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‘… The direct opposite of rational knowledge is feeling …’ (SCHOPENHAUER 5). It is possible that these words of Schopenhauer constitute the germ of the idea that was to become the Jungian theory of functions, since it is well-known that these were the first two of the functions which Jung identified, and that opposition was, from the beginning, of the very essence of the theory. It is interesting, though, that for Schopenhauer feeling gets defined purely negatively. Rational knowledge (wissen) he described as an abstract consciousness of concepts. Everything else, ‘whatever it may be’, is feeling. And then to make quite sure you realise that this is a miscellany, Schopenhauer adds:
Thus the immeasurably wide sphere of the concept of feeling includes the most different kinds of objects, and no one can ever understand how they come together until he has recognised that they all agree in this negative respect, that they are not abstract concepts. For the most diverse and even antagonistic elements lie quietly side by side [my italics] in this concept; for example, religious feeling, feeling of sensual pleasure, moral feeling, bodily feeling, as touch, pain, sense of colour, of sounds and their harmonies and discords, feeling of hate, of disgust, of self-satisfaction, of honour, of disgrace, or right, of wrong, sense of truth, aesthetic feeling, feeling of power, weakness, health, friendship, love, etc. etc.’ (Ibid 5).
Curiously, this is almost exactly the way Jung was to describe how opposites exist in the unconscious, ‘slumbering side by side’—that is, before they get differentiated, which is the great conscious-making act (JUNG 2, p. 157).
Perhaps if Jung had not gone on to differentiate sensation (Empfindung, which Schopenhauer saw as a sub-class of feeling) and intuition, he, too, would have been struck with a grab-bag of affects and attitudes that were unified only in not being rational concepts. But, as we know, Jung took quite a different path, treating feeling as