he further differ-
entiated the four ego functions according to how they are expressed through
two psychological “attitudes,” an extraverted and an introverted form.8 A
recent study of the correspondence of Jung with Hans Schmid-Guisan from
1915–16 (Beebe & Falzeder, 2013) shows Jung’s refinement of the two atti-
tudes and four functions as pairs of opposites. This was a pivotal episode in
the long process of developing a sophisticated typology. Interestingly,
intuition only entered Jung’s mature typology after he adopted Maria
Moltzer’s introduction of it as a new function in 1916.9
Von Franz described the four central functions of sensation, intuition,
thinking, and feeling as providing a “basic orientation for the ego in the
chaos of appearances” (Von Franz, 1975: 47). Jung likened these to “the four
points of the compass,” which together describe “a kind of totality.”
Sensation establishes what is actually present, thinking enables us to
recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and intuition points to
possibilities as to whence it came and whither it is going in a given
situation. (Jung, 1921, pp. 540–541, §958)
Existence, meaning, value and possibility. . .Jung presented each func-
tion as a distinct and orthogonal mode of interaction with the world, which
nevertheless operate simultaneously as “a kind of totality.” This totality
emerges from the process of individuation, which strives to integrate and
balances all four functions.10
Despite their mutual bonds, the four functions are complementary in a
manner similar to Bohr’s sense11: opposing functions (e.g., thinking and feel-
ing) are mutually exclusive, such that both cannot be fully operative at the
same time for the same subject. For example, an exaggerated thinking func-
tion would diminish the expression of the feeling function; an exaggerated
sensing function would diminish intuition, and vice versa. Yet, each function

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 400 Farzad Mahootian and Tara-Marie Linné

is a necessary part of the complete description of the personality. For, as Jung

observed, “we know that a man can never be everything at once, never quite
complete. He always develops certain qualities at the expense of others, and
wholeness is never attained” (Jung, 1921, p. 540, §955). Jung found examples of
this totality in world literature but also sought to express it philosophically as a
metaphysical monism, that is to say, the unus mundus, and psychologically as
a sense of the wholeness, in other words, the Self.12
According to this theory, everyone differentiates one of these functions
more than the others and relies on it for adaptation to conditions. Jung
stipulated “. . .since it is a vital condition for the conscious process of
adaptation always to have clear and unambiguous aims, the presence of a
second function of equal power is naturally ruled out” (Jung, 1921, p. 405,
§667). Von Franz stated that usually a second and sometimes a third
function may also be developed to a lesser degree, but the fourth (opposite
of the main function) remains mostly unconscious which is why Jung
named it the “inferior function” (Jung, 1975, pp. 47–48). The superior
function, Jung stated,
is the most conscious one and completely under conscious control,
whereas the less differentiated functions are in part unconscious and far
less under the control of consciousness. The superior function is always an
expression of the conscious personality, of its aims, will, and general
performance, whereas the less differentiated functions fall into the category
of things that simply ‘happen’ to one. (Jung, 1921, p. 340, §575)
With regard to the inferior function, Jung asked, “what happens to those
functions which are not consciously brought into daily use and are not
developed by exercise?”
They remain in a more or less primitive and infantile state often only half
conscious or even quite unconscious. These relatively undeveloped func-
tions constitute a specific inferiority which is characteristic of each type
and is an integral part of his total character. The one-sided emphasis on
thinking is always accompanied by an inferiority of feeling, and differ-
entiated sensation is injurious to intuition and vice versa.
(Jung, 1921, p. 540, §955)

Thinking and Feeling

As defined by Jung, thinking is
the psychological function which, following its own laws, brings the
contents of ideation into conceptual connection with one another. It is

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 Jung and Whitehead 401

an apperceptive activity, and as such may be divided into active and

passive thinking. Active thinking is an act of the will, passive thinking is a
mere occurrence. . . Active thinking [involves submitting] the contents
of ideation to a voluntary act of judgment. . . [and] corresponds to my
concept of directed thinking [. . .] I call directed thinking a rational
function, because it arranges the contents of ideation under concepts in
accordance with a rational norm of which I am conscious.
(Jung, 1921, pp. 481–482, §830–2)
It is essential to note here that Jung defined thinking and feeling as both
“rational” functions in that “the thinking function . . . [is the means by]
which our conscious ego establishes a rational (that is, in accord with reason
in general) logical order among objects. . . . [whereas,] the feeling
function . . . rationally establishes or, alternatively, ‘selects’ hierarchies of
value” (von Franz, 1975, p. 46). The feeling function poses the question: what
is this worth? Is this more important than that? We ascertain the value of
phenomena in the outer world through our internal experience of feelings,
positive and negative, which thereby enable us to order and prioritize; the
feeling function is evaluative. Jung emphasizes that the rational basis of the
feeling function can only be discerned by first differentiating it from intu-
ition and sensation.

Intuition and Sensation

Jung often characterized the rational functions as judging, and the irrational
ones as perceptive:
Feeling values and feeling judgments. . .are not only rational but can also
be as logical, consistent and discriminating as thinking. . .When we
think, it is in order to judge or reach a conclusion, and when we feel it
is in order to attach a proper value to something. (1921, p. 539, §953)
Furthermore,
Both intuition and sensation . . . are functions that find fulfillment in the
absolute perception of the flux of events. Hence, by their nature they will
react to every possible occurrence and be attuned to the absolutely
contingent, and must therefore lack all rational direction. For this reason
I call them irrational functions, as opposed to thinking and feeling, which
find fulfillment only where they are in complete harmony with the laws
of reason.” (1921, p. 455, §776)
With the heightened use of the intuitive faculty, aspects of other func-
tions may be downplayed. The judging process linked to the rational

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 402 Farzad Mahootian and Tara-Marie Linné

functions is comparatively relaxed. Jung (1921, pp. 370–371, §616) described

the configuration like this, “[the irrational functions] have a decided advant-
age over the [rational functions]” because they process all occurrences,
those conforming to reason and those that do not. Jung referred to this as
a “perception of accidentals”; whereas, the rational functions filter reality for
occurrences accessible only to reason and lawfulness. The irrational func-
tions “subordinate judgment to perception. . . [and] base themselves exclu-
sively on experience – so exclusively that, as a rule, their judgment cannot
keep pace with their experience” (Jung, 1921, p. 455, §776).
Jung’s formulation of typology informs our understanding of the con-
cept of intuition in two important ways: (1) All individuals will demonstrate
a particular level of development of the intuitive function, moving along a
spectrum of differentiation, and (2) regardless of the extent of its differ-
entiation, the intuitive faculty in all individuals will be counterbalanced by
multifarious combinations of the other three main egoic functions (think-
ing, feeling, sensation), each of which is likewise developing along a
continuum.13

integration of the four functions

The Integration of the Psyche Occurs at Different Scales

The integration of the four main functions of the ego is an important aspect
of the overall individuation process, which involves all levels of the psyche.
The four functions interact in an attempt to equilibrate. Integration at this
egoic level also entails balancing the superior function with the inferior
function. The paths of individuation are as diverse as the number of
individuals that follow the process “through the opposites.” Individuation
requires integration at the level of the ego and at the level of the overall
psyche. For example, integrating key opposites beyond those of the con-
scious ego include persona with the shadow, conscious gender qualities with
one’s unconscious gender traits, etc. According to Jung, the inferior func-
tion for each individual, and intuition for all individuals, play an indispen-
sable and central role in initiating and mediating the integration of the
entire psyche. The burning question remains, Why and how is the inferior
function in a special position to accomplish this feat?
When a function that should normally be conscious lapses into the uncon-
scious [i.e., becomes archaic] its specific energy passes into the uncon-
scious too. A function such as feeling possesses the energy with which it is
endowed by nature; it is a well-organized living system that cannot under

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 Jung and Whitehead 403

any circumstances be wholly deprived of its energy. So with the inferior

function, the energy left to it passes into the unconscious and activates it in
an unconscious way, giving rise to fantasies on a level with the archaicized
function. In order to extricate the inferior function from the unconscious
by analysis, the unconscious fantasy formations that have now been
activated must now be brought to the surface. The conscious realization
of these fantasies brings the inferior function to consciousness and makes
further development possible. (Jung, 1921, pp. 450–451, §764)
According to von Franz (1975, p. 47), “intuition is not identical with
fantasy which Jung regards as a human capacity independent of the func-
tions, just as the will is.” Von Franz wrote in an attached footnote, “Fantasy
can find expression via thinking, feeling, intuition and perceptions and is
therefore probably an ability sui generis, with deep roots in the uncon-
scious.” Although fantasy and intuition are different functions, the mechan-
ics and relation to the unconscious is similar. The creative and
transformative processes that spring from the deep well of the unconscious
open the receiver at each moment to alternative, possible arrangements
inherent within the subjective experience of the amalgam and flow of space
and time. These possibilities are, otherwise, overlooked by more constricted
and oblivious states of consciousness. This requires an expanded awareness
of choice within the egoic dimension of consciousness, and a corresponding
acceptance of responsibility for ones actions that in turn influence the
overall flow.
These processes can lead to many different outcomes, including practical
insights, radical innovations, or personal growth. Promptings from the
unconscious can occur through the intuitive function. Jung described intu-
ition as the function that is most closely connected to the unconscious for all
individuals, regardless of the extent to which they have developed it.
Intuition in all its variations is strongly cathected to the unconscious
because, as we have previously noted, it derives its perceptual data via the
unconscious. As such, promptings from the unconscious frequently occur
through the intuitive faculty and/or through the inferior function, as Jung
noted, the mechanics involved in each of these processes is quite similar.
We conclude this section with an observation about the multiple levels at
which intuition can operate. It is important to understand that integration
of the four main functions is mediated by intuition at the scale of the ego. But
intuition can also function as a mediator in the higher-level integration that
occurs between consciousness as a whole and the unconscious in which it is
embedded: there is a shift in scale of interaction from the ego to what Jung
called the Self.14 The capacity to operate on multiple scales is in keeping with

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 404 Farzad Mahootian and Tara-Marie Linné

intuition’s capacity for seeing future possibilities, especially those emerging

from the unconscious. Jung noted, “The intuitive function is represented in
consciousness by an attitude of expectancy, by vision and penetration . . .”
(1921, p. 366, §610). It was clear to Jung that the interaction of the psycho-
logical type functions within each individual was a complex affair analogous
to the mixing and blending of the reactive, transformative processes evi-
denced in the alchemical vas. He identified the
imaginative activity of . . .intuition, without which no realization is
complete. . . [in the final stage of the alchemical process]. Intuition
gives outlook and insight; it revels in the garden of magical possibilities
as if they were real. Nothing is more charged with intuitions than the
lapis philosophorum. This keystone rounds off the work into an experi-
ence of the totality of the individual. (Jung, 1954, p. 281, §492)
We shall revisit the imaginative activity of intuition in opening new
possibilities, at the end of this chapter. For now, as we move on to examine
the history of scientific thinking, let us keep in mind the function of the
inferior function in alerting us, sometimes forcibly, to the lack of balance
that follows from overvaluing any one function over the others.
The inferior function . . .is not at the disposal of the conscious mind, and
even after long use it never loses its autonomy and spontaneity. . .it hits
consciousness unexpectedly, like lightening, and occasionally with dev-
astating consequences. It thrusts the ego aside and makes room for a
supraordinate factor, the totality of a person, which consists of conscious
and unconscious and consequently extends far beyond the ego.
(Jung, 1959, pp. 303–304, §541)
Jung’s admonition about the inferior function also applies beyond the
scale of the individual psyche: “History teaches us over and over again that,
contrary to rational expectation, irrational factors play the largest, indeed
the decisive, role in all processes of psychic transformation” (Jung, 1956,
p. xxvii). We should bear this in mind in the following section as we
consider Whitehead’s critique of science, which focused not on the individ-
ual level of the psyche, but at the collective level of history, and beyond both
to the level of the cosmos.

jung and whitehead on scientific thinking

Written in 1925 in the midst of two great revolutions in physics, Science and
the Modern World is Whitehead’s critique of the emergence of scientific
thought from the European renaissance forward. The deficiencies,

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 Jung and Whitehead 405

strengths, and possibilities of science occupy the chapters of this somewhat

unusual work of improvisational philosophy.15 Whitehead begins his his-
tory with a note on ignorance: we are asked to consider the “provincialism”
(Whitehead, 1925, p. vii) of science, implying at least three critiques. First,
the historicity of science restricts it to a position on the timeline of history,
where it is defined not only by what it knows but also by what it does not
know. Second, there is a general lack of attention, or interest, in anything
that deviates from the established paradigms of science at any given time.
Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, science lacks a strong self-reflexive
awareness regarding its own provincialism.
In his overall assessment of the sciences, Whitehead made a statement
with which Jung would agree: despite the fact that science is a highly
intellectual activity, its historical development is to a significant extent,
unconsciously driven.16 Whitehead configured intuition and rationality as
complementary functions within the relationship between philosophical
and scientific thinking:

Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its

function to harmonise, re-fashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to
the nature of things. . . Its business is to render explicit, and – so far as
may be – efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed
without rational tests. (Whitehead, 1925, p. xii)

In Jung’s words, science cannot help but include irrational factors

because of how scientific thinking works: it is necessarily selective and, as
Whitehead put it, abstractive.

A completely rational explanation of an object that actually exists (not one

that is merely posited) is a Utopian ideal. Only an object that is posited can
be completely explained on rational grounds, since it does not contain
anything beyond what has been posited by rational thinking. Empirical
science, too, posits objects that are confined within rational bounds,
because by deliberately excluding the accidental it does not consider the
actual object as a whole, but only that part of it which has been singled out
for rational observation. (Jung, 1921, pp. 454–455, §775)

Whitehead argued that philosophy is not only the critic of cosmologies, it

is also the “critic of abstractions” (Whitehead, 1925, p. 59). In relation to a
given actual object, an abstraction is an image, a map or schematic: a
simplification that captures some of the important facets of the entity
while excluding others. Philosophy must attend to occasions on which an
abstraction is mistaken for the actual entity from which it was abstracted.

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 406 Farzad Mahootian and Tara-Marie Linné

Whitehead called this misidentification the “fallacy of misplaced concrete-

ness,” and considered it the most pervasive and insidious error of thinking
(Whitehead, 1925, p. 51). The fallacy represents retrograde intellectual activ-
ity: going against better judgment and rationality. It is not irrational in the
way that Jung intended this term: an “existential factor [that surpasses] our
powers of comprehension, the limits of rational thought being reached long
before the whole of the world could be encompassed by the laws of reason”
(Jung, 1921, pp. 454–455, §775). The fallacy of misplaced concreteness
expresses ignorance of limits, an ignorance of the difference between that
which it posits and that which exists.
Whitehead’s position is consistent with Jung with regard to the fact that
abstraction is a necessary vice; one cannot think without abstractions
(Whitehead, 1925, p. 59). But Whitehead believed it is a vice that can be
checked and adjusted through self-reflection. It is this insight that led him to
comfortably claim that “the history of scientific ideas is a history of mis-
takes” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 25). His history of the origins of modern science
is an attempt to recover the shadow (a Jungian term designating undevel-
oped or rejected aspects) of science, that is to say, what was discarded during
the 16th–19th centuries. In the sections that follow, we present a summary of
the mainstream scientific worldview of the period, followed by Whitehead’s
analysis of what was missing, together with a discussion of his alternative.

whitehead’s critique of the dualism

of modern science
Whitehead traced the climate of opinion from the 16th to the 20th century
to understand the origins of the dualistic split between mind and body, or as
Jung put it, psyche and matter. To the question, “what is nature?” the most
prominent thinkers of the time answered: “matter in motion.” Rene
Descartes’17 metaphysical dualism posited that there were two kinds of
substance, mind (immaterial, indivisible, and lacking spatial dimension)
and body (material, spatially extended, divisible). The central paradigm for
thinking about nature, namely materialistic mechanism was well established
by the mid-17th century and canonized in Newton’s idea of science by the
18th century.18 Isaac Newton (1642–1727) used Descartes analytic geometry
and his own invention, the calculus, to simplify nature into something that
could be understood as point masses distributed over points of space at
instants of time. According to this scheme of thought, mass, space, and time
were dubbed the “primary qualities” of nature and considered to be objec-
tive, that is, mind independent. All other qualities, such as colors, sounds,

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 Jung and Whitehead 407

and the pleasure, goodness, and beauty associated with these, were called
“secondary qualities” and treated as mind-dependent, in other words, as not
really existing in nature but figments of the imagination.
This worldview, which holds that nature itself has no intrinsic value,
direction, or purpose, is the direct result of the split between mind and body:
the body is stripped of all mentality. In such a system, all values are
subjective, arising solely from the mind and lacking any objective founda-
tion in nature. Whitehead wryly noted that according to the materialistic
mechanical conception of nature, “the poets are entirely mistaken,” we must
congratulate our minds for the rose’s lovely scent, the nightingale’s beautiful
song. By contrast, “Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless:
merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly” (Whitehead,
1925, p. 54).
In short, the mechanistic worldview completely disregards the possibility
of psychological facts on a par with physical facts, and considers moral and
aesthetic values are purely subjective and merely secondary. True, over the
past three centuries many of the so-called secondary qualities have sub-
mitted, to some extent at least, to quantification: color and sound were
analyzed by means of wave and particle models, olfactory and taste gave way
to chemical models, tactile sensations were analyzed electrically. But moral
and esthetic values and other psychological facts are not readily quantifi-
able. Even after the 1990s “Decade of the Brain,” they seem irreducibly
subjective. In a world where science corners the market on truth and reality,
that is, in a world under the spell of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,
such qualities seem less real than atoms and less true than equations.

whitehead roots out an alternative

In rooting out the source of this trend and searching for an appropriate
alternative, Whitehead highlighted key moments of self-doubt in the midst
of the “Century of Genius” and the “Enlightenment,” expressed by John
Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776), the central founders of
empirical philosophy. According to standard empiricist epistemology, sense
data are the ultimate source of all knowledge; furthermore, the senses
operate as purely passive recorders. Locke’s notion of mind as a blank
slate (tabula rasa) arose from this basis; he explicitly denied the existence,
and even the possibility of innate ideas. Despite the clarity of these dogmas,
Locke and Hume could not ignore the exceptions they discovered and, in
their intellectual honesty, did not redact from their writings.19 The upshot of
Whitehead’s critique was that these exceptions were significant and

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 408 Farzad Mahootian and Tara-Marie Linné

foundational: contrary to empiricist dogma, some contents of experience do

not come from the senses. This is similar to Immanuel Kant’s proposal that
the structures of experience originate with the perceiving subject.20
Whitehead broke with Kant and claimed that there are potentially infinite
structures of experience, varying in degrees of complexity, intensity, and
richness – there is no “necessary and universal” a priori structure for all
experience.21
Whitehead argued that both empiricists and Kantians dealt inadequately
with experience, diminishing it to fit their theories of knowledge. Accordingly,
Whitehead’s radical empiricism requires us to deal squarely with the fact that
we are experiencing at all. Upon examining experience, we find it to be a
mixture of order and disorder, displaying a degree of regularity as well as
novel divergences from regularity. The standard empirical approach asks me
to start with the contents of my experience and note that I see material objects
in space that appear to be subject to laws, and since there are no exceptions to
laws, I too must therefore be a material object in space subject to laws.
Whitehead’s alternative flips the standard picture of empiricism on its head:
he asks me to start with the fact that I am an experiencing subject in a network
of interactions subject to laws, and since there are no exceptions to laws, the
entities I interact with must also be experiencing subjects in a network of
interactions. As he put it, “if you start from the immediate facts of our
psychological experience, as surely any empiricist should begin, you are at
once led to the organic view of nature. . .” (Whitehead, 1925, p. 73). “Organic”
is intended as the alternative to mechanical, just as Whitehead’s philosophy of
organism is intended as an alternative to the modern era’s implicit philosophy
of mechanism. It is imperative to note that by organism he meant an organized
system of responsiveness, but to understand specifically what that means
we must recur to the famous predecessor of British empiricism, Francis
Bacon (1561–1626).
Though much of Bacon’s thought led directly to mainstream empiricism,
it also contained seeds of an alternative perspective. Whitehead found in
Bacon’s writing a view more radical than that of his successors: Bacon held
that perception can function independently of sense organs, nervous sys-
tems, and cognition – it is not even specific to living systems. In other words,
according to Bacon, perception is the manner in which material bodies act
and respond to one another – it is the medium of all interactions.

It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet
they have perception; for when one body is applied to another, there is a
kind of election to embrace that which is agreeable, and exclude or expel

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 Jung and Whitehead 409

that which is ingrate; and whether the bodies be alterant or altered,

evermore a perception precedeth operation; for else all bodies would be
like one to another.
(Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, quoted in Whitehead, 1925, p. 41)

The idea of mercury in a thermometer “perceiving” its environment

made more sense to Bacon’s predecessors than to his successors. The dual-
substance metaphysics of Descartes and his 16th-century contemporaries
hardened into the cosmologies of the 18th century. Science based on pri-
mary qualities of nature concentrated on inert matter as the real “some-
thing” of which living and nonliving entities are composed. Indeed, even
after the 20th-century rejection of Newtonian concepts of matter and
motion, the idea of ascribing activity, let alone perceptual activity, to bare
matter sounds very strange to most ears. This continues to be the case as
long as abstractions such as mind and matter are taken to be actualities; the
inevitable result of this error is the ever more precise formulation of ques-
tions that cannot be solved within the framework that conceived them.
Questions like that of the emergence of living from nonliving entities will
remain insoluble, as will the interaction between mental and physical
substances.
For Whitehead, Bacon’s notion of “noncognitive perception” bridged the
conceptual gap that was created by taking mind and body as different kinds
of substance and seeing nature as mostly mindless (except for the human
portion). Rather than separating them, this view assumes that every entity
perceives. In order to generalize this idea beyond common usage and to
avoid excessive and inevitable anthropomorphic associations, Whitehead
coined the term “prehension,” to signify an entity’s mode of selective
responsiveness to its environment. He also used the term “feeling” to capture
the bidirectionality of this idea: selectivity requires an act of valuation that
characterizes individual agency, and responsiveness requires the receptivity
needed for the mutuality of communal relations. It is through prehension
that individual entities selectively appropriate and respond to their environ-
ment; but the environment itself consists of a community of individuals
engaged in similar acts of prehension. Whitehead echoed the sentiment of
the Romantic poets: nature is alive and we are embedded within it.22
Whitehead held that selection is valuation and the act of selection
organizes the individual’s perception of and response to the world. We
may summarize this by saying that each individual is an organized system of
responsiveness. As this characteristic is perfectly general to living and non-
living individuals, Whitehead substituted the term “organism” for the

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 410 Farzad Mahootian and Tara-Marie Linné

organized system of prehensions that constitutes any individual; he used

feeling interchangeably with prehension to make its valuational aspect more
obvious. The deliberate use of this archaic term expresses Whitehead’s
intention that a prehensile act characterizes the primary relationship
between organisms.
The difference between living and nonliving is a matter of the complexity
of organization and its associated “depth of individuality.”23 It is important
to understand that Whitehead was a non-reductionist. He did not believe
that life was reducible to complexity. Like Bergson, Whitehead saw a
spontaneity and freedom in life that eludes the purely mechanical repetition
of organized systems of atoms, molecules, etc. Life “lurks in the interstices”
(Whitehead, 1929, p. 105), the interactional space between complexly
ordered biochemical networks that exist in and around biological cells.
Life takes advantage of the stability that biochemical modes of order offer
but is not bound to replicate them. He held that life defines itself in the
specific ways that it departs from existing modes of order, modifying the
latter to originate novelty in order to intensify and enrich its experience.
Whitehead proposed a similar explanation of consciousness: rather than
simply identifying it with neurons and neuronal activity, as many cognitive
scientists are wont to do, he characterized it as that which dwells in the
interstices of the brain.24 In this interstitial “place,” consciousness takes
advantage of the potentialities of freedom and spontaneity to an even
greater extent than life does.

comparisons of jung and whitehead

What have Whitehead’s ideas of feeling and intuition to do with Jung’s?
Beyond any complex terminological comparisons, let us directly examine
what each thinker has established. Jung’s recognition of the complemen-
tarity of opposites led him to formulate a schema for balancing the four
main functions of consciousness. The dynamic interaction of the func-
tions produces emergent phenomena that evolve (ideally) toward a bal-
ance and integration of consciousness and the unconscious. Jung expected
this framework to apply not only to the individual psyche but also to the
macro-scale of human affairs, namely history. Let us examine Whitehead’s
historical analysis in this light.
Whitehead’s retelling of the history of science has dredged up the sup-
pressed and undeveloped aspects of western scientific mentality. Applying a
Jungian typological analysis to Whitehead’s findings, we observe the follow-
ing. The mechanistic science of the 16th–19th centuries commits the fallacy

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 Jung and Whitehead 411

of misplaced concreteness, thus overvaluing the thinking function and

relegating feeling, intuition and sensation to an inferior status. By placing
prehension at the center of his cosmology, Whitehead’s alternative to
mechanism raises the complementary opposite of thinking, namely feeling,
to a superior status and brings the remaining inferior functions, intuition
and sense, along for the ride. Whitehead did not see the other three
functions as different in kind from feeling. Although it lacks the psycho-
logical depth of Jung’s typology, the net effect of this perspective is similar: it
is a deliberate attempt at rebalancing the Western psyche.
The return of feeling can balance the excess of thinking, but what do
sensation and intuition get out of this? If thinking was clearly the superior
function in classical scientific mentality, then sensation was the auxiliary
(second most developed) function, given the empirical emphasis of exper-
imental science. Why not consider sensation as superior and thinking as
auxiliary? The chief reason is that (as briefly discussed in a previous section)
the sense data that were considered worthy of scientific consideration were
limited by the prevailing theoretical paradigm. What of intuition? As the
complementary opposite of sensation, its status is inferior and primarily
unconscious. The rehabilitation of feeling could lead to further differ-
entiation of both sensation and intuition.
The key similarity between Jung and Whitehead is that both men
considered feeling to be an evaluative and therefore a rational function.
However, Whitehead considered thinking to be an outgrowth of feeling. In
Whitehead’s case, there are different grades of feeling – he did not begrudge
nonliving systems their own experience of the world. The higher, more
complex grades of organism evolve from lower ones; so too, higher grades
of experience are built on lower ones.25 Thus, cognitive perception, and
consciousness in general, emerge out of noncognitive experience and
unconscious interaction with the world, a position that Jung would agree
with. According to Whitehead, thinking, and other modes of “higher
order” mentality, are modes of feeling. Simply put, thinking consists of
“feelings of feelings,” and other complex modes of comparative feeling.
This analysis, and especially its outcome, are strongly consonant with
Jung’s idea of the rational functions. Jung’s conceptualization of the feeling
function beyond affectivity similarly broadens our understanding of the
term to consider alternative modes and grades of expression. In their recent
(2013) publication of the Jung-Schmid correspondence, Beebe and Falzeder
consistently use the term “feeling-into” (Einfühlung) instead of feeling in
order to convey a different and deeper quality than the latter has in
common usage, especially in American English26. The German term has

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 412 Farzad Mahootian and Tara-Marie Linné

been translated as empathy, but Jung’s feeling-into, like Whitehead’s pre-

hension, goes further to indicate a bidirectional grasping; like the experi-
ence of “getting it,” the immediacy of non-verbal communication that
carries the subliminal, irreducible levels of noncognitive, even unconscious
interactions with the world at large. This is a significant point of connection
between the two thinkers, one that often elicited surprise and misunder-
standing by their critics.
As our focus is on rational intuition, we will conclude this section with a
comparison of Jung and Whitehead on the untapped potential of intuition.
A comparative discussion of intuition is not as simple as our consideration
of feeling because Whitehead’s use of intuition is closely allied to judgment,
a term that for Jung was tied to thinking and feeling rather than intuition
and sensation. Nevertheless, the outcomes of Jung’s and Whitehead’s con-
siderations are remarkably similar on a point which was very important to
both thinkers: creative advance.
Whitehead distinguished two kinds of prehensions: “physical” and “con-
ceptual” (Whitehead, 1929, p. 86). “Physical prehensions” include the sim-
plest sensory apprehensions of the environment. “Conceptual prehensions”
are constituted by processes of comparison and combination, or what is
commonly called pattern recognition, replication, and modification. For
Whitehead, conceptual prehensions might involve both judgmental and
nonjudgmental acts. He referred to these as “intuitive judgments” and
divided them into three classes: affirmative, negative, and suspended. The
first two address conformation – affirmatively or negatively – with objective
data, while the third form neither affirms nor denies conformity with the
data. It entertains propositions (to use Whitehead’s term) but does not judge
them (Whitehead, 1929, p. 270).27 It is the “suspense” form of intuitive judg-
ment that most closely corresponds to Jung’s idea of the active form of
intuition. Both Whitehead and Jung believed that the active mode creates
novel experiences – this capacity of intuition had key consequences. In
Whitehead’s system, it generates the creative advance of the universe – a
term he borrowed from Bergson. Jung believed that by mediating the
process of individuation, active intuition unfolds the future.
Jung remarked on the involvement of an active and interactive compo-
nent in intuition.
The intuitive function is represented in consciousness by an attitude of
expectancy, by vision and penetration; . . .Just as sensation, when it is the
dominant function, is not a mere reactive process of no further signifi-
cance for the object, but an activity that seizes and shapes its object, so

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 Jung and Whitehead 413

intuition is not mere perception, or vision, but an active, creative process

that puts into the object just as much as it takes out.
(Jung, 1921, p. 366, §610–611)
Jung used two further pairs of labels to elaborate this difference: to
distinguish concrete from abstract and subjective from objective intuition.
Subjective pertains to “unconscious psychic data originating in the subject,”
whereas, objective refers to the “perception of data dependent on subliminal
perception of the object and on the feelings and thoughts they evoke.” Jung
further identified “concrete and abstract forms of intuition, according to the
degree of participation on the part of sensation. Concrete intuition mediates
perceptions concerned with the actuality of things, abstract intuition medi-
ates perceptions of ideational connections. Concrete intuition is a reactive
process, since it responds directly to the given facts; abstract intuition, like
abstract sensation, needs a certain element of direction, an act of the will, or
an aim” (Jung, 1921, p. 453, §771).
A nonjudgmental approach is also important in the clinical practice of
psychotherapy. It is essential that an ambiance of nonjudgmental openness
and acceptance is maintained in relation to the intuitive function so that the
contents of the unconscious are allowed to flow into consciousness without
obstruction. Unconscious content is irrational and hence, may seem initially
foreign to the rational faculties. An objectionable reaction or negative judg-
ment stemming from the evaluative mechanism of the thinking or feeling
function can inhibit communication via the intuitive function. Individuals
in whom intuition, as well as the rational functions, are strongly differ-
entiated would conceivably allow information from the unconscious to flow
unobstructed. Instead of exercising one’s functions on a premise of exclu-
sivity, the more differentiated, balanced psyche is more inclusive of both
rational and irrational content as they are integrated within a more encom-
passing psychological frame.
As such, the highly balanced individual has a broader array of more
complex and creative ways to respond to, combine, and interact with
internal and external stimuli. Combining Jungian and Whiteheadian per-
spectives, we can imagine that consciousness, as interstitial, creates many
potential pathways flowing to and from itself. Pathways between the “cen-
ter” of consciousness (the ego) and the “center” of the total personality (the
Self) are well-traveled. For the individuated person, consciousness and the
unconscious flow together as a complex and highly adaptive system. Offering
a multiplicity of responses to ever-changing conditions within the flow
of events, enlivens a taste for the “unconquered nature in us” flowing

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 414 Farzad Mahootian and Tara-Marie Linné

toward the “unborn future.” We must be aware that neither for Jung, nor for
Whitehead did stepping into the flow of Nature represent a peaceful and
relaxing voyage, but a bold and risky adventure of striking out into the wild.
Is there any parallel in the context of Whitehead’s critique of science?
What would science look like if we. . . open our portals to a broader array of
observations? adopt a more organic, concrete set of models with which to
examine? begin with naturally occurring mutual interdependencies, rather
than artificially isolated systems? change our strategies of science research
and education? Some steps have already been taken in these directions:
Sensor technology advances have generated unprecedented access to a
variety of data, although of hitherto unknown quantity, quality, and utility.
Biomimetic28 models are based on a variety of organic, rather than mechan-
ical, structures and functions. Earth system management and ecosystem
management strive to work with the complex mutual interdependencies of
our planet. All major governmental science research funding agencies in the
United States now encourage, and in some cases require, interdisciplinary
research programs. Jung and Whitehead were bold interdisciplinary
thinkers decades before the term was invented.

conclusion
According to Jung, a schism will continue to grow in the psyche between the
conscious superior function and the remaining undeveloped functions,
resulting in a “breakdown of the harmonious cooperation of psychic forces
in instinctive life” (1921, p. 70, §105), unless the disparity is made conscious
and addressed. Jung depicted the severity of this situation by referring to the
inferior function as “an open and never healing wound” (1921, p. 70, §105).
Through fortuitous events and/or the activation of the unconscious, the
individual, and even entire cultures, may eventually discover the inherent
limitation of one-sided development. Because of the dynamic and compen-
satory relationship between the conscious and unconscious, the imbalance
within the conscious dimension activates the unconscious in order to render
better harmony and balance to the larger system. He described activation as
arising from subtle inner processes that impose on the conscious mind with
the suggestive force of compensation.

It corresponds to a similar function in the physiological sphere, namely,

self-regulation of the living organism. . .I conceive it as functional adjust-
ment in general, an inherent self-regulation of the psychic apparatus. . .
The activity of the consciousness is selective. Selection demands direction.

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 Jung and Whitehead 415

But direction requires the exclusion of everything irrelevant. This is

bound to make the conscious orientation one-sided. The contents that
are excluded and inhibited by the chosen direction sink into the uncon-
scious, where they form a counterweight. . . a counterposition. . . until
finally a noticeable tension is produced. . .[and] becomes so acute that
the repressed contents break through in the form of dreams and sponta-
neous images.” (Jung, 1921, pp. 418–419, §693–694)
Though Whitehead was neither a psychologist nor a physiologist, he had
a keen interest in the development of both sciences; their influence on his
thinking is evident in his choice of metaphors, beginning with the main
name of his system of thought: “the philosophy of organism.” This is also
evident in his choice of terms such as “appetition,” “lure for feeling”
“satisfaction,” “enjoyment,” etc., which he rendered into technical terms
for the purpose of explaining the process of coming into being that every
particular entity in the universe experiences. He characterized the process of
becoming real as “realization,” and elsewhere as “individualization”
(Whitehead, 1925, pp. 199, 201), a term so very close to Jung’s “individuation.”
Whitehead’s direct experience of the history of science was akin to the
situation Jung describes above. The inhibited and excluded aspects of
Western thought (e.g., the secondary qualities) were rejected as irrelevant,
selected against – negatively prehended, in Whitehead’s terms. This selec-
tion produced a counterweight and eventually the “repressed contents
broke through.” He was one of the 20th-century figures who understood
the gravity of the historical moment and attempted to express and integrate
the repressed side of nature back into science.
A sense of wildness is never far from the imaginations of Jung and
Whitehead: both of them had a reverence for nature, both witnessed the
dawn of the atomic era, and both knew all too well that science and
technology are inherently risky. As Whitehead noted long ago, “major
advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in
which they occur” (Whitehead, 1927, p. 88). We never know exactly when we
are on the verge of a “major advance in civilization,” but we can with some
certainty claim the birth of the information age as one. Toward the end of
his life, Jung’s strongest concern was the collective shadow and the unin-
tegrated nature of the Western psyche. He saw the process of individuation
as a civic duty and requisite for our collective endeavors of science and
survival.29 For Whitehead, our task is “the creation of the future, so far as
rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue.
The future is big with every possibility of achievement and of tragedy”
(Whitehead, 1938, p. 233).30

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 416 Farzad Mahootian and Tara-Marie Linné

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notes
1. See the chapters on Aristotle and Ockham, in this volume.
2. Principia Mathematica (1910–1913) was co-authored with Bertrand Russell. This
three-volume work attempted to ground all mathematical thought in logic. In
the course of writing the fourth volume, it became clear to Whitehead that the
entire enterprise was theoretically non-viable – he destroyed volume four.
Details of how he reached this judgment and abandoned the project would
take us far afield; it is enough to note that this was an important finding in the
history of mathematics, related significantly to Gödel’s revolutionary incom-
pleteness theorem.
3. Krause, Elizabeth (1997). The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to
Whitehead’s Process and Reality. New York: Fordham University Press.
4. Jung C. G., (2009). The Red Book. Sonu Shamdasani (Ed., Trans.), Mark Kyburz
(Trans.), John Peck (Trans.) W. W. Norton & Company.
5. He believed these are acquired through life experience and/or by phylogenetic
inheritance. Jung first introduced this in his groundbreaking work,
Wanderlungen und Symbole der Libido (Psychology of the Unconscious) in
1912, which was later published as Symbols of Transformation (1956).
6. For more on the a priori, see the chapter on Kant in this volume.
7. For an in-depth discussion, see von Franz (1964).
8. Subsequent empirical researchers expanded upon his findings and created
corresponding assessment tools (e.g., the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
MBTI), which are now applied in diverse fields, as well as used for team
development, communication, and management in various industries. For a
standard MBTI reference, see Quenk (2000). For an interesting revision
based on a recent empirically-based critique of the original MBTI categories,
see Wilde (2011).
9. See page 29 of (Beebe & Falzeder, 2013). The authors trace the stages of
development of Jung’s typology between 1909 and 1921.
10. Emblem 19 of Atalanta Fugiens is a graphic alchemical portrayal of “mutual
bonds” between these functions, here represented as the four elements of earth,
air, fire and water. But the lesson is inverted for impact: the emblem tells us that
these four are like brothers, “If you kill one of the four, all will be dead
immediately;” this happens because “they’re bound by Nature’s mutual
bonds” (Maier, 1989, p. 143).
11. Niels Bohr (1958) introduced complementarity in the context of quantum
mechanics in order to describe the relationship of mutual exclusion between
dynamical and kinematic descriptions of subatomic particles: both are neces-
sary for a complete description but they cannot be applied simultaneously.

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 418 Farzad Mahootian and Tara-Marie Linné

Dynamical descriptions involve observations of energy and time, while the

kinematic ones involve position and momentum. The Heisenberg indetermi-
nacy relations express this complementarity in a quantitative mathematical
form.
12. The archetype of totality may also be expressed symbolically: examples in
classical mythology include the world egg, world tree and so on; in contemporary
mythology, the “star child” emerging from the monolith/wormhole at Europa,
recapitulates cosmic history in Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrik’s epic 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968).
13. For a contemporary extrapolation of Jung’s eight-fold typological schema
and its relation to shadow work in the intersubjective field of psychotherapy,
see Beebe (2004). Beebe addresses developmental change in typology over
time.
14. Jung perceived a strong correlation between the integrating and emergent
power of the transcendent function within the process of individuation and
systems for self-development in Eastern philosophies. He was especially
intrigued by the holistic intuition of Chinese correlative cosmology and
wrote extensive commentaries on Richard Wilhelm’s translations of two
classics of esoteric Chinese literature, the I Ching and The Secret of the
Golden Flower.
15. a. Stengers, Isabelle (2011). Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation
of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; b. Ford, Lewis (1984).
The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, SUNY Press, Albany, NY.
16. Scholars of science and technology studies have articulated the human messi-
ness behind the sterile textbook picture of science. This is commonplace since
the analyses of Thomas Kuhn and other historians, sociologists and philoso-
phers since the late 1950s.
17. Rene Descartes (1596–1650) was a philosopher, scientist, and brilliant mathe-
matician, after whom our present day Cartesian coordinates are named. He
promulgated an extremely influential philosophy based on a dualistic meta-
physic of mental and physical substances in his Meditations on First Philosophy
(1641) and other tracts.
18. (Eastman, 2008) offered a clear and concise account of the historical and
conceptual transitions from a pre-scientific substance-based metaphysics to a
post-scientific matter-based metaphysics, and subsequently to a Whiteheadian
process-based metaphysics.
19. See Whitehead’s discussion of Hume’s infamous admission that one may be
able to perceive a “missing shade of blue” within a graded series of blues, in
(Whitehead, 1929: pp. 53–54, 86–87).
20. See the chapter on Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in this volume for more details
on his seminal work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
21. (Whitehead, 1929: p. 88) noted: “The philosophy of organism is the inversion of
Kant’s philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason describes the process by which
subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world. The philosophy
of organism seeks to describe how objective data pass into subjective satisfac-
tion, and how order in the objective data provides intensity in the subjective
satisfaction.

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 Jung and Whitehead 419

22. “Nature Alive” is the title of a chapter of Whitehead’s last book, written in
counterpoint to the chapter that precedes it, “Nature Lifeless.” The book is
Modes of Thought (1938).
23. Whitehead’s education philosophy advocated the appreciation of a variety of
values. “According to the metaphysical doctrine which I have been developing,
to do so is to increase the depth of individuality. The analysis of reality indicates
two factors, activity emerging into individual aesthetic value. Also the emergent
value is the measure of the individualization of the activity” (Whitehead, 1925,
p. 199).
24. Whitehead originates this idea in his Process and Reality, (Whitehead, 1929,
pp. 105–106).
25. The dynamics of experience are basically the same; differences arise from
complexity of response and creativity enabled by the complexity of a body’s
internal structures. More complex structures can support more complex
experiences.
26. Falzeder, as translator of the correspondence, noted that Einfühlung is an
ordinary word in German with no exact English equivalent, and explains his
reasons for choosing feeling-into. “Rather than using ‘empathy’ to translate it. . .
I have decided on ‘feeling-into,’ unusual as it may sound. This is not only a
literal translation but also the term chosen by H. Godwin Baynes in the first
English translation of Psychological Types. . .Since Baynes, who lived in Zurich
at the time, was assisted in the translation by Jung himself [who listened to
Baynes’ translation weekly] we may be certain that the choice of word met with
the latter’s approval, or might even have been suggested by him” (Beebe &
Falzeder, 2013, p. 33).
27. A terminological conflict is at hand with regard to “judgment.” Whitehead
introduced it in order to demonstrate the emergence of consciousness and
propositional logical thought out of the combinatorial operations of various
types of comparative feelings. Whitehead’s detailed discussion (Whitehead,
1929, p. 272) of that process would take us far afield, especially in light of the
fact that it is the “suspended judgment,” that is, the non-judgmental form of
Whitehead’s intuitive judgment, which is of most interest to us in the present
context.
28. “Biomimetics is the field of science and engineering that seeks to understand
and to use nature as a model for copying, adapting, and inspiring concepts and
designs” (Bar-Cohen, 2005, p. 2).
29. Carl Jung interviews, in Engelen, Philip. (1992) The Psychology of Jung: Passions
of the Soul, Vol. 3: Mind and Matter. Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities
and Sciences.
30. This is the opening line of Whitehead’s Epilogue to his last book. Taken from a
commencement address in 1933, it is addressed to the task of higher education.

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