Errant Cause

The Errant Cause — rendered in Plato’s Timaeus as planoumenai aitia — names the irrational, wandering principle of Necessity (Ananke) that operates alongside Nous as a co-originary power in the cosmos. Within the depth-psychology corpus, this concept occupies a distinctive and philosophically charged position: it designates that dimension of existence which resists rational persuasion, defies teleological reduction, and manifests in precisely those deviations, accidents, and irruptions that refuse incorporation into any purposive scheme. Hillman is its primary advocate, treating the Errant Cause not as a deficiency of reason but as the very signature of Ananke’s sovereignty — an autonomous principle whose operations are recognizable in anxiety, psychopathology, compulsion, and the inexplicable ruptures of biography. He draws on a line of translation that includes Jowett (‘variable cause’), Thomas Taylor (‘erratic cause’), and the commentator Grote (‘the indeterminate, the inconstant’), insisting that the wandering, straying, rambling quality of this cause is constitutive rather than accidental. The errant cause gives depth psychology its epistemological foundation: from Freud’s parapraxes to Jung’s association experiments, the discipline begins precisely where rational necessity fails. The tension between Nous and Ananke, between intelligible design and errant deviation, thus structures the entire archetypal-psychological project.

In the library 13 passages

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 full philological and philosophical range of the Errant Cause, identifying it with Ananke and cataloguing its defining attributes as deviating, irrational, and resistant to rational persuasion.

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 the errant cause is the epistemological origin of depth psychology itself, visible in parapraxes and association errors where Necessity overrides rational control.

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 demonstrates the paradox of the Errant Cause as an absolute yet indeterminate determinism, visible in the biographical accidents through which Necessity expresses itself in individual lives.

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

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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 commentary on the Timaeus identifies the structural paradox of the Errant Cause as Necessity paradoxically aligned with disorder rather than with the lawful order typically attributed to necessity.

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

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we have been perpetually reminded that the work of the most ungrudging benevolence cannot be perfect; it can only be ‘as good as possible’. The Demiurge has been operating all through under certain given conditions, which he did not originate and which set a limit to the goodness of his work. We have now to bring into account that ‘other principle’ concerned in the production.

Cornford establishes the cosmological framework in which the Errant Cause figures as the recalcitrant co-principle the Demiurge cannot fully master, permanently limiting rational design.

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 extends the Errant Cause into clinical psychology by identifying anxiety as a direct manifestation of Ananke’s errant operations, which no rational analysis can dissolve.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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It tells of the fundamental conflict between the reason within us and the powers of fate that cannot listen to that reason, that cannot be reached by understanding or moved from their compulsive course. 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.

Through the Oresteia, Hillman situates the Errant Cause as the mythical ground of psychopathology — the compulsive course that defies both reason and therapeutic transformation.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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The answer was found in the maker’s desire that all things should be as like himself, that is to say, as good, as possible. This was the ‘supremely valid principle’… and 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 traces the structural opposition in the Timaeus between the Demiurge’s rational purpose and the irrational factors — the domain of the Errant Cause — that the rational account must now confront.

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

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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 bifurcation in accounts of Necessity — as either random chance or lawful regularity — against which the Errant Cause stands as an irreducible third term.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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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 extends the Errant Cause into the mythology of Eros and Aphrodite, arguing that love’s compulsive fixations are among its most recognizable psychological expressions.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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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 connects Hillman’s self-image as Knight Errant to the intellectual and psychological valuation of deviation and errant movement implicit in his concept of the Errant Cause.

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

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Athene is the head-sprung daughter of Zeus, the very epiphany of his Nous, his introjected Metis… her structure of consciousness can espy predictabilities, prepare for them, and thus normalize the unexpected.

Hillman’s account of Athene as the normalizing counter-principle to the Errant Cause illuminates the mythological tension between rational foresight and errant necessity.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007aside

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