‘This extraordinary, edited volume is based on key papers from the

first conference of its kind exploring the problematic arising from the
writings of C. G. Jung and Gilles Deleuze on holism. The wealth of
expertise offered here provides a much-​needed in-​depth exploration
of rhizomatic holism found in Jung and Deleuze, but is also further
expanded to assist readers in realizing the tremendous implications
for 21st-​century psychology and philosophy. The editors are to be cel-
ebrated for crafting this remarkable collection; it will not disappoint!’
Joseph Cambray, PhD, President/​CEO,
Pacifica Graduate Institute, USA

‘The configuration of systems and the relationships of interconnecting

parts to a whole is a fascinating conceptual puzzle, and one vital to
our understanding of the functioning of society and our relationship
with ourselves, others, and the world at large. Jung, Deleuze, and the
Problematic Whole asks important epistemological and ethical ques-
tions of wholeness through the lens of heavyweight thinkers, Gilles
Deleuze and C. G. Jung. Written by experts in continental philosophy
and Jungian studies, this book is insightful in its scrutiny of a variety
of interrelated issues, including reductionism, totalitarianism, privi-
lege and exclusion, identity, creativity, and personal and social trans-
formation. A wholly compelling book.’
Lucy Huskinson, Professor of Philosophy,
Bangor University, UK; author of Architecture and
the Mimetic Self

‘Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole is essential reading for

those interested in the flourishing area of Jung/​Deleuze studies. From
a Jungian perspective, Deleuze’s ideas allow an interpretation of Jung’s
writing on the unus mundus that both critiques and revitalizes his work.
For those who study Deleuze, this is added evidence of the potential
for a psychology consonant with the ideas of schizoanalysis. Overall,
this book marks an important contribution to the ongoing exploration
of Jung’s influence on the philosopher of the rhizome.’
Barbara Jenkins, Professor, Department of Communication
Studies, Wilfred Laurier University, Canada; author of Eros and
Economy: Jung, Deleuze, Sexual Difference
Jung, Deleuze, and the
Problematic Whole

This book of expert essays explores the concept of the whole as it

operates within the psychology of Jung, the philosophy of Deleuze,
and selected areas of wider twentieth-​century Western culture, which
provided the context within which these two seminal thinkers worked.
Addressing this topic from a variety of perspectives and disciplines
and with an eye to contemporary social, political, and environmen-
tal crises, the contributors aim to clarify some of the epistemological
and ethical issues surrounding attempts, such as those of Jung and
Deleuze, to think in terms of the whole, whether the whole in question
is a particular bounded system (such as an organism, person, society,
or ecosystem) or, most broadly, reality as a whole.
Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole will contribute to enhanc-
ing critical self-​reflection among the many contemporary theorists and
practitioners in whose work thinking in terms of the whole plays a
significant role.

Roderick Main, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Psychosocial

and Psychoanalytic Studies and Director of the Centre for Myth
Studies at the University of Essex, UK.

Christian McMillan, PhD, is Lecturer at West Suffolk College, University

of Suffolk, and was formerly Senior Research Officer in the Department
for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK.

David Henderson, PhD, is Lecturer in Jungian Studies in the Department

for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK.
He is a member of the British Jungian Analytic Association (BJAA)
and the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP).
PHILOSOPHY & PSYCHOANALYSIS BOOK SERIES
JON MILLS
Series Editor

Philosophy & Psychoanalysis is dedicated to current developments and

cutting-​edge research in the philosophical sciences, phenomenology,
hermeneutics, existentialism, logic, semiotics, cultural studies, social
criticism, and the humanities that engage and enrich psychoanalytic
thought through philosophical rigor. With the philosophical turn in
psychoanalysis comes a new era of theoretical research that revisits
past paradigms while invigorating new approaches to theoretical, his-
torical, contemporary, and applied psychoanalysis. No subject or disci-
pline is immune from psychoanalytic reflection within a philosophical
context including psychology, sociology, anthropology, politics, the
arts, religion, science, culture, physics, and the nature of morality.
Philosophical approaches to psychoanalysis may stimulate new areas
of knowledge that have conceptual and applied value beyond the con-
sulting room reflective of greater society at large. In the spirit of plu-
ralism, Philosophy & Psychoanalysis is open to any theoretical school
in philosophy and psychoanalysis that offers novel, scholarly, and
important insights in the way we come to understand our world.

Titles in this series:

Innovations in Psychoanalysis: Originality, Development, Progress
Edited by Aner Govrin and Jon Mills

Holism: Possibilities and Problems

Edited by Christian McMillan, Roderick Main, and David Henderson

Romantic Metasubjectivity Through Schelling and Jung:

Rethinking the Romantic Subject
Gord Barentsen
Jung, Deleuze, and the
Problematic Whole

Edited by Roderick Main,

Christian McMillan, and
David Henderson
First published 2021
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Title: Jung, Deleuze and the problematic whole / edited by
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Description: Abingdon, Oxon : New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Series: Philosophy and psychoanalysis |
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Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995.
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ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​42874-​7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​42875-​4 (pbk)
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Contents

List of figures ix
About the contributors x
Acknowledgement xiv

Introduction 1
RODERICK MA IN, CHR ISTIA N McMILLAN, AND
DAV ID H ENDER SO N

1 The ethical ambivalence of holism: An exploration

through the thought of Carl Jung and Gilles Deleuze 20
RODERICK MA IN

2 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-​form in Jung’s

‘The undiscovered self’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s
‘Treatise on nomadology’ 51
CHRISTIAN McMILLA N

3 Jung as symptomatologist 80
DAV ID H ENDER SO N

4 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self 102

IN NA S EMETSKY

5 The geometry of wholeness 125

GEORGE H O GENSO N

6 The status of exceptional experiences in the

Pauli-​Jung conjecture 142
HARALD ATMA NSPACHER
viii Contents

7 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence:

Anaxagoras, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Klages, and Jung on
the beauty of it all 167
PAUL BISHO P

8 Holism and chance: Markets and meaning under

neoliberalism 193
JOS HUA R A MEY

Index 209
Figures

4.1 Multiplicity 108

4.2 Tarot as a sign-​system 121
5.1 Client’s first sketch 126
5.2 Client’s second sketch 127
5.3 Kalachakra mandala 128
5.4 Codex Fejérváry-​Mayer 129
5.5 ‘The River Map’, one of the legendary foundations
of the I Ching 130
5.6 Mandala based on a woman’s dream 131
5.7 The Mandelbrot set 134
5.8 Bifurcation graph 135
5.9 Bifurcation and Mandelbrot set 136
5.10 Cobweb plot 137
5.11 The initial stage 137
5.12 The final point of unity 138
5.13 Chaos 138
6.1 The mental, the physical, and the underlying,
psychophysically neutral, holistic reality, according
to the Pauli-​Jung conjecture 145
6.2 Four fundamental classes of exceptional experiences
resulting from the conceptual framework of the
Pauli-​Jung conjecture 156
About the contributors

Harald Atmanspacher, PhD, is a senior scientist and has been a staff

member at Collegium Helveticum, University of Zurich and ETH
Zurich, since 2007. After his PhD in physics at Munich University
(1986), he worked as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute
for Extraterrestrial Physics at Garching until 1998. Then he served
as head of the theory group at the Institute for Frontier Areas of
Psychology at Freiburg until 2013. His fields of research are the
theory of complex systems, conceptual and theoretical aspects of
(algebraic) quantum theory, and mind–​matter relations from inter-
disciplinary perspectives. He is the president of the Society for
Mind-​Matter Research and editor-​in-​chief of the interdisciplinary
international journal Mind and Matter.
Paul Bishop, PhD, is William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages at
the University of Glasgow and his research has focused on the
history of ideas in general and the German intellectual tradition
in particular. His most recent publications include On the Blissful
Islands: With Nietzsche and Jung in the Shadow of the Superman
(Routledge, 2016) and, aside from his interests in translation and
in the use of languages for business, he has published an introduc-
tory study on the thought of Klages entitled Ludwig Klages and the
Philosophy of Life: A Vitalist Toolkit (Routledge, 2017).
David Henderson, PhD, is Lecturer in Jungian Studies at the Department
for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex.
He is a member of the British Jungian Analytic Association (BJAA)
and the International Association for Analytical Psychology
(IAAP). He is a convenor and regular contributor to the Jung-​Lacan
 About the contributors xi

Research Network. He has contributed chapters to Re-​Encountering

Jung: Analytical Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis
(Routledge, 2017; R.S. Brown, Ed.) and to Depth Psychology
and Mysticism, (Palgrave, 2018; T. Cattoi and D. Orodisio, Eds.).
Published papers include ‘Freud and Jung: the creation of the psy-
choanalytic universe’ and ‘ “A life free from care”: the hermit and
the analyst’, both in Psychodynamic Practice. His book, Apophatic
Elements in the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis: Pseudo-​
Dionysius and C. G. Jung, was published by Routledge in 2013. He
was the co-​investigator on a two-​year (2016–​18) research project
titled ‘ “One world”: logical and ethical implications of holism’
funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK.
George Hogenson, PhD, teaches in the Analyst Training Program at the
C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and supervises trainees in the pro-
gram. He regularly lectures on Jung’s theories in the United States
and Europe, and writes on the theory of archetypes, synchronicity,
and the role of symbolism in the life of the individual. His work
on the nature of archetypal imagery resulted in his being invited
to present the Caroline and Earnest Fay Lectures at Texas A&M
University in 2011. In addition to his work as a teacher and analyst,
he is a former Vice President of the International Association for
Analytical Psychology, and on the editorial board of The Journal
of Analytical Psychology, to which he has contributed numerous
articles.
Roderick Main, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Psychosocial
and Psychoanalytic Studies and Director of the Centre for Myth
Studies at the University of Essex. His publications include The
Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern
Western Culture (Brunner-​Routledge, 2004), Revelations of Chance:
Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience (SUNY, 2007), Jung on
Synchronicity and the Paranormal (Routledge/​Princeton, 1997), and
Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious (Karnac, 2013). He was prin-
cipal investigator on a two-​year (2016–​18) research project titled
‘ “One world”: logical and ethical implications of holism’ funded by
the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK.
xii About the contributors

Christian McMillan, PhD was Senior Research Officer in the

Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the
University of Essex working on an AHRC-​funded project ‘ “One
world”: logical and ethical implications of holism’ (2016–​18). His
doctoral thesis, ‘The image of thought in Jung’s whole-​Self: a critical
study’ (2014) focused on similarities and differences in the thought
of depth psychologist C. G. Jung and French post-​structuralist
philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. Publications include: ‘Jung, litera-
ture, and aesthetics’ in Jung and Philosophy (Routledge, 2019;
Jon Mills, Ed.); ‘Jung and Deleuze: enchanted openings to the
other’, International Journal of Jungian Studies (December 2018);
‘Archetypal intuition: Beyond the human’ in Psychoanalysis, Culture
and Society (ed. David Henderson, 2012). Forthcoming publications
include: ‘Kant’s influence on Jung’s vitalism in the Zofingia Lectures’
in Holism: Possibilities and Problems (C. McMillan, R. Main, and
D. Henderson, Eds.; Routledge, 2020).
Joshua Ramey, PhD, is Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace, Justice,
and Human Rights at Haverford College, USA. His work includes
The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (Duke
University Press, 2012) and Politics of Divination: Neoliberal
Endgame and the Religion of Contingency (Rowman & Littlefield,
2016). He is co-​editor, with Matthew Haar Farris, of Speculation,
Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The
Enigmatic Absolute (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
Inna Semetsky has a PhD in educational philosophy preceded by an
MA in counselling psychology and a GradDipEd. She has published
eleven books including Deleuze, Education and Becoming (Sense,
2006), Re-​Symbolization of the Self (Sense, 2011), The Edusemiotics
of Images (Sense, 2013), and Semiotic Subjectivity in Education and
Counseling: Learning with the Unconscious (Routledge, 2020). In
2000 she received the Kevelson Award from the Semiotic Society of
America for her paper ‘The adventures of a postmodern fool’. Her
book Edusemiotics (Springer, 2015, co-​authored) received the Book
Award from the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
She has numerous book chapters including in the volume Deleuze
 About the contributors xiii

and the Schizoanalysis of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2016; F. L. Shults

and R. Powell-​Jones, Eds.) as well as in international handbooks.
Her papers have appeared in Educational Philosophy and Theory,
Zygon, Semiotica, and other journals. She serves as a chief consult-
ant to the recently established Institute for Edusemiotic Studies
(Melbourne). She is also a long-​time Tarot reader.
newgenprepdf

Acknowledgement

Work on this book was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council, UK [AH/​N003853/​1].
Introduction
Roderick Main, Christian McMillan,
and David Henderson

This book explores the concept of the whole as it operates within the
psychology of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–​1961), the philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze (1925–​1995), and selected areas of wider twentieth-​century
Western culture, which provided the context within which Jung and
Deleuze worked. Addressing this topic from a variety of perspectives
and disciplines, the book aims to clarify some of the epistemological
and ethical issues surrounding attempts, such as those of Jung and
Deleuze, to think in terms of the whole, whether the whole in question
is a particular bounded system (such as an organism, person, society,
or ecosystem) or, most broadly, reality as a whole.
While reflection on the concept of the whole and its relations to
the elements that constitute the whole has been a staple of Western
philosophical and cultural traditions since the ancient Greeks (Dusek
1999: 19–​22; Esfeld 2003: 10), such reflection has had, from the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, several moments of particular salience.
The significance of wholeness was much discussed, for example, in the
life and mind sciences as well as in the physical sciences of the first
half of the twentieth century, especially within the German-​speaking
world (Harrington 1996) but also more broadly (Lawrence and Weisz
1998). Ideas about wholeness were later a prominent influence on the
countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Wood 2010), and
continue to be so in the alternative spiritualities, therapies, and work
practices that have proliferated since the 1980s (Hanegraaff 1998;
Heelas and Woodhead 2005). Concern with how to think in terms of
wholes also underpins much of the current preoccupation with com-
plexity theory (Cambray 2009), transdisciplinarity (Nicolescu 2002,
2 Roderick Main et al.

2008; Rowland 2017), and, certainly not least, ecology (Marietta 1994;
Fellows 2019).
In most of these contexts, concern with the concept of the whole
has been both epistemological and ethical. On the one hand, scien-
tists and researchers have been taxed with how to acquire adequate
knowledge and understanding of phenomena, such as those relating to
life, consciousness, or culture, whose complexity does not readily lend
itself to the kind of reductive analyses that have proven so successful
in physics and chemistry (Phillips 1976). On the other hand, cultural
commentators have argued that many of the environmental, political,
economic, social, and psychological problems besetting the modern
world have their deep roots in forms of thinking that embed divisive
and fragmenting dualisms –​for example, between humans and nature,
spirit and matter, Creator and creation –​and have advanced concepts
of wholeness as means to foster a greater sense of interconnectedness,
reconciliation, and unity (Berman 1981; Hanegraaff 1998: 119).
Perspectives giving central importance to the concept of the whole
have also acquired, especially in the English-​speaking world, an influ-
ential new moniker: holism (Smuts 1926). Coined by Jan Smuts in
1926, the term ‘holism’ and its adjectival form ‘holistic’ are now used,
with varying emotional loading and varying degrees of clarity and
emphasis, in practically every area of contemporary life, including aca-
demic as well as popular contexts (Main, McMillan, and Henderson
2020: 1–​6). Reflecting this widespread usage, the terms ‘holism’ and
‘holistic’ are also used at many points in the present work, even though
Jung seems never to have employed the German translation of holism
(Holismus) nor Deleuze its French translation (holisme) –​they wrote
instead in terms of the German and French words for ‘the whole’: die
Ganzheit (and its cognates) and le Tout, respectively.
Whether dubbed holism or not, thinking in terms of the whole has
a presence in recent and contemporary academic and popular thought
that could benefit from being more fully examined. Despite the sali-
ence their ideas have achieved in some quarters, advocates of holistic
thinking have been charged with unrealisable epistemological ambi-
tions, with misrepresenting reductionism, and with logical absurdity
(Phillips 1976), as well as with claiming desirable outcomes, such as
environmental outcomes, that are attributable to other factors (James
2007). Again, contrary to the claims that holistic thinking has beneficial
 Introduction 3

ethical and political implications because of its reconciliation of del-

eterious dualisms, other commentators have charged holism with fos-
tering ‘totalitarian intuitions’ (Popper 1957: 73). Again, the irony has
not gone unnoticed that Smuts himself, for all that he promoted unity
and wholeness on the highest international stage through his involve-
ment in establishing both the League of Nations after the First World
War and the United Nations after the Second World War, neverthe-
less was a proponent of segregation between whites and blacks in his
home country of South Africa (Shelley 2008: 103). Although attempts
have been made to address these epistemological and ethical criticisms
(Bailis 1984–​85; Harrington 1996), there continues to be deep intellec-
tual suspicion of holistic perspectives.
With these and related issues in mind, the present book is a contribu-
tion towards clarifying the status of holistic thought through compar-
ing relevant aspects of the work of Jung and Deleuze.1 In focusing on
Jung and Deleuze we have selected two influential twentieth-​century
thinkers whose work has in crucial respects been governed by the con-
cept of the whole. For Jung, psychological wholeness, signified by the
archetype of the self, was the goal of individual development, abet-
ted where necessary by therapy (1928, 1944). Furthermore, in his later
work he theorised that the wholeness whose realisation was aimed at
was not just psychological but included also the world beyond the indi-
vidual psyche: psyche and matter were considered two aspects of a sin-
gle underlying reality which he referred to as the unus mundus or ‘one
world’ (1955–​56: §662). The process of realising wholeness was for
Jung central not only to therapy and individual development but also
to addressing many social, cultural, and political ills, which he consid-
ered largely to stem from thinking in a one-​sidedly conscious (usually
materialistic and rationalistic) way, without taking due account of the
unconscious (1957). In his early work, the concept of the whole was
an implicit concern for Jung, inasmuch as his work at that time was
devoted to understanding what could be considered the opposite of
wholeness, namely, psychic fragmentation that manifested as pathol-
ogy (Smith 1990: 27–​46). However, from the time of the experiences
that led to his writing The Red Book (2009), wholeness became increas-
ingly explicit as the central focus of Jung’s psychological model and
psychotherapy, and in the guise of the concepts of individuation and
the self it pervades all of his mature writing.
4 Roderick Main et al.

Compared to Jung, Deleuze had a more conspicuously ambivalent

relationship to the concept of the whole. On the one hand, he was
relentlessly critical of organicistic thinking –​often taken as synony-
mous with holism –​in which the parts of a system are all considered
to work towards the ends of the whole, like organs within an organism
(Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 43). On the other hand, his entire opus
was driven by the attempt to articulate a philosophy of pure imma-
nence in which being was considered ‘univocally’, that is, not to be
‘realer’ in some expressions (e.g., as thinking, as consciousness, or as
the Creator) than in others (e.g., as extension, as matter, or as crea-
tures) (Deleuze 1968b, 2001). Within such a philosophy, reality could
be conceptualised as an open and ever-​changing whole in which the
parts, even though not all internally related as in an organism, are,
by dint of their involvement in a single ‘plane of immanence’, capa-
ble of being endlessly interrelated externally, horizontally, or, in the
term Deleuze (and his co-​writer Félix Guattari [1930–​1992]) may have
borrowed from Jung, ‘rhizomatically’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 35–​
60; Somers-​Hall 2012: 6–​7). For Deleuze, such a conception of the
open whole removed the need to conceive of an organising principle
(e.g., mind, God) that is transcendent to what it organises (e.g., matter,
the world). This had wide-​ranging ethical and political implications
for Deleuze, since he considered transcendence –​the conception of
a dimension of reality that was separate from and superior in being
and value to the rest of reality –​to be the root of totalitarian and
other forms of exclusionary thought through providing a locus where
privileged values and aspects of identity could order the rest of real-
ity while themselves remaining shielded from criticism (1968a). The
concept of the whole as such appears episodically in Deleuze’s publica-
tions. It is explicit in Bergsonism (1966), the two cinema books (1983,
1985), the revision of Proust and Signs (1972), and in Anti-​Oedipus
(1972) and What is Philosophy? (1991), the latter two co-​authored with
Guattari. But expressed or at least implicated in other terms, such as
‘the virtual’, ‘univocity of being’, ‘the plane of immanence’, or the
‘body without organs’, the concept of the whole is arguably ubiquitous
in Deleuze’s writings.
Bringing together the work of Jung and Deleuze is by no means
an easy or obvious task. In the first place, neither the ideas of Jung
nor those of Deleuze can be easily or stably assimilated to established
 Introduction 5

mainstream systems of thought that might provide secure reference

points for comparison. Jung was avowedly not a systematic thinker
(1939: ix), he acknowledged that he purposely wrote in an ambigu-
ous style (1976: 70), and he regularly both drew on and expressed
himself in the language of obscure esoteric currents of thought such
as Gnosticism and alchemy (1929–​54, 1944, 1946, 1951, 1955–​56).
Deleuze, for his part, when he drew on earlier philosophers, tended
to give their ideas creative new interpretations, as in his treatment of
Spinoza’s concept of substance (1968b) or Nietzsche’s doctrine of
eternal recurrence (1962, 1968a). Even more challengingly, when he
wrote in his own voice (or collaboratively with Guattari), he seemed
often to overhaul his entire conceptual language from one publication
to the next (Somers-​Hall 2012: 1). In the second place, it is not obvious
that the intellectual trajectories of the two thinkers should significantly
intersect. Where Jung was a psychologist working in Switzerland in a
predominantly German-​speaking intellectual environment, Deleuze
was a philosopher working in France in a predominantly Francophone
milieu. Moreover, Jung was fifty years Deleuze’s senior and thus of a
different era, the pair never met, and the intellectual influence between
them, such as it was, ran only one way, somewhat stealthily (Kerslake
2007: 70), from Jung to Deleuze.
However, the parallels and overlaps between Jung and Deleuze are
nonetheless notable. Although a psychologist, Jung read deeply in phi-
losophy, including thinkers and traditions that were also important to
Deleuze, such as Kant, Nietzsche, and Western esotericism. Conversely,
Deleuze, although a philosopher, explored deeply and commented
critically on the concept of the unconscious and the field of psychoa-
nalysis, including the work of Freud, Lacan, Klein, and Jung (Deleuze
and Guattari 1972; Holland 2012). Both Jung and Deleuze worked in
opposition to the mainstream in their respective disciplines, both were
concerned with the relationship between personal transformation and
knowledge (‘gnosis’), and both were deeply critical of contemporary
Western culture and politics.
Only a few prior works have explored the connections between
Jung and Deleuze in any detail. Of seminal importance among these
is Christian Kerslake’s Deleuze and the Unconscious (2007), which
meticulously uncovers the substantial influence of Jung on Deleuze’s
development of a conception of the unconscious that had more
6 Roderick Main et al.

affinity with symbolist and occultist thought and the work of Janet
and Bergson than with Freud’s psychoanalysis. Although Deleuze was
not explicit about this Jungian influence, Kerslake shows that it con-
tinued ‘to shape his theory of the unconscious right up to Difference
and Repetition’ (ibid.: 69). Nor, arguably, is Kerslake’s book important
only for enriching understanding of Deleuze; it has also recently been
hailed as ‘[t]‌he real turning point for a more comprehensive under-
standing of Jung’s theorizing’ (Hogenson 2019: 692).
Also significant, in this case for demonstrating the productivity of
jointly applying the ideas of Jung and Deleuze, are works by Inna
Semetsky and Barbara Jenkins. Semetsky, in a series of books going
back over a decade, has applied concepts from Jung and Deleuze in
developing a theory of ‘edusemiotics’, on the role of signs and their
interpretation in education. Her focus has been sometimes on Deleuze
(Semetsky 2006), sometimes on Jung (Semetsky 2013), and sometimes
on both (Semetsky 2011, 2020). No less insightfully, Jenkins (2016) has
drawn on both thinkers to offer a highly original exploration of how
the ‘social relations between things’ can illuminate the role of desire
and sexual difference in culture and the economy.
Kerslake’s, Semetsky’s, and Jenkins’s books touch on many issues
germane to the concept of the whole, but it is not their main focus.
The same can be said of the various shorter discussions of connec-
tions between Jung and Deleuze that have been slowly increasing in
number over the past couple of decades (e.g., Hauke 2000: 80–​83;
Kazarian 2010; Pint 2011; Holland 2012; Semetsky and Ramey 2013;
Henderson 2014: 113–​18; Cambray 2017; Hogenson 2019). There have
also been several substantial works that have addressed the concept
of the whole and/​or holism either in Jung (Smith 1990; Kelly 1993;
Huskinson 2004; Cambray 2009) or, albeit often via implicated terms
rather than directly, in Deleuze (Ansell-​Pearson 1999, 2007; Badiou
2000; Hallward 2006; Ramey 2012; Justaert 2012). However, these
works have not brought the two thinkers together.
Most relevant to the present book are several works that were either
a prelude to or part of the same overall project. The prelude was a
study by McMillan (2015), which undertook a Deleuzian critique of
Jung’s concept of the whole and compellingly flagged some poten-
tial ethical problems with Jung’s formulations, raising the question of
whether and how these problems might be addressed. In a later work,
 Introduction 7

focusing on late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century debates about

vitalism that were of interest to both Jung and Deleuze, McMillan
identified the importance of relations of interiority or exteriority in
determining different kinds of holism and their ethical implications
(McMillan 2020). The relations of interiority in organicistic holism
imply that the whole is pre-​given and closed, which could poten-
tially give rise to forms of totalitarian and exclusionary thought. In
Deleuze’s criticisms of organicism and postulation of relations of
exteriority, McMillan argues, it is possible to identify an alternative
form of rhizomatic or ‘transversal’ holism, as well as a correspond-
ing ‘material vitalism’, in which the whole remains always open and
creative (ibid.: 122–​23). Despite Jung’s affinity with a range of pre-​
modern organicistic thinkers, his own dynamic concept of the whole
can, McMillan argues (2018, 2019), also be understood as open and
creative, with concepts such as psychic reality (esse in anima), the psy-
choid archetype, and synchronicity providing openings onto relations
of exteriority. These studies show how an encounter between Jung’s
psychology and Deleuze’s philosophy can foster an enhanced reflexiv-
ity in both, ensuring that any holism ascribed to these thinkers is a
critical holism, one that challenges rather than reinforces the bounda-
ries of systems.
In a paper complementary to his chapter in the present volume,
Main (2017) has argued that, contrary to disenchantment, which is
rooted in the metaphysics of theism whereby nature and the divine
are considered ontologically separate, much holistic thought, includ-
ing Jung’s, has its roots in panentheistic metaphysics, in which nature
is considered to be an expression or aspect of the divine. This meta-
physics underpins, usually implicitly, many of the positive claims made
for holism in relation to, for example, ecology, healthcare, education,
social and political relations, and spirituality. It also, negatively for
some, associates holism with heterodox traditions of Hermetic and
mystical thought. In this context, both Main (2019) and McMillan
(2018) have discussed the relevance for holism of Jung’s concept of
synchronicity –​which is also a feature of several essays in the present
volume (Semetsky, Hogenson, and Atmanspacher).
Also complementary to the present book is the same team of editors’
Holism: Possibilities and Problems (McMillan, Main, and Henderson
2020). This companion volume focuses specifically on the concept of
8 Roderick Main et al.

holism, and it encompasses a wider range of theoretical perspectives

than just those of Jung and Deleuze, although the latter are well repre-
sented. The present book, however, is the first to focus specifically and
in depth on the problem of the whole as it jointly figures in the works
of Jung and Deleuze.
The contributors to the present book, as already noted, are all
experts on the thought of either Jung or Deleuze, if not both. All
are, or have been, academics, while some are also practitioners
(Henderson, Hogenson, Semetsky, Ramey). Between them they rep-
resent a significant array of disciplines: philosophy (Ramey), psy-
chotherapy/​analysis (Henderson, Hogenson), education (Semetsky),
physics (Atmanspacher), German studies (Bishop), and psychosocial
and psychoanalytic studies (Main, McMillan). Some of the contrib-
uted essays explore the tensions between Jung’s and Deleuze’s different
concepts of the whole and their respective ethical implications (Main,
McMillan, Bishop). Others use the two authors primarily to amplify
each other’s thought (Henderson, Semetsky, Atmanspacher). Others
again focus on contexts or topics equally informed by or equally rel-
evant to both authors (Ramey, Hogenson). Among the epistemologi-
cal, ethical, and methodological questions relating to the concept of
the whole that are raised by the essays are the following:

• What is the relationship between a particular concept of ultimate

wholeness and the multiplicities of experience?
• Can unitary reality be experienced directly?
• What is the status of symbolic knowledge of the whole?
• What are the ethical (including social, cultural, and political)
implications of different concepts of the whole?
• Is there an intrinsic relationship between concepts of the whole
and totalitarian thinking?
• Is it possible to avoid totalitarian dangers of holism by developing
a form of critical holism based on the concept of an open whole?
• What is gained for the thought of Jung and Deleuze by staging an
encounter between them?
• Can psychotherapeutic concepts such as Jung’s be usefully appro-
priated by a philosophy such as Deleuze’s, and can philosophical
concepts such as Deleuze’s be usefully appropriated by a psychol-
ogy such as Jung’s?
 Introduction 9

• How do the preoccupations of Jung and Deleuze in relation to the

whole connect with other thinkers (such as Kant, Bergson, Klages,
and Pauli) and other fields (such as complexity theory, physics,
political economy, esotericism, and cultural history)?

Considering the magnitude of the questions being posed, the

answers given to them are inevitably partial and provisional, and each
essay refracts the questions through the author’s own specific preoc-
cupations and expertise. Nevertheless, there are many convergences
among the essays. Important points that connect several of the con-
tributions, even if they do not explicitly connect them all, include,
far from exhaustively: that for both Jung and Deleuze wholeness is
important because it helps to keep thought open to creativity and
relationship; that wholes, or even the ultimate whole, can be creatively
expressed through symbols (including symptoms, signs, and images);
that these symbols are generated by estranging ‘encounters’, whether
with art, exceptional experiences, or expressions of otherness or the
unconscious more generally, each of which disturbs static patterns of
thought; that knowledge of the whole can be direct (through imma-
nent experience) as well as symbolic; that in either case knowledge of
the whole is transformative, making ethical demands on the knower;
that symbols of the whole are not just conscious constructions but
are expressions of a natural process; that attempts to reify symbols of
the whole result in one-​sided or static representational thinking, and
attempts to capture the practice of generating symbols are vulnerable
to institutional control; and that many paths lead back from thinking
about the whole to traditions of esoteric and mystical thought.
There are, of course, many aspects of thinking in terms of the whole
that this book, largely for contingent reasons, has not been able to
address as fully as we would have liked. The two most significant omis-
sions are probably gender issues (useful resources would be Jenkins
2016 and Rowland 2017) and issues relating to environmentalism and
the Anthropocene (see, for example, Fellows 2019). Another neglected
topic is the relation between holistic thinking and Eastern thought
(see, however, Yama 2020 and Main 2019: 67–​68). Additional work
could be usefully undertaken in each of these areas, as well as many
others. Meanwhile, we hope that the following essays will, each in its
way, spur further reflection both on the problem of the whole and on
10 Roderick Main et al.

the thought of Jung and Deleuze, especially as the two thinkers crea-
tively connect with each other.
In the opening chapter,2 Roderick Main examines the disputed ethi-
cal status of holism through comparing aspects of the thought of
Jung and Deleuze on the concept of wholeness. He first highlights
relevant holistic features of Jung’s psychological model, especially
the concepts of the self and unus mundus (one world), and traces
the cultural and social benefits that are claimed to flow from such
a version of holism. He then confronts Jung’s model with Deleuze’s
more constructivist way of thinking about wholes and totality in
terms of difference, multiplicity, and pure immanence, which aims to
ensure that his concept of the whole remains open. The Deleuzian
perspective arguably exposes a number of questionable philosophi-
cal assumptions and ethical implications in Jung’s holism –​especially
concerning the notions of original and restored wholes, organicism,
and internal relations, with their implicit appeals to transcendence. In
order to assess whether this Deleuzian critique is answerable, Main
focuses attention on the understanding of transcendence and imma-
nence within each thinker’s model. Distinguishing between theism,
pantheism, and panentheism, he proposes that the metaphysical logic
of panentheism can provide a framework that is capable of reconcil-
ing the two thinkers’ concepts of the whole. In light of this, Jung’s
position turns out to be an ally of the Deleuzian critique whose real
target is the kind of strong transcendence characteristic of classical
theism, which both thinkers eschew.
Focusing more explicitly on political issues, Christian McMillan
(Chapter 2) also explores conceptual affinities between Jung’s work
and that of Deleuze together with his co-​writer Guattari. McMillan
draws extensively from one of Jung’s final essays, ‘The undiscovered
self (present and future)’ (1957), which was first published after the
two world wars and in the immediate aftermath of the Red Scare in
the United States. Jung’s essay is noteworthy for its critique of the role
of the State in modern times. It analyses the ways in which the State
organises and orientates thought in a one-​sided, ethically deleterious
manner that excludes alternative forms of organisation. McMillan
parallels this with Deleuze’s critical focus on the organisation and
distribution of relations within thought systems, of which the State
is one variation. In the first half of the chapter, McMillan examines
 Introduction 11

various concepts that Jung presents in his essay: positive concepts such
as ‘individual’ and ‘whole man’ and negative concepts such as ‘mass
man’, ‘statistical man’, and ‘State’. In the second half of the chapter,
McMillan relates Jung’s analysis of the ways in which thought is ori-
entated by the abstract idea of the modern State to Deleuze’s critique
of the image of thought, which formed a crucial part of his Difference
and Repetition (1968a).
The uncanny internal resonance between Jung’s psychological the-
ory and Deleuze’s philosophy receives further scrutiny from David
Henderson (Chapter 3). Through a discussion of Deleuze’s concepts
of symptomatology, percept, and minor literature, from his Essays
Critical and Clinical (1993), Henderson demonstrates the rich poten-
tial of Deleuzian thought for amplifying elements of Jung’s psychol-
ogy. According to Deleuze, ‘Authors, if they are great, are more like
doctors than patients. We mean that they are themselves astonishing
diagnosticians or symptomatologists’ (1969: 237). Jung can be read
in this way as a symptomatologist, a ‘clinician of civilization’, who
discovered the collective unconscious and prescribed a renewed rela-
tionship with wholeness as a remedy for the personal, cultural, and
collective ‘dis-​eases’ of modern life. The percept is a type of vision or
hearing, and Henderson uses this concept of Deleuze’s to reflect on
Jung’s capacity to see the unconscious. Finally, Henderson shows how
Deleuze’s concepts of minor literature and minority politics throw
light on the corpus of Jung’s writing and on the role of analytical psy-
chology within the wider field of psychoanalysis.
Inna Semetsky (Chapter 4) continues the discussion of how symp-
toms, symbols, and signs can paradoxically express the unconscious or
irrepresentable dimension of reality and thereby promote wholeness.
She draws parallels between the axiom of the third-​century alchemist
Maria Prophetissa (‘One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of
the third comes the one as the fourth’), which Jung refers to as a meta-
phor for the process of individuation, and Deleuze’s paradoxical logic
of multiplicities (problematic Ideas) –​both of which are based on the
notion of the tertium quid, the included third. Semetsky argues that the
reading of signs is an experiment that involves experiential learning
(self-​education or apprenticeship) and, ultimately, self-​knowledge in
the form of deep gnosis. Only through such knowledge can we become
in-​dividual, ‘whole’ selves. Semetsky’s chapter also addresses ethics as
12 Roderick Main et al.

the integration of the Jungian shadow archetype that may manifest

in events of which, according to Deleuze, we must become worthy.
To conclude, Semetsky presents an example of a transformative, heal-
ing (‘making whole’) practice that demonstrates the actualisation
of the virtual archetypes via their ‘dramatisation’ in the esoteric yet
‘real characters’ of a neutral language, such as envisaged by Wolfgang
Pauli, Jung’s collaborator on the concept of synchronicity. By means
of such a practice, for Semetsky, Deleuze’s call to retrieve and read the
structures immanent in the depth of the psyche is answered: we self-​
transcend by becoming-​other.
Complementing Semetsky’s appeal to esoteric thought, George
Hogenson (Chapter 5) also explores the relationship between certain
mathematical patterns and symbols of wholeness, but within a more
scientific framework. He compares formally constructed mandalas and
other geometric forms associated by Jung with the notion of whole-
ness with the iterative elaboration of the equations associated with
Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry. Hogenson argues that these symbols
of wholeness are manifestations of fundamental mathematical struc-
tures that manifest throughout the natural world and connect psyche
to the rest of nature in a fundamental form. Additionally, his analysis
illustrates how the breakdown of psychic wholeness can be modelled
in the breakdown of unity into chaotic states, thereby providing an
argument for Jung’s model of the psyche moving from the individual
complex to the unus mundus and the unity of the self.
In an argument also thoroughly grounded in science, in this
case physics and consciousness research, Harald Atmanspacher
(Chapter 6) explores relational and immanent experiences in relation
to what he has called the Pauli-​Jung conjecture, which is a coherent
reconstruction of Pauli’s and Jung’s scattered ideas about the relation-
ship between the mental and the physical and their common origin.
It belongs to the decompositional variety of dual-​aspect monisms, in
which a basic, psychophysically neutral reality is conceived of as radi-
cally holistic, without distinctions, and hence discursively inexpressible.
Epistemic domains such as the mental and the physical emerge from
this base reality by differentiation. Within this conceptual framework,
Atmanspacher identifies three different options to address so-​called
exceptional experiences, that is, deviations from typical reality models
that individuals develop and utilise to cope with their environment.
 Introduction 13

Such experiences can be understood (i) as either mental images or

physical events, (ii) as relations between the mental and the physical,
and (iii) as direct experiences of the psychophysically neutral reality.
These three classes are referred to as reified, relational, and immanent
experiences.
Paul Bishop (Chapter 7) is also concerned with ideas and experiences
that express a holistic and enchanted view of reality. He argues that
for Friedrich Nietzsche –​a key influence on Jung and Deleuze alike –​
the world is both disenchanted and enchanted. From a transcendental
perspective (associated with Judeo-​Christianity), the world is disen-
chanted; it is ‘the work of a suffering and tormented God’. Yet from
an immanent perspective, the world is in fact enchanted –​or poten-
tially so, and the means by which Nietzsche proposes to re-​enchant (or
rediscover the primordial enchantment of) the world is the doctrine of
eternal recurrence. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his animals proclaim
Zarathustra to be ‘the teacher of the eternal recurrence’, and this pas-
sage has caught the attention of numerous commentators, including
Heidegger and Deleuze. Another critic of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eter-
nal recurrence is Ludwig Klages, himself deeply invested in the chal-
lenges of disenchantment and re-​enchantment. Central to Klages’s
philosophy are his doctrine of the ‘reality of images’ and his related
notion of ‘elementary similarity’. Elementary similarity informs the
kind of perception he associates with die Seele, that is, with the soul
or the psyche, and which he regards as essentially symbolic. Can the
concepts of identity, similarity, dissimilarity, and difference, Bishop
asks, help us to relate and coordinate the thought of Klages, Jung, and
Deleuze –​and not just in relation to Nietzsche?
The volume concludes with Joshua Ramey’s highly original per-
spective on the relationship between divination and financial markets
(Chapter 8). Ramey explores how extreme variants of neoliberal ideol-
ogy about the power of markets, particularly as articulated in the late
work of Friedrich Hayek, produce illusions about the kind of mean-
ings that can be construed on the basis of chance or random processes.
Randomness poses an interesting problem for holism in general, but
here Ramey focuses on the specific power that uncertainty (linked
to the basic fact of extreme contingency, or chance) is supposed to
display, within ‘correctly’ functioning markets, to generate meaning.
In Ramey’s book, Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the
14 Roderick Main et al.

Religion of Contingency (2016), he has argued that the extreme ver-

sion of neoliberal market apologetics holds that markets can function
as divination processes –​that is, as inquiries into more-​than-​human
knowledge. The complex and unstable relation between chance and
the Whole is figured here in an equivocation over whether chance
means everything or nothing, and helps to explain the particular rela-
tion between neoliberal ideology and nihilism.

Notes
1 The present volume is one of the outputs of a research project examining
the logical and ethical implications of holism through comparing relevant
aspects of the work of Jung and Deleuze. The project, run by the present
editors, was titled ‘ “One world”: logical and ethical implications of holism’
and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK,
between 2016 and 2018 (grant number AH/​N003853/​1). In brief, we wished
to understand better why holism attracts such strong positive and negative
valuations, and whether the positive or the negative point of view, if either,
is the better warranted. We attempted to probe the underpinning concepts
of ultimate wholeness at work in different models, such as those of Jung
and Deleuze, and to trace how those concepts of wholeness might relate,
ethically and politically as well as epistemologically, to the multiplicities of
experience. We were especially concerned with the significance and impact
of these issues in the field of psychotherapy. As part of the project, an
invited group of experts in the thought of Jung and/​or Deleuze presented
and discussed papers in an intensive two-​day workshop at the University
of Essex, and it is those papers which in revised form are the basis of this
book. One of the participants at the workshop, Christian Kerslake, was
unfortunately unable to contribute an essay, but the volume has neverthe-
less greatly benefited from his comments during the workshop, as well as
from the inspiration provided by his ground-​breaking book, Deleuze and
the Unconscious (2007). The workshop was followed by an international
conference, also at the University of Essex, with a broader remit on holism
more generally and much wider participation. Some of the papers from
that conference, as well as our more general findings about holism, have
been published in a companion volume to the present book (McMillan,
Main, and Henderson 2020; Main, McMillan, and Henderson 2020).
2 The following summary of the chapters is based on abstracts provided by
the contributors.
 Introduction 15

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Lacanian Ideology Critique 4: 47–​55.
Popper, K. (1957). The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge.
Ramey, J. (2012). The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ramey, J. (2016). Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion
of Contingency. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Rowland, S. (2017). Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning psychology and liter-
ature in C. G. Jung and James Hillman. London and New York: Routledge.
Semetsky, I. (2006). Deleuze, Education and Becoming. Rotterdam, NL: Sense
Publishers.
Semetsky, I. (2011). Re-​Symbolization of the Self: Human Development and
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Semetsky, I. (2020). Semiotic Subjectivity in Education and Counseling: Learning
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Whole: Creating Theoretical Syntheses, 89–​ 109. New Brunswick and

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The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, 1–​ 12. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Chapter 1

The ethical ambivalence of holism

An exploration through the thought of
Carl Jung and Gilles Deleuze
Roderick Main

Among the many ways in which the concept of holism has been used
since it was coined almost a hundred years ago (Smuts 1926), two
polarised extremes stand out. On the one hand, holism –​briefly, the
doctrine that the whole is more than the sum of its parts1 –​has been
championed as the solution to a range of scientific and cultural prob-
lems associated with the condition Max Weber termed disenchantment
(1919: 139, 155). For example, as Anne Harrington has related, vari-
ous life and mind scientists in the German-​speaking world during the
first decades of the twentieth century sought to develop ‘a new science
of Wholeness’ that, as well as solving scientific problems that seemed
intractable to an analytic approach, would counteract the cultural
sense of alienation and meaninglessness that was seen as stemming
from ‘the old science of the Machine’ with its ‘mechanistic, instrumen-
talist thinking’ (1996: xv–​xvi). Later in the twentieth century, Morris
Berman, lamenting how a disenchanted worldview had ‘destroyed the
continuity of the human experience and the integrity of the human
psyche’ and ‘very nearly wrecked the planet as well’, proposed holism
as a key component in an urgently needed ‘re-​enchantment of the
world’: ‘Some type of holistic, or participating, consciousness and a
corresponding socio-​political formation’, he wrote, ‘have to emerge
if we are to survive as a species’ (1981: 23). Similar sentiments also
inform many of the more recent manifestations of holistic thought
in spirituality, therapy, ecology, and other areas (Hanegraaff 1998:
119–​58; Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Fellows 2019).
On the other hand, holism has been charged with facilitating the
emergence of totalitarianism and its associated ills. Organicistic and
other holistic tropes were part of the Nazi rhetoric, for instance, and
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 21

for at least some scientists in the interwar German-​speaking world

there were very real connections between the holism promoted in their
scientific work and their support for aspects of Nazi ideology, such as
the expectation that individuals should subordinate their self-​interest
in order to serve the organic whole, the Volk, of which they were parts
(Harrington 1996: 175–​78). While Harrington notes that ‘the history
of German holism is a history of many stories and […] other politi-
cal relationships [than conservative, antidemocratic, and totalitarian
ones] were possible, and in various ways, persuasive’ (ibid.: 208), other
commentators have argued that the connection between holism and
totalitarianism is intrinsic. Karl Popper, for example, identified holism
as one of the presuppositions, along with historicism and essentialism,
that typically leads to totalitarian political formations (1945, 1957).
More recently, Jozet Keulartz concluded a discussion of holism in
the thought of Jan Christiaan Smuts, Alfred North Whitehead, and
late twentieth-​century ecology with the claim that ‘the link between
holism and totalitarianism does not rest exclusively on historical coin-
cidence but may well be the consequence of an internal relationship’
(1998: 141; see also Cooper 1996).
The ethical ambivalence that seems to attach to holism –​where it
is seen alternatively as the solution to a range of social, cultural, and
political ills or as a major cause of such ills –​is explored in the present
chapter through an examination of the work of the Swiss psycholo-
gist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–​1961). Jung’s professional life overlapped
with the emergence of the principal forms of both twentieth-​century
holism and twentieth-​century totalitarianism. His work is itself deeply
holistic (Smith 1990; Main 2019) and has been construed as, on the
one hand, re-​enchanting (Main 2011, 2013, 2017) and, on the other
hand, problematically implicated with Nazism and anti-​ Semitism
(Grossman 1979; Maidenbaum and Martin 1992). It thus exemplifies
the problem under discussion.
The question that this chapter addresses, then, is what are the ethi-
cal implications of holism, and more particularly whether the case of
Jung suggests that there is indeed an intrinsic relationship between
holistic and totalitarian forms of thought. The approach taken to
exploring these issues involves first highlighting salient aspects of
Jung’s holistic thought and the ethical benefits, individual and social,
that arguably stem from it. This positive picture is then confronted with
22 Roderick Main

a perspective deeply critical of holistic thought and its possible totali-

tarian implications –​the perspective of the French post-​structuralist
philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–​1995).2 Deleuze was demonstra-
bly influenced by Jung and developed ideas that have many affinities
with Jung’s (Kerslake 2007; Holland 2012: 310–​13), and he also, like
Jung, reflected deeply on the problem of the whole throughout his
professional life (Ansell-​Pearson 2007: 5). This makes it all the more
interesting that on the particular issue of holistic thought, Deleuze
appears to have taken a position almost opposite to Jung’s. Rather
than pore over historical or biographical issues, however, the chapter
examines some of the metaphysical assumptions underpinning Jung’s
and Deleuze’s thought, particularly in relation to transcendence and
immanence, in order to assess the extent to which Deleuze’s criticisms
of holistic thought as intrinsically totalitarian might be answerable
from the perspective of Jung’s holism. It also considers whether this
confrontation has any implications for understanding the thought of
Deleuze.

Jung’s holistic thought

The appropriateness of designating Jung’s work as a form of holism,
despite his not having used this specific term himself,3 is supported by
a number of considerations that have been discussed elsewhere (Main
2019). These include the pivotal and pervasive importance of the con-
cept of wholeness in his work; the parallels between his thought and
that of contemporaneous thinkers widely designated as holists; his
explicit influence on subsequent self-​proclaimed holists; and the close
fit of his ideas with various characterisations and formal definitions of
holism (ibid.: 61–​63). For the purpose of the present discussion, there
are several points to highlight.
As a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Jung’s primary concern was
with processes of psychological healing and development. Increased
‘human wholeness’ (1944: §32) was important to him because he
envisaged this as the goal of those processes. He characterised such
wholeness as consisting in a union of opposites (1911–​12/​1952: §460;
1946: §532; 1958: §784), most generally as ‘the union of the conscious
and unconscious personality’ (1940: §294), and he designated this
united state with the concept of the self (1955–​56: §145), the ‘archetype
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 23

of wholeness’ (1951a: §351; 1952a: §757). The self, or wholeness,

found expression in a multitude of symbols for Jung, among which
the mandala was of particular importance (1944: §§323–​31). The over-
all process of developing such wholeness he called ‘individuation’
(1928: §§266–​406). Jung’s thought is holistic, then, in that it presup-
poses the possibility of psychological wholeness, and that presuppo-
sition informs both how psychological processes are understood and
how psychotherapy is done.
While Jung was primarily concerned with psychological wholeness,
he considered that the process of developing psychological wholeness
could lead in the direction of a wider wholeness that included the
world beyond the psyche. At one level, the world beyond the psyche
included the social world. Jung was not a social holist in the usual
sense of holding that social entities have properties that are irre-
ducible to the behaviours of the individuals composing those social
entities (1957: §§504, 553–​54). Nevertheless, he considered that the
pursuit of wholeness at the individual level, insofar as it ‘makes us
aware of the unconscious, which unites and is common to all man-
kind’, could ‘[bring] to birth a consciousness of human community’
(1945: §227). As he wrote in connection to this, ‘Individuation [the
process of realising the wholeness of the self] is an at-​one-​ment with
oneself and at the same time with humanity, since oneself is a part of
humanity’ (ibid.).
At another level –​or other levels –​the world beyond the psyche
included for Jung the physical and spiritual worlds. In the conclud-
ing chapter of his late work Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–​56: §§654–​
789), Jung presented his model of psychological development in terms
of three ‘conjunctions’ (or a conjunction in three stages) as described by
the sixteenth-​century alchemist Gerhard Dorn. The first conjunction
or stage was the union of the psyche and spirit, or of the mind within
itself, a realisation of inner psychic integration (ibid.: §§669–​76). The
second conjunction or stage was the union of the integrated psyche
with the body or with the world of physical reality (ibid.: §§677–​93).
The third and final conjunction or stage was the union of the integrated
mind and body with the world of potential, the unitary source of all
actualisations, the ‘one world’ or unus mundus (ibid.: §§759–​75). This
conception implied that realisation of wholeness could involve two
forms of integration that were empirical or immanent: the integration
24 Roderick Main

of the mind within itself and the integration of the internally inte-
grated mind with the body and with the external world. Besides this,
however, the conception also implied that realisation of wholeness
could involve a third form of integration that was non-​empirical or
transcendent: the integration of the integrated mind-​body with its uni-
tary source. At its deepest levels, Jung’s holism was thus cosmic and
mystical as well as psychological and social.
The possibility of holistic relations existing between, as well as
at, different levels of reality is reflected in Jung sometimes suggest-
ing that the relationship between psychological wholeness and the
wholeness of humanity or of the world could be understood as one
between microcosm and macrocosm. Jung sometimes invoked this
idea in his discussions of society, describing the individual person as
‘a social microcosm, reflecting on the smallest scale the qualities of
society at large’ (1957: §553; see also §540). More often, however, he
introduced the idea in relation to the cosmological visions and trans-
formative practices of pre-​modern, non-​Western, and especially eso-
teric, above all alchemical, thinkers (1944: §472; 1952b: §§923, 925–​26,
928–​29, 937).
Although Jung did not generally present his thinking about whole-
ness in terms of the relationship between wholes and parts, as do most
formal definitions of holism (Phillips 1976: 6; Esfeld 2003), such terms
and ways of understanding are arguably implicit in his view (Main
2019: 61–​63). Like more explicitly holistic thinkers, Jung prioritised
the perspective of wholeness when dealing with subject matter, in his
case the human personality or more specifically the self, that could not
be adequately understood in terms of a purely analytic approach (Jung
1952b: §§821, 864; Phillips 1976: 6–​12). Like explicit holists, he saw this
whole as more than the sum of its parts (Phillips 1976: 12–​15); that is,
the self was for him more than an aggregate of the contents comprising
it: in shorthand, the conscious ego, the shadow, and the other arche-
types of the collective unconscious (Jung 1944: §44; 1951a: §43; 1955–​
56: §145). He also considered that the self, as the whole, determined
the nature of its parts (Phillips 1976: 16); that is, to the extent that it
was the ‘organiser of the personality’ (Jung 1958: §694) the self deter-
mined the nature of the conscious ego, shadow, and other archetypes.
Again like explicit holists, Jung did not think the parts could be under-
stood if considered in isolation from the whole (Phillips 1976: 17–​19);
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 25

in his terms, since the manifestations of the ego, shadow, and other
archetypes at any time were related to their role in the process of indi-
viduation, which in turn was governed by the self (Jung 1928, 1944), it
was not possible adequately to understand the ego, shadow, and other
archetypes in isolation from the self. Finally, Jung saw the parts as
dynamically interrelated or interdependent (Phillips 1976: 19); the ego,
shadow, and other archetypes evinced for him precisely such interre-
lationship and interdependence, as described throughout his mature
discussions of his psychology (1928; 1940: §302; 1944; 1955–​56; see
also Smith 1990; Cambray 2009: 33–​36).
In sum, Jung’s conception of wholeness, while primarily psychologi-
cal, extended to include the social world, the physical world, and the
spiritual world, and the connections among these various domains of
experience were sometimes framed in terms of the relationship between
microcosm and macrocosm. Although he did not use the term ‘holism’
himself, his concept of wholeness can be quite closely fitted with for-
mal analytic definitions of holism.

The ethical implications of Jung’s holistic thought

For Jung, attending to wholeness could generate not only certain
kinds of knowledge but also distinct ethical benefits. At the individual
level, the principal ethical benefit of attending to wholeness was that
it enabled persons to address their one-​sidedness and the pathologies
that Jung considered to stem from one-​sidedness (1937: §255, 258). By
becoming more conscious of aspects of their whole personality that
had been operating unconsciously, they would be less likely to project
these aspects onto others (1951a: §16).
At the social level, we have already seen that Jung considered devel-
opment towards wholeness of the self as a process that made indi-
viduals conscious of their shared collectivity (1945: §227). In a more
specifically political register, he also argued that, insofar as the self
or wholeness with which individuation brings a person into relation-
ship transcends empirical experience (1957: §509; 1958: §779), it could
serve, as belief in God had traditionally done, as an ‘extramundane
principle capable of relativising the overpowering influence of external
[social and political] factors’ and in particular could prevent a person’s
‘otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass’ (1957: §511; see also
26 Roderick Main

McMillan 2021). More widely still, in the light of his late concepts of
synchronicity, the psychoid archetype, and the unus mundus, Jung sug-
gested that there might be a universal interconnectedness among all
aspects of reality, including between psyche and matter (both organic
and inorganic) (1955–​56: §§662, 767). This would have implications for
human responsibility towards the natural as well as cultural and social
environments (Fellows 2019).
Finally and most pertinently for the present discussion, Jung’s holis-
tic thought represented a response to the condition of disenchantment.
For the wholeness promoted by Jung’s psychological model involves
the integration, or at least reconciliation or harmonising, of factors
normally treated as separate and irreconcilable within the framework
of disenchantment: irrationality and rationality, transcendence and
immanence, value and fact, religion and science. Weber’s fragmentary
but influential statements about disenchantment imply, at least in an
‘ideal-​typical’ case (Asprem 2014: 39–​40), four main propositions. As
concisely summarised by Egil Asprem, these are that there is no genu-
ine mystery or magic, so that ‘nature can in principle be understood
by empiricism and reason [alone]’ (2014: 36; Weber 1919: 139); that
‘science can know nothing beyond the empirically given’ and therefore
‘metaphysics is impossible’ (Asprem 2014: 36; Weber 1919: 140–​42);
that values cannot be derived from facts and hence ‘science can know
nothing of meaning’ (Asprem 2014: 36; Weber 1919: 142–​44, 146);
and finally, because empiricism and reason provide no evidence for
the putative transcendent realities and values of religion, that science
and religion are irreconcilable and consequently one can only embrace
religion by putting aside science, that is, by making an ‘intellectual
sacrifice’ (Weber 1919: 155; Asprem 2014: 36).
Against this, Jung, with the inclusion in his holistic psychological
model of the unconscious, the non-​rational, and the irrepresentable,
implied the impossibility of ever fully or adequately grasping nature
by empiricism and reason alone (1963: 390; Main 2017: 1111). With
his openness to anomalous, mystical, and other forms of numinous
experiences, his understanding of symbols and myths as ‘the revelation
of a divine life in man’ (1963: 373), and his formulation of transcen-
dental concepts such as the archetype in itself, synchronicity, and the
unus mundus, he implied (even while he may have denied) the possibil-
ity of metaphysics (Jung 1947/​1954; 1952b; 1955–​56: §§759–​75; Main
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 27

2017: 1111–​13). And with his inclusion, in order to achieve a ‘whole

judgement’ (1952b: §961), of the functions of feeling and intuition and
of a form of acausal connection through meaning (synchronicity), he
implied the possibility of meaning and value, no less than of order
and fact, being objective features of reality (Jung 1921, 1952b; Main
2017: 1113–​14). Taken together these aspects further implied that reli-
gion and science were reconcilable and both contributed perspectives
essential to a whole picture of the world (Main 2017: 1114–​15). In thus
comprehensively challenging disenchantment, Jung’s holistic thought
also challenged the ethical implications of disenchantment that so
troubled many cultural commentators throughout the twentieth cen-
tury (ibid.: 1001–​2).

Deleuze’s criticisms of holistic thought

Jung’s crediting of anomalous and numinous experience, his willing-
ness to develop concepts such as synchronicity that can accommodate
such experience, and his interest in pre-​modern and esoteric attempts
to articulate these kinds of experience and concept already place his
thought about disenchantment and its undoing beyond the pale for
many commentators (Macey 2000: 212). Deleuze, however, would
have been unlikely to reject Jung’s thought for these reasons. For he
too was interested in experiences or ‘encounters’ (1968a: 176) that
shock common sense, in developing novel concepts based on such
experiences, and in exploring what Hermeticism and related currents
might have to offer modern thought (Kerslake 2007: 159–​88; Ramey
2012). Nevertheless, within Jung’s thinking about the whole there are
several features, including ones associated with his esoteric sources,
that reflect ideas Deleuze, in his thinking about the whole, did specifi-
cally target.
Deleuze was positive about the concept of the whole when, as in
Henri Bergson’s thought, it was conceived as something ‘neither given
nor giveable’ (1983: 9), that is, as something that does not have a pre-​
given or fixed nature or static endpoint but is in a process of continual
becoming and creativity. ‘[I]‌f the whole is not giveable’, Deleuze main-
tained, ‘it is because it is the Open, and because its nature is to change
constantly, or to give rise to something new’ (ibid.). He thus insisted
that the whole not be confused with ‘a closed set of objects’ (ibid.).
28 Roderick Main

The whole was, rather, ‘that which prevents each set, however big it is,
from closing in on itself, and that which forces it to extend itself into a
larger set’ (ibid.: 16).
It was against closed wholes that Deleuze levelled his criticism, in
particular against formulations of the whole as either pre-​existent or
the goal of some future realisation, as organic in the sense that the
whole governed and gave meaning to the parts of which it was com-
posed, and as constituted by internal relations that determined its
essence. In the 1972 revision of Proust and Signs, Deleuze contrasted
two ways in which a fragment or sign could ‘speak’:

[A fragment or sign can speak] either because it permits us to divine

the whole from which it is taken, to reconstitute the organism or
the statue to which it belongs, and to seek out the other part that
belongs to it –​or else, on the contrary, because there is no other
part that corresponds to it, no totality into which it can enter, no
unity from which it is torn and to which it can be restored.
(Deleuze 1972: 112)

The former way reflects the view of the ancient Greeks as well as of
Medieval and Renaissance Platonism (ibid.). The latter way reflects
modernist literature such as Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps
Perdu, in which, wrote Deleuze, ‘One would look in vain […] for plati-
tudes about the work of art as an organic totality in which [as in holis-
tic conceptions] each part predetermined the whole and in which the
whole determines the part’ (ibid.: 114). In the fragmented universe
of Proust’s novel, ‘there is no Logos that gathers up all the pieces,
hence no law attaches them to a whole to be regained or even formed’
(ibid.: 131). For Deleuze, the whole is precisely the multiplicity of frag-
ments –​fragments that are related to one another only through ‘sheer
difference’ and not through being parts of either an original or a future
whole (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 42). As Deleuze and his co-​author
Félix Guattari expressed it in Anti-​Oedipus: ‘We no longer believe in a
primordial totality that once existed or in a final totality that awaits us
at some future date’. Rather:

We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover

such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 29

these particular parts but does not totalise them; it is a unity of

all of these particular parts but does not unify them; it is added to
them as a new part fabricated separately.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 42)

Earlier in this chapter I drew on a formal definition of holism

(Phillips 1976) to demonstrate how closely Jung’s thought fits with
such definitions. The author of that definition, Denis Phillips, con-
cluded that in holism as it has generally been understood in the social
sciences, the kinds of relations of the parts of a whole both to the
whole that they constitute and to one another are identical to the
‘internal relations’ theorised by neo-​Hegelian thought (ibid.: 7–​20).
‘The parts of an organic [i.e., holistic] system are internally related
to each other’, writes Phillips (ibid.: 7), such that any change to the
relations alters the parts and hence also the whole: in other words,
‘entities are necessarily altered by the relations into which they enter’
(ibid.: 8). As Patrick Hayden has clarified in a discussion of Deleuze’s
empiricism, this implies that systems and entities have essences from
which their relations derive (Hayden 1995: 284–​85). In the under-
standing of wholes affirmed by Deleuze, by contrast, relations are not
derived from the essence of things or from their parts but are external
to them, so that the relations can be changed without affecting the
terms related (ibid.: 286). This leads to a view of entities and systems,
including ‘wholes’, as not essences but constructions (ibid.: 286–​87; see
also Roffe 2010: 304–​5).
The problem for Deleuze with the three interrelated notions of pre-​
existent (or original) and future (or restored) wholes, organicism, and
internal relations was that they each presupposed and reinforced the
idea of transcendence, that is, the idea that there is a level of real-
ity separate from, superior to, and governing the empirical world.
Pre-​existent or future wholes imply beginning or end points outside
the process of becoming, of which any experiential wholes are either
degraded or not yet fully realised versions. They also imply determin-
ism and finalism, both of which negate the openness and creativity of
becoming.
No less problematically, organicism postulates a unity over and above
and governing its organs or parts, with the subordinated parts drawing
their meaning only from their function within the whole. Moreover,
30 Roderick Main

the organic view of wholes privileges individual living organisms over

other forms of nature, such as the inorganic and the social (Protevi
2012: 248–​49), thereby giving rise to an image of the whole of nature
that in fact reflects only some of its forms. This was particularly prob-
lematic for Deleuze since, as John Protevi explains, he saw organisms
as tending to assume ‘habituated patterns’ or ‘strata’, resulting in ‘a
centralised, hierarchical, and strongly patterned body’ (2012: 257),
which prevents the body from being ‘open to new orderings and new
potentials’ (ibid.).
Finally, the notion of internal relations with its essentialist impli-
cations also, as Hayden explains, underpins a view of reality as ‘an
organic, stable, and absolute unity that transcends the empirical world
[…] a fixed Whole that transcends its parts’, in contrast to Deleuze’s
preferred empiricist view, based on external relations, of reality as ‘a
series of shifting contingent wholes that form the immanent and open
network of the world’ (Hayden 1995: 286–​87). The contrasting ethical,
social, and political implications of these holistic and empiricist views
that Deleuze respectively criticises and favours are well summarised by
Hayden:

On the one hand, essentialism and the paradigm of internal rela-

tions [i.e., organicistic holism] leads [sic] in the direction of extreme
centralization and totalization, the subordination of individuals to
transcendental principles, and passivity in the face of social and
political homogeneity. On the other hand, pluralist empiricism and
the theory and practice of external relations promotes [sic] decen-
tralization and multiplicity, resistance to supposed universal neces-
sities, and action with respect to the possibilities of creating new
types of social and political association.
(Hayden 1995: 287; see also Goodchild 2001:
158–​59; Braidotti 2012; Patton 2012)

Organicistic holism in Jung

Where Deleuze condemned the notions of original and restored
wholes, organicistic thinking, and internal relations because of their
explicit and implicit appeals to transcendence, Jung arguably drew
on all of these notions in support of his concept of wholeness. For
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 31

example, he referred to ‘the production and unfolding of the original,

potential wholeness’ (1917/​1926/​1943: §186); to ‘the a priori existence
of potential wholeness’, on account of which, he stated, ‘the idea of
entelechy [a vital principle guiding an organism’s or system’s develop-
ment and functioning] instantly recommends itself’ (1951a: §278); and
to an ‘apocatastasis’ or ‘anamnesis’ in which the ‘ever-​present arche-
type of wholeness’, the ‘original state of oneness with the God-​image’,
would be restored (ibid.: §73; see also 1955–​56: §§152, 660, 662). He
described the unus mundus, with which the re-​integrated mind-​body is
united in the third of Dorn’s conjunctions, as ‘the potential world of
the first day of creation, when nothing was yet “in actu”, i.e., divided
into two and many, but was still one […], the eternal Ground of all
empirical being’ (1955–​56: §760).
Again, Jung included approvingly among the ‘forerunners’ of his
deeply holistic concept of synchronicity (Main 2019) the Ancient Greek
thinker Hippocrates and the Renaissance esoteric thinker Pico Della
Mirandola, in both of whom organicism is explicit. For Hippocrates,
as Jung quoted directly, ‘all things are in sympathy. The whole organ-
ism and each one of its parts are working in conjunction for the same
purpose’ (in Jung 1952b: §924); while for Pico Della Mirandola, as
Jung summarised, the world was ‘one being, a visible God, in which
everything is naturally arranged from the very beginning like the parts
of a living organism’ (Jung 1952b: §927). Jung’s frequent references in
his alchemical works to microcosm and macrocosm and notions of
the ‘Anthropos’, ‘Original Man’, and ‘Adam Kadmon’ also imply an
organicistic perspective (1944, 1951a, 1955–​56).
It is less easy to find clear evidence of Jung’s having been influ-
enced by the notion of internal relations, as this is an idea stemming
from philosophical traditions with which he did not directly engage.
There are, however, indirect connections. The modern formulation of
the idea of internal relations mainly derived from Hegel’s philosophy
of the Absolute (Phillips 1976: 7–​20). As Glenn Magee has demon-
strated, though, Hegel’s own conception of the universe as an inter-
nally related whole was deeply influenced by the Hermetic notion that
‘everything in the cosmos is internally related, bound up with every-
thing else’ (2001: 13–​14). For Jung’s part, even though he did not refer
to the concept of internal relations as such, several of his ideas appear
to suggest it: for example, his view of the mutual determination and
32 Roderick Main

dynamic interrelationship and interdependence of the self as the whole

and the ego, shadow, and archetypes as its parts (Phillips 1976: 7–​20;
Main 2019: 61–​63); and his statements, apropos synchronicity and the
unus mundus, about ‘the universal interrelationship of events’ and ‘an
inter-​connection and unity of causally unrelated [i.e., externally unre-
lated] events’ (1955–​56: §662).4
Finally, while Jung, like Deleuze, could express suspicion of the con-
stricting and protective uses of transcendence –​as when he charged
the alchemists he otherwise so valued of having attempted to ‘entrench
themselves behind seemingly secure positions in the Beyond’ with their
‘metaphysical assertions’ (1955–​56: §680) –​he nevertheless did not share
Deleuze’s zeal for rooting out transcendence entirely. On the contrary,
he insisted that ‘[t]‌he concept of psychic wholeness necessarily involves
an element of transcendence on account of the existence of unconscious
components’ (1958: §779). Again, after noting that ‘the self can become
a symbolic content of consciousness’, he continued by also stressing
that ‘it is, as a superordinate totality, necessarily transcendental as
well’ (1951a: §264). And the final chapter of Mysterium Coniunctionis,
while acknowledging the inevitable uncertainty of any representa-
tion of transcendental reality, nonetheless concludes by affirming that
‘[t]he existence of a transcendental reality is indeed evident in itself’ and
‘[t]hat the world inside and outside ourselves rests on a transcendental
background is as certain as our own existence’ (1955–​56: §787).
Prima facie, Jung’s endorsement of the notions of original and
restored wholes, organicistic thinking, internal relations, and tran-
scendence suggests that his thought might be deeply vulnerable to a
Deleuzian critique that would charge it with advocating a concept of
the whole that intrinsically is static, promotes hierarchical and totali-
tarian relations intrapsychically, interpersonally, and culturally, and
overall stymies creativity and open relationship. In the remainder of
this chapter, I propose a perspective for thinking about Jung’s and
Deleuze’s concepts of the whole, as well as of the relation between
their bodies of thought more generally, from which this apparent vul-
nerability might be addressed.

Panentheism and the open whole

Christian McMillan, who has undertaken the most rigorous interroga-
tion to date of the metaphysical logic and potential ethical dangers of
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 33

Jung’s concept of the whole from a Deleuzian perspective (McMillan

2015), has identified some possible ways in which it could be argued,
in response to the Deleuzian critique, that Jung’s thought does after
all support the idea of an open whole. One response would involve
establishing connections between Jungian and Deleuzian thought in
relation to contemporary scientific developments with which both
thinkers can be aligned, such as in experimental physics, the phi-
losophy of science, and the theory of emergence, where these fields
promote the idea of open systems (ibid.: 21–​25). Another response
would be to focus on Jung’s concept of synchronicity as providing a
form of post-​phenomenological access to the real through the ‘shock’
that synchronistic experiences give to normal thought and sensibility
(ibid.: 21, 246–​49). Other possible responses would involve reimag-
ining some of Jung’s more controversial concepts as ‘ “openings” to
“enchanted Others” ’ (McMillan 2018: 195) –​concepts such as esse in
anima (psychic reality), the psychoid, archetypes, and (again) synchro-
nicity, each of which keeps the whole open by providing ways ‘to think
about the dynamic fluidity of [the] boundaries [of the psyche]’ (ibid.).
All of these responses would involve advancing a purely immanent
interpretation of Jungian psychology.
The alternative response that I propose, rather than cast or recast
Jung as a purely immanent thinker, queries the desirability and perhaps
feasibility of eliminating transcendence. In anticipation, I distinguish
between two different ways of understanding transcendence and argue
that the kind of transcendence opposed by Deleuze was in fact also
opposed by Jung, while the (different) kind of transcendence found
in Jung is also discernible in Deleuze. From this perspective, Jung’s
and Deleuze’s respective bodies of thought, including their ways of
conceiving the whole, turn out to be quite close allies in challenging
the first kind of transcendence, which arguably is what spawns both
disenchantment and totalitarian thought.

Theism, pantheism, and panentheism

Deleuze’s opposition to transcendence was epitomised by his asser-
tion that ‘the task of modern philosophy’ was ‘to overturn Platonism’
(1968a: 71), with its subordination of sensible objects to intelligible
(transcendent) ideas. The same opposition also drove his lifelong
efforts to develop a philosophy of pure immanence (1968b, 2001),
34 Roderick Main

an aspiration expressed most blatantly in his admiration for Spinoza,

whom he called the ‘prince’ and even the ‘Christ’ of philosophers
because he ‘never compromised with transcendence’ but constructed a
‘plane of immanence’ that ‘does not hand itself over to the transcend-
ent, or restore any transcendence’, thereby inspiring ‘the fewest illu-
sions, bad feelings, and erroneous perceptions’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1991: 48, 60).
This alignment with Spinoza and aspiration towards pure imma-
nence suggest that Deleuze’s philosophy can be characterised as pan-
theistic (1968b: 333).5 The definitive feature of pantheism is that it
equates the divine with the world (nature, the cosmos), that is, it sees
the divine as being no more than the world (Mander 2012; Buckareff
and Nagasawa 2016: 2–​3).6 Among other things, this clearly implies
that the divine is not separate from the world and is necessarily impli-
cated in and affected by the world.
Pantheism strikingly contrasts with classical theism, such as under-
pins the mainstream religious thought of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. In classical theism the divine is considered to be essentially
separate from the world, to be unaffected by the world, and to be
more than the world (Cooper 2006: 14–​15; Buckareff and Nagasawa
2016: 1–​2). It is against this conception of divine-​world relations that
Deleuze’s criticisms of transcendence and alignment with pantheism
appear to be levelled. For this classical theistic conception provides the
pattern for relations where a separate eminent principle –​the divine (or
the one, or the mental) –​is considered to be realer, more valuable, and
regnant over that from which it is separated –​the world (or the many,
or the physical). Significantly, this same separation between the divine
and the world was seen by Weber as the deep root of disenchantment
(1904–​5: 61, 178; Main 2017:1102–​4).
However, pantheism is not the only way of conceiving the rela-
tionship between the divine and the world that would challenge clas-
sical theism. Akin to pantheism, but with a significant difference, is
panentheism. Panentheism can be concisely defined as ‘the belief or
doctrine that God includes and interpenetrates the universe while
being more than it’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 2002: 2080).
Recognising that it comprises several varieties, Michael Brierley
defines panentheism more fully but still generically in terms of the
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 35

following three premises: ‘First, that God is not separate from the cos-
mos […]; second, that God is affected by the cosmos […]; and third,
that God is more than the cosmos’ (2008: 639–​40; see also Cooper
2006: 17–​19; Buckareff and Nagasawa 2016: 2–​3). Through the first
two of Brierley’s premises, panentheism is akin to pantheism, while
through the third it differs. Specifically, panentheism affirms a kind
of transcendence in that it considers the divine to be more than the
world. But this transcendence differs from that of classical theism in
that it expressly holds that the divine is not separate from the world
and that the divine is affected by the world. Another way of express-
ing the differences between classical theism, pantheism, and panenthe-
ism would be to say that the relationship between the divine and the
world in classical theism is chiefly characterised by transcendence, in
pantheism is chiefly characterised by immanence, and in panentheism
involves a balance between transcendence and immanence (cf. Asprem
2014: 281). As we shall now see, the perspective of panentheism could
be a helpful framework for making sense of the tension we have uncov-
ered between Jung’s and Deleuze’s respective concepts of the whole
and their ethical implications.

Jung as an implicit panentheist

As I have argued in detail elsewhere (Main 2017: 1105–​11), Jung’s
psychological model can be construed as underpinned by a form of
implicit panentheism. This construal depends on Jung effectively hav-
ing equated the unconscious with God: ‘Recognising that [numinous
experiences] do not spring from his conscious personality, [man] calls
them mana, daimon, or God’, Jung wrote, adding: ‘Science employs
the term “unconscious” ’ (1963: 368) –​a position that is as much a
sacralisation of psychology as it is a psychologisation of the sacred (cf.
Hanegraaff 1998: 224–​29). Jung’s statements about God, or the God-​
image, in Answer to Job and elsewhere, depict God as not separate
from the world, as affected by the world, and as more than the world
(1952a: §§631, 686, 758); and correlatively his statements about the
unconscious depict it as not separate from consciousness, as affected
by consciousness, and as more than consciousness (1952a: §§538, 555,
557–​58; 1963: 358; Main 2017: 1108–​10).
36 Roderick Main

Construing Jung’s thought as panentheistic supports the characteri-

sation of it at the beginning of this chapter, where it was shown to be
holistic and to challenge the propositions underlying disenchantment.
Thus, a recent study of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–​1832),
who coined the term ‘panentheism’ in the early nineteenth century,
argues that Krause’s concept not only anticipated recent thinking
about holism but still provides an insightful theoretical framework
for it (Göcke 2018: 196–​200). Indeed, Brierley’s generic definition of
panentheism arguably could be applied to holism: that is, in holism the
whole is not separate from the parts, is affected by the parts, and yet
is more than the parts. With regard to disenchantment, I have detailed
in a previous publication how the metaphysical logic of panentheism
undoes each of the defining features of this condition, using Jung’s
thought as an illustration (Main 2017). And it is worth noting that
Western esotericism, perhaps the most literal carrier of enchantment
as well as one of the deep cultural influences on holistic thought
(Hanegraaff 1998; Dusek 1999: 99–​205) and a major source for Jung,
has in its turn been convincingly shown to be based on panentheis-
tic thought (Magee 2001: 8–​9; Hanegraaff 2012: 371; Asprem 2014:
77–​79, 279–​84).
Even more pertinently, however, construing Jung’s thought as
panentheistic shows how his concept of the whole, together with the
involved notions of original and restored wholes, organicism, and
internal relations, might remain open and not after all be vulnerable
to the Deleuzian critique. If Jung’s concept of the whole, that is, the
self, is both transcendent and immanent, it both exceeds the possibil-
ity of being completely expressed (insofar as it is an archetype in itself)
and receives an ongoing multiplicity of necessarily partial empirical
expressions (archetypal images). The dynamic between the transcend-
ence and immanence here keeps the concept open by ensuring that,
while the archetypal images express ever-​different aspects or formula-
tions of wholeness, no archetypal image is a final or complete expres-
sion of the whole. Each image gives an approximate expression that
resolves the tensions and problems being experienced at the time, but
that resolution, as now a conscious image, itself immediately and recur-
sively becomes part of a new set of tensions and problems, which in
turn requires resolution through the emergence of another archetypal
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 37

image. In other words, the transcendent aspect of the whole is kept

from being static by its non-​separation from and ability to be affected
by the world of becoming; while the immanent aspect of the whole is
kept from being static by being continually destabilised by the ‘more’
of the transcendent.
Jung’s openness to such a dynamic concept of transcendence, where
the transcendent is envisaged as implicated with becoming, can be
seen when he states at the beginning of ‘Answer to Job’ that ‘we can
imagine God as an eternally flowing current of vital energy that end-
lessly changes shape just as easily as we can imagine him as an eternally
unmoved, unchangeable essence’ (1952a: §555, emphasis added). More
empirically, his recognition that even the most stable, symmetrical,
and ordered symbols of wholeness are necessarily subject to continual
change was expressed in his observation that the mandala –​the para-
mount symbol of the self (1963: 221) and the ‘empirical equivalent’
of the unus mundus (1955–​56: §661) –​transforms from one manifesta-
tion to the next (1944: §§122–​331; 1963: 220–​22). As he wrote, citing
Part Two of Goethe’s Faust: ‘Only gradually did I discover what the
mandala really is: “Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind’s eter-
nal recreation” ’ (1963: 221).
As well as keeping open his overall concept of the whole, the mutual
implication of transcendence and immanence in Jung’s panenthe-
istic thought similarly ensures that his conceptions of original and
restored wholes, organicism, and internal relations remain open. For
example, in his statements about the restoration of an original whole-
ness (apocatastasis), Jung described the self as a state of ‘potential
wholeness’ (1917/​1926/​1943: §186; 1951a: §278) and the unus mundus
as ‘the potential world of the first day of creation’ (1955–​56: §760). But
what it means to realise this state or world of potential is to achieve ‘a
synthesis of the [immanent] conscious with the [transcendent] uncon-
scious’ (ibid.: §770), that is, a synthesis in which empirical conscious-
ness reconnects with and becomes able more fully to express the unus
mundus as a source of open-​ended creativity. Again, insofar as Jung’s
statements about organicism and microcosm–​ macrocosm relations
refer, directly or indirectly, to symbols of the self (such as the Hermetic
notion of the ‘Anthropos’ and its synonyms), then this organicism and
the related notion of microcosm–​macrocosm are no more promoting
38 Roderick Main

a closed system than is the concept of the self. Finally, any version
of internal relations that can be found in Jung’s work is similarly not
closed, for the ‘universal interrelationship of events’ (1955–​56: §661)
postulated by Jung on the basis of synchronicity accords with what
‘can be verified empirically’ (1952b: §938). It is a potential but contin-
gent and open relationship that, by transgressing normal spatiotempo-
ral and psychophysical limits, can connect even the most distant and
divergent events (ibid.: §840). But it is explicitly not, as in Leibniz, for
example, ‘a complete pre-​established parallelism’ expressing an ‘abso-
lute rule’ (ibid.: §938). In a statement with relevance for the influence
on him of pre-​modern and esoteric thought generally, Jung described
synchronicity as ‘a modern differentiation of the obsolete concept of
correspondence, sympathy, and harmony’ (1951b: §995; emphasis
added). It was a ‘modern differentiation’ precisely by virtue of being
based on ‘empirical experience and experimentation’ (ibid.).

Deleuze as an implicit panentheist

As well as helping to make sense of how Jung’s thought, despite its
appeals to transcendence, can remain open, creative, and relational,
the metaphysical logic of panentheism can help in resolving some dif-
ficulties that attach to Deleuze’s attempt to articulate a philosophy of
pure immanence. While Deleuze’s efforts to root out all trace of tran-
scendence from his philosophy have been found compelling and help-
ful by some commentators (e.g., Albert 2001; Ansell-​Pearson 2001;
Adkins 2018), others have found reasons to question this project. Alain
Badiou, for example, has argued that Deleuze, with his ‘metaphysics of
the One’ (2000: 10), far from reversing Platonism, himself establishes a
‘Platonism of the virtual’ (ibid.: 45). Phillip Goodchild has noted that,
paradoxically, Deleuze’s ‘plane of immanence’, as well as being tran-
scendental in the Kantian sense of being ‘a presupposition about the
nature of thought’, is also transcendent in the Kantian sense inasmuch
as it is ‘a matter of being’ (2001: 158). Again, Peter Hallward, while
acknowledging that Deleuze’s ‘affirmation of absolute and immanent
creativity certainly blocks any invocation of a transcendent “crea-
tor” ’, has suggested that this comes at the ethical and political cost
of implying ‘a philosophy that seeks to escape any mediation through
the categories of subjectivity, history and the world’ (2006: 3). And
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 39

Christopher Simpson has argued that the extreme form of transcend-

ence opposed by Deleuze is a caricature –​‘God as a static, univocal
eternity –​absolute in its immutability and stasis beyond time and
becoming, and so unable to relate to the world’ (2012: 78) –​and that
it is this caricature that generates the problematic ‘dualism between
God and the world’ (ibid.) that Deleuze finds so objectionable. Like
Badiou, Simpson also finds that Deleuze himself effectively reintro-
duced a form of transcendence through his concept of the virtual:

Deleuze’s actual and virtual are both real, but the virtual […] is
ultimately more real, the ‘ “good” transcendental creative factor’
having a definite privilege and priority over the ‘ “bad” static and
representable created element’, over ‘the illusory solidity of the
actual’. In this way Deleuze’s reversal of Platonism yet reflects a
neo-​Platonic or Gnostic dualism.
(Simpson 2012: 79, quoting Justaert 2009: 542–​43)

The weight of these criticisms of Deleuze’s understanding of tran-

scendence is certainly debatable, but one way in which they could be
eased would be to see his thought as involving not a theistic but a panen-
theistic form of transcendence. The principal ground for making this
move is that the same set of logical relationships that is found between
the divine and the world in panentheism, and between the unconscious
and consciousness in Jung’s thought, can be found between the virtual
and the actual in Deleuze’s thought. The virtual (a field of potentiality
comprising a multiplicity of ‘problematic ideas’) and the actual (spe-
cific occurrences representing the solutions to problematic ideas) are
the two main characterisations of reality in Deleuze, and they recip-
rocally determine each other in an open-​ended process of creativity
(1968a: 214–​74). Thus, for Deleuze, the virtual is not separate from
the actual, since both are aspects of the same reality (ibid.: 260–​61,
350); is affected by the actual, through ‘a double process of reciprocal
determination’ (ibid.: 260; cf. the reference to ‘counter-​actualisation’
below); and is more than the actual, inasmuch as the actual does not
resemble and cannot fully express the virtual (ibid.: 260–​1, 264).7
That this construal of Deleuze’s thought may not be entirely unwar-
ranted is suggested by the helpful perspective on his views of transcend-
ence offered by James Williams (2010) and Kristien Justaert (2012),
40 Roderick Main

both, significantly, drawing on the process philosophy of Alfred North

Whitehead. In language reminiscent of Deleuze, Whitehead had writ-
ten about how ‘[t]‌he vicious separation of the flux from the perma-
nence leads to the concept of an entirely static God, with eminent
reality, in relation to an entirely fluent world, with deficient reality’
(1929: 346). Yet Whitehead did not, as Deleuze did, aim to resolve this
separation by eliminating transcendence and advocating pure imma-
nence. As Williams explicates:

For Whitehead, separated transcendence is pure stasis, meaning-

less because no change whatsoever can take place within it, a time-
less and momentum free block. Yet pure immanence is equally
nonsensical, since as pure flux we cannot explain its valued for-
ward momentum and novelty, it becomes free of any realities and
without sense.
(Williams 2010: 98)

Whitehead conceived of the divine as dipolar, having both a trans-

cendent ‘primordial nature’ and an immanent ‘consequent nature’
(1929: 31, 343–​45). Williams explains that the two movements stem-
ming from these two natures correspond to the two co-​existing move-
ments described by Deleuze as explication and complication (Williams
2010: 102; see Deleuze 1968b: 175–​76), and he suggests that the rela-
tions resulting from the two movements for Whitehead precisely match
Deleuze’s description: ‘The multiple is in the one which complicates it,
as much as the one is in the multiple that explains it’ (Deleuze 2003: 244,
quoted in Williams 2010: 101; Williams’s emphasis). Put in terms of
Deleuze’s alternative vocabulary of the virtual and the actual, this is to
say that the actual is in the virtual and the virtual is in the actual. Just
as for Whitehead’s metaphysics there is a ‘creative circle moving from
abstract eternal realm through a creative transformation in the actual
and back to a now transformed virtual real’, so in Deleuze’s thought, as
expressed for example in Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1969: 149–​51), ‘Ideas
or sense move through surface or intensity to an actual realm, where a
counter-​actualisation reworks the form and power of the virtual, send-
ing it back to return again as new creativity’ (Williams 2010: 96). In
terms echoing characterisations of panentheism, Williams concludes
that ‘Deleuze’s work is open to an interpretation where immanence
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 41

and transcendence are never treated as fully separable, but rather

must be considered as essentially and indivisibly related as processes’
(2010: 102; cf. Ramey 2012: 207). Justaert makes this complex set of
relationships even more explicit:

In Whitehead’s philosophical system, the actual (God’s consequent

nature or the many) influences and even changes the virtual (God’s
primordial nature or the one); and while the primordial nature of
God is a form of pure potentiality for Whitehead, his consequent
nature is both physical and actual. The actual therefore ensures
that the virtual does not become a static transcendence. Indeed,
there are continuous fluxes and becomings between the two ways
of being. ‘It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the
World creates God’, Whitehead concludes.
(Justaert 2012: 77, quoting Whitehead 1929: 348)

Whitehead was one of the twentieth-​century philosophers whom

Deleuze most revered.8 Yet, far from eschewing the notions of organ-
icism and internal relations, Whitehead considered these notions
integral to how he understood the nature of reality as process: he
referred to his philosophy as ‘the philosophy of organism’ (1929: 18
et passim) and he invoked internal relations, not just external rela-
tions, to make sense of the ‘actual occasions’ that he considered to
be the basic units of reality (ibid.: 308–​9). Although, like Jung, he did
not appear to be aware of the concept of panentheism, his reflections
on ‘God and the World’ at the conclusion of Process and Reality
have been foundational for process panentheism, one of the most
prominent currents of contemporary panentheistic thought (Cooper
2006: 165–​93). Together these features of Whitehead’s philosophy
suggest, pace Deleuze, that the notions of transcendence, original
and restored wholes, organicism, and internal relations can be under-
stood in ways compatible with a rigorously articulated philosophy of
becoming and process. In turn, this makes plausible the suggestion
that Deleuze’s own philosophy could be productively construed as
panentheistic.
The more widely held view of Deleuze appears to be that, although
his work involves ‘a certain thought of unity’, nevertheless ‘we cannot
consider him to be a “holist” in any direct sense’ (Roffe 2010: 305).
42 Roderick Main

In light of the above panentheistic considerations, however, Justaert

would disagree:

Deleuze’s (and even Spinoza’s) metaphysics reflects a holistic and

monistic view of creation: the One (God/​Being) and the many (cre-
ation/​beings) are two sides of the same coin. They are related to
each other through the act of expression. God expresses Himself
in the whole of creation in the same way.
(Justaert 2012: 30)

Conclusion
From the perspective of a panentheistic metaphysics, it appears that
Jung’s holistic thought can escape the kinds of criticism that Deleuze
levelled against forms of transcendence that foster totalitarianism.
Such problematic forms of transcendence stem from a theistic meta-
physics, which considers there to be an essential separation between
the divine and the world. However, the form of transcendence that
can be found in Jung and that informed his explicit and implicit use of
the notions of original and restored wholes, organicism, and internal
relations was panentheistic and as such denied any essential separation
between the divine and the world. Arguably, Jung was as opposed as
was Deleuze to theistic transcendence, for it was the divine-​world sepa-
ration of theistic transcendence that also spawned the condition of
disenchantment against which so much of Jung’s own critical energy
was exerted (Main 2017: 1102–​4). In the end, Deleuze and Jung appear
to have shared a common critical target in theistic transcendence.
The case of Jung’s psychology thus suggests that at least some influ-
ential forms of holistic thought have no intrinsic relationship to totali-
tarianism. Indeed, Jung’s psychology even provides an example of how
holistic thought can be deployed as a prophylactic against totalitarian
thought, as when Jung argued in ‘The undiscovered self’ that realisa-
tion of the wholeness of the self through individuation can serve, as
religion had once done, as a counterbalance to the mass-​mindedness
out of which totalitarianism was prone to emerge (1957; see also
McMillan 2021).
The holism that Jung promoted centres on a concept, the self,
which involves a synthesis of (immanent) ego-​consciousness with the
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 43

(transcendent) unconscious. This involvement of the unconscious

ensures that the concept of the whole informing conscious thought
remains in a process of transformation, open to ever-​new possibilities
of connection and creation. For Jung it was one-​sided and fixated ego-​
consciousness rather than the self that was associated with the prob-
lematic forms of despotic thought traced by Deleuze to transcendence.
This is evident from Jung’s comments about the ‘new ethic’ that Erich
Neumann identified as implied by the depth psychological aim of unit-
ing consciousness and the unconscious in the individuation process:

[Neumann] compares the relation to the unconscious with a par-

liamentary democracy, whereas the old ethic [a collective morality
based on ethical rules] unconsciously imitates, or actually prefers,
the procedure of an absolute monarchy or a tyrannical one-​party
system. Through the new ethic, the ego-​consciousness is ousted
from its central position in a psyche organized on the lines of a
monarchy or totalitarian state, its place being taken by wholeness
or the self, which is now recognized as central.
(Jung 1949: §1419)

If there are problematic associations of Jung’s thought with totalitar-

ian currents of his day, these, such as they may be, would appear to
exist despite rather than because of the structure of his thought, and
need to be examined historically and biographically.
This said, there is scarcely ground for complacency. For it is pos-
sible for ego-​consciousness to fall out of relationship with the uncon-
scious at any point, especially when, as is often and even typically the
case, the confrontation of ego-​ consciousness with the unconscious
is painful or otherwise difficult. At that point, the integration so far
achieved by ego-​consciousness could indeed become defensively fixed
and thereby provide the basis for the development of totalitarian for-
mations. Awareness of this possibility, sharpened by the confrontation
with Deleuzian thought, adds urgency to the task of maintaining the
relationship between ego-​consciousness and the unconscious, which
for Jung would mean persisting vigilantly in the lifelong process of
individuation.
For Deleuze’s philosophy, in its turn, the confrontation with Jung’s
thought, in particular the suggestion that has emerged that Deleuze
44 Roderick Main

could also be understood as an implicit panentheist, might help

to reframe some of the problems that certain scholars have found
with his understanding of transcendence and his attempt to articu-
late a philosophy of pure immanence. Finally, viewing Deleuze as an
implicit panentheist could also provide a context within which some of
Deleuze’s important, but in his own writings less foregrounded, influ-
ences could emerge more fully into view, including those of Western
esotericism, Whitehead, and not least Jung.

Acknowledgement
Work on this chapter was supported by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council [AH/​N003853/​1].

Notes
1 For a detailed discussion of the issues involved in defining holism, see
Main, McMillan, and Henderson (2020).
2 In view of Popper’s explicit criticism of the alleged totalitarian implica-
tions of holism, his philosophical perspective might have been an alter-
native one to use for confronting Jung. However, the holism that Popper
criticises is specifically social holism –​the view that social entities have
properties that are irreducible to the behaviours of the individuals com-
posing those social entities –​and Jung, while seemingly a thoroughgoing
holist in relation to the development of individuals, was himself critical
of social holism (1957, §§504, 553–​54). In their study of medical holism
between 1920 and 1950 Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz (1998)
observe that ‘there have been two rather different holistic responses to
modernity’, one emphasising ‘the need for individual wholeness, plenitude,
or authenticity’ and the other ‘the submergence of the individual within
a larger entity —​nation, race, religious community, nature’ (1998: 7).
Popper’s target was the latter response. Jung’s holism concerns itself with
the former.
3 The term ‘holism’ was not coined until 1926 and appeared in a work writ-
ten in English (Smuts 1926). Jung, like many other German-​speaking intel-
lectuals, continued to use the established term Ganzheit and its cognates
(Ganzheitlichkeit, etc.) rather than Holismus, the derived German form of
the English neologism.
4 Sean Kelly draws detailed parallels between Jung’s concept of the self and
Hegel’s concept of the Absolute in a study centring on the two thinkers’
shared implicit notion of ‘complex holism’ (Kelly 1993). While Kelly does
 The ethical ambivalence of holism 45

not himself foreground the concept of internal relations, his study arguably
provides a basis for doing so.
5 Deleuze himself characterised his thought, along with Spinoza’s, as atheistic
(Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 92). This does not necessarily contradict their
characterisation as pantheistic. Since the eighteenth century, pantheism has
often been charged with being equivalent to atheism, inasmuch as the pan-
theistic denial of any distinction between God and the world can seem to do
away with the need for any separate discourse about God. Furthermore, in
one sense pantheism certainly is ‘a-​theistic’ in that it negates classical theism.
However, neither Deleuze nor Spinoza would have approved a form of athe-
ism that denied the sacredness of the world or the role of the infinite within
it. They aimed not to banish the divine from their thought but to locate, or
re-​locate, it entirely within the world (nature, cosmos), if not as the world.
6 There are, of course, multiple ways of understanding pantheism, theism,
and panentheism and the borders between them are often difficult to deter-
mine. For the purpose of setting out my broad argument in what follows,
it has seemed sufficient, as well as practical, to adopt quite wide, generic
definitions of the terms.
7 Also suggestive of panentheism is Deleuze’s formulation that ‘[t]‌he prob-
lem is at once both transcendent and immanent in relation to its solutions’
(1968a: 203).
8 For further discussion of the relationship between Deleuze and Whitehead,
see Robinson (2009).

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Chapter 2

The ‘image of thought’ and

the State-​form in Jung’s ‘The
undiscovered self ’ and Deleuze and
Guattari’s ‘Treatise on nomadology’
Christian McMillan

Introduction
This chapter focuses on a number of conceptual affinities that appear
within the work of Swiss depth psychologist C. G. Jung (1875–​1961)
and the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–​1995) and
his co-​writer Félix Guattari (1930–​1992). I draw extensively from one
of Jung’s final essays, ‘The undiscovered self (present and future)’
(1957), which was first published after both world wars and just after
the period of the Red Scare in the United States. Jung’s essay is note-
worthy for its critical exigencies on the role of the State1 in modern
times. Jung analyses the ways in which the State organises and orien-
tates thought in a certain one-​sided manner. He considers the nega-
tive logical and ethical effects of this organisation on the individual,
religion, and science. When in conformity with the State, these three
systems reinforce the way in which the State organises and orientates
an image of thought whose effects serve to exclude alternative forms
of organisation.
In ‘The undiscovered self’ Jung presents arguments that attest to the
psychological causes and consequences of the organisation of thought
when it is universalised by the State. Likewise, Deleuze tends to focus
on the organisation and distribution of relations within thought sys-
tems of which the State is one variation (others include the organism,
language, psychoanalysis, art, science, and religion). In the first half of
the chapter, I examine concepts that Jung presents in his essay. Jung
introduces positive concepts such as ‘individual’ and the ‘whole man’
and negative ones such as the ‘mass man’, ‘statistical man’ and the
‘State’. Jung’s positive concepts can be read as gesturing to an alterna-
tive form of relations which share some affinities with Deleuze and
52 Christian McMillan

Guattari’s affirmative characterisation of ‘relations of exteriority’ (the

‘form of exteriority’). These characterisations feature alongside their
critique of the ‘State-​form’ from ‘1227: Treatise on nomadology –​the
war machine’, which comprises the twelfth plateau of A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980/​ 1987), a work they
co-​authored in 1980.
In the second half of the chapter, I consider Jung’s analysis of the
ways in which thought is orientated by the abstract idea of the State
in modernity. I then relate this to Deleuze’s critique of the image of
thought which formed a crucial part of his Difference and Repetition
(1968). I draw attention to the notion of the ‘private thinker’ that was
first illuminated by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition and to which
he returned in the ‘Treatise on nomadology’. In this section I will argue
that Jung’s intentions in his essay exhibit many features which one can
find in common with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘private
thinker’, a ‘thinker’ capable of resisting a hegemonic and one-​sided
image of thought. This argument involves an engagement with Jung’s
conceptualisation of estranging encounters with the extramundane
from ‘The undiscovered self’. I argue that these encounters make pos-
sible a re-​orientation of a one-​sided image of thought. In the latter
sections of this chapter, I consider these encounters in relation to
Deleuze’s emphasis on the role of ‘the encounter’, which he believed
could stimulate thought in new ways. Deleuze often referred to artistic
encounters as capable of generating new ways of thinking and relat-
ing. Jung appears to be no less positive when in the concluding part of
his essay he calls upon the potentials in modern art, which, along with
analytical psychology, might open thought beyond its containment in
a claustrophobic and one-​sided image.

The abstract idea of the State and the State-​f orm

Jung used the term ‘wholeness’ frequently in his works. Often the term
is accompanied by another, ‘totality’, referring to the total personal-
ity. He refers to the psyche as ‘the totality of all psychic processes,
conscious as well as unconscious’ (1921: §797). The goal of wholeness
is a distant one, Jung tells us, and by individuation he means ‘the com-
plete actualisation of the whole human being’ (1934: §352). Elsewhere,
Jung reminds us that individuation is ‘the process by which a person
 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form 53

becomes a psychological “in-​dividual”, that is, a separate, indivis-

ible unity or “whole” ’ (1939: §490). In ‘The undiscovered self’ Jung
reflects on the ‘fate of the individual human being’ (1957: §497) in an
age of ‘mass-​mindedness’ (ibid.: §§500, 511). At the end of the essay he
asks his readers to recognise an ethical imperative: that they recognise
the individual as ‘that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends’
(ibid.: §588). What has taken place such that Jung would be moved to
advocate for the necessity of such an ‘individual’?
In his essay, Jung identifies a number of targets which he holds
as being responsible for the emergence of what he refers to as the
modern ‘mass man’ (ibid.: §§510, 511, 537, 538, 567). The targets
include the ‘abstract idea of the State’ (ibid.: §499), ‘State-​religion’2
(ibid.: §522) and a State-​science whose methodology is predominately
‘statistical’ (ibid.: §§494, 495, 497, 499, 503, 507, 522, 523, 529; cf.
‘statistical man’, §537).3 The problematic logical implications of the
abstract form of the State are closely bound up with a process of
‘statistical levelling down’ whose form Jung classifies as the ‘rational-
istic Weltanschauung’ of the West (ibid.: §522; cf. §§523, 549, 553). The
logical implications of ‘levelling down’ involve processes of exclusion
which take as their object the ‘irregular’ (ibid.: §§494, 495). According
to Jung, the ‘individual’ is an exemplar of the ‘irregular’ and conse-
quently a casualty of the exclusionary effects which levelling down
entails. He laments that ‘it is not the universal and the regular that
characterise the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be
understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singu-
lar’ (ibid: §495). In this passage, Jung equates the terms ‘universal’,
‘regular’, and ‘recurrent’. These terms serve the general function of
the ‘rationalistic Weltanschauung’, excluding the ‘irregular’, ‘unique’,
and ‘singular’. The form of the Weltanschauung and of the ‘abstract
idea of the State’ is the same. Under this form, the organisation of
relations proceeds in accordance with certain assumptions and pre-
suppositions; the assumption that man is a comparative unit results
in ‘an abstract picture of man as an average unit from which all indi-
vidual features have been removed’ (ibid. par: 495; emphasis added).
Taken together, these processes of exclusion have an ‘alienating effect’
(ibid.: §577) on the psyche of modern man.
In 1980 Deleuze and Guattari were also preoccupied with themes
similar to those that had engaged Jung some twenty years before. In
54 Christian McMillan

A Thousand Plateaus they generated a number of concepts that echo

Jung’s use of the concept ‘mass’ and the effects of ‘levelling down’,
which he associated with the form of the ‘rationalist Weltanschuung’.
Chief among these concepts Deleuze and Guattari refer to the ‘major-
ity’ and the ‘majoritarian’, which they present as ‘the analytic fact
of Nobody’ (1980/​1987: 105). By the term majoritarian they do not
mean a greater relative quantity than something else, for example a
minority.4 Rather, ‘majority implies a constant, of expression or con-
tent, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it’ (ibid.).
Deleuze and Guattari claim that ‘[m]‌ajority assumes a state of power
and domination’ (ibid.), and as an example of its representative man
they refer to ‘white, male, adult, “rational,” etc., in short, the aver-
age European, the subject of enunciation’ (ibid.: 292).5 ‘Majoritarian’
man and ‘mass man’ refer to a ‘Nobody’: ‘Majority is an abstract
standard that can be said to include no one and thus speak in the
name of nobody’ (Conley 2005: 165). As we have seen, Jung takes
account of something similar to the Nobody of this constant, stand-
ard and homogeneous majoritarian measure when he uses the term
‘unit’ to underscore the ‘psychological effect of the statistical world-​
picture’ (1957: §499).6 As a ‘recurrent’, ‘statistical’, ‘comparative’, and
‘average unit’ (ibid.: §495), Jung’s mass man is the product of a ‘level-
ling down and a process of blurring that distorts the picture of reality
into a conceptual average’ (ibid.).
Both Jung and Deleuze–​Guattari consider the formation of the mass
and the majoritarian to have an intimate relationship with the State.
Here a note of caution is required. When Jung refers to the ‘abstract
idea of the State’ (1957: §499), he implies that he is not actively seek-
ing to distinguish between specific States, historical or otherwise. In
the essay Jung tends to single out totalitarian regimes because of their
capacities for accelerating the production of mass-​mindedness. He
uses the term ‘dictator States’ (1957: §§510, 511, 514, 515, 517, 571,
580) when referring to totalitarian regimes and, as one might expect
given the historical context of his essay (1957), there are references to
Communism (ibid.: §§504, 515, 516, 523, 541, 544, 559, 568),7 Russia,
Stalin, China (ibid.: §517), and socialism (ibid.: §§511, 517).8 But to
conclude from this that Jung privileges some normative conception
of the democratic State over other variations would be incorrect.9 The
State has a certain abstract form, and this form finds itself embodied
 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form 55

in the rationalistic Weltanschauung. In their ‘Treatise on nomadology’,

Deleuze and Guattari refer to the State-​form directly:

The State-​form, as a form of interiority, has a tendency to repro-

duce itself, remaining identical to itself across its variations and
easily recognizable within the limits of its poles, always seeking
public recognition (there is no masked State). […] Only thought is
capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right,
of elevating the State to the level of de jure universality […]. If it
is advantageous for thought to prop itself up with the State, it is
no less advantageous for the State to extend itself in thought, and
to be sanctioned by it as the unique, universal form. […] The State
gives thought a form of interiority, and thought gives that interior-
ity a form of universality.
(1980/​1987: 360, 375, 376)

It is important to note that Deleuze and Guattari refer to the State-​

form as a form of interiority. In the ‘Treatise’, the system they are
preoccupied with is the State or more broadly the political, but the
form of interiority is not exclusive to the political. One can locate the
form of interiority in other registers such as philosophical systems
or other systems of thought. In the passage above, the authors indi-
cate that the form of interiority can reproduce itself across variations.
In ‘The undiscovered self’ the variations affected by the State-​form
include religion and science. In addition, Jung writes that for the mass
man, ‘the policy of the State is the supreme principle of thought and
action. Indeed, this was the purpose for which he was enlightened, and
accordingly the mass man grants the individual a right to exist only
in so far as he is a function of the State’ (1957: §510; emphasis added).
Hence the State-​form extends itself in thought accounting for the uni-
versality of presuppositions such as the recurrent and regular. When
we try to distil the form of levelling down which Jung identifies with
the rationalistic Weltanschauung, we should bear in mind Deleuze and
Guattari’s suggestion that the function of the State-​form is ‘capture’.
Paul Patton summarises their account, reiterating that the ‘essential
function of the state is capture’ but also that ‘the underlying abstract
form of the state is an interiority of some kind’ (2000: 99). ‘If it can
help it’, Deleuze and Guattari comment, ‘the State does not dissociate
56 Christian McMillan

itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, com-

modities, money or capital, etc.’ (1980/​1987: 385–​86). Levelling down
captures relations by reducing them to the form of the same and inte-
riorises them within a whole10 or a milieu of interiority.
When religion ‘compromises with the State’, Jung says that he pre-
fers ‘to call it not “religion” but a “creed”. A creed gives expression
to a definite collective belief, whereas the word religion expresses a
subjective relationship to certain metaphysical, extramundane factors’
(ibid.: 507; emphasis in original).11 Jung’s criticism of religion as creed
is echoed in Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of ‘absolute religion’
from the ‘Treatise’. They claim that ‘[t]‌he absolute of religion is essen-
tially a horizon that encompasses, and, if the absolute itself appears
at a particular place, it does so in order to establish a solid and sta-
ble center for the global. […] Religion is in this sense a piece in the
State apparatus’ (1980/​1987: 382). When science compromises with the
State, its form becomes statistical with its attendant implications such
as levelling down. In the ‘Treatise’, Deleuze and Guattari label science
‘Royal’ or ‘State-​science’ when it compromises with the State:

Royal science is inseparable from a “hylomorphic” model implying

both a form that organizes matter and a matter prepared for the
form; it has often been shown that this schema derives less from
technology or life than from a society divided into governors and
governed, and later, intellectuals and manual laborers. What char-
acterizes it is that all matter is assigned to content, while all form
passes into expression.
(1980/​1987: 369)

If we read Jung’s concerns about the extent to which thought, religion,

and science compromise with the abstract idea of the State from a
Deleuzian-​Guattarian perspective, then the form of this compromise
revolves around the form of interiority. This in turn concerns relations
of interiority. In the previous passage, Deleuze and Guattari classify
these relations as belonging to a schema that is hylomorphic, which
involves the assumption of a ‘transcendent, formal ordering of matter
which generates two orders of being (form and content) that can only
be related analogically’ (Adkins 2015: 107). These two orders are onto-
logically discontinuous, and Deleuze and Guattari seek to account for
 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form 57

an ontological continuum on which relations of interiority form one

abstract pole (or tendency) but which includes relations of exterior-
ity as another tendency. In the ‘Treatise’, the authors account for the
difference between these two kinds of relations in the form of a rea-
sonably straightforward metaphor. Referring to the difference between
two board games, chess and Go, they write:

Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China

played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature
and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations,
and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains
a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject
of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these rela-
tive powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess
player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast,
are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anony-
mous, collective, or third-​person function: “It” makes a move. “It”
could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are ele-
ments of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic
properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very differ-
ent in the two cases. […] On the other hand, a Go piece has only
a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or con-
stellations, according to which it fulfils functions of insertion or
situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. […] Finally, the
space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a
closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another,
of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum
number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in
an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of
springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to
another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, with-
out departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the
“striated” space of chess.
(1980/​1987: 352–​53)

In this illustration, space is used to establish a context in which one

can begin to approach the distinctions between relations of interiority
(and its milieu) and relations of exteriority. We should recall that these
58 Christian McMillan

distinctions are not intended as discontinuities but rather as tenden-

cies on a continuum. Why is chess a game of State? Its space is already
cut up (striated) and its pieces are coded according to their allowable
moves and their shape. Although there are a vast number of permit-
ted moves, the game is fundamentally static. Movement through stri-
ated space is highly controlled and the pieces have formalised identities
that have been hierarchically organised in advance. Internal relations
determine the function of the chessboard and pieces, and its milieu of
interiority. Striated space is another term for a homogenous space of
quantitative multiplicity in which relations are subordinate to a global
dimensionality. As an abstract machine of capture, the State-​form cre-
ates striated spaces which are homogenous and measurable and which
constitute a milieu of interiority by drawing boundaries. These require
common measures, which in turn enable a distribution of similarities
and differences.
Jung does not employ spatial distinctions to articulate the differ-
ences between the rationalistic Weltanschauung and the role that
the irregular might serve to resist its form. Instead he generates
other concepts or uses existing ones in a very novel way. As we have
seen, he sets up a distinction between the individual and the mass
man. Likewise, he draws the reader’s attention to the notion of the
‘whole man’ (1957: §§523, 553, 561). These are concepts of resist-
ance or ‘war-​machines’12 (to adopt another concept from Deleuze
and Guattari’s ‘Treatise’). Jung characterises the whole man as an
irrational datum, ‘the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal
or “normal” man’ (ibid.: §498; emphasis in original). What are the
capabilities of the whole man? What can he/​she do? This is an ethi-
cal question in the Spinozistic sense of ethics as an expansion of
what a body can do. The whole man is capable of relating in ways
that are not captured or excluded by the State-​form. Adkins com-
ments that ‘[i]‌t is precisely for this reason that the war machine is
always trying to ward off the state. […] The state converts the war
machine’s exteriority to a self-​same interiority’ (2015: 113). These
modes of relating are experimental, that is, their effects cannot be
fully determined in advance; but this does not mean that no influ-
ence is exerted on others or the world.
In the ‘Treatise’, Deleuze and Guattari introduce a number of con-
cepts which are used for thinking through the implications of ways
 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form 59

of relating which are exterior to, or outside, those of the State-​form.

Most of the time they refer to the nomad, nomadic, and nomadicism,13
situating these in relation to different contexts (e.g. space, language,
art, thought, and so on). Elsewhere in A Thousand Plateaus they refer
to processes such as ‘becoming-​revolutionary’ (1980/​1987: 292) and
‘becoming-​minoritarian’ (ibid.: 106–​7). They declare that ‘[t]‌here is
no becoming-​majoritarian; majority is never a becoming’ (ibid.: 107),
meaning that in becoming-​minoritarian one does not aim at acquiring
a new majority and a new constant. Rather, the figure of a minoritar-
ian consciousness, Deleuze and Guattari assert:

continually oversteps the representative threshold of the majori-

tarian standard, by excess or default. In erecting the figure of a
universal minoritarian consciousness, one addresses powers (puis-
sances) of becoming that belong to a different realm from that of
Power (Pouvoir) and Domination. Continuous variation consti-
tutes the becoming-​minoritarian of everybody, as opposed to the
majoritarian Fact of Nobody.
(1980/​1987: 106)

Are we entitled to equate this universal figure of minoritarian con-

sciousness with the figure of the whole man and the individual pre-
sented in ‘The undiscovered self’? As a continuous variation, the
becoming peculiar to minoritarian consciousness is a kind of meta-
morphosis, a potential to deviate from the standard or unit that defines
the mass and the majority. Resistance to the abstract idea of the State
is developed in the minoritarian consciousness of the whole man
who is capable of experimenting with relations engendering hetero-
geneous connections which are open to the outside. Finally, we might
recall some of Jung’s earliest sentiments from his final lecture to the
Zofingiaverein from 1899:14 ‘[t]‌o be sure, the normal man is not a quan-
tity acknowledged by public statute, but rather is the product of tacit
convention, a thing that exists everywhere and nowhere’ (1899: §246).
The image of the whole man that Jung presents us with over fifty years
later in ‘The undiscovered self’ calls to this image of the normal man
which, as a man of nowhere, is an analytic fact of Nobody and whose
everywhere is majoritarian, in contrast to the becoming-​minoritarian
of everybody.
60 Christian McMillan

Jung’s critique of the ‘image of thought’ and its

‘orientation’ in ‘The undiscovered self ’
In the previous section, I identified a number of conceptual affinities
between Jung’s essay ‘The undiscovered self’ and Deleuze/​Guattari’s
‘Treatise on nomadology’ from A Thousand Plateaus. We saw that
these writers were equally concerned with the logical and ethical impli-
cations of the exclusory effects that they considered certain forms of
relations could engender in thought and society. In what follows I want
to return to Jung’s essay and examine the ways in which he accounts
for the genesis of the habits of thought peculiar to the mass man and
what he tells us about resisting these habits. Likewise, I will return to
the work of Deleuze and of Deleuze and Guattari in order to assist
this examination. In this section, my focus is primarily on the system
of thought rather than the State-​form. What remains common to both
systems is the form of interiority.
In his essay, Jung offers the following erudite synopsis of the genesis
of the alienating effects of exclusion on the psyche of modern man:

His consciousness therefore orientates itself chiefly by observing

and investigating the world around him, and it is to the latter’s
peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical resources.
This task is so exacting, and its fulfilment so profitable, that he for-
gets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature
and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being.
In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world
where the products of his conscious activity progressively take the
place of reality.
(Jung 1957: §557; emphasis added)

Jung refers to a certain orientation of thought towards the conceptual

which gradually engenders an image of thought that becomes exact-
ing, that is, fixed. Man puts his own image or conception of himself
in the place of other images; in other words, man takes ‘one image as
the source and ground of all other images, without accounting for how
this image of all imaging is possible’ (Colebrook 2010: 184–​85). This
is exactly what Jung laments when in 1937 he accounts for the death
of God as a process whereby God’s image dissolves into the common
 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form 61

man. The common man (like the mass man) ‘suffers from a hubris of
consciousness that borders on the pathological’. Jung avers that ‘[t]‌his
psychic condition in the individual corresponds by and large to the
hypertrophy and totalitarian pretentions of the idealised State’ (1938/​
1940: §141). The death of God (first heralded by Friedrich Nietzsche
[1844–​1900]) was the death of an image of God that had become too
closely grounded in our own common image. ‘[W]ith Nietzsche’, Jung
says ‘ “God is dead.” Yet it would be truer to say, “He has put off
our image, and where shall we find him again?” ’ (ibid.: 144; emphasis
added). What is lost in this process is an understanding of the genesis
of ‘our image’ and how it came to be so dominant and all-​pervasive.
One of the less explicit preoccupations of Jung’s essay concerns a
mass projection with a one-​sided orientation and image of thought.
This collective projection is facilitated by the State apparatus when
it is universalised in the discourse of creeds and the methodologies
of statistical science. The collective identification with this image is
marked by Jung as ‘the triumph of the Goddess of Reason’ and he says
that it testifies to ‘a general neuroticizing of modern man’ (1957: §553).
Elsewhere in the essay, Jung argues that the ‘supremacy’ and ‘wor-
ship of the word’ (logos) ‘was necessary at a certain phase of man’s
development’ (ibid.: §554). This sentiment is also echoed in the fol-
lowing: ‘[o]‌nly when conditions have altered so drastically that there
is an unendurable rift between the outer situation and our ideas, now
become antiquated, does the general problem of our Weltanschauung
or philosophy of life, arise’ (1957: §549). In these passages one can
discern an emphasis on a necessary or inevitable diremption of mod-
ern man, which results in collective neurosis. In her critical study of
the recent ascendency of the image of the organism in ‘contemporary
modern vitalisms’,15 Claire Colebrook (a Deleuzian scholar) claims
that ‘it is the diremption of modern man –​and all the false problems,
neuroses, alienations and illusions that he brings in train –​that allows
this non-​organic, abstract, ideal, spiritual or properly machinic and
differential life to be intuited’ (2010: 177). This follows in the train
of ‘necessary illusions […] leading the way to an intuition of life as
essentially productive of its own misrecognition’ (ibid.). A collective
projection and identification with a one-​sided image may be a conse-
quence of ‘the organism’s tendency to territorialise or re-​territorialise
all relations around the image of its own illusory unity’ (ibid.: 143).
62 Christian McMillan

Jung’s comment that alienated modern man ‘slips imperceptibly into a

purely conceptual world’ (1957: §557) gestures to his awareness of the
counter-​efficient, neurotic effects of this process of universalisation,
capture, and territorialisation. I include these points to show that scru-
tiny of collective projection is a critical act, one that is only possible
‘after trauma –​after the self has experienced what is other than itself
as an alien infraction’ (Colebrook 2010: 176). On a collective level this
testifies to those moments of ‘extreme isolation, impoverishment and
detachment from “life” that man recognises as a power to create dis-
torting, truncated, illogical and sterile images’ (ibid.: 180).
Orientation to an image of thought is another way of expressing a
certain way of relating to an image. I postulate that in ‘The undiscov-
ered self’ Jung is proposing an ethical re-​orientation of the way we
relate to each other and the world via a new image. This image is closely
aligned with the way he presents the positive concept of the individual
and the whole man in the essay. As we shall see, the whole man acts
as a kind of conceptual persona for Jung in his essay. I borrow ‘con-
ceptual personae’ from the last work by Deleuze and Guattari, What
is Philosophy? (1991/​1994). They write that ‘philosophy is the art of
forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’ and that ‘concepts need
conceptual personae that play a part in their definition’ (ibid.: 2). The
concept is a ‘presence that is intrinsic to thought, a condition of possi-
bility of thought itself, a living category, a transcendental lived reality’
(ibid.: 3). ‘Concepts are not waiting for us ready-​made, like heavenly
bodies. There is no heaven for concepts. They must be invented, fabri-
cated, or rather created and would be nothing without their creator’s
signature’ (ibid.: 5).
Jung’s presentation of the concepts ‘whole man’ and ‘individual’ in
the essay can be regarded as transformative concepts. Although the term
‘individual’ is very common and often carries with it certain implicit
presuppositions, Jung’s critical use of the term in the essay is novel and
challenging. In those passages from ‘The undiscovered self’ where Jung
criticises mass and collective opinion (e.g. 1957: §§503, 535, 554), he
comes close to Deleuze’s criticism of the image of thought (which forms
the basis of Deleuze’s third chapter of Difference and Repetition). In
this criticism Deleuze takes Descartes’ famous ‘I think therefore I am’
to task for presupposing too much, namely ‘what it means to be and
to think […] and that no one can deny that to doubt is to think, and
 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form 63

to think is to be. […] Everybody knows, no one can deny, is the form of
representation and the discourse of the representative’ (1968/​1994: 130;
emphasis in original). According to Deleuze, the doxa of common-​sense
and good-​sense forms the implicit presupposition of philosophy as cogi-
tatio natura universalis, and he suggests that we ‘may call this image of
thought a dogmatic, orthodox or moral image’ (ibid.: 131). What is it
that can challenge this image of thought? I suggest that Jung’s deploy-
ment of the individual and the whole man might have something in
common with the way in which Deleuze and Guattari present the ‘Idiot’
as a conceptual persona capable of resisting this image (1991/​1994: 62).
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze comments:

At the risk of playing the idiot, do so in the Russian manner: that

of an underground man who recognises himself no more in the
subjective presuppositions of a natural capacity for thought than
in the objective presuppositions of a culture of the times, and
lacks the compass with which to make a circle. Such a one is the
Untimely, neither temporal nor eternal.
(1968/​1994: 130)

We ask if Jung’s notion of the individual and whole man might also
have affinities with the underground man, one with the ‘necessary
modesty’:

not managing to know what everybody knows, and modestly deny-

ing what everybody is supposed to recognise. Someone who neither
allows himself to be represented nor wishes to represent anything.
Not an individual endowed with good will and a natural capacity
for thought, but an individual full of ill will who does not manage
to think, either naturally or conceptually.
(1968/​1994: 130)

When Jung criticises the rationalist Weltanschauung and proposes an

alternative to ‘the triumph of the Goddess of Reason’ (1957: §553), it
is reason itself that is subjected to critique, given the way it has become
orientated by the established values of the abstract idea of the State. We
have seen how these values serve to exclude, how they become lodged
in an image of thought which sustains collective opinion in a one-​sided
64 Christian McMillan

manner: ‘[t]‌he image of thought is the only figure in which doxa is

universalised by being elevated to the rational level’ (Deleuze 1968/​
1994: 134). If we read Jung’s essay with these comments in mind, then
he can be regarded as an ‘untimely’, ‘private thinker’,16 a voice among
other ‘isolated and passionate cries’ which are isolated on account of
the fact that ‘they deny what everybody knows […]. And passionate,
since they deny that which, it is said, nobody can deny’ (ibid.: 130). In
the words of Bruce Baugh: ‘The private thinker is unreasonable because
Reason is nothing but the guarantor of the ideas of “everyone”, and
the private thinker is incapable of going along with the crowd, even at
the cost of being misunderstood and despised’ (2015: 315).

Becoming estranged
Returning to the passage from ‘The undiscovered self’ that I drew from
earlier (1957: §557), it is noteworthy that Jung refers to the real being
of man and his instinctual foundations as having become uprooted.
Such terms might imply a kind of original17 image or a natural way of
relating before the fall of modernity.18 But such an assessment would
be too simplistic. Elsewhere in the essay Jung calls on a positive power
of ‘estrangement’ (1957: §§507, 557) that can be contrasted with the
alienating and exclusionary effects propagated by the prevailing image
of thought. During encounters with the ‘extramundane’ (ibid.: pars,
507, 508, 509, 511, 514, 543),19 an estranging distancing from the image
of thought occurs. At times Jung refers to this estrangement as involv-
ing an ‘immediate inner experience’ (1957: §592) or an ‘immediate
relation with God’ (ibid.: §§563, 564).20 In becoming estranged from
a prevailing normative image, potentials for imaging (which were for-
merly excluded by this image, or captured by it and reduced to the form
of the same) are freed. This may be characterised as a positive process
of disembodiment in the sense that a normative image of thought (for
example, what Jung calls the statistical man or the mass man) is an
image from which one is becoming estranged. Nonetheless, a norma-
tive image of the self is a rather vague characterisation. Colebrook
offers some articulation in the following context:

The normative image of the artwork is tied closely to the norma-

tive image of the self, and both are premised on a norm of organic
 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form 65

life: the proper self is a well-​formed whole in which there is not an

imposed or centered form so much as a dynamic interaction of
constantly re-​engaged parts, all contributing to the ongoing coher-
ence of a well-​bounded unity.
(2010: 69)

Colebrook is decidedly critical of this image of the bounded ‘whole’,

a whole which is often assumed to be maintained and regulated via a
fixed inventory of transcendental conditions or sensory-​motor hab-
its. Other Deleuzian scholars such as Rosi Braidotti do not refer to a
normative image directly, but critically consider normative features of
the modern liberal subject such as the common-​sense notion that only
stable identities reposing on firms grounds of rational and moral uni-
versalism can ensure ethical probity, moral and political agency, and
basic human decency (2012: 170). A normative image of the liberal
individual with a universalistic or individual core (moral intention-
ality/​rational consciousness) is not presupposed by Jung as a neces-
sary condition for ethics; in its place a non-​unitary, relational vision
of the subject as whole is accorded priority. To this extent, Jung has
something in common with post-​structuralist philosophies in that he
promotes the ‘dissolution of the hard-​core self of liberal individual-
ism’ (Braidotti 2012: 186) and tacitly advocates an ‘ethics of deper-
sonalisation’, achieving a ‘post-​identity or non-​unitary vision of the
self’ which requires ‘the dis-​identification from established references’
(ibid.). Estrangement from an organic image of the whole is disem-
bodying in the sense that the organisation of its internal relations is
freed from subordination to a pre-​given whole. Relations that were
not considered proper to the milieu in which the organic image had
been situated are opened up onto an outside.21 Being orientated by an
image of thought that is too closely grounded in the conditioned (or
too much like an organic whole) presupposes a certain distribution of
relations that can have negative logical and ethical implications. These
implications can be registered at different levels: at the level of the
abstract idea of the State (Jung’s preoccupation in ‘The undiscovered
self’), at the level of thought (Deleuze’s preoccupation in Difference
and Repetition), and at the level of life (or the organism, which is
one register among others that preoccupy Deleuze and Guattari in A
Thousand Plateaus).22
66 Christian McMillan

The reciprocity between this image and the State engenders a one-​
sidedness which can reach epidemic (mass) proportions. The organisa-
tion and distribution of relations is channelled through thought and
through institutions such as religion and science. In disorganising this
image, the relation to the image of thought alters significantly:

It would not, therefore, be a question of evaluating images, theories

or art works on the basis of their proximity to the lived; it would
not be a question of judging images according to their attainability
or similarity to what is recognised or recognisable. What needs to
be rethought is not the nature and content of images […] but the
relation to images.
(Colebrook 2010: 115–​16; emphasis in original)

What is important in this passage is the emphasis on non-​organic

images or those which are estranged to the point of bearing no rela-
tion with the recognised of common opinion. Considered in this way,
Jung’s reflection on the process of estrangement can be read as a com-
mentary on ways of re-​organising relations which are opened up dur-
ing encounters with the extramundane, as he calls it. The individual
or whole man can engage potentials in new ways that were formerly
prohibited.
One of the reasons for the numerous references to art and artists
(untimely and private thinkers) in the work of Deleuze and Deleuze/​
Guattari23 relates to their interest in the estranging and transformative
effects that ideas and artistic works can evoke in the encounter. They
attempt to ally these effects with concepts, accounting for a philosoph-
ical process of concept creation. In relation to this it might be worth
recalling the following point on which Deleuze insisted:

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an

object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What
is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be
grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffer-
ing. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only
be sensed.
(1968/​1994: 139; emphasis original)
 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form 67

Art and extramundane encounters

Jung tends to territorialise estranging encounters with the extramun-
dane on to the more traditional language of theology, but we need
to recall that he takes theology to task when ‘it compromises with
the State’ and ‘compromises with mundane reality’ (1957: §507).
Furthermore, at the end of ‘The undiscovered self’, Jung suggests the
possibility of an alliance between his analytical psychology and what
he calls modern art. He recognises that this art-​form has ‘turned away
from the old object-​relationship toward the dark chaos’ (ibid.: §584)
and that it has opened up relations in such a way that they are no
longer dependent on recognition. Jung claims that modern art is an
‘excellent example: though seeming to deal with aesthetic problems, it
is really performing a work of psychological education on the public by
breaking down and destroying their previous aesthetic views of what is
beautiful in form and meaningful in content’ (ibid.). In other words, it
breaks down an image of thought. Nevertheless, Jung remains ambiv-
alent about this ‘education’, adding that ‘art, so far as we can judge
it, has not yet discovered in this darkness what it is that could hold all
men together and give expression to their psychic wholeness’ (ibid.).
In spite of this, he concludes that ‘since reflection seems to be needed
for this purpose, it may be that such discoveries are reserved for other
fields of endeavour’ (ibid.). Potential alliances between different fields
of endeavour are something that Jung is open to.24
Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy has been characterised as one
that actively forms (machinic) alliances with non-​ philosophies,
such as art, cinema, and science. In these alliances philosophy does
not claim any right to judge or assume any position of superior-
ity (Deleuze 1968/​1994: xvi; Lambert 2003: 18–​19). This strategy is
employed by Deleuze and by Deleuze and Guattari in their philoso-
phy at large. Extramundane encounters in their work are most often
drawn from aesthetic examples and from the world of ideas, past and
present. It is arguably for this reason that Jung’s work found its way
directly into the hands of Deleuze and encouraged him to write his
1961 essay ‘From Sacher-​Masoch to masochism’, in which ‘we find
Deleuze entranced by Jung’s labyrinthine 1912 book Transformations
and Symbols of the Libido’ (Kerslake 2004: 135).25 In his work, Jung
established alliances with what we might call non-​psychologies; for
68 Christian McMillan

instance, in his collaboration with Wolfgang Pauli (1900–​1958) an alli-

ance was formed with quantum physics. Jung’s more orthodox sources
of alliance included mythology, religion, and certain branches of phi-
losophy. Indeed, alliance formation appears to be at the heart of his
empiricism.26 In combination, these varied sources form a ‘machinic
assemblage’; in other words, analytical psychology does not and can-
not work all by itself: it needs ‘other machines that fit into its appa-
ratus or assemblage and provide it with contents in order to work, in
order to produce concepts’ (Lambert 2012: 19).
Is it noteworthy that Jung includes comment on modern art in the
closing passages of ‘The undiscovered self’ as if art, with analytical
psychology, had a role to play in an alliance of resistance against the
alienating orientation of the image of thought? There are a number
of reasons why it might be. Firstly, it has already been established that
Jung finds something of value in the power of modern art to desta-
bilise object-​recognition. From a Deleuzian perspective, this can be
read as gesturing to ways of relating to images which do not presup-
pose a certain exclusionary distribution and organisation of relations.
Secondly, Jung’s inclusion of modern art in his essay also points to
another domain in which the extramundane can be encountered. An
encounter with God, an encounter with the unconscious, and encoun-
ters with modern art reinforce a theme that runs throughout Jung’s
essay, i.e. the destabilisation of the distinction between the inner and
the outer.27 Roderick Main makes a related point:

Although the collective unconscious is not structured socially, its

field of influence inescapably includes society; and although the
individuating person’s obligations are not imposed directly from
the outer, social order, they emerge inwardly partly as a response
to and in a form that encompasses the outer, social and indeed
environmental order.
(2004: 142)

Jung tends to classify extramundane encounters as examples of imme-

diate inner experience (1957: §592). What is the status of inner when
it is thought of in terms of relations? The inner is not a private and
personal location. It is not the ‘possession of a subjective interiority
or thought’ (Adkins 2015: 117). Rather, the form of the inner is an
 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form 69

exteriority. In the context of ‘The undiscovered self’, which deals with

the negative effects of an orientation to an image of thought whose
form is embodied in the abstract idea of the State, the outer corre-
sponds to a form of interiority with respect to the organisation of its
relations. Employing some of Main’s terms above, the outer order can-
not be the cause of obligations because the form by which it organ-
ises relations is diametrically at odds with the form of exteriority that
obligates the whole man and the private thinker. Modern art, which
problematises the inner/​outer binary in terms of exteriority/​interior-
ity relations and which in Jung’s view performs a ‘work of psycho-
logical education on the public’ (1957: §584), is capable of presenting
images which break with the organic form of representation and
recognition that characterises object-​recognition and the orientation
of the ‘conceptual world’ (ibid.: §557). It can encompass the outer,
social, and environmental because in breaking with old images, new
ways and modes of relating may be revealed which open experimental
pathways with ‘this world’ or worlds that had formerly been obscured
or excluded. To engage with this world, according to Deleuze, neces-
sitates a belief, but one that is ‘no longer addressed to a different or
transformed world’:

Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The

reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only
by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he
sees and hears. […] Restoring our belief in the world –​this is the
power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad). […] What is
certain is that believing is no longer believing in another world, or
in a transformed world. It is only, it is simply believing in the body.
(1989: 172)28

For Deleuze, an inward response to the outer orientation of the mass

man would involve a belief in this world. In his ‘Concerning the
archetypes, with special reference to the anima concept’ (1936/​1954),
Jung wrote that the anima (soul or psyche) was inseparable from the
world: ‘Its nature [the psyche] shows itself not merely in the personal
sphere, or in the instinctual or social, but in phenomena of world-​
wide distribution. So if we want to understand the psyche, we have to
include the whole world’ (ibid.: §114).29 Elsewhere Jung claimed that
70 Christian McMillan

‘[i]‌ndividuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the
world to oneself’ (1947/​1954: §432).30 What opens this world up are
estranging encounters and, as we have seen, Jung has referred to these
as ‘extramundane’, including art as a venue for their engagement. For
Deleuze and Deleuze/​Guattari these encounters can take place across
numerous different registers and their philosophy is in part a study of
estranging images, a practice they sometimes refer to as noology. In the
‘Treatise’ they offer this definition:

Noology, which is distinct from ideology, is precisely the study of

images of thought, and their historicity. […] noology is confronted
by counterthoughts, which are violent in their acts and discontinu-
ous in their appearance, and whose existence is mobile in history.
These are acts of a “private thinker”, as opposed to the public
professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov. Wherever they
dwell, it is the steppe or the desert. They destroy images.
(1980/​1987: 376)

‘The undiscovered self’ with its innovative use of concepts such as

the mass man might be read as a study of images. In this way Jung can
be called a private thinker and his essay embodies an inward response
that encompasses this world. In the ‘Treatise’, Deleuze and Guattari
refer to the private thinker as experiencing a certain kind of solitude.
They qualify their use of the term private thinker, stating that this ‘is
not a satisfactory expression, because it exaggerates interiority, when
it is a question of outside thought. […] And this form of exteriority
of thought is not at all symmetrical to the form of interiority’ (1980/​
1987: 376, 377).31 They give further reasons for this qualification.
Firstly, ‘to place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with
the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a war machine, is a
strange undertaking’. Secondly, they say that ‘[a]‌though it is true that
this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude, it is an extremely
populous solitude like the desert itself, a solitude already intertwined
with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, exist-
ing only through it, though it is not yet here’ (ibid.: 376–​77). Thinking
of the inner that Jung refers to so often in ‘The undiscovered self’ as
a populous solitude might serve to de-​emphasise an epistemological
and ontological discontinuity that can become entrenched in the inner/​
 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form 71

outer distinction. Jung’s use of the concept of mass as well as his novel
use of the terms ‘individual’ and ‘whole man’ can be read as opening
up an outside thought by exposing the conditions and genesis of what
organises relations in an exclusory fashion (the abstract idea of the
State) and at the same time advocating for an engagement with the
extramundane across different registers. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s
‘Treatise’, Jung’s essay has an untimely quality.

Concluding remarks
The potential influence of Jung’s essay, its public or educational role
cannot be determined in advance. It is not the work of a public pro-
fessor or what Deleuze and Guattari also call a ‘State-​thinker’ or
‘man of the State’ (1980/​1987: 25, 268, 269, 356, 378, 482) because
it does not compromise with the ‘State-​form’ (ibid.: 376). Indeed,
Jung’s essay critically exposes the logical and ethical implications of
relations when thought, the church, and science compromise with the
State-​form. The outcomes of the essay are experimental and the work
is in solidarity with ‘a new earth and people that do not yet exist’, an
‘oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical and irretrievably minor race’,
as Deleuze and Guattari put it (1991/​1994: 108–​9).32 The uses that
concepts are put to by Jung in the essay should not be read as har-
bouring any pretensions to the erection of a new normativity, major-
ity, or mass of the future.33 Rather, their use gestures to the potential
creation of pockets of resistance, whose form is experimental.
Wholeness in this context is an ethical experimental practice or per-
formance with relations that ‘liberate life and thought from already
constituted relations and extended quantities but not by appealing
to some pure life before all differentiation’ (Colebrook 2010: 151).
Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical method is often guided by
the question: ‘what would thinking be if it were detached from the
organised body of self-​constituting man and placed in relation to
other differentials? […] becoming-​imperceptible, or the thought of
not being, not maintaining oneself, experimenting not with annihila-
tion and return to anti-​self-​consciousness’ but with ‘approximation
to zero’ (ibid.: 151, 152).
In ‘The undiscovered self’, Jung raises awareness of the period
of extreme isolation that man is undergoing. From a Deleuzian
72 Christian McMillan

perspective, this is not to be understood as isolation from a natural way

of relating; rather, it testifies to a power to create images and experi-
mental ways of relating to them. To become critically and creatively
aware of this power involves estranging encounters and for Deleuze
and Guattari these can be used to generate concepts which resist the
hegemonic effects that the prevailing one-​sided image tends to exert
on relations.

Acknowledgement
Work on this chapter was supported by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council [AH/​N003853/​1].

Notes
1 Throughout this chapter the word ‘State’ is given an initial capital, as in
the English translations of both Jung’s ‘The undiscovered self’ (1957) and
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Treatise on nomadology’ in A Thousand Plateaus
(1980/​1987: 409–​92).
2 Or more generally religion governed by ‘creeds’ (Jung 1957: §507; see
below).
3 Roderick Main (following Peter Homans) claims that ‘Jung’s understanding
of modern society was “identical to that of the theory of mass society” –​
a theory which, along with Marxism, is “the most prevalent and widely
known theory of modernity”. The modern form of this theory originated
in the work of Max Scheler, José Ortega, and Karl Mannheim’ (2004: 136;
Homans 1995: 178, 174).
4 The statistical number of minorities may in actuality be greater than
that of the majority: ‘A minority can be numerous, or even infinite; so
can a majority. What distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority
the relation internal to the number constitutes a set that may be finite
or infinite, but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined
as a nondenumerable set, however many elements it may have’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 469–​70). Deleuze and Guattari also claim that ‘the
use of the number as a numeral, as a statistical element, is proper to the
numbered number of the State, not to the numbering number’ (1980/​
1987: 390). One might also compare this to Jung’s critical comments
on ‘large numbers’ from his essay (1957: §§503, 524, 535, 538, 539). It is
clear from the essay that Jung tends to associate the ‘mass’ with large
numbers.
 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form 73

5 We might compare this with Jung’s acknowledgement that ‘the European

has also to answer for all the crimes he has committed against the coloured
races during the process of colonization. In this respect the white man car-
ries a very heavy burden indeed. It shows a picture of the common human
shadow that could hardly be painted in blacker colours’ (1957: §571; cf.
Deleuze and Guattari’s critical comments on the ‘Face’ of Christ as ‘white’
and what they call the ‘white wall/​black hole system’ [1980/​1987: 167–​88]).
6 Jung’s concerns about ‘statistical’ science are evident from his earliest lec-
tures, the Zofingia Lectures (1896–​1899). ‘To be sure, the normal man is
not a quantity acknowledged by public statute, but rather is the product of
tacit convention, a thing that exists everywhere and nowhere […] Just as a
Paris cellar now harbours a standard meter by which all other instruments
of measurement are calibrated, so, in an indetectable place inside the
heads of scientific-​minded men, there exists the standard of the normal
man that is used to calibrate all scientific-​philosophical traits’ (1983: §246;
emphasis added; cf.: §287. See Bishop 1995: 42).
7 Jung differentiates between historical variations, e.g. ‘primitive commu-
nism’ (1957: §503) and Marxism (ibid.: §§522, 523, 549, 568).
8 Cf. Main 2004: 117–​21, 135–​38.
9 Deleuze and Guattari assert that the State is an ‘abstract machine of over-
coding’ (1980/​1987: 230), with a specific form and a function before any
concrete historical incarnation.
10 A recurring theme throughout all of Deleuze’s thought, including with
Guattari, concerns relations of the ‘whole’ (tout). Deleuze’s persistent
criticisms of a ‘logical’, ‘organic unity’/​’organic totality’ and internal rela-
tions are situated across many different registers throughout his works
(history, literature, art, cinema, politics, biology), and the notion of the
‘whole’ frequently appears with them. Many Deleuzians are critical of
the term ‘holism’ (e.g. DeLanda 2009: 37) because they tend to equate
this with organicism (e.g. Colebrook 2010: 141–​45) and with the relations
of interiority that Deleuze tends to identify with organic unity/​totality
(e.g. Deleuze 1966/​2000: 113–​16, 161, 163; 1983/​1986: 95–​96, 322–​23, 326–​
27; cf. ‘closed’ and ‘open’ whole/​s [1983/​1986: 9–​11, 16–​20; Deleuze and
Guattari 1991/​1994: 105]).
11 Under these circumstances of ‘compromise’, Jung asserts that ‘[t]‌he State
takes the place of God’ and that if ‘[t]he policy of the State is exalted to a
creed, the leader or party boss becomes a demigod beyond good and evil’
(1957: §511).
12 It should be noted that the object of the ‘war machine’ is not war in the
conventional sense but the conditions of creative mutation and change
(see Patton 2000: 109–​10; cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1980/​1987: 229–​30).
74 Christian McMillan

13 Also nomad science, nomad space, nomad war-​ machine, nomad art,
nomad thought (see Deleuze and Guattari 1980/​1987: 359–​423).
14 Jung delivered these lectures as a student in the years 1896–​1899 between
the ages of twenty-​one and twenty-​three. In May 1895 he became a mem-
ber of the Zofingiaverein, a Swiss Student Fraternity, and was elected
Chairperson of the Basle section during the winter term of 1897/​98.
15 E.g. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s model of living systems,
Andy Clark’s anti-​Cartesian positing of an extended mind, and the Gaia
hypothesis. These are targeted in Colebrook’s study.
16 In the ‘Treatise’, Deleuze and Guattari refer to the ‘private thinker’ in a
manner reminiscent of their treatment of the conceptual persona of the
‘Idiot’ (1980/​1987: 376). Their selection and presentation of certain ‘pri-
vate thinkers’ and modern artists as case studies dispenses with any exca-
vation of their personal past in a manner reminiscent of Jung’s distinction
between ‘visionary art’ and ‘psychological art’ (1930/​1950: §139).
17 For example, he refers to building a ‘bridge to the original man’ as a
solution to the alienating effects of the rationalist Weltanschauung
(1957: §549).
18 As Colebrook notes: ‘perhaps the most dominant form of this narra-
tive, and one that has a great deal of force at present, is the lapse into
Cartesianism: current diagnoses of the state of play in philosophy, neu-
roscience, and everyday thinking lament the ways in which, following
Descartes’ error we mistake the mind for a distinct substance, and then
imagine knowledge as some mode of picturing or information processing’
(2010: 130).
19 In the Zofingia Lectures Jung uses the term ‘supermundane’ in a similar
way (1983: §287). Jane Bennett surveys the narratives of ‘loss’ that inform
many disenchantment ‘tales’ (2001: 56–​90). Bennett refers to a ‘Deleuzean
[sic] kind of enchantment, where wonders persist in a rhizomatic world
without intrinsic purpose or divinity, or the “subjective necessity” (again
Kant’s phrase) of assuming telos or God’ (ibid.: 34).
20 These notions of ‘immediate’ experience appear in Jung’s earliest lectures
(1896–​1899) where he refers to the idea of a unio mystica (1983: §§225,
257, 259, 265, 272, 289, 290). He contrasts this with the ‘ominous taint of
Kantian subjectivism’ (ibid.: §251; cf. Paul Bishop, 1995: 42) that he iden-
tifies in the theology of Albrecht Ritschl (1822–​1899). By ‘Kantian sub-
jectivism’ I think Jung had in mind Kant’s philosophical commitment to a
‘rational faith’ (Vernunftglaube), which Kant espoused in part as response
to the pantheism controversy, opposing with some vehemence Friedrich
Heinrich Jacobi’s (1743–​1819) salto mortale (a leap of faith).
 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form 75

21 Disembodiment is often thought of as something negative because of its

association with Cartesianism and attendant disenchantment narratives.
However, Colebrook comments that Deleuze and Guattari’s thought is
sometimes preoccupied by a ‘perverse Cartesianism… that does not react
against Descartes because he dehumanised life by rendering man into a
ghostly disembodied subject, but because res cogitans was too much like a
living body’ (2010: 144).
22 E.g. ‘[N]‌ot all Life is confined to the organic strata: rather, the organism is
that which life sets against itself in order to limit itself, and there is a life
all the more intense, all the more powerful for being anorganic. There are
also nonhuman Becomings of human beings that overspill the anthropo-
morphic strata in all directions’ (1980/​1987: 503).
23 E.g. Proust and Signs (1966/​2000); Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
(1981/​2003); Cinema I (1983/​1986) and Cinema II (1985/​1989), and in col-
laboration with Guattari, e.g. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986).
24 For example, in 1945 Jung writes: ‘Science qua science has no boundaries,
and there is no speciality whatever that can boast of complete self-​sufficiency.
Any speciality is bound to spill over its borders and to encroach on adjoining
territory if it is to lay serious claim to the status of a science’ (1945: §212)
25 Kerslake writes that ‘Deleuze’s central thesis is that masochism must be
conceived as a perverse realisation of the fantasy of incest –​on condition
that incest is taken in its “more profound” significance as a symbol of
rebirth, as Jung claims’ (2004: 135). Positive references to Jung’s work
appear in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition where Deleuze rhetorically
asks: Was not one of the most important points of Jung’s theory already
to be found here: the force of ‘questioning’ in the unconscious, the con-
ception of the unconscious as an unconscious of ‘problems’ and ‘tasks’?
Drawing out the consequences of this led Jung to the discovery of a pro-
cess of differentiation more profound than the resulting oppositions (see
The Ego and the Unconscious)’ (1994: 317, n. 17). This remark forms the
basis of Kerslake’s detailed study of the relationship between Bergson,
Kant, Jung and Deleuze (2007).
26 Sean McGrath alludes to this when he claims that the ‘empirical compo-
nent to analytical psychology’ is ‘abductive, not inductive’: ‘The explana-
tory account itself is not deduced from the empirical facts: its sources
are varied: the history of mythology, religion, and philosophy, as well as
Jung’s own not infrequent flights of a priori speculation. Abduction “leads
away” (ab-​ducere) from the empirical facts to be explained and constructs,
on the basis of logical, imaginative, and intuitive moves, a speculative
account of how those facts could be possible’ (2014: 30).
76 Christian McMillan

27 Jung appears to de-​emphasise the ‘outer world’ (e.g. 1957: §§507, 549), the
‘external’ (ibid.: §§508, 511, 529, 561, 563), and the ‘worldly’ (ibid.: §§514,
543, 563, 567) in the essay and valorise the ‘inner’ (ibid.: §§511, 516, 519,
521, 529, 533, 537, 542, 561). A potential consequence of this emphasis
on the ‘inner’ is to locate ‘psychological reality and the nature of the self
more within the private sector’ (Homans 1995: 142–​43), the process of
individuation being ‘entirely psychical not social’ with an endpoint that ‘is
a pure and intensely privatised self, liberated from all obligation imposed
from without by the social order’ (ibid.: 143).
28 Cf.: ‘[I]‌t may be that living in this world, in this life, becomes our most dif-
ficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered or our
plane of immanence today’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991/​1994:75).
29 Cf. Bishop 2009: 154.
30 Cf. Main 2004: 140. On this sentence Bishop comments that ‘in the defi-
nition of ‘individuation’… given in that work, Jung makes the famous
remark Individuation schließt die Welt nicht aus, sondern ein, inaccurately
but wonderfully translated by R.F.C. Hull as “individuation does not shut
one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself ” ’ (2008: 161).
Bishop’s translation is: ‘individuation does not exclude, but includes, the
world’.
31 See Michel Foucault’s analysis of Maurice Blanchot and the form of
exteriority of thought: ‘La pensée du dehors’ ,Critique, no. 229 (June
1966): 523–​48.
32 Jung appears to call on such a people when he declares that the ‘spir-
itual transformation of mankind… may not set in for hundreds of years’
(1957: §583).
33 Nevertheless, Jung also states that he would like to see the ‘effect on all
individuals’ (1957: §583). Would this be to erect another ‘majority’ or
‘consensus’ of the future?

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Chapter 3

Jung as symptomatologist
David Henderson

Reading Deleuze, one hears Jung. The internal resonance between

Jung’s psychological theory and Deleuze’s philosophy is uncanny.
Žižek (2004) in characteristically pithy fashion states: ‘No wonder,
then, that an admiration of Jung is Deleuze’s corpse in the closet; the
fact that Deleuze borrowed a key term (rhizome) from Jung is not a
mere insignificant accident –​rather, it points toward a deeper link’
(ibid.: 662). This deeper link has been more sympathetically explored by
Kerslake (2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2009), Semetsky (2004, 2006; Lovat
and Semetsky 2009; Semetsky and Delpech-​Ramey 2012), McMillan
(2012, 2018), and Jenkins (2016). They provide us with the only sys-
tematic studies of Deleuze and Jung available thus far. This chapter
is part of an interest in using concepts from the work of Deleuze to
amplify elements of Jung’s theory. In this case, it employs the concepts
of symptomatology, percept and minor literature from Deleuze’s dis-
cussion of the critical and the clinical. As such, it belongs to Jungian
studies rather than constituting an intervention in Deleuzian philoso-
phy. It is preliminary spadework, experimental exploration of the rhi-
zome, rather than definitive interpretation.
Deleuze introduced the theme of the critical and the clinical in his
1967 essay, ‘Coldness and cruelty’, an analysis of the concept of sado-
masochism, arguing that ‘The critical (in the literary sense) and the
clinical (in the medical sense) may be destined to enter into a new rela-
tionship of mutual learning’ (Deleuze 1991: 14). He suggested that,
‘Because the judgement of the clinician is prejudiced we must take an
entirely different approach, the literary approach, since it is from litera-
ture that stem the original definitions of sadism and masochism’ (ibid.).
The diagnostic power of literature continued to be a preoccupation for
 Jung as symptomatologist 81

Deleuze up to his final book, Essays Critical and Clinical (1997a), first
published in 1993.
His interest however is avowedly philosophical, not literary or clini-
cal. Deleuze (2014) insists that ‘A philosophical concept can never be
confused with a scientific function or an artistic construction, but finds
itself in affinity with these in this or that domain of science or style of
art’ (ibid.: xiii). Philosophy exploits these affinities for its own purposes.
It ‘always enters into relations of mutual resonance and exchange with
these other domains for reasons that are always internal to philosophy
itself’ (Smith 1997: xii).
Does Deleuze’s project of the critical and the clinical resonate in the
rhizome of psychoanalysis? Freud (1925) said that psychoanalysis is
located between philosophy and medicine. Jung’s (1989) description
of his decision to specialise in psychiatry points to similarly liminal
territory:

Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and
in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field
common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere
sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the
collision of nature and spirit became a reality.
(Jung 1989: 109)

Psychoanalysis wrestles with the angel of inbetweenness. It is not

entirely one thing or another. Is it science or is it hermeneutics? Is it
knowledge or is it narrative?
Among these uncertainties, there is the constant tension in psycho-
analytic theory and practice between what is internal to the session
or the analysis and influences or pressures coming from outside of
the clinical frame. Like Deleuze’s philosophy, psychoanalysis wants
to engage in these relations of mutual resonance and exchange with
neighbouring discourses for reasons that are internal to itself. It is
ultimately concerned with resolving its own clinical and theoreti-
cal dilemmas, and not necessarily with shedding new light on other
areas of knowledge. There is an ethical debate within the profession
between those who prioritise clinical experience and those who give
greater relative weight to concepts and demands coming from outside
82 David Henderson

of the clinical domain. For example, there are those who argue that
it is essential for psychoanalysts to be knowledgeable about neurosci-
ence and those who feel that neuroscience has nothing of significance
to contribute to our understanding of the analytic process. Infant
observation is another example. Some trainings require students to
undertake a two-​year infant observation in order to understand the
developmental process in depth. Others take the approach that there
is not necessarily a correspondence between the historical baby and
the child archetype, or between the observed infant and the clinical
infant, as Stern (1985) has described them. Similarly, Hillman (1964)
argues that the meaning of suicide within psychoanalysis is radically
different from the significance it carries in other disciplines such as
sociology, medicine, law or religion. This controversy extends to the
reverse direction as well, to the long-​standing discussion about the
status of applied psychoanalysis, where it is debated to what extent
concepts generated in clinical experience are applicable to the world
outside the clinic.
In all of these cases it can be argued that ultimately the usefulness
or purpose of exploring the affinities, resonances and exchanges with
extra-​analytic domains arises from reasons internal to analysis itself.
We can hear an echo here of Jung’s insistence that he was approaching
issues and questions as a psychologist –​not as a philosopher or theo-
logian. He was alert to an astonishing range of adjacent discourses
and he was adept at enlisting concepts from these disparate fields for
his own purposes.

Symptomatology
Deleuze identified three key features of medicine: symptomatology,
etiology and therapy. Syptomatology is the study of signs. Etiology
is the search for causes. Therapy is the development and application
of a treatment. According to Smith (1997), ‘While etiology and thera-
peutics are integral parts of medicine, symptomatology appeals to a
kind of limit-​point, premedical or submedical, that belongs as much
to art as to medicine’ (ibid.: xvi). Deleuze (1983) aligns his concept
of symptomatology with Nietzsche’s active science, as opposed to a
passive, reactive or negative science. ‘A symptomatology […] interprets
phenomena, treating them as symptoms whose sense must be sought
 Jung as symptomatologist 83

in the forces that produce them’ (ibid.: 70). This critique is productive.
As Kaiser (2017) observes, ‘Symptoms are perspectival and subjective
[…]. Symptomatology is used as a critical tool, an activity to distil the
relations of forces underlying the currently congealed order of things’
(ibid.: 185–​86). ‘The point of critique is not justification but a different
way of feeling: another sensitivity’ (Deleuze 1983: 88).
Illnesses are often identified with the names of the scientists who iso-
lated a constellation of symptoms or the names of patients who suffered
from the syndrome –​for example, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Parkinson’s
disease, Roger’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or Cruetzfeldt-​Jakob’s
disease. Deleuze (1990) argued that literary figures, among them Lewis
Carol, Zola, Fitzgerald, Artaud, Kafka, Proust and Beckett, are symp-
tomatologists, readers of signs. He was interested in these writers, not
as patients, but as ‘clinicians of civilization’:

Authors, if they are great, are more like doctors than patients.
We mean that they are themselves astonishing diagnosticians or
symptomatologists. There is always a great deal of art involved in
the grouping of symptoms, in the organization of a table (tableau)
where a particular symptom is dissociated from another, juxta-
posed to a third, and forms the new figure of a disorder or ill-
ness. Clinicians who are able to renew a symtomatological picture
produce a work of art; conversely, artists are clinicians, not with
respect to their own case, nor even with respect to a case in general;
rather, they are clinicians of civilization.
(Deleuze 1990: 237)

For Jung (1966), art performs critical, interpretive and regulative

functions:

Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work

educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the
age is most lacking […] so art represents a process of self-​regula-
tion in the life of nations and epochs.
(ibid.: pars. 130–​31)

A good deal of psychoanalytic literary criticism produces what

are in essence case studies that use clinical concepts to analyse the
84 David Henderson

psychopathology of authors, their plots and characters. Jung (1993a)

was critical of this approach:

[I]‌t is sometimes possible to explain a work of art in the same way

as one can explain a nervous illness in terms of Freud’s theory or
Adler’s. But when it comes to great poetry the pathological expla-
nation, the attempt to apply Freudian or Adlerian theory, is in
effect a ridiculous belittlement of the work of art. The explanation
not only contributes nothing to an understanding of the poetry,
but, on the contrary, deflects our gaze from that deeper vision
which the poet offers. […] great art is man’s creation of something
superhuman in defiance of all the ordinary, miserable conditions
of his birth and childhood. To apply to this the psychology of neu-
rosis is little short of grotesque.
(Jung 1993a: pars. 1723–​24)

However, Deleuze (1990) argues that Freud also functioned as a

symptomatologist: ‘From the perspective of Freud’s genius, it is not
the complex which provides us with information about Oedipus and
Hamlet, but rather Oedipus and Hamlet who provide us with informa-
tion about the complex’ (ibid.: 237). It is Oedipus and Hamlet who
illuminate the suffering of the patient, not a putatively neutral or
objective, clinical concept. Freud ‘discovered’ the Oedipus complex by
exploiting literature to organise certain clinical phenomena.
It is symptomatology that opens the door for Deleuze (2004) into
psychoanalysis and psychiatry:

I would never have permitted myself to write on psychoanalysis

and psychiatry were I not dealing with the problem of symptoma-
tology. Symptomatology is situated almost outside of medicine, at
a neutral point, a zero point, where artists and philosophers and
doctors and patients can encounter each other.
(Deleuze 2004: 134)

It seems natural that we would find Jung in that encounter of artists,

philosophers, doctors and patients. What can we learn about Jung if
we think of him as a symptomatologist? How can Deleuze amplify our
 Jung as symptomatologist 85

understanding of Jung? Is Jung like a novelist ‘who invents unknown

or unrecognized affects and brings them to light as the becoming of his
characters’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 174)?
Symptomatology functions in terms of the proper name and the
‘multiplicity’ or ‘assemblage’ that is referred to. Jung’s name is often
associated with certain clinical phenomena, we could say assemblages,
such as Jungian complexes, Jungian archetypes, the Jungian collec-
tive unconscious, Jungian analysis, Jungian analyst, Jungian dreams,
Jungian self. In each of these cases Jung has drawn together certain
psychic phenomena and organised particular constellations of experi-
ence. New relations between psychic elements are brought to light and
can be discussed. To label these as Jungian is both meaningful and
meaningless. The label simultaneously illuminates and obscures. The
very name of Jung informs us and blinds us. While he has brought to
light striking new psychological facts, the aura of ‘Jung’ in the minds
of some of his followers can eclipse the very phenomena with which
he was experimenting.
Deleuze argues that literary artists, through the act of writing, reveal
life, a life, non-​organic life. ‘In reality writing does not have its end in
itself, precisely because life is not something personal. Or rather, the
aim of writing is to carry life to the state of a non-​personal power’
(Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 50). Gesturing toward a similar theme in
Jung’s writing, Rowland (2005) observes:

Jung offers the notion of the ‘symbol’ in which the work or image
is an emblem of the unknown or unknowable. Such art princi-
pally speaks a language foreign to the ego of its author; its sig-
nificance surpasses traces of the formation of the ego. Such art
is autonomous of the author because it is rooted in the collective
unconscious, not reliant upon the author’s personal life, but rather
his impersonal one. For symbolic art, the author is not a guide to
the work.
(Rowland 2005: 8)

Rowland highlights the compensatory function of art in Jung’s the-

ory: ‘Such art represents the healing self-​regulation of the psyche
amplified into the cultural dimension […] symbolic art structurally
86 David Henderson

transforms collective culture in ways that amount to an internal self-​

regulating mechanism’ (ibid.: 11).
For Deleuze, the question that a literary work poses is not ‘What does
it mean?’ but rather ‘How does it function?’ The work does not pro-
pose interpretations. It evokes experimentation. The literary machine
is made up of fragments, singularities. The work of art is to ‘establish
a system of communication among these parts or elements that are in
themselves noncommunicating’ (Smith 1997: xxiii). It produces a unity
of parts, but it does not unify the parts:

[T]‌he whole produced by the work is rather a ‘peripheral’ total-

ity that is added alongside its parts as a new singularity fabricated
separately. […] The work thus constitutes a whole, but this whole
is itself a part that merely exists alongside the other parts, which
it neither unifies nor totalizes. Yet it nonetheless has an effect
on these parts, since it is able to create nonpreexistent relations
between elements that in themselves remain disconnected, and are
left intact. […] the Whole is never a principle but rather an effect
[…]. The Whole, in other words, is the Open, because it is its nature
to constantly produce or create the new.
(Smith 1997: xxiii)

The suggestion that in this particular notion of the whole the elements
‘in themselves remain disconnected, and are left intact’ resonates with
Cusa’s (1997) statement that the coincidence of opposites is a ‘unity
to which neither otherness nor plurality nor multiplicity is opposed’
(ibid.: 121). The coincidence of opposites is one of Jung’s key images
of the whole (Henderson 2014). To the extent that Jung follows Cusa,
this is a whole that does not extinguish difference or singularity. The
assertion that the nature of Deleuze’s ‘whole’ is ‘to constantly produce
or create the new’ echoes Jung (1959c), who argues that ‘one should not
overlook the fact that in reality man’s procreative power is only a spe-
cial instance of the “procreative nature of the Whole” ’ (ibid.: par. 313).
There are some immediate applications of these thoughts to Jung’s
view of individuation. They give us a way of thinking about the experi-
ment of individuation as something that produces a sense of whole-
ness that exists alongside the many elements of the personality and
the unconscious. It promotes communication between the elements
 Jung as symptomatologist 87

without subordinating them to a greater identity. We could say that

therapy is about discovering possibilities, differences, rather than pro-
ducing a monolithic personality structure. As Searles notes (Sedgwick
1993), individuation increases the capacity to live with multiplicity; it
does not iron things out. Jung’s (1959a) wry observation that ‘Were it
not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in
his greatest passion, idleness’ (ibid.: par. 56) resonates with the idea
that it is the function of literature to stir us to experimentation and
to enable communication between fragments and singularities. Like
Jung’s ‘leaping and twinkling of the soul’, Deleuze (1983) characterises
Nietzsche’s will to power as ‘essentially creative and giving: it does not
aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire
power. It gives: power is something inexpressible in the will (something
mobile, variable, plastic); power is in the will as “the bestowing virtue”,
through power the will itself bestows sense and value’ (ibid.: 80).
Deleuze’s primary concern in his thinking about literature is Life,
non-​organic life. In an interview he stated: ‘You have seen what
is essential for me, this “vitalism” or a conception of life as a non-​
organic power’ (Smith 1997: xiii). Writing is the vehicle that is able ‘to
carry life to the state of a non-​personal power’ (Deleuze and Parnet
1987: 50). Deleuze refers to a scene in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual
Friend about a man, despised by everyone, who is on his deathbed:

No one has the least regard for the man. With them all, he has
been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but the spark
of life within him is curiously separate from himself now, and they
have a deep interest in it, probably because it is life, and they are
living and must die.
(Dickens 1952: 443)

Deleuze observes something similar in babies:

Small infants all resemble each other and have hardly any individ-
uality; but they have singularities –​a smile, a gesture, a grimace –​
which are not subjective characteristics. Infants are transversed by
an immanent life that is pure power, and even a beatitude through
their sufferings and weakness.
(Deleuze 2001: 30)
88 David Henderson

It is fair to say that analysts are –​or should be –​acutely attuned to

these sparks, singularities and spontaneous gestures. You might call
these experiences encounters with the archetypal aspect of existence.
They are pre-​personal, transpersonal and post-​personal. You could
see them as experiences of the Jungian self. Dickens’s character and
Deleuze’s infant resonate with Jung’s (1993b) description of the ‘col-
lective level’ of experience:

Because the basic structure of the mind is the same in everybody,

we cannot make distinctions when we experience on that level.
There we do not know if something has happened to you or to
me. In the underlying collective level there is a wholeness which
cannot be dissected. If you begin to think about participation
as a fact which means that fundamentally we are identical with
everybody and everything, you are led to very peculiar theoreti-
cal conclusions. You should not go further than those conclusions
because these things get dangerous. But some of the conclusions
you should explore, because they can explain a lot of peculiar
things that happen to man.
(Jung 1993b: par. 87)

These experiences have peculiar and possibly dangerous effects on

our minds. They are present in the dying man and the newborn infant:

In this idea the all-​ embracing nature of psychic wholeness is

expressed. Wholeness is never comprised within the compass of
the conscious mind –​it includes the indefinite and indefinable
extent of the unconscious as well. Wholeness, empirically speak-
ing, is therefore of immeasurable extent, older and younger than
consciousness and enfolding it in time and space.
(Jung 1959b: par. 299)

One thing that the dying man and the newborn infant have in common
is a lack of cognitive capacity and self-​consciousness. Non-​organic life
is witnessed by the people assembled at the deathbed and by the baby’s
parents. As Jung (1959c) says, the conscious mind can only have a
tenuous awareness of wholeness: ‘Empirically speaking, consciousness
 Jung as symptomatologist 89

can never comprehend the whole, but it is probable that the whole is
unconsciously present in the ego’ (ibid.: par. 171).
Jung maintained that Christ is an archetypal image of the self in a
Western context. Is witnessing non-​organic life akin to seeing god in
one’s neighbour?

The spontaneous symbols of the self, or of wholeness, cannot in

practice be distinguished from a God-​image. […] there is an ever-​
present archetype of wholeness which may easily disappear from
the purview of consciousness or may never be perceived at all.
(ibid.: par. 73)

It could be argued that Mother Teresa had a vocation to witness

signs of this non-​organic life in the dying people she nursed on the
streets of Kolkata.
According to Jung (1956), ‘When an idea is so old and so generally
believed, it must be true in some way, by which I mean that it is psycho-
logically true’ (ibid.: par. 4). Is it psychologically true that non-​organic
life is wholeness? Did Jung acting as a symptomatologist diagnose the
vicissitudes of non-​organic life in the domain of human experience?
He wrote about the perils of lack of contact with this life and of over-​
identification with it. He was concerned with how to establish a viable
relationship with wholeness.
A viable relationship with non-​organic life or wholeness involves a
combination of openness and resilience:

Literature then appears as an enterprise of health: not that the

writer would necessarily be in good health […] but he possesses an
irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen
and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocat-
ing things whose passage exhausts him, while nonetheless giving
him the becomings that his dominant and substantial health would
render impossible.
(Deleuze 1997b: 228)

Often the popular notion of the wounded healer implies that there is
trauma in the therapist’s past that they have dealt with or confronted
90 David Henderson

in their own therapy, and that this informs the therapist’s engagement
with clients or patients in the present. Deleuze’s construction raises
the question as to whether the practice of psychotherapy is in itself
damaging, wounding, shaming and debilitating for the therapist. The
resilient therapist is not an invulnerable therapist. As Freud (1930)
observed, ‘Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many
pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks’ (ibid.: 75).

Percept
The percept is a type of vision or hearing. Are there particular features
in the way that Jung saw and heard that contributed to his position
as a symptomatologist? François Zourabichvili (1996) describes the
percept as ‘A critical-​clinical perception. Critical because we discern
a force in it, a particular type of force, and clinical because we evalu-
ate the declination of this force, its inclination, its ability to fold or
unfold itself’ (ibid.: 192). The percept is one of five themes in Deleuze’s
work that are important to the critical and clinical project as described
by Smith (1997): 1) the destruction of the world (Singularities and
Events); 2) the dissolution of the subject (Affects and Percepts); 3) the
dis-​integration of the body (Intensities and Becomings); 4) the ‘minori-
zation’ of politics (Speech Acts and Fabulations); 5) the ‘stuttering’ of
language (Syntax and Style).
The theme of the dissolution of the subject has affinities with
Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious, in which he encountered
spontaneous and autonomous images and affects. He discovered the
landscape of the collective unconscious. In grappling with these expe-
riences, he formulated his theories out of unknown and unrecognised
forces. As Deleuze observes: ‘A great novelist is above all an artist who
invents unknown or unrecognized affects and brings them to light as
the becoming of his characters’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 174).
Jung’s ‘characters’ are the archetypes, archetypal images, and a distinc-
tive approach to clinical practice. The disturbing impact of the percept
is a basic component in the formation of concepts:

It is independent of the creator through the self-​positing of the cre-

ated, which is preserved in itself. What is preserved –​the thing or
the work of art –​is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound
 Jung as symptomatologist 91

of percepts and affects. Percepts are no longer perceptions; they

are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects
are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength
of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are
beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164)

Beginning with his confrontation with the unconscious, Jung refined

his vision and hearing by working with his patients and on the Red
Book. He was interested in the autonomous unconscious, whose
contents ‘are independent of a state of those who experience them’.
According to Zourabichvili (1996), ‘Deleuze is less concerned to fix an
essence of the appearing of things, than with bringing out and differ-
entiating the non-​organic life that they involve’ (ibid.: 191).
This points to a tension in analytical psychology between a wish to
interpret archetypes and archetypal images and a wish to experiment
with them; a tendency to fix the essence of an image and a tendency
to be sensitive to the non-​organic life, the wholeness in the image.
This can appear as a choice between viewing the archetypal image as
a representation of the archetype or viewing the archetypal image as
the site of archetypal pressure. To ask of Jung ‘What were you think-
ing of ?’ could be rephrased as ‘What did you see?’ or better, ‘How did
you see?’

How does sight regain its power when it becomes vision, or per-
cept? When one sees the invisible, the imperceptible, or when what
cannot be seen is perceived: the invisible enveloped in what one
sees, not as a hidden world beyond appearance, but animating
sight itself from within appearance, or what one sees […] it is nec-
essary that the invisible seen is the invisible of the visible itself, the
‘being of the sensible’.
(Zourabichvili 1996: 190)

Was Jung interested in the invisible of the visible or was he interested

in a hidden world? Without a doubt many of his disciples take up his
work as a description and exploration of a hidden world. Much of his
work lends itself to that sort of interpretation, but it can be argued
that in his writings on the practice of psychotherapy he is attending
92 David Henderson

to the invisible of the visible. This resonates with Winnicott’s plea that
the mother must see the baby that is really there, not the baby that she
might wish for, or fear, or feel is expected of her. Can the therapist see
the non-​organic life, the wholeness, in the patient?
What sort of experience did Jung have that enabled him to formu-
late his picture of a new landscape –​the collective unconscious? As
Zourabichvili (1996) observes, ‘To live a landscape: one is no longer in
front of it, but in it, one passes into the landscape’ (ibid.: 196). When
Jung’s inner landscape came alive and he entered the drama, his rela-
tionship with the unconscious changed. He was no longer observing
memories and representations. He became an actor and he was acted
upon. He was no longer observing the soul, but living with soul. The
expanse and force of this newly discovered landscape placed a demand
on him as a writer. Jung discusses this in terms of excess libido:

This excess libido constitutes the essential precondition to devel-

oping a culture […]. As such, the symbol is also the mother of sci-
ence […] ‘initiating’ a sustained playful interest in the object that
allows man to make all sorts of discoveries which would otherwise
have escaped him […]
(Gieser 2014: 153)

In his confrontation with the unconscious, Jung experienced visions

and intuitions that threw him into turmoil. As Zourabichvili observes,
‘Can we speak of a profound landscape, as we say of an idea? An idea
is not profound because it is well-​founded, in close contact with its
foundations, but rather because it makes thought ‘founder’ [effondant]
and liberates the infinite resonances in chaotic communication within
it’ (1996: 200). Similarly, Jung’s concepts presuppose a collapse in the
face of the unknown. Zourabichvili again:

The writer, far from reporting lived experience, makes a vital dis-
covery. He sees at the limit of the livable, he lives what cannot be
lived through. […] Deleuze appears to give two reasons, two argu-
ments for the idea that the percept exceeds all lived experience and
exists in the absence of man: (1) it overflows subjectivity, and (2) it
conserves itself independently of that which experiences it and
 Jung as symptomatologist 93

composes it. So, he specifies, it is a matter of a conservation in

itself (and not only in some material).
(Zourabichvili 1996: 201)

Jung’s (1964) percept, the collective unconscious, is autonomous

and it ‘was psyche long before there was any ego conscious, and will
remain psyche no matter how far our ego consciousness extends’
(ibid.: par. 304).
The Red Book represents, among other things, Jung’s attempt to
grapple with the expanse and force of this newly discovered landscape.
He is wrestling with personal and collective turbulence. The Red Book
contains a number of features, which can be taken as evidence for the
view that Jung can be read as a symptomatologist. According to Beebe
(2014), the book is:

a living memorial to the psychological experience of surviving the

disorientation occasioned by the emergence of […] a ‘psychic epi-
demic’, the affects associated with the arrival of World War I […].
[It] dramatizes with skill not only the abreaction of the fragmented
psychic state of one individual traumatized by historical upheaval,
but also the therapeutic strategies for self-​healing that can emerge
out of such an experience. The Red Book thus provides in literary
form a model of how the integrity of psyche can be restored in the
face of cultural processes that threaten to undermine it.
(Beebe 2014: 108–​9)

Beebe identifies the Red Book as a ‘trickster work of art’ fuelled by

rage at Freud and the psychoanalytic movement (ibid.: 109). Although
Beebe doesn’t explicitly say so, the inference can be drawn that this
personal rage resonates with the rage unleashed by World War I. Beebe
argues that the book tells a ‘post-​heroic story’ (ibid.: 113). The demand
to discover a post-​heroic approach is raised by Jung’s own mid-​life
dilemmas, as well as by the need to recognise the limitations of ration-
ality in culture and politics:

The times were demanding, as if from within themselves, that the

heroic quest for a brilliant adaptation be sacrificed […]. This time,
94 David Henderson

its direction is not up toward mastery, but down into a profound

acceptance of incapacity.
(ibid.: 114)

In the face of hubris and the striving toward rational perfection, on

a personal or a collective level, Jung, as symptomatologist, prescribes
the experience of limitation and learning ‘how to hold one’s capacity
in tension with one’s incapacity’ (ibid.: 116).
As a symptomatologist, Jung diagnoses the failures of psychology
and psychotherapy. ‘The Red Book’, writes Sanford Drob, ‘can be meta-
phorically understood as a dream, not the dream of an individual per-
son, but the dream of the discipline and practice of psychology’ (Drob
2012: 260). In the face of the tendency to understand ‘the psychothera-
peutic process in simple cognitive, pragmatic, and manualized terms,
[Jung] reminds us that psychological exploration has the potential to
open worlds as well as treat symptoms’ (ibid.: 263). The Red Book is an
expression of Jung’s experiment with wholeness. According to Hogenson
(2014), ‘The Red Book is Jung’s umwelt, and, as such, it represents Jung’s
recovery of the holistic image in the age of the sciences’ (ibid.: 104).

Minor literature
The minorisation of politics and minor literature are further elements
of Deleuze’s thought about the critical and the clinical that can be
used to amplify Jung’s own writings and the work of analytical psy-
chologists as minor literature. In their discussion of Kafka and minor
literature, Deleuze and Guattari (1986) observe:

A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather

that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the
first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it lan-
guage is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization. […]
In short, Prague German is a deterritorialized language, appropri-
ate for strange and minor uses.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 16–​17)

Jung was adept at appropriating the language of science, psychology,

religion and philosophy for his own ‘strange’ uses. He is ‘a foreigner
 Jung as symptomatologist 95

within his own language’ (Bogue 2003: 100). This may account for
some of the bewilderment and hostility expressed toward Jung’s work.
Like Kafka, he has taken familiar words and images and infused them
with destabilising intent:

Kafka’s Yiddish […] is not so much a language as a way of inhab-

iting language, a minority’s means of appropriating the majority’s
tongue and undermining its fixed structure. Yiddish speakers, like
Prague Jews, make a minor use of language, a destabilising defor-
mation of the standard elements of German that sets it in motion
and opens it to forces of metamorphosis.
(Bogue 2003: 97)

The sometime kaleidoscopic and florid impression that Jung’s writ-

ing gives can be seen as an aspect of the experimental nature of his
thought. People can feel at sea in the Collected Works. As Bogue (2003)
observes, this resonates with the view of Deleuze and Guattari that:

to invent something new is necessarily to invent something whose

shape cannot be foreseen. The new emerges through a process of
metamorphosis whose outcome is unpredictable. If writers find
existing configurations of social relations unacceptable, their only
option is to induce a metamorphosis of the established forms of
the social field, with no guarantee that the result will be a more
acceptable community. It is for this reason that in a minor literature
expression precedes content: “it is expression that outdistances or
advances, it is expression that precedes contents.”
(Bogue 2003: 110)

Jung was led by his dreams, visions, active imagination, intuition,

sculpture and play toward the formation of his own language. A major
literature starts from given content, whereas minor literature starts
with expression:

A major, or established, literature follows a vector that goes from

content to expression. Since content is presented in a given form
of the content, one must find, discover, or see the form of expres-
sion that goes with it. […] But minor, or revolutionary, literature
96 David Henderson

begins by expressing itself and doesn’t conceptualise until after-

ward. […] Expression must break forms, encourage ruptures and
new sproutings.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 28)

The notion of a minor literature has a political dimension. It is not

the creation of an individual and is not dominated by a towering fig-
ure. A hagiographic attitude toward Jung can obscure the collective
nature of his work. As Bogue (2003) states:

In the absence of a people, writers who are marginalized and soli-

tary may be in the best position “to express another potential com-
munity”, but if they do so, it will not be as individual subjects, for
“the most individual literary enunciation is a particular case of
collective enunciation”.
(Bogue 2003: 111)

As a solitary explorer of the psyche, Jung had rhizomatic links with

others contributing to a common endeavour:

It is here that we confront Deleuze’s conception of the political

destiny of literature. Just as writers do not write with their egos,
neither do they write “on behalf of ” an already existing people or
“address” themselves to a class or nation. […] what they find rather
is that “the people are missing.”
(Smith 1997: xli)

The writer is part of the creation of a people. Literature has the

capacity to create a nation. This idea has uncanny resonances with
Zeller’s (1975) description of his discussion with Jung about a dream:

Dream: A temple of vast dimensions was in the process of being

built. As far as I could see –​ahead, behind, right and left –​there were
incredible numbers of people building on gigantic pillars. I, too, was
building on a pillar. The whole building process was in its very first
beginnings, but the foundation was already there, the rest of the build-
ing was starting to go up, and I and many others were working on it.
 Jung as symptomatologist 97

Jung said, ‘Ja, you know, that is the temple we all build on. We
don’t know the people because, believe me, they build in India and
China and in Russia and all over the world. That is the new reli-
gion. You know how long it will take until it is built?’
I said, ‘How should I know? Do you know?’
He said, ‘I know.’
I asked how long it will take.
He said, ‘About six hundred years.’
‘Where do you know this from?’ I asked.
He said, ‘From dreams. From other people’s dreams and from
my own. This new religion will come together as far as we can see.’
(Zeller 1975: 2)

Whether this story demonstrates Jung’s supreme confidence in his own

interpretations of the unconscious or his experiments in the rhizome
of dreams I am not sure, but it resonates with Deleuze’s approach in
that both the writer and the dreamer are contributing to the creation
of new political and cultural formations.
As a consequence of Jung’s prescription of holism as the remedy
for the personal, cultural, ethical and religious ills that assail modern
Western civilisation, it could be argued that he initiated a minor litera-
ture and a minority politics. In the world of psychoanalytic writing,
analytical psychology is a minor literature and within the professional
world of psychoanalysis, Jungian associations practice minority poli-
tics. As Be Pannell explains:

Minor literature is characterised by a concern not with concepts

developed by individual subjects at the centre of literary action,
but rather what is given to perception; the forces encountered by
the body, experienced as intensities, percepts and affects from
which concepts are constructed. This has important implications
for psychology, as minor literature articulates modes of becom-
ing that do not emphasise the individual subject. These intensi-
ties, percepts and affects are fleeting and non-​representable, where
every form that takes shape at infinite speeds vanishes as soon as
it appears.
(Pannell 2018: 196)
98 David Henderson

Jung’s writings on psychotherapy are saturated with references to

the ‘fleeting and non-​representable’, the limits of the analyst’s under-
standing, the plasticity of the psyche and the fluidity of the analytic
process (Henderson 2014). It might be argued that the liminality
of the practice, theory and institutions of analytical psychology is
central to the potency of its creative contribution to psychoanalysis.
One is reminded of the centrality of the inferior function in Jung’s
thought. While there is pressure to bring analytical psychology to a
more established position, it may be worth considering the words of
Deleuze and Guattari (1983): ‘Only the minor is great and revolution-
ary’ (ibid.: 26).

Conclusion
This chapter began with the assertion that ‘Reading Deleuze, one hears
Jung’. It has explored possible resonances between Jung’s psychology
and Deleuze’s philosophy as a way of amplifying our appreciation of
analytical psychology. It has made use of Deleuze’s concepts of symp-
tomatology, percept and minor literature, from his writings on the
critical and the clinical. As a symptomatologist, Jung can be seen as
a ‘clinician of civilization’, who discovered the collective unconscious
and prescribed a renewed relationship with wholeness as a remedy for
the personal, cultural and collective dis-​eases of modern life. The per-
cept is a type of vision and hearing. Jung’s encounter with elements
of the autonomous unconscious engendered turbulence, which stim-
ulated the production of the Red Book and the articulation of new
theories and clinical methodologies. Jung’s writing can be read as a
minor literature which destabilises the language of psychoanalysis and
psychology for ‘strange and minor uses’ and the institutions of ana-
lytical psychology can be understood as practising minority politics in
the world of psychoanalysis. There is ample scope for further experi-
mentation with the thought of Deleuze to illuminate the texture of the
rhizome of analytical psychology.

Acknowledgement
Work on this chapter was supported by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council [AH/​N003853/​1].
 Jung as symptomatologist 99

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Chapter 4

One, two, three… one

The edusemiotic self
Inna Semetsky

Individuation as becoming-​s elf

Edusemiotics –​educational semiotics –​is a new field of study that
explores semiotics as a foundational philosophy in the context of edu-
cation and learning. Semiotics is the study of signs, their action and
transformation. Signs are not just visible objects referring to some-
thing else directly. Jung seems to propagate this fallacy: he took sym-
bols as standing for more than their immediate meanings, and signs as
representing something already known (as penis, father or mother, for
Freud). But, according to the founder of modern semiotics, American
philosopher Charles S. Peirce, signs represent a broad category encom-
passing images, indices, and symbols as well as signs portending in
nature. Signs also include clinical symptoms in terms of both diagno-
sis and prognosis. Signs are relational entities. Gilles Deleuze concep-
tualised ‘fold’ as an in-​between relation. Jung commented that Freud
‘was blind toward the paradox and ambiguity of the contents of the
unconscious, and did not know that everything which arises out of the
unconscious has […] an inside and an outside’ (Jung 1963: 153) –​quite
in accord with Deleuze for whom the ‘outside’ is

animated by […] movements, folds and foldings that […] make up

an inside: they are not something other than the outside but pre-
cisely the inside of the outside. […] The inside is an operation of
the outside: […] an inside […] is […] the fold of the outside.
(Deleuze 1988a: 96–​97)

Deleuze considered philosophers and creative artists to be semio-

ticians and symptomatologists who can unfold and read signs as
 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self 103

symptoms. This attention to signs and images was prominent in

Deleuze’s overall corpus, and his philosophy partakes of the Hermetic
hieroglyphic worldview that considered the world as a book written
with signs to be deciphered. Deleuze and Guattari were strongly anti-​
Oedipal and their critique included both Freud’s and Jung’s (re)turn to
the ‘royal road’ of dreams. Yet, Jung was explicit that:

The via regia to the unconscious […] is not the dream, as he [Freud]
thought, but the complex, which is the architect of dreams and
of symptoms. Nor is this via so very ‘royal’, either, since the way
pointed out by the complex is more like a rough and uncommonly
devious footpath that often loses itself in the undergrowth and
generally leads not into the heart of the unconscious but past it.
(CW 8: §210)

Complexes express deep psychic life, and the unconscious is not

reduced to its repressed ‘acquisitions’ during an individual lifetime
but has a collective dimension in terms of objective psyche. The col-
lective unconscious is populated by archetypes that manifest in typi-
cal life-​situations as habitual patterns of thought and action of which
we remain unaware, therefore tending to behave repetitively, thus
reinforcing the archetypal constellations that sink even deeper in the
unconscious to the point of having totally possessed the psyche. Jung
emphasised that ‘complexes can have us’ (CW 8: §200), and a feeling-​
toned complex is ‘the image of a certain psychic situation […]. This
image has a powerful inner coherence, it has its own wholeness and […]
a relatively high degree of autonomy’ (CW 8: §201). Complexes par-
take of ‘Descartes’ devils and seem to delight in playing impish tricks’
(CW 8: §202) leading to the fragmentation of personality. They form
splinter psyches or ‘the fractured I of a dissolved Cogito’ (Deleuze
1994: 194). For Jung, these fractured pieces are to be integrated within
the psyche made whole. It is the archetype of wholeness –​or self –​that
implicitly guides us towards ‘the ultimate integration of conscious and
unconscious, or […] the assimilation of the ego to a wider personality’
(CW 8: §557): the process of individuation.
In analysis, individuation as a healing (making whole) process was
defined by Jung in terms of self-​education: becoming an integrated
104 Inna Semetsky

personality, becoming-​self. The edusemiotic self thus indicates indi-

viduation as a symbolic process of self-​education and learning that
proceeds by means of the integration of the unconscious guided by
the archetype of wholeness, the self. Presenting his depth psychology
as a method of self-​education, Jung (CW 17) maintained that self-​
knowledge remains an indispensable basis of adult development and
emphasised the indirect method for attaining such inner self-​knowledge
by means of symbolic mediation when we learn to ‘perceive the effects
[of the unconscious] that come into consciousness’ (ibid.: §112). While
being ‘irrepresentable’ (CW 8: §417) factors at the invisible end of the
total psychic spectrum, archetypes are ‘the forms which the instincts
assume. […] It is like Nature herself –​prodigiously conservative, and
yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation’
(CW 8: §339). The archetypes thus function as signs subsisting in the
world that, like hieroglyphs to be deciphered, relate to something that
they are not, something other –​therefore forming enfolded structures,
the meaning of which is not given a priori but needs to be interpreted
in practice. Jung refers to what he calls the Faustian question when ‘the
ego must […] ask: “How am I affected by this sign?” ’ (CW 8: §188),
that is, by one or another invisible archetype within the individuating
process.
For Deleuze (1995: 127), the role of affects is significant: affects
are ‘becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them
(thereby becoming someone else)’. Commenting on the case of Little
Hans, Deleuze remarked that Freud took no account of the collec-
tive assemblages comprising multiple becomings as ‘moving relation-
ships’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 93) which constitute the process of
individuation that demands we become aware of the imperceptible
signs affecting us at the unconscious level. It is precisely a function of
‘consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world
through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality
the world within us’ (CW 8: §342). Such making the invisible visible or
perceiving the imperceptible constitutes a mystical experience, which
Deleuze (1989) equated with a sudden awakening of perception that
is raised to a new power. In Jungian analysis, such ‘vision’ is the index
of wholeness achieved by means of the transcendent function –​a term
borrowed from the mathematics of complex (real and imaginary)
 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self 105

numbers. The compensatory relation between the unconscious and

consciousness, writes Jung:

generates a tension charged with energy and creates a living, third

thing –​not a logical stillbirth in accordance with the principle
tertium non datur but a movement out of the suspension between
opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of being, a new
situation. The transcendent function manifests itself as a quality
of conjoined opposites.
(CW 8: §189)

Tertium non datur –​ the excluded third –​pertains to pure rationality,

the logic of the non-​affective intellect. Jung’s depth psychology aims
to integrate the unconscious by the inclusion of ‘a third thing in which
the opposites can unite. […] In nature the resolution of opposites is
always an energic process: she acts symbolically in the truest sense of
the word, doing something that expresses both sides, just as a waterfall
visibly mediates between above and below’ (CW 14: §705). The water-
fall as ‘the incommensurable third’ (CW 14: §705) serves as a powerful
symbol, a precursor for individuation that parallels Deleuze’s concept
of becoming, which always ‘passes between points, it comes up through
the middle. […] A becoming is neither one nor two; […] it is the in-​
between, the […] line of flight or descent running perpendicular to
both’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 293) –​just like in Jung’s ingenious
example of the waterfall. The tertium non datur hence becomes tertium
quid –​ the included third: even if apparently logically unclassifiable, it
establishes a relation that connects the perceived opposites.
For Jung, ‘archetypes [as] […] structural elements of the psyche […]
possess a certain autonomy and specific energy which enables them
to attract, out of the conscious mind, those contents which are best
suited to themselves’ (CW 5: §344) and are charged with psychic or
spiritual energy, exceeding Freud’s sexual libido. While Deleuze seems
to think that not only Freud but Jung too reduced libido to an imme-
diate satisfaction of one’s wishes, he (with Guattari) inadvertently
used the term libido in quite a Jungian manner, designating specific
energy and the transformations of this energy in terms of the role of
the unconscious as active desiring-​production that overturns the theatre
106 Inna Semetsky

of static representations by laying down the plane of immanence or

the plane of Nature: ‘immanence is the unconscious itself’ (Deleuze
1988b: 29). Significantly, Deleuze does not deny the presence of the
‘transcendental principle [that] precedes matter and form, species and
parts, and every other element of the constituted individual’ (Deleuze
1994: 38) while acting at an invisible plane of organisation:

It is like in music where the principle of composition is not given

in a directly perceptible, audible, relation with what it provides. It
is therefore a plane of transcendence, a kind of design, in the mind
of man or in the mind of a god, even when it is accorded a maxi-
mum of immanence by plunging it into the depth of Nature, or of
the Unconscious.
(Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 91)

The aim of schizoanalysis –​coined by Deleuze and Guattari (1983)

to contrast with psychoanalysis –​is to rediscover the transcendental
unconscious defined by the immanence of its criteria and to articulate
the corresponding practice which is hereto qualified as both transcen-
dental and materialist, ‘an unconscious of thought just as profound as
the unknown of the body’ (Deleuze 1988b: 19). Such status of the uncon-
scious indicates a convergence between Deleuze’s and Jung’s positions,
and especially in terms of the complementary relation between as-​if-​
irreconcilable dualities. Jung considered the real nature of the arche-
types to be transcendental and occupying what he called the unitary or
psychoid level, which reflects the ‘secret immanence of the divine spirit
of life’ (CW 14: §623) partaking of the alchemical benedicta viriditas or
‘blessed green’ as a sign of the presence of the animating power in mat-
ter that creates one world: unus mundus. The archetypal dynamics are
‘a manifestation of the energy that springs from the tension of oppo-
sites’ (CW 7: §121), and it is when the conscious ego acknowledges the
existence of an unconscious partner that such semiotic communica-
tion puts one on the road to individuation in order ‘to free life from
where it’s trapped’ (Deleuze 1995: 141).
Even if Jung made clear that the ‘solvent’ to the problem of uni-
fication ‘can only be of an irrational nature’ (CW 14: §705), there is
a specific, even if paradoxical, logic that underlies the Western eso-
teric tradition of Hermeticism, Kabbalah and alchemy. This is what
 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self 107

Deleuze calls the logic of multiplicities and which is at the crux of

edusemiotics.

Logic of multiplicities
According to Jung, alchemy purports to fill in the gaps in religious
dogma, which demonstrates a tendency towards the masculine, with
the opposite, compensatory tendency of invoking ‘the chthonic
femininity of the unconscious’ (CW 12: §26). Across his corpus,
Jung referred to the axiom of Maria Prophetissa, a third-​century
alchemist, as a metaphor for individuation. The enigmatic axiom
states: One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes
the one as the fourth. Jung’s interpretation of the axiom boils down to
his quaternity as the unity of the four elements, even if one of them
appears missing –​like an inferior function marking the deficiency
in consciousness. But Jung seems to take the sequence of numbers
literally, in their linear progression. From the viewpoint of edusemi-
otics, though, these numbers symbolise what Deleuze referred to as
multiplicities that possess a specific logic in contrast to binary logic,
the latter utilising the principle of the excluded middle as tertium
non datur. In parallel to Charles S. Peirce’s notion of genuine signs
as triadic structures, Deleuze points out that ‘there are two in the
second, to the point where there is a firstness in the secondness, and
there are three in the third’ (Deleuze 1989: 30). Multiplicities are
intensive, interpenetrative: they are ternary structures functioning
on the basis of ‘a theory and practice of relations, of the AND’
(Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 15) that form assemblages as systems of
signs based on ‘symbiosis, a “sympathy” ’ (ibid.: 69). Multiplicity’s
‘only unity is that of co-​functioning’ (ibid.: 69) –​of sympathetic
relations forming a complex whole. Such logic is not ‘subordinate to
the verb to be. […] Substitute the AND for IS. A and B. The AND
is […] the path of all relations, which makes relations shoot outside
their terms’ (ibid.: 57).
Taking two abstract terms A and B, Deleuze inserts the conjunction
AND that defies the opposition between the binaries. A multiplicity
contains an a-​signifying rupture or difference –​a pure relation, a gap –​
in which the conjunction AND intervenes in the mode of the included
third: not in the opposition of A to B but ‘in their complementarity’
108 Inna Semetsky

...AND

...AND

AND

A B

Figure 4.1 Multiplicity

(Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 131). Even as A and B formally belong to

different, heterogeneous series, they reciprocally determine each other.
‘It is in difference that movement is produced as an “effect”, that phe-
nomena flash their meaning like signs’, notes Deleuze (1994: 57). Recall
Jung’s example of the waterfall in nature as an ‘effect’ or the included
middle that resolves the perceived opposition. Deleuze ingeniously
addresses difference in primarily ontological terms: ‘Difference is not
phenomenon but the noumenon closest to the phenomenon. […] The
phenomenon that flashes across this system, bringing about the com-
munication between disparate series, is a sign’ (ibid.: 222). Such com-
munication is transversal, assuring the mutual ‘affectivity’ or resonance
of A and B. Deleuze intensifies AND as if stuttering: AND… AND…
AND, and we can construct a visual diagram for multiplicity as a semi-
otic structure where the otherwise divergent series symbolised by two
‘disparates’, A and B, converge on a paradoxical element symbolised by
AND (Figure 4.1).
The included third creates a rhizomatic network in which the whole
dualistic split of either sensible or intelligible, either rational thought
or lived experience, either material or spiritual, is bridged. Rhizome is
Deleuze’s biological metaphor for becoming, a living symbol of vital-
ity and organic growth. Jung would agree:

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhi-
zome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that
appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers
away –​an ephemeral apparition. […] Yet I have never lost a sense
 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self 109

of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux.

What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.
(Jung 1963: 4)

Such a hidden, invisible, true life is ‘a’ life of pure immanence (Deleuze
2001). Deleuze uses the indefinite article –​‘a’ life –​as an index or a
sign of the impersonal transcendental field, which is ‘a-​ subjective’
(2001: 25) –​outside individual consciousness –​hence unconscious
in the Jungian sense. Immanence and transcendence are not simple
binary opposites but are enfolded, with ‘the immanent contained
within a transcendental field’ (Deleuze 2001: 30). They are just two
poles in the single, ubiquitous semiotic relation.
Jung refers to the Hermetic principle of coincidentia oppositorum
as ‘transgressivity’ (CW 8: §964), the mystical coincidence of oppo-
sites, such as matter and spirit, that nonetheless can be connected
indirectly or transversally via the semiotic conjunction AND. Deleuze
describes transversal communication in almost alchemical terms as
the ‘transformation of substances and a dissolution of forms, a pas-
sage to the limit or flight from contours […]. We witness the incorpo-
real power of that intense matter, the material power of that language’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 109) expressed in symbolic form. It is
via symbols and images that we become aware of the unconscious
knowledge as gnosis. A symbolic approach ‘reflects a higher level of
intellect and, by not forcibly representing the unknowable as known,
gives a more faithful picture of the real state of affairs’ (CW 11: §417).
Gnosis is produced in the midst of the transformative process (semi-
osis) that connects two ‘inseparable planes in reciprocal presuppo-
sition’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 109) via their integration, and
‘establish[es] the bond of a profound complicity between nature and
mind’ (Deleuze 1994: 165) that manifests at the deeper, soul, level –​
the soul of the world, anima mundi.
Deleuze brings in Hermetic notions, referring to the transversal
link as a demonic operation that leaps over borders and boundaries.
Significantly, it is Diotima the Priestess –​a feminine ­figure –​who taught
Socrates that there is a ‘daimon’ by the name of Eros located between
‘lack’ and ‘plenty’ that can hold two opposites together as a whole. As
a culmination of desire sparked between the two deities, Eros itself is a
symbol of union (alchemical marriage), of hieros gamos or coniunctio
110 Inna Semetsky

(CW 8: §900). It is the erotic desire for gnosis, or longing for wisdom,
that ultimately brings the unconscious into consciousness. For Jung,
Eros is the feminine principle of relatedness, of binding, of connect-
ing, in contrast to detached reason or Logos (e.g., CW 9ii: §29). In
Jung’s dreams, the figure of Philemon, his male spiritual guide, was
accompanied by a female figure as a personification of soul. Jung
shared the Gnostic vision of Wisdom-​Sophia as the Bride of Christ
who, by educating humankind in gnosis, can bring Sophia back into
Pleroma (fullness of being). Jung associated Wisdom with one of the
Sephirot in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, which is a symbol of the divine
descending into the human world. Deleuze, non-​incidentally, asserted
that becoming-​woman is ‘the key to all other becomings’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 277). Sophia resides in all of us, even the most phallo-
cratic, as remnants of divine sparks enfolded in the world that need to
be gathered, unconcealed, or unfolded so as to create a life ‘filled with
immanence’ (Deleuze 1997: 137).
Eros, affect, desire, libido! Whatever the name, it cannot be reduced
to merely the lack posited by psychoanalysis: it is the excess (or
‘plenty’) of implicated, enfolded meanings that characterises schizoan-
alytic desiring-​production as the individuating process of becoming-​
other, becoming-​self. Desire is ‘constructivist’ (Deleuze and Parnet
1987: 96): it constructs the plane of immanence. Eros, according to
myth, was conceived in an uncanny act that partakes of Deleuze’s
description of the plane of immanence:

it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts

to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable.
These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological
processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head
for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with
bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 41)

It is the eyes of the mind that allow us to perceive the invisible arche-
types of the collective unconscious when, by constructing the plane of
immanence, we can cross the threshold of consciousness. Such an erotic,
active relation pertains to the paradoxical logic of multiplicities (signs)
and showcases itself in synchronistic, a-​causal experiences defying the
 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self 111

direct mechanistic causality of classical physics. The concept of syn-

chronicity was developed by Jung in collaboration with physicist and
Nobel-​laureate Wolfgang Pauli. Synchronicity addresses the problem-
atic of the meaningful ‘relation of the psychic to the material world
[that can be compared] with two cones, whose apices, meeting in a
point without extension –​a real zero-​point –​touch and do not touch’
(CW 8: §418), just like the intensive yet seemingly ‘non-​localizable’
(Deleuze 1994: 83) conjunction AND that forms a semiotic triangle as
a paradoxical open-​enclosure. Albeit virtual, such a point would not
be ‘without similarities to the One-​Whole of the Platonists’ (Deleuze
1991: 93). Pauli envisaged the development of theories of the uncon-
scious as outgrowing their solely therapeutic applications by being
eventually assimilated into mainstream natural science. He considered
the unconscious analogous to the notion of ‘ “field” in physics’ (Pauli
1994: 164). Indeed, ‘the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 283), to complex nature that exceeds the
physical reality given directly to the senses. Reality is semiotic, per-
meated with signs that can reach deep into the unconscious virtual
memories. The ‘virtual is the whole’ (Deleuze 2003a: 30), and the field
of the collective unconscious constitutes a cosmic, collective ‘gigantic
memory’ (Deleuze 2001: 212) contained in the transcendental field.
So, when Maria Prophetissa ‘cried without restraint, “One becomes
two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the One as the
fourth” ’ (as Jung says in Psychology and Alchemy [CW 12: §209], quot-
ing from the alchemical text) –​likely similar to Cassandra in her frenzy
crying out, in vain, about the future destruction of Troy –​she was using
these numbers symbolically. Sure enough, the mode of expression
pertaining to multiplicities is ‘a virtual number’ (Deleuze 2003a: 34).
Deleuze stresses, in reference to Peirce, that there is ‘not merely 1, 2, 3,
but 1, 2 in 2 and 1, 2, 3 in 3’ (Deleuze 1986: 198) –​even if he errone-
ously thinks that Peirce meant thirdness as the end of the story (that
as such would have closed a semiotic triangle). But it is precisely third-
ness (tertium quid) that is the very essence of the unending semiotic
process, the evolutionary dynamics of signs: ‘Essence is finally the
third term that […] complicates the sign and the meaning. […] It meas-
ures in each case their relation […] the degree of their unity’ (Deleuze
2000: 90), and it is the very ‘essence of the virtual to be actualized’
(Deleuze 2003a: 28). It is because of the relational, semiotic structure
112 Inna Semetsky

of the world that ‘From virtuals we descend to actual states of affairs,

and from states of affairs we ascend to virtuals, without being able to
isolate one from the other’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 160).
The ultimate inseparability or unity of the ‘one world’ manifests
in synchronistic experiences. Synchronicity demonstrates that ‘psy-
che and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing’
(CW 8: §418). This thing is meaning as the included third, the con-
junction AND –​a paradoxical yet logical element in the ubiquitous
tri-​relative semiotic structure. So ‘one’ as becoming ‘two’ means dual-
ity –​the opposition of matter and mind, consciousness and the uncon-
scious at the level of our ordinary, sensible experience. But ‘two’ duly
becomes ‘three’ in their reconciliation: the alchemical ‘union of the
two is a kind of self-​fertilization’ (CW 12: §209). There is no place in
the one-​sided logic of consciousness for such apparent self-​reference
or self-​organisation, precisely because of the latter’s circularity or non-​
linearity. It is when a semiotic triangle is ‘complete’ by virtue of con-
junction that it simultaneously becomes another ‘one’ as the ‘fourth’ in
the continuous transformation of signs or, in Bergson’s terms, creative
evolution. Signs evolve: they grow in meaning. The growth of meanings
per se is a mark of ‘infinite “learning” ’ (Deleuze 1994: 192): novelty is
the prerogative of the evolution of consciousness and is the ultimate
task of edusemiotics because ‘Everything that teaches us something
emits signs; every act of learning is an interpretation of signs’ (Deleuze
2000: 4). The semiotic structure of multiplicities highlights the repeti-
tion of difference and not the reproduction of sameness.
Strictly speaking, the fourth is ‘one’ in terms of the integrated whole,
a sort of ‘area’ of the semiotic triangle. In Jungian analysis, the inte-
gration of the unconscious ‘presents a way of moving from “either-​
or” to “and” by going beyond the limitations of logical discourse or
common sense. […] The experience of “and-​ness” is central to psycho-
logical change’ (Samuels 1985: 59). Surely Deleuze’s conjunction AND
cannot be reduced to simple numerical addition. Deleuze presents the
logic of multiplicities in terms of the esoteric calculus of Ideas, which
are obscure problematic instances that, just like signs, are ‘differential
flashes which leap and metamorphose’ (Deleuze 1994: 146). They are
not a priori clear and distinct, as Descartes wanted them to be. They
are unconscious structures ‘necessarily overlaid by their products or
effects’ (Deleuze 2003a: 181) that, like Jungian archetypes, can jolt
 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self 113

us out of the comfort zone of habits, thus forcing the ‘genesis of the
act of thought’ (Deleuze 1994: 157). The Ideas comprise ‘a theatre of
problems and always open questions which draws spectator, setting
and characters into the real movement of an apprenticeship of the
entire unconscious, the final elements of which remain the problems
themselves’ (Deleuze 1994: 192). Indeed, the field of collective uncon-
scious can never be fully exhausted because of the archetypes’ mani-
fold of references.
Jung’s self-​education as an apprenticeship in signs necessarily
becomes an ‘experimentation on oneself, [which] is our only identity,
our single chance for all the combinations which inhabit us’ (Deleuze
and Parnet 1987: 11). It is problematic Ideas that elicit learning by
virtue of the ‘presentation of the unconscious, not the representation
of consciousness’ (Deleuze 1994: 192). Learning from the experiential,
albeit perplexing, encounters with archetypes ultimately creates the
‘widened consciousness’ which:

is no longer that touchy egotistical bundle of personal wishes,

fears, hopes and ambitions which always has to be compensated or
corrected by unconscious counter-​tendencies; instead it is a func-
tion of relationship to the world of objects, bringing the individ-
ual into absolute, binding, and indissoluble communion with the
world at large.
(CW 7: §275)

Deleuze’s powerful method that enables the integration of uncon-

scious Ideas is both empirical and transcendental. The both-​and qual-
ity is intrinsic to semiotics. Recall the psychoid, or psychophysical,
status of the archetypal –​semiotic –​reality. While maintaining the dic-
tum of empiricism in terms of relations being external to their terms,
signs as differential relations or pure differences do determine these
very terms, thus being their constitutive –​transcendental –​condition
(‘one becomes two…’ etc.). Transcendental empiricism is superior to
its plain tabula-​rasa cousin. Jung too denounced the tabula-​rasa state
of individual consciousness because the ‘collective unconscious com-
prises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earli-
est beginnings. It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences’
(CW 8: §230). The world is populated by problematic Ideas, which are
114 Inna Semetsky

virtual; yet it is on the basis of the very reality of the virtual ‘that exist-
ence is produced, in accordance with a time and a space immanent in
the Idea’ (Deleuze 1994: 211) when we experience the effects of actual-
ised archetypes. Their integration in consciousness demands a recipro-
cal counter-​actualisation: moving, via mediation by symbols, from the
actual back to the virtual.
A semiotic relation has ‘two halves of the Symbol’ (Deleuze
1994: 279), and signs always participate in the double, Neo-​platonic,
movement of descending and ascending while effectuating ‘the gen-
esis of intuition in intelligence’ (Deleuze 1991: 111). Intuition blended
with intelligence is the way of reading signs, of exploring and evaluat-
ing the problematic Ideas. The encountered ‘problem is at once both
transcendent and immanent in relation to its solutions. Transcendent,
because it consists in a system of ideal liaisons or differential relations
between genetic elements. Immanent, because these liaisons or rela-
tions are incarnated in the actual relations which do not resemble them
and are defined by the field of solution’ (Deleuze 1994: 163). It is the
incarnation or embodiment of the transcendental field of the collec-
tive unconscious that allows it to merge with its own ‘object’ as deep
knowledge, gnosis, which is always already immanent in perception
even if in its vague, virtual, albeit not in any way unknowable, Kantian,
state. The Idea’s ‘problematic structure is part of objects themselves,
allowing them to be grasped as signs, just as the questioning or prob-
lematising instance is a part of knowledge allowing its positivity and
its specificity to be grasped in the act of learning’ (Deleuze 1994: 64).
The logic of multiplicities, of signs, thus literally makes sense: mean-
ing is implicated in learning! There is no genuine learning in what can
be immediately recognised: objects directly given to consciousness are
only surface effects, the pale projections or derivatives of the ‘initially
undifferentiated field’ (Deleuze 1993: 10) of the collective unconscious.
Yet it is precisely a surface –​serving as a symbolic border between
material and spiritual, corporeal and incorporeal –​that functions as
the ‘locus of sense: signs remain deprived of sense as long as they do
not enter into the surface organization which assures the resonance of
two series’ (Deleuze 1990: 104). Archetypal experiences begin to make
sense (thereby initiating individuation) when the depth of the psyche
‘having been spread out became width. The becoming unlimited is
maintained entirely within this inverted width’ (Deleuze 1990: 9), and
 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self 115

the meaning of experience, paradoxically, even ‘more profound since it

occurs at the surface’ (Deleuze 1990: 10) in the form of projection of
deep unconscious structures. The logic of multiplicities transcends the
one-​sided ‘syntactical link with a world’ (Deleuze 1990: 178). It has its
own grammar. The impoverished link is transformed into a synchro-
nistic or transversal connection that includes the dimension of mean-
ing and makes logic commensurate with ethics.

The ethics of integration

Deleuze addresses the paradoxes of logic mainly in relation to lan-
guage, but the French word sens –​or meaning –​also has an ethical
nuance in terms of the direction taken in our practical lives. The mean-
ing produced in experience affects our decision-​making and choice of
action, and we always have ‘to become worthy of the event’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 160). The diversity of experiential situations that
abound in life disrupts preconceived judgements based on a strict
moral code, especially when problematic situations present us with
moral dilemmas. Morality cannot be imposed as though ‘brought
down on tables of stone from Sinai’ (CW 7: §30), and the presupposed
universal rules of human conduct can ‘never lead to those crucial deci-
sions which are the turning-​points in a man’s life. […] Through the new
ethic, the ego-​consciousness is ousted from its central position in a psy-
che organized on the lines of a monarchy or totalitarian state, its place
being taken by wholeness or the self, which is now recognized as central’
(Jung in Neumann 1969: 13, 18). The new ethics is holistic, devoted to
the integration of the unconscious shadow, in contrast to the old or
partial ethics focused solely on ego-​consciousness. Archetypes can be
‘the ruling powers’ (CW 7: §151), and amidst the archetypes such as
anima and animus, great mother, eternal child, trickster, old wise man,
rebirth, persona, etc., the shadow can easily affect the psyche to the
point of possession. One’s own shadowy, unsavoury qualities tend to
become projected onto the other. At the collective level, the shadow
encompasses those outside the norms of the established moral or legal
order and social system, such as ‘criminals, psychotics, misfits, scape-
goats’ (Samuels 1985: 66). It is not only that these figures belong to the
category of outsiders –​significantly, it is dominant culture itself that
fails to assimilate its own shadow and as a result often implements
116 Inna Semetsky

the scapegoat policy because of its reliance on ‘universality, method

[…] judgement […] a court of reason, a pure ‘right’ of thought. […]
The exercise of thought thus conforms to […] the dominant meanings
and to the requirements of the established order’ (Deleuze and Parnet
1987: 13).
Even as ego-​consciousness focuses on indubitable and unequivocal
moral principles, these very principles crumble under the ‘compensa-
tory significance of the shadow in the light of ethical responsibility’
(Jung in Neumann 1969: 12), the neglect of which tends to precipi-
tate multiple consequences in the social world. The shadow rules
one-​sidedly unless integrated into the whole of the personality. In the
absence of integration, it can create a sealed, aggressive world until
it starts spontaneously acting out, often in the form of a destructive
climax or psychotic breakdown. Individuation as becoming-​self is
embedded in the dynamics of becoming-​other, and it is the confronta-
tion with the shadow that brings to the surface the conscious ‘recogni-
tion of an alien “other” in oneself’ (CW 13: §481). Deleuze commented
that culture usually experiences violence that serves as an active force
for the formation of our thinking: force is ‘an act of the fold’ (Deleuze
1993: 18) in the individuating process that includes ‘the harshest exer-
cise in depersonalization’ (Deleuze 1995: 6) as a dark precursor for
becoming-​other, becoming-​self! Yet, without undergoing a symbolic
death, no rebirth is possible. It is affective becoming-​other that ‘draws
a hidden universe out of the shadow’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 66),
illuminating it like a beam of light so that a tiny ‘spark can flash […] to
make us see and think what was lying in the shadow around the words,
things we were hardly aware existed’ (Deleuze 1995: 141). A spark, as
a counterpart to the shadow, may very well belong to the divine sparks
of Kabbalistic vessels dispersed in the world, the integration of which
parallels the archetype of rebirth that Jung equated with the affirma-
tion of life. Rebirth is characterised by our lives acquiring novel sense
and direction in the process of unfolding the archetypal structures that
‘imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, they’re the symptoms
of life gushing forth or draining away. […] There’s a profound link
between signs, events, life and vitalism’ (Deleuze 1995: 143).
The value dimension is inherent in the interpretation of signs, and
the process of becoming is ‘ethical and aesthetic, as opposed to moral-
ity’ (ibid.: 114). We trace the multiple rhizomatic lines by going to the
 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self 117

depth of the problem: ‘which of them are dead-​ended or blocked,

which cross voids, which continue, and most importantly the line of
steepest gradient, how it draws in the rest, towards what destination’
(Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 120). The immanent evaluation of experi-
ence brings forth the clinical aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy not only
by entailing a diagnosis of a particular mode of existence by means
of assessing its symptoms –​that is, reading them as the signs of the
present. It also affords a prognosis even if uncertain. Deleuze asks,
prophetically, ‘What is it which tells us that, on a line of flight, we will
not rediscover everything we were fleeing? […] How can one avoid the
line of flight’s becoming identical with a pure and simple movement of
self-​destruction’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 38). The clinical aspect is
complemented by critical and creative aspects, and:

The problem of critique is that of the value of values, of the evalu-

ation from which their value arises, thus the problem of their crea-
tion. […] This is the crucial point; high and low, noble and base, are
not values but represent the differential element from which the
value of values themselves derives.
(Deleuze 1983: 1–​2)

Once again we are reminded that signs as multiplicities do not involve

‘a simple addition’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 313): it is the evalua-
tion of experience, the interpretation of signs, and getting to the depth
of the differential dynamics that brings to the surface specific mean-
ings enfolded in the psyche. A singular event ‘upsets being’ (Deleuze
1995: 44) while simultaneously propelling us to becoming, to individu-
ation. Jung was explicit that the process of individuation, contrary to
extreme individualism, produces ‘a consciousness of human commu-
nity precisely because it makes us aware of the unconscious, which
unites and is common to all mankind’ (CW 16: §227). By integrating
the unconscious, we have a chance to become worthy of events and
experiences as the creed of Deleuze’s ethics.
The integration of the shadow thus becomes a specific method of
ethics that may put an end to the continuing debate: ‘since Socrates
[…] [philosophers] have sought […] criteria for distinguishing between
right and wrong and between good and evil’ (Baron, Pettit, and Slote
1997: 1). What is common to all approaches is that they are framed
118 Inna Semetsky

by the reasoning of a rational agent who presents moral categories

in the form of binary opposites. The ethics of integration, however,
overcomes the split inherent in simple moral algebra with its divi-
sion into good versus evil or right versus wrong. It enables us to move
beyond good and evil via the integration of those dualisms that are
deeply ingrained in the cultural consciousness. The ethics of integra-
tion, the ultimate task of which is ‘the design of an open society, a
society of creators’ (Deleuze 1991: 111), recapitulates the ontology of
relations and focuses on new modes of existence, on multiple becom-
ings. Becoming, for Deleuze, is an anti-​memory or rather a paradoxi-
cal memory of the future, as if ‘everything culminates in a “has been” ’
(Deleuze 1990: 159), which is understandable, considering that signs
are always bipolar, double-​sided entities connecting the dimensions
of past and future as two poles of one ‘temporal’ sign. A society of
creators would comprise a people to come as the uncanny product of
multiple experimentations. These people belong to ‘an oppressed, bas-
tard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, irremediably minor race. […] They
have resistance in common –​their resistance to death, to servitude, to
the intolerable, to shame, and to the present’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 109–​10). Resistance to the present demands its evaluation, laying
down the plane of immanence, reading signs, and ‘decoding the secrets
of intelligent alien life within and without us’ (Ansell-​Pearson 1997: 4).
Such life is neutral, beyond the dualities of subject and object, self and
other, good and evil, and the people to come will have to become edu-
semioticians, fluent in the language of signs and capable of applying it
at the level of practice.
Coincidentally, Pauli envisaged the gradual discovery of a neutral
language (in Meier 2001) that functions symbolically to describe an
invisible reality which is inferable indirectly through its visible effects.
Responding to Pauli, Jung pointed out the ‘materialization of a poten-
tially available reality, an actualization of the mundus potentialis’ (in
Meier, 2001: 83). Such language partakes of Deleuze’s esoteric differ-
ential calculus, which is ‘beyond good and evil’ (Deleuze 1994: 182)
as the prerogative of the mathesis universalis. Mathesis –​also trans-
lated as learning –​unifies science, art, spirituality and magic and rep-
resents ‘an alphabet of what it means to think’ (Deleuze 1994: 182).
Deleuze is adamant that ‘to believe that mathesis is merely a mysti-
cal lore, inaccessible and superhuman, would be a complete mistake.
 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self 119

[…] For mathesis deploys itself at the level of life, of living man. […]
Essentially, mathesis would be the exact description of human nature’
(Deleuze 2007: 143) expressing itself in characters representing ‘the
encounter of the sensible object and the object of thought. The sensi-
ble object is called symbol, and the object of thought […] is a hiero-
glyph or a cipher. […] mathesis […] transforms knowledge itself into a
sensible object. Thus we shall see mathesis insist upon the correspond-
ences between material and spiritual creation’ (Deleuze 2007: 151) in
the best tradition of Hermeticism. Such universal language transcends
the barriers between native languages, conflicting beliefs, and incom-
mensurable values immortalised in the symbol of ‘the heaven-​high
tower of Babel that brought confusion to mankind’ (CW 5: §171).
Mathesis as a neutral language reflects the unified, psychoid reality of
archetypes, and its ‘real characters’ are archetypal images, ideograms,
or what Leibniz called ‘arcana’.

From analysis to synthesis

Mathesis precedes and exceeds the verbal expressions of the conscious
mind, and ‘it is not the personal human being who is making the state-
ment, but the archetype speaking through him’ (Jung 1963: 352). Our
knowledge of the language of images becomes of paramount impor-
tance because the process of individuation ‘is an experience in images
and of images. […] Its beginning is almost invariably characterized by
one’s getting stuck in a blind alley or in some impossible situation;
and its goal is […] illumination or higher consciousness, by means of
which the initial situation is overcome’ (CW 9i: §82). It is via the arche-
typal images that the often-​shocking encounter with the unconscious
shadow in analysis is produced: ‘the shock has an effect on the spirit,
it forces it to think, and to think the Whole. […] It does not follow like
a logical effect, analytically, but synthetically as the dynamic effect of
images […] it is not a sum, but a “product”, a unity of a higher order’
(Deleuze 1989: 157–​58) as the very purpose of individuation. While
addressing in detail such esoteric practices as alchemy or I Ching, Jung
also referred to ‘the set of pictures in the Tarot cards […] distantly
descended from the archetypes of transformation’ (CW 9i: §81) that
represent ‘typical situations, places, ways and means’ (ibid.: §80) and
not only active personalities in dreams.
120 Inna Semetsky

The Tarot deck comprises 78 pictures, 22 so-​called Major Arcana

and 56 Minor. Deleuze, non-​incidentally, says: ‘I undo the folds of con-
sciousness that pass through every one of my thresholds, the “twenty-​
two folds” that surround me and separate me from the deep’ (Deleuze
1993: 93). Tarot performs a transcendent function in the form of a
spatio-​temporal, seemingly random, distribution of images in a typi-
cal layout (Semetsky 2011, 2013) as a Deleuzian ‘dramatisation’ of the
virtual Ideas undergoing actualisation. There is ‘drama beneath every
logos’ (Deleuze 2003a: 103) as the play of unconscious archetypes
beneath their conceptual representation, the path to which is a trans-
versal, synchronistic connection created in practice by an intuitive
and ‘unconscious psychic mechanism that engenders the perceived in
consciousness’ (Deleuze 1993: 95). A Tarot spread confirms ‘the pos-
sibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single
plane of consistency or exteriority’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 9) –​
the plane or surface on which we literally see the otherwise invisible ele-
ments of the psyche. The archetypal images ‘convey the projection, on
external space, of internal spaces defined by “hidden parameters” and
variables or singularities of potential’ (Deleuze 1993: 16). Still, hidden
variables become exposed in our very experience: what was buried in
the depth of the psyche is brought to the surface and the unconscious
is made available to consciousness: it makes sense. Reading and inter-
preting the archetypal images of Tarot contributes to the integration
of the unconscious in the process of counter-​actualisation, as we said
earlier: moving from the actual to the virtual so as to discover deep
inner gnosis. Laying out the pictures creates a map or cartography of
the unconscious that often suggests ‘highs’ or bouts of depression at
the subtle, affective level. Tarot operates so as to ‘bring this assemblage
of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices,
to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something
I call my Self’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 84): the individuated,
edusemiotic self.
The interpretation of Tarot images parallels Jungian self-​education
in terms of symbolic lessons learned in the school of life that embody
the meanings of experience, even as they so far remained out of aware-
ness. Importantly, the Tarot ‘map does not reproduce an unconscious
closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 12) in a process at once creative (making sense), critical
 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self 121

TAROT

(IMAGE = MEANING)

SELF OTHER

Figure 4.2 Tarot as a sign-​system

(self-​reflective), and clinical (healing). Tarot is a semiotic system par

excellence, an exemplar of mathesis in action as the embodiment of
the logic of the included third. It acts as the conjunction AND between
consciousness and the unconscious, immanent and transcendent, self
and other (Figure 4.2).
Jung stressed (CW 8: §402) that meaning and image are identical: as
images unfold and take shape, their meanings become clear. Tarot
images distributed in the layout comprise the semiotic ‘levels of sensa-
tion […] like arrests or snapshots of motion, which […] recompose the
movement synthetically in all its continuity’ (Deleuze 2003b: 35). The
edusemiotics of Tarot performs ‘the supreme act of philosophy: not
so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there,
[…] as the outside and inside of thought, […] that which cannot be
thought and yet must be thought, which was thought once, as Christ
was incarnated once, in order to show, that one time, the possibility
of the impossible’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 59–​60). Well, maybe
not just that one time! It is the dynamic unfolding of signs that over-
comes the dualism of the inside and the outside, consciousness and
the unconscious, virtual and actual, and brings ‘nature and culture
together in its net’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 236). The relational
nature–​culture network is the precondition for the gnostic knowledge
preeminent in spiritual teachings with regard to essential kinship and
oneness with the world: mystics, creative artists, or ‘supreme’ philos-
ophers play an intensive, participatory role in the world instead of
remaining detached self-​conscious observers.
The Tarot layout transcends ‘spatial locations and temporal succes-
sions’ (Deleuze 1994: 83) when the diachronic (historical, ex-​Memoria)
dimension of the collective unconscious becomes compactified into a
122 Inna Semetsky

single synchronic slice. We thus achieve an expanded perception of

time and space when they are ‘released from their human coordinates’
(Deleuze 1986: 122). In this respect, ‘Space-​time ceases to be a pure
given in order to become the totality or the nexus of differential rela-
tions in the subject, and the object itself ceases to be an empirical given
in order to become the product of these relations’ (Deleuze 1993: 89) –​
such product being the very meaning of experience embodied in the
archetypal imagery of Tarot that ‘determines the nature of the con-
figurational process and the course it will follow, with seeming fore-
knowledge’ (CW 8: §411), which differs from vulgar fortune telling but
affords divinatory potential to Tarot readings!
Physicist David Bohm, whose ontology of wholeness is based on
the existence of the implicate order of reality, asserted that there exists
‘an anticipation of the future in the implicate order in the present.
As they used to say, coming events cast their shadows in the present.
Their shadows are being cast deep in the implicate order’ (Bohm in
Hederman 2003: 44). It is becoming aware of the archetypal shadow
during Tarot readings that duly ‘propels us into a hitherto unknown
and unheard-​of world of problems’ (Deleuze 1994: 192). We are learn-
ing how to ‘read, find, retrieve the [semiotic] structures’ (Deleuze
2003a: 181) in the form of material artefacts that embody our past,
present, and even future experiences. By going deeper into the psyche
we can explore options in the future evolution of signs and find a sin-
gular line of flight that ‘has always been there, although it is the oppo-
site of a destiny’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 125). Signs are paradoxical
bipolar entities: the folds blending destiny with its own opposite, free
will. Tarot creates ‘an affect of self on self’ (Deleuze 1988a: 101) –​
and self-​reference, because of the synthesis afforded by the logic of
multiplicities, is simultaneously self-​transcendence: individuation as
becoming-​self is always already becoming-​other.

References
Ansell-​Pearson, K. (1997). Deleuze outside/​outside Deleuze. In K. Ansell-​
Pearson (Ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer (pp. 1–​22).
London: Routledge.
Baron, M. W., Pettit, P., and Slote, M. (1997). Three Methods of Ethics: A
Debate. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell.
 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self 123

Deleuze, G. (1983). Nietzsche and Philosophy (H. Tomlinson, Trans.).

New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement-​Image (H. Tomlinson and
B. Habberjam, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
Deleuze, G. (1988a). Foucault (S. Hand, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1988b). Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (R. Hurley, Trans.). San
Francisco: City Lights Books.
Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-​Image (H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta,
Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
Deleuze, G. (1990). The Logic of Sense (M. Lester and C. J. Stivale, Trans.).
New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1991). Bergsonism (H. Tomlinson, Trans.). New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (T. Conley, Trans.).
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972–​1990 (M. Joughin, Trans.). New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1997). Essays Critical and Clinical (D. W. Smith and M. Greco,
Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (2000). Proust and Signs (R. Howard, Trans.). Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (2001). Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (A. Boyman, Trans.).
New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, G. (2003a). Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–​1974). New York:
Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, G. (2003b). Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (D. W. Smith,
Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (2007). Mathesis, science and philosophy. In R. Mackay (Ed.),
Collapse III (pp. 141–​55). Falmouth: Urbanomic.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-​Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1994). What is Philosophy? (H. Tomlinson and
G. Burchell, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G., and Parnet, C. (1987). Dialogues (H. Tomlinson and B.
Habberjam, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
124 Inna Semetsky

Hederman, M. P. (2003). Tarot: Talisman or Taboo? Reading the World as

Symbol. Dublin: Currach Press.
Jung, C. G. (1953–​1979). Collected Works (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press. [cited as CW]
Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections (R. Winston and
C. Winston, Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books.
Meier, C. A. (Ed.). (2001). Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/​Jung Letters, 1932–​
1958. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Neumann, E. (1969). Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (E. Rolfe, Trans.).
London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Pauli, W. (1994). Writings on Physics and Philosophy (R. Schlapp, Trans.).
Berlin: Springer-​Verlag.
Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-​Jungians. London and New York: Routledge.
Semetsky, I. (2011). Re-​Symbolization of the Self: Human Development and
Tarot Hermeneutic. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Semetsky, I. (2013). The Edusemiotics of Images: Essays on the art~science of
Tarot. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Chapter 5

The geometry of wholeness

George Hogenson

A client in my practice, whose artistic skills are highly developed, regu-

larly carries a sketchbook with him in which he draws images from
his dreams, paintings and other renderings of his process in analysis.
Shortly prior to the conference represented in this book he brought
two sketches to our session. The first (Figure 5.1), he recounted, arose
spontaneously. When he completed the sketch, he ‘sat with it for a long
period of time, feeling contented and at peace’.
Several days later he attempted to reproduce the experience, but the
figure he drew in this instance left him feeling ‘disturbed and unsettled’
when he finished (Figure 5.2).
Both images are complex and reward detailed examination, but for
purposes of the present discussion I want to focus on the central geo-
metric distinction between them. In the first image we see a centred
square that is subdivided into four triangular elements. The quadratic
shape itself balances between a space of light —​illuminated by a sun-​
like eye —​and complete darkness, while the internal quadratic subdi-
vision demarcates the boundary between the light and dark domains
as well as marking their essential conjunction in the vertical. In the
second image the central square has been divided into two squares,
each of which is subdivided into two triangular elements. The two
squares are now balanced within a complex and quite formal structure
of incomplete circular patterns, almost mechanical in structure, with
the dark element narrowly confined between two of the incomplete
circles. The illuminating eye is still present, but like the dark element
it appears withdrawn from the central elements of the image, casting
only a representation of light, in contrast to the encompassing sense of
126 George Hogenson

Figure 5.1 Client’s first sketch

Reproduced with permission

illumination in the first image. Overall, the image has a highly planned
or intentional quality, the result of the artist’s desire to recreate an
experience that was originally spontaneous.
Jung is clear, and ample phenomenological evidence underwrites his
claim, that the most common pattern associated with the experience
of wholeness is the quadratic pattern, frequently but not always within
a circular structure. These are the classic geometric characteristics of
the mandala. Their universality is well attested, ranging from the pat-
terns of Buddhist mandalas such as the Tibetan Kalachakra (Figure
5.3) to the pre-​Columbian Aztec such as the Codex Fejérváry-​Mayer
cosmogram with the fire god Xiuhtecuhtli in the centre (Figure 5.4).
In his essay on mandala symbolism Jung includes a series of
mandala figures, some of his own composition and many from his
patients, in addition to images from cultural traditions such as the pre-​
Columbian cosmogram and the Kalachakra. In all of these traditions
 The geometry of wholeness 127

Figure 5.2 Client’s second sketch

Reproduced with permission

it is important to keep in mind the correlation that inheres between the

cosmographic image and the interior states of those who engage with
the mandala. To further set the stage for the argument of this chapter
I want to add two more of these mandala-​like figures, one from Jung’s
investigations of the Chinese I Ching or Book of Changes and the other
by a patient following a dream (Figures 5.5 and 5.6).
What is important in these two mandala images is the pattern of
quadratic movement either out from a central point or in toward a
central point, and the ambiguity as to which direction the pattern is
moving. Although Jung’s rendering of his patient’s mandala is in black
and white he reports that it was in fact coloured in red, green, yellow
and blue. He goes on to comment that:
128 George Hogenson

Figure 5.3 Kalachakra mandala

Source: WikiCommons

As to the interpretation of the picture, it must be emphasized that

the snake, arranged in angles and then in circles round the square,
signifies the circumambulation of, and way to, the centre. The
snake, as a chthonic and at the same time spiritual being, symbol-
izes the unconscious. The stone in the centre, presumably a cube, is
the quaternary form of the lapis philosophorum. The four colours
also point in this direction. It is evident that the stone in this case
signifies the new centre of personality, the self, which is also sym-
bolized by a vessel.
(Jung 1969b: §651)
 The geometry of wholeness 129

Figure 5.4 Codex Fejérváry-​Mayer

Source: WikiCommons

The geometry of wholeness

The question raised by these and many other examples is whether the
geometry of the symbolic patterns has a relationship to the experi-
ences associated with them or if they are simply conventional patterns
with no deeper significance. Put another way, if we take the two images
produced by my client, is there some underlying relationship between
the patterns and his experience of peacefulness in the first instance and
disturbance in the second? Furthermore, if such a distinction exists,
does it tell us something about the experience of wholeness as a psy-
chological phenomenon?
130 George Hogenson

Figure 5.5 ‘The River Map’, one of the legendary foundations of the I Ching
Reproduced (with permission) from C. G. Jung, ‘Concerning mandala symbolism’, Figure 2,
in Collected Works,Volume 9i

To work out a possible answer to these questions we can look at

what is now recognized as the basic geometry of the natural world,
fractal geometry (Mandelbrot 1983). The origins of fractal geometry
can be traced back at least to the seventeenth century when mathema-
ticians began to work with recursive patterns. Recursion —​the itera-
tive repetition of a simple mathematical process in which the result
of one iteration becomes the variable for the next iteration —​is cen-
tral to the generation of fractal patterns. For example, one can draw
a straight line down the west coast of Norway, and derive one length
for the coastline. It would be immediately evident, however, that this
was an unusually inaccurate map. Through a process of recursive
fractioning of the original line, however, the map will become increas-
ingly accurate. In principle this process could go on almost infinitely,
finally arriving at a map that encompassed even the grains of sand
on the shores of the Hardanger Fjord. More illustrative of the for-
mation of fractal patterns are the correspondences that exist between
the branching patterns of trees and the vein patterns in the leaves of
the tree. Once again, one can see a process of ever-​finer reiteration
 The geometry of wholeness 131

Figure 5.6 Mandala based on a woman’s dream

Reproduced (with permission) from C. G. Jung, ‘Concerning mandala symbolism’, Figure 4,
in Collected Works,Volume 9i

of a simple recursive structure in the formation of the natural world.

Although controversial at extremely large scales, some cosmologists
have suggested that the structure of the elusive dark matter follows a
fractal pattern, and even that the hypothesized multiverse is fractal in
structure.
This last level, while disputed, is at least instructive for purposes
of examining the structure of the Kalachakra and Codex Fejérváry-​
Mayer mandalas, as both of them represent a cosmological map in
the form of the domains of the deities who define their structure. The
degree to which fractal geometry can subsume phenomena ranging
from the structure of neuronal dendrites in the brain to, possibly, the
structure of the multiverse was not central to the study of this form
of geometry until Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–​2010) realized the impor-
tance of scaling or the degree to which a phenomenon at one level of
scale reproduced itself at ever greater scales. This is the principle that
132 George Hogenson

accounts for the self-​similarity —​another concept in scaling phenom-

ena —​between the structure of the tree and the structure of the veins
in the tree’s leaf. Mandelbrot attributes his discovery of scaling to an
accidental reading of a review of a book by the American polymath
George Kingsly Zipf (1900–​1950), upon the recommendation of his
uncle, a distinguished French mathematician.
Zipf was on the faculty of Harvard University, nominally with
an appointment in linguistics but with freedom to pursue a variety
of interests. He eventually referred to himself as a student of human
ecology, by which he meant the entire range of human activity. The
research he is best known for, however, involved the scaling phenom-
ena of human institutions, beginning with the size of towns and cities
but finally grounding on the frequency of words in texts. What Zipf
found was that the relative scale of communities or the frequency of
words in a text all followed the same pattern of distribution. If, in a
given geographic area, the largest community had 5,000 inhabitants,
the next largest community would have approximately 2,500, but there
would be two such communities, and so on down to the smallest com-
munity. The same relations appear in texts and a variety of other phe-
nomena ranging from the intensity of earthquakes to the frequency
of visits to websites on the Internet. Zipf’s law, as this phenomenon is
now known, is a power law distribution, due to the role of an exponent
in the calculation of the pattern, and along with Fibonacci numbers
and fractal geometry it seems to be among a small group of calcula-
tions that apply to situations that otherwise appear to have no relation
to one another.
In a series of papers I have suggested that Zipf’s law sheds light
on elements of Jung’s understanding of symbols and the nature of
archetypal phenomena (Hogenson 2004, 2005, 2009, 2014, 2018). The
argument in these papers has focused on what I have called symbolic
density in which some symbolic structures manifest a deep hermeneu-
tical structure or potential for interpretation. Archetypal phenomena,
in this interpretation, are capable of much deeper interpretation than
other symbolic structures. This distinction would apply to Jung’s cri-
tique of Freud’s understanding of the symbol as basically a sign, with
relatively limited semiotic reference, in distinction to his own under-
standing of the symbol as referencing otherwise inaccessible dimen-
sions of the psyche.
 The geometry of wholeness 133

As with fractals, Zipf’s law relies on an iterative process to work

out the frequency in the various patterns it describes. I now want to
argue that both fractal geometry, as found in Mandelbrot’s work and
Zipf’s theories of scaling, which played a decisive role in the develop-
ment of Mandelbrot’s theorizing, shed light on the geometry of the
images associated with wholeness —​the mandalas of Jung’s patients,
Buddhist meditation, and my own client.

The Mandelbrot set

The Mandelbrot set (Figure 5.7) is probably the best-​known example
of fractal geometry, superseding the Julia set from which it derives
much of its structure. The Mandelbrot set was not, however, developed
by Mandelbrot but by the French mathematician Adrien Douady, who
named the set in honour of Mandelbrot. Much of its fame derives
from renderings of the pattern that add colour to certain outcomes of
the iterative calculation, z=z2+c. As it happens, the colours that are so
captivating are actually outcomes of the equation that fall outside the
stipulated boundaries of the set. As one will see in computer-​generated
renderings of the Mandelbrot set, the patterns that fall outside the
original boundaries frequently begin, at a later point in the iterative
process, to recapitulate at ever smaller scales, the original pattern of
the set. This process of seemingly infinite recursion is one of the most
fascinating aspects of the calculation.
It is also the case, however, that the results of the recursive iteration
of the formula for the set can be graphed in a variety of forms. The
two, to which we will turn our attention here, are known as a bifurca-
tion, or logistic, graph and a cobweb plot or graph. The bifurcation
graph typically appears in the form shown in Figure 5.8.
The bifurcations in the graph correspond to critical inflection points
on the Mandelbrot set. Essentially, what is happening is that as the for-
mula for the Mandelbrot set evolves, the value of z –​in this simplified
­example –​reaches critical points where the graph changes dramati-
cally. If these values are transposed to the bifurcation graph and used
as parameter values in that graph, they correspond to critical bifurca-
tion points in the graph, as can be seen in the illustration in Figure 5.9.
The cobweb plot, on the other hand, has the form shown in
Figure 5.10.
134 George Hogenson

Figure 5.7 The Mandelbrot set

Source: WikiCommons

What interests us here is the relationship between the Mandelbrot

set —​or, for that matter, other fractal patterns that will fall close to the
same graphical outcomes —​the bifurcation diagram and the cobweb
plot (Figures 5.8, 5.9, and 5.10). Using the same parameters for the
calculation in each instance, the graphical depiction of the calculation
falls out in distinct patterns, to which we will attend.
In essence, the initial stages of the iterative calculation for the
Mandelbrot set results in outcomes that are identical or diverge in
only the slightest degree. However, the process of iteration eventually
begins to display the characteristics associated with critical depend-
ency on the initial conditions, and divergence occurs abruptly at an
inflection point in the graphing process. The initial divergence is a sin-
gle bifurcation of the plot on the bifurcation graph. This is followed,
however, by a further bifurcation, and the eventual emergence of a
chaotic regime as the divergences multiply. The point that is of greatest
concern to modelling the mandala patterns illustrated above is the first
 The geometry of wholeness 135

1.5

0.5

0
xn

–0.5

–1

–1.5

(i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v)

–2
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
a

Figure 5.8 Bifurcation graph

Source: WikiCommons

bifurcation. To illustrate this point we can look at a combination of

moments in all three graphs (Figures 5.11, 5.12, and 5.13).
Subsequent bifurcations eventually lead to the chaotic regime.1

Discussion
Among the themes that are central to Jung’s system of psychology,
the ‘unity of opposites’ looms large. Drawing principally from the
fifteenth-​century Cardinal-​philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, Jung’s focus
is on a variety of unities, such as consciousness and the unconscious or
anima and animus. It is in these unities that Jung sees the possibility of
an experience of wholeness that he associates with the quadratic form
of the mandala:

Although ‘wholeness’ seems at first sight to be nothing but an

abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical
in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontane-
ous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala
 newgenrtpdf
136
George Hogenson
Figure 5.9 Bifurcation and Mandelbrot set
Source: WikiCommons
 The geometry of wholeness 137

Figure 5.10 Cobweb plot

Source: ‘Fractal Geometry’, Yale University, Michael Frame, Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–​
2010), and Nial Neger. Open source.

Figure 5.11 The initial stage

Source: Courtesy of Michael Hogg
138 George Hogenson

Figure 5.12 The final point of unity

Source: Courtesy of Michael Hogg

Figure 5.13 Chaos

Source: Courtesy of Michael Hogg

symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people

who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the
historical records of many peoples and many epochs. Their sig-
nificance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by
history as well as by empirical psychology.
(Jung 1969a: §59)
 The geometry of wholeness 139

The other aspect of this view of wholeness, which he derives in part

from his study of Gnosticism, is that the quadratic form not only gives
shape to psychic wholeness but is imbedded in the material world
as well:

The primordial image of the quaternity coalesces, for the Gnostics,

with the figure of the demiurge or Anthropos. He is, as it were,
the victim of his own creative act, for, when he descended into
Physis, he was caught in her embrace. The image of the anima
mundi or Original Man latent in the dark of matter expresses the
presence of a transconscious centre which, because of its quater-
nary character and its roundness, must be regarded as a symbol
of wholeness. We may assume, with due caution, that some kind
of psychic wholeness is meant (for instance, conscious + uncon-
scious), though the history of the symbol shows that it was always
used as a God-​image.
(Jung 1969a: §308)

We can now begin to see the possible importance of the relationship

between fractal geometry, in our example presented by the Mandelbrot
set, and the images of wholeness identified by Jung. The original work
done on fractal geometry was confined to the purely mathemati-
cal world of Georg Cantor and others, but with Mandelbrot’s work
and the implementation of fractal geometry on computers it became
evident that fractals, in large measure, defined the geometry of the
actually existing physical world. If, at the same time, fractals define
important elements of the symbolic world of psychic wholeness as
conceptualized by Jung it becomes possible to hypothesize a level of
psychophysical unity as proposed by Jung, particularly in his collabo-
ration with Wolfgang Pauli.
What we find in the various diagrams presented above is the forma-
tion of a quaternity at precisely that point where the first bifurcation
occurs, as unity separates into duality. Further progress leads inexora-
bly to a chaotic regime of dispersal, both in the physical world and in
the psyche.
Returning then to my client and the two drawings he brought to
our session, we can now see that the spontaneously drawn figure that
brought with it a sense of calm appears, as a simple quaternity, to
140 George Hogenson

occupy that point in the formation of the cobweb plot where unity is
on the cusp of bifurcation. The second drawing, intended to recreate
the spontaneous experience but failing to do so, occupies the space
defined by the bifurcation of unity into duality. A sense of wholeness
infuses the first drawing, while the dissonance of duality is reflected in
the second. In the same manner we can now see in the cosmic man-
dalas such as the Kalachakra or the Aztec Codex Fejérváry-​Mayer a
recognition of the encompassing nature of this inflection point in the
geometry of nature and the psyche. Jung saw this correspondence as
central to his thinking about synchronicity, remarking on the impor-
tance of mathematics as a transcendent aspect of reality:

Psyche and matter exist in one and the same world, and each
partakes of the other, otherwise any reciprocal action would be
impossible. If research could only advance far enough, therefore,
we should arrive at an ultimate agreement between physical and
psychological concepts. Our present attempts may be bold, but
I believe they are on the right lines. Mathematics, for instance, has
more than once proved that its purely logical constructions which
transcend all experience subsequently coincided with the behav-
iour of things. This, like the events I call synchronistic, points to a
profound harmony between all forms of existence.
(Jung 1969a: §413)

The particular mathematics of Jung’s own reflections on wholeness,

of course, are forms of geometry, and we can now begin to see why
the symbolism of wholeness is in fact the form that unifies psyche and
physis.

Note
1 The process by which this pattern unfolds can be viewed in its entirety at
https://​vimeo.com/​13566850

References
Hogenson, G. B. (2004). What are symbols symbols of ? Situated action, myth-
ological bootstrapping and the emergence of the self. Journal of Analytical
Psychology, 49(1): 67–​81. doi:10.1111/​j.0021-​8774.2004.0441.x
 The geometry of wholeness 141

Hogenson, G. B. (2005). The self, the symbolic and synchronicity: virtual

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W. H. Freeman.
Chapter 6

The status of exceptional

experiences in the Pauli-​Jung
conjecture
Harald Atmanspacher

Introduction
Most of our present understanding of mind and its place in nature
began to develop around the turn of the twentieth century and, even-
tually, led to the almost hegemonic pretence of what is today called
physicalism. In a nutshell, physicalism claims that nature, including
the mind, is essentially described and explained by physics. Typically,
physicalist attempts to clarify the nature of mind mean reducing men-
tal states and their behaviour to brain states and their behaviour. Most
contemporary neuroscientists adhere, knowingly or not, to this philo-
sophical programme.
There is a variety of versions of physicalism (eliminative, epiphe-
nomenal, reductive, non-​reductive, etc.) which I cannot discuss in
detail here (see Papineau [2015] for a very brief overview). One crucial
assumption in all of them is the so-​called ‘causal closure (or complete-
ness) of the physical’, stating that every event in nature that has a cause
has a physical cause. This assumption is widely held without discom-
fort, though a number of authors have recently expressed concerns
about its unquestioned validity (Lowe 2000; Montero 2003; Bishop
and Atmanspacher 2011).
However, many of the hopes and promises that the promulgators of
the ‘decade of the brain’ at the turn of the twenty-​first century gener-
ated are still unfulfilled today. There is no doubt that brain research
has yielded important insights, yet an understanding of the fundamen-
tal problem of the relationship between our mental lives and what our
brains do has surely remained an open problem. The naive idea of one-​
to-​one neural correlates of conscious states has proven pure fantasy
 The Pauli-Jung conjecture 143

(cf. Anderson 2010), and other physicalist-​oriented ideas replacing it

may turn out difficult to realise as well.
At present we observe that the lack of success of physicalist
approaches concerning the solution of one of the deepest questions
in the history of mankind, the nature of mind-​matter correlations,
entails the search for alternative approaches. A most prominent one
among those alternatives differs substantially from physicalism and
has received increasing attention under the notion of dual-​aspect
thinking.
The historical protagonist of dual-​aspect thinking in philosophy is
Spinoza, whose conceptual framework addresses the mental and the
physical as the two ‘attributes’ of thought and extension of a psycho-
physically neutral substance. For Spinoza, this substance is divine,
hence infinite, so that it actually has infinitely many attributes. Only
two of them are apperceptible by human beings with their limited
intellectual abilities. For this reason, Spinoza’s philosophical system
belongs to the variety of dual-​aspect monisms.1
Spinoza’s terms of thought and extension suggest that his thinking
is a reaction to Descartes’ interactive dualism with res cogitans and res
extensa. While this dualism clearly violates the assumption of the causal
closure of the physical insofar as it posits that the mental be capable
of acting upon the physical, causal closure in Spinoza is violated in a
subtler way. Since the attributes, which do not interact directly, derive
from one base substance, this substance may inject effects, intrusions
as it were, into the attributes. So they are causally closed against one
another but not against the psychophysically neutral.

Decompositional dual-​a spect monism

Within the tradition of dual-​aspect thinking, one can distinguish two
different, in a sense opposing, base conceptions.2 In one of them, psy-
chophysically neutral elementary entities are composed into sets of such
entities, and depending on the composition these sets acquire mental
or physical properties. Major historic proponents of this composi-
tional scheme are Mach, James, Avenarius, and Russell. In the litera-
ture, this scheme is often referred to as ‘neutral monism’ (Stubenberg
2010; Alter and Nagasawa 2012). A much discussed neo-​Russellian
144 Harald Atmanspacher

version of neutral monism has been proposed by Chalmers (1996),

which has been quite influential, both in the philosophy of mind and
in cognitive neuroscience (cf. the work of Tononi and his group, e.g.,
Oizumi et al. 2014; Tononi 2015; Tononi et al. 2016).
The other base conception is closer to Spinoza’s original way of
thinking, where the psychophysically neutral does not consist of
elementary entities waiting to be composed, but is conceived as one
overarching whole that is to be decomposed. In contrast to the atomis-
tic picture of compositional dual-​aspect monism, the holistic picture
of the decompositional variant today is strongly reminiscent of the
fundamental insight of entanglement in quantum physics. Quantum
systems are wholes that can be decomposed in infinitely many comple-
mentary ways, very close to how Spinoza’s idea of the divine has been
interpreted.
Inspired by its quantum theoretical significance, modern decompo-
sitional dual-​aspect thinking has been mainly proposed by philosophi-
cally oriented physicists in the twentieth century, starting with Bohm
and Pauli (together with the psychologist C. G. Jung). Subsequent
work along the same lines has been due to d’Espagnat, Primas, and
others. A key difference between compositional and decompositional
accounts is that the mental and the physical are reducible to neutral
elements if these are the basis for composition, but they are irreducible
(in the standard understanding of reduction) to a neutral whole if this
is the basis for decomposition.
A second important point is that decomposition necessarily implies
correlations between the emerging parts, while composition does not
necessarily give rise to correlations between different sets of composed
elements. In this way, decompositional dual-​aspect monism has been
highlighted as the one philosophical framework that explains mental-​
physical correlations most elegantly and naturally. The price to be paid
is that the metaphysics of a psychophysically neutral whole is largely
undeveloped and leaves much work to be done. We will present a spec-
ulative approach toward successive layers of decomposition in terms
of symmetry breakings and resulting partitions below in the section on
‘Consciousness and the unconscious in the mental domain’.
One additional piece of support for the decompositional picture
derives from the distinction of ontic and epistemic levels of reality,
which has been successfully employed in the interpretation of quantum
 The Pauli-Jung conjecture 145

physics (Atmanspacher and Primas 2003). The leading analogy here is

that an ultimately undivided ontic universe of discourse is epistemi-
cally inaccessible since it offers no distinctions. Successive decomposi-
tions introduce more and more refined layers that can be epistemically
(e.g. cognitively, or otherwise empirically) accessed.
The decompositional version of dual-​aspect monism suggested by
Pauli and Jung (cf. Atmanspacher 2012 for an overview with many
original references) offers interesting options to explore such refined
layers through Jung’s concept of archetypes, somewhat analogous to
the basic symmetry breakings that governed the early evolution of the
fundamental interactions in the physical universe.

The Pauli-​Jung conjecture

Pauli and Jung began to think about mind-​matter relations fairly soon
after they first met in 1932, but the intense interaction that led to their
version of dual-​aspect monism happened after Pauli’s return from
Princeton to Zurich in 1946. Their discussions were accompanied by
an extensive exchange of ideas that Pauli had with his colleague Fierz
at Basel. Fortunately, much of this material is today accessible (in
German) in von Meyenn’s masterful eight-​volume edition of Pauli’s
correspondence.
Although neither Pauli nor Jung was much inclined to discuss their
ideas with contemporary academic philosophers (aside from a few
exceptions), their conversations had a distinctly philosophical fla-
vour. However, their usage of philosophical concepts and notions was

Mental domain Physical domain

conscious objects observed objects

Collective unconscious Quantum nonlocality

Unus mundus

Figure 6.1 A
 ccording to the Pauli-​Jung conjecture, the mental and the physical are mani-
festations of an underlying, psychophysically neutral, holistic reality, called unus
mundus, whose symmetry must be broken to yield dual, complementary aspects.
From the mental, the neutral reality is approached via Jung’s collective uncon-
scious; from the physical, it is approached via quantum nonlocality.
146 Harald Atmanspacher

unsystematic. It was typical for them to avail themselves of the history

of philosophy as they saw something fit their position or intention.
Nevertheless, their comprehensive correspondence yields valuable
information, allowing a coherent and detailed reconstruction of their
approach: the Pauli-​Jung conjecture (Atmanspacher and Fuchs 2014).
In the following I will sketch the framework of the Pauli-​Jung ver-
sion of decompositional dual-​aspect monism (depicted by the cartoon
in Figure 6.1) in four parts: (1) the relation between local realism and
holism in quantum physics, (2) the relation between consciousness
and the unconscious in Jung’s psychology, (3) the common, psycho-
physically neutral ground of both the mental, conscious realm and the
physical, local realm, and (4) the relation between these realms as a
consequence of and mediated by their common ground.

Local realism and holism in the physical domain

Today there is wide agreement that the fundamental theory of physi-
cal matter is quantum theory. Yet one of its central problems, per-
haps the most difficult one, is a proper understanding of the process of
measurement. Although much progress has been achieved toward its
solution since the early days of quantum mechanics, the measurement
problem is still not completely understood. However, empirical results
and modern formulations of quantum theory allow us to state it in a
way that is more precise than ever before.
A measurement process can be viewed as an intervention decom-
posing the state of a so-​called entangled system, for example the state
Φpair of a photon pair. This pair state is not the same as the product of
the states Φ1 and Φ2 of two separate photons; we write this as Φpair ≠
Φ1 ⊗ Φ2. The two photon states arise from the pair state as soon as a
property of the system, like spin, is measured: Φpair → Φ1 ⊗ Φ2. The
decomposition of the entangled state Φpair into local states Φ1 and Φ2
abolishes the former state Φpair of the system as a whole and entails
nonlocal correlations between its disentangled parts, the two photon
states. These nonlocal correlations are not created by causal signals
between the two photons. They are due to the holistic nature of the
pair state from which they arise.
Conceptually speaking, measurement is the transition from an
unobserved state to observed states of a system. At the same time it
 The Pauli-Jung conjecture 147

suppresses the connectedness constituting a holistic reality and gen-

erates separate local objects constituting a local reality. This issue of
empirical access is mirrored by the important philosophical differ-
ence of ontic and epistemic states. Ontic states and associated intrin-
sic properties refer to the holistic concept of reality, are operationally
inaccessible, and are supposed to characterise the system independ-
ent of its observation and our resulting knowledge. In contrast,
epistemic states and associated contextual properties refer to a local
concept of a reality that is operationally accessible by measurement
(and observation).3
In the framework of algebraic quantum theory, the ontic-​epistemic
distinction can be mathematically formalised and has turned out to be
powerful and attractive for understanding the differences and similari-
ties of various interpretational schemes in quantum theory. A helpful
source for more details in this regard is a comprehensive account of
epistemic and ontic quantum realities by Atmanspacher and Primas
(2003). Today we know that both state concepts, the ontic and the epis-
temic, are together necessary for a comprehensive description of real-
ity; neither of them is sufficient on its own.4
One may wonder why it is useful to have an ontic level of descrip-
tion at which direct empirical (or operational) access is no option in
principle. However, a most appealing feature of an ontic description
is that it comprises first principles and universal laws that are unavail-
able in a purely epistemic description. From a proper ontic description
it is possible to deduce proper epistemic descriptions, given enough
details –​contexts as it were –​are known about the epistemic (empiri-
cal) framework that is at stake.
Although this is a fairly modern picture, it also has a conservative
aspect: quantum theory as of today does not at any place refer to the
mental world of human observers, to their cognitive capabilities or
psychological condition. Any inanimate environment can play the role
of a ‘measuring device’, though in a non-​intentional manner. No con-
sciousness is necessary for measuring a quantum state. On the other
hand, as soon as controlled experiments are considered, it is clear that
issues like the design of an experiment, the choice of observables of
interest, or the interpretation of the results of a measurement are
crucial. They depend on decisions based on the intentions of human
observers and are not part of the formalism of quantum theory.
148 Harald Atmanspacher

In a letter to Fierz of August 10, 1954 (von Meyenn 1999: 742–​747,

translation HA), Pauli speculated:

It might be that matter, for instance considered from the perspec-

tive of life, is not treated ‘properly’ if it is observed as in quantum
mechanics, namely totally neglecting the inner state of the ‘observer’.
[…] The well-​ known ‘incompleteness’ of quantum mechanics
(Einstein) is certainly an existing fact somehow-​somewhere, but of
course it cannot be removed by reverting to classical field phys-
ics (that is only a ‘neurotic misunderstanding’ of Einstein), it has
much more to do with holistic relationships between ‘inside’ and
‘outside’ which contemporary science does not contain.

In his privately distributed manuscript on ‘modern examples of

background physics’, Pauli (1948) emphasised that the measurement
problem ‘does not indicate an incompleteness of quantum theory
within physics but an incompleteness of physics within the totality of
life’. Pauli’s uneasiness with the status of science in general and phys-
ics in particular was not an odd idea but a serious criticism of great
relevance. The question is how to turn it into viable research.

Consciousness and the unconscious in the mental domain

According to the Pauli-​Jung conjecture, the role which measurement
plays as a link between local and holistic realities in physics is mir-
rored by the act in which subjects become consciously aware of ‘local
mental objects’, as it were, arising from holistic unconscious contents
in psychology. The holistic realities of physics and psychology project
in parallel onto mental and physical local realities. This idea is most
clearly elaborated in Jung’s supplement to his ‘On the nature of the
psyche’ (Jung 1969).5 Here is a quote from a letter by Pauli that Jung
cites in footnote 130 in this supplement (ibid.: §439):

[…] the epistemological situation regarding the concepts of ‘con-

sciousness’ and the ‘unconscious’ seems to offer a close analogy to
the situation of ‘complementarity’ in physics, sketched below. On
the one hand, the unconscious can only be made accessible in an
indirect way by its (ordering) influence on conscious contents, on
 The Pauli-Jung conjecture 149

the other hand every ‘observation of the unconscious’, i.e. every

attempt to make unconscious contents conscious, has a prima facie
uncontrollable reaction back onto these unconscious contents
themselves (as is well known, this precludes that the unconscious
can be ‘exhaustively’ brought to consciousness). The physicist will
per analogiam conclude that precisely this uncontrollable backlash
of the observing subject onto the unconscious limits the objec-
tive character of its reality and, at the same time, provides it with
some subjectivity. […] The development of ‘microphysics’ has
unmistakably led to a remarkable convergence of its description
of nature with that of the new psychology: while the former, due
to the fundamental situation known as ‘complementarity’, faces
the impossibility to eliminate actions of observers by determinable
corrections and must therefore in principle relinquish the objective
registration of all physical phenomena, the latter could basically
complement the merely subjective psychology of consciousness by
postulating the existence of an unconscious of largely objective
reality.

It is important to realise that the relation between holistic and local

realms in both mental and physical domains is conceived as bidirec-
tional. Unconscious contents can become conscious, and simulta-
neously this very transition changes the unconscious left behind.
Analogously, physical measurement necessitates a decomposition of
the holistic realm, and simultaneously this very measurement changes
the state of the system left behind. This picture, already outlined in
Pauli’s letter to Fierz of October 3, 1951 (von Meyenn 1996: 377), rep-
resents a genuine interdependence between holistic and local domains.
It can entail indirect mind–​matter correlations via the holistic realm
that occur in addition to those correlations that are due to dual epis-
temic ‘manifestations’ of that realm.
In the same context, Jung (1969: §439) makes a significant move
away from his previous understanding of archetypes as (biological)
hereditary instincts over (psychological) raw feelings and inner images
to the more advanced notion of psychophysically neutral, transcen-
dental (or metaphysical) principles. Since his mature understanding
of archetypes embraces both their manifestations in subjective con-
sciousness and their origin in the impersonal objective unconscious,
150 Harald Atmanspacher

Jung invented the term ‘psychoid’ to characterise them as structural

principles beyond the conscious psyche.

Archetypes and unus mundus

The simple but radical idea of the Pauli-​ Jung conjecture is the
assumption of a background reality from which the mental and the
physical are supposed to emerge as epistemically distinguishable.
Although physics and psychology point to their common basis in
different ways, the basis itself is assumed to be of unitary nature: a
psychophysically neutral domain that is neither mental nor physical,
a tertium quid.
Already in 1948, Pauli expressed his predilection for such a psycho-
physically neutral domain beneath (or beyond) the mental and the
physical in a letter to Fierz of 7 January 1948 (von Meyenn 1993: 496f,
translation HA):

The ordering and regulating factors must be placed beyond the dis-
tinction of ‘physical’ and ‘psychic’ –​as Plato’s ‘ideas’ share the
notion of a concept and of a force of nature (they create actions
out of themselves). I am very much in favour of referring to the
‘ordering’ and ‘regulating’ factors in terms of ‘archetypes’; but
then it would be inadmissible to define them as contents of the psy-
che. The mentioned inner images (‘dominant features of the collec-
tive unconscious’ after Jung) are rather psychic manifestations of
the archetypes which, however, would also have to put forth, cre-
ate, condition anything law-​like in the behaviour of the corporeal
world. The laws of this world would then be the physical manifes-
tations 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.

Jung’s psychology hosts quite a selection of archetypes, to which dif-

ferent degrees of unconscious depth can be ascribed. Among Jungians
there is agreement that the shadow and the anima/​animus complex are
the first and therefore least deep-​seated archetypes with whose mani-
festations individuals become confronted. Candidates for more funda-
mental archetypes are the self, as the goal of the individuation process,
 The Pauli-Jung conjecture 151

and maybe most basic the archetype of number, expressing qualitative

principles like unity, duality, trinity, quaternity, and so forth.
The term Jung used for the ultimately ontic, psychophysically neu-
tral domain without any distinctions is the unus mundus, the one world,
a notion adopted from the 16th-​century Belgian physician and alche-
mist Gerardus Dorneus. In his Mysterium Coniunctionis of 1955–​56,
Jung writes (1970: §767):

Undoubtedly the idea of the unus mundus is founded on the

assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on
an underlying unity, and that not two or more fundamentally dif-
ferent worlds exist side by side or are mingled with one another.
Rather, everything divided and different belongs to one and the
same world, which is not the world of sense but a postulate […].

Divisions or distinctions are a basic principle of every episte-

mology, sometimes called an epistemic split. In somewhat more
abstract terms, distinctions can be conceived as symmetry breakings.
Symmetries in this parlance are invariances under transformations.6
An entirely distinction-​free, totally symmetric state of affairs is asso-
ciated with a radically undivided reality, to which there is no epis-
temic access at all.
When the holistic unus mundus is split, correlations emerge between
the resulting domains. These correlations are remnants, as it were, of
the wholeness that is lost due to the distinction made. Splitting the
unus mundus as the holistic domain into mental and physical domains
suggests ubiquitous correlations between mental and physical states.

Mind–​m atter correlations and synchronicity

Conceiving the mind–​matter distinction in terms of splitting a psy-
chophysically neutral domain implies correlations between mind and
matter as a direct and generic consequence. It is important, though, to
stress that these correlations are not due to causal interactions (in the
sense of efficient causation as usually looked for in science) between
the mental and the physical. In the Pauli-​Jung conjecture it would be
wrong to interpret mind (or mental states) as caused by matter (or
physical states) or vice versa.
152 Harald Atmanspacher

Pauli and Jung discussed such correlations extensively in their cor-

respondence between June 1949 and February 1951 when Jung drafted
his article on synchronicity for the book that he published jointly with
Pauli (Jung and Pauli 1955). A mental and a physical event, apparently
accidental and not necessarily simultaneous, are called synchronistic if
they are neither causally related nor pure chance, but correspond with
one another by their joint meaning.
Pauli and Jung thought that synchronistic phenomena cannot be
corroborated by statistical methods as they are usually applied in the
sciences. In a letter to Fierz of 3 June 1952, Pauli wrote (von Meyenn
1996: 634f, translation HA) that:

synchronistic phenomena […] elude being captured in natural ‘laws’

since they are not reproducible, i.e. unique, and are blurred by the
statistics of large numbers. By contrast, ‘acausalities’ in physics are
precisely described by statistical laws (of large numbers).

And in his ‘Lecture to the foreign people’ (Atmanspacher et al.

1995: 326, translation HA), where Pauli sketched some of his ideas
about biological evolution, he stated that:

external physical circumstances on the one hand and corresponding

adaptive hereditary alterations of genes (mutations) on the other
are not connected causally-​reproducibly, but occur –​correcting the
‘blind’ chance fluctuations of the mutations –​meaningfully and pur-
posefully as inseparable wholes together with the external circum-
stances. According to this hypothesis, which differs from both
Darwin’s and Lamarck’s conception, we encounter the requested
third type of natural laws, consisting of corrections of the fluctua-
tions of chance due to meaningful or purposeful coincidences of non-​
causally connected events.

What Pauli here postulates is a kind of lawful regularity beyond both

deterministic and statistical laws, based on the notion of meaning and,
thus, clearly not a subject of physics proper. In modern philosophy of
mind, meaning is covered by the term ‘intentionality’, and it is under-
stood as a reference relation between a representation and what it rep-
resents (cf. Atmanspacher and Fach 2019 for more details).
 The Pauli-Jung conjecture 153

However, meaning in this sense is also not a subject of psychology

proper. It is a relational concept, relating a mental representation to
objects in the physical world. Therefore, synchronistic events, consti-
tuted by the joint meaning of mental and physical states, are paradigm
examples of mind–​matter correlations, or psychophysical correlations.
They result from the epistemic split, or symmetry breakdown, differ-
entiating the mental and the physical, and they express the undivided
wholeness of the unus mundus from which they derive.
There is a stunning analogy of this picture to physical entangle-
ment sketched above in the section on ‘Local realism and holism in
the physical domain’: just replace Φpair with the psychophysically neu-
tral domain and Φ1 and Φ2 with the mental and the physical. While
physical correlations between two photon states Φ1 and Φ2 are purely
statistical though, correlations between the mental and the physical
comprise both objective and subjective elements: they are meaningful.
At this point it may be interesting to inject that Deleuze, in his stud-
ies of Jung in relation to Spinoza, makes the following observation
(Deleuze 1999: 326–​27):

One feels that the soul and body have at once a sort of identity
that removes the need for any real causality between them, and a
heterogeneity, a heteronomy, that renders it impossible. The iden-
tity or quasi-​identity is an ‘invariance’, and the heteronomy is that
between two varying series, one of which is corporeal, the other
spiritual. Now real causality enters into each of these series on
their own account; but the relation between the two series, and
their relation to what is invariant between them, depends on non-
causal correspondence. If we then ask what concept can account
for such a correspondence, that of expression appears to do so
[…], since it brings a correspondence and a resonance into series
that are altogether foreign to one another.

Deleuze here relates non-​causal correspondence to a resonance express-

ing the identity of the invariant ground of the mental and the physical.
It is an expression of the origin of the experience of meaning, not an
expression of a cause by its effect, as in what he calls real causality. In
the Pauli-​Jung conjecture, this is what synchronicities are all about.
Moreover, archetypes and their role in manifesting synchronicities
154 Harald Atmanspacher

suggest a distinction between two basic kinds of psychophysical cor-

relations for which we have proposed the notions of ‘structural’ and
‘induced’ correlations (Atmanspacher and Fach 2013).
Structural correlations refer to the role of archetypes as ordering
factors with a unidirectional influence on the mental and the physical
(Pauli’s letter to Fierz of 1948, von Meyenn 1993: 496–​97). They arise
due to the epistemic split of the psychophysically neutral domain,
generating mental and physical aspects. Structural correlations
are a straightforward consequence of the basic structure of dual-​
aspect monism. They are assumed to be persistent and empirically
reproducible.
Induced correlations refer to the back-​reaction that changes of con-
sciousness induce in the unconscious and, via the unidirectional cor-
relations, in the physical world as well. (Likewise, measurements of
physical systems induce back-​reactions in the physical ontic reality,
which can lead to changes of mental states.) This way, the picture is
extended to a bidirectional framework of thinking (Pauli’s letter to Jung
of 1954, Jung 1969: §439). In contrast to structural, persistent correla-
tions, induced correlations depend on all kinds of contexts. They occur
only occasionally and are evasive and not (easily) reproducible.
While structural correlations define a baseline of ordinary, robust
psychophysical correlations (such as mind–​ brain correlations or
psychosomatic correlations), induced correlations (positive or nega-
tive) may be responsible for deviations above or below this baseline.
Induced positive correlations, above the baseline, are characterised as
phenomena with excess correlations –​similar to ‘salience’ phenom-
ena (cf. Kapur 2003). Synchronistic events clearly belong to this class.
Induced negative correlations, below the baseline, are characterised as
phenomena with deficit correlations.
Again, in both induced and structural correlations there is no direct
causal relation from the mental to the physical or vice versa (i.e. no
direct ‘efficient causation’). The problem of a direct ‘causal interaction’
between the categorically distinct regimes of the mental and the physi-
cal is thus avoided. Of course, this does not mean that the correlations
themselves have no reason: the origin of structural correlations is the
epistemic split of the psychophysically neutral domain. The origin of
induced correlations is interventions in the conscious mental or in the
 The Pauli-Jung conjecture 155

physical domain, whose back-​effects on the psychophysically neutral

level manifest themselves in the complementary domain, respectively.

Exceptional experiences
Phenomenological typology
Experiences are called ordinary if they are consistent with typical mod-
els of reality that individuals develop to cope with their environment.
In modern societies, basic elements of such models are established
epistemological concepts (such as cause-​and-​effect relations) and sci-
entific principles and laws (such as gravitation). Experiences inconsist-
ent with those basic elements or deviating from them are considered
exceptional (see Fach et al. 2013 for more details).
Two fundamental components within the global model of reality
of individuals are the self-​model and the world-​model. The distinc-
tion between them may seem to resemble the Cartesian distinction of
res cogitans and res extensa, but there is a decisive difference: while
Descartes’ dualism is ontologically conceived, both self-​model and
world-​model in the Pauli-​Jung conjecture are explicitly epistemic.
The world-​model contains representations of states of the material
world, including the individual’s own bodily features. The referents of
these representations are observationally accessible and provide inter-
subjective knowledge, sometimes called ‘objective’ or ‘third-​person’
knowledge. The self-​model contains representations of internal men-
tal states, such as sensations, cognitions, volitions, affects, motiva-
tions, inner images. As a rule, these states can only be experienced by
the individual itself –​they are ‘subjective’ and based on ‘first-​person’
accounts.
World-​model and self-​model are often experienced as correlated.
For instance, the bodily organs or limbs, representations in an indi-
vidual’s world-​model, and bodily sensations, representations in an
individual’s self-​model, are usually experienced in strong mutual rela-
tionship. Nevertheless, an individual can distinguish self and world.
Mental states induced by external sensory stimuli differ from states
generated by internal processing. Individuals are usually capable of
differentiating their inner images, affects and fantasies from their per-
ception of physical events in their world-​model.
156 Harald Atmanspacher

Coincidence phenomena
Connection of ordinarily disconnected elements
of self model and world model

Internal phenomena External phenomena

Deviations of the Deviations of the
self model world model

Dissociation phenomena
Disconnection of ordinarily connected elements
of self model and world model

Figure 6.2 Four fundamental classes of exceptional experiences resulting from the
­conceptual framework of the Pauli-​Jung conjecture

Exceptional experiences (EEs) typically appear as deviations7 in an

individual’s reality model. This entails a classification of EEs based on
two pairs of phenomena (cf. Fach 2011). One pair refers to deviating
experiences within the subject’s self-​model and world-​model, while the
other refers to the way in which elements of those models are merged
or separated above or below ordinary (‘baseline’) correlations. This
results in four classes of EE (see also Figure 6.2).

1. External phenomena are experienced in the world-​model. They

include visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and kinetic phenomena,
the impression of invisible but present agents, inexplicable bodily
changes, phenomena concerning audio or visual recordings or the
location or structure of physical objects.
2. Internal phenomena are experienced in the self-​ model. They
include somatic sensations, unusual moods and feelings, thought
insertion, inner voices, and intriguing inner images. As in class (1),
the affected individual is convinced that familiar explanations are
suspended, and the experiences appear ego-​dystonic.
3. Coincidence phenomena refer to experiences of relations between
self-​model and world-​model that are not founded on regular senses
or bodily functions, but instead exhibit connections between ordi-
narily disconnected elements of the self-​model and world-​model.
Typically, these excess correlations are assumed to be non-​causal,
 The Pauli-Jung conjecture 157

often experienced as a salient or meaningful link between mental

and physical events.8
4. Dissociation phenomena are manifested by disconnections of ordi-
narily connected elements of self-​model and world-​model. For
instance, individuals are not in full control of their bodies, or
experience autonomous behaviour not deliberately set into action.
Sleep paralysis, out-​of-​body experiences,9 and various forms of
automatised behaviour are among the most frequent phenomena
in this class, which is characterised by deficit correlations.

Atmanspacher and Fach (2013, 2019), Fach et al. (2013) and Fach
(2020) showed how this classification is backed up by comprehensive
empirical material. This is not the place to go into details about this.
Let me just state that an overall number of over 2300 cases of EEs
documented at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and
Mental Health (IGPP) at Freiburg and currently six surveys based on
questionnaires for different groups of again more than 2300 individu-
als confirmed the proposed classification impressively.

Transcendence or immanence?
As mentioned above, EEs of the two pairs of phenomena have differ-
ent status. While EEs in classes (1) and (2) refer to internal and external
phenomena, i.e. to deviations of the self-​model and the world-​model
themselves, classes (3) and (4) refer to relations between them. EEs in
(1) and (2) are typically reported as categorially reified with respect to
self or world. EEs in (3) and (4) are basically relational between self
and world, although their experience is often described in reified terms
belonging to self or world or both.
A synchronistic experience, for instance, is not experienced as such
unless the link between a mental state and the physical state to which it
corresponds is experienced. It was Jung’s brilliant move to postulate the
experience of meaning as this link. In a way, this experience of mean-
ing can be regarded as our ‘sense’ of psychophysical correlations, as
the ordinary senses refer to ordinary perception. By postulating mean-
ing as a relational experience, Jung makes explicit that he addresses
something beyond physics and psychology. And by excluding causality
158 Harald Atmanspacher

and chance he goes beyond the two reflexes that the explanatory reper-
toire of physicalism offers for observed correlations.
Both Pauli and Jung insisted that archetypes and anything else
below the horizontal line in Figure 6.1 are not empirically accessible in
any direct way. Yet, since the psychophysically neutral domain below
the line mediates between and impacts on the mental and the physical,
it can generate manifestations that deliver indirect information about
itself. This way of thinking is very much in the Kantian spirit of a
transcendental realm containing the conditions for the possibility of
experiences occurring in empirical reality. The transcendental itself
remains inaccessible.
But this position is not canonical. There is a long tradition of so-​
called mystical experiences that are neither reified nor relational, but
rather immanent.10 The classic work by Stace (1960) extracted some
elementary features of mystical experiences from various spiritual tra-
ditions, some of which also relate to dreams: unification of opposites;
no distinction between mental and physical; no spatial or temporal
localisation; intense emotion of peace, joy, bliss, blessedness, lucidity
or light; awareness beyond ordinary mental functions. Marshall (2005)
provides a more recent, very readable and detailed study of mystical
experiences.
Mystical experiences are hard to communicate in conventional lan-
guage and logic, and corresponding attempts often result in paradoxi-
cal formulations (Bagger 2007). Opposite notions such as good and
evil can emerge as simultaneous representations of an underlying iden-
tity in the sense of a coincidence of opposites, a big theme of the Neo-​
Platonist Nicolas of Cusa (Miller 2013) and adopted by Jung. Also
in the terminology of Jung (1953), the many facets of the individual
ego (first-​person singular, with its first-​person perspective) are seen as
representations of an overarching archetypal self that unfolds itself in
the process of individuation.
Adopting a notion introduced by Gebser (1986), we proposed char-
acterising these types of experiences as ‘acategorial’ (Atmanspacher
1992; Atmanspacher and Fach 2005), referring to states that are expe-
rienced without conceptual, or categorial, content (see Gunther 2003;
Feil and Atmanspacher 2010). The difficulties in communicating these
experiences, as those of acategorial states in general, often lead to met-
aphorical descriptions in which categorial terms are used to indicate
 The Pauli-Jung conjecture 159

what has been experienced acategorially. One way to do this amounts

to reifying projections onto physical objects or mental images.
An example: experiences of joy, bliss and lucidity are often referred
to as experiences of ‘light’. However, it would be a naive misunder-
standing to interpret such experiences as an electromagnetic field
within the body. And it would be equally misguided to interpret them
in terms of a merely mental image of light. The mystic sees them as
ultimately transcending the distinction between self and world, inside
and outside, subject and object. Marshall (2005: 24) has an impressive
example of a light experience that starts relational, that is, between
inside and outside, and becomes immanent, that is, transcends that
distinction:

I suddenly found myself surrounded, embraced, by a white light,

which seemed both to come from within and from without, a very
bright light but quite unlike any ordinary physical light. […] I had
the feeling of being ‘one’ with everything and ‘knowing’ all things.
[…] I had the sense of this being utter Reality, the real Real, far
more real and vivid than the ordinary everyday ‘reality’ of the
physical world.

If one trusts the sources, it is crucial for such experiences to be stupen-

dous experiences of numinosity. We may assume that such experiences
actually belong neither to the physical nor to the mental realm, nor are
they relations between the two as in experienced meaning. If meaning
is a relation explicated through an epistemic mind–​matter split, imma-
nent experiences point right to the psychophysically neutral source of
explicate meaning. They are non-​discursive yet open to experience.
But careful: without the epistemic split of subject and object, such
experiences cannot be subjective in the usual sense of a first-​person
experience any more!

Mysterium coniunctionis
At the end of his life, Jung published his last major work, which is
also his final account on alchemy: Mysterium Coniunctionis (1970). At
the end of this book we find several sections in Chapter VI, in which
he explains his eventual understanding of the alchemical coniunctio,
160 Harald Atmanspacher

the coincidence of opposites. And here we find his last great move,
enlarging his framework of thinking from his previous neo-​Kantian
stance of an inaccessible transcendence to the direct experience of
immanence.
Jung’s account of the coniunctio is essentially based on his read-
ing of Gerardus Dorneus (also known as Gerhard Dorn) whom we
met before, a follower and promulgator of the ideas and scriptures of
Paracelsus. One of Dorn’s most important works was his Speculativa
Philosophia, part two of his Clavis Totius Philosophiae Chymisticae of
1567.11 Dorn, and with him Jung, distinguishes three successive stages
or degrees of the coniunctio.
The first of them, the unio mentalis, aims –​roughly speaking –​at the
emergence of the self from the ego in the process of individuation, in
other words: toward self-​awareness. Jung (1970: §707) writes:

In the language of hermetic philosophy, the conscious ego-​

personality’s coming to terms with its own background, the so-​
called shadow, corresponds to the union of spirit and soul in the
unio mentalis, which is the first stage of the coniunctio. The extreme
opposition of the shadow to consciousness is mitigated by comple-
mentary and compensatory processes in the unconscious.

Elsewhere Jung expresses that the shadow is just the first encounter
with elements of the unconscious, of which others have to follow in
order to complete the process (see also the section above on ‘Archetypes
and unus mundus’).
In the second stage, the integrated mind (unio mentalis) is to become
united with the bodily sphere, respectively with the corporeal world
in general. This refers directly to the mind–​matter problem. At the
second-​stage coniunctio, relations between the mental and the physi-
cal are explicitly experienced. While there is always a temptation to
project these experiences into the mental or the physical, they must be
understood as relational, not reified.12 This is where Jung (1970: §662,
translation HA) places the relevance of synchronistic phenomena:

Although synchronistic phenomena occur in time and space, they

are remarkably independent of these two indispensable deter-
minants of physical existence and do not conform to the law of
 The Pauli-Jung conjecture 161

causality in our scientific worldview. Its tendency to carefully sepa-

rate all parallel events from one another is absolutely necessary for
reliable scientific knowledge, but it also loosens and obscures the
universal connectedness of events. This in turn renders any insight
into the unity of the world more and more difficult.

Only if the second-​stage coniunctio is accomplished does the possi-

bility of the most comprehensive third-​stage coniunctio arise: the unifi-
cation with and in the unus mundus (Jung 1970: §760 translation HA):

The one and simple is what Dorneus called the unus mundus. This
one world was the res simplex. For him, the third and highest
degree of the coniunctio was the union of the integrated human
with the unus mundus –​the potential world of the first day of crea-
tion, when nothing was yet in actu, no two or many, but just one.

Jung uses his terms carefully: res simplex, the eternal ground of all
empirical being as the merger of res cogitans and res extensa; poten-
tiality in contrast to actuality, so that we may speak of the reality of
both the possible and the actual; and the first day of creation as the
undivided oneness from which the multifaceted diversity of the empir-
ical world emerges.
The mysterium coniunctionis is the alchemist’s formula, and Jung’s
eventual testimony, for experiences that transcend the distinction of
the mental and the physical and point toward their common ground.
Yet the mysterium can be experienced as immanent, as such, not only
as a metaphysical speculation of our cognitive minds.

Acknowledgements
This article contains material adapted from previous publications in
the Journal of Consciousness Studies 19(9) (2012): 96–​120, and in Mind
and Matter 15 (2017): 111–​129, with permission by author and editors.

Notes
1 Spinoza was well received by the German idealists (Hegel: ‘philosophy is
Spinozist or it’s no philosophy at all’), and a number of other important
162 Harald Atmanspacher

figures in the history of philosophy, such as Schopenhauer, Avenarius,

James, Whitehead, and Russell remind us of Spinoza’s dual-​aspect think-
ing. Its more recent renaissance in philosophy is exemplified by philoso-
phers such as Brüntrup, Chalmers, Deleuze, Nagel, Sayre, Seager, Strawson,
and others. Philosophically interested physicists with a dual-​aspect account
are Mach, Pauli, Bohm and, more recently, Polkinghorne, Lockwood,
d’Espagnat, Primas, and Haken. Of particular interest are variants of dual-​
aspect thinking in psychology. Pertinent names are Fechner, Jung (together
with Pauli), and currently Velmans, Damasio, Solms, Panksepp, Hobson,
Friston, and the much discussed approach by Tononi.
2 A compact account of twentieth-​century examples of these conceptions
can be found in Atmanspacher (2014), including commentaries by Horst,
Seager, and Silberstein.
3 It should be noted that David Bohm’s version of aspect monism offers a
one-​to-​one parallel to the ontic–​epistemic distinction with his distinction
of implicate and explicate orders (see Atmanspacher 2014 for discussion).
Murphy (1998) discusses how Bohm’s terminology translates into the con-
ceptual framework that the French philosopher Deleuze (1994) proposed.
His distinction is between the virtual and the actual, which together consti-
tute reality. With these terms Deleuze counters the opposition of possibility
(or potentiality) versus reality that has been prominent in some interpreta-
tions of quantum theory. On Deleuze’s view, the possible is already part of
reality, not a precursor to reality from which it unfolds.
4 In a more comprehensive picture, the concepts of epistemic and ontic states
need to be considered relative to a chosen descriptive framework. This
leads to the notion of relative onticity introduced by Atmanspacher and
Kronz (1999).
5 The German original was first published as ‘Der Geist der Psychologie’
in 1946, and later revised and expanded (including the supplement) as
‘Theoretische Überlegungen zum Wesen des Psychischen’ in 1954.
6 For instance, the curvature of a circle is invariant under rotations by
any arbitrary angle. A circle thus exhibits complete rotational symmetry.
Symmetry breakings are a powerful mathematical tool in large parts of
theoretical physics, but we do not know better than by pure speculation
which symmetries are to be ascribed to the unus mundus.
7 Such deviations are often referred to as ‘anomalies’, or ‘paranormal’, ‘psy-
chic’ or ‘psi’ experiences. We prefer the notion of a deviation because the
theoretical approach taken here entails basic classes of such deviations that
can be systematically distinguished. This renders the term ‘anomalies’ (in
the sense of singular unsystematic occurrences) to be at least arguable –​if
not inappropriate.
 The Pauli-Jung conjecture 163

8 Meaningful coincidences such as ‘synchronicities’ à la Jung (1972) are

examples, including extrasensory perception and related phenomena.
9 Metzinger (2005) provides a challenging discussion of out-​of-​body experi-
ences based on the concept of phenomenal models of intentionality rela-
tions. See also Atmanspacher and Fach (2019).
10 It is not accidental that Deleuze coined the notion of immanence as the
‘vertigo of philosophy’, vividly discussed and meticulously analysed by
Kerslake (2002). See also his more general account in Kerslake (2007).
11 Dorn’s Speculative Philosophy has been translated by Paul Ferguson and is
available through Adam McLean’s alchemy website at www.alchemyweb-
site.com/​bookshop/​mohs34.html.
12 Jung discusses the reification of the relational at length, for instance when
he criticises the misplaced concreteness sometimes ascribed to alchemi-
cal symbols, such as the lapis as a physical body that can be produced in
the laboratory.

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Chapter 7

Holistic enchantment and

eternal recurrence
Anaxagoras, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Klages,
and Jung on the beauty of it all
Paul Bishop

Anaxagoras answered a man who was […] asking why one should
choose rather to be born than not by saying ‘for the sake of viewing
the heavens and the whole order of the universe’.
(Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, book 1, §5: 1216a 11–​14)

In his famous encomium of Goethe in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche

set out in detail exactly why he regarded this great author of German
classicism so highly:

No mere German event, but a European event; a grand attempt

to surmount the eighteenth century, by a return to nature, by an
ascension to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-​
surmounting on the part of that century. —​He possessed its
strongest instincts: its sentimentality, its nature worship, its ten-
dencies anti-​historic, idealistic, unreal, and revolutionary (the last
is only a form of the unreal). He called to his aid history, science,
antiquity, and likewise Spinoza, but above all practical activity;
he encircled himself with nothing but defined horizons; he did
not sever himself from life, but placed himself in it; he was not
desponding, and took as much as possible on himself, over him-
self, and into himself. What he aspired to was totality […].1

Or to put it another way, Nietzsche regarded Goethe as an exemplar

of holism.
For Nietzsche, the world is both disenchanted and enchanted: from
a transcendental perspective (associated with Judeo-​Christianity), the
world is disenchanted, it is ‘the work of a suffering and tormented
168 Paul Bishop

God’,2 and at one point even Zarathustra cries out, ‘There is much
filth in the world!’ (Es gibt in der Welt viel Kot).3 However, Zarathustra
also goes on to say, ‘But the world itself is not yet a filthy monster on
that account’, and from an immanent perspective the world is in fact
enchanted —​or potentially so. The means by which Nietzsche pro-
poses to re-​enchant (or rediscover the primordial enchantment of) the
world is the doctrine of the eternal recurrence.
Various sources have been suggested for Nietzsche’s doctrine of eter-
nal recurrence, including Heraclitus,4 and one of the earliest editors
of Nietzsche’s works, Rudolf Steiner, believed that he had discovered
various sources of Nietzsche’s thinking in his library —​in this case, in
the works of the German positivist philosopher and economist, Eugen
Dühring (1833–​1921):

A penetrating conception of Nietzsche’s final creative period

shone clearly before me as I read his marginal comments on
Eugen Dühring’s chief philosophical work. Dühring there devel-
ops the thought that one can conceive the cosmos at a single
moment as a combination of elementary parts. Thus the history
of the world would be the series of all such possible combina-
tions. When once these should have been formed, then the first
would have to return, and the whole series would be repeated. If
anything thus exists in reality, it must have occurred innumer-
able times in the past, and must occur again innumerable times
in future. Thus we should arrive at the conception of the eter-
nal repetition of similar states of the cosmos. Dühring rejects
this thought as an impossibility. Nietzsche reads this; he receives
from it an impression, which works further in the depths of his
soul and finally takes form within him as ‘the return of the simi-
lar’, which, together with the idea of the ‘superman’, dominates
his final creative period.
I was profoundly impressed —​indeed, shocked —​by the impres-
sion which I received from thus following Nietzsche in his reading.
For I saw what an opposition there was between the character of
Nietzsche’s spirit and that of his contemporaries. Dühring, the
extreme positivist, who rejects everything which is not the result
of a system of reasoning directed with cold and mathematical
regularity, considers ‘the eternal repetition of the similar’ as an
 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence 169

absurdity, and sets up the idea only to show its impossibility; but
Nietzsche must take this up as his solution of the world-​riddle, as
an intuition arising from the depths of his own soul.5

Steiner emphasizes the psychological impact that this doctrine had

on him, and thereby illustrates the formative intention underlying
Nietzsche’s formulation of the doctrine:6

Nietzsche’s ideas of the ‘eternal repetition’ and of ‘superman’

remained long in my mind. […] Nietzsche perceived the evolu-
tion of humanity in such a way that whatever happened at any
moment has already happened innumerable times in precisely the
same form, and will happen again innumerable times in future. The
atomistic conception of the cosmos makes the present moment
seem a certain definite combination of the smallest entities; this
must be followed by another, and this in turn by yet another —​
until, when all possible combinations have been formed, the first
must again appear. A human life with all its individual details has
been present innumerable times; it will return with all its details
innumerable times.
The ‘repeated earth-​ lives’ of humanity shone darkly in
Nietzsche’s subconsciousness. […]7

In one of the models of ‘eternal recurrence’ found in Nietzsche’s

Nachlass, he speaks of ‘the great dice game of existence’,8 and
another —​and highly charismatic —​presentation of the doctrine can
be found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Following the initial presenta-
tion of the doctrine of eternal recurrence in The Gay Science, §341,
and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part Three, ‘Of the Vision and the
Riddle’, in the later chapter of Part Three entitled ‘The Convalescent’,
Zarathustra’s animals proclaim him to be ‘the teacher of the eternal
recurrence’, and they summarize this teaching for him in these words:

‘I shall return, with this sun, with this eagle, with this serpent —​
not to a new life or a better life or a similar life:
I shall return eternally to this identical and self-​same life, in the
greatest of things and in the smallest, to teach once more the eter-
nal recurrence of all things,
170 Paul Bishop

To speak once more the teaching of the great noontide of earth

and man, to tell man of the Superman once more’.9

But are Zarathustra’s animals right?

Numerous thinkers have explored the implications of the doctrine
of eternal recurrence, including Lou Andreas-​Salomé, Oskar Ewald,
Georg Simmel, Ernst Bertram, Charles Andler, Ludwig Klages, Alfred
Baeumler, Erika Emmerich, Thierry Maulnier, Karl Jaspers, Ludwig
Griesz, and Martin Heidegger —​as Karl Löwith (1897–​1973) pointed
out in his study, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence
of the Same (1935).10 And to this list of names one could also add
Pierre Klossowski,11 Gilles Deleuze, and other French interpreters of
Nietzsche.
Heidegger places a reading of the chapter entitled ‘The Convalescent’
at the centre of his essay ‘Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?’12 In order
to answer this question, Heidegger turns to the chapter entitled ‘The
Convalescent’ and foregrounds the passage where Zarathustra iden-
tifies himself as ‘the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the
advocate of the circle’.13 On Heidegger’s account, all three things
point to the doctrine of the eternal recurrence, and he reformulates
Zarathustra’s answer as follows: ‘Zarathustra is the teacher of the
Eternal Recurrence of the same and the teacher of the Superman’,
adding that ‘Zarathustra teaches the Superman because he is the
teacher of the Eternal Recurrence’ —​and vice versa.14
Thus Heidegger argues that ‘both doctrines’, that is, eternal recur-
rence and the Übermensch, ‘belong together in a circle’, and ‘by its cir-
cling, the doctrine accords with what is, with the circle that constitutes
the Being of beings —​that is, the permanent within Becoming’.15 For
Heidegger, eternal recurrence of the same is ‘the name of the Being
of beings’, and the Übermensch is ‘the name of the human being who
corresponds to this Being’.16
Yet Heidegger remains concerned about the doctrine of the eternal
recurrence of the same, on which he appends a note to his essay. Here
he announces that Nietzsche himself knew that what Zarathustra
calls his ‘most abysmal thought’ remains ‘an enigma’, and he adds
that we ourselves are ‘all the less free to think that we can solve the
enigma’ —​and yet: ‘the obscurity of this final thought in Western
metaphysics should not seduce us into avoiding that thought by
 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence 171

subterfuge’.17 According to Heidegger, there are two possible kinds

of subterfuge or ways of avoiding the thought of eternal recurrence.
First, we can say that Nietzsche’s thought eternal recurrence is ‘a kind
of “mysticism” and has no place before thought’; and second, we can
say that ‘this thought is already ancient’, by identifying it with other
cyclical views of the course of the world (such as the one found in
Heraclitus). In Heidegger’s view, neither strategy is satisfactory, and
he goes on to reject the suggestion that Nietzsche’s doctrine of eter-
nal recurrence should be interpreted ‘in a mechanical sense’; rather,
he argues, it hints at something metaphysical —​and at something
beyond metaphysics:

That Nietzsche experienced and expounded his most abysmal

thought from the Dionysian standpoint only suggests that he was
still compelled to think it metaphysically, and only metaphysically.
But it does not preclude that this most abysmal thought conceals
something unthought, which also is impenetrable to metaphysical
thinking.18

For different reasons, albeit ones that are, as in Heidegger, indexed

to Platonism and to the overcoming or overturning of Platonism —​
Nietzsche talks about ‘inverted Platonism’, while Deleuze’s work
has been described as an ‘overturning of Platonism’,19 —​ Deleuze
is intrigued by Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence, which he
discusses at various points in his work, including in Nietzsche and
Philosophy (1962), in Nietzsche (1965), and in Difference and Repetition
(1968).20
In Nietzsche and Philosophy, for instance, Deleuze offers a reading
of eternal recurrence that is at variance from that of the majority of
other commentators. As it is presented in ‘The Convalescent’ —​‘all
things recur eternally, and we ourselves with them […]’, etc. —​eternal
recurrence involves the identity of what recurs. For Deleuze, however,
eternal recurrence involves similarity and dissimilarity, or more pre-
cisely it is the recurrence of dissimilarity. According to Deleuze:

We misinterpret the expression ‘eternal return’ if we understand it

as ‘return of the same’. It is not being that returns but rather the
returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of
172 Paul Bishop

becoming, and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which
returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed
of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in eternal return
does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the con-
trary, the fact of returning for that which differs.21

In his 1965 study of Nietzsche, Deleuze reaffirms that one should

avoid ‘turning the Eternal Recurrence into a return of the Same’, and
he describes it as erroneous to believe that eternal recurrence refers
to ‘a cycle, or a return of the Same, or a return to the same’ (adding
it is equally erroneous to believe it refers to an ancient idea borrowed
from the Greeks, the Hindus, or the Babylonians…).22 In Difference
and Repetition, a kind of extended gloss on ideas originally explored
in relation to eternal recurrence, Deleuze declares:

It is not the same which returns, it is not the similar which returns;
rather, the Same is the returning of that which returns, —​in other
words, of the Different; the similar is the returning of that which
returns, —​ in other words, of the Dissimilar. The repetition in
the eternal return is the same, but the same in so far as it is said
uniquely of difference and the different. This is a complete reversal
of the world of representation, and of the sense that ‘identical’ and
‘similar’ had in that world.23

Rather, Deleuze prefers to read Nietzsche in terms of active and reac-

tive forces, as several passages from Nietzsche and Philosophy will con-
firm, and the starting-​point for this approach is a twofold one: first,
Spinoza’s observation in his Ethics (part 3, proposition 2, scholium)
that ‘no one has yet determined what the body can do’;24 and second,
Nietzsche’s remark that ‘we are in the phase of modesty of conscious-
ness’.25 Although Deleuze offers what seems like a curiously abstract
definition of the body as ‘[a]‌relation between dominating and domi-
nated forces […] whether chemical, biological, social, or political’,26
the key distinction for Deleuze is between ‘superior and dominating
forces’ and ‘inferior or dominated forces’, i.e., between active and reac-
tive forces. On this basis, Deleuze proposes the following reading of
eternal recurrence:
 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence 173

The eternal return produces becoming-​active. It is sufficient to

relate the will to nothingness to the eternal return in order to real-
ize that reactive forces do not return. However far they go, how-
ever deep the becoming-​reactive of forces, reactive forces will not
return. The small, petty, reactive man will not return.27

And in his 1965 study of Nietzsche, Deleuze is even clearer in his

emphasis on the positive aspects of eternal recurrence:

Affirmation alone returns, this that can be affirmed alone returns,

joy alone returns. Everything that can be denied, everything that
is negation, is expelled due to the very movement of the eternal
return. We were entitled to dread that the combinations of nihil-
ism and reactivity would eternally return too. The eternal return
must be compared to a wheel; yet, the movement of the wheel is
endowed with centrifugal powers that drive away the entire neg-
ative. Because Being imposes itself on becoming, it expels from
itself everything that contradicts affirmation, all forms of nihilism
and reactivity: bad conscience, ressentiment…, we shall witness
them only once. […] The eternal return is the Repetition; but it is
the Repetition that selects, the Repetition that saves. Here is the
marvelous secret of a liberating and selective repetition.28

Yet Deleuze’s reading can be challenged, not least because it appears

to overlook Zarathustra’s distress precisely that ‘alas, man recurs eter-
nally! The little man recurs eternally!’,29 and Deleuze’s account has
most recently been challenged by Michel Onfray. For as Onfray points
out, to interpret the eternal return as a selective principle occludes its
function as a tragic principle which invokes what Nietzsche elsewhere
calls amor fati and serves as the keystone to the entire existential edifice
constructed by him.30
An intriguing critique of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence
was advanced by a thinker who is, today, comparatively unknown
but who was, in fact, one of the earliest significant commentators
on Nietzsche’s work, Ludwig Klages (1872–​1956).31 (Recent work on
this controversial figure includes studies by Nitzan Lebovic, who has
sought to situate him in the content of a so-​called ‘Nazi biopolitics’;32
174 Paul Bishop

and Jason Ā. Josephson-​Storm, who has placed Klages in a tradition

that expounds the ‘myth’ of disenchantment, and presented him as a
combination of the Derridean critique of logocentrism, the Frankfurt
School critique of the Enlightenment, and the Heideggerian suspicion
of technology —​albeit as a ‘monstrous’ one, and explicitly not in an
attempt to rehabilitate Klages.)33
Now in some ways Klages can be seen as an holistic thinker, inas-
much as he offers a total interpretation of reality using such concepts
as spirit (Geist) and soul (Seele); in other ways he is an anti-​holistic
thinker, inasmuch as he conceives of reality as being radically fis-
sured, broken, split between Geist and Seele, regarding these two
forces as being radically opposed. For his ‘signature concept’ of
spirit or Geist, Klages is profoundly indebted to Aristotle who, in
his treatise On the Generation of Animals, advanced the view that,
in conception, the female contributes the matter of the future com-
posite, while the male contributes the soul. The intellect, however,
enters the individual at another point: it is, in Aristotle’s phrase, an
‘intellect from without’ (nous thurathen).34 Klages himself specifically
mentions this doctrine on two occasions in his main work, The Spirit
as Adversary of the Soul (1929–​1932), referring to it as ‘the doctrine
that the spirit is added to life from outside (= thurathen, according to
Aristotle’s expression)’.35
In his early treatise Of Cosmogonic Eros (1922;21926) Klages stated
his core thesis as follows:

The cosmos is alive, and all life is polarized into soul (psyche) and
body (soma). Wherever there is living body, there is soul; wherever
soul, there is living body. The soul is the sense of the body, the image
of the body is the appearance of the soul. Whatever appears, that
has a sense; and every sense reveals itself as it appears. Sense [der
Sinn] is experienced internally, appearance [die Erscheinung] exter-
nally. The former must become image if it is to be communicated,
and the image must become internal again, for it to have an effect.
Those are, expressed without metaphor, the poles of reality.36

What Klages presents to us here in ‘cosmic’ terms —​a dialectical

interrelation between dynamic opposites, a union born of an energic
 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence 175

tension —​is, he thinks in The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul, also

observable in world history:

The history of humanity shows us in humankind and only in

humankind the war ‘to the knife’ between all-​embracing life and a
power outside space and time, which wants to sever the poles and
thereby destroy them, to ‘de-​soul’ the body, disembody the soul: it
is called spirit [Geist] (Logos, Pneuma, Nous).37

And in book 4, part 3, c­ hapter 54, Klages offers the following remark-
able image to describe his thesis:

The spirit resembles a wedge driven into the life-​cell, a wedge

whose goal is to tear it in half or, less metaphorically expressed, to
deprive the body of soul, to deprive the soul of body, and in this
way to kill life itself.38

So it would be fair to say that Klages’s central thesis is admirably

summed up in the title of his major work: for him, Geist is the enemy of
Seele, or (more usually) ‘the spirit is the adversary of the soul’, or (less
conventionally) ‘mind is the opponent of psyche’. Klages would have
us believe that the rational mind has split us apart from the passionate-​
intuitive part of our selves, so that our (instrumental) consciousness is
purchased at the price of alienation from the emotional and affective
component of our identity.
In his book-​ length survey of Nietzsche’s philosophy published
in 1926 and entitled The Psychological Achievements of Friedrich
Nietzsche (Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Friedrich Nietzsches),
Klages examined Nietzsche’s philosophical ‘research goals’ and ‘meth-
ods’, before considering the ‘applications and results’ of this investiga-
tive methodology and discussing a number of key ideas and motifs
in Nietzsche’s philosophy.39 In the third part of this study, Klages
offers a wide-​ranging critique of Nietzsche, beginning with what he
calls Nietzsche’s ‘Socratism’, by which Klages means —​in this respect,
anticipating Heidegger’s later critique in his Nietzsche lectures —​40
that Nietzsche failed to escape the discursive space of Platonic (i.e.,
metaphysical) thought as found in the dialogues attributed to Socrates.
176 Paul Bishop

Moreover, as far as Klages is concerned, the doctrine of eternal recur-

rence is a nonsensical idea and one of Nietzsche’s biggest mistakes; in
Klages’s eyes, it was conceptually flawed through and through:

Think about it: a Heraclitean as convinced as Nietzsche was knows

no things, therefore no similarity of things, therefore no repeti-
tion of any kind. Similar things can recur, identical things never.
Conversely, the assumption of repetitions constitutes the defining
characteristic of mechanistic thought, irrespective of whether one
is thinking of the numbers of plates that are manufactured from
one and the same factory model, or the rotations of a wheel at a
certain speed, or for that matter a cosmic wheel, whose each and
every rotation requires billion upon billions of years. So much is
evident. Simply unceasing repetition, the symbol of all mecha-
nistic thought and the most unconditional counterexpression of
life, is affirmed by Nietzsche the Heraclitean and in The Will to
Power, where he tries to cover up the contradiction by separating
the infinity of the repetitions from a merely finite world machine
of mechanistics through an emphasis on its terrible prospect: the
most extreme exaggeration of a baroque ideal called perpetuum
mobile!41

In order to appreciate this critique of Nietzsche, we have to see it in

the context of Klages’s philosophy as a whole, in which two ideas
are central. First, there is the doctrine of the ‘reality of images’ (die
Wirklichleit der Bilder), an astonishing attempt on the part of Klages
to reverse the entire Western philosophical tradition and argue for the
ontological superiority of the image as opposed to the thing (material-
ism) or the Idea (Platonic idealism).42
On the account of the doctrine of the ‘reality of images’ offered by
Franz Tenigl,43 these images are powers or essences of the soul that are
the basis of all cosmic (elementary) or cellular (organic) phenomena.
In such organisms as flowers, plants, or human beings, they manifest
themselves and shape matter in the form of growth, metabolism, and
inheritance. In animals they additionally awaken drives and instincts
that initiate motions. In human beings, too, these vegetative and ani-
mal vital processes manifest themselves, while over and beyond these
there arises, independent of the drives, the ‘capacity for vision’. In this
 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence 177

way the world itself awakens and reveals itself for human beings to be
a reality of images, thus enabling them to create symbols of reality that
in turn renews for all intuitively envisioned individuals the revelation
of essences. Here lies the root of myth, religious cult, and festival, as
well as poetry and art.
Although these powers of the soul are invisible, they are called
‘images’ because they can appear to humans and to animals alike in
sensorily intuitable images. Every intuitive image (Anschauungsbild),
which is split up across different senses, is governed by a meaning or
a significance with which the essence, the power of the soul, manifests
itself. The experiential process constitutes a polaristic relation between
the images of the world as they manifest themselves (the macrocosm)
and the receptive soul (the microcosm). This means that it is only
because an essential life appears in the images that we feel or experi-
ence ourselves as being alive.
Klages himself defined his doctrine of the reality of images in the
following terms:

The reality of images is a reality of appearance [eine Wirklichkeit

der Erscheinung] insofar as it is a reality of souls that appear or,
since souls are at any rate alive, a reality of constantly changing
life. The comparison: real, more real, most real means: alive, more
alive, most alive, and the basis for all gradations of value appropri-
ate to the world lies in the degree of vital fullness [Lebensfülle].44

The ‘reality of images’ is a reality that ‘reaches back in an endless

chain into what has no beginning’ (endlos verkettet zurückreicht ins
Anbeginnlose), for ‘primordial images are souls of the past as they
appear’ (Urbilder sind erscheinende Vergangenheitsseelen);45 time and
again Klages emphasizes that these ‘images’ (Bilder) are ‘powers that
manifest themselves’ (wirkende Mächte).46 For Klages, ‘reality’ is ‘pure
happening’ (Geschehen schlechthin)47 —​ or in Deleuzian terms, an
‘event’.
Second, and related to the doctrine of the reality of images, is
Klages’s notion of elementare Ähnlichkeit or ‘elementary similarity’.

If somebody looks without inhibition at an object and its reflec-

tion, he or she judges the appearances of both as being completely
178 Paul Bishop

equal (in spite of the fact that in the mirror-​image right and left are
of course reversed). How much more closely by contrast must we
determine the relation of the fleeting images of primordial space to
each and every present impression-​image [Eindrucksbild] of sensory
space, since here being equal certainly does not prevail? Our answer
is as follows: both are connected by means of elementary similarity.48

The notion of ‘elementary similarity’ is the means by which Klages

explains that reality as we experience it is intuited as a coherent
whole.49 In each sensory impression (Eindruck) the temporal-​spatial
images converge because of their ‘similarity’ or, as Klages puts
it: first, ‘impression images [Eindrucksbilder] emerge’ —​literally,
‘coagulate’ —​‘from the concurrently experienced similarities of per-
ceived primordial images’; and second, ‘the meaningful grouping of
the impression images results in accordance with elementary simi-
larities’.50 On this conception of the ‘reality of life’ (Wirklichkeit des
Lebens) everything is connected, not by cause and effect, but exclu-
sively according to ‘elementary similarities’, so that ‘the weaving
power of all that belongs together through relation or opposition’
is located in ‘the workings of essences […] which appear in intuitive
images’ (Wirksamkeit von Wesen … die in den Anschauungsbildern
erscheinen).51 Or to put it another way, ‘if neither spatial and tempo-
ral continuity nor qualities would, without concurrently experienced
similarities, be perceptible, then it is clear that the conditions for sim-
ilarities must be present for it to be possible for them to appear’.52
In Handwriting and Character, Klages argues that reproduction is
the recurrence of similar images across similar intervals of time,53
and even the movement of individual beings derives from elemen-
tary similarity,54 so that it is no exaggeration to say that ‘the means
of all real self-​realization [alles wirklichen Wirkens] is elementary
similarity’.55
Playing on the etymology of the word ‘symbol’ —​from σύμβολον
(symbolon), cf. συμβάλλειν (symballein), i.e., ‘to throw together’ —​
Klages declares that ‘the symbol-​discovering act does not separate eve-
rything and instead embraces in one that which on the level of objective
thought would disintegrate into what is experienced and experience itself,
object and subject, world and ego, there and here, once upon a time and
now’,56 for in symbolic thought everything belongs together. Instead of
 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence 179

differentiating and making distinctions, what comes to the fore is elemen-

tary similarity, and out of this elementary similarity arises a symbolic
world. In a lengthy footnote added to his discussion of Romanticism in
­chapter 57 of The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul, Klages observes:

Just as relations can be established between all concepts, so con-

nections can be demonstrated between all symbols, and just as all
concepts are different from each other, so no symbol is identical in
meaning to another. The content of the circle symbol is one thing
if the circle is thought of as rotating, and another when the circle
is motionless.57

According to Klages, the notion of identity informs the kind of per-

ception he associates with der Geist, i.e., with spirit, mind, or intellect;
and, for Klages, this Geist is an essentially negative agent. (This position
has earned him the reputation of being an irrationalist, although —​as
one can see from the intricacy of his argumentation —​this is far from
being the case.) By contrast, the notion of similarity informs the kind
of perception he associates with die Seele, i.e., with the soul or the psy-
che, and which he regards as essentially symbolic:

We have repeatedly given examples of the belief in images of pre-​

history and its reflective form of non-​conceptual, but symbolic
thought. Now we want to arrange —​from the miraculous tales
and liturgies, from the reverence for fetishes and magical beings,
from soothsaying and superstitions, from sacred customs and cel-
ebrations, restrictions and commands, or in short from the entire
heritage of prehistorical humankind in a particular series —​a
greater range of witnesses to demonstrate that the life-​ bound
spirit, despite the limitless diversity of its creations and no less
in its degenerate and disintegrating as in its healthy and perfect
ones, is based on the rule of the belief in images over the belief in
the reality of things and in all expressions without exception the
efficacy (even if by no means a discursive consciousness) allows
one to discern the following fundamental thought: the essential
unity of images themselves with the active powers of the world, of
the images among themselves according to the extent of their ele-
mentary similarity, and of a special image with its symbolic signs,
180 Paul Bishop

and then again of the image-​receiving and the sign-​giving soul of

humankind.58

To put it another way, Klages is exploring a form of non-​identity

thinking he calls symbolic, and in this respect there is a significant
point of contact with C.G. Jung, another twentieth-​century thinker
who is interested in the symbol. (In twentieth-​century thinking it is
possible to discern two major lines of thought: those who are primar-
ily interested in signs, from Saussure through to such structuralists
and post-​structuralists as Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze, and
another —​in some respects, more neglected or more subterranean tra-
dition —​that is interested in symbols, from J. J. Bachofen through to
Cassirer, Klages, and Jung.)
Underpinning the idea of the symbol is the concept of homology,
related to the notion of homoiōsis,59 a doctrine that goes back to the
pre-​Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, an impor-
tant intellectual source for Klages.60 For reasons of space, we cannot
explore Anaxagoras’s teaching (as it has come down us in fragmentary
form) in detail here,61 but its significance was rightly appreciated by
Nietzsche. (For his part, Heidegger seems to have been more interested
in Anaximander, Heraclitus, or Parmenides than in Anaxagoras.)62
Nietzsche discussed the thought of Anaxagoras in its intellectual-​
historic context of pre-​Socratic thought in Philosophy in the Tragic
Age of the Greeks (1872–​1873) and in his lecture course on The Pre-​
Platonic Philosophers (first given in 1869–​1870).63 In the first of these
works, he summarized the achievement of Anaxagoras as residing in
his conception of nous:

The Spirit [nous] of Anaxagoras is a creative artist. It is, in fact,

the most tremendous mechanical and architectural genius, creat-
ing with the simplest means the most impressive forms and orbits,
creating a movable architecture, as it were, but ever from the irra-
tional free random choosing that lies in the artist’s depths. It is as
though Anaxagoras were pointing to Phidias and —​confronted
by the enormous art object of the cosmos —​were proclaiming as
he would of the Parthenon, “Coming-​to-​be is not a moral but an
aesthetic phenomenon.”64
 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence 181

In effect, Nietzsche’s Anaxagoras anticipates one of the central claims

of The Birth of Tragedy, that is, that ‘the world is justified as an aes-
thetic phenomenon’.65 And in a footnote to his notes for his lectures,
Nietzsche outlined the core idea of Anaxagoras as follows:

A substitute for religion in the circles of the educated. Philosophy

as an esoteric cult of the man of knowledge in contrast to folk reli-
gion. Mind [νοῦς] as the architect and artist, like Phidias. The maj-
esty of simple, unmoved beauty —​Pericles as orator. The simplest
possible means. Many beings [ὄντα], countless many. Nothing goes
lost. Dualism of motion. The entire Mind [νοῦς] moves. Against
Parmenides: he accounts the senses, the will to nous, but he must
now carry out a new distinction, that of vegetative and animal.66

In one of his surviving fragments, Anaxagoras proposes the quasi-​

atomistic theory that the universe is composed of the ‘seeds of all
things’ (DK 59 B4), and according to Aristotle, these ‘seeds of all
things’ are described as homoiomeries, that is, things that are homoge-
neous components.67
The term homoiomeries and the notion of homoiōsis can also be
found in Plato; for instance, in the notion of homoiōsis theōi = ‘like-
ness to God’ as in the remark made by Socrates to Theodorus in the
Theaetetus (176a–​b), ‘Therefore we ought to try to escape from earth
to the dwelling of the gods as quickly as we can; and to escape is to
become like God, so far as this is possible; and to become like God is
to become righteous and holy and wise’.68 This notion of homoiōsis
theōi as the end (telos) of life which is to be attained by knowledge
(gnōsis) is maintained by Iamblichus (Protrepticus, chap. 3) where he
writes: ‘Knowledge of the gods is virtue and wisdom and perfect hap-
piness, and makes us like to the gods’.69 This Neoplatonic tradition
continues down to the thirteenth century where, in De visione beati-
fica and De intellectu et intelligibili, Dietrich von Freiberg drew (as did
Meister Eckhart) a distinction between similitudo Dei and imago Dei,
the former being for the created order and the latter applicable for the
intellect.70
The notion of homology or homoiōsis underpins the symbol, which
for its operational efficacy relies on a likeness or similarity between
182 Paul Bishop

itself and what it symbolizes. As Klages points out, alluding to the

declaration made by Plotinus in his Ennead entitled ‘On Beauty’
(I.6.9), ‘For one must come to the sight with a seeing power made
akin and like to what is seen. No eye ever saw the sun without becom-
ing sun-​like […]’,71 these words ‘inspired those much admired verses
by Goethe’:72

If the eye were not sunny,

How could we perceive light?
[Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft
Die Sonne könnt es nie erblicken?]73

On the one hand, this saying confirms the thesis (found in Homer,
Parmenides, and Empedocles) that only like can recognize like (the
so-​called homoion theory),74 and Klages identifies this position held by
Anaxagoras and his notion of homoiomeries.75
For Klages this tradition continues into the Renaissance, in the
form of Francesco Patrizzi’s maxim that cognition means to become
one with the object (cognitio nihil est aliud, quam Coitio quaedam cum
suo cognobili),76 and Tommaso Campenella’s definition of the act of
knowledge as a fusing with the object (cognoscere est fieri rem cog-
nitam).77 On the other, Klages identifies the view also attributed to
Anaxagoras that things are only recognized by their opposites (i.e.,
coldness by warmth, warmth by coldness, brightness by darkness,
darkness by brightness, sweetness by bitterness, bitterness by sweet-
ness), an intuition of ‘the polar character of […] similarity’ as well
as a recognition of the ‘suffering quality [Erleidniston] of sensory
experience’.78
Just as Klages envisages two essentially opposing powers, i.e.,
soul and spirit, so he posits two faculties that are related to each of
them: one vital, one intellectual. In the most extreme case, this means
that the spirit grasps only its productions, torn away from life (and
in the sphere of Being), and hence also itself (cf. Anaxagoras, DK59
B12); life, by contrast, lives and experiences only itself, that is, what is
alive and vital. It falls to the personal ego to link both worlds within
itself, for only it can bear within itself both aspects and both faculties.
Thus on Klages’s view the tragedy of human life resides in its impulse
 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence 183

to create a holistic sense of existence out of an ontological being that

is irremediably, irredeemably fissured and broken.
***
Eternal recurrence is a fascinating doctrine that has intrigued think-
ers as diverse as the German sociologist and political economist, Max
Weber (1864–​1920), who refers to it in a footnote in The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905),79 and the Russian mathemati-
cian and esotericist P. D. Ouspensky (1878–​1947), who uses the idea as
a motif in his novel, Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (1915).80 Most recently
it has been used by Anthony Peake to support his hypothesis that
there is evidence for a life after death;81 curiously enough, one of the
most recent academic interpretations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Paul
S. Loeb’s The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (2010), lends credence
to this hypothesis by arguing that, as Zarathustra dies, he experiences
on his deathbed a revelation that shows him how his life is endlessly
repeating —​enabling him to return to his identical life, recollect this
revelation, and go beyond the human to become an Übermensch.82
In the German philosophical tradition, it attracted the attention
of Herbert Marcuse, who discussed the eternal return in Aristotle,
Hegel, and Nietzsche in a ‘philosophical interlude’ in his Eros and
Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955),83 where he cited
the words of the animals in ‘The Convalescent’, ‘Everything goes, eve-
rything returns; the wheel of existence rolls for ever. […] Everything
departs, everything meets again; the ring of existence is true to itself
for ever. /​Existence begins in every instant; the ball There rolls around
every Here. The middle is everywhere. The path of eternity is crooked’,84
and he remarks on this image of the closed circle as ‘the symbol of
being-​as-​end-​in-​itself’:

While Aristotle reserved it to the nous theos, while Hegel iden-

tified it with the absolute idea, Nietzsche envisages the eternal
return of the finite exactly as it is —​in its full concreteness and
finiteness. This is the total affirmation of the life instincts, repel-
ling all escape and negation. The eternal return is the will and
vision of an erotic attitude toward being for which necessity and
fulfilment coincide.85
184 Paul Bishop

And it also intrigued the eclectic German-​Jewish critic and essay-

ist, Walter Benjamin (1892–​1940), who wrote in his essay, ‘Central
Park’, §35:

Eternal recurrence is an attempt to link the two antinomic prin-

ciples of happiness with one another: namely that of eternity and
that of the yet once again. —​The idea of eternal recurrence con-
jures out of the Misère (wretchedness) of (the) time the speculative
idea (or the phantasmagoria) of happiness. Nietzsche’s heroism
is the counterpart of Baudelaire’s which, out of the wretched-
ness of philistine routine, conjures up the phantasmagoria of the
modern.86

In this sense, Benjamin comes to the conclusion that must surely count
as the most devastating statement ever of disenchantment —​‘That
“things just go on” is the catastrophe’!
This idea, that ‘hell […] is not something that lies before us, but this
life here’, is one that we also find expressed by Jung in his Red Book. In
‘The Conception of the God’, Jung says:

He who journeys to Hell also becomes Hell; therefore do not forget

from whence you come. The depths are stronger than us; so do not
be heroes, be clever and drop the heroics, since nothing is more
dangerous than to play the hero. The depths want to keep you;
they have not returned very many up to now, and therefore men
fled from the depths and attacked them. What if the depths, due
to the assault, now change themselves into death? But the depths
indeed have changed themselves into death; therefore when they
awoke they inflicted a thousandfold death. We cannot slay death,
as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to over-
come death, then we must enliven it.87

Jung’s Red Book, which is remarkable in so many ways, is not least

remarkable for its insistence on the positivity of life, despite (or
because of its) recognition of the negativity of life. As Jung put it in
Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1911–​1912), later revised
as Symbols of Transformation (1952):
 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence 185

It is hard to believe that this teeming world is too poor to provide

an object for human love —​it offers boundless opportunities to
everyone. It is rather the inability to love which robs a person of
these opportunities. The world is empty only to him who does not
know how to direct his libido towards things and people, and to
render them alive and beautiful. What compels us to create a sub-
stitute from within ourselves is not an external lack, but our own
inability to include anything outside ourselves in our love.88

And thus the Red Book, as the imagistic (or intuitive or symbolic)
source-​book of Jung’s later, theoretical writings on analytical psychol-
ogy, also includes a positive message:

Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the

sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it
can win life back. The dead matter will change into black serpents.
Do not be frightened, the serpents will immediately put out the
sun of your days, and a night with wonderful will-​o’-​the-​wisps will
come over you.89

Notes
1 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘Roving expeditions of an inopportune
philosopher’, §49, ‘Goethe’, in Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner; Nietzsche
Contra Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist [Works, vol. 3], tr.
T. Common, London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1899, pp. 218–​19.
2 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part One, ‘Of the afterworldsmen’, in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, 1969, p. 58.
3 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part Three, ‘Of old and new law-​tables’,
§14; Zarathustra, tr. Hollingdale, p. 222.
4 For further discussion, see J. N. Berry, ‘Nietzsche and the Greeks’, in
K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 83–​107 (esp. §3, ‘Heraclitus’,
pp. 91–​98); and B. Magus, ‘The connection between Nietzsche’s doc-
trine of eternal recurrence, Heraclitus, and the Stoics’, Helios, 1976,
vol. 3, 3–​21.
5 R. Steiner, The Story of My Life, ed. H. Collinson, London;
New York: Anthroposophical Publishing; Anthroposophic Press, 1928,
pp. 182–​83.
186 Paul Bishop

6 Cf. ‘My philosophy brings the triumphant idea of which all other modes
of thinking will ultimately perish. It is the great cultivating idea […]’ (The
Will to Power, §1053; in Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufmann,
tr. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books, 1968,
p. 544.
7 Steiner, The Story of My Life, p. 186.
8 Will to Power, §1066; The Will to Power, tr. Kaufmann and Hollingdale,
p. 549.
9 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part Three, ‘The convalescent’, §2; in
Zarathustra, tr. Hollingdale, pp. 237–​38.
10 K. Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the
Same [11935; 21956; 31978], tr. J. H. Lomax, Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press, 1997, p. 196.
11 See P. Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle [1969], tr. D. W. Smith,
Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press; Athlone Press, 1997.
12 Originally published as M. Heidegger, ‘Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathustra?’, in
Vorträge und Aufsätze, Pfullingen: Neske, 1954, pp. 101–​26; tr. by B. Magus
as ‘Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?’, The Review of Metaphysics, 1967,
vol. 20, no. 3, 411–​431, and cited here from D. B. Allison (ed.), The New
Nietzsche, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1985, pp. 64–​79.
13 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘The convalescent’, §1; in Zarathustra,
tr. Hollingdale, p. 233.
14 Heidegger, in Allison (ed.), New Nietzsche, p. 75.
15 Heidegger, in Allison (ed.), New Nietzsche, p. 75.
16 Heidegger, in Allison (ed.), p. 77. In the sense that he uses the term ‘Being
of beings’, Heidegger is explicitly drawing on Schelling’s treatise of 1809
on human freedom (cf. New Nietzsche, p. 79): ‘In the final and highest
instance there is no other Being than Will. Will is primordial Being, and all
predicates apply to it alone —​groundless, eternity, independence of time,
self-​affirmation! All philosophy strives only to find this highest expres-
sion’ (F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigation concerning the Nature of
Human Freedom and its Object, tr. J. Gutmann, La Salle, IL: Open Court,
1992, p. 24).
17 Heidegger, in Allison (ed), New Nietzsche, p. 78.
18 Heidegger, in Allison (ed.), New Nietzsche, p. 79.
19 See J. Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal,
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012, p. 126.
20 For further discussion, see P. D’Iorio, ‘The eternal return: Genesis and
interpretation’, Lexicon Philosophicum: International Journal for the
History of Texts and Ideas, 2014, vol. 2, 41–​96 (p. 42).
 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence 187

21 G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy [1962], tr. H. Tomlinson, London

and New York: Continuum, 2006, p. 48.
22 G. Deleuze, Nietzsche, Paris: PUF, 1965, pp. 36 and 41.
23 G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [1968], tr. P. Patton, London:
Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 391.
24 ‘For indeed, no one has yet determined what the body can do, that is,
experience has not yet taught anyone what the body can do from the laws
of Nature alone, insofar as Nature is only considered to be corporeal, and
what the body can do only if it is determined by the mind. For no one has
yet come to know the structure of the body so accurately that he could
explain all its functions –​not to mention that many things are observed
in the lower animals which far surpass human ingenuity, and that sleep-
walkers do a great many things in their sleep which they would not dare
to awake. This shows well enough that the body itself, simply from the
laws of its own nature, can do many things which its mind wonders at’
(Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, tr. E. Curley, in A Spinoza Reader, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 155–​156).
25 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §676, ‘On the origin of our evaluations’; The
Will to Power, tr. Kaufmann and Hollingdale, p. 357.
26 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, tr. Tomlinson, p. 37.
27 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, tr. Tomlinson, p. 66.
28 Deleuze, Nietzsche, pp. 38 and 40.
29 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Hollingdale, p. 236.
30 M. Onfray, La Construction du surhomme [Contre-​historie de la philoso-
phie, vol. 7], Paris: Grasset, 2011, p. 281. On amor fati, see p. 286: ‘Here
is the meaning of amor fati: to love one’s destiny, to consent to it with the
most total adherence, to desire it, to will it. When one loves what happens
to us, one gives no quarter: what arises from what is evil, what is negative,
from suffering forms part of it. There is no question of removing from
what takes place what suits us by refusing and challenging what annoys us.
The eternal recurrence does not select, it reiterates what has happened —​
including suffering’.
31 For an overview of Klages’s philosophy, see P. Bishop, Ludwig Klages
and the Philosophy of Life: A Vitalist Toolkit, London and New York:
Routledge, 2018.
32 N. Lebovic, The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise
of a Nazi Biopolitics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
33 J. Ā. Josephson-​Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity,
and the Birth of the Human Sciences, Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 2017, pp. 209–​239 (pp. 213–​15 and 209). My thanks to
Roderick Main for bringing this work to my attention.
188 Paul Bishop

34 Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), tr. H. Lawson-​Tancred, ‘Introduction’,

p. 95. See De Generatione Animalium, Book 2, 736 b 27 (‘Reason alone
enters in, as an additional factor, from outside’) and 744 b 22 (‘a mind,
external to them’) (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, tr. A.L. Peck,
London; Cambridge, MA: Heinemann; Harvard University Press, 1943,
pp. 170–​71 and 230–​31); cf. Aristotle, “De Partibus Animalium” I and “De
Generatione Animalium” I (with passages from II.1–​3), tr. D.N. Balme,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, pp. 63–​64 and 159–​60.
35 Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 6th edn, Bonn: Bouvier,
1981, p. 369, cf. p. 868.
36 Klages, Vom kosmogonischen Eros, in Ludwig Klages, Sämtliche Werke, ed.
E. Frauchinger, G. Funke, K. J. Goffmann, R. Heiss, and H. E. Schröder,
9 vols, Bonn: Bouvier, 1964–​2000, vol. 3, pp. 353–​497 (p. 390).
37 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 390.
38 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 755.
39 Ludwig Klages, Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Friedrich Nietzsches,
Leipzig: Barth, 1926. For further discussion of Klages’s relation to
Nietzsche, see P. Bishop, ‘Ludwig Klages’s early reception of Friedrich
Nietzsche’, Oxford German Studies, 2002, vol. 31, 129–​ 60; and ‘Ein
Kind Zarathustras und eine nicht-​metaphysische Auslegung der ewigen
Wiederkehr’, in Hestia: Jahrbuch des Klages-​Gesellschaft, 2002/​2003, vol.
21, 15–​37.
40 ‘In the thought of will to power, Nietzsche anticipates the metaphysical
ground of the consummation of the modern age. In the thought of will to
power, metaphysical thinking itself completes itself in advance. Nietzsche,
the thinker of the thought of will to power, is the last metaphysician of the
West. The age whose consummation unfolds in his thought, the modern
age, is the final age’ (M. Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes 3 and 4, vol. 3,
The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, ed. D. RF. Krell, tr.
J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, and F. A. Capuzzi, New York: HarperCollins,
1991, Part One, c­ hapter 1, p. 8).
41 Klages, Errungenschaften Nietzsches, pp. 215–​16.
42 For further discussion of Klages’s difficult notion of the ‘reality of images’,
see H. E. Schröder, ‘Einführung in das Lebenswerk von Ludwig Klages’, in
Schröder (ed.), Schiller —​Nietzsche —​Klages: Abhandlungen und Essays
zur Geistesgeschichte der Gegenwart, Bonn: Bouvier, 1974, pp. 269–​318
(esp. pp. 281–​88); H. Kasdorff, ‘Die nie zu bestastende Wirklichkeit der
Bilder: Ein Hinweis auf Ludwig Klages’, in Ludwig Klages: Gesammelte
Aufsätze und Vorträge zu seinem Werk, Bonn: Bouvier, 1984, pp. 170–​
86; and G. Böhme, ‘Die Wirklichkeit der Bilder und ihr Gebrauch’,
Hestia: Jahrbuch der Klages-​Gesellschaft, 2004–​2007, vol. 22, 137–​48.
 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence 189

43 F. Tenigl, ‘Ludwig Klages’, in Metzler-​Philosophen-​Lexikon: Von den

Vorsokratikern bis zu den Neuen Philosophen, ed. B. Lutz and N. Retlich,
2nd edn, Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1995, pp. 459–​63.
44 Klages, Ausdrucksbewegung und Gestaltungskraft: Grundlegung der
Wissenschaft vom Ausdruck, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, pp. 139–​313 (p. 257).
45 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 846; cf. Vom kosmogonis-
chen Eros, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3, p. 470.
46 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1237.
47 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1132.
48 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 346.
49 R. Müller, Das verzwistete Ich —​Ludwig Klages und sein philosophisches
Hauptwerk “Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele”, Berne and Frankfurt
am Main: Lang, 1971, pp. 60–​63.
50 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 375.
51 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, pp. 379 and 401.
52 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, pp. 1132–​33.
53 Klages, Handschrift und Charakter: Gemeinverständlicher Abriß der graph-
ologischen Technik, Bonn: Bouvier, 1989, p. 36.
54 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, pp. 1047 and 1136–​37.
55 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1132.
56 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1195.
57 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1444, note 20.
58 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, pp. 1257–​58.
59 For a discussion of the conceptual distinction between homology and
analogy, see C. Louguet, ‘Anaxagore: Analogie, proportion, identité’,
Philosophie antique, 2013, vol. 13, 117–​45.
60 Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, “Fragments” and “Testimoniae”: A Text and
Translation with Notes and Essays, ed. P. Curd, Toronto, Buffalo, and
London: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
61 For an overview of Anaxagoras as one of the earliest proponents of
holism, see P. Curd, ‘Anaxagoras and the theory of everything’, in P. Curd
and D. W. Graham, The Oxford Companion to Presocratic Philosophy,
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 230–​49.
62 M. Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, tr. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi,
New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1984; and M. Heidegger, The Beginning
of Western Philosophy: Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides, tr.
R. Rojcewicz, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015.
63 F. Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, tr. M. Cowan,
Washington, DC: Regnery, 1962, §14-​§19 (pp. 90–​117); and The Pre-​
Platonic Philosophers, ed. and tr. G. Whitlock, Urbana, IL, and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2001, pp. 94–​105.
190 Paul Bishop

64 Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, §19; tr. Cowan,
pp. 112–​13.
65 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ‘Attempt at a self-​criticism’, §5; cf. §5
and §24, in: Basic Writings, ed. and tr. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern
Library, 1968, pp. 22, 52 and 141.
66 Nietzsche, The Pre-​Platonic Philosophers, p. 229 (tr. modified); cf. ‘Die
vorplatonischen Philosophen’, in Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen (WS 1871/​
72 –​WS 1874/​75) [Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, II. Abteilung, vol. 4],
ed. F. Bornmann and M. Carpitella, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter,
1995, p. 304.
67 See Physics, book 3, §4, 203a19-​22: ‘Those who make [the elements] infi-
nite in number, as Anaxagoras and Democritus do, say that the infinite is
continous by contact —​compounded of the homogeneous parts accord-
ing to the one, of the seedmass of the atomic shapes according to the other’
(Aristotle, Complete Works, ed. J. Barnes, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1984, vol. 1, p. 345; On the Heavens, book 3, §3, 302a28-​
31: ‘Now Anaxagoras opposes Empedocles’ view of the elements… His
elements are the homoeomerous things, viz. flesh, bone, and the like’
(Complete Works, vol. 1, p. 495); On Generation and Corruption, book 1,
§1, 314a20-​21: ‘Anaxagoras posits as elements the “homoeomeries”, viz.
bone, flesh, marrow, and everything else which is such that part and whole
are synonymous’ (Complete Works, vol. 1, p. 512); Metaphysics, book 1,
§3, 984a12–​16: ‘Anaxagoras of Clazomenae […] says the principles are
infinite in number; for he says almost all things that are homogeneous are
generated and destroyed (as water and fire is) only by aggregation and seg-
regation, and are not in any other sense generated or destroyed, but remain
eternally’ (Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 1556); and Metaphysics, book 1, §7,
988a26–​29:: ‘Plato spoke of the great and the small, the Italians [i.e., the
Pythagoreans, because Pythagoras founded his society at Croton] of the
infinite, Empedocles of fire, earth, water, and air, Anaxagoras of the infin-
ity of homogeneous things’ (Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 1562).
68 Plato, Theaetetus; Sophist [Works, vol. 2], tr. H. N. Fowler, London:
Heinemann; New York: Putnam, 1921, pp. 127 and 129.
69 Iamblichus, Protrepticus, §3; cited in A. Uždavinys (ed.), The Golden Chain:
An Anthology of Platonic and Pythagorean Philosophy, Bloomington, IN:
World Wisdom, 2004, pp. xv and 300.
70 See M. L. Führer, ‘The agent intellect in the writings of Meister Dietrich
of Freiberg and its influence on the Cologne School’, in K.-​H. Kandler,
B. Mojsisch, and F.-​B. Stammkötter (ed.), Deitrich von Freiberg: Neue
Perspektiven seiner Philosophie, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft,
 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence 191

Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Grüner, 1999, pp. 69–​ 88 (p. 85); and
D. Hedley, The Iconic Imagination, New York and London: Bloomsbury,
2016, pp. 47–​48.
71 Plotinus, Enneads, I.6.9, in Plotinus, Porphyry on Plotinus; Ennead I, tr.
A.H. Armstrong, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University
Press, 1966, p. 261.
72 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, pp. 1134–​35.
73 Goethe, Entwurf einer Farbenlehre, ‘Einleitung’, in Werke [Hamburger
Ausgabe], ed. E. Trunz, 14 vols, Hamburg: Wegner, 1948–​ 1960;
Munich: Beck, 1981, vol. 13, pp. 324; Goethe, Theory of Colours, tr.
Charles Lock Eastlake [1840], Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press,
1970, p. liii.
74 Müller, Das verzwistete Ich, p. 62; cf. Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der
Seele, pp. 1133 and 1134, citing Homer, Odyssey, book 17, l. 218: ‘So the
god always brings a like to his own like’ (Homer, The Odyssey, tr. A. Cook,
2nd edn, New York and London: Norton, 1993, p. 189); and Empedocles,
fragment DK31 B109: ‘For by earth we see earth, by water water, /​by ether
bright ether, and by fire flaming fire, /​love by love and strife by mournful
strife’ (J. Barnes (ed.), Early Greek Philosophy, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1987, p. 189).
75 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1133.
76 F. Patrizzi, Panarchia, 14: ‘De intellectu’ (Nova de universis philosophia,
Ferrara, 1591), fol. 31; cited in E. Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos
in Renaissance Philosophy, tr. M. Domandi, New York, and Evanston,
IL: Harper & Row, 1963, pp. 134 and 169.
77 Cited in Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy,
p. 169.
78 Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1135.
79 M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. T. Parsons,
New York; London: Scribner; Allen & Unwin, 1930, p. 232, note 66.
80 For further discussion, see B. Ross, ‘The eternal return: Time and time-
lessness in P. D. Ouspensky’s Strange Life of Ivan Osokin and Mircea
Eliade’s “The secret of Dr. Honigberger” ’, Analecta Husserliana: The
Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol. 99, The Cosmos and the
Creative Imagination, ed. A.-​ T. Tymieniecka and P. Trutty-​ Coohill,
Cham: Springer, 2016, pp. 253–​62.
81 A. Peake, The Labyrinth of Time: The Illusion of Past, Present and Future,
London: Arcturus, 2012.
82 P. S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010.
192 Paul Bishop

83 H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud,

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956, pp. 106–​26.
84 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part Three, ‘The convalescent’, §2;
Zarathustra, tr. Hollingdale, p. 234.
85 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 122.
86 Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, tr. L. Spencer and M. Harrington, New German
Critique, Winter 1985, vol. 34, 32–​58 (p. 50).
87 C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. S. Shamdasani, tr. M. Kyburz,
J. Peck, and S. Shamdasani, New York and London: Norton, 2009, p. 244.
88 C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation [Collected Works, vol. 5], tr. R.F.C.
Hull, 2nd edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967, §253.
89 Jung, The Red Book, p. 244.
Chapter 8

Holism and chance

Markets and meaning under neoliberalism
Joshua Ramey

In 2016 I published Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the

Religion of Contingency.1 The book is an invitation to challenge neo-
liberal claims for the superiority of markets as a mode of dealing with
chance, and to suggest that there have always been and can be again
less deadly and more creative ways to engage with the uncertainty in
social life than through the medium of markets. My thesis is that a
deeper understanding of the social and political stakes of divination
practices can help to unmask the authoritarian pretensions of neo-
liberalism in this regard, and open up different ways of reconsidering
the political and economic stakes of the role of chance in social life.
What I mean by divination is, generically, any tradition-​bound and
systematic practice by which human beings solicit more-​than-​human
knowledge, generally on the basis of chance.2 I will say more about
divination in a moment, but for the moment I need to explain how
I understand neoliberalism, in order to set up exactly why I think neo-
liberalism trades on our understanding of divination in order to per-
suade us to accept markets as the ultimate form of social order.
Unlike the neoclassical, the neoliberal views markets as information
processors. My hypothesis is that the neoliberal experiment in impos-
ing markets and market-​like processes on more and more modalities
of human cooperation, human need, and human desire has been suc-
cessful in presenting itself as the only genuine option for social order
because markets have a deep resemblance to traditional divination
tools. In other words, I argue that neoliberalism has succeeded in pre-
senting itself as common sense partly because it is an ideology that is
covertly and unconsciously rooted in ancient ideas about the neces-
sity of divination practices for social order. By divination practices
194 Joshua Ramey

I mean any tradition-​bound and systematic practice by which human

beings solicit more-​than-​human knowledge, generally on the basis of
chance —​the spill of the entrails, the roll of the bones, the spread of
the cards, the flight of birds, the upsurge of intuition by diviners in
states of trance.
The fury and frenzy, the effervescence and ferment of markets,
and the special form of collective information this chaos is supposed
to generate, can be envisioned as a giant surface of divination upon
which thousands upon thousands of micro-​and macroscopic chances
are taken as prices are asked, taken, and asked again. The book con-
tends that our devotion to markets, at least in this particular, ‘neo-
liberal’ phase of capitalism, can be characterized as a ‘religion of
contingency’, a ritual practice of determining who can be sacrificed,
who is expendable, what must be preserved, and what is to be glorified,
on the basis not of the invisible but the visible hand of the market,
which is chance itself, appearing in the guise of unregulated competi-
tion. Whether destructive or creative, peaceful or warlike, every chance
is a chance for someone, somewhere, to profit: there are even futures
markets in terrorist attacks and natural disasters. When we manage to
deplete the earth’s carrying capacity for this game, we may all be dead,
but someone, somewhere, will be very, very rich.
I’m offering this deliberately hyperbolic picture partly to be pro-
vocative, but partly because there is a truth in the hyperbole, a truth
about our current hegemonic ideology that is easy to miss because it
has largely become common sense. The truth of our complete faith in
markets is not a truth that most economists would adhere to —​I’ve
never actually met an economist who admits to being a neoliberal, and
I doubt whether any of my colleagues in the economics department
where I work would dream that markets should completely displace
deliberative democracy as a mode of social order. But neoliberalism’s
influence on public policy and on the most influential economists of
the last 30 years is well documented.3 From its inception in the Mont
Pelerin society, a profoundly philosophical movement has seized upon
the affordances of markets for deeply sinister ends, a political theory
that does not see markets in the instrumental way that most econo-
mists tend to, but as ontological ciphers of how reality is, in itself, and
how human societies must become in order to conform to that reality.
 Markets and meaning under neoliberalism 195

Neoliberalism glorifies the role of markets as generators of

more-​than-​human knowledge, as what Philip Mirowski calls ‘meta-​
information’ processors.4
I follow Mirowski’s argument that over the last 30 years neoclassi-
cal and mainstream orthodox economics has become more neoliberal
in this sense. Although variations on this view are everywhere among
neoliberals, its clearest formulation must be attributed to the intellec-
tual father of neoliberalism, Friedrich Hayek. In the last period of his
career, Hayek was arguing for the point of view that markets don’t just
process existing economic information but generate new, unforeseeable
truths about society (about what is wanted, needed, and possible).5
Neoliberalism is many things, but I’m mostly interested in this core
belief, now taken as common sense, that the imposition of markets
or market-​like forces in more and more dimensions of human life is
a superior form of social coordination, social order, and decision-​
making than traditional modes of deliberation, debate, consensus for-
mation, or representative democratic processes.
What is ‘neo’ in neoliberalism, from this point of view, is that
whereas classical liberals like Adam Smith thought of markets and
market-​like processes, and exchange relationships in general, as more
or less spontaneous features of human social life (although they were
wrong about that —​no society has ever been based on barter), neolib-
eralism sees the state as playing a crucial role in creating and imposing
markets and market forces upon society. This is because the essence
of the market for them is not that it is a natural way of distributing
goods and services, but because it is a cultural ideal of competition
that must be engineered and imposed on society from above.6 From
privatization experiments in Chile in the 1970s to the 2008 auctions
of the telecommunications bandwidth, from school vouchers to the
enforced participation in the health care markets under Obamacare,
the neoliberal agenda has been to insinuate markets everywhere, fos-
tering economic competition as a substitute for deliberative demo-
cratic processes.
We might debate the merits of any of these experiments. But as long
as the underlying ideological presuppositions of neoliberalism are not
interrogated, the words of Margaret Thatcher that ‘there is no alterna-
tive’ for genuine social order other than markets and yet more markets
196 Joshua Ramey

will continue to dominate politics, especially in a world where corpo-

rate interests have more say than ever before in planning our collective
futures (or what is left of them) in a rapidly destabilizing social and
natural ecology.
The task of my book is to contribute to undermining neoliberal
philosophical presuppositions. Neoliberal capitalism is driven by
deeply philosophical commitments that are nevertheless passed off
as simple common sense. At the heart of this commitment is a para-
dox: freedom is found within the constraints of the market. Only mar-
ket constraints, market discipline, produce genuinely free outcomes.
Submission to the laws of the market is the true source of liberty.7 The
problem is not that this view is paradoxical. Most of the enduring phil-
osophical views of human freedom are paradoxical. For Augustine,
freedom was submission to God’s will; for Spinoza, submission to
reason; for Kant, submission to the moral law; for Habermas, sub-
mission to the norms of communicative discourse. The problem is the
particular neoliberal paradox, which assumes that markets have an
ontological, indeed cosmic, power to embody the truth about human
meaning, desire, and purpose.
How is the salience of the particular neoliberal view of freedom jus-
tified? The lynchpin of the argument is found in Hayek’s work, where
he (and Milton Friedman) are quite clear that the problem with so-​
called ‘socialism’ —​any attempt by the state to pro-​actively plan for
the economic future —​is that it is not responsive enough to unforesee-
able contingencies, to the dynamic mutations in supply and demand,
cultural and natural changes, rises and falls of favor and disfavor, that
mark social life. Their argument, then, is that markets are the only
appropriate and only true mediators of chance to human life. That
is, markets are the appropriate means by which human expectations
encounter the inherent randomness of the universe and in terms of
which those expectations must be defined, challenged, and revised.
The inherent novelty and differentiation endemic to an indeterminate
universe of forces, according to Hayek, is properly mediated to human
life only in the form of markets. And if markets, properly constructed,
continue to reinforce or exacerbate existing relations of unequal
wealth, power, and status, this is simply because markets reflect an
evolutionary dynamic that selects those worthy of survival from those
unfit for the cosmic future.8 Markets are in this sense second nature,
 Markets and meaning under neoliberalism 197

the economic completion of the work of random selection and adap-

tive mutation initiated by life itself.

Divinatory markets
Markets, then, are seen as an interaction with chance that results
in destiny, a reading of our fates in the vicissitude of market forces.
Markets are, that is, tools of divination: a systematic, tradition-​bound
process used by a community for ascertaining more-​ than-​human
knowledge. In the book I examine a range of divination practices,
both ancient and contemporary, Western and global, to explore the
deep resonance between the role of contemporary markets in neo-
liberal capitalism and the traditional role of divination rites in social
life more generally. I include in my ambit the collective, ritual-​trance
practices studied by Victor Turner among the Ndembu and by E. E.
Evans-​Pritchard among the Azande. I studied many other practices,
including the ancient auspices of the Daoist and Confucian I Ching
or book of changes, the global practice of scapulimancy —​shoulder-​
bone divination —​and a variety of other practices including Yoruban
Ifà, Tarot reading, dowsing, and the famous Roman practices of divi-
nation by observation of the flight paths of birds.
These practices involve the posing of an urgent question —​should
I go to war? Has someone practiced sorcery? Is now the time to start
a new business? —​in situations understood to be so enormously com-
plex that they may as well be understood to be redolent with gods, or
at least with forces or intentionalities that are radically different to and
not in direct communication with human minds. Contemporary mar-
ket interactions, where buyers and sellers contest the prices of com-
modities, form a dispersed, collective, continuously iterated practice
of inquiry into the unknown, a consultation with the oracle that we, as
a market society, collectively constitute. And although it is ultimately
an authoritarian sham, the market not only seems to be a divinatory
practice but furthermore occupies the place of prestige in social life
that divination practices have always held. Like traditional modes of
divination, we use markets to continuously contest the results of the
oracle, trying again and again for a satisfying answer, for something
we can live with (or without). And just as markets can be cornered,
rigged, and monopolized, traditional divination rites can also be
198 Joshua Ramey

co-​opted by charlatans, rigged by unscrupulous and greedy oppor-

tunists, or marred by incorrect procedure. Social mechanisms exist to
contest and revise and recast the divinatory event. And yet despite the
potential for authoritarian capture, the anthropological record shows
that divination techniques are deeply democratic, so much so that they
form the basis for almost all contemporary forms of gambling, from
dice to roulette to card games. These games are democratic, that is,
because they can be played by anyone, and in relation to chance no one
has a privileged point of view.
There is an important episode in the history of empire that can clue
us into the problem here.9 The interpretation of lightning and thunder
(ceraunomancy) was a divinatory practice commonly used by the col-
lege of augurs in Roman society; the college of augurs being the very
experts whom the Roman polity relied on in matters of war, politics,
and commerce. Rome’s struggles with democracy, where the question
of what grounds the authority of sovereign governance was of pro-
found importance, were deeply embedded in questions surrounding
the access to rites of divination. (As observed by many scholars and
practitioners, although often practiced by experts, divination is noth-
ing if not contestable —​nothing if not a taking and reading of signs
open to recasting, replay, revision, and intensely deliberative reflection
among all concerned.)
It is this very contention between the plebs and patricians that led
to the secession of the plebs to Mons Sacer, a general strike that shut
down Rome until certain demands were met. The ‘secession of the
plebs’ was not just an exodus from the city of Rome, but also a cleverly
targeted occupation: Mons Sacer was the sacred mountain on which
the augurs would perform the ritual taking of the auspices. If the patri-
cians were to attempt to ignore the plebs, and perhaps try to wait it
out, eventually the aristocracy of Rome would have to decide what the
gods thought about all of this, and thus would be met by the irreverent
plebs. The demand of the plebs for a more democratic society came in
the form of access to the rights of divination, since they saw that all
civil rights, public and private, were dependent on them. The seat of
patrician power was in their exclusive access to the college of augurs
and the ‘taking of the auspices’ performed by the magistrates. For this
reason they alone were able to interpret divinatory practices despite
 Markets and meaning under neoliberalism 199

the fact that the costs of warfare or failed economic speculation would
always be borne by the masses.
The plebs mocked the aristocratic reliance upon divinatory author-
ity, and, by doing so, demystified the sacred practice of augury as
leaving up to chance grave decisions that would affect entire com-
munities. The plebs’ demand for inclusion in the taking of the aus-
pices cleverly unmasked the authoritarian capture of chance by
the patricians. If it was the case that, as the plebs had taunted the
patricians, what was used as the grounds of divine authority were
merely random events of chickens feeding, lightning striking, or a
particular number of birds in the sky, then the patricians ought to
be mocked because their authority is derived from either a malicious
chicane or a ridiculous human conceit, therefore the patricians did
not have any authority worth recognizing. But, if the auspices which
decided public office, warfare, and law (specifically the laws concern-
ing the payment of debts) were in fact divine, then the honor and
glory granted by them should include all those they affect. What was
at stake for the plebs was not just access to divinatory rites and the
honors granted by them, but to have a say in what is sacred —​to join
in the process of providential thinking —​in order to have a say in
what the future may look like and what sacrifices are worth making.
Divination’s communal character, insofar as it exists at all, would
be not basic or primitive but rather a function of contestation and
struggle over the true nature of authority, over who can be authorized
to speak for everyone.
There are remarkable similarities between the secession of the plebs
and the OWS movement that ought not to be overlooked. Occupy
Wall Street originally intended to occupy the trading room floor at the
New York Stock Exchange, the place where the auspices of the global
financial system were taken by futures trading —​a kind of deriva-
tives trading that determines the value of commodities in the future
by way of contracts between exclusive parties, namely those who have
the capital to risk —​and the demands of OWS were not specific but
general. Why was it the case that billions of the aptly named 99% were
to suffer the burdens of a financial market which decided the future of
humanity and its environmental conditions without the 99% having a
voice in these decisions at all?
200 Joshua Ramey

Gaming chance
There is something deeply democratic about chance, and that is part
of why market-​based society seems to have so much popular appeal,
at least in the United States. Anyone can get lucky, anyone can
get a break. Jackson Lear, in his monumental study Something for
Nothing: Luck in America, contends that gambling maintains such
an important place in American culture because of the association
of chance with grace, with a free gift of potential change in status
that is available to anyone, regardless of pre-​existing arrangements
of wealth and power, regardless of how much of a winner or loser
you’ve been up to that point.10 And as David Graeber and many oth-
ers have shown, divination in the form of the casting of lots also has
an extraordinary relation to the history of democratic experimenta-
tion, from the lots cast to determine the Athenian assembly to the
law, still on the books in the state of Arizona, that in runoffs between
candidates for certain governmental positions, a tie is decided by the
draw of the higher card from a deck.11
My argument is that neoliberalism draws heavily upon our cul-
tural and historical familiarity with divination, and with the impor-
tance of divination for both religious and democratic aspirations, in
order to justify its celebrations of markets. If it is in markets that we
truly find our chances, find grace, and discover the lineaments of true
democracy —​where no one is chosen or not by nature, where all have
a chance —​then even if markets continue to massively fail us and
wound us, to what other secular god will we turn? If we believe that
markets are the temple of chance, then it is to markets that we must
sacrifice, and market outcomes we must praise.
Marketplace games are disastrously, even catastrophically limited
games, externalizing the ecological and social costs of profit-​seeking
in a way that has imperiled life on this planet. But the sacred identity
of such games is more generic than economic activity can capture, and
consciousness of the role of chance in social life must be expanded
beyond the purview of the market and beyond the usual dismissal of
divination based on its supposed irrationality and mystification. Other
stories incorporating chance can be told, other meanings made, other
affordances encouraged and fostered. There are other politics of divi-
nation than that dominated by the rule of profit. But for progressive
 Markets and meaning under neoliberalism 201

politics to advance beyond its rationalistic modernist limitations, and

to imagine another politics of divination, will require conceptions of
individuality, responsibility, agency, choice, and meaning that more
fully acknowledge the interdependency, uncertainty, fragility, and
contingency of our plans in the face of chance. Only then can other
relations to chance be cultivated than those currently embodied by
market-​based divinations of value through price alone.
To understand this we need a brief discussion of the role of games
in social life. In his brilliant 1958 study, Man, Play, and Games, Roger
Caillois proposed that games and play constitute an important force in
the establishment and maintenance of social life:

Games discipline instincts and institutionalize them. For the time

that they afford formal and limited satisfaction, they educate,
enrich, and immunize the mind against their virulence. At the same
time, they are made fit to contribute usefully to the enrichment of
the establishment of various patterns of culture.12

Games are meant to be a supplement to, and not a substitute for,

social life in general. Yet the point of understanding games and play,
for Caillois, is that social life in general attempts to imitate or bring
into being the principles aspired to by ideal games. The ideal game
for a modern, democratic polity would be one that perfectly subor-
dinates the role of chance to that of merit, the role of unforeseeable
contingency to the rule of maximum reward for maximum displays
of excellence. ‘That is why political reformers ceaselessly try to devise
more equitable types of competition and hasten their implementa-
tion’, Caillois puts it.13
Caillois proposed that games of chance (of alea, in Greek) were
one among four types that could define the range of games played by
human societies. The other three include games of make-​believe or imi-
tation (mimicry), games of competitive skill (agôn), and games of ver-
tigo (ilinx, the Greek term for whirlpool). Historically, Caillois notes
that democratic societies have tended to emphasize games of agôn and
alea over those of mimicry and ilinx. Societies (typically pre-​modern)
that search for a sense of justice and order through identification with
transcendent powers —​gods, ancestral spirits, or animal totems —​tend
202 Joshua Ramey

to use rituals of imitation (including masks) and the inducement of

vertigo (ilinx) through dance and consciousness-​altering substances,
to allow more-​than-​human powers to become felt as present to, and
authoritative for, the life of the community. One way or another, games
allow hierarchies to be justified and order maintained in a context of
mutual recognition that the sources of life, health, and continuity tran-
scend and include the entire community. As the outcome of games,
the lot of each becomes something that can be meaningfully accepted.
Unlike traditional societies, those with egalitarian aspirations attempt
to establish a just social order partly by allowing for the establishment
of rank through agonistic games of competition establishing merit or
worthiness, and partly through games of chance which acknowledge
that the ability to compete is itself a matter of contingent placements
of birth, innate talent and intelligence, family support, and other ways
in which individuals are differentiated by unaccountable forces that
precede and produce their stations in life.
In a democratic society, as Caillois puts it, the role of competitive
games of skill and those of chance are understood to be ‘contradictory
yet complementary’.14 That is to say, there is never a stable synthesis,
let alone a perfect identity between fair chances and equal merit. And
this synthesis is largely a failed project. Although modernity tries to
‘enlarge the domain of regulated competition, or merit, at the expense
of birth and inheritance, or chance’, this project remains unfulfilled —​
‘remote and improbable’, for Caillois, because it is an ‘evolution which
is reasonable, just and favorable [only] to the most capable’ (emphasis
added).15 Those unable to compete are tempted to rebel against moder-
nity’s offer of inclusion through merit, and are led deeper and deeper
into superstitious relations to chance. As Caillois puts it:

As for the avarice today observed in the pursuit of good fortune, it

probably compensates for the continuous tension involved in mod-
ern competition. Whoever despairs of his own resources is led to
trust in destiny. Excessively rigorous competition discourages the
timid and tempts them to rely on external powers. By studying and
utilizing heavenly powers over chance, they try to get the reward
they doubt can be won by their own qualities, by hard work and
steady application.16
 Markets and meaning under neoliberalism 203

To overcome the superstition that thinks it can read chance as destiny,

societies with egalitarian aspirations are caught in the following dif-
ficulty. True distributive justice, giving to each what each is due, must
always in some sense be unequal if there are unequal chances for the
development of merit and the proving of worth (to say nothing of the
fact long noticed by communist social theory that different individuals
may have very different needs and requirements in order to contrib-
ute). And if chance is objective, not an illusion but a feature of reality,
then the so-​called playing field between competitors can never, in prin-
ciple, be perfectly leveled. Agonistic competition for the establishment
of value and worth can never completely eliminate the chance differ-
ences between the advantages of opponents. But neither can chance
ever fully obscure the sense that some individuals are inherently more
worthy of honor than others.
As long as the overcoming of the chances of birth and placement by
effort and merit eludes us, either in games or in social life generally, the
unstable tension between the roles of chance and achievement threat-
ens to undo the fabric of egalitarian societies. And Caillois argued
that under social conditions where fair competition is perceived as
being too difficult, games of chance take on inordinate importance
and become perverse, leading to superstition, a reliance on ‘external
powers’ of chance and destiny for success. Caillois writes:

[Alea] leaves hope in the dispossessed that free competition is still

possible in the lowly stations in life… That is why, to the degree
that alea of birth loses its traditional supremacy and regulated
competition becomes dominant, one sees a parallel development
and proliferation of a thousand secondary mechanisms designed
to bring sudden success out of turn to the rare winner.17

Caillois’s argument in Man, Games, and Play was that the role of com-
petition must not be excessive or unfair, lest modern societies devolve
into barbaric inequality and provoke revolt. But dreams of a mid-​
twentieth-​century Keynesian, democratic-​socialist compromise with
capitalism eventually lost to the neoliberal argument that markets
could manage themselves and thus manage democratic aspirations
automatically. A dogma that ‘free markets’ would adjudicate all claims
204 Joshua Ramey

to worthiness (value) directly on the basis of impersonal market forces

(unforeseeable contingent variability of supply and demand) became
the neoliberal superstition of our times. It is as if the neoliberal era,
with its championing of markets as a substitute for social policy, and
market tests as a proof of merit, claimed markets could identify games
of alea directly with those of agôn, and that markets had the power
to honor both competitive merit and unmerited luck, in the same
fell swoop.
I argue that this identification of markets with both the discern-
ment of genuine merit and the honoring of chance is possible only
on the basis of an equivocation in the neoliberal era between markets
and traditional forms of divination. This is the sense of my thesis
that markets are not really, but really seem to be, divinatory and thus
divine. In economic life, which is supposed to be the place, according
to champions of the market, where agôn and alea finally stabilize and
synthesize, the primary engines through which marketplace activity
occurs are the games most excluded from social valorization: mimicry
and ilinx. The giving and taking of prices —​especially in the speed
and intensity of complex finance —​is a complex game of imitation in
which one tries to demand the price that one thinks the average per-
son would accept in a given moment (thus the key role of imitation),
and the ability to propose the right price is a matter of surrendering
oneself to the vertiginous whorl that is the market itself (ilinx). In this
way, markets present themselves as the necessary supplement to other
egalitarian processes such as elections. But this is done through those
affects —​ecstatic imitation and sympathetic intuition —​through
which humans attempt to surpass the need for deliberation and con-
testation upon which democratic processes depend. This is especially
clear in the intensity of the trading pit, where buyers and sellers must
use their ‘animal spirits’ to persuade one another to give and take
prices beyond what is probable or reasonable to expect. (As trader and
philosopher Elie Ayache explains, each time a price is agreed to, the
entire market is re-​created, since given the saturation of information,
there would be no trading at all if the market could not be re-​created
each time, beyond probability, beyond the reasonable expectations
held by all traders in common.)18
The ‘state’ in which one divines is precisely a state of mimicry and
ilinx, since the skilled diviner must enter into a state of openness to
 Markets and meaning under neoliberalism 205

potential meaning that is accessible only through the alteration of con-

sciousness, the expansion of consciousness, through both sympathetic
and symbiotic relations to the clients seeking wisdom and to the spir-
its embodied in the oracular techniques and traditions with which the
diviner works. In this way, our current dependence upon markets as
a form of social order reveals a very deep impasse in modernity, one
Caillois identified as the rejection or repression of the role of games of
mimicry and ilinx as valid, justifiable modes of human activity. In some
sense the reason that agôn-​alea remains an unstable pairing, in moder-
nity, is that the roles of mimicry and ilinx are rejected as irrational and
without legitimate social purpose. The tension between the slow, sober
processes of rational deliberation and the ecstatic, impassioned cun-
ning of marketplace activity threatens to tear egalitarian society apart.
But this is a problem much older than capitalist culture, and cultures
that integrate divination practices into what it means to deliberate may
help us to understand ourselves —​and to act —​better than we do.

Divining otherwise
To evoke divination practices as a framing of complex contemporary
problems may seem spooky or outré, especially when we now use big
data and complex algorithms to place bets on possible futures that
seem grounded in empirically verified probabilities. But the probable
does not exhaust the possible, and in fact profitability (especially on
the massively capitalized derivatives market) depends crucially on our
models of future states not being ever completely accurate. Bear trad-
ers, for example, can only short the market if the consensus view of
probability is wrong.19 And it is precisely the glut of information pro-
vided by big data which diminishes the possibility of what is called
information arbitrage, making large gains in financial speculation
extremely difficult. (The primary arguments used to justify the massive
amounts of capital that are locked up in the derivatives market is not
that it creates new wealth, but that shifting bets on options and futures
reveals important information about where the economy is and where
it is going, making the derivatives market in particular an especially
important, perhaps the key, pseudo-​divinatory practice.)20
The problem, of course, is that the pressure that is placed on firms
and nations by hedge funds to show profitability, to show efficiencies,
206 Joshua Ramey

and so on, derives from the interests of the largest bondholders or

holders of options. That interest is profitability, which may or may not
reflect the interest of the general public, the nation state, global peace,
or the ecosystems upon which industry and finance survive. And it is
precisely here that we desperately need a post-​capitalist future in which
power does not devolve exclusively to the largest firms and the com-
mand over labor and capital that their holdings represent.
By figuring contemporary neoliberal commitments to markets as a
subspecies of a general human commitment to divination practices,
I argue that while neoliberalism may be right that some collective
practice of divination is necessary, it is not necessary that this prac-
tice be figured in and as markets. While marketplace divinations are
geared exclusively toward the discernment of what is profitable in the
nearest term possible, more expansive and capacious forms of divina-
tion would enquire as to how clear and present human needs, desires,
frustrations, and longings might themselves require modification in
view of those human and non-​human others to which we are related
by interdependency and not by rent-​seeking, bartering, or zero-​sum
competition.
Such non-​contractual, non-​hierarchical, subtle and often ambigu-
ous relational interdependencies are those that black theory, Marxist,
feminist, queer, and deep ecological thinkers have been trying to draw
our attention to for many years. They are the interdependencies tradi-
tional divination practices seek to render tractable for human commu-
nities in relation to the complex and ultimately obscure forces present
to us in such constituencies as (in no particular order) the world of
other less-​able and less-​wealthy human beings than those who can
compete in the marketplace, as well as animals, plant life, ecological
niches, seasonal changes, ancestral spirits, unconscious archetypes,
and other potencies of suffering and joy calling for attention below the
reaches of the conscious mind.21
You and I may disagree about who or what should be on this list wor-
thy of our attention and care and fidelity. But the problem, from my
perspective, is not that contemporary neoliberalism denies the reality
of non-​human persons and powers, or the influence of their unforesee-
able relations to our plans and projects. The problem is that neoliber-
alism is an ideology that believes, with totalitarian and authoritarian
certainty, that markets and market processes can dominate, control,
 Markets and meaning under neoliberalism 207

and order the unknown once and for all. Neoliberalism has locked up
the god of chance and thrown away the key of uncertainty. The eco-
logical, social, and psychological costs of this particular politics of
divination and this particular religion of contingency are increasingly
clear. The question remains whether we will continue with neoliberal-
ism deeper into the social and ecological death it entails, or whether
we will re-​animate the archive of traditional practices, in order to
return to a place we truly cannot leave: an earth-​bound experiment
with subtle, nuanced, and open-​ended practices of reading chance
aloud, together.

Notes
1 Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency
(Rowman and Littlefield, Intl., 2016). This paper is a précis of the argu-
ments of the book, and was presented as a talk at the conference,
‘Holism: Possibilities and Problems: An International Interdisciplinary
Conference,’ September 8–​10, 2017.
2 Anthony Thorley, Chantal Allison, Petra Stapp, and John Wadsworth,
‘Clarifying divinatory dialogue: A proposal for a distinction between prac-
titioner divination and essential divination,’ in Divination: Perspectives
for a New Millennium, edited by Patrick Curry (Farnham, UK: Ashgate
Publishing Limited, 2010), 252–​253.
3 See especially Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How
Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013).
4 Ibid.
5 Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1973).
6 See especially Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), chaps. 5–​7.
7 See Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1944) and Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
8 Michel Foucault already made clear, in his 1978–​79 lectures, that the exac-
erbation of wealth inequality would be no argument against the value of
imposing market forces on all of social life, since already for the German
Ordoliberal school —​highly influential on Hayek and subsequent neo-
liberal ideology —​inequality helps to facilitate and maintain competi-
tion, which is the essence of the social life neoliberalism aims to produce.
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, chaps. 5–​7.
208 Joshua Ramey

9 I owe the details of the account of the secession of the plebs and its impli-
cation for my argument to the unpublished research of Adam Cope, and
I owe to Adam, as well, the observations about the connections between
the secession of the plebs and the tactics of Occupy Wall Street.
10 Jackson Lear, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking
Books, 2003).
11 David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement
(New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2013).
12 Roger Caillois, Man, Games, and Play, translated by Meyer Barash
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 55.
13 Ibid., 114.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 48.
17 Ibid., 114.
18 Elie Ayache, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability (New York: Wiley,
2010).
19 For a clear exposition of this point, following on from Ayache’s work, see
Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age
of Derivative Finance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
20 See Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives: A
Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital, and Class (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
21 For an analysis of how capitalism and money constrict our ability
to attend to or develop awareness of real but unprofitable forces, see
Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London:
Routledge, 2001).
Index

Note: Figures are denoted by italic text and notes by “n” and the number of the
note after the page number, e.g., 163n12 refers to note number 12 on page 163. The
lengthy list of figures against “geometry, of wholeness” and “wholeness, geometry
of ” are explained on page ix.

1227: Treatise on nomadology –​the war Anaxagoras 180–​181, 182,

machine 52, 55, 60 190n67
anima mundi 109, 139
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu 28 anomalous experience 26, 27
Absolute, the 31 Answer to Job 35, 37
absolute religion 56 Anthropocene, the 9
abstract idea of the State 52–​59, 63, Anti-​Oedipus 4, 28–​29
65, 69, 71 anti-​Semitism 21
acategoriality 158–​159 apocatastasis 31, 37
achievement 203 applied psychoanalysis 82
actual, the 39, 40, 41, 114, 120, archetypal aspect of existence 88
161, 162n3 archetypal experiences 114–​115
affect/​affectivity 66, 108, 155, 175, 204; archetypal imagery 36, 89, 90, 91, 119,
and the edusemiotic self 104, 110, 120, 122
116, 120, 122; of self on self 122; and archetypal phenomena 132
symptomatology 85, 90, 91, 93, 97 archetypal shadow 122
agôn/​agonistic competition 201, 203, 204 archetypes 32, 33, 114, 119, 120, 158,
alchemy 5, 11, 23, 24, 31, 32; and the 206; and anima 69; of collective
edusemiotic self 106–​107, 109–​110, unconscious 24–​25, 103, 104, 110,
111, 112, 119; and exceptional 113; Jungian 85, 90, 91, 105, 106,
­experiences 151, 159–​160, 161, 163n12 145, 149–​150; as ruling powers 115;
alea 201, 202, 203, 204 as structural elements of psyche
alliances, between different fields 105; and synchronicities 153–​154; of
67–​68 transformation 119; and unus mundus
alternative spiritualities, therapies, and 150–​151; virtual 12; of wholeness 31,
work practices 1 89, 103, 104
analytical psychology 11, 52, 67, 68, art, modern 52, 67, 68, 69, 74n16
75n26, 185; and symptomatology aspect monism 162n3; see also
91, 97, 98 dual-​aspect monism; neutral monism
anamnesis 31 Asprem, Egil 26, 35, 36
210 Index

assemblages 85, 104, 107 clinical domain 102, 117; and

authoritarianism 193, 197, 198, 199, ­symptomatology 80, 81, 82, 84,
206–​207 85, 94, 98
autonomous unconscious 91, 98 clinicians of civilization 83
closed wholes 28
background reality 150 cobweb plot 133, 134, 137, 140
baseline correlations 156 Codex Fejérváry-​Mayer 126, 129, 131, 140
becoming 75n22, 89, 97, 170, 172; and coincidence phenomena 86, 109, 156,
Being 173; and the edusemiotic self 156–​157, 158, 160
112, 114–​115, 117, 118, 122; and Coldness and cruelty 80
holism 27, 29, 37, 39, 41; of Jung’s collective assemblages 104
characters 85, 90; process of 116–​117; collective culture 86
see also rhizome collective information 194
becoming estranged 64–​66 collective level, of experience 62, 88,
becoming-​active 173 94, 115
becoming-​imperceptible 71 collective opinion 62, 63–​64
becoming-​majoritarian 59 collective projection 61–​62
becoming-​minoritarian 59 collective unconscious 11, 24, 68, 145,
becoming-​other 12, 116, 122 150; and edusemiotic self 103,
becoming-​reactive 173 110–​111, 113, 114, 121–​122; and
becoming-​revolutionary 59 symptomatology 85, 90, 92, 93, 98
becoming-​self 102–​107, 110, 116, 122 common man 61
becoming-​woman 110 communication, transversal 109
Benjamin, Walter 184 competition 194, 195, 201, 202, 203–​204,
Bergson, Henri 6, 27, 112 206, 207n8
Bergsonism 4 complementarity 107–​108, 148–​149
bidirectionality 149, 154 completeness, of the physical 142, 143
bifurcation 133–​135, 135, 136, 139, 140 complexes 85, 103
binary opposites 109, 118; see also complexity theory 1–​2, 9
­dualisms/​duality compositional dual-​aspect monism 144
Birth of Tragedy, The 181 conceptual personae 62
body without organs 4 conceptual world 60, 62, 69
Bohm, David 122, 144, 162n3 conjunctions 23, 31
bounded system 1 connectedness 147, 161
bounded whole 65 conscious ego 24–​25, 106, 160
consciousness: cultural 118; ego-​ 43;
Caillois, Roger 201–​202, 203–​204, 205 empirical 37; minoritarian 59;
capitalism 194, 196, 197, 203–​204 ­subjective 149–​150
capture 55–​56, 58, 62, 64; authoritarian consciousness research 12
198, 199 consequent nature, of the divine 40
causal closure, of the physical 142, 143 constructivism 10, 110
Central Park 184 contingency 13, 194, 201, 207
centralization 30 Convalescent, The 169, 170, 171,
centrifugal power 173 183
chance 13, 14, 152, 158, 193–​208 correlations 127, 143, 144, 146, 149,
chaos/​chaotic states 12, 67, 138, 194 151–​155, 156–​157, 157–​158
chess 57, 58 correspondence 38, 82, 119, 130, 140,
classical theism 10, 34, 35, 45n5 150, 153
 Index 211

cosmic mandalas 140; see also Codex and holistic enchantment 167–​168,
Fejérváry-​Mayer; Kalachakra 174, 184
mandala dispersal 139
cosmography 126–​127 dissimilarity 13, 171
cosmology 24, 31–​32, 34, 35, 126–​127, dissociation phenomena 156, 157
131–​132 dissolution 65, 90, 109
cosmos 168, 169, 174, 180 distributive justice 203
counter-​actualisation 114 divination 13, 14, 122, 193–​194,
countercultural movements 1 197–​199, 200–​201, 204–​207
creativity 7, 9, 10, 72, 87, 139, 180; and divine, the 7, 110, 116, 144; and holism
edusemiotic self 102–​103, 112, 117, 34–​35, 39, 40, 42, 45n5
120–​121; and holism 27, 29, 32, 37, domination 54, 59
38, 39, 40 dramatisation 12, 93, 120
creed 56, 61, 73n11; of Deleuze’s dreams 103, 110, 119, 127, 131, 138,
ethics 117 158; and symptomatology 85, 94,
critical, the 80–​81, 90, 94, 98 95–​96, 96–​97
critical holism 7, 8 dual-​aspect monism 12, 143–​145,
culture 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 63; and edusemiotic 146, 154
self 115–​116, 118, 121; and markets dual-​aspect thinking 143, 161–​162n1
200, 201, 205; and symptomatology dualisms/​duality 2, 3, 39, 139, 140, 181;
86, 92, 93–​94 and edusemiotic self 112, 118, 121;
and exceptional experiences 143, 151,
decompositional dual-​aspect monism 12 155; see also binary opposites
deficit correlations 154, 157 Dühring, Eugen 168–​169
Deleuze and the Unconscious 5–​6, 14n1 dying man 88–​89
deliberative democracy 194
depersonalization 116 Eastern thought 9
depth psychology 43, 51, 104, 105 ecology 2, 7, 20, 21, 132; and markets
derivatives market 205 196, 200, 206, 207
desire 6, 87, 109–​110, 193, 196, 206 economics 195, 204
desiring-​production 105–​106 ecosystems 1, 206
determinism 29, 152 education 6, 7, 8, 11, 102; psychological
deterritorialization 94 67, 69, 71; self-​ 103–​104, 120
diagnosis 80, 102, 117 edusemiotic self 102–​122, 108, 121
dictator States 54 EE (exceptional experiences) 9, 12–​13,
difference 10, 13, 28, 86, 87, 172; 142–​163, 145, 156
and edusemiotic self 107, 108, ego, conscious 24–​25, 106, 160
112, 113 ego-​consciousness 43
Difference and Repetition 6, 11, 171, 172; elementary similarity 13, 177–​178,
and ‘image of thought’ and State-​form 179–​180
52, 62, 63, 65, 75n25 embodiment 54–​55, 69, 114, 121, 122,
differentiation 12, 38, 71, 75n25, 196 201, 205; see also disembodiment
diremption, of modern man 61 empiricism 25, 26, 29, 30, 37, 38, 68, 113
disembodiment 64, 65, 75n21, 175; enchanted Others 33
see also embodiment enchantment 13, 74n19; holistic 167–​192
disenchantment 7, 13, 74n19, 75n21; and encounter, the 52, 66
eternal recurrence 167–​168, 174, 184; energy 37, 42, 105–​106
and holism 20, 26, 27, 33, 34, 36, 42; entelechy 31
212 Index

environmentalism 9 extramundane, the 25–​26, 52, 56, 64,

epistemic levels of reality 144–​145 66, 67–​71
epistemology 1, 2, 3, 8, 70–​71, 148–​149, extreme contingency 13, 14, 152, 158,
151, 155 193–​208
Eros 109–​110 eyes of the mind 110–​111
Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical
Inquiry into Freud 183 finalism 29
esotericism 5, 9, 36, 44 financial markets 13, 14, 193–​208
Essays Critical and Clinical 11, 81 form of exteriority 52, 69, 70, 76n31
esse in anima 7, 33 fractal geometry 12, 130–​131, 132,
essences 91, 111–​112, 176, 177, 178; and 133, 139
holism 28, 29, 37 freedom, human 186n16, 196
essentialism 21, 30 future wholes 10, 29, 30–​31, 32, 36,
estrangement 9, 52, 64–​66, 67, 70, 72 37, 41, 42
eternal recurrence/​eternal return 5, 13, futures trading 199
168, 169–​172, 172–​173, 173–​174, 176,
183, 184 games/​gaming chance 200–​205
ethical ambivalence, of holism 20–​45 Geist 2, 23, 81, 106, 109, 119, 158, 160;
ethical responsibility 116 and eternal recurrence 168, 174, 175,
Ethics (book) 172, 187n24 179, 180, 182
ethics (concept) 11–​12, 58, 65; of gender 9
­integration 115–​119 geometry: fractal 12, 130–​131, 132, 133,
etiology 82 139; of wholeness 125–​140, 126, 127,
exceptional experiences (EE) 9, 12–​13, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136,
142–​163, 145, 156 137, 138
excess correlations 154, 156–​157 German holism 21
excess libido 92 gnosis 5, 11–​12, 109, 110, 114, 120
exchange relationships 195 Gnosticism 5, 39, 110, 121, 139
excluded third 105, 107 Go 57
exclusion 4, 7, 53, 60, 64, 68 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 167–​168
experience: acategorial 158–​159; Guattari, Félix 4, 5, 10, 28–​29, 51,
­anomalous 26, 27; archetypal 114–​115; 73n10
collective level of 62, 88, 94, 115;
empirical 25, 38; exceptional 9, 12–​13, habits of thought 60
142–​163, 145, 156; immanent 9, 12, Handwriting and Character 178
13, 159; multiplicities of 8, 14n1; Hayek, Friedrich 13, 195, 196
­mystical 104–​105, 158; numinous hearing 11, 90, 91, 98
26, 27, 35; reified 13, 157, 158, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 31,
160; ­relational 13, 157, 158, 160; 44–​45n4, 183
­synchronistic 33, 112, 157–​158 Heidegger, Martin 13, 170–​171, 174,
experiential learning 11 175, 180, 188n40
experiential wholes 29 hermeneutics 81, 132
experimentation 38, 86, 87, 98, 110, 113, Hermeticism 7, 27, 31, 37–​38, 103,
118, 200 109, 160
exteriority 7, 52, 57–​58, 69, 70, 120 hidden world 91–​92
external phenomena 156, 156, 157 historicism 21
external power 201–​202, 203 holism: and chance 193–​208; critical
external relations 30, 41 7, 8; ethical ambivalence of 20–​45;
 Index 213

German 21; organicistic 7, 30–​32; individuation 3, 11, 52–​53, 104, 110, 160;
rhizomatic/​transversal 7 and archetypes 114–​115, 150–​151,
Holism: Possibilities and Problems 7–​8 158; axiom of Maria Prophetissa as
holistic enchantment, and eternal 107; as becoming-​self 102–​107, 116,
­recurrence 167–​192 117, 119, 122; and holism 23, 25–​26,
holistic reality 145, 147 43; and symptomatology 76n27,
holistic thought 2–​3, 7, 9, 20, 21–​30, 36, 76n30, 86–​87
42 induced correlations 154–​155
homoiomeries 18, 182 information processing 74n18, 193
homoiōsis/​homology 180, inner, the 68–​69, 70–​71, 148
181–​182, 189n59 inner psychic integration 23
human freedom 186n16, 196 inner/​outer binary 69
human wholeness 22–​23 integrated mind 23–​24, 160
integrated whole 112
I Ching 119, 127, 130, 197 integration, ethics of 115–​119
Idea 176 intelligence 114, 202
ideal games 201 intentionality 65, 152, 163n9
idealised State 61 interconnectedness 2, 26
idealism, Platonic 176 interiority 7, 55–​56, 56–​57, 57–​58, 60,
identity 4, 13, 87, 113, 200, 202; and 68, 69, 70
eternal recurrence 171–​172, 175, 179; internal phenomena 156, 156
and external experiences 153–​154, internal relations 7, 30–​32
158; and holistic enchantment intuitions 3, 27, 61, 114, 169, 182, 194,
171–​172, 175, 179 204; and symptomatology 92–​93,
ilinx 201, 202 95
illness 83, 84 intuitive images 178
image of thought 11, 51, 52, 60–​71; invisible, the 91–​92, 104, 106, 108–​109,
see also rhizome 110–​111, 118, 120
images, impression and intuitive 178 irrationality 26, 200; see also
imitation, games of 201, 202, 204–​205 rationality
immanence 10, 106, 109, 110, 157–​161, irregular, the 58
163n10; and holism 22, 26, 35, 36, 37, irrepresentable, the 11, 26, 104
40–​41; plane of 4, 34, 38, 76n28, 106,
110, 118, 121; pure 4, 10, 33–​34, 38, Jenkins, Barbara 6, 9
40, 44, 109; secret 106 Jungian archetypes 85, 90, 91, 105, 106,
immanent experiences 9, 12, 13, 159 145, 149–​150
immediate inner experience 64, 68–​69
imperceptible, the 91, 104 Kalachakra mandala 126–​127, 128,
impersonal transcendental field 109 131, 140
impression images 178 Kant, Immanuel 5, 9, 38, 74n20, 114,
incarnation, of the transcendental field 158, 160, 196
of the collective unconscious 114 Kerslake, Christian 5–​6, 14n1, 75n25,
included third 11, 105, 111, 150 80, 163n10
individual (Jung) 53, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, Klages, Ludwig 13, 173–​176, 177–​180,
63, 65, 66 182–​183
individual development 3 knowledge 5, 11–​12, 109, 110, 114, 120;
individual psyche 3; see also psyche, the more-​than-​human 14, 193, 195, 197
individual wholeness 23, 25, 44n2 Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich 36
214 Index

language 51, 59, 90, 94–​95, 115, 118–​119 metaphysics 7, 26–​27, 38, 40, 42, 144,
learning 11, 80, 94; and edusemiotic self 170–​171
102, 104, 112, 113, 114, 118 methodology 8, 53, 61, 98, 175
levelling down, statistical 53 methods 71, 104, 113, 116, 117, 152, 175
libido 92, 105–​106, 110, 185 microcosm 24, 25, 31, 37–​38, 177
literature 80–​81, 83–​84, 86 microphysics 149
local realism 146–​148 mimicry 201, 204–​205
Logic of Sense 40 mind, integrated 23–​24, 160
Logos 28, 61, 110, 120, 175 mind-​matter correlations 143, 144, 149,
151–​155, 157–​158
macrocosm 24, 25, 31, 37–​38, 177 minor literature 11, 80, 94–​98
major literature 95–​96 minoritarian consciousness 59
majoritarian 54–​55, 59 minority politics 11, 97, 98
majority 54, 59, 71, 72n4, 95 models of reality 155
make-​believe, games of 201, 202, modern art 52, 67, 68, 69, 74n16
204–​205 modern differentiation 38
Man, Play, and Games 201 modernity 44n2, 52, 64, 72n3, 202, 205
mandala symbolism 126, 127, 130, 131 monism 12, 143–​145, 146, 154, 162n3
Mandelbrot, Benoit 12, 131–​132, 133 Mons Sacer 198
Mandelbrot set 133–​135, 134, 135, 136, more-​than-​human knowledge 14, 193,
137, 138, 139 195, 197
Marcuse, Herbert 183 multiplicities 8, 11, 14n1, 107–​115, 108,
market forces 195, 197, 204, 207n8 117, 120, 122
marketplace games 200–​201 mundus potentialis 118
markets, financial 13, 14, 193–​208 Mysterium Coniunctionis 23, 32, 151,
masochism 75n25, 80 159–​161
mass man 11, 51–​52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 60, mystical experiences 104–​105, 158
64, 69–​70 mystical thought 7, 9
mass opinion 62, 63–​64
mass projection 61–​62 nature 2, 7, 12, 30, 34, 140, 167, 187n24;
mass-​mindedness 53, 54 and edusemiotic self 102, 104, 105,
material vitalism 7 106, 108, 109; and exceptional experi-
material world 25, 111, 139, 153, 154, ences 142, 149, 150
155, 159 nature–​culture network 121
materialism 176 Nazism 20–​21, 173–​174
mathematics 104–​105, 140 neoliberal capitalism 194, 196, 197
mathesis universalis 118–​119, 121 neoliberalism 13–​14, 193–​194, 195,
matter 2, 3, 4, 26, 56, 176, 185; and 196–​197, 203–​204, 206, 207n8
­edusemiotic self 106, 112; and neo-​Platonism 39, 114, 158
­exceptional experiences 145, 146, neutral language 12
148; and wholeness 139, 140; see also neutral monism 143–​144
mind-​matter correlations newborn infant 88–​89
measurement 146–​147, 148, 149, Nietzsche, Friedrich 5, 13, 61, 70, 82, 87,
154 167–​192
mental, the 12, 13, 34, 143–​161, 145 Nietzsche and Philosophy 171–​172
mental-​physical correlations 143, 144, nihilism 14, 173
149, 157–​158 Nobody 54, 59
merit 201, 202–​203, 204 nomadicism 59
 Index 215

noncausal correspondence 153 Pauli-​Jung conjecture 12, 142–​163,

non-​identity thinking 180 145, 156
nonlocal correlations 146 Peirce, Charles S. 102, 107, 111
non-​personal power 85, 87 percept 11, 80, 90–​94, 97, 98
non-​rational, the 26 perception 13, 34, 104, 114, 122, 155,
noology 70 157, 179
normal man 59, 73n6 peripheral totality 86
numinous experience 26, 27, 35 personal transformation 5
personality 24, 25, 86–​87
objective psyche 103 phenomenological typology, of
objective unconscious 149–​150 ­exceptional experiences 155–​157, 156
object-​recognition 68 philosophical concepts 8, 81, 145–​146
occultism 6 photon pair 146
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) 199 physical, the 12, 13, 34, 142, 143,
Of Cosmogonic Eros 174–​175 144, 150, 151; and immanence 157,
one world see unus mundus 158, 160, 161; and mind–​matter
one-​sided image 52, 61, 72 ­correlations 153, 154; and Pauli-​Jung
one-​sidedness 25, 66 conjecture 145, 146; and synchronicity
ontic levels of reality 144–​145 153–154; and transcendence 157, 158,
open society 118 160, 161
open systems 33 physical reality/​physical world 23, 25,
open whole 4, 8, 32–​42 111, 139; and exceptional experiences
open-​ended creativity 37 146–​148, 153, 154, 155, 159
opposites 105, 106, 109, 118, 174–​175, physicalism 142, 143, 158
182; coincidence of 86, 109, 158, 160; physics 12, 33, 68, 111; and exceptional
union of 22–​23, 135, 158 experiences 142, 144–​145, 146,
ordinary correlations 156 148–​149, 150, 152, 157, 162n6
organicism 4, 7, 10, 73n10; and holism physis 139, 140
29–​30, 30–​32, 37–​38, 41, 42 plane of immanence 4, 34, 38, 76n28,
organisation 10; invisible plane of 106; 106, 110, 118, 121
of relations 51, 53, 65, 66, 68, 69; of plane of Nature 106
thought 51 Platonic idealism 176
organism 1, 4, 51, 61, 65, 75n22, 176; Platonism 28, 33, 38, 39, 111, 171
and holism 28, 30, 31, 41 plebs 198–​199, 208n9
original wholes 10, 29, 30–​31, 32, 36, plurality 86
37, 41, 42 political economy 9
otherness 9, 86 Politics of Divination: Neoliberal
outside thought 70, 71 Endgame and the Religion of
OWS (Occupy Wall Street) 199 Contingency 13–​14, 193–​208
post-​capitalist power 206
panentheism 7, 10, 32–​42, 45n6, 45n7 post-​structuralism 22, 180
pantheism 10, 33–​35, 45n5, 45n6, power(s) 54, 57, 59, 87, 200; of becom-
74n20 ing 59; centrifugal 173; diagnostic 80;
parts 4, 65, 86, 106, 144, 168; and holism external 201–​202, 203; and images
21, 24–​25, 28–​29, 29–​30, 31, 32, 36 68, 69, 72, 176; of language 109; of
pathology 3, 25, 61, 84, 110 markets 13, 204, 206–​207; in matter
patricians 198–​199 106, 109; non-​personal 85, 87; outside
Pauli, Wolfgang 12, 68, 111, 118, 139 space and time 175; patrician 198;
216 Index

post-​capitalist 206; procreative 86; psychotherapy 3, 8, 23, 90, 91–​92, 94, 98

ruling 115; of the soul 177, 182; of the pure immanence 4, 10, 33–​34, 38, 40,
spirit 182; transcendent 201–​202, 203; 44, 109
and the truth 196; unequal 196; of
the virtual 40; weaving 178; will to 87, quadratic form 125, 126, 127, 135, 139
188n40; of the world 179 quantum nonlocality 145
power law distribution 132 quantum physics 68, 144, 146
pre-​existent wholes 10, 29, 30–​31, 32, 36, quaternity 107, 135, 138, 139–​140, 151
37, 41, 42
primordial nature, of the divine 40 rational agent 118
private thinker 52, 64, 66, 69, 70, 74n16 rationalistic Weltanschauung 53, 55, 58,
Process and Reality 41 63–​64, 74n17
procreation 86 rationality 26, 93–​94, 105; see also
prognosis 102, 117 irrationality
Prophetissa, Maria 11, 107, 111 realism, local 146–​148
Proust and Signs 4, 28 reality: of appearance 177; background
psyche, the 3, 12, 13, 52, 69, 96, 140; and 150; epistemic levels of 144–​145; holis-
archetypes 105, 114; and dispersal tic 145, 147; of images 13, 176–​178,
139; and edusemiotic self 103, 117, 188n42; of life 178; local 147; models
122; and holism 23, 33; invisible ele- of 155; ontic levels of 144–​145, 147,
ments of 120; of modern man 53, 154; physical 23, 111; psychic 7, 33;
60; plasticity of 98; self-​regulation of self-​model of 155, 157; transcendental
85–​86; and shadow 115; and similarity 32; unitary 8; world-​model of 155, 157
179–​180; structural elements of; and reason 26, 63, 64, 110, 116, 196
symbol 132; and wholeness 135 rebirth 75n25, 115, 116
psychic fragmentation 3 reciprocal determination 39
psychic reality 7, 33 recognition 66, 67, 68, 69
psychic wholeness 12, 32, 67, 88, 139 reconciliation 2, 3, 26, 112
psychoanalysis 5, 6, 11, 51, 81, 82, recursion 130, 133
84, 97, 98 Red Book, The 3, 91, 93, 94, 98, 184–​185
psychoanalytic literary criticism 83–​84 reductionism 2
psychoid archetype 7, 26 reification/​reified experiences 9, 13, 157,
Psychological Achievements of Friedrich 158, 159, 160, 163n12
Nietzsche, The 175 relational entities 102
psychological concepts 140 relational experiences 13, 157, 158, 160
psychological development 22–​23 relations: bidirectional 149, 154; of exte-
psychological education 67, 69 riority 7, 52, 57–​58; external 30, 41;
psychological healing 22–​23 internal 7, 30–​32; social 6, 95
psychological model, of Jung 3, 10, 26, 35 religion 51, 55, 56, 66, 68, 181; of con-
psychological wholeness 3, 23, 24 tingency 194, 207; and holism 26, 27,
psychology, depth 43, 51, 104, 105 42; and symptomatology 82, 94–​95, 97
psychopathology 84 representations 9, 32, 63, 69, 91, 92,
psychophysical correlations 143, 144, 125–​126, 172; and edusemiotic self
149, 157–​158 106, 113, 120; and exceptional experi-
psychophysical unity 139 ences 152, 153, 155, 158
psychophysically neutral reality 12, 13; resistance 30, 58, 59, 68, 71, 118
and exceptional experiences 143, 144, restored wholes 10, 29, 30–​31, 32, 36,
146, 150, 151, 153, 154–​155, 158, 159 37, 41, 42
 Index 217

rhizome 7, 80, 81, 97, 98, 108–​109, recurrence 174, 175, 176, 177, 179,
116–​117; see also image of thought 180, 182
River Map, The 130 space 57–​58, 88, 114, 120, 122, 160–​161,
Royal science 56 175, 178
ruling powers 115 Spinoza, Baruch 5, 143, 167, 172, 196;
and exceptional experiences 144, 153,
sadism/​sado-​masochism 80 161–​162n1; and holism 34, 42,
scaling 131–​132, 133 45n5
schizoanalysis 106 spirit 2, 23, 81, 106, 109, 119, 158, 160;
secret immanence, of the divine and eternal recurrence 168, 174, 175,
spirit 106 179, 180, 182
Seele 13, 174, 175, 179; see also soul Spirit as Adversary of the Soul, The 174,
self, the 3, 10, 12, 62, 64–​65, 89, 104, 175, 179
128; and exceptional experiences spirituality 7, 20, 118
150–​151, 160; and holism 22–​23, State, the 52–​59, 61, 63, 65,
24–​25, 32, 36, 37–​38, 42–​43, 44–​45n4 69, 71
self-​education 11, 103–​104, 120–​121, 121 State-​form 52–​59
self-​knowledge 11, 104 State-​religion 53
self-​model, of reality 155, 157 State-​science 53
self-​reflection 121 State-​thinker 71
self-​similarity 132 static representations 9, 106
self-​transcendence 122 static transcendence 41
semiotics 102–​122, 108, 121, 121 statistical levelling down 53
sensible objects 33, 119 statistical man 11, 51, 53, 64
shadow archetype 12, 24–​25, 32, 150, Steiner, Rudolf 168
160; and edusemiotic self 115–​116, striated space 58
117–​118, 119, 122 structural correlations 154–​155
shared collectivity 25 structuralism 180
signs 6, 9, 11, 82, 83, 179–​180, 198; and subject, dissolution of the 65, 90
edusemiotic self 102–​122 subjective consciousness 149–​150
similarity 13, 132, 171–​172, 176, 178, submission, to market laws 196
179, 181–​182; elementary 13, 177–​178, substance 5, 74n18, 109, 143
179–​180 superordinate totality 32
Simpson, Christopher 39 symbolic density 132
Smuts, Jan Christiaan 2, 3, 20, 21, 44n3 symbolic structures 132
social entities 23, 44n2 symbolic world, of psychic
social life 193, 195, 196, 197, 200, 201, wholeness 139
203, 207n8 symbolism 126–​127, 140
social order 68, 76n27, 193, 194, symbols 9, 11, 12, 89, 177, 179, 180; and
195–​196, 202, 205 edusemiotic self 102, 109, 114; and
social relations 6, 95 holism 23, 26, 37–​38; and wholeness
social valorization 204 132, 135, 138
socialism 54, 196 symptomatology 80–​98
society 1, 24, 56, 60, 68, 72n3, 118; and symptoms 9, 11, 82–​83, 94, 102–103,
markets 195, 197, 198, 200, 202, 205 116, 117
Socratism 175 synchronicity 7, 12, 111, 112, 140,
soul 13, 69, 87, 92, 110, 153, 160; and 151–​155, 157–​158; and holism 26–​27,
holistic enchantment and eternal 31, 32, 33, 38
218 Index

synthesis: from analysis to 119–​122, true life 108–​109

121; of conscious and unconscious Twilight of the Idols 167
37, 42–​43 typical reality models 12

Tarot, as a sign-​system 119–​121, 121, Übermensch 170, 183

121–​122 ultimate wholeness 8, 14
temple dream 96–​97 uncertainty 13, 32, 81, 117, 193, 201, 207
tertium non datur 105, 107 unconscious, the 3, 5–​6, 9, 11, 68, 75n25,
tertium quid 11, 105, 111, 150 128, 135; autonomous 91, 98; collec-
theism 7, 10, 32–​42, 45n5, 45n6, tive see collective unconscious; and
45n7, 74n20 edusemiotic self 102–​122; and excep-
therapeutics 82 tional experiences 144, 146, 148–​150,
therapy 3, 20, 82, 87, 90; see also 154, 160; and holism 23, 26, 35, 39,
psychotherapy 43; objective 149–​150; and symp-
thought: Eastern 9; habits of 60; holistic tomatology 86–​87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 97;
2–​3, 7, 9, 20, 21–​30, 36, 42; image of transcendental 106
11, 51, 52, 60–​71; mystical 7, 9; unconscious shadow 115
outside 70, 71; systems of 10, 51; underground man 63
totalitarian 8, 33, 42 undiscovered self (present and future),
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and The 10, 42, 51–​76
Schizophrenia, A 52, 54, 59, 60, 65 unequal power 196
Thus Spoke Zarathustra 13, 169–​170, 183 unidirectional correlations 154
time 88, 114, 122, 160–​161, 175 unio mentalis 23–​24, 160
total personality see totality union of opposites 22–​23, 135, 158
totalitarian intuitions 3 union of the conscious and unconscious
totalitarian regimes 54 personality 22–​23
totalitarian thought 8, 33, 42 unitary reality 8
totalitarianism 20–​21, 42 unities 135, 138
totality: Deleuze on 10, 28–​29, 73n10, unity of opposites 22–​23, 135, 158
86, 122; Jung on 52, 138; Nietzsche’s unity of the self 12
view of Goethe on 167; Pauli on 148; universal interconnectedness, among all
peripheral 86; superordinate 32 aspects of reality 26
totalization 30 univocity of being 4
transcendence 4, 10, 106, 109, 122, unus mundus 3, 10, 12, 106, 112; and
157–​161; and holism 22, 26, 29–​44 archetypes 150–​151; and exceptional
transcendent power 201–​202, 203 experiences 145, 153, 160, 161; and
transcendental empiricism 113 holism 23, 26–​27, 31, 32, 37; and
transcendental field 109, 111, 114 symmetries 162n6
transcendental reality 32
transcendental unconscious 106 value: dimension of 116–​117; in Jung’s
transdisciplinarity 1–​2 psychological model 26; market-​based
transformation 24, 62, 66, 109 199, 201, 203
Transformation and Symbols of the vertigo, games of 201, 202
Libido/​Symbols of Transformation vertigo of philosophy 163n10; see also
184–​185 immanence
transgressivity 86, 109, 158, 160 violence 116
transversal communication 109 virtual, the 4, 39, 40–​41, 111–​112, 114,
transversal holism 7 120, 162n3
 Index 219

virtual archetypes 12 wholeness: archetype of 31, 89, 103, 104;

vision (in Jungian analysis) 104–​105 geometry of 125–​140, 126, 127, 128,
vision (sight) 11, 65, 84, 90, 91, 98 129, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138;
visions (dreams) 24, 92, 95, 110, 176 of humanity 22, 24; psychic 12, 32,
vitalisms 7, 61, 87, 116 67, 88, 139; psychological 3, 23, 24;
ultimate 8, 14
war machines 58, 70, 73n12 wholes 1–​2, 9, 10, 144, 152; and holism
wealth inequality 207n8 24, 28, 29, 30–​31, 32, 36, 37, 41, 42
weaving power, of all that belongs Will to Power, The (book) 176
together through relation or will to power (concept) 87, 188n40
opposition 178 woman’s dream, Mandala based
Weltanschauung 53, 55, 58, 61, on a 131
63–​64, 74n17 world-​model, of reality 155, 157
What is Philosophy? 4, 62 wounded healer 89–​90
Whitehead, Alfred North 21, 40–​41, 44,
161–​162n1 Zarathustra 13, 168, 169–​171, 173,
whole, the: bounded 65; integrated 183
112–​113; open 4, 8, 32–​33; symbolic Zipf, George Kingsly/​Zipf’s law
knowledge of 8 132, 133
whole man 11, 51–​52, 58, 59, 62, 63, Zofingia Lectures 73n6, 74n19
66, 69, 71 Zofingiaverein 59, 74n14