Kepler

These primary images which the soul can perceive with the aid of an innate ‘instinct’ are called by Kepler archetypal (‘archetypalis’). Their agreement with the ‘primordial images’ or archetypes introduced into modern psychology by C. G Jung and functioning as ‘instincts of imagination’ is very extensive.

Pauli establishes the foundational claim that Kepler’s own term ‘archetypalis’ for pre-existent ideas in the soul anticipates Jung’s archetype concept with striking conceptual precision.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994thesis

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a wholeness formerly contained in the idea of the analogy between microcosm and macrocosm but apparently already lacking in Kepler and lost in the world view of classical natural science.

Pauli identifies in Kepler a pivotal historical loss of the microcosm-macrocosm wholeness, marking him as the threshold figure between symbolic and purely quantitative science.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994thesis

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the contrast between his scientific method of approach and the magical-symbolical attitude of alchemy was nevertheless so strong that Fludd, in his day a famous alchemist and Rosicrucian, composed a violent polemic against Kepler’s chief work, Harmonices mundi.

Pauli frames the Kepler-Fludd polemic as the collision of two opposing intellectual worlds — quantitative science and magical-symbolical alchemy — whose tension reverberates into modern physics.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994thesis

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According to Kepler, the individual soul, which he calls vis formatrix or matrix formativa, possesses the fundamental ability to react with the help of the instinctus to certain harmonious proportions which correspond to specific rational divisions of the circle.

Pauli explicates Kepler’s doctrine of the soul’s innate harmonic instinct as the psychological mechanism linking inner archetype to outer celestial mathematics.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994thesis

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Pauli told Fierz: ‘I have thought about it and I believe I should not do this. For, indeed, there comes the time when I must give documentary evidence of what I owe this man’

The editorial history of Pauli’s Kepler essay — deliberately kept together with Jung’s synchronicity paper — reveals Pauli’s personal debt to Jung and the intentional depth-psychological framing of his Kepler study.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994thesis

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Kepler connects the Trinity with the three-dimensionality of space and that the sun with the planets is regarded as a less perfect image of the abstract spherical symbol.

Pauli analyzes Kepler’s neoplatonic-trinitarian cosmology, in which geometric and theological symbols interlock to produce a hierarchical image of the universe culminating in the sun.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting

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for Kepler the earth is a living thing like man. As living bodies have hair, so does the earth have grass and trees… As a living being the earth has a soul, the anima terrae, with qualities that can be regarded as to a large extent analogous to those of the human soul.

Pauli traces Kepler’s animistic cosmology of individual planetary souls, showing the residual alchemical-vitalist substrate beneath his mathematical science.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting

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In them can be seen the reciprocal connection of the circumferential figure with a central figure… In Kepler’s view, the two figures are supposed to correspond to the circular form and the point form of the soul.

Pauli expounds Kepler’s geometric symbolism from the Harmonices mundi, in which the circumferential and central figures of the soul correspond to its dual modes of perception and action.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting

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I reflect on the visible movements determinable by the senses themselves, you may consider the inner impulses and endeavour to distinguish them according to grades. I hold the tail but I hold it in my hand; you may grasp the head mentally, though only, I fear, in your dreams.

Kepler’s own words in reply to Fludd articulate his methodological commitment to sensory-mathematical observation over Fludd’s speculative inner symbolism.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting

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every bit of knowledge gained from a measurement must be paid for by the loss of other, complementary items of knowledge… This uncontrollable interaction between observer and system observed… invalidates the deterministic conception of the phenomena assumed in classical physics.

Within the essay formally titled after Kepler’s influence on scientific theory, Pauli draws the explicit line from Kepler’s epistemological transition to the non-determinism of quantum mechanics.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting

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It was in July 1595 that Kepler experienced the sudden illumination of the geometrical harmonies of the planetary orbits that set in motion his long and arduous research that at last led triumphantly to his discovery of the laws of planetary motion.

Tarnas correlates Kepler’s foundational creative breakthrough with the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1595–96, exemplifying his thesis that major scientific discoveries coincide with specific planetary alignments.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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The year the supernova appeared, 1572, was the same year as Kepler’s birth; both events thus coincided with the Uranus-Neptune opposition that took place halfway in the cycle that unfolded between the conjunctions of Copernicus’s birth and Newton’s.

Tarnas situates Kepler’s birth within a long Uranus-Neptune cycle linking Copernicus to Newton, reading the astronomer as an archetypal node in the cosmological revolution.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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Johann Kepler (1571–1630) had broken forever the old classical notion of the circle as the structuring form of the universe, by demonstrating that the orbits of the planets are not circles but ellipses.

Campbell marks Kepler’s demonstration of elliptical orbits as the definitive rupture with classical cosmological form, contextualizing it within the broader emergence of modern scientific mythology.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting

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Mathematical reasoning is ‘inborn in the human soul’ (eius inerant animae)… Nowadays we very properly use, if I am not mistaken, the word ‘instinct.’ For quantity is known to the human mind, and to the other souls, by instinct even though it were lacking all the senses for this purpose.

Pauli cites Kepler’s doctrine of mathematical instinct as the prototype for the archetypal endowment of the psyche with formal a priori structures.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting

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it is for the vulgar mathematicians to concern themselves with quantitative shadows; the alchem—

Kepler’s dismissal of Fludd’s alchemical mathematics as mere shadow-play underscores the methodological divide between quantitative and qualitative-symbolic traditions that Pauli regards as paradigmatic.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994aside

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The two polar fundamental principles of the universe are formas the light principle, coming from above, and matter as the dark principle, dwelling in the earth.

In comparing Fludd’s cosmological diagrams with Kepler’s, Pauli illuminates the polarity of light and darkness as a symbolic-theological framework that Kepler’s mathematical science was displacing.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994aside

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