Jung understood that the true union is not between the “logical mind” and “human emotions,” but between the primary function of mind—image-making and imagination—and human emotions. Our emotions accompany our mental images, not our logical mind, and this is something whose importance modern psychology has not understood.

Realism is the sacred slogan of the modern scientific method, and it has affected even philosophy and psychology. Jung believed that the human mind creates the reality of our everyday life in a way for which the only adequate name is “fantasy and imagination.” Even what we regard as the cold, fixed and unquestionable reality of our life is the product of imagination. We refuse to call it our mind's fantasy and imagination and instead call it reality; but the truth is that what we call the reality of life is itself only imagination that has frozen and become immobile. Our lives are fundamentally stories we tell ourselves on the basis of what we think and imagine. Fantasy is not only the world we inhabited at six years old; our present world too is the product of our images and imagination.

It is not only philosophy and psychology that the modern world has deprived of imagination, image and poetic language. The modern world is also unable, in understanding historical phenomena, to leave the paradigm within which it has confined itself. The modern scientific outlook assumes, for example, that “alchemy” was a simple and early form of natural science: a primitive chemistry from a time when supposedly simple and ignorant premodern human beings did not understand the constitution of the world or the nature of substances. This is also the way modern people often approach “myth” and ancient mythic stories: as primitive explanations of how the world came into being before modern science revealed the origins and structures of matter and the universe.

In my view, what is simplistic is not alchemy and mythic stories, but the dangerous reductionism with which modern human beings approach the complexity of the historical mind. Modern people, fascinated with the world of things, fail to understand that for thousands of years the world of actions and meanings was more important to historical human beings than the world of things. Even historical understandings of that world of action were based on the distinctive function of the human mind—imagination—and perhaps what human beings achieved along this path was far more complex than the modern world's simplified, imaginationless interpretation of it.

Science and the modern world are interested in the material structure of the world. Their approach is to reduce the world to “particles” and to understand the physical laws governing them. They then easily assume that ancient human beings were searching for the same thing that modern people are searching for.

In fact, by projecting its own interests and mentality into the past, modern humanity treats it as self-evident that not only are today's most important questions the same questions human beings have asked throughout history, but that all earlier intellectual efforts were directed towards answering the questions modernity now regards as most important.

The modern world imagines that Zeus was the ancient human explanation for lightning, at a time when people did not know what caused lightning. But the truth, in this reading, is not that Zeus explains lightning; rather, lightning is a manifestation of the anger of Zeus. Alchemy and myth are concerned less with the material world outside than with the functions of mind and the inner world of the human being. Their field is fundamentally the world of action and meaning, not the world of things; their question is how human life and action in the world should be lived, not what the world is materially made of.

Heidegger believed that science does not think but works, and that it also compels us to change from thinking beings into technological beings. Philosophy, by returning to a power stronger than technological knowledge and its limitations, may be able to save us.

Aydin Areta