Though in past essays I've drawn some limited comparisons to the philosophical systems of Schopenhauer, Jung, and Whitehead, here I'll try to dovetail the major similarities between all three together.
Though I'd read a lot of Jung before I made my way through THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, in the early days of this blog I believe I focused a bit more on Schopenhauer's contrast of different types of will. In 2016's THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL, I attempted to fold Carl Jung's somewhat Kantian "four functions" into Schopenhauer's system:
Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking" finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.
One thing that is not made clear by this excerpt is what Jung said about the nature of his four functions, in that he labeled "sensation" and "intuition" are purely perceptual functions, while "feeling" and "thinking" served, respectively, to sort and judge the raw data provided by the perceptual functions. I think this arrangement is implicit from the way I restated Jung's theory as it would apply within a purely literary matrix, but it's best to make it the point as explicit as possible. (I will again note that the above terms "underthought" and "overthought" have to a great extent fallen to the wayside in the course of this ongoing project.)
In many respects this formulation is still fundamental to my system. However, because of my still imperfect assimilation of the process philosophy of Whitehead, I think one might argue that both Schopenhauer and Jung, who share a considerable influence from Immanuel Kant, that both thinkers may have tended to portray the experience of "perception" as essentially passive, while both Jung's "judging functions" and Schopenhauer's higher form of will are comparatively "active." At least one of Jung's pronouncements on the origins of intuition strikes me as rather problematic:
like sensation, intuition is a characteristic of infantile and primitive psychology. It counterbalances the powerful sense impressions of the child and the primitive by mediating perceptions of mythological images, the precursors of ideas.
Whitehead, who takes issue with Kant in PROCESS AND REALITY, did not deem perception to be passive, as shown by this interpretation from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The critical aspects of SMW were ideas that Whitehead had already expressed (in different forms) in his previous publications, only now with more refined clarity and persuasiveness. On the other hand, the constructive arguments in SMW are astonishing in their scope and subtlety, and are the first presentation of his mature metaphysical thinking. For example, the word “prehension,” which Whitehead defines as “uncognitive apprehension” (SMW 69) makes its first systematic appearance in Whitehead’s writings as he refines and develops the kinds and layers of relational connections between people and the surrounding world. As the “uncognitive” in the above is intended to show, these relations are not always or exclusively knowledge based, yet they are a form of “grasping” of aspects of the world. Our connection to the world begins with a “pre-epistemic” prehension of it, from which the process of abstraction is able to distill valid knowledge of the world. But that knowledge is abstract and only significant of the world; it does not stand in any simple one-to-one relation with the world. In particular, this pre-epistemic grasp of the world is the source of our quasi- a priori knowledge of space which enables us to know of those uniformities that make cosmological measurements, and the general conduct of science, possible.
This emphasis on "pre-epistemic" forms of cognition matches up fairly well with my adaptation of Whitehead's term "concrescence," which I applied to my literary version of Jung's four functions in 2021's PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 2:
A "prehension," as noted before, is a process by which an organism gains knowledge of and organizes its experience, whether that knowledge is organized through the concrescence of sensation (the kinetic potentiality), of feeling (the dramatic potentiality), of thinking (the didactic potentiality), of intuition (the mythopoeic potentiality), or any possible combinations of the four. All four potentialities would have been available to the human species ever since they split off from smaller-brained mammals, so none of the potentialities predate one another.
In the preceding paragraph I limited my line of inquiry to the human species, but I can accept in a general sense Whitehead's extensive of the "pre-epistemic" stage even to non-sentient phenomena like electrons. Despite some of the conceptual discontinuities between these three philosophical luminaries, I feel that all of them were seeking to unravel the same conundrum of existence, and that their similarities outweigh their differences.
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