Flux

Within the depth-psychology corpus, Flux designates the Heraclitean principle that all things are in perpetual movement and transformation — summarized in the classical formula panta rhei, ‘all things flow.’ The term enters psychological discourse primarily through Jung’s profound engagement with Heraclitus, whom he regarded as one of the foundational pillars of Western spiritual thought, and it carries both a cosmological and a clinical weight. Edinger, interpreting Heraclitus through a Jungian lens, treats flux as the metaphysical background against which the ego-Self distinction becomes intelligible: if nothing is static, then every psychic ‘standpoint’ must be understood as a transient configuration of energy rather than a fixed identity. McGilchrist extends this reading into neurological and philosophical territory, arguing that flux is not mere chaos but dynamic equilibrium — stability achieved through, not despite, ceaseless change. Plotinus introduces a crucial qualification: the Kosmos itself endures precisely because ‘flux is not outgoing’; internal motion does not entail disintegration. In Plato, the Heraclitean doctrine of radical flux poses a specific philosophical danger: if identity itself dissolves in universal becoming, the ethical subject capable of living a coherent moral life cannot be sustained. The corpus thus triangulates around three tensions: flux as ontological truth versus epistemic threat; flux as vitality versus pathological loosening; and the Heraclitean river as image of Self-renewal versus as emblem of the impossibility of stable knowledge.

In the library 11 passages

Heraclitus was also well known for his doctrine of flux, panta rhei, which means ‘all things flow’; everything is in a state of becoming; nothing is static and fixed.

Edinger establishes flux — via the Heraclitean panta rhei — as the foundational ontological principle that all becoming supersedes static being, and reads it as the philosophical ground for understanding psychic transformation in depth psychology.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis

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Stability in the experiential world is always stability provided by a form through which things continue to flow… stasis, the opposite of change and flux, is incompatible with life, and leads only to separation, and disintegration.

McGilchrist argues that Heraclitean flux is not disorder but dynamic equilibrium — the condition of life itself — such that stasis, not change, is the true threat to integrity and wholeness.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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in a world of radical flux, Socrates argues, discrete identities could never form, and we may infer that there could be no coherent notion of a whole person living a whole life.

Hobbs identifies the Platonic counter-argument to Heraclitean flux: if becoming is truly radical and universal, the ethical subject dissolves, making moral philosophy — and individuation — impossible.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis

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‘flux is not outgoing’: where there is motion within but not outwards and the total remains unchanged, there is neither growth nor decline, and thus the Kosmos never ages.

Plotinus qualifies the flux doctrine by distinguishing internal cyclical motion from outgoing dissolution, arguing that the eternal Kosmos is preserved precisely by a self-contained flow that neither accumulates nor exhausts itself.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270thesis

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By cosmic rule, as day yields night, so winter summer, war peace, plenty famine. All things change. Fire penetrates the lump of myrrh, until the joining bodies die and rise again in smoke called incense.

The primary Heraclitean fragments present flux as cosmic law — the mutual transformation of opposites — grounding the depth-psychological interest in enantiodromia and psychic compensatory dynamics.

Heraclitus, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, 2001supporting

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The idea of inner flux informed eighteenth-century humoral pathology: passions caused movement in ‘humors,’ which made patients think of things that ‘excited’ them.

Padel traces the medical and pathological dimension of flux through the Greek humoral tradition, demonstrating that inner psycho-somatic movement was understood as simultaneously the condition of vitality and the mechanism of disease.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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being by nature passionless and not liable to flux, since He is simple and uncompound, He is not subject to passion or flux either in begetting or in creating.

John of Damascus employs the concept of flux as a theological negative — divine simplicity is defined precisely by its immunity to flux, establishing a theistic counterpoint to the Heraclitean cosmology that pervades the philosophical tradition.

John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021supporting

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the human stream of consciousness, that is to say, the human life-flux, not only can, but very often does take re-embodiment in sub-human creatures immediately after having been in human form.

Evans-Wentz deploys ‘life-flux’ as the Buddhist analogue for Heraclitean becoming, framing the stream of consciousness as an ongoing flux of psychic energy that persists through and beyond embodiment.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting

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if they are to be in motion, and nothing is to be devoid of motion, all things must always have every sort of motion.

Plato’s Theaetetus presents the logical extension of the flux doctrine — that if all is motion, perception and knowledge themselves become unstable — establishing the epistemological stakes of the Heraclitean position for subsequent philosophical and psychological inquiry.

Plato, Theaetetus, -369supporting

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Medical writers infer inner movement from outer body movements. Restless kicking tells them that cold phlegm is flowing in the patient’s body.

Padel’s account of Greek medical inference from outer to inner movement contextualizes the broader ancient assumption that flux — visible or invisible — is the diagnostic key to bodily and psychic states.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994aside

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the cessation of a magnetic field is not identical to the establishment of the magnetic field; even if the effects of induction that the two variations of flux can provoke in a circuit… are equal.

Simondon’s discussion of electromagnetic flux asymmetry offers a structural analogy for understanding how the beginning and end of a psychic or physical process differ qualitatively even when quantitatively equivalent — relevant to depth psychology’s interest in directionality of transformation.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside

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