Psyche (Plotinian)

Psyche (ψυχή) is the third hypostasis — Soul — proceeding from nous as Intellect proceeds from the-one. plotinus conceives Soul in two aspects: an upper Soul oriented toward Intellect and the Forms, and a lower Soul that penetrates nature, generating and sustaining the sensible world.

Plotinus holds that Soul is both one and many. The All-Soul and the individual souls are not numerically distinct substances but modes of one reality: “That the Soul of every individual is one thing we deduce from the fact that it is present entire at every point of the body — the sign of veritable unity — not some part of it here and another part there” (Enneads IV.9). This is the passage Jung invokes as the ancient precursor to the collective-unconscious and as a parallel to synchronicity (Edinger 1999).

Soul is incorporeal — “soul does this. It is therefore incorporeal” (Enneads IV.7) — and its presence in body is not local. The soul “at once contains the Primal Nature [as centre] and is contained by it [as circumference]” (Enneads VI), so that every soul holds within itself “through our own centre to the centre of all the centres.”

The Homeric psyche was breath-soul and shade. The Platonic psyche was the immortal principle of the Phaedrus and Timaeus. The Plotinian psyche is the metaphysical culmination of this development — Soul as a hypostasis in its own right, the third principle of reality, the matrix from which individual souls derive and to which they return. Jung inherits this conception; what Plotinus calls Soul’s two aspects, Jung will distinguish as the personal and the collective psyche.

Relationships

• the-one
• nous
• epistrophe
• self
• collective-unconscious
• anima-mundi

Primary sources

• enneads (Plotinus 270)
• edinger-psyche-in-antiquity-book-one (Edinger 1999)