ABSTRACT
In this chapter Rico Sneller explores the viability of thinking wholes without excluding alterity. He argues that 20th-century philosophy, from Emmanuel Levinas onwards, in a critique of the Western tradition exhaustively unmasked any attempt to totalise while thinking. However, this critique may have unnecessarily rejected experience. Yet, what cannot be thought or articulated can perhaps still be experienced.
Sneller’s hypothesis is that the C.G. Jung’s notions of ‘synchronicity’ and ‘image thinking’ could bring a solution to the apparently mutual exclusion of ‘whole’ and ‘alterity’. He argues that a revaluation of (1) nature, (2) consciousness and (3) language is requisite to this end. Nature should be reinterpreted as psychoid, such as to mitigate the strict boundaries between it and consciousness. Consciousness should be seen as endowed with a ‘slider’ that oscillates between alternate states of mind. And language should similarly be seen as a multifaceted reality rather than as a useful yet one-dimensional instrument. Synchronistic experiences, Sneller suggests, are not only those eliciting the said revaluation of nature, consciousness and language, but also those that are likely to produce themselves once this revaluation is undertaken. In order to express them, Sneller contends that we have to resort to images rather than concepts.
