ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the influence of Immanuel Kant’s ‘biophilosophy’, from the second book of his Third Critique, The Critique of Teleological Judgement, first published in 1790, on C.G. Jung’s (1875–1961) ‘vitalism’. The rationale for this chapter concerns the importance of Kant’s influence on theories of the organism and organic individuation that emerged in the 19th century and which can broadly be classed as holistic and organicistic. The kind of ‘vitalism’ which Jung appeared to extol in his Zofingia Lectures (1896–1899) and which a handful of Jungian scholars have examined (Nagy, 1990; Addison, 2009) betrays features of Kant’s influence from the third Critique albeit of a ‘second hand’ nature given that Jung never engaged with this Critique directly. Rather, as McMillan demonstrates, it is the filtered effect of Kant’s biophilosophy on 19th-century organicism which made its mark on Jung’s early reflections concerning what he refers to as a ‘pre-existent vital principle’ and which he deems as ‘necessary to explain the world of organic phenomena’. Furthermore, this chapter reflects on the nature of this organicistic vitalism from a critical perspective, one which draws from the ideas of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and other contributions from scholars in Deleuze Studies.
