Overcoming Modernity

Subtitled 'synchronicity and image-thinking', this book constitutes a cultural critique of modern Western science using as a point of departure not only Japanese culture but also the ideas of CG Jung. The two other key terms are space-time and mind-body integration, indicating a holistic view. Western thinking has been exported via science and philosophy around the world, but it is nevertheless one-sided in privileging reason and discursive thinking over creativity and intuition. It has also been associated with individualism, which in turn reflects the atomistic view that human beings are in a sense above and outside of nature rather than being embedded in it. This sense of separation, even exclusion, also gives rise to alienation, and calls for a reinterpretation of the relationship between what we call outer and inner. This is exactly what Jung set out to do, partly as a response to encountering the I Ching and other modes of oriental thinking. The author surveys image thinking across cultures, relating it to the philosophy of being, found only in existentialism in the Western tradition. A discussion of synchronicity opens up the whole field of parapsychology and invites a corresponding enlargement of the Western world view along the lines suggested by David Bohm and others where the metaphor of the wave is given precedence over the particle. As a whole, the book is a stimulating corrective to the Western lens.