Seba.Health

Concept · Seba Knowledge Graph

Nous

Nous — νοῦς

Nous (νοῦς, earlier noos) names, across the Greek tradition, the faculty by which the mind sees. The word carries the graph from Homer to Plotinus with a single thread: the eye of the soul, the organ of clear images, the intelligible realm where all the Forms are held in simultaneous actuality.

The Homeric organ of clear images

In the homeric-plural-self noos stands apart from the affective organs thumos and phrenes. Bruno Snell: “thymos is the mental organ which causes (e)motion, while noos is the recipient of images” (Snell 1953, p. 12). Noos is akin to νοεΐν, to realize, to see in its true colours: “the mind as a recipient of clear images, or, more briefly, the organ of clear images” (Snell 1953, p. 13). It is, in Snell’s image, “the mental eye which exercises an unclouded vision.”

Shirley Darcus Sullivan catalogues its features: noos is always singular, one per person, non-physical, never a container for other psychic entities (Sullivan 1995, p. 19). Its range is wider than intellect alone — “a ‘way of thinking’ … ‘clear sightedness’ … deliberation … a ‘way of reacting’ … a ‘way of coping’” (Sullivan 1995, p. 19). It is hidden: “there is no seer among mortals who would know the noos of Zeus” (Hesiod fr. 303.2, quoted Sullivan 1995, p. 20). And it is mutable: “the noos of the human being on earth is such as is the day that the father of humans and gods brings” (Od. 18.130–137). Ruth Padel registers its partly-divine character: “Nous is to us in each of us a god” (Euripides fr., quoted Padel 1994, p. 33).

Anaxagoras — cosmic ordering principle

With Anaxagoras nous becomes the ordering principle of the universe. “Nous is without limit, self-ruled and mixed with no thing, but alone and by itself… . It is the finest and purest of all things, and has all judgement concerning everything and is most powerful” (Anaxagoras B 12, quoted Sullivan 1995, p. 34). Nous surrounds and permeates the seeds of things and set them in the motion that produced their present arrangement (Sullivan 1995, p. 34). The human nous and the cosmic nous are one principle at two scales — the microcosm-macrocosm axiom in its pre-Socratic form.

Plato — the eye of the soul, the ordering reason

Plato inherits the Homeric noos-as-eye and makes it the soul’s organ for the Forms: Snell notes that “Plato too understands the νους as δμμα τής ψυχής”, the eye of the soul, citing Symposium 219A, Republic 533D, Theaetetus 164A, Sophist 254A (Snell 1953, p. 312). In the plato-timaeus reason cannot be present apart from soul, and the cosmos is ensouled because it bears reason.

Plotinus — the second hypostasis

In the enneads Plotinus raises Nous to its metaphysical summit. “The greatest, later than the divine unity, must be the Divine Mind, and it must be the second of all existence, for it is that which sees The One on which alone it leans” (Enneads V). Nous is being-as-thinking: “Being, therefore, and the Intellectual-Principle are one Nature” (Enneads V). It is the kosmos noetos, the intellectual Kosmos, containing “all the beauty of the Ideas, all the Gods of the Intellectual realm”:

“The Intellectual-Principle; beautiful; the most beautiful of all; lying lapped in pure light and in clear radiance; circumscribing the Nature of the Authentic Existents; the original of which this beautiful world is a shadow and an image; tranquil in the fullness of glory since in it there is nothing devoid of intellect, nothing dark or out of rule; a living thing in a life of blessedness.” (Enneads V)

Soul proceeds from Nous as Nous proceeds from the-one; the return of the soul is the contemplation-theoria that turns perception inward until the eye of the soul sees what it was made to see (Enneads V).

The Hermetic and Jungian inheritance

In the corpus-hermeticum the philosophical Nous takes on a voice, becoming a personal interlocutor who grants gnosis-hermetic. Jung inherits the double aspect — impersonal principle and personal encounter — when he reads alchemical Mercurius as both the substance transformed and the transforming figure. The self as Jung conceives it — totality that is also address — is the Hermetic Nous rendered psychologically; the collective-unconscious is the repository of the archetypal Forms that Plotinian Nous holds in eternal actuality.

Relationships

Primary sources