The term ‘hardness’ occupies a surprisingly rich and multi-valent position across the depth-psychology and philosophical corpus assembled here. At one pole, hardness functions as an ontological predicate — a material quality that Descartes and Heidegger examine as a mode of extension, a sensible attribute that does not constitute the real being of substance and which dissolves under analytic pressure. At another pole, hardness is a cosmological and moral principle: in the I Ching traditions transmitted through Wang Bi, Wilhelm, Liu I-ming, and Thomas Cleary, hardness (gang) names the yang force itself — action, strength, decisiveness, and the will that resists corruption. Here hardness is not inert matter but dynamic moral energy, inseparable from its complement softness. A third register emerges in depth-psychological and phenomenological writing: William James treats the ‘hardness in the heart’ as a psychospiritual obstruction dissolved by religious conversion, while James Hillman rehabilitates hardness as a masculine initiatory value — not a pathology to be overcome but a quality whose spiritual import must be consciously received. The tension between hardness as obstacle to transformation and hardness as necessary virtue runs throughout the corpus, making the term a genuine crossroads for questions about will, resistance, the masculine principle, and the conditions of psychological change.
American life is filled with hardness, competition. A men’s retreat is not a retreat from that hardness, but a place where hardness can become clearer and have spiritual value and import.
Hillman argues that hardness is not an affliction to be escaped but a psychic reality requiring conscious engagement and spiritual revaluation within initiatory masculine work.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023thesis
The stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart has broken down… With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns.
James identifies hardness of heart as the psychic armoring that religious conversion temporarily dissolves, marking it as the chief interior obstacle to saintly transformation.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
There are norms for action and repose, which are determined by whether hardness or softness is involved. Hardness means action, and softness means repose.
Wang Bi’s commentary establishes hardness as the fundamental cosmological principle of yang activity, structuring all motion and rest in the Changes.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis
Here one rides atop the hard and strong with softness and yet manages to stay within the Mean, and this is how punishment can be administered… the success derived from the hardness and strength.
The commentary interprets hardness and strength as the enabling force by which legitimate authority and righteous correction operate, provided they are tempered by centrality.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis
Firmness is strength, sturdiness, decisiveness, power, energy, keenness. Those who use firmness well cannot be corrupted by wealth and rank, cannot be moved by poverty and lowliness, cannot be suppressed by aggression.
Liu I-ming elaborates hardness/firmness as a comprehensive virtue of moral invulnerability, identifying it with the yang energy that sustains integrity under external pressure.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
Firmness is strength, sturdiness, decisiveness, power, energy, keenness… People with unflinching loyalty, who do not buckle in the face of difficulty, are able to be this way due to the energy of firmness.
Cleary’s transmission of Liu I-ming reinforces firmness-as-hardness as an inner energetic quality cultivated through Taoist practice, giving it an explicitly spiritual rather than merely physical sense.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
Matter may have such definite characteristics as hardness, weight, and colour… but these can all be taken away from it, and it still remains what it is. These do not go to make up its real Being.
Heidegger, following Descartes, demonstrates that hardness is a mode of extensio — a contingent sensory attribute ontologically subordinate to the substance it qualifies, thereby deflating its metaphysical status.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
It has the power of knowing its hardness, and then the conversion of its hardness into liquidity; for someone might know its hardness, who does not therefore know its whiteness.
Descartes treats the mind’s cognition of hardness as an example of the progressive accumulation of attributes that establishes the mind as better known than any extended thing.
, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008supporting
Hard and soft are terms that address them as kinds of physical forms… One might refer to things that exist as material forces as either hard or soft; this is to sum up their endings.
Wang Bi assigns hardness to the register of Earth and physical form, distinguishing it from the immaterial force-categories of Heaven, and linking it to the summation of things in their completed states.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994supporting
Top Yang represents someone so high that he overreaches himself and moreover is hard and strong to an extreme degree, so who would ever want to get together with him?
The commentary diagnoses excessive hardness as social and moral failure — an overextension of yang strength that renders a person unapproachable and incapable of harmonious encounter.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994supporting
Recognizing the difference between (say) hardness and softness involves, to begin with, raising the question of whether they are one or two features… it also involves recognizing that hardness and softness being two features entails that they are separate and different.
Lorenz uses hardness and softness as the paradigm case for Plato’s analysis of how the soul, through reason rather than perception, recognizes the distinction between opposite qualities.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
Forming the belief that something is hard, for instance, involves affirming that hardness is or has being with regard to the thing in question. And it has been clear to Theaetetus all along that the senses provide no access to being.
The analysis argues that hardness, like all perceptual predicates, can only be grasped as having being through the soul’s rational activity, not through sense perception alone.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
The hard and the soft achieve clarity by taking separate action; thunder and lightning make a vivid display by uniting together.
Wang Bi’s commentary presents hardness and softness as complementary principles that, through their differentiated operation, produce the clarity necessary for just governance and discernment.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994aside