The concept of ‘Soul As Knowing Activity’ occupies a pivotal position across the depth-psychological corpus, uniting Neoplatonic metaphysics, Aristotelian faculty psychology, and modern depth-psychological theory in a shared insistence that soul is not a passive substance but an enacting, self-reflexive intelligence. Plotinus provides the speculative foundation: the soul is not merely an object of knowledge but the very medium through which knowing occurs, and the Intellectual-Principle achieves self-vision precisely by being identical with what it sees. Aristotle’s De Anima grounds this in faculty analysis, distinguishing the nutritive, perceptive, and rational dimensions of soul while insisting that the highest functions are inherently self-aware. Giegerich radicalizes this inheritance most forcefully: the soul exists only as its own self-knowledge — ‘the soul always thinks’ — and psychology betrays its subject when it mistakes narcissistic introspection for the soul’s genuine demand to know itself in its logical truth. Hillman inflects the same insight imaginally, arguing that soul-making is inseparable from ideation and reflection; the ‘eye of the soul’ is opened by ideas, not by ego-action. The central tension in this constellation is between knowing as contemplative self-sufficiency (Plotinus, Giegerich’s logical life) and knowing as imaginal enactment (Hillman, Romanyshyn). What unites them is refusal to treat soul as inert datum: it is always already the subject of its own investigation.
The soul is not just the object of psychological investigation! It is both at once: that which knows (or wants to know) and that which is to be known. Its knowing itself is not a secondary addition… it exists only as its self-knowledge.
Giegerich argues that the soul’s knowing activity is constitutive of its existence, not derivative from it, making self-knowledge the very ontological ground of the soul.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
It would be already absurd enough to deny this power to the soul or mind, but the very height of absurdity to deny it to the nature of the Intellectual-Principle, presented thus as knowing the rest of things but not attaining to knowledge, or even awareness, of itself.
Plotinus establishes self-knowing as a non-negotiable attribute of soul, insisting that genuine self-cognition is definitionally impossible for composite beings yet essential to the Intellectual-Principle.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
I insist that the soul wants to know itself, and that it is not satisfied with longing for this self-knowledge, but needs the real, accomplished encounter with the naked truth.
Giegerich distinguishes the soul’s demand for actual self-cognition from the deflated Jungian-Hillmanian position that treats the goal as perpetually deferred, condemning the latter as a betrayal of soul.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
When it looks upon the authentic existences it is looking upon itself; its vision as its effective existence, and this efficacy is itself since the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Act are one: this is an integral seeing itself by its entire being.
Plotinus identifies vision and existence as strictly identical in the Intellectual-Principle, establishing a model in which the soul’s knowing activity and its being are one undivided act.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
One acts as if knowing were no more than a kind of entertaining an idea. But knowing is, figuratively speaking, a ‘physical,’ ‘brutal’ event… The name for this kind of knowledge is ‘information.’
Giegerich polemically distinguishes genuine soul-knowing from the domesticated ‘information’ model, insisting that authentic knowing transforms the knower rather than merely registering a content.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
psyche is itself a kind of knowing, a keen accounting, a wit of what is there; and nous is psychological, engaged in intelligent interlocutions among its images.
Hillman identifies psyche’s essential nature as a mode of knowing enacted through imaginal interlocution, collapsing the boundary between soul and intellect in the ‘white country’ of the silvered mind.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
The soul’s first habitual activity is reflection, which in old-fashioned language belongs to the essence of consciousness as wetness to water.
Hillman presents reflection as the soul’s constitutive activity, an essential property rather than an occasional act, linking soul to consciousness through its inherent reflective nature.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
The soul reveals itself in its ideas… the investigation of a person’s ideas are as revealing of his archetypal structure as are his dreams and his desires.
Hillman argues that soul expresses and knows itself through ideas, making ideation a primary mode of soul’s self-revelation rather than a secondary intellectual overlay.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
Thus the self-knower is a double person: there is the one that takes cognisance of the principle in virtue of which understanding occurs in the soul or mind; and there is the higher, knowing himself by the Intellectual-Principle with which he becomes identical.
Plotinus articulates a hierarchical double structure of self-knowing within soul, distinguishing ordinary self-cognition from the higher identification with the Intellectual-Principle itself.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
Soul and truth are correlates. Like water for fish, so is truth the native element for the soul.
Giegerich frames truth not as something the soul seeks externally but as the soul’s very medium of existence, making knowing activity inseparable from soul’s ontological condition.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
This light shining within the soul enlightens it; that is, it makes the soul intellective, working it into likeness with itself, the light above.
Plotinus figures the soul’s knowing activity as an illumination from above that transforms soul into intellectual likeness, making cognition a dynamic assimilation rather than passive reception.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
its essential existence is to be an activity… the soul considered as the activity of another and prior soul.
Plotinus defines soul in terms of activity rather than substance, anticipating the depth-psychological insistence that soul’s being is constituted by its energetic self-enactment.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
To truly know Artemis means to know that The Huntress is the stag… To truly know the truth means to know that Artemis is not undialectically the simple opposite of the hunted stag.
Giegerich uses the Actaion myth to demonstrate that genuine soul-knowing dissolves the opposition between knower and known, requiring dialectical identity rather than representational distance.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Knowing in Fred, knowing in Rachel, knowing in a bee, knowing in an apple tree, knowing in nothingness, knowing in the Milky Way.
Thich Nhat Hanh universalizes knowing as an impersonal, subject-less activity pervading all phenomena, offering a non-Western complement to the Plotinian identification of soul with intellective activity.
, The Sun My Heart, 1988supporting
as to our own Soul we are to hold that it stands, in part, always in the presence of The Divine Beings.
Plotinus asserts that the soul partially maintains continuous contact with divine intellection, grounding its knowing activity in an ongoing metaphysical participation rather than intermittent effort.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
soul-making takes place as much through ideation as in personal relationships or meditation.
Hillman explicitly equates ideation with the primary processes of soul-making, affirming that knowing through ideas is a central mode of soul’s self-constituting activity.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
Since ‘interpreting’ a story means ‘giving the notion of the story,’ interpretation of this myth amounts to giving the notion of the hunt, and by the same token the notion of the Notion.
Giegerich frames mythic interpretation as itself a form of soul’s self-knowing activity, where the act of giving the notion of a story is simultaneous with soul’s articulation of its own logical life.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside
what was one mass of rust from long neglect it has restored to purity… seen now unalloyed it is at once filled with admiration of its worth and knows that it has no need of any other glory than its own.
Plotinus uses the image of purified gold to describe how the soul, restored from self-ignorance, achieves self-knowing as a recovery of intrinsic worth rather than acquisition of external knowledge.
, The Six Enneads, 270aside
making the work of knowing a labor of an-amnesis, of un-forgetting what has been forgotten.
Romanyshyn frames psychological knowing as an anamnetic activity — a retrieval of forgotten soul — situating research itself within the orbit of soul’s self-knowing movement.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007aside
Psychology proper is neither the science ‘psychology,’ nor the psychology which people have. It is the contradictory unity of both.
Giegerich argues that genuine psychology embodies the soul’s dialectical self-relation, refusing to resolve the tension between objective knowledge and subjective interiority.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside