Wolfgang Pauli

The teaching

Taught from his essay on Kepler (1952), his lectures on science and Western thought, and his letters to Carl Jung.

Images before concepts

Wolfgang Pauli teaches that knowledge of nature is not built by logic from observation alone. Between the impressions of the senses and the concepts of a theory there must be a bridge, and he finds it in ordering images that exist in the psyche before reason can state them: archetypes, in Carl Jung's sense. To understand something in nature is to find that an outer pattern answers an inner image, and the joy of discovery is the joy of that match. His great example is Kepler, set against the Rosicrucian physician Robert Fludd, as the branch The physicists who read the mystics tells it.

Two attitudes of the West

In his lectures on science and Western thought he finds two basic attitudes running through the whole history of the West. One is critical and rational: it wants to understand, to measure and to know. The other is mystical: it seeks the redeeming experience of oneness, in which the knower is lost in the whole. Pauli holds that neither can be given up. The mystic who flees the world of measurement, and the rationalist who denies all that reason cannot reach, each live by half; it is the fate of the West, he says, to keep bringing the two into connection, and to bear the tension between them rather than escape it.

The observer cannot stand outside

Quantum physics, for Pauli, has already taught the lesson. The observer's free choice of experiment decides which side of nature appears; the act of observing changes what is observed; and the single event is fixed by no cause, only the statistics of many. The detached observer of classical physics, looking on without taking part, is gone. Jung's psychology meets the same thing from the other side, since the conscious mind that observes the unconscious changes it.

Pauli saw in the two a parallel, and hoped for a language in which mind and matter would be seen as complementary aspects of one reality. He offered it as a hope and never as a finding.

Background physics

His own dreams gave him material. He noticed that they spoke in the terms of physics, of radioactivity, of isotopes, of spectral lines splitting in two, but used those terms as symbols of what was happening in the psyche, as though the language of physics were carrying a second meaning. He called this background physics, wrote it up for Jung, and took it as a hint that physics and psyche speak of one reality. In the long series of his dreams that Jung printed without his name, the culmination is a vision of a world clock, two circles about one centre turning in different rhythms, which Jung read as an image of the whole self.

Meaning without cause

With Jung he worked out the idea of synchronicity, a coincidence joined not by cause but by meaning, which the branch called Synchronicity teaches with the figure of four the two men drew together. Pauli's part was to insist that such an order without cause is not an exception to science but its complement: physics itself, in the decay of a single atom whose moment no cause decides, has already met events that are ordered without being caused.

Three and four

Pauli recognised Kepler and Fludd in himself, the one who measures and the one who seeks the whole, the thinker in threes and the thinker in fours. The fourth, in Jung's language, is what the rational trinity leaves out: the dark, the irrational, matter and the feminine. Pauli held that a science fit for the future must take it back in, not by giving up measurement, but by admitting that the scientist's own psyche is part of the work; and in his letters he returned again and again to the alchemists' image of the union of opposites.