ABSTRACT
In this chapter Gord Barentsen interrogates the idea of an ethical holism by articulating the theoretical countertransferences between Jungian thought and the Naturphilosophie of German philosopher Friedrich Schelling. Barentsen begins with Schelling, who conceives Nature’s products as composed from an infinite matrix of ‘dynamic atoms,’ mutually entangled points of intensity called actants. Paradoxically singular yet entangled in each other, objects in Nature are ‘inhibitions’ of this infinite actantial productivity. Nature desires the whole of a final, absolute product, but this whole is made (im)possible by the infinite productivity which both constitutes and dissipates this horizon of totality.
Barentsen articulates the isomorphism between the actants’ dynamism and Jung’s mature formulation of the archetype. What Barentsen calls Jung’s ‘therapeutics of presence’ (archetypes concretized for the sake of a linearized therapy) is troubled by the open energic economy of his metapsychology, which entangles archetypes with each other like Schelling’s actants. Thus, this therapeutics’ teleological individuation attempts to contain an unruly purposiveness whose fluidity resists congelation into an overarching whole.
In the closing passages, Barentsen responds to the question: can we ethicize this ‘whole made of holes,’ a totality ostensibly more than the sum of its parts but nevertheless destabilized by its constituent seethe of nonmolar intensities?
