ATD re light & evil

[Keith]

On Jan 2, 2007, at 8:02 PM, davemarc wrote:

[snip]

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from http://tinyurl.com/yzv4ka :

3.3.4 "To be or not to be" and the Platonic privatio boni

To do this, let us first return to Pauli's letter. Toward its end he  
comes back to the above mentioned motto "To be or not to be" (see  
3.3.1). With it he characterizes the confrontation between "being"  
and "nonbeing", begun in ancient philosophy. First he tells us that  
"nonbeing" "did not simply mean not being present" but is "that which  
cannot be thought about", "which cannot be reduced to notions and  
concepts". "Being", by contrast, is that which can be grasped by the  
reasoning process associated with the thinking function.

In a section that is absent in the German original [Meier, 1992] and  
in the English translation [Meier, 2001], but is included in the copy  
of the letter in Pauli's Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, he  
continues, that for us today "nonbeing" means "irrational" and  
"obscure". Moreover, since Socrates and Plato Good is defined as the  
rational and Evil is only the absence of Good, a privatio boni.

This Platonic definition, which is also the official doctrine of the  
Catholic Church, was attacked by Wolfgang Pauli as well as by Carl  
Jung, for example in a note of § 600 in Answer to Job. Pauli quotes  
parts of this note; therefore we will include it in our argumentation:

     "The naive assumption that the creator of the world is a  
conscious being must be regarded as a disastrous prejudice which  
later gave rise to the most incredible dislocation of logic. For  
example, the nonsensical doctrine of the privatio boni would never  
have been necessary had one not had to assume in advance that it is  
impossible for the consciousness of a good God to produce evil deeds.  
Divine unconsciousness and lack of reflection, on the other hand,  
enable us to form a conception of God which puts his actions beyond  
moral judgement and allows no conflict to arise between goodness and  
beastliness." [Jung, CW 11, § 600, n. 13]

When one reads the letter, one feels that Pauli is very happy about  
Jung's remark on the privatio boni as a "nonsensical doctrine". Of  
course it is Jung's approach to an image of God, which is a  
coniunctio oppositorum he likes so much. We will see that this  
symmetry of a renewed image of God is very important for the Nobel  
laureate.

Pauli continues his letter by comparing the Platonic Ideas with the  
phenomenon of matter. The logical conclusion of the above statements  
is, that matter is only the absence of these Ideas. We can generalize  
this Platonic prejudice and say that matter is only the absence of  
the spirit. As Jung has seen [CW 12, § 405-13; The spirit in matter]  
it was exactly alchemy that compensated this devaluation of matter by  
the postulate of the "spirit in matter", which it also called the  
Spirit Mercurius [CW 13, § 239-303].

In the letter, Pauli goes on and shows a further assumption of the  
Platonic philosophy about matter: Because Ideas are "being", they are  
also eternally unchangeable. Therefore, "the process of becoming and  
the changeable, hence also matter, appeared in a certain form of  
psychology as nonbeing".

We can summarize these Platonic statements as follows:

     Spirit (the Platonic Ideas) is the Good, the eternally  
unchangeable, is rational and therefore "being", but

     Matter is the Evil, the changeable, the irrational and therefore  
"nonbeing", and

     Matter is a privatio of Spirit, as the Evil is a privatio of Good

This Platonic philosophy is also behind the determinism of classical  
natural science and is the deeper reason, why it is the intention of  
every scientist, to find "eternal" causal natural laws behind the  
changeable, behind motion, which is itself a property of matter.