"Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also"
About this Quote
Jung is smuggling a rebuke into what sounds like a calm epistemological slogan. “Knowledge” doesn’t sit on a pedestal of verified facts; it squats on a compost heap of wrong turns, projections, misreadings, and half-true stories we tell ourselves before reality corrects us. The provocation is in the word “rests”: error isn’t a temporary embarrassment on the way to truth, it’s structural support. Pull it out and the whole enterprise collapses into sterile certainty.
The intent tracks with Jung’s broader project: psyche over proof, meaning over mere measurement. In analytic psychology, “error” includes the distortions we’d rather deny - the dream that lies, the memory that edits, the superstition that persists. Those aren’t just bugs; they’re data. A patient’s mistaken belief can be the most honest signal of an underlying conflict. The unconscious, after all, doesn’t speak in clean propositions. It speaks in symbols, substitutions, and defenses - a language that looks like error if you’re expecting a lab report.
The subtext is also a swipe at the modern fantasy of pure objectivity. Jung had watched Freud’s movement harden into doctrine and saw how quickly “truth” becomes a badge of belonging. Error, by contrast, keeps knowledge humble and alive; it forces revision, admits complexity, and resists moralizing. Read historically, in a Europe rocked by world wars and mass ideologies, the line lands as an anti-certainty ethic: the refusal to pretend we’re ever finished learning, or finished being wrong.
The intent tracks with Jung’s broader project: psyche over proof, meaning over mere measurement. In analytic psychology, “error” includes the distortions we’d rather deny - the dream that lies, the memory that edits, the superstition that persists. Those aren’t just bugs; they’re data. A patient’s mistaken belief can be the most honest signal of an underlying conflict. The unconscious, after all, doesn’t speak in clean propositions. It speaks in symbols, substitutions, and defenses - a language that looks like error if you’re expecting a lab report.
The subtext is also a swipe at the modern fantasy of pure objectivity. Jung had watched Freud’s movement harden into doctrine and saw how quickly “truth” becomes a badge of belonging. Error, by contrast, keeps knowledge humble and alive; it forces revision, admits complexity, and resists moralizing. Read historically, in a Europe rocked by world wars and mass ideologies, the line lands as an anti-certainty ethic: the refusal to pretend we’re ever finished learning, or finished being wrong.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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