Hendrik Lorenz

Hendrik Lorenz is the Princeton philosopher whose The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle (2006) is the standard contemporary treatment of the non-rational soul in classical philosophy. Working in the analytic tradition of ancient philosophy, Lorenz reads the Platonic tripartite soul and the Aristotelian doctrine of epithumia against each other to clarify what the Greeks meant by an appetitive or spirited desire — a desire that is not reasoned but that, in its own register, responds to reasons and can be trained.

For the Seba lineage, Lorenz’s work is load-bearing at the point where the classical account of the non-rational soul meets Jung’s feeling-function. The classical tradition, rightly read, does not place appetite or spirit against reason as blind against sighted; it places them as parts of the soul that participate in reason in their own way — which is exactly Jung’s claim for feeling as a rational valuating function. See lorenz-brute-within-appetitive.

Relationships

• lorenz-brute-within-appetitive
• tripartite-soul
• feeling-function