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While Cecile Tougas was writing this essay, I was pondering the article by Atmanspacher and Fach recently published (2013a, 2013b). I had also been rereading Jung, Pauli, and von Franz (1992, also Gieser 2005) as I tried to understand better the issues the early atomic physicists were struggling with. To deal with the unclarity, my own viewpoint needed to become more focused. This required me to recall things read and thought over the years, while I now also engaged current concerns.
Aristotle has been for me such a custodian of basic good sense that I was glad to have Tougas's essay spur me to review his notions of causality.
I noticed anew that I have been hoping to discover or be able to forge a juncture between what the eminent scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi called ‘personal knowledge’, with its individual and social aspects, and what Jung and others have spoken of by such terms as the ‘objective psyche’. For Polanyi, ‘Personal, tacit assessments and evaluations … are required at every step in the acquisition of knowledge—even “scientific” knowledge’ (Polanyi 31). This view relativizes ‘objectivity’ while reducing its urgent appeal.
A friend (synchronistically?) gave me a book of essays by the philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1923), esteemed by William James (and also cited by Atmanspacher and Fach). Peirce's essays on chance and necessity enhanced my ‘understanding, despite initial resistance to the idea, that some…’ some realities can only be grasped statistically. This brought me closer to the mindset of physicists dealing with atoms and neutrons, which I earlier tried to imagine as small things but which may exist more as bundles or clouds of who knows what but that some physicists think can only be known as numbers.
I awoke from a dream reflecting on the Greek axiom ‘Know thyself’, inscribed in the forecourt of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and felt this had a bearing on the concerns I am sketching. Apollo was the god of sunlight, clarity, and reason