By Ralf SchauerhammerThe prevailing view of Kepler's "archetypal" thinking today contains a fatal error that has been spreading in people's minds for half a century since an essay by Wolfgang Pauli. The error becomes clear when one realizes that Kepler thought metaphorically, but his critics, such as Pauli, think symbolistically. I actually wanted to write a review of Rhonda Marten’s book “Kepler’s Philosophy and the New Astronomy,” but I will do that. It’s not worth it, even though the author is considered “bright young star in the history of the philosophy of science” and although experts recommend the book because it reflects “the latest thinking on the question of Kepler’s archetypes.” It is nevertheless worthwhile, or perhaps precisely because of this! For the prevailing view of Kepler’s “archetypal” thinking today is marked by a fatal error that has been perpetuated for half a century by Wolfgang Pauli’s well-known essay “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Formation of Scientific Theories in Kepler.”
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) It is easier to understand what this error is when one considers that Pauli’s essay was written as a supplement to C.G. Jung’s essay “Synchronicity as a Principle of Acausal Connections.” Both essays appeared in the same book and refer to each other repeatedly. Pauli explicitly states that his consideration of Kepler’s “archetypal” thinking is concerned with the connection between the thinking of “modern quantum physics” and C.G. Jung’s “modern psychology,” which “recognizes symbolic images as material” in the “collective (objective) psyche.” Pauli concludes with the words: “Precisely because the possibility of such symbolism has become alien to our time, it should be of particular interest to refer to another time (namely Kepler’s time, RS),… which enables us to prove the existence of a symbol with a simultaneously religious and scientific function.” However, the fact remains, and Pauli cannot quite bring himself admit that Kepler’s thinking has nothing to do with the kind of symbolic “archetypal” thinking propagated by Jung and so widespread today. If one does not make this sufficiently clear, then one is attributing something false to Kepler. Kepler’s thinking then remains enigmatic. In Martens’ book, this is already expressed in the question with which she begins her book: “How is it possible that the person who wrote the ‘Mysterium Cosmographicum’ could be the same person who also wrote the Astronomia Nova?”1 One might ask oneself such a question in the privacy of one’s own room, but as the beginning of a book?! Kepler was obviously one and the same person, and he had no problem with that. This becomes clear to anyone who reads the casual and refreshingly open comments that Kepler included in the second publication of his early work Mysterium Cosmographicum, which had appeared 25 years earlier. So the mystery lies less with Kepler than in the mind of Rhonda Martens.2 Metaphor or symbolWhen Kepler uses the word archetype, he means something fundamentally different from what Jung and Pauli call “archetypal.” The difference lies precisely in what distinguishes a metaphor from a symbol. Kepler thinks and speaks metaphorically, Jung and Pauli symbolically. The effect of a metaphor in classical poetry, which evokes in the listener a transformation that is emotionally linked to the process of recognizing an essential idea, differs fundamentally from the sensual emotional state conveyed by symbols in romantic poetry. Unlike metaphors, symbols do not convey real insight. The difference is as follows. Children’s magazines sometimes feature dot-to-dot puzzles in which dots numbered in a specific order must be connected with a pencil line. Once the line has been drawn through all the dots, a shape appears on the paper, for example, a bird or a little man. The child has followed the number symbols, from the first dot to the second, from 3 to 4, and has finally drawn a beautiful bird or a well-proportioned little man without understanding what a bird or a little man actually is. Landmarks such as 3 or 4, which have no real meaning for the bird or the little man, appear to the child as important means of orientation. This is how symbolic thinking works. The situation is completely different when the child is given the task of drawing a bird or a little man on a white sheet of paper. The child must first understand the creature (the bird is an animal, but it does not have four legs) and derive the proportions from the creature. When it is finished, it has understood something essential about the bird or little man and can repeat the drawing in any number of variations (a hunchbacked little man, a beautiful girl, etc.). They realize that they have to find and understand certain proportions between the limbs. The child will also try to draw little men better and better, which requires them to understand more and more about the nature and anatomy of humans. Finally, if the child’s name is Rembrandt, for example, they will understand themselves better and better by drawing themselves. This is the simplest form of metaphorical thinking. Today, symbolic thinking is the norm for thinking. typical, which, as in children’s puzzles, only connects points with connects point to point. Of course, there are scientific terms for this, such as “curve fitting” or “benchmarking” or “statistical method” or “chaos theory,” or, if it is supposed to sound particularly clever, it is emphasized that “ontological considerations lie outside the realm of exact sciences.” Even today, science is still as entertaining as the devil describes it in the student scene in Goethe’s Faust: Empiricism and symbolism are mutually dependent, because where the spiritual bond is missing, a word symbol sometimes takes its place. Symbolic thinking has also become so widespread through Romanticism and, more strongly, in the form propagated by C.G. Jung in the “open conspiracy” of the “New Age movement” that no one thinks anything of it anymore and it is considered completely normal. Kepler’s metaphorical thinkingBefore we can discuss the image of Kepler portrayed by Jung and Pauli, here are a few quotes from Kepler, which speak for themselves in their refreshing vividness. Kepler expressly opposes the symbolic use of geometry—today we say “mathematical models” instead of geometry—when he says, for example: 3 “I have not satisfied my mind with speculations of abstract geometry, i.e., with images of the possible and the impossible, with which the most famous geometers of today spend almost their entire lives; rather, I have traced geometry in the celestial bodies and in doing so have followed the footsteps of the Creator, sweating and panting.” And even when he uses the word “symbolize,” he means something quite different from C.G. Jung. In his writing “Tertius Interveniens,” Kepler says: 4 “So it is one of my thoughts whether not all of nature and all heavenly delicacy is symbolized in geometry.” But the creature, in its activity, unconsciously or consciously, instinctively or rationally, imitates the Creator: the earth in the formation of crystals, the plant with its formative power in the structure and arrangement of its leaves and flowers, man in his creative activity. And all this activity is like the play of a child, without intention, without purpose, out of an inner urge, out of the joy of creating, so that the eye delights in what is being created and the observing mind finds itself again and recognizes itself in what it has created. “As God the Creator played, so he also taught nature, as his image, to play, namely the very game that he played before her.” Primarily, it is free, creative, playful thinking, which Schiller calls the “play instinct,” that harmoniously produces the geometric “ornaments.” The harmonies that can be perceived by the senses are “traces” and “visible evidence” of this creative process. Not the other way around, as Jung would have us believe by claiming that geometric symbols are “patterns of behavior” to which our minds are “instinctively” bound. Finally, let us consider a passage from the Chapter 12 of Kepler’s second edition of his Mysterium Cosmographicum, which deals directly with the significance of “archet y pal” archetypes: “In the present chapters, I will have the physicists against me, because I have derived the natural properties of the planets from immaterial things and mathematical figures, and now dare to explain the origin of the celestial orbits on the basis of purely imaginary intersecting figures. I will respond briefly as follows. Since God, the Creator, is a spirit and does what he wills, nothing prevents him from basing his weighing of forces and marking out of orbits on immaterial things or things that exist in the imagination. And since he wants nothing that is not highly reasonable, and nothing exists without his will, may my opponents say what other considerations could have guided God in weighing the forces, etc., since there was nothing there except quantities? If, finding nothing, they then resort to the unexplored powers of creative wisdom, well, let them have the moderation they impose on their thirst for knowledge, and rejoice in it at the same time as in the reputation for piety, but allow us to make the causes probable from the quantities, provided we say nothing unworthy of the great architect … ‘ Kepler comments on this: “Behold what rich rewards the principle has brought me in the last 25 years, of which I was already firmly convinced at that time: that mathematical things are the causes of natural things (a doctrine against which Aristotle has railed in so many places) because God, the Creator, carried mathematical things within himself from eternity as archetypes in the simplest and most divine abstraction from the quantities considered materially. Aristotle denied the existence of a creator and assumed an eternal world. No wonder he rejected archetypes. For I confess that they would have no meaning if God had not referred to them in creation… If he (Aristotle, RS) finally learned that the most beautiful and compelling reasons for phenomena arise from harmonies as archetypes, then I believe he would wholeheartedly acknowledge the archetypes and, since these have no effect in themselves, God as the architect of the world Once again, Kepler turns against those who feel “pious” by “taking refuge in unexplored forces” and thus “imposing restraint on their thirst for knowledge,” while Kepler himself “traces geometry in the celestial bodies” and “follows in the footsteps of the Creator, sweating and panting.” He makes it clear that this “principle of archetypes” is not needed if, like Aristotle, one assumes an “eternal world,” or, as we can add from today’s perspective, like Newton, an entropic world in absolute space and absolute timeentropic world that occasionally needs to be wound up like a clock, or, as in modern times, a “Big Bang” as the origin of an eternally unchanging universe. However, if one recognizes the universe as a process of creation, not as something that is essentially complete after the “Big Bang” and only follows the laws of causality laws, but as a process that recognizes humans as the image of the Creator (i.e., enabling freedom, which can be developed for the future through the discovery and application of fundamentally new physical principles), then, and only then, is the “principle of archetypes” needed to guide the process of knowledge. Where this process is negated (as Kepler’s above quotation teaches in relation to Aristotle), this “harmonic idea” is unnecessary. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz still understood this. In Newton’s “modern” universe, this thinking no longer existed. The necessity of the “principle of archetypes,” which Once children have learned not only to connect dots with lines, but also to draw birds and little men in a wide variety of ways, they will understand everything that leads to the recognition of harmonious relationships. They will naturally realize that they are able to create increasingly beautiful pictures because they have a better grasp of the underlying proportions and harmonies. When the child sets out to draw a continuously improving, true picture of the universe, it will naturally apply the “principle of archetypes” here as well. Rhonda Martens interprets Kepler’s thinking as symbolic-archetypal and therefore sees problems that did not exist for Kepler. For Kepler, for example, there is no problem at all with the coexistence of the metaphors of nested Platonic solids, as he uses them in the Mysterium Cosmographicum, and the temporally variable harmonic intervals with respect to the angular velocities of the planets at aphelion and perihelion as seen from the sun, which he develops in the Harmonv of the World. Delighted like a child who has succeeded in drawing the bird or the little man in an even more beautiful way, Kepler reports on The “origin story” of his discoveries: “I had been looking for nothing but stones in this house of the world, stones that had a pleasing shape, but still only a shape that stones have. I did not know that the architect of the world had shaped the stones according to the well-structured image of a living body. So I gradually came, especially in the last three years, to the harmonies (of the world harmony model, RS) by tolerating very small deviations in the spatial figures (of the mystery model, RS). On the one hand, I was led to this by the idea that the harmonies played the role of form, putting the finishing touches, while the figures played the role of matter, which in the world is the number of planetary bodies and the raw extension of spatial areas. On the other hand, the harmonies also provided the eccentricities that the spatial figures did not even suggest. Or: the harmonies gave the statue its nose, eyes, and other limbs, while the spatial figures had only prescribed the external size of the raw mass.” Rhonda Martens writes on page 140 in reference to the same section of World Harmony: “In Kepler’s revised view, an acceptable model did not need to be geometrically determinable, as it could be influenced by harmony. One wonders whether it was easy for Kepler to revise his geometry.”5 Firstly, Kepler did not revise his “view of geometry” because he never thought symbolically or archetypically, and secondly, Kepler was a “philosophical mind”6who enjoyed constantly redesigning his system to make it better. But actually, I didn’t want to talk about Marthen’s book at all. Jung’s archetypal symbolism: make 4 out of 3!C.G. Jung does not recognize creative insight. In the human mind, symbolic images that have always slumbered in the “collective unconscious” merely “intensify.” In his essay “The Spirit of Psychology”7. Jung writes the following under the heading “Pattern of Behavior and Archetype”: “… Instinct and archaic mode coincide in the biological concept of pattern of behavior. There is no such thing as an amorphous instinct in which each instinct has the form of its situation. It always fulfills an image that has fixed characteristics. The instinct of the leafcutter ant is fulfilled in the image of the ant, the tree, the leaf, the cutting, the transport, and the fungus garden. If one of these determinations is missing, the instinct does not function. because it cannot exist without its total form, without its image. Such an image is a type of a priori nature. It is innate to the ant before any activity, because the latter can only take place if a corresponding instinct provides the occasion and opportunity for it. This pattern applies to all instincts and is present in identical form in all individuals of the same species. The same applies to humans… Although, from a certain point of view, through… it is correct to refer to the pattern of behavior as an archaic remnant that still exists, as Nietzsche did, for example, with regard to the functioning of dreams, but this does not do justice to the biological and psychological significance of these types. They are not merely relics or remnants of earlier modes of functioning, but rather ever-present, biologically indispensable regulators of the instinctual sphere…”
C.G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli For Jung, archetypes are virtually idols that imperceptibly guide human thinking in an eternally unchanging manner. In his convoluted way of speaking, C.G. Jung explains the following: “From these experiences and considerations, I have recognized that there are certain collectively existing unconscious conditions that act as regulators and stimulators of creative imagination and produce corresponding formations by making the existing material of consciousness serve their purposes… The existence of these unconscious regulators, which I have occasionally referred to as dominants because of the way they function, seemed so important to me that I based my hypothesis of a so-called impersonal, collective unconscious on them.” Jung found it “highly remarkable” that “a kind of spontaneous amplification of the archetypes” occurs in this process. “The emergence of archetypes has,” for Jung, a character “that must be described, if not as ‘magical,’ then at least as spiritual… It is not uncommon for the archetype to appear in the form of a spirit in dreams or in fantasy figures, or even to behave like a ghost…” That is why C.G. Jung profoundly recognized in 1936 that what happened under the Nazis was a spontaneous amplification, even a discharge of the Germanic “Wotan” archetype, for which individual persons could not be held responsible. After the war, when the whole nightmare was over, C.G. Jung took the “collective unconscious” of the Germans into collective custody and put forward the thesis of German collective guilt. In order to evaluate Pauli’s essay on Kepler’s “archetypal thinking,” we must also consider what C.G. Jung discussed in 1948 in Symbolism of the Spirit under the heading “An Attempt at a Psychological Interpretation of the Trinity Dogma.” In his “Concluding Remarks”8he summarizes: “The Trinity is also an archetype that not only promotes spiritual development with dominant force, but also enforces it when necessary.” Jung sees the danger of a “harmful one-sidedness,” whereby “goodness does not become better through exaggeration, but worse, and a small evil… a great one. The shadow is simply part of human nature, and only at night are there no shadows. It is therefore a problem.” C.G. Jung locates his satanic worldview in this “natural” shadow side of human beings, which cannot exist in the trinity, but is completed by the meaning of the quaternity taken by Jung from Gnosticism and alchemy. He asserts: “In the comprehensive formula of the Trinity, ‘creation,’ i.e., matter, is not included, at least not explicitly.” This is not true, but it provides a useful basis for the following sophism: “Under these circumstances, there are only two possibilities: either it is real and then it is included in the divine actus purus, or it is unreal, a mere illusion… However, the latter conclusion is contradicted on the one hand by the incarnation of God and the work of redemption in general, and on the other hand by the autonomy and eternity of the ‘prince of the world’, namely the devil, who is only defeated but by no means destroyed and, according to his eternity, cannot be destroyed. If the reality of the creation of the world is included in the actus purus, then the devil is also there — q.e.d. This situation results in a quaternity.” Jung recognizes very well that through “the Holy Spirit’s influence on man,” man is “involved in the divine process.” Jung has a problem with this because through this involvement, man loses his “autonomy from God.” He therefore demands the necessary existence of Lucifer, “without whom there would have been no creation and certainly no history of salvation. The shadow and the counter-will are the inevitable conditions of every realization.” This is nonsense, because belief in God expresses the creative cognitive ability of man. The “realization” of man is “autonomous,” i.e., not possible without or contrary to this ability. Indeed, this creative potential is precisely the basis of human freedom. The perversion of “freedom,” the freedom of a liberal hedonist or a drug victim, which is in reality the greatest human bondage, is what is brought about in the human spirit by this satanic “autonomy” demanded by Jung. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz develops a concept of evil compatible with human freedom in his theodicy. No “autonomous” devil is necessary for this: “There is, in fact, an original imperfection in the creature before all sin, because (but) limitation belongs to the nature of the creature: therefore it cannot know everything, it can be deceived and commit other errors.” Therefore, one should not “regard evil as an effective cause.” The cause of evil consists “in deprivation, that is, in what the effective cause has not done.”9 Real freedom “Harmonizes” with the creative thinking of humans—that is what Kepler actually expresses through the spherical metaphor of the Trinity. This consideration of C.G. Jung’s “archetypal” thinking C.G. Jung regarding the Trinity and Quaternity was necessary in order to understand the connection between Jung’s essay “Synchronicity as a Principle of Acausal Connections” and Pauli’s “Influence of Archetypal Ideas… in Kepler.” In addition to his own astrological investigations and an enthusiastic eulogy of the card games of the founder of parapsychology, Joseph Banks Rhine, the article contains an attempt to develop an “archetype” valid for modern science. In this context, Jung refers to Pauli’s article and states: “The revolution in physics brought about by the discovery of radioactivity has significantly modified the classical view.” According to Jung, this classical view is a “triadic worldview” that “continued the type of trinity” advocated by Kepler. In his search for an archetype for the modification of the physical worldview brought about by the discovery of radioactivity, Jung enjoyed the “kind interest” that “Prof. W. Pauli showed in my research” and says: “We have accordingly agreed on the following quaternion: indestructible energy, space-time continuum, causality, synchronicity. This scheme satisfies the postulates of modern physics on the one hand and those of psychology on the other.” So now we know how modern physics went to hell. Once again, Pauli’s Kepler essayWe now know the lens through which Wolfgang Pauli views the “influence of archetypal ideas… in Kepler.” It would be unfair to simply lump Pauli together with C.G. Jung, but he undoubtedly follows Jung’s symbolic mysticism to such an extent that he can no longer understand the decisive aspect of Kepler’s scientific way of thinking. Right at the beginning, Pauli says the following about Kepler’s “archetypal images”: “The correspondence with the ‘primordial images’ or archetypes introduced into modern psychology by C.G. Jung, which function as ‘instincts of understanding,’ is very extensive.” To leave no doubt that he really did misunderstand, Pauli continues: “Insofar as these images are an ‘expression of a suspected but as yet unknown fact,’ they can also be described as symbolic according to C.G. Jung’s definition of the symbol… In this world of symbolic images, archetypes function as the sought-after bridge between sensory perceptions and ideas.” No, the bridge is not symbolic at all, but rather the active creative spirit of man. As Kepler says, it is “man in his creative activity” who, “like a child playing a child, out of the joy of creating,” rediscovers his creative spirit and recognizes in what he has created “how God the Creator plays.” It is in this activity, not in the symbol, that the bridge between idea and sensory truth lies. Pauli’s symbolistic misinterpretation of Kepler’s thinking leads him to overestimate Kepler’s fascination with Pythagorean spherical harmony. For Kepler, “geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world,” says Pauli, adding: “This principle is both his strength and his limitation.” With this sentence, Pauli summarized the core message of Rhonda Marten’s book half a century before its publication. However, Kepler does not say that “geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world” in the form of a bridging symbol, but rather that geometry is a prerequisite for the human mind to perceive the beauty of the world or to recognize harmony, and even dissonance. “As for sensual harmonies, four factors contribute to their existence.
Geometry only provides the “pure” harmonies required under point 4, thus contributing only to one of the necessary components of the process by which we experience the “beauty of the world” in our hearts and minds. 1 0 Pauli asserts: “That is why we also regard Kepler’s view of the correspondence between the sun and the planets surrounding it with his abstract spherical image of the Trinity as primary: because he views the sun and planets with this archetypal image in the background, he believes in the heliocentric system with religious passion — not the other way around.” In Chapter 33 of his Astronomia nova, Kepler says the exact opposite. He proves at length that the “real sun” must be at the center of the world because that is where the center of power is, and then says: “Of course, if I had attempted to prove a priori (from the very special significance of the sun) what I have proven a posteriori (from observation) through a rather long investigation, then… I would probably have deserved to be listened to with an inclined ear.” If one does not assume that Kepler’s unconscious played a nasty trick on him, then these lines show that Kepler weighs the primary and secondary in exactly the opposite way to Pauli. But Pauli does not only present Kepler’s “archetypal” thinking in the sense of C.G. Jung. He contrasts Kepler’s “instinctively guided” thinking with the mystical symbolism of the co-founder of the Rosicrucians, Robertus Fludd, who represents the “thinking type” of quaternity. In this “historical investigation,” Pauli concludes that although the epigone Fludd is inferior to the original thinker Kepler, as already quoted at the beginning, the “investigation” provides “proof of the existence of a symbol with a simultaneously religious and scientific function.” And Pauli finds this important, because “since the time of Kepler and Fludd, however, the possibility of a bridge between the extreme poles of this pair of opposites has come closer: on the one hand, the idea of complementarity within modern physics has the contradiction” as it appears in the wave-particle paradox “only seemingly” resolved, “on the other hand, however, the applicability of old alchemical ideas in C.G. Jung’s psychology points to a deeper unity of psychological and physical events.”
The divine and earthly triangle From Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi Maioris etc. Kepler versus FluddThe problem with Pauli’s essay becomes particularly apparent when one realizes that a “historical investigation” of the different points of view of Kepler and Fludd is completely superfluous. Kepler himself provided it with great clarity and generality in the appendix to Book V of his Harmony of the World. And it is precisely this discussion that makes it clear that Kepler’s thinking is not archetypal-symbolic. And one also sees immediately that it is not a question of 3 or 4. Kepler says: “But when I decided a year ago to publish the five books of my Harmony, it seemed to me a matter of great importance to compare my work with that of Ptolemy… (and thus, RS) to point out the differences between the symbolism of Ptolemy and my genuine proofs.” revealing the weakness and imperfection of those symbolisms and the main cause thereof, i.e., the fallacy of the foundations of Ptolemaic astronomy… Those symbolisms are for the most part not compelling; they are neither causal nor natural, but rather poetic and oratorical… I have therefore shown, after an improved astronomy that records the true and simple movements of the planets, eliminating the apparent ones based on deceptions of our sense of sight, that all harmonious proportions occur in the sky according to a true and genuine, quantitative and measurable ratio, but not according to a mere meaningless symbolism… Enough of Ptolemy’s work. I would hereby also conclude the appendix, were it not for the related nature of the subject, which invites me to satisfy those people who have demanded that I should not fail to mention in my work the harmonics of Mr. Robert Fludd, physician in Oxford… There is a tremendous difference between us in this regard. For starters, the harmonies he attempts to teach are pure symbolism, about which I have the same to say as I do about those of Ptolemy, namely that they are more poetic and oratorical than philosophical and mathematical… That is why his work contains so many illustrations, while mine contains mathematical figures marked with letters. It is also clear that he derives his greatest pleasure from incomprehensible riddles about reality, while I aim to bring the obscure facts of nature into the bright light of knowledge. The former is the domain of chemists, hermeticists, and Paracelsists, while the latter is the task of mathematicians… This is the spirit of his entire book, as is already evident from the title Macrocosm and Microcosm … In my work, I do, of course, also deal with some things that echo those macrocosmic explanations, where in Book IV I make the Earth into a living being. But this happens in a completely different context. For I do not claim that there is a pure analogy between the Earth and living beings; nor do I allow the archetype of the living being to be taken from the Earth. Rather, my intention is simply to prove that the processes observed on the globe cannot be attributed solely to the movements of the elements or the properties of matter, but testify to the presence of a soul. In order for my reasoning to be understood, I had to cite the various spiritual functions in the bodies of living beings… An equally great difference between us is that he attributes four degrees of darkness and gloom to the elemental region, because, every thing has four quarters’ (yes, of course, as well as three thirds or five fifths) and of these he has four in the earth three in water (which is where its transparency comes from), two in air, and one in fire. Elsewhere, he further divides every region, both elemental and celestial, into three spaces, an upper, a middle, and a lower, without the senses making this probable everywhere. One sees that the units are again arbitrary… I, on the other hand, take natural units, namely the two extreme movements of the individual planets, which are formed by nature according to their specific sizes, and in these I seek harmonies only in movements. He picks out a few insignificant consonances and develops them from the mixture of his pyramids, which he carries in his mind as an image of the world he has conceived… I, however, have proven that the entire complex of harmonic tuning, with all its parts and the extreme proper motions of the planets, is contained according to specific measures proven by astronomy. For him, therefore, the image he himself has designed of the world is, for me, on the other hand, the world itself or the real motion of the planets in it, the object of world harmony.” Kepler’s relativistic spaceI would now like to refer to a passage in Pauli’s essay in which Pauli takes up a very interesting aspect and, inspired by this, considers what concept of space Kepler might have had. Pauli writes: “Regarding the term ‘anima movens,’ I would like to note that Kepler’s views on the cause of motion are inconsistent. At one point in his writing on the new star, he says: … Ultimately, the forces that move the heavenly bodies are somehow part of a thought process, so that they somehow understand, imagine, and strive toward their path, not through deliberation, as we humans do, but through an innate impulse that was imprinted on them at creation, and in the same way, the spiritual abilities of natural things also have an innate knowledge of their goal, according to which they direct all their actions.” Here Kepler takes an animistic point of view, but elsewhere he says: The sun, in the midst of the moving stars, itself at rest and yet the source of movement, bears the image of God the Father, the Creator. For what creation is to God, movement is to the sun. But it moves within the fixed stars, as the Father creates in the Son. For if the fixed stars did not create space through their static being, nothing could move. But the sun distributes its motive power through a medium in which that which moves is contained, just as the Father creates through the Holy Spirit or through the power of the Holy Spirit. This view has much in common with modern field physics. Pauli undoubtedly recognized something very essential here. I would like to go beyond that and ask the reader two things. First, not to regard Kepler’s “view” as “vacillating.” but to assume a “language problem,” that is, a situation in which Kepler can only tentatively express a concept for which he does not have sufficient terms at his disposal. What “field concept” could that be? Second, to momentarily erase from our consciousness the concept of the gravitational field as found in every textbook, so that this concept, with all its “gravity” gained in the meantime, does not immediately steer our thinking in this direction. If we look at the two quotations in this way, then they have something in common. If we interpret the comparison between the sun, the sphere of fixed stars, and the interwoven space in the second quotation not as a symbol that defines Kepler’s thinking, but as a metaphorical description of the creative process of cognition,1 1 then one understands that Kepler’s concept of space has a quality that is coherent with the human thought process. But how could he express this in the language of Euclidean geometry, to which he was bound? That is why the function of the Trinity metaphor in second “feldtheoretic” quote is the same as in the first “animistic” quotation, the image from the “spiritual abilities of natural things,” which have “a knowledge of their goal within themselves,” “according to which they direct all their actions.” It is not Kepler’s point of view that is wavering, but at most his form of expression. If one considers Kepler If you are familiar with Newton, then vou know that he definitely does not anything mean mystical or supernatural. He always starts from material conditions and consistently rejects any symbolic construction, whether it be epicycles, equilibrium points, the mean sun, or anything else. He would also have rejected Newton’s “absolute space” as such a construct, as the second quote, which emphasizes that the fixed stars must “create” space, makes clear. 1 2
Cover image of the Rudolphine Tables. Opposite: Excerpt Kepler repeatedly emphasizes that even if one assumes a planetary soul, it does not have human-like “thinking activity,” and that all its actions must be oriented toward real, determinable things, such as the size of the solar disk visible from the planet. When he speaks of the soul of the Earth or the soul of a planet, he means a scientifically exact, universal function that must be researched using strict criteria. In this context, assumed. Kepler expresses a very fundamental principle in Chapter 38 of Astronomia Nova, according to which the harmonious interaction of the “forces” must be: “The examples of nature and the assumed relationship between the heavenly and earthly Phenomena clearly demonstrate that the effects of a simple body are all the simpler the more general they are, and that any differences that arise (such as the varying distance from the sun or the eccentricity in the motion of the planets) are caused by external factors.” Kepler’s thinking today and tomorrowThe real reason why I did not attempt to review Marten’s book is the lack of respect shown by the “new young star” of today’s science for the great achievements and brilliant mind of Johannes Kepler. What are we to think of someone who dismisses Kepler on page 171 of his book by patting him “snobbishly” on the shoulder, as if to say: Despite all your mistakes, it wasn’t entirely in vain, old man! And this after accusing Kepler of errors in his “archetypal” thinking, which have little to do with his actual thinking, but all the more with the perspective of today’s observer. Kepler advanced human thought by leaps and bounds; like no other person in modern times, he contributed to the advancement of science, and we should be happy if we succeed in mobilizing some of this tremendous power of thought within ourselves. Kepler himself was a self-critical person and never behaved arrogantly. It is very significant how he portrays himself on the title page of the Rudolphine Tables as the consummator of astronomy. At first glance, Kepler is not even recognizable in the Temple of Astronomy depicted there, whose ten columns are each dedicated to one of the great astronomers of the past. But then you find Johannes Kepler in a small picture at the base of the temple. He is sitting at a table and is in the process of completing this temple of astronomy by placing the dome on these pillars; a modest but self-confident and very accurate selfcharacterization. Karl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest astronomers, says that after Kepler, the problem for astronomers was no longer to derive completely unknown elements, but that they only had to modify the already known elements a little in order to define them within narrower limits. 1 3 This is still true today. Normally, Kepler is viewed through the lens of “Newtonian system,” through which Kepler’s work was supposedly “perfected.” With this approach, the essence of Kepler’s thinking is no longer recognizable. The great importance attached to the three “Keplerian laws” is misleading in itself. To make matters worse, they are numbered incorrectly in all textbooks. Kepler first came up with the “area theorem,” i.e., the so-called “second Keplerian law.” It was only later that he discovered the elliptical shape of the orbits, i.e., what is now called “Kepler’s First Law.” The confusion is quite understandable for someone like Newton and Galileo, who merely describe the phenomena formally with mathematical tools: first the shape of the orbit is described, and then the law for the velocity on this orbit follows. In reality, however, this obscures Kepler’s creative thinking. The correct Keplerian sequence of laws results in an interesting paradox (for formal thinkers). How could Kepler know that the “travel beam” of the planet passes through equal areas in equal times, when he did not yet know the respective distances of the planet from the sun, i.e., when he did not yet know whether the limiting curve was an ellipse, a circle, an oval, or whatever curve it might be? When you think about it, you realize why the area theorem was of primary importance to Kepler. It expresses the physical principle of a coherent effect between the central sun and the planets. It is the same concept that led Leibniz, more than half a century later, to the new science of “dynamics,” which in turn led to his correction of Descartes’ concept of “quantity of motion” and to the methodological development of infinitesimal calculus.1 4This transition from static-mechanical thinking to the dynamic concept of living force is already hinted at in the letter Kepler wrote to Brenger on October 4, 1607: “Of course, I also use circles to help me, but only for calculation, insofar as circles explain the mode of action of the balance, the lever, and the weights, and thus only partially. For the rest, I draw on the areas described by the planet in its orbit; in these I seek the strength and weakness of the forces exerted on the movements.” Research into the history of the natural sciences often refers to the significance of Kepler’s “harmonic principle.” It is even recognized that this principle “led Kepler directly or indirectly to all his discoveries.”1 5 It is then noted that this idea has since ceased to exist in natural science. That is precisely the problem! Is it enough to simply note this? Would it not be important to examine what science has lost with this “fundamental harmonic idea”? After all, it was this idea that guided the greatest astronomer to all his discoveries! When poets such as John Keats and Friedrich Schiller say in “The Artists” that “truth is beauty,” then that is precisely Kepler’s “fundamental harmonic idea.” This is essential for the future of science: truth exists, but only if truth is beauty. Today’s natural scientists know reject such “metaphysical speculations” out of hand. They may think what they like. But when, in this state of mind, they say something clever about “Kepler’s thinking,” they resemble a group of blind people who reproach the sighted Kepler for not using his cane correctly along the existing orientation markers and railings and for talking about invisible spirits. What the “precise” scientist does not want to see is that there is no such thing as “empirical truth.” It is, as Friedrich Schiller says in his poem “Columbus,” if America did not yet exist, it would rise out of the waves before the approaching Columbus. For nature accomplishes what the brilliant mind promises! Truth is beauty because scientific truth is based on the coherence of the creative process of knowledge with nature. The universe “obeys” the creative thinking of man, just as it obeys the creator God, whose living image is the creatively cognizant human being. This is Kepler’s “harmonic principle,” which he expresses with his metaphor of the trinity of spherical surface, spherical center, and spherical content, which can only be misunderstood as “mystical” if it is reduced to an “archetypal” geometric symbol. Basically, it is as simple as Kepler describes at the end of his Harmony of the World. Humans can recognize the universe because it is “harmoniously” ordered in such a way that it corresponds to their own process of cognition. Therefore, according to Kepler, “the entire universe is animated by one and the same continually creative spirit, which acts for the sake of beauty and goodness and knows what to do with any excess matter .” For example, living beings arise from inanimate matter, but so do new stars.1 6 “That universal world spirit seems to accomplish the feat of arranging everything in mutual harmony… If nothing living existed, it would make all matter alive.”1 7 We cannot perceive this principle, which continually shapes things for the better, directly, but we can recognize it from the harmoniously ordered traces it “leaves behind.” Even in inanimate matter, there is a “creative force” that acts “like a pregnant woman,” which “reproduces the five regular geometric bodies in gemstones and crystals.” Even when Kepler attempts to describe the movements of the heavens “like a clock,” this does not mean that he believed the universe to be a clock. Newton, on the other hand, believed in the absurdity of a dead universe that functions like a clock and therefore has to be wound up from time to time. Leibniz, on the other hand, thinks exactly like Kepler when he says: “By no means, therefore, should one reject the final causes and the idea of a spirit of perfect wisdom whose activity is directed toward the highest good… Rather, the main principles of physics are derived precisely from the concept of a spiritual cause.” Leibniz refers to Socrates, who explains in Plato’s Phaedo that one cannot conclude from the movement of Socrates’ bones and muscles why he is sitting here, because he would not be doing so if the mind had not decided that it was more dignified for Socrates to accept the death sentence than to flee. Leibniz continues: “I do not deny, however, that once the principles have been established, natural processes can and must be explained according to the rules of mathematical mechanics, provided only that the admirable purposes of ordering providence are not forgotten. The principles of physics, and thus also those of mechanics, cannot themselves be derived from laws of mathematical necessity, but ultimately require reference to the highest intelligence for their justification: herein lies the true reconciliation between faith and reason.”1 8 This is the core of Kepler’s “idea of harmony,” which (in contrast to Jung’s “archetype” of a “Quaternio” (from “indestructible energy, space-time continuum, causality, and synchronicity”) has the potential to transform modern science into a This naturally requires that, despite centuries-old ways of thinking, we try to understand Kepler and develop his ideas further in line with his thinking and that of Plato, Cusa, and Leibniz. Harmony in inanimate nature, in living nature and in the human cognitive process“But note the analogy: where size predominates, significance declines. Where the scale is smaller, dignity increases. The sphere of fixed stars is the largest, but it is motionless, inert. Next comes the moving world; it is smaller, but all the more significant because it has been given such an admirable and well-ordered motion. But this part of the world cannot think, cannot draw conclusions, is not endowed with a vegetative soul; what it does, it has not learned, but has been imprinted upon it; neither what it is not and will not be, nor what it is, emanates from it. It remains as it was created. Now comes our little globe, our little hut, the creator of vegetative beings, which is itself shaped from within by a soul, the artful creator of such wonderful works, and daily ignites from within itself the little souls of so many plants, fish, and insects, so that they easily fill the immense expanse of the outshines the rest of the world! After all, look at the little creatures! Here there are already feelings and arbitrary movements, an infinite variety of artistic body shapes. Look at those specks among them that are called humans, who bear God’s image within themselves, who are the masters of the entire immense universe. Who among us would wish for a body as large as the universe in exchange for renouncing our soul?” From a letter from Kepler to Herwart von Hohenburg, Prague, March 28, 1605
Epilogue about the sun with speculative assumptions“…It is not only from the sun as the focal point or eve of the world that light, as the heart of the world, life and warmth, as the ruler and mover of all movement, emanates into the world. Rather, the sun also collects, as it were, taxes from the entire province of the world according to the law of kingship, which consist in a most lovely harmony, or rather, the species of two planets converging on it are united in harmony by the activity of some spirit and thus, as it were, minted into coins from raw silver and gold… Nor do we, like Aristotle and the pagan philosophers, introduce spiritual powers as gods, nor, like the magicians, innumerable hosts of planetary spirits… While I am careful to avoid this, let us now also examine openly and freely, with natural reasons, the nature of the individual spiritual forces, especially if such a spirit occupies the place of a world soul in the heart of the world… If it is permissible to explore the labyrinth of nature’s secrets by analogy, then I believe the following conclusion is not unreasonable: just as the six spheres relate to their common center, i.e., the center of the entire world, so too does the discursive mind relate to the Reason, as distinguished by Aristotle, Plato, Proclus, and the other philosophers. And again, just as the revolution of the individual planets around the sun from place to place relates to the rotation of the sun in the center of the entire system without any translation, so too does the activity of the discursive mind relate to that of reason, and manifold conclusions to thoroughly simple spiritual knowledge. For just as the sun moves all the planets through the species emanating from it by revolving around itself, so too, as the philosophers teach, the mind brings forth conclusions by recognizing all things in and of itself, i.e., by unfolding and extending its simplicity to those conclusions, it causes everything to be recognized. The movements of the planets and the sun at their center and the operations of the reasoning mind are so closely connected and intertwined that human reasoning would never have worked its way through to the correct distances of the planets and everything that depends on them, and would never have established astronomy, if the earth, our home, did not travel its annual circle in the middle between the others, exchanging one place with another, one position with another Kepler, Harmony of the World, Book V, Chapter X. Footnotes:
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