Acausal Orderedness

Acausal orderedness names the broader cosmological principle from which Jung derived synchronicity as a special case. Where synchronicity proper designates the meaningful coincidence of a psychic and a physical event in a single unrepeatable moment, acausal orderedness designates those pervasive, eternally recurrent features of reality — the properties of natural numbers, the constancy of the speed of light, the half-lives of radioactive decay — that obtain without any discoverable cause. Jung introduced the term to prevent synchronicity from being read merely as an exotic curiosity of individual experience, situating it instead within a general ontology of causeless order that underlies both mind and matter. Von Franz is the most sustained elaborator of this distinction, tracing its implications through physics, mathematics, Chinese cosmology, and the unus mundus tradition. Murray Stein reads the broader conception as Jung’s cosmological statement proper, a principle underlying cosmic law rather than merely psychic life. The central theoretical tension the term generates is between its narrow application — the archetype-mediated equivalence of inner and outer events — and its wide application as a structural feature of the universe itself. Both Stein and von Franz insist that the narrow reading requires expansion into the wide one, while acknowledging that doing so imports experimentally reproducible phenomena that sit uneasily beside the singular, non-repeatable character of synchronistic events.

In the library 15 passages

certain factors in nature are ordered without its being possible to find a cause for such an order… In the realm of the mind or psyche acausal orderedness is manifest in such examples as the fact that 6 is a perfect number

Von Franz defines acausal orderedness as causeless natural order manifesting in both physical constants and mathematical necessities, and distinguishes it as the general principle of which synchronistic events are only momentary special instances.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The meaningful coincidence or equivalence of a psychic and a physical state that have no causal relationship to one another means, in general terms, that it is a modality without a cause, an “acausal orderedness.”

Jung’s canonical source text defines acausal orderedness as the general modality — encompassing creative acts, natural number properties, and physical discontinuities — of which synchronicity is a particular, non-repeatable instance.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

synchronicity in the narrow sense is only a particular instance of general acausal orderedness — that, namely, of the equivalence of psychic and physical processes where the observer is in the fortunate position of being able to recognize the tertium comparationis

Von Franz, citing Jung directly, argues that synchronicity must be understood as a subspecies of acausal orderedness and that treating it otherwise risks illegitimately multiplying explanatory principles.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This requirement seems to force itself on us when we consider the above, wider conception of synchronicity as an ‘acausal orderedness.’ Into this category come all ‘acts of creation,’ a priori factors such as the properties of natural numbers, the discontinuities of modern physics

The passage presents the conceptual pressure that compels expansion of synchronicity into acausal orderedness, noting the uncomfortable inclusion of experimentally reproducible phenomena alongside singular events.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Synchronicity, or ‘acausal orderedness,’ is a principle underlying cosmic law… our human experience of acausal orderedness, through the psychoid factor and the transgressivity of the archetype, is a special case of much broader orderedness in the universe.

Stein frames acausal orderedness as Jung’s cosmological statement, positioning individual human synchronistic experience as a local instance of a universal structuring principle.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Jung noted that in nature there is also something that he called acausal orderedness, for instance all a priori facts in physics, such as half-lives and the speed of light. These also cannot be causally explained; they can only be observed, but we can give no cause for them.

Von Franz explains acausal orderedness as the class of irreducible a priori facts in nature and mind that resist causal reduction and can only be observed, distinguishing them linguistically from synchronistic events proper.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This form of orderedness differs from that of the properties of natural numbers or the discontinuities of physics in that the latter have existed from eternity and occur regularly, whereas the forms of psychic orderedness are acts of creation in time

Von Franz draws the key distinction within the domain of acausal orderedness between eternal, recurrent physical and mathematical orders and the temporally singular creative acts that constitute synchronistic events.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Reflections on Synchronistic Events as Subspecies of a Possibly More General Principle of Acausal Orderedness… two well-known examples of acausal orderedness, namely the discontinuities of physics and the individual mathematical properties of natural numbers.

Von Franz identifies the section heading and content of her systematic inquiry into acausal orderedness as the general category encompassing synchronistic events, with physical discontinuities and number properties as its paradigm cases.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

acausal orderedness is the more general category under which synchronistic events are subsumed as special cases… four newly discovered states of affairs that are currently considered acausal and that correspond to Jung’s notion of acausal orderedness

Von Franz marshals contemporary astrophysics — radioactive half-lives, quantum unpredictability, cosmic background radiation, Foucault’s pendulum — as empirical corroboration of Jung’s concept of acausal orderedness.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

mathematics deals with the ‘acausal orderedness’ in our own mind, which is based on number; and physics, among other themes, deals with the ‘acausal orderedness’ in nature, such as the speed of light and the rate of radioactive decay

Von Franz maps the distinction between mathematical and physical domains onto the two faces of acausal orderedness — inner and outer — while raising the further question of whether such orders carry meaning.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In contrast to acausal orderedness (for example, the properties of natural numbers or the discontinuities of physics) which occurs regularly, synchronicity phenomena are acts of creation in time.

Von Franz underscores the temporal distinction: acausal orderedness is eternal and regular, while synchronistic events are unrepeatable creative acts within its framework — a distinction critical to understanding why synchronicity is a subspecies, not a synonym.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

these new creations take place in each case only as a special instance within a ‘general acausal orderedness,’ that is, as a case of formal equivalence of psychic and physical processes. The recognizable form of an a priori psychic orderedness is the archetype.

Von Franz positions the archetype as the introspectively accessible form of psychic acausal orderedness, which grounds synchronistic events as creative acts nested within the wider pattern of causeless order.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

this new theory of a second time dimension seems to spring from a tentative effort to grasp that double aspect of reality which Jung has called ‘acausal-orderedness’ and ‘synchronicity.’

Von Franz links modern relativistic proposals for an imaginary second time dimension to the same conceptual problem Jung addressed with acausal orderedness, situating his concept at the frontier of physics.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The archetype then, when manifesting in a synchronistic phenomenon, is truly awesome if not outright miraculous — an uncanny dweller on the threshold. At once psychical and physical, it might be likened to the two-faced Roman god Janus.

Hoeller characterizes the archetype’s dual psychic-physical nature in synchronistic manifestation, gesturing toward the psychoid ground that underlies acausal orderedness without explicitly invoking the term.

Hoeller, Stephan A., The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

if the causal principle is only relatively valid, then it follows that even though in the vast majority of cases an apparently chance series can be causally explained, there must still remain a number of cases which do not show any causal connection.

Jung establishes the theoretical precondition for acausal orderedness by arguing that the relative — rather than absolute — validity of causality opens conceptual space for genuinely acausal phenomena.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms