Seat of the Affections (Plotinus)

The opening move of the Enneads is a question about location: “Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat? Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both” (Plotinus, Enneads I.1.1). Plotinus then extends the question to discursive reason and intellection, and finally to “this very examining principle, which investigates and decides in these matters” — the principle must also be brought to light (I.1.2).

The problem is the Lineage’s inheritance in a single sentence. It presupposes that psychē is not simply “the mind” or “the inner person” but a principle whose location relative to body, intellect, and self-examining reason cannot be taken for granted. The affections are not in the soul the way wine is in a cup. The soul employs the body; the body presents to the soul; there may be a third entity — a blend — in which the affections are properly seated. Psychē is discovered here as an irreducibly relational term.

This is the classical ground of the Jungian distinction between ego and objective-psyche. The ego is Plotinus’s “examining principle” the tradition insists must itself be examined; the objective psyche is the hypostatic Soul the ego employs and is employed by. Hillman‘s refusal to locate soul “anywhere” (Re-Visioning) is a Plotinian move — the soul is found only in the working-with, never at a fixed seat. esse-in-anima is Jung’s reassertion of the Enneads’ priority: the examining principle does not precede the affections it examines; all we have is being-in-soul.

Relationships

• plotinus — origin.
• enneads — the text.
• psyche-plotinian — the hypostatic doctrine this question opens.
• nous — the higher principle above psychē.
• objective-psyche — the Jungian inheritor.
• esse-in-anima — the Jungian priority.
• ego-self-axis — the Jungian relational structure.

Primary sources

• enneads (Plotinus I.1.1–2)