The concept of Material Immaterial Mediation designates the structural problem — perennial in depth psychology and its philosophical antecedents — of how the spiritual or psychic and the corporeal or sensory communicate, interpenetrate, and mutually condition one another without dissolving into monism or hardening into irreconcilable dualism. The corpus treats this not as an abstract metaphysical puzzle but as the operative condition of psychological and cosmological existence. Plotinus supplies the foundational grammar: matter stands as a reflective vessel, repelling yet receiving ideal forms, remaining itself unchanged while becoming the site of manifestation. John of Damascus translates this logic into a theology of the icon, where the material image furnishes an immaterial and intellectual sight. Aurobindo maps the same polarity across an evolutionary ontology, positing infinite gradations between gross substance and pure spirit-substance. Corbin, reading Ibn Arabi, locates the mediating zone in the Imaginative Presence — a realm neither purely sensory nor purely intelligible. Simondon reformulates the classical problem in the language of information theory, treating the living individual as a relay node between orders of magnitude that lack direct intercommunication. McGilchrist anchors the entire problematic in embodied cognition: even words for the immaterial return to bodily realities. Hillman, characteristically, refuses the dichotomy, arguing instead for soul-matter — a psychic substance that is neither material object nor immaterial abstraction. The tension throughout is between hierarchical mediation (a chain of levels) and immanent interpenetration (presence without modification).
the material image offering them an immaterial and intellectual sight.
John of Damascus argues that material representations of angels and cherubim function as mediating instruments that render immaterial, intellectual realities perceptible to embodied beholders.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016thesis
Matter remains as it was, taking nothing to itself: it is the check to the forthwelling of Authentic Existence; it is a ground that repels; it is a mere receptacle to the Realities as they take their common path and here meet and mingle.
Plotinus defines matter as a purely receptive, unmodified substrate through which immaterial ideal forms manifest without being absorbed, establishing the asymmetric structure of material-immaterial mediation.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
material things become visible through standing midway between bare underlie and Pure Idea.
Plotinus characterizes sensible things as mediating entities occupying the ontological interval between undifferentiated matter and the purely immaterial Ideal, making visible what is otherwise beyond perception.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
the living being performs informational work, thereby itself becoming a node of interactive communication between an order of reality that is superior to its dimension and an order of reality that is inferior to it.
Simondon reconceives material-immaterial mediation in information-theoretic terms: the living individual is a relay that enacts communication between incommensurable orders of magnitude, functioning as an interior mediator.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
Between gross substance and pure spirit substance this must be the fundamental antinomy. In Matter Chit or Conscious-Force masses itself more and more to resist and stand out against other masses of the same Conscious-Force; in substance of Spirit pure consciousness images itself freely.
Aurobindo frames the material-immaterial polarity as a fundamental cosmic antinomy admitting infinite gradation, with matter and spirit as contrasting modes of the same Conscious-Force.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
through these images the real worlds and powers that overtop our existence are able to take possession of the consciousness in the physical world, to pour into it their potencies, to transform it with the light of their higher being.
Aurobindo describes how material image-forms serve as mediating channels through which immaterial higher planes of being pour their powers into terrestrial consciousness.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
That is what we are each after—that sense of matter apart from material things and the materialist view of things… What we look for is soul-matter.
Hillman proposes ‘soul-matter’ as a third term that dissolves the material-immaterial binary, locating genuine substance in psychic reality rather than in either physical objects or purely spiritual abstraction.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
the characteristic Act of immaterial entities is performed without any change in them… where act means suffering change, there is Matter: an immaterial Being would have no ground of permanence if its very Act changed it.
Plotinus distinguishes immaterial agency — which acts without undergoing modification — from material causation, grounding the asymmetry that makes mediation between the two orders possible.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
everything which emerges from the world of Mystery to take on a visible form, whether in a sensible object, in an imagination, or in an ‘apparitional body,’ is divine inspiration, divine notification and warning.
Corbin, reading Ibn Arabi, identifies the Imaginative Presence as the mediating domain through which immaterial divine realities take on perceptible form across the spectrum from sensory object to visionary image.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
Even words such as ‘virtual’ or ‘immaterial’ take us back in their Latin derivation — sometimes by a very circuitous path — to the earthy realities of a man’s strength (vir-tus), or the feel of a piece of wood (materia).
McGilchrist demonstrates that language itself enacts a material-immaterial mediation: concepts of the immaterial are irreducibly grounded in bodily and material experience.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
Spirit itself is pure substance of being presenting itself as an object no longer to physical, vital or mental sense, but to a light of a pure spiritual perceptive knowledge in which the subject becomes its own object.
Aurobindo describes a hierarchy of substance running from physical matter through vital and mental planes to spirit, each requiring an appropriate mode of perception, charting the full arc of material-immaterial mediation.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
the sympathetic quality of the universe depends upon its being one living thing, and that our amenability to experience depends upon our belonging integrally to that unity.
Plotinus grounds cosmic sympathy — the transmission of influence across material and immaterial registers — in the ontological unity of the living universe, making continuity the precondition of any mediated perception.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
where the bringing to order must cut through to the very nature, the base original must be transmuted: it can leave ugliness for beauty only by a change.
Plotinus argues that certain forms of mediation between ideal and material require genuine transmutation of the substrate, not mere surface decoration, distinguishing levels of material-immaterial interaction.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
Jung had to capture the raw material of his initial experiences in the vessel of his scientific work and to incorporate it in the world view of his time. It was this mediation effort that was responsible for the scientific varnish that the work obtained.
Giegerich identifies Jung’s theoretical project as an act of mediation between raw psychic (immaterial) experience and the material-conceptual frameworks of scientific discourse.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Descartes developed the idea that human beings have a dual nature: they have a body, which is made up of material substance, and a mind, which derives from the spiritual nature of the soul… made up of an immaterial substance that is unique.
Kandel traces the Cartesian formulation of the material-immaterial dualism — body as material substance, soul as immaterial — as the modern philosophical backdrop against which depth-psychological alternatives to strict dualism define themselves.
, In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006supporting
the individuation of the real, exterior to the subject, is grasped by the subject due to the analogical individuation of knowledge within the subject.
Simondon argues that knowledge mediates between inner and outer individuation through analogy rather than direct correspondence, a form of immaterial-to-material translation operating within the knowing subject.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
Neoplatonism tried to resolve the dualism with pluralism, by stringing them out on a differentiated vertical chain through the middle region.
Hillman notes that Neoplatonism addressed the material-immaterial problem by interposing a graduated hierarchy of intermediate regions — a structural solution echoed in Jungian personification of psychic figures.
, Healing Fiction, 1983aside
the soul’s ‘Lord of love’ is the image acting within it, the organ of its perception, whereas the soul itself is His organ of perception.
Corbin describes a reciprocal mediation in Ibn Arabi’s theosophy in which divine image and human soul are mutually each other’s organ, dissolving unidirectional material-immaterial hierarchy into a dynamic of mutual perception.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969aside