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Pauli on Synchronicity Pauli on Synchronicity Teun Lammers 11922583 Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Wouter Hanegraaff Second Examiner: Dr. Carolina Ivanescu Religious Studies Master Thesis Western Esotericism August 2019 Index Introduction 2 Why Pauli? 5 Die Geiβel Gottes 6 The other Pauli 8 The Problem 11 The Psychophysical Problem 17 No Scientific Picture 18 The Measurement Problem 20 Detached Observer 22 The ‘Cut’ 24 Opposites Unite 25 The Psyche 26 The Cosmic Order 30 The Symbolic Wave Function 31 The Conscious Order 32 Mathematical Reality 32 Archetype 34 Synchronicity 38 Everyday World 38 Pauli-effect 40 Meaning-Correspondence 41 Statistical Correspondence 43 The General Acausal Order 44 Conclusion 46 Bibliography 48 1 Introduction The first poem I ever text messaged my soon to be girlfriend was ‘Roll the dice’ by Charles Bukowski. With its strong appeal on following your own course through life no matter the consequences, and lines like ‘You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire’ it served me as a small mantra when I was in fact changing my life for the better. On our second date we went to the nearest café from her house, appropriately named ‘Bukowksi’, when she mentioned there was one poem hanging from an old typewriter next to the bar. Surprisingly it turned out to be ‘Roll the dice’. This remarkable coincidence gave the poem some special meaning for the both of us. However the climax came, when after some time of proper courtship, we were making love for the first time and suddenly out of nowhere the raw voice of Bukowksi started reciting our poem with its epic first lines ‘if you’re going to try, go all the way, otherwise don’t even start’. It turned out that Soundcloud had randomly selected an unknown techno set featuring our special poem the moment we indeed went all the way. The unlikely appearance of the poem in the middle of a techno set, expressing the poems message in a setting which appeared tailored for it, created a highly unlikely meaningful coincidence that can hardly be described other than ‘magical’. However in our current time such ‘magical’ coincidences are often explained by attributing them to pure chance. Given the absence of any direct perceivable causal relationship between the physical event and the corresponding psychological meaning the whole event is seen as a highly unlikely but still probable twist of fate. However it is unfortunate that the strong meaningful content of the coincidence appears to lose all significance when interpreted in this ultimately meaningless explanation of pure chance. There exists however a concept that does try to capture these meaningful coincidences without relinquishing their apparent meaning. This concept is known as Synchronicity and was developed by the famous Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) and refined by the input of the highly esteemed quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958). They defined Synchronicity as ‘an acausal connecting principle’ that connects events occurring in the physical and psychic dimension on the basis of a meaningful connection.1 1 Jung, Synchronicity. 2 In the current scholarship dealing with western esotericism, the theory is either conceived as a new esoteric concept developed in the 20th century2 or seen as a modern expression of the esoteric worldview of correspondences pitted directly against the modern scientific worldview based on ‘instrumental causality’.3 Given the fact that Jung’s theoretical framework has been strongly connected to older esoteric currents of thought it is admissible to perceive his theory of Synchronicity to be a natural offshoot of them. However this perspective on Synchronicity appears to focus strongly on the esoteric roots of the concept and less on Pauli’s influence in its conceptual development. Given the fact that Pauli was considered one of the highest authorities in theoretical physics this brings up the question how he conceived the theory of Synchronicity to be in accordance with the developments in the field of quantum physics. Therefore in this thesis we will investigate how Pauli’s conception of Synchronicity falls naturally in the conceptual framework that he developed from the interpretation of the paradigm-shifting discoveries in quantum physics. The central research question is therefore: Can we consider Pauli’s conception of Synchronicity to be derivable from his philosophical interpretation of quantum physics? If so; how? To be able to answer this question we will first look at how Pauli considered the problem of observation in quantum physics to force our thinking towards a new approach to the ‘psychophysical’ problem. As we will see, the principle of complementarity, in which opposites are seen as complementary aspects of a higher order, serves as Pauli’s basic conceptual framework to understand the nature of reality. This framework ultimately leads Pauli to the postulation of a cosmic order in which Jung’s concept of the archetypes are employed as the basic ordering structures of both the physical and psychological domains. With this in mind we will then consider how Pauli conceived the concept of Synchronicity to be grounded in this archetypical foundation and how the concept of archetype can even be extended to conceptually capture the ‘statistical laws of nature’ formulated in quantum physics. However we will begin with reflecting on Pauli’s status as a very well respected theoretical physicist in order to draw attention to the high level of his conceptual abilities. After that we will shortly reflect on his relationship with Jung. We will end the first chapter with questioning the idea that the 2 Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment, 139. 3 Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture, 501. 3 invocation of quantum physics to defend an worldview based on correspondences can be assumed to be merely the ‘clothing’ of a pre-established belief with a modern scientific ‘garb’. Instead we will bring into sharp focus how one of the principal architects of the Copenhagen interpretation considered the concept of Synchronicity to be a necessary postulate to conceptually grasp the acausal order of reality that is forced upon our thinking when reflecting on the ontological perspective of dual-aspect monism that logically follows from the observation problem in quantum physics. 4 Why Pauli? When the layman says ‘reality’ he usually thinks that he is speaking about something which is self-evidently known; while to me it appears to be specifically the most important and extremely difficult task of our time to work on the elaboration of a new idea of reality. This is also what I mean when I always emphasize that science and religion must have something to do with another.4 Wolfgang Ernst Friedrich Pauli was born on 25 April 1900 in the city of Vienna. His father, Wolfgang Josef Pauli, was a professor of chemical medicine at the University of Vienna while his mother, Berta Camilla Schütz, worked as a writer and journalist. The Pauli family was completed with the birth of Pauli’s younger sister Hertha. Although Pauli’s father was a descendent of a well-respected Jewish family he later converted to the Catholic faith to successfully pursue a university career. The famous positivist Ernst Mach (1838-1916), who had a strong influence on Wolfgang senior, took on the role of Godfather when the young Pauli was baptized in his father’s new ‘faith’. This led Pauli in later years to acclaim that ‘I was thus baptized in an antimetaphysical manner rather than in a Catholic one’.5 However the discernable influence of Mach’s positivism on Pauli, found its counterbalance in his exposure to the Pythagorean numerology advocated by his most important teacher Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951). After Pauli finished his physics studies in Munich he first became an assistant to Max Born (1882-1970) and later to Niels Bohr (1885- 1962) in Copenhagen. It was Pauli’s collaboration with Bohr, and the latter’s other assistant Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), that led to the development of the decisive ideas in quantum physics known as the ‘Copenhagen School’. In 1928 Pauli was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Technical University of Zürich. Given his Jewish ancestry, Pauli left the country at the beginning of the Second World War to work at the intellectual safe haven of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Upon his return in 1946 he reassumed his professorship in Zürich. It was in this city’s Red Cross hospital that Pauli, on 15 December 1958, drew his last breath in room number 137. 6 The symbolism of the number that marked his passage couldn’t be more suited given Pauli’s lifelong fascination for the number 137 as the key to the mysteries of modern physics.7 4 Pauli to Fierz, 12 Aug. 1948, Laurikainen, Beyond the Atom, 153,154. 5 Pauli to Jung, 31 Mar. 1953, Meier, Atom and Archetype, 103. 6 Enz, No Time to Be Brief, 533; Gieser, The Innermost Kernel, 333. 7 In theoretical physics 1/137 is an approximation of the value of the fine structure constant. This constant of nature determines, among other things, the fine structure of the individual spectral lines of atoms. The fine structure constant is a dimensionless constant whose value is determined by the speed of light (c), the charge of the electron 5 Die Geiβel Gottes Pauli is widely considered to be one the most brilliant physicists of the last century. His genius has been compared in status to that of Albert Einstein (1879-1955) by his senior colleague Born.8 Einstein himself considered Pauli to be his spiritual son, capable of completing the work in physics he had begun.9 Already as a youngster of 21 years old he made a huge impression on Einstein when he wrote an excellent encyclopedia article10 on the then rarely understood relativity theory.
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