Thought of the Heart

Hillman’s name, borrowed and elaborated from Corbin, for the heart’s native cognitive activity: imaginational thinking, the apprehension of the world as image. The thesis is stated in the opening of the 1979 Eranos lecture: “the thought of the heart is the thought of images… the heart is the seat of imagination… imagination is the authentic voice of the heart, so that if we speak from the heart we must speak imaginatively” (Hillman 1992).

The thought of the heart is not: sentimentality, cœur-de-lion heroism, the muscular pump of Harvey, or Augustinian confessional interiority — Hillman’s three “captive hearts” through which the original organ has been obscured (Hillman 1992). It is: the organ of aisthesis, “a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, ‘aha’… an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented.” Sensing and imagining are not divided in the heart’s response; their division is a Scholastic-Cartesian inheritance the depth tradition must undo.

Hillman grounds the doctrine in Corbin’s himma and in the Aristotelian-Avicennan continuity that locates the sensus communis in the heart. He extends it toward the anima-mundi: the heart is the organ that perceives the world’s aesthetic life, the soul of things in their particularity, “the lion, the wound, and the rose” out of which a true philosophy must arise. Philos — love — arises in the heart of our blood; philosophy itself, properly understood, is an event of the heart.

Relationships

• himma-as-creative-imagination
• aisthesis-as-organ-of-the-heart
• anima-mundi
• reason-of-the-heart
• image-as-psyche

Primary sources

• hillman-thought-heart (Hillman 1992)
• corbin-alone-with-alone (Corbin 1969, the himma passage Hillman quotes)