Having stuffed a passel of materialistic rubbish into the gaping mouths of those guttersnipes, the educated proletariat

Carl Jung, while a student at Basel University faculty of medicine, rejected the materialistic and mechanistic science of his teachers. From an early period he condemned academia “for having stuffed a passel of materialistic rubbish into the gaping mouths of those guttersnipes, the educated proletariat.” He referred to this as resulting in “the moral instability of the upper echelons of society and the total brutalization of the working man”. 101 Sherry comments that it is important to understand that Jung, like many other scientists in the German-speaking world, was schooled in a tradition rooted in the scientific works of Goethe rather than in Darwin’s Origin of Species”.102 Here we see the fundamental difference of world-views between the German and English, with England as the harbinger of the age of materialism, of liberalism and capitalism, reflected in its science. Goethe influenced Oswald Spengler’s morphology of history, and he also influenced Jung’s morphology of the psyche.

Sherry states that although Goethe as a scientist was a “keen empiricist”, he also “opposed the mechanistic model proposed by Bacon and employed by Newton … He rejected a mathematically abstract approach to science for one that included both the sensual reality of the thing observed and the imaginative faculty of the observer. This technique of Anschauung (‘direct vision’) reflected Goethe’s artistic-poetic temperament and was used to study Nature in a holistic, organic way”.103 While visiting the botanical garden at Palermo he had a sudden insight into the underlying character of plants, which he called the Ur-pflanze (“archetypal plant”). Jung’s study of “archetypes of the soul”104 is analogous to the Goethean study of the archetypes of plants and animals.

Modern science can no longer discount Goethe’s plant archetypes. In recent years genetic studies of mutant flowers indicate that a single gene triggers the growth of flowers in plants, which sets off the myriad of changes needed to produce a flower. “The discovery is part of a wider series of breakthroughs in the study of flower development which have confirmed the theory, originally put forward by the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe more than 200 years ago, that the different organs in a flower, such as petals and stamens, are all variations on a single theme”.105 This suggests that life, including human life, has archetypal forms that unfold. It was a morphological approach that was adapted by Spengler to the study of history.

101 Quoted by Sherry, 18.
102 Jay Sherry, 17.
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid., 18.
105 Enrico Coen, Rosemary Carpenter, 1992.

Kerry Bolton
The Decline and Fall of Civilizations