Seba.Health

Concept · Seba Knowledge Graph

Alchemy as Logic (opus contra imaginationem)

Alchemy as Logic

Giegerich’s reading of alchemy breaks with Jung on a decisive point. For Jung, medieval alchemy was the historical link between the ancient past (mythology, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism) and the modern situation of the soul — a reservoir of imaginal pre-figurations for the psychology of the unconscious. “But for us,” Giegerich writes, “it is also the link between the imagination and dialectical logic” (Giegerich 2020, p. 134).

Alchemy is opus contra naturam — and Giegerich takes the phrase exactly. The work is against the grain of nature because it is the soul overcoming its own imaginal immediacy to become thought. “Even though alchemy undoubtedly uses an imaginal style of thought, the very point of alchemy seems to me to be striving to overcome the imagination” (Giegerich 2020, p. 134). The opus is therefore properly opus contra imaginationem. Mercurius, the “living and liquid concept,” is “subjective and objective at once”; he is “a concept—even if a) a concept in imaginal form… b) a paradoxical concept, and c) one still invested with a certain autonomous… activity of its own” (Giegerich 2020, p. 137).

The operations — mortificatio, putrefactio, fermentatio, evaporatio, distillatio, sublimatio, the separation and conjunction of opposites — are “logical operations expressed in a material, chemical imagery and often acted out as literal chemical operations” (Giegerich 2020, p. 139). All of them, Giegerich notes, “designate different aspects of what HEGEL termed Aufhebung, sublation” (Giegerich 2020, p. 139n). Alchemy, on this reading, is the tradition’s first rigorous approach to the soul’s logical life — a dialectic in the medium of matter, redeemed (more than a century before Jung) in Hegel’s Phenomenology.

Relationships

Primary sources