ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the nature of C. G. Jung’s science and of the importance of alchemy to his work. It discusses his attempts to offer a new principle of science with the sort of “meaningful coincidences” he dubbed synchronicity. The chapter shows that how he sought, through these developments, to change modernity. Jung was interested in a science of symbols and felt that alchemy was a possible historical source, along with myth. The practice was generally considered the mere historical precursor to chemistry, science hampered by its enmeshment with religion, according to Enlightenment followers of the Newtonian paradigm. Found in speculative, poetic, and imaginal systems of meaning such as religion, the arts, and mythical texts like those of alchemy, symbols problematize the division between representation and reality. Thus Jung’s attitude to knowledge, given the key role he ascribes to symbols, necessarily refuses materialism.
