In an essay aptly named “Success,” Emerson wrote: “To redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.”
The conviction that language, out of its internal logic, bears within itself at every stage and every state of culture the forces needed to heal those very misunderstandings and misinterpretations that language itself constantly provokes and creates was already the foundation of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic program in the Tractatus. And it would also become the guiding assumption of the whole of his late philosophy from 1929 onward, particularly in his second major work, Philosophical Investigations.
While all of this positions Jung in the long stream of idealism, beginning with Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley, and others, it suggests also that his insight is radically new because it brings to startled awareness a post-Kantian perspective that all that we experience is psychological, that is to say, that it is experienced intra-psychically however much it may be autonomously other. Said succinctly, Kant made phenomenology and depth psychology necessary.
As Einstein said, common sense—non-weirdness—is just a bundle of prejudices acquired before the age of eighteen. The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation. The Metaphysics of Quality satisfies these.
In one sense language is wholly an activity of thought, and thought is all it can ever express; for the level of experience to which it belongs is that of awareness or consciousness or imagination, and this level has been shown to belong not to the realm of sensation or psychical experience, but to the realm of thought.
The historian in re-enacting past thought, both theoretical and practical, subjects it to criticism, ‘forms his own judgment of its value, corrects whatever errors he can discern in it’ (IH 214).
The [Chinese] government was offering its people a bargain: prosperity in exchange for loyalty.
