Mixture

he made a mixture of the indivisible and the divisible, thus producing a third form of existence … forcing the nature of the Different, though it resisted the mixture, into Jungian with the Same. Thus, with the admixture of being, the three became one.

Jung explicates the Platonic Timaeus to show that the World-Soul is constituted through the forced mixture of metaphysical opposites, establishing mixture as the foundational act of cosmogonic and, by extension, psychological creation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

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certain bodies, when assisted by one another, are so mutually unified through and through that while being preserved together with their own qualities they are mutually coextended as wholes through and through.

The Stoic doctrine of total blending holds that substances can interpenetrate completely while each retains its distinctive qualities, establishing the concept of krasis as the model for soul-body union and organic unity.

A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987thesis

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how can we possibly think that in a mixture the relation of matter with matter, mass with mass, is contact and that only the qualities are fused? The pulp is not merely in touch with water outside it or even in its pores; it is wet through and through so that every particle of its matter is drenched in that quality.

Plotinus argues that genuine mixture cannot be reduced to surface contact or quality-transmission alone; it must involve the total interpenetration of matter, pressing beyond both Atomist and Peripatetic accounts.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270thesis

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since the healthy also have mixtures of humours, it is possible that external objects are in their nature such as they appear to people in the so-called ‘unnatural’ state, and that these mixtures make

The Pyrrhonist fourth mode deploys the variability of bodily humoral mixture to show that no perceptual state can claim normative privilege, turning mixture into an epistemological argument for suspension of judgment.

A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting

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there are two things that we refer to when we use the term harmony. The main use is to denote the composition of quantities … and the secondary use is to denote the ratio of ingredients in a mixture. In neither sense is it reasonable to call the soul a harmony.

Aristotle distinguishes two senses of mixture-as-harmony and systematically rejects both as adequate definitions of soul, marking a critical limit on the use of mixture as a psychophysical explanatory concept.

Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), -350thesis

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the necessary pleasures should certainly be allowed to mingle … for any single class to be left by itself pure and isolated is not good, nor altogether

In the Philebus, Plato argues that the good life itself requires the mixture of pleasure and wisdom, treating isolation of any single genus as deficiency and mixture as the condition of value.

Plato, Philebus, -360thesis

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fill up both the double and the triple intervals, cutting off yet more parts from the original mixture and placing them between the terms, so that within each interval there were two means.

The mathematical construction of the World-Soul in the Timaeus proceeds by inserting harmonic and arithmetic means into an original numerical mixture, showing mixture as the generative principle of cosmic proportion.

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

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The Stoic conception of ‘through-and-through blending’ sets no limit to the relative quantities of its constituents; so we may reasonably conjecture that the proportions of air to fire in ‘breath’ vary in relation to the different qualifications they generate in matter.

Stoic pneumatic theory specifies that the variable proportions within the air-fire mixture of breath account for the entire range of qualitative differentiation in material bodies.

A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting

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hot with cold, dry with moist, soft with hard and in other mixtures that result, by chance, of necessity, from the combination of opposites, generate a world, by nature and chance.

Plato summarizes the materialist cosmogony according to which elemental mixtures arising from the collision of opposites produce the ordered world through natural necessity rather than divine reason.

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

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the ‘right’ mixture of the four elements produces health, whereas an excess of one over the others brings about sickness. His emphasis on the harmonious tension of opposites, however, is ultimately based on Heraclitus.

Snell shows how Empedoclean element-mixture, channelled through Heraclitean tension, defined health as correct proportionality—an ethical-medical deployment of mixture central to Greek normative thought.

Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting

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Melikratos means not only a mixture of honey and milk, but also, as Hippokrates and Aristotle bear witness, the beverage later known as hydromeli.

Kerényi documents the sacred ritual mixture of honey and milk as melikratos, situating archaic Greek mixture-practice within the religious calendar and the cult of the dead.

Kerényi, Carl, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting

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these three Forms are wholly distinct. They are, indeed, ‘all-pervading’ in that every one of them ‘combines’ with every other and with every Form there is.

Cornford’s commentary on the Timaeus clarifies that Existence, Sameness, and Difference are the all-pervading Forms whose mutual combination constitutes the structural logic behind the World-Soul mixture.

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

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for the soul to supervene would be for a one-way relationship to hold … it follows, a blend. Alexander insists, rightly, that his view is in an important respect very different from the idea that the soul is a blend.

Sorabji distinguishes Alexander of Aphrodisias’s supervenience theory from the claim that the soul simply is a material blend, showing the philosophical stakes in differentiating supervening emergence from mixture-identity.

Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting

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all smells are of a half-formed nature, and no element is so proportioned as to have any smell … smells always proceed from bodies that are damp, or putrefying, or liquefying, or evaporating, and are perceptible only in the intermediate state, when water is changing into air and air into water.

Plato situates olfactory sensation in the transitional, half-mixed state between water and air, making the phenomenology of smell dependent on incomplete elemental mixture.

Plato, Timaeus, -360aside

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in the embryo, the bones, tendons, nails, contents of the head, and whites of the eyes come from the father, ‘who sows the white’; skin and colored parts are derived from the mother, ‘who sows the red.’

Hillman traces the gendered symbolic chemistry of seed-mixture in Jewish and Aristotelian embryology, showing how the red-white opposition organizes theories of generative blending.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside

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