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Classical root of the Self
Classical root of the Self
Jung’s Self inherits a classical structure that runs from Plato through Plotinus into the alchemical tradition. Plato’s tripartite-soul is already plural and already ordered — the logistikon above, the thumos and the appetites below — held in a synthesis the Republic admits is fragile: “It is not easy for a synthesis composed of many parts to be everlasting, especially when the synthesis is not mixed in the finest possible way” (Plato, Republic 611a, discussed in Hobbs 2000). The Timaeus extends this psychology outward into cosmology: the world-soul is the unifying principle of the cosmos, a totality-structure for which the individual psyche is microcosm.
Plotinus lifts the structure to its decisive form in the Enneads. The One moves toward itself, and intellection is the self-reflection by which the Good contemplates the Good: “the self-intellection is not deliberate: it sees itself as an incident in its contemplation of The Good; for it sees itself in virtue of its Act” (Plotinus, Ennead VI.9.8). The structure Jung names as the Self — a center that is simultaneously the ground and the telos of the psyche, knowable only through its self-reflection — is recognizably this Plotinian logic carried into empirical psychology. Jung cites Ennead VI.9.8 directly in Aion’s notes on the symbolism of the iota and the lapis (Jung 1951).
The Stoic elaboration — the pneuma as world-soul, “the ‘active principle’ of the world, which pervades ‘matter’, the ‘passive principle’, in a relation described as that of ‘world-soul’ to the ‘body’ of the world” (Long & Sedley 1987) — is the pneumatic transmission through which the Platonic world-soul becomes anima-mundi for the alchemists. The Self as Jung conceives it is the end of this arc — a totality-structure that has traveled from cosmology through Neoplatonic metaphysics through alchemy into empirical psychology, losing none of its paradoxical shape.