Errant Cause

The Errant Cause — Plato's planoumenai aitia from the Timaeus — occupies a distinctive and generative position within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning as the cosmological warrant for psychology's attention to deviation, irrationality, and the unpersuadable dimensions of psychic life. Across the corpus, the term is treated not as a mere philosophical curiosity but as a living psychological force: the operations of Ananke (Necessity) that resist rational governance, wander from predictable courses, and manifest precisely in those regions of experience that cannot be mastered by the will or explained by linear causation. Hillman is the central voice here, deploying the Errant Cause to ground depth psychology's foundational methods — from Freud's parapraxes to Jung's association experiments — in a Platonic metaphysics of deviation. For Hillman, the errant cause is not chaos in the nihilistic sense but a second archê alongside Nous, equally constitutive of the ensouled universe. Cornford's commentary on the Timaeus supplies the scholarly scaffolding, situating the Errant Cause within the problem of irrational factors that constrain even the Demiurge's benevolent design. The key tension throughout is between this irreducible irrationality and psychology's repeated attempts to domesticate it through theory — a project the corpus consistently regards as futile and as a misreading of Necessity's nature.

In the library 13 substantive passages

Here Necessity is characterized as the Errant Cause. Jowett translates planoumenai aitia as 'variable cause'; Thomas Taylor, as 'erratic cause;' and Plato's commentators use, for the operations of this principle, such words as: rambling, digressing, straying, irrational, irresponsible, deviating, misleading, deceiving, irregular, random.

Hillman establishes the Errant Cause as Plato's characterization of Necessity (Ananke), enumerating its semantic field — deviation, irrationality, randomness — as the defining qualities of this second cosmological principle alongside Nous.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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Necessity breaks through the control of reason and reveals in a chance moment the 'errant cause' operating in the soul. Historically, depth psychology starts from this perspective and in principle continues to look for its truths in errors in which deeper, more central necessities lie.

Hillman argues that depth psychology's founding method — attending to slips, errors, and deviations — is grounded in the Platonic Errant Cause, positioning psychopathological deviation as the primary site of psychological truth.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis

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The law it follows is Necessity, which wanders erratically. Little wonder that we readers are drawn to biographies and autobiographies, for they offer glimpses of how irrational Necessity works in a human life. Although Necessity's rule is absolute and irreversible, this determinism is indeterminate. Unpredictable.

Hillman extends the Errant Cause into biography and the daimon theory, arguing that Necessity's absolute determinism paradoxically operates through indeterminate, erratic, and unpredictable wandering across an individual life.

Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis

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in the seemingly contradictory notion of a Necessity which is also an Errant Cause, and associated, not with order and intelligibility, but with disorder and random chance.

Cornford's Timaeus commentary identifies the paradox at the core of the Errant Cause: Necessity, normally associated with compulsion and determinism, is here allied with disorder and randomness rather than with intelligible order.

Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis

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We have now to bring into account that 'other principle' concerned in the production. I

Cornford frames the Errant Cause as the 'other principle' — the irrational, constraining factor that limits even the Demiurge's benevolent design and must be accounted for in any complete cosmology.

Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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If anxiety truly belongs to Ananke, of course, it cannot be 'mastered by the rational will.' When anxiety floods us or attacks us, we can but receive it as a gap (chaos) in rational continuity. Hence, anxiety does not submit to analysis; it works its ways inescapably until its necessity is admitted.

Hillman applies the Errant Cause directly to the psychology of anxiety, arguing that anxiety is the experiential register of Ananke's operations and therefore structurally resistant to rational analysis or therapeutic mastery.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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Philosophy has generally considered necessity in two different ways. Sometimes philosophers speak of it as lawless chance (like the Greek tyche), as a principle of randomness, blind, mechanical, statistical, pointless. Other times they take the converse position, relating necessity with the regular, predictable, and gesetzmässig.

Hillman surveys the philosophical ambiguity of Necessity — alternately identified with random chance and with deterministic regularity — to frame the Errant Cause as the specifically Platonic resolution of this tension.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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This course is like our psychopathology which I defined earlier as that part of us which cannot be accepted, cannot be repressed, and cannot be transformed.

Hillman maps the Errant Cause onto clinical psychopathology, specifically onto those compulsive, fate-driven dimensions of the psyche that resist acceptance, repression, and transformation alike.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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The discourse needs a fresh starting-point... we have followed its guidance to the point where rational design came into contrast with factors in the visible world that are 'incapable of any plan or intelligence for any purpose'.

Cornford narrates the Timaeus's structural pivot toward the irrational factors — those incapable of purpose or intelligence — that constitute the domain of the Errant Cause and necessitate a fresh cosmological inquiry.

Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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I would rather keep accident as an authentic category of existence, forcing s

Hillman resists dissolving the accidental into fatalism or finalism, insisting on accident as an irreducible ontological category — consistent with the Errant Cause's refusal to be subsumed under rational teleology.

Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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Ultimately Aphrodite and Ananke become interchangeable: they can both create Eros and can both appear through Nemesis (revenge). We experience this identity particularly in the immovable fixations of love.

Hillman traces the mythological convergence of Aphrodite and Ananke, suggesting that erotic compulsion and necessity share the same irreversible, irrational character that defines the Errant Cause.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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she wears on her breast the Gorgo, that terrifying image of irrationality; her animal, the owl, is her 'wisdom,' but it is also a bird of doom, a screeching night-creature that can be situated among the Harpies, Sirens, Keres, Moirae-winged images of fateful necessities.

Hillman's reading of Athene as containing both Nous and Ananke attributes offers an oblique commentary on how rational governance must reckon with the fateful, errant dimension of necessity even within its own symbols.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007aside

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a Knight Errant picking up insights as he moves — perhaps imagining his own wandering 'off course away from the true logos of intellectual reasoning and intuitional revelation'; his own following of emotion and regarding 'desire as also holy, listening to the deviant discourse of the imagination.'

Russell captures Hillman's self-identification with the errant mode — the Knight Errant as a figure for psychologizing that follows deviation, desire, and imagination rather than the straight logos, embodying the Errant Cause as personal method.

Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023aside

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