27 November 2019

Wolfgang Pauli - Collected Quotes

"[…] inner images are rather psychic manifestations of the archetypes which, however, would also have to put forth, create, condition anything lawlike in the behavior of the corporeal world. The laws of this world would then be the physical manifestations of the archetypes. […] Each law of nature should then have an inner correspondence and vice versa, even though this is not always directly visible today." (Wolfgang Pauli, [letter to Markus Fierz] 1948)

"The layman always means, when he says 'reality' that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality." (Wolfgang Pauli, [letter to Markus Fierz] 1948)

"When one analyzes the pre-conscious step to concepts, one always finds ideas which consist of 'symbolic images.' The first step to thinking is a painted vision of these inner pictures whose origin cannot be reduced only and firstly to the sensual perception but which are produced by an 'instinct to imagining' and which are re-produced by different individuals independently, i. e. collectively [...] But the archaic image is also the necessary predisposition and the source of a scientific attitude. To a total recognition belong also those images out of which have grown the rational concepts." (Wolfgang Pauli, [letter to Markus Fierz] 1948)

"The process of understanding in nature, together with the joy that man feels in understanding, i.e., in becoming acquainted with new knowledge, seems therefore to rest upon a correspondence, a coming into congruence of preexistent internal images of the human psyche with external objects and their behavior. […] the place of clear concepts is taken by images of strongly emotional content, which are not thought but are seen pictorially, as it were, before the minds eye." (Wolfgang Pauli, "Der Einfluss archetypischer Vorstellungen auf die Bildung  naturwissenschaftlicher Theorien bei Kepler", 1952)

"To us […] the only acceptable point of view appears to be the one that recognizes both sides of reality - the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical - as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously […] It would be most satisfactory of all if physis and psyche (i.e., matter and mind) could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality." (Wolfgang Pauli', "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler", [Lecture at the Psychological Club of Zurich], 1948)

"The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level." (Wolfgang Pauli, [letter to Jagdish Mehra], 1958)

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