Schopenhauer & Synchronicity

I am reading Schopenhauer's Parerga & Paralipomena (translated by E.F.J. Payne). I am going to put forward that the essay, simply titled (😉) Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual. is a precursor to Carl Jung's notion of Synchronicity. This isn't to say many other authors didn't do this, or this topic regarding Schopenhauer hasn't been exhaustively discussed previously, but I was taken aback by Schopenhauer's tentative, almost apologetic tone. Because I just ploughed through some 200 pages of Schopenhauer's vitriol towards his contemporaries, the switch in delivery was very noticeable.

I'll try not to cloud this issue with misrepresentations of Schopenhauer's main philosophy, but forgive me if I do & try to look past this to my point regarding Synchronicity.

I'll use S for Schopenhauer from this point on. S was a determinist very much immersed in the Newtonian view of cause & effect, indeed very impressed with the scientific advances made in his lifetime. As a self-professed Kantian he agreed in main with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He regarded perception as the basis for knowledge & further that our perceptual apparatus provided a "template" to organize & filter these perceptions. Space, time, & causality were a priori, in other words, built in conditions for our perceptions. These 3 conditions could not be overcome & science was a systematic discovery of the consistencies of our perceptual world - not an unraveling of the mysteries of the universe.

S posited a loophole: we have a unique experience of something within ourselves. He called this the Will. He comes close to ascribing this to our experience of emotions. Although unaware of Darwin's theory of evolution, S also argues that other life indicates a advancing development of perceptual ability & complexity in general.

Despite arguing the the Will is unknowable, S tells us quite a bit about this Will. It is the foundation of the universe, the basis for life, an incomprehensible presence outside of space, time, & causality. Here is where one can point out this is similar to Carl Jung's collective unconscious (or other accounts of psyche, élan, spirit, noosphere, etc.)

S fought the hook he caught himself on - a hook made of the deterministic universe of Newtonian physics & an unknowable basis for this universe that was not deterministic. Here is S fighting the hook in his essay: "Although the ideas to be given here do not lead to any firm result, indeed they might perhaps be termed a mere metaphysical fantasy, I could not bring myself to consign them to oblivion …"

In the essay S examines historical accounts of coincidences within individual lives that challenge the concept of causality. S, of course, predated Quantum Theory, so he didn't have this avenue to explore & possibly make a convoluted argument to account for these mysterious coincidences. He instead is forced to give arguments of cause & effect chains beyond our perception or understanding, but the fact remains he presents circumstances which could be viewed as synchronicity including daimons, psychoids & archetypes. S mentions fate, destiny, second sight, soothsayers, & so on. S really goes out on a limb here especially considering the thrashing he gave. earlier in the work. to Fiche, Schelling, & Hegel.

I'll forgo a quote where S gives an account of one of these coincidences. I'll go out on a limb myself & state the reader has experienced such occurrences themselves, so such a quote would be redundant. Instead here is some of what S thought about this:

"... a subjective connection that exists only in reference to the individual who experiences them."

"Now those two kinds of connection exist simultaneously and yet the same event, as a link in two quite different chains, …"

"It is the great dream that is dreamed by that one entity, but in such a way that all its persons dream it together."

I felt a mental shove to post this. I have been reacquainting myself with Jung as well as Schopenhauer. So here is a possible synchronicity for me: in his essay, S references a work by Jung-Stilling (1740 - 1817) called in translation, Theory of Pneumatology. Given that I was reading about Jung & S, this reference stood out. Surely this wasn't an ancestor of Carl Jung? It bothered me so I did some searching online & concluded there isn't any relationship. But it was a meaningful connection to me. Blame this event for this post. 😊