self

From Dave Richardson, Charlotte N.C.
I quote a letter from John Landon, answering a question of mine: is Jung's 
idea of the self the same as Kant's?
m not completely familiar with Jung's idea of the self. I should be wary of 
collating the two. Kant's notions of the self, please note, are heavily 
shadowed by the idea of the noumenal. Also, there is a complex relation of 
the self as appearance and self as noumenon, with the 'I' of 'apperception' 
as he calls it sitting astraddle. A complex picture of the self then. 
Jung is dealing with the unconscious, but the realm of archetypes remains 
unclear to me in relation to all this. Jung's archetypes however are 
curiously compelling in their own way, but what is their exact status? 
Platonic Ideas? And so on. 
John Landon
Website on the eonic effect
http://eonix.8m.com
nemonemini@eonix.8m.com
Reply from Dave Richardson:
    John Landon, you say that Kant and Jung's ideas of the self are noumenal. 
 They transcend empirical validation.  I agree. Perhaps Jung (who died in 
1962) would agree.  He knew he couldn't establish empirically any of his 
models of the self, the psyche, the personal unconscious, or the collective 
unconscious.  So he based his system on postulates instead of axioms.  And 
Kant had a similar attitude toward the self, though he had not model of the 
unconscious: not phenomenal but noumenal.
    But Kant and Jung's idea of the self probably agree.
Mr. Landon, you wonder about the archetypes [of the collective 
unconscious--Jung's name for the source of instinctual behavior].  Jung 
became obsessed with archetypes, as evidenced in several books about them\
    But the fascinating thing for me is the personal unconscious.  Jung 
didn't know as we do the extent to which it is close to the brain.  The 
latter has a hundred billion neurons.  It has ten trillion connections in it 
(synapses).  This enables the personal unconscious, a storehouse of every 
conscious experience, no matter how evanescent, to be immensely complex and 
also very speedy in its operations.
Yours,  Dave Richardson