Response to Pietikainen and Stevens

The papers of Pietikainen and Stevens present radically divergent views of Jung's psychological and cultural theories and raise issues of considerable significance to our understanding of Jung's project and the possible course of its contemporary development. Pietikainen sets out, as he states in his abstract, to remove what he considers to be ‘unfruitful discourse on the genetic inheritance of archetypes’ from the larger Jungian enterprise. He intends to do this by recourse to the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, whose philosophy of symbolic forms stands as one of the monuments of early twentieth-century neo-Kantianism. He will do this, he tells us, by demonstrating that archetypes are ‘culturally determined functionary forms’ that give shape to a specific class of what Pietikainen considers to be cultural activities, including emotions, numinous experiences and pathologies. Stevens, on the other hand, maintains that Jung's persistent references to the biological basis of his theory of archetypes are fundamental elements in Jung's epistemology, and furthermore, that the state of contemporary research on the biological foundations of behaviour makes it impossible to ignore or dismiss the biological dimension of human experience.

Stevens has done us a service by highlighting the epistemological aspect of the dispute framed by these papers. It is easy to miss this fact in Pietikainen's paper because of his perfunctory and dismissive treatment of biological arguments of any kind, an attitude that was not shared by Cassirer. Indeed, as I will discuss below, Cassirer was deeply respectful of evolutionary theory and ethology, having written extensively on Darwin and appreciatively on such contemporaries as Uexküll. But he did have reservations about the range of claims made by ethologists; this was to do with his view of the mediating capacity of symbolic forms, in so far as he believed that the symbolizing capacity of humans effectively removed the majority of human endeavours