The Soul’s Logical Life

The soul’s logical life is Giegerich’s name for what psychology is actually about. The phrase binds two claims: that the life of the soul is logical (not image, not emotion, not libido, but thought in the dialectical sense), and that psychology is therefore a discipline of interiority whose subject is the Notion’s self-relation.

“The thesis propounded here, that the soul is at bottom logical life or thought, is immediately open to all sorts of misunderstandings and feeling-toned prejudices” (Giegerich 2020, p. 9). Giegerich anticipates the misunderstanding and refuses it. Logical does not mean formal-logical, intellectualist, or “cut off from living experience.” It means concrete in the Hegelian sense — the Notion that has absorbed and sublated emotion, image, and symptom into itself. “Being sublated psychosomatic symptom, emotion, and image, the Notion is not their simple (undialectical) opposite. It is not the abstract, ‘nothing but’ type of notion, merely intellectual… Rather, it is the concrete Notion which, due to its genesis from emotion and image, is still satiated with them” (Giegerich 2020, p. 49).

The soul, on this account, does not exist. “The soul does not exist, does not have an existence, is not a positive entity, nor a positive attribute of an existing entity. It is its own substance, but this substance is, or has the quality of, (logical) negativity” (Giegerich 2020, p. 134). The soul is sublatedness — what results from the alchemical-logical operation of negation upon a given prima materia of experience. To think the soul’s logical life is to think the movement of Aufhebung itself.

This is the concept from which the rest of Giegerich’s apparatus descends: anthropological-fallacy, dismemberment, psychological-obsolescence, the critique of the imaginal.

Relationships

• dialectical-psychology
• anthropological-fallacy
• individuation
• coniunctio
• logos

Primary sources

• giegerich-souls-logical-life (Giegerich 2020, pp. 9, 49, 134)