Knowledge, within the depth-psychology corpus, is never a simple cognitive achievement but rather a site of perpetual contestation between modes of apprehension — discursive and participatory, natural and supernatural, morning and evening, human and divine. The Platonic legacy, traced through the Theaetetus, Meno, and Parmenides, establishes the foundational tensions: whether knowledge is perception, right opinion, or something requiring explanation; whether possessing knowledge and having it are the same; whether absolute ideas are knowable at all to minds bound by their own partiality. These questions ripple through every subsequent stratum of the corpus. In the Philokalia and Orthodox mystical literature, knowledge bifurcates into a relative, intellective kind and an authentic participatory gnosis accessible only through grace and ascetic practice. Aurobindo elaborates an ‘integral knowledge’ that overcomes the sevenfold ignorance by identity with the known. Jung’s commentary on Augustine’s morning and evening knowledge introduces the depth-psychological valence: as ego-consciousness expands, the luminous self-knowledge of origins darkens into rational mastery of the world. Von Franz brings this forward into the domain of synchronicity and ‘absolute knowledge’ as a transpersonal, acausal awareness. Across these registers, the recurring tension is between knowledge as intellectual possession and knowledge as transformative union — episteme versus gnosis — and it is precisely that tension which makes the term theoretically inexhaustible.
The second is true and authentic knowledge. Through experience alone and through grace it brings about, by means of participation and without the help of the intelligence and its intellections, a total and active perception of what is known.
The Philokalia distinguishes two kinds of knowledge — relative intellectual knowledge and an authentic participatory gnosis that transcends intellection and is received through grace.
, The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981thesis
Integral knowledge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness.
Aurobindo defines integral knowledge as the systematic reversal of a sevenfold ignorance, culminating in self-revelation at every level of consciousness from the Absolute to the practical.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
Morning knowledge is knowledge of the creator, evening knowledge is the knowledge of created things. Morning knowledge knows about God, evening knowledge knows about humanity. Morning knowledge is religion, evening knowledge is science.
Edinger, via Jung’s reading of Augustine, articulates a depth-psychological polarity between primordial self-knowledge (morning knowledge) and the ego’s rational mastery of the world (evening knowledge), with the latter progressively darkening the former.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
Knowledge is like a fabric woven by the virtues on the loom of the human soul. The virtues are not only powers creating knowledge; they are the principles and sources of knowledge.
In St Isaac’s tradition as interpreted by St Justin, knowledge is constitutively ethical — moral virtue is not merely a precondition but the generative substance of genuine knowledge.
, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Presentthesis
By knowledge arriving at conscious oneness with that which we know, — for by identity alone can complete and real knowledge exist, — the division is healed and the cause of all our limitation and discord and weakness and discontent is abolished.
Aurobindo argues that genuine knowledge is not representational but identical with its object, and that the attainment of such identity resolves the foundational divisions of human existence.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948thesis
Natural knowledge is that which the soul can acquire through the use of its natural faculties and powers when investigating creation and the cause of creation - in so far, of course, as this is possible for a soul bound to mat
The Philokalia Volume 4 distinguishes natural from supernatural knowledge, grounding the distinction in the soul’s condition and the degree of divine illumination available to it.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis
Thus, with Augustine, the first day of creation begins with self-knowledge, cognitio sui ipsius, by which is meant a knowledge not of the ego but of the self, that objective phenomenon of which the ego is the
Jung locates the origin of creation-knowledge in self-knowledge understood not as ego-reflection but as awareness of the objective Self — a depth-psychological reformulation of Augustinian illumination.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis
This same idea of a ‘cosmic knowledge’ is suggested, as Cazenave has already pointed out, by the experiment carried out in connection with the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, because this experiment leads to the supposition that particle B ‘knows’ instantly and without any communication
Von Franz draws a parallel between Jungian absolute knowledge and quantum non-locality, suggesting a transpersonal, acausal dimension of knowing that transcends subject-object division.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
Once more, then, we must ask the meaning of the statement, that ‘Knowledge is right opinion, accompanied by explanation or defin
The Theaetetus subjects the classical definition of knowledge as justified true belief to systematic scrutiny, demonstrating that the conjunction of right opinion with explanation is itself philosophically unstable.
, Theaetetus, -369thesis
And will not knowledge—I mean absolute knowledge—answer to absolute truth? Certainly. And each kind of absolute knowledge will answer to each kind of absolute being?
The Parmenides argues that absolute knowledge answers to absolute being but remains inaccessible to human minds that lack participation in the Forms, positing an unbridgeable epistemological gap.
, Parmenides, -370thesis
the notion that divine knowledge was to be acquired in the mysteries was widely held; we may add that, side by side with the motifs which we have mentioned, it occurs in Plato’s Symposium where Diotima instructs Socrates in the mysteries of Eros.
Snell traces the ancient distinction between divine and human knowledge into Greek mystery traditions, showing that initiation was conceived as the primary avenue for transcending ordinary epistemic limitation.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
if you discard knowledge, you will hardly find the crown of happiness in anything else. But of what is this knowledge?
The Charmides investigates whether any specific form of knowledge is sufficient for happiness, pressing Socratic intellectualism to identify the content of the knowledge that constitutes the good life.
, Charmides, -380supporting
Jñānaṁ prakāśakaṁ loke, knowledge is the only thing that makes you understand things in this world. Ātmā caiva prakāśakaḥ, but that individual soul is also that element which makes you understand things.
The Vijnana Bhairava posits knowledge and the knowing soul as twin illuminating principles, collapsing the distinction through non-dual recognition of their ultimate identity.
, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting
the only right guides are knowledge and true opinion—these are the guides of man; for things which ha
The Meno concludes that practical human guidance rests on either knowledge or true opinion, distinguishing their respective epistemological statuses while acknowledging that virtue may be neither.
, Meno, -385supporting
The true relation has not been seized, because these two sides of existence must always appear discordant and unreconciled to our intelligence so long as there is only a partial knowledge. An integral knowledge is t
Aurobindo argues that the apparent opposition between self-consciousness and becoming arises from partial knowledge, and that their reconciliation requires the attainment of integral knowledge.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
sophrosyne can be taken as the knowledge of one’s own knowledge or ignorance. Socrates explicitly connects this definition with the commandment of the Delphic Apollo: gnothi seauton means ‘Become aware of your own weakness and ignorance.’
Dihle shows that Socratic self-knowledge (gnothi seauton) is fundamentally a recognition of one’s ignorance rather than a positive intellectual possession, linking epistemic humility to virtue.
, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
do you suppose that he would ever have enquired into or learned what he fancied that he knew, though he was really ignorant of it, until he had fallen into perplexity under the idea that he did not know, and had desired to know?
The Meno establishes that genuine inquiry into knowledge is only possible once the illusion of already knowing has been dissolved through aporia — ignorance is the productive threshold of knowledge.
, Meno, -385supporting
you might as well argue that ignorance may make a man know, and blindness make him see, as that knowledge can make him ignorant.
Socrates presses the paradox that knowledge cannot itself be the vehicle of ignorance, forcing a more complex theory of how false opinion is possible within the soul.
, Theaetetus, -369supporting
what remains at the basis of the critique of knowledge is this postulate that being is fundamentally substance, i.e. in-itself and for-itself.
Simondon locates the hidden postulate of the epistemological tradition in substantialism and argues that abandoning it transforms the relativism that otherwise haunts the critique of knowledge.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
As a carpenter must know a good table before he is able to construct it, so must a man know in advance what is good before he can act properly. Anyone who possesses a mechanical knowledge of some sort will also, as a matter of course, turn out something good.
Snell traces Socrates’ teleological epistemology to the craftsman analogy, where knowledge of the good precedes and conditions every successful moral action.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
Let the first hypothesis be that virtue is or is not knowledge,—in that case will it be taught or not?
The Meno frames the teachability of virtue as wholly dependent on resolving whether virtue is a form of knowledge, establishing the epistemological stakes of moral inquiry.
, Meno, -385supporting
They explain the verb ‘to know’ as meaning ‘to have knowledge.’ THEAETETUS: True. SOCRATES: I should like to make a slight change, and say ‘to possess’ knowledge.
Socrates introduces the distinction between having and possessing knowledge to account for cases where knowledge is acquired but not currently active, an early analogue of dispositional versus occurrent knowing.
, Theaetetus, -369supporting
not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for it to know, but that whic
Foucault, as discussed by Ure and Sharpe, distinguishes a transformative curiosity that reshapes the knower from a merely acquisitive drive to accumulate information — aligning philosophical practice with self-transformation over epistemic accumulation.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021aside
if my mind never trips in the conception of being or becoming, can I fail of knowing that which I perceive? THEAETETUS: You cannot. SOCRATES: Then you were quite right in affirming that knowledge is only perception.
The Theaetetus temporarily endorses the Protagorean-Heraclitean thesis that knowledge is infallible perception, before the argument proceeds to dismantle it.
, Theaetetus, -369aside