Jung, Whitehead, and DNA
David Cowles
Oct 24, 2024
“Just as Jung’s self conditions every ego, so ‘Abram and Sarah’ condition every human being and primordial DNA/RNA conditions every organism.”
“Who R U?” The caterpillar’s iconic question figures prominently in our work here at Aletheia Today. But it’s not original to AT or even to Lewis Carroll. It dates back at least to the 5th century BCE, the golden age of Western civilization: “Know thyself!”
No surprise then the famous polymath, Carl Jung took a stab at the caterpillar’s question. Jung begins with multiple meanings of ‘you’. First, there’s the very particular you we know and love – Jung called this the ego; then there’s the broader, cosmic You which Jung called the self. While ego is local, self is universal.
Together, ego and self are the warp and woof of life. Ego begins at a singularity (you) and radiates out toward the cosmic event horizon (self) like ripples on the surface of the great lake of being; self begins at that horizon and radiates inward, converging at a singularity, you.
In Jung’s model, you are your own unique person, but that unique person ‘rolls up’ every other person who ever lived. The entire species, homo sapiens, is expressed in each and every human person. Each individual ego expresses the universal self and is then incorporated into that self for the benefit of other egos. Every ego is, among other things, an incarnation of the collective self.
True to his psychoanalytic mission and identity, Jung focused almost exclusively on human beings. Human society is his universe of discourse. He makes no explicit effort to generalize his ontology to include non-human life forms…or the inorganic.
Alfred North Whitehead, on the other hand, a mathematician, philosopher, and Jung’s contemporary, applied a similar model to the universe and everything in it. In place of Jung’s egos, Whitehead’s universe consists exclusively of events which he called actual entities. Like Leibniz’ monads, each actual entity (Jung’s ego) prehends the entirety (Jung’s self); it is a local expression of the universal.
Jung considers the self to be transcendent. As the eidos dei, the essence of God, the self is ineffable (Jung, 1951). However, Jung insists that psychology discuss the self, not as a metaphysical concept, but as an empirical phenomenon: “I cannot prove to you that God exists, but my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man (sic)…” (Jung, 1977).
Judeo-Christian tradition understands Humanity as ‘the image and likeness’ of Deity. Jung understands God through his analysis of individual persons. In Whitehead’s cosmology, each actual entity (event) is lured into being by the values that constitute God’s Primordial Nature (e.g. Beauty, Truth, Justice). In turn, each actual entity contributes its specific determination to God’s Consequent Nature for the benefit of all other entities.
Both models (Jung’s and Whitehead’s) anticipate modern genetics. The emergence of the DNA/RNA molecule kicks off the process we know as ‘evolution’; prior to that, it’s all just high school chemistry.
Your DNA is the product of 250 million years of humanoid evolution…and 4 billion years of biological evolution in general.
In various ways according to different models, 4 billion years of evolution are encoded in your individual DNA. What our scientists call the ‘genome’, Jung referred to as the ‘collective unconscious’: “Out of this universal One there is produced an individual subjective consciousness, i.e. the ego” (Jung, 1951):
Genome (Self) → Genotype → Phenotype (Ego).
In Whitehead’s version, God’s Primordial Nature and the Multiplicity → Actual World (self) → Actual Entity (Ego) → Superject (Objective Immortality) → God’s Consequent Nature. God’s Consequent Nature, the telos, in turn conditions the development of every subsequent Actual Entity. In the end, as Paul wrote in First Corinthians, “God is all in all.”
According to modern biology, the DNA/RNA molecule only appeared once in terrestrial history; but its self-replicating ability was so powerful that it has populated almost every available niche with diversely adapted life forms. That primordial DNA molecule is essentially incarnate in every living thing on this planet.
As noted above, Whitehead’s cosmology extends Jung’s paradigm to cover all events, all actual entities. According to Whitehead, everything that is prehends the entirety and manifests the pattern that is God.
Biology traces a line of descent from each of us back to a LUCA, a Last Universal Common Ancestor. In fact, it traces back to two such LUCAs. The first is species specific - a single human couple, a modern day Adam and Eve (or Abraham and Sarah) who lived c. 5000 years ago and whose DNA is now found in every human being on Planet Earth.
We share our second LUCA with every living organism of every species alive on Earth today: bacterium, fungus, plant or animal. This LUCA’s DNA is that of a unicellular organism that lived about 4 billion years ago. This DNA in turn descends from the primordial DNA/RNA molecule which synthesized just one time on Earth a few hundred million years before. Just as Jung’s self conditions every ego, so ‘Abram & Sarah’ condition every human being and primordial DNA/RNA conditions every organism.
Acknowledgement: For many of these thoughts re Jung, I am indebted to Kamal, Maysara, "What Is Your True Self According to Carl Jung?" TheCollector.com, May 24, 2024, https://www.thecollector.com/what-is-your-true-self-according-to-carl-jung/.
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