The term ‘equality’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along several distinct axes that resist easy synthesis. At one pole, Aurobindo’s Yoga philosophy treats equality (samata) as a supreme spiritual attainment — an inner equanimity that transcends the dualities of pleasure and pain, good and evil, and becomes the very ground of liberated action. Here equality is not a social arrangement but a discipline of the soul, the precondition for divine working through a perfected nature. At another pole, the political-philosophical tradition represented by Ricoeur, Hannah Arendt (through Jeremy Waldron’s analysis), and Fromm treats equality as a normative achievement grounded in human relational capacity, mutual recognition, or shared creaturely dignity. Ricoeur identifies equality (isotēs) as the ethical core of distributive justice in the Aristotelian tradition; Fromm diagnoses modernity’s debased version — the leveling of difference — as a simulacrum of genuine equality. McGilchrist frames the Enlightenment pursuit of equality as a consequence of left-hemisphere categorization, which paradoxically generates new inequalities through the power of manipulation. The corpus thus holds a productive tension between equality as inner spiritual poise, equality as political-ethical norm, and equality as a concept distorted by modern rationalism.
A perfect equality of our spirit and nature is a means by which we can move back from the troubled and ignorant outer consciousness into this inner kingdom of heaven and possess the spirit’s eternal kingdoms
Aurobindo posits perfect inner equality (samata) as the indispensable yogic discipline by which the soul transcends disturbed mentality and becomes an instrument of divine action.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948thesis
A name can be given to the ethical core common to distributive justice and to reparative justice. This common core is equality (isotēs). Correlatively, the unjust, often cited before the just, is synonymous with the unequal.
Ricoeur identifies equality as Aristotle’s foundational ethical category underlying both distributive and reparative justice, and the unequal as the primary face of injustice.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
The ordinary mental standards will be exceeded on the basis of this dynamic equality. The eye of his will must look beyond to a purity of divine being, a motive of divine will-power guided by divine knowledge
Aurobindo argues that dynamic equality of the will dissolves the ego’s interference and enables action guided purely by divine knowledge, transcending ordinary moral standards.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948thesis
Equality had meant, in a religious context, that we are all God’s children, that we all share in the same human-divine substance, that we are all one. It meant also that the very differences between individuals must be respected
Fromm distinguishes the original religious meaning of equality — shared divine substance that honors individual difference — from its modern degeneration into standardized uniformity.
, The Art of Loving, 1956thesis
The continual change and the individual differences of actual living things are exchanged for stasis and equality, as the butterfly is skewered, unmoving, a specimen in the collector’s cabinet.
McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere’s drive to categorize substitutes a spurious static equality for the living individuality of things, while its pursuit of power paradoxically reintroduces inequality.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
It is this search for equality in the midst of inequality, whether the latter results from particular cultural and political conditions, as in friendship between unequals, or whether it is constitutive of the initial positions of the self and the other
Ricoeur traces solicitude’s ethical movement as a continual striving to restore equality within asymmetrical relations of self and other, including friendship, sympathy, and mortality.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
People are equal; we hold that they are equal. Equality is not an idle description of anything… It is an ‘ought,’ not an ‘is.’ It is normative, not descriptive.
Through Waldron’s reading of Arendt, equality is established as a normative commitment rather than a natural given, grounded not in bare facts but in a responsive moral stance toward human characteristics.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
Equality might be based on relational facts about humans – that each human may be capable of entering into certain relations with others. Some Christian thinkers have pursued a theory of this kind, suggesting that humans are equals because they equally have the capacity to love one another.
Waldron surveys a theological grounding for equality based not on individual properties but on relational capacity — the shared ability to love — connecting equality to the imago Dei tradition.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
The equality attending the public realm is necessarily an equality of unequals who stand in need of being equalized in certain respects and for specific purposes.
Arendt’s political equality is presented as an artificial construction that equalizes naturally unequal persons for specific public purposes, not a natural condition but a civic achievement.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
A view about equality might be shallow in a similar way. A person who treats x and y as equals but not z might, when challenged for an explanation, simply respond that x and y belong to the human species
Waldron diagnoses the philosophical shallowness of equality claims that rest on species membership without further grounding, drawing an analogy with the structural deficiency of racist reasoning.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
He was pointing to facts, albeit non-natural facts, in virtue of which it was hideously wrong to treat Dred Scott as a ‘mere chattel.’ George Fletcher associates the holism for which he argues… with the idea that humans are one another’s equals because they are created in the image of God.
The passage illustrates how equality claims can be grounded in non-natural theological facts — specifically the imago Dei — as a foundation for moral objections to dehumanization.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
She has a view about what humans are like and though, as she says, that view does not drive her or anyone to adopt a principle of equality, it is nevertheless what her principle of equality responds to and is grounded on.
Waldron argues that Arendt’s equality, while not derivable from a theory of human nature, is nonetheless genuinely grounded in a substantive account of what humans are, refuting the charge of groundless existentialist assertion.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
Attachment to its likings and repugnances keeps the soul bound in this web of good and evil, joys and sorrows. The seeker of liberation gets rid of attachment, throws away from his soul the dualities
Aurobindo describes the prerequisite for equality as the dissolution of dualistic attachment, presenting the soul’s entanglement in attraction and repulsion as the primary obstacle to inner equanimity.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948supporting
Democratic theory and equality and, 30–2 equality linked to action, 19
An index entry establishes a structural link in the text between democratic theory, political equality, and Arendt’s concept of action, indicating that equality is treated as constitutively tied to participatory politics.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
Groups of newly self-conscious underdogs of every variety sought to impose their own definition of ‘equality.’ ‘Doing good’ itself became suspect as the sixties turned into the seventies
Kurtz observes how mid-twentieth-century American social movements fragmented the concept of equality into competing and often adversarial group-specific definitions, symptom of a broader crisis of shared values.
, Not God A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, 2010aside
From an etymological perspective, isonomia could derive from nomos and mean equality before the law, which is not the same as political equality.
Detienne traces the etymological ambiguity of isonomia in archaic Greek thought, distinguishing equality before the law from political equality proper and situating the concept within early Greek juridical-moral discourse.
, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, 1996aside