On the other hand, Jung's own writings suggest it would not be correct to say that most Swiss endorsed the extremist, not to mention crazy and criminal, aspects of Nazidom, or actually hoped for a German victory—and Jung appears to have been about as typical a German Swiss as any on such matters; later we will see that Joseph Campbell's wife noted that when Jung moved conversationally into political and social issues, the less he was the brilliant worldclass thinker, and the more an ordinary provincial German Swiss. Either the Schom reports are misleading, or German Swiss, and Jung among them, were capable of serious duplicity, or of possessing several contradictory levels of consciousness at the same time.
That is not impossible. German Swiss, like decent Germans in the fatherland, could well have been caught in the emotional bind of feeling on the one hand a natural patriotic and volkish, not to mention economic, identification with Germany, and at the same time a natural revulsion at some of its policies. It is also not clear that a real majority of Swiss would have actually wanted to trade Switzerland's peculiar but functional democracy for a führerstate.
Jung, with all his own immense subjective realms, was undoubtedly a microcosm of the Swiss perplex, and perhaps did not sort it out
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any better than his countrymen. Like them, he rescued Jews yet was capable of antiSemitism; he felt volkishness in his blood yet could see how it led to national insanity. Like them, he was no doubt relieved when 1945 brought an end to the horrible tensions and contradictions. Perhaps the seeming contradictions of Jung's attitudes on Nazi Germany boil down to nothing more than this: politically he was not the brilliant intellectual, but an ordinary German Swiss with all the fears and prejudices and complications pertaining thereto. But though he felt this identity, he could also sometimes see through it; he was less than consistent.
It is striking, and no doubt significant, that Frank McLynn begins his massive biography of Jung with this perhaps unexpected declaration: "To understand Carl Gustav Jung one must first understand Switzerland, and this is no easy matter." Alluding to the complexities of a republic without a president and a confederation without direct power over its citizens, McLynn remarks that "Some observers have even suggested . . . that Jung could not have had the theories he had if he had been born elsewhere, since the Swiss constitution is itself 'Jungian,'" and adds, "Superstitious, xenophobic, conservative, earthbound, introverted, moneyminded—all these epithets have been used to describe Jung, and even more frequently to describe his native country." 82
When he was dealing with Germany rather than his own multinational nation, however, Jung seemed instinctively to think more in volkish, racial, collective unconscious terms. (If little Switzerland has a distinctive national collective unconscious, Jung never really reveals what it is; however, there are no doubts about Germany's—from the unique vantage point of a German Swiss who was half under the heavy sway of that ominous unconsciousness and half an outside observer of it.) Andrew Samuels, in his important and balanced discussion of Jung and National Socialism, stresses that it is what we might call the corporate—the volkish, if one wishes—side of traditionalism that carried Jung close to disaster on that issue. "It was Jung's attempt to establish a psychology of nations that brought him into the same frame as Nazi antisemitic ideology." 83 "In C. G. Jung, nationalism found its psychologist." 84 To Jung, especially the earlier Jung, national psychological identity was very important: hence the discussions of Germanness, and of the strange anomaly of the Jews as a people without a nation. Thus Samuels agrees there is something "in
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Jung's habitual way of thinking that leads to antisemitism.'' 85 It produces "ideograms" about nations, Jews and, leadership, that can move in dangerous convergence with Nazism.
I agree. But all this needs to be balanced with attention to the nonpolitical, or even antipolitical, significance of individuation. It also needs to be balanced with what might be called Jung's political "Swiss" side, with its commonsense if ambiguous aversion to extremism, and its regard for the small and the local—concerns also basic to the traditionalist mind. In addition to the anomaly of the Jews, there is the anomaly of the Swiss as a nation made up of fragments of three peoples, which has no particular Wotan of its own and little overt power in the world. Yet this incongruous state serves as a kind of counterweight to the ragings of the mighty, and was also able to provide Jung (and others) a privileged observation post in the eye of the storm. It is hard to believe he really ever intended to reject personally the political virtues of his own nation. Jung undoubtedly for himself affirmed civilrights democracy in the conservative Swiss or AngloAmerican style, for certainly a pioneering doctor of the soul needs adequate freedom to publish ideas and analyze patients without totalitarian interference.
In the end, Jung's apparent political philosophy seems comparable to that of Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the icon of modern democratic conservatism. Like the Burke of "On the Sublime and the Beautiful" (1756), Jung was a romantic rather than a classicist, holding that what is greatest and most beautiful is not clarity, but the infinite—the spacey realm of his "No. 2." Burke held that the sense of the infinite is heightened by obscurity: "It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions." Surely that sentiment is similar to the sense of numinous mystery aroused by Jung's unconscious, breaking into consciousness through the shadowy archetypes, which are only the conditioned forms taken by ultimate powers whose roots stretch virtually to infinity. Their potency was only enhanced by Jung's putative Kantianism, through which he considered that true reality cannot be known, for we can know only the projections of consciousness upon it; so its form is archetypal and its language is myth.
In politics, particularly in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke affirmed his belief in the wisdom of tradition. Even if they contain some evil, traditional institutions entail a covenant with the past not to be lightly broken, and to search for too great
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a purity in the political and social world is to invite fresh corruption. As a Christian, the British parliamentarian believed, like Voegelin, that the world and humanity are imperfect, and the quest for perfection in the social order spurious. The political obligation is to correct finite present ills and preserve established liberties, not to risk destroying the state in the hope of hypothetical largescale improvement. Thus, as is well known, Burke favored the Irish and American rebellions, believing they were intended to preserve concrete liberties and bring about incremental change within the structures of established institutions, but opposed the French Revolution because it was supposed to produce a wholly new society based on rationalism. Undoubtedly it was the French republic's novel philosophical basis, founded on abstract and hypothetical belief in "atomistic" human liberty and equality, and no less its belief that a wholly new and irreversible human order could be commenced in historical time—exactly what Voegelin meant by political gnosis—which most deeply offended the conservative thinker.
Although Jung never referred to the British statesman, the latter's combination of romantic vision and cautious politics based on an appreciation of tradition resonates well with Jung's values. Tradition is, after all, where the myths and symbols which must embody the archetypes come from. The Burkean Jung also realized that the individual soul could often express itself in ways far removed from politics, and therefore politics was by its own nature a limited art. Throughout his life Jung was deeply suspicious of the social order. Adventures in the private worlds of childhood and early adolescence forced upon him an intense awareness of the irrevocable split between his inner self and the norms of the social order in which he had to live his outer life. He entered adulthood convinced that private experience took primacy over the paradigms offered by society. 86 He would therefore have been no very willing recruit to the subjugation of subjectivity itself that is the ultimate goal of any serious totalitarianism.