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Psychological Perspectives
A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought

ISSN: 0033-2925 (Print) 1556-3030 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www
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The Age of Imagination
Christophe Le Mouël
To cite this article: Christophe Le Mouël (2018) The Age of Imagination, Psychological
Perspectives, 61:3, 285-310, DOI: 10
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Psychological Perspectives, 61: 285–310, 2018
Copyright # C
...
Jung Institute of Los Angeles
ISSN: 0033-2925 print / 1556-3030 online
DOI: 10
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2018
...
Unfortunately, most individuals will approach physical
sciences with dread, due in part to the difficulty with speaking the language of the
universe, and for this reason may fail to perceive its breathtaking beauty
...
The Enlightenment of the 18th century was an
Age of Reason that deeply shaped our modern society
...
This exploration concerns classical physics
and its repression of imagination; the difficult emergence of deterministic chaos is
viewed as a return of what was left behind, so to speak: the shadow of reason
...

—C
...
Jung (1970, par
...
The verb kosmein means “to prepare”
and also “to adorn, to dress
...
Physical science is about this: the
consideration of the lawful, orderly structure of material things
...
To
account for reality, we can no longer reduce the future to a recurrence of the past and
must also imagine what might be observed in the present
...


I

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PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 䉬 VOLUME 61, ISSUE 3 / 2018

Peter Zokosky, Attraction, oil on panel, 18  17 in
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CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

287

In an essay written in 1784, philosopher Immanuel Kant described the
Enlightenment as an Age of Reason wherein humanity threw off the yoke of nonage,
that is, of immaturity, especially in religious matters:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage
...
This
nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in
indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s
guidance
...
) “Have the courage to use your own
understanding,” is therefore the motto of the enlightenment
...
384)
Kant borrowed his Sapere aude from Roman moral poet Horace (65 B
...
E
...
68)
...

“Dare to imagine!” might become the motto of a new enlightenment wherein humankind consciously realizes its intimate participation in the creative flow of the cosmos
...
C
...
),

CLASSICAL PHYSICS
The Age of Reason loosely started around the 17th century with the discovery
that the universe, in its entirety, is orderly and that this order is expressed in the language of mathematics
...
But the book cannot be understood unless one
first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is
composed
...
(Popkin, 1966, p
...
There was no great divide
between Heaven and Earth, only a lack of imagination that prevented us from seeing
Heaven on Earth
...
Have a large bowl of water with some fish in it; hang up a
bottle that empties drop by drop into a wide vessel beneath it
...
The fish swim indifferently in all directions; the drops

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fall into the vessel beneath; and, in throwing something to your friend, you
need throw it no more strongly in one direction than another, the distances
being equal; jumping with your feet together, you pass equal spaces in every
direction
...
You will discover not the least
change in all the effects named, nor could you tell from any of them whether
the ship was moving or standing still
...
26–27)
Galileo’s description of a correspondence between the motion of things seems
almost trivial, yet it is critical
...
We won’t have to
adjust the strength and direction of our actions
...
It is only when we consider what this basic correspondence
means that we begin to experience the shock of the relativity of motion
...
Through this mysterious window, we suddenly
see another context that presents itself to our ever-flowing imagination
...
The shock of the relativity of space and motion
consists in the unsettling realization that the bell-shaped trajectory of the apple observed
inside the second vehicle—our alter-ego throws its apple up, then moves forward with
its vehicle and catches it farther away at the same time that we do—corresponds to the
straight-line trajectory of our apple in our vehicle! Both trajectories describe the same
phenomenon viewed from two observers, yet they are entirely different
...
Our senses vacillate before such a paradox! How is it possible?
Finding order in such unsettling circumstances first requires that we become
increasingly critical of sensory experiences
...
The displacement of Earth from its central position, as proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus in the
16th century, took centuries to emerge, but when it finally did, it sparked a revolution
that presaged the Age of Reason
...
At all times, we are bound to
a particular context, or frame of reference, which implies that we cannot observe the
paradox of Galileo’s relativity
...
For this reason, they are
said to be universal and can be written in the language of mathematics
...
416)
...
Absolute rest could no longer exist; rather,
things left to themselves endlessly roamed the universe in a straight line
...
(Barbour, 2001, p
...

The scientific revolution was, however, not attributed to the power of imagination
...

Imagination was more like the scaffolding of a building, something necessary only in
the early stage of a construction that would eventually have to go
...
Descartes’s career started with
an impressive spiritual experience that changed him durably
...
113)
...
He had stopped for the winter
in Ulm, where he planned to attend the coronation of Ferdinand II of Austria as Roman
Holy Emperor
...
It is
interesting to note that the coronation of the new emperor coincides with the beginning
of the Thirty Years’ War, one of the bloodiest religious conflicts in Europe with about
eight million casualties, which ended in October of 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia
...
Descartes’
career roughly spanned the time of war, since he died at the beginning of 1650
...

In the second dream—he was, in fact, awake—he heard a thunderclap that terrified him
and then saw his room fill with fiery sparks (von Franz, 1991, p
...
Descartes described
this happening as a descent of the “Spirit of Truth” (von Franz, 1991, p
...
176),
referring to the episode in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2, 2–4) in which the Holy Spirit
descended upon the Apostles with the sound of a mighty wind, in the form of tongues of
fire
...
Descartes received the gift of the new language of
reason—mathematics—and became the father of modern philosophy
...
The following year, in 1620,
Descartes wrote that he “began to understand the fundamental principle of a wonderful
discovery” (Descartes, 1620/1985, p
...
It is uncertain what this discovery might be,
but it might have been the idea “that there must be a general science which explains all
the points that can be raised concerning order and measure irrespective of the subject

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matter, and that this science should be termed mathesis universalis” (Descartes,
p
...

Descartes went on studying geometry and arithmetic and developed crucial segments of the universal mathematics of which he dreamed
...
Further developed
by Newton, this science would become the essential language with which to express
the classical laws of motion
...
He wrote: “We have within us the
sparks of knowledge, as in a flint: philosophers extract them through reason, but poets
force them out through the sharp blows of the imagination, so that they shine more
brightly” (Descartes, 1620/1985, p
...

Imagination is not a mere combination of knowledge or impressions we have
...
I suspect that when Descartes wrote
the previous words, the shattering experience of the thunderclap followed by the vision
of the sparks scattered in his room was still bearing on his mind
...
In the essay “The Search after Truth by the Light of Nature,” he demoted the
imagination of a child to a mere tabula rasa, a blank slate, upon which our senses, various inclinations, and masters impress a coarse portrait of reality
...
” However, the task at hand is too great, the original impression too faulty, disproportionate
...
405)
...
This goal is truth, which the spirit that descended upon
him had originally revealed
...

The repression of imagination in Descartes’s philosophy is deliberate, but also
symptomatic of his own incapacity to appreciate the dimension of time in nature
...
126)
...
173)
...
The flow of time would later be introduced by Newton as a basic
principle of physics
...
From the moment of Creation until the end of time, every natural process was
yoked to absolute time, wherever it occurred
...
In Newton’s words: “Absolute,
true and mathematical time, in and of itself, and of its own nature, without reference to
anything external, flows uniformly and by another name is called duration” (Newton,
1687/2016, p
...
The continuous flow of time was placed in the hand of God, who

CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

291

conducted the clockwork mechanism of the cosmos with an inflexible law
...
This seems like a reasonable assumption,
which is implicit in our Western language when we speak of the past, the present, and the
future, rather than my past, my present, and my future
...
With the concept of absolute time, the metaphysical belief of an omnipresent yet transcendent God becomes part of science
...
In Einstein’s relativity, time becomes relative and God
cedes His conducting role to a natural phenomenon: light
...
There was no place in it for
invention and the creation of something new, only for discovery
...
402)
...

Imagination, however, did not entirely disappear, only retreated to the private
sphere of the philosopher where it inspired new discoveries
...
He was the last
of the magicians” (Dry, 2014, p
...

I compare the classical pathway of the physical sciences to an asphalt freeway,
going straightforward or, occasionally, circling above ground at an interchange
...
The result is the lifeless clockwork worldview we all
know and that has showed its disastrous limits in our time
...
This is a world where eros is reduced
to an extreme and where little real creativity spontaneously happens
...


DETERMISTIC CHAOS
The image of classical mechanics I have just presented might sound exaggeratedly negative, considering all the prodigious accomplishments this science has led to,
from the industrial revolution to space travels
...
It takes only a pause on the linear road of rigid reason to realize that more natural
beauty, featuring a complex order, awaits us when we take a closer look around us
...
Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens first discovered this “odd kind
of sympathy” in 1665 (Buyse, 2017, p
...
At the time of his discovery, Huygens resided
in his family house in a region struck by the plague
...
Huygens wrote to his father:
Having been forced to keep to my chambers for some days, which I occupied
in making some observations of my clocks of a new design, I noticed an
intriguing effect, and one which no one ever would have thought of
...
Here, two clocks
are found which never deviate at all, which will seem incredible and yet it is
entirely true
...
(Buyse, p
...
120)
...

Imperceptible material vibrations, induced by the motion of the pendulum clocks, were
at the origin of the perpetual accord
...
A letter from Huygens was published, without the consent of
its author, in a rush the following month in the French Journal des Savants
...
126)
...

His creation was based on Galileo’s study of the motion of the pendulum
...
In other words,
whether the oscillation was small or large, the duration taken for a back-and-forth
motion was identical
...
Much later, at the turn of the 17th century, he
would develop more accurate time-keeping devices to study the unsuspected order of
the pendulum motion
...
In the creation of the first pendulum clock, Huygens could not help but notice that
the isosynchronous behavior of a single pendulum was only an approximate behavior
hard to maintain
...
Then, even in the case of small amplitudes, a brief kick
had to be given repeatedly to the pendulum so that it did not stop in response to the
friction of the air and other contrary mechanical effects
...
Yet,

CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

293

according to our modern standards, Huygens’ clock would be deemed exceedingly
imprecise since every single day, it would be skewed by fifteen seconds; in a month, a
duration of more than seven hours would be lost
...

Huygens continued to work on the design of his pendulum clock and, in 1660,
began to receive support from the newly formed British Royal Society
...
It could take a couple of months to navigate westward
across the Atlantic to reach the Americas
...
Of
course, the position of the North Star in the night sky indicated with good precision the
latitude of a ship—that is, its position from the North Pole—but no heavenly body
proved regular enough to determine its longitude
...
From time immemorial, the sun had served as indefatigable navigator along the invisible lines of the longitudes from east to west, as well as the celestial
clock beating the time of human societies
...
These positions were provided from the
benchmark city of Greenwich, where the British armada was harbored, and served navigators to situate themselves, at least approximately, at sea
...
For example, let us suppose we
are in the midst of our navigation to the Americas
...
According to our almanac, the sun rose at
6:00 in the morning in Greenwich
...
Knowing
the latitude of the ship, it takes only a little mathematics to calculate a longitude and
precisely determine the location of the ship
...
They seemed destined to replace the sun
itself
...
To the
inherent imprecision of Huygens’ clock, additional complex factors affected the oscillation of the pendulum clock at sea, such as the vibrations of the ship, the variation of
cold and heat, as well as irregular motions in case of storms
...
Moreover, it was
determined that at least two clocks were necessary on board each ship, in case one of
them would stop, need repair, or require cleaning
...
In this light, the extraordinary observation that
imperceptible vibrations mediating two clocks could be the cause of a collective order
appeared unexpected and, to say the least, unimaginable
...
Huygens’ odd sympathy was a setback and clocks, after all, might not be the
most appropriate instruments to solve the problem of the longitude
...

125–126)
...

Yet, they betray, at the same time, the utilitarian bent of classical mechanics
...
It
took three more centuries to realize that, in fact, nature favored such a subtle, complex
form of beauty
...
Entrainment is probably the
most primitive example of constructive, emergent behavior (Buyse, p
...

A recent re-examination of Huygens’ experimentation with clocks, published in
2002 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, indicates that the discovery of entrainment was due to “talent and luck,” since it “depended somewhat serendipitously on the
extra heavy weighting of his clocks intended to make them more stable at sea”
(Bennett, Schatz, Rockwood, & Wisesenfeld, p
...
I find this assessment quite meaningful, considering that we are dealing with a miraculous phenomenon that Huygens
called sympathy, consonance, agreement, “accord merveilleux” (marvelous accord)
...
127) and, from the latter
word, there is only one step to Jung’s version of serendipity: synchronicity
...
But since these vibrations could
not continue in an orderly way without interfering with each other, at least
while the two pendula were not in accord with one another, it happened in a
marvelous way that even when the swings of the pendula had been
intentionally disturbed, they came to swing together again, almost as if they
were two strings in unison
...
The third way is
to construct these two clocks from the start with so much skill and accuracy
that one can be certain of their subsequent agreement
...
147–148)
These three ways are perfectly understandable
...
The way of influence is
that of common philosophy; but since we can conceive neither material

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PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 䉬 VOLUME 61, ISSUE 3 / 2018

particles nor immaterial qualities or species that can pass from one of these
substances to the other, we must reject this opinion
...
148)
By “common philosophy” Leibniz meant Cartesian philosophy, which, after separating body and soul as distinct substances, imagined their continual influence occurring via
causal interactions
...
The collective
vibrations of neurons would lead to a marvelous agreement that we associate with embodied consciousness
...
Assuming that such a bridge
could be found in a causal regression to elementary particles, we would be led to the
hypothesis of panpsychism: All matter, somehow, is ensouled
...
But, I hold,
that is to appeal to a Deus Ex Machina in a natural and ordinary matter,
where, according to reason, God should intervene only in the sense that he
concurs with all other natural things
...
148)
During the Scientific Revolution, reflections on the nature of physical causality
entered into collision with the question of God’s influence upon the world, resulting in
hybrid speculations such as occasionalism
...
The way of assistance might look far-fetched but, even
nowadays, we hear people express the belief that God is energy or that energy is associated with the divine, which similarly grafts, in a rather artificial way, a spiritual shoot to
the trunk of science
...
The difficulty with this way is that it does not explain anything at all, nor does it add any significant contribution to the debate on the nature of causality
...

Finally, Leibniz (1989) proposes his preferred hypothesis:
Thus, there remains only my hypothesis, that is, the way of pre-established
harmony, through a prior divine artifice, which has formed each of these
substances from the beginning in such a way that by following only its laws,
laws which it received with its being, it nevertheless agrees with the other, as
if there were a mutual influence, or as if God
Logic sometimes makes monsters
...
More of continuity, or less of
continuity, more derivatives, and so forth
...

In former times when one invented a new function it was for a practical
purpose; today one invents them purposely to show up defects in the reasoning
of our fathers and one will deduce from them only that
...
973)
Unbeknownst to Poincare was the fact that his demonstration of the chaotic
nature of the solar system was, after all, directly related to logical monsters
...
It turns out that a chaotic system is characterized by the underlying
presence of strange attractors, which belong to the family of pathological functions
...
It was an entry into a dark realm of collective consciousness, where the questioning about quality proved as important, if not
more, than quantity
...
A
qualitative assessment—for example, of the stability or instability of a system—went
beyond the art of the geometer and required the survey of a multitude of geometric

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features at once, rather than the exact detail of individual traits
...
The focus is now on imagining how things would be
otherwise
...
Then, as the scales fell from the eyes, the new generation of mathematicians began to appreciate the intricate beauty of deterministic chaos—which suddenly was perceived everywhere around us and within us, from the ragged contours of
coastlines, mountains, and leaves to complex weather systems; from the beating of our
own hearts to the simultaneous firing of neurons in our brains
...
The word fractal, coined by Mandelbrot, comes
from the Latin frangere, which means “to break
...
Fractals serve to describe
“grossly irregular and fragmented facets of nature” (Mandelbrot, 1980, p
...
Mandelbrot also makes
the analogy with numbers and situates fractals between the Euclidian shapes in the
same way that fractions and rational numbers lie between whole numbers (p
...
To
get an intuitive image of what this means, we just need to look around us at the cubes,
spheres, and other smooth shapes we use to build our homes and cities, and contrast
them with complex shapes of trees, root systems, and clouds engineered by nature
...
B
...
The discovery of dynamics
...

Bennett, M
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F
...
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Huygens’ clocks
...
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...

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...

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McGuire, eds
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