Tammie: You've asserted that the work of both philosopher, Immanuel Kant, and psychologist, Carl Jung, are in many respects Philospychic, I'm hoping you might elaborate on that.

Stephen: I first became aware of and interested in Jung's psychology while I was studying in Oxford. I became good friends with a priest who had studied Jung's writings in depth. As I shared with him my growing interest in Kant, he shared Jung's ideas with me. We both soon realized that the two systems have many deep values in common, even though they deal with very different aspects of human life. In his youth Jung actually read a considerable amount of Kant's writing and accepted Kant's basic metaphysical principles as the philosophical foundations of his own psychology. There is plenty of evidence for this; but the relevant passages are scattered so evenly throughout Jung's voluminous writings that they are easily overlooked by most readers.

In a nutshell, Kant and Jung are both philopsychers because they both have (1) a deep interest in both philosophy and psychology and (2) a desire to apply their insights in these fields to the task of self-knowledge. They both exhibit "soul- loving" tendencies in so many ways that I couldn't hope to give an exhaustive summary here. But a few examples should suffice to clarify the sort of thing I'm thinking of.

Kant's philosophical project was motivated to a large extent, I have argued, by his interest in the phenomenon of "spirit-seeing". He saw a direct analogy between a mystic's claim to have an objective experience of a spiritual world and a philosopher's claim to construct a system of metaphysical knowledge. Kant believed human beings have souls, but thought it is a dangerous illusion to think this can be proved. Kant's first Critique, where he develops this view in most detail, is sometimes interpreted as a rejection of metaphysics; but in fact, it is an attempt to save metaphysics from an overly logical (unloving) approach that claims to establish scientific knowledge of God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul. By demonstrating that we cannot know the reality of these three "ideas of reason" with absolute certainty, Kant was not rejecting their reality; rather, as his second Critique makes clear, he was attempting to transform metaphysics from a head-centered discipline to a heart-centered discipline. In this sense, the overall character of Kant's philosophy can be seen to be soul-loving.

Jung says he read Kant's 1766 book, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, at "just the right time" in his own development. He was training to be a psychiatrist at a time when medical students were indoctrinated into a reductionistic, deterministic, and naturalistic way of understanding disease. Yet he had a firm belief in the soul. Kant's philosophy helped Jung to maintain an intellectually honest (heart- centered) belief in metaphysical ideas that were being rejected by many of his colleagues. As a result, he developed a psychology that did not seek to reduce the soul to something non-metaphysical, such as sex (as in Freud's psychology).

Jung's psychology is more philosophically-informed than Freud's (and the systems developed by many other psychologists, such as Skinner). Like Kant, he is a philopsycher because his scholarly research and the system he developed honor the mystery of the human soul. Love thrives on mystery, but is vanquished by claims to absolute, scientific knowledge.

Tammie: You've written that, "first, wisdom requires us to recognize that there is a boundary between our knowledge and our ignorance...Second, wisdom requires us to believe it is possible, despite our necessary ignorance, to find a way to break through this very boundary line. ..Finally, then, the new lesson is that we only really begin to understand what wisdom is when we recognize that, even after we succeed in breaking through our former limits, we must return to our original home. However, there is a crucial difference between our original state and our state when we return: for we now have some awareness (even if we cannot call it "knowledge") of both sides of the boundary..." Your observations really resonated with me and I thought of Joseph Campbell's myth of the "hero's Journey" as I read. I was hoping you could elaborate a bit more on the journey that might lead one to a greater awareness of "both sides of the boundary."

The passage you quote is from the opening chapter of Part Three in The Tree of Philosophy. In that chapter I am trying to provide the reader with some insight into what it means to pursue (or "love") wisdom. The key is to recognize that wisdom is not something predictable, something we can know in advance like the outcome of a mathematical calculation or of a simple scientific experiment. Socrates went to great pains to emphasize that the wisest stance human beings can take is to admit that we do not know what wisdom entails in any given situation. His point (in part) is that if we already possessed wisdom, we would not need to love it. Philosophers who claim to possess wisdom are actually not philosophers (wisdom-lovers) at all, but "sophists" ("wisdom"-sellers, where "wisdom" must remain in quotes).

Because wisdom isn't predictable, I'm reluctant to say much about how my conception of wisdom can lead a person to greater awareness. What I can say is that in The Tree I give three extended examples of how this might work: scientific knowledge, moral action, and political agreement. In each case there is a "traditional" interpretation that sets up a "boundary", giving us genuine assistance in understanding the topic in question; but it is transcended by another philosopher who believes the boundary, if made absolute, does more harm than good. My argument is that the wisdom-lover will take the risk of going beyond the boundary in search of wisdom, but will not regard limitless wandering as an end in itself. Returning to the boundary with the new insights obtained is, I argue, the most reliable way to search for wisdom.

You may have noticed that in Part Three I never actually explain *how* to "return to the boundary" in each case. When I come to this part in my lectures, I tell my students that I have deliberately left out such an explanation, because each of us has to work this out for ourselves. Wisdom-loving is not something that can be put into "kit" form. Neither is insight. We can prepare ourselves for it; but when it hits us, insight often comes in a form we never would have expected beforehand.

Respecting boundaries while at the same time being willing to risk going beyond them when necessary is a key concept of philopsychy as I understand it. Philopsychers (soul-lovers) will therefore not only be scholars, but will be people who attempt to put their ideas into practice. Kant and Jung both did this, in their own very different ways. So do I. But just how each philopsycher does this is not something that can be generalized.