I n place of the familiar notion of psychic reality based on a system of private experiencing subjects and dead public objects, I want to advance a view prevalent in many cultures (called primitive and animistic by Western cultural anthropologists), which also returned for a short while in ours at its glory through Florence and Marsilio Ficino. I am referring to the world soul of Platonism, which means nothing less than the world ensouled. . . . Let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event as it is, its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image-in short, its availability to imagina-tion, its presence as a psychic reality.
— James Hillman
Hillman reaches back to Ficino not as a nostalgia move but as a diagnostic one. Florence in the fifteenth century briefly interrupted the Platonic inheritance's dominant tendency — its long drift toward interiority as withdrawal, soul as the private theater of a subject sealed off from dead matter. What Ficino recovered, and what Hillman is recovering here, is the older Platonic claim that soul is not housed in the subject but distributed through the world itself, present in things as their animated face.
The practical consequence is stranger than it first sounds. If the anima mundi is the soul-spark available through each particular thing — its sensuous surface as disclosure of interior image — then the question "where is soul?" no longer points inward, toward your private experience, your depth, your inner life. It points outward, toward the specific face of this event, this object, this face. Soul becomes a relational quality between perceiver and perceived, and imagination is the faculty that keeps the relation alive. Without imagination, the thing goes dead — not because the thing changed but because the perceiver withdrew into the bubble of private experience and stopped attending.
That withdrawal is the default modernity has made structural, and Hillman is naming it precisely by refusing to begin there.
James Hillman·A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman·1989