Platonic Anamnesis

Anamnesis (ἀνάμνησις) — recollection, remembering — is Plato’s epistemological claim that the soul knew the Forms before its incarnation, and that philosophical insight is not the acquisition of new knowledge but the recovery of what has been forgotten. The doctrine is elaborated most systematically in the Meno and the Phaedo, but the plato-phaedrus gives it its most imagistic form: the soul that beholds beauty in the sensible world remembers the Form of Beauty it saw on the plain of truth before the fall into the body.

For the Seba tradition, Platonic anamnesis is the classical ancestor of the Jungian claim that the unconscious contains, in archetypal form, what consciousness must recover through symbolic work. Hillman’s framing — philosophizing as “a driven mission to move the soul toward awareness of its archetypal background” (Hillman 1972) — is a direct inheritance. The method of amplification, the procedure of active imagination, and the whole Jungian confidence that dreams speak a forgotten language all depend on an anamnestic epistemology: the psyche already knows what it must come to know.

The Phaedrus’s specific claim — that beauty is the one Form that casts a clear image in the sensible world, and so is the privileged vehicle of anamnestic ascent — becomes the charter for Neoplatonic aesthetics from Plotinus’s Ennead I.6 onward, and it is the ultimate root of Jung’s confidence that the symbol is the privileged carrier of psychic transformation.

Relationships

• anamnesis
• plato-phaedrus
• winged-soul-chariot
• mnemosyne
• archetype
• active-imagination

Primary sources

• plato-phaedrus (Plato)
• plato-meno (Plato)
• The Myth of Analysis (Hillman 1972)