Seba.Health
Work · Seba Knowledge Graph
The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World
The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World
Hillman’s two-part book, derived from the 1979 Eranos lecture The Thought of the Heart and the 1982 Florence lecture Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the World. The two essays form a single argument: the recovery of the heart as the organ of imaginational cognition is also, and necessarily, the recovery of the world’s soul as a perceptible reality — the anima-mundi — because the aesthetic organ that perceives image is the same organ that perceives the soul of things.
The Thought of the Heart opens with an explicit dedication of the work to Henry Corbin — “because of him, the basis of our work has already been done” — and proceeds by diagnosing three “captive hearts” that have obscured the true organ: the cœur de lion, the Harveian pump, and the Augustinian confessional heart. Against these, Hillman recovers the heart of aisthesis, of himma, of the philos in the blood. The lineage runs Corbin → Ibn ʿArabī → Greek thymos / enthymesis → Renaissance Ficinian spiritus.
Anima Mundi extends the recovery outward: the heart that perceives by image perceives the world as ensouled. “To the ensouled world we too are objects of aisthesis, aesthetically breathed in by the anima mundi” (Hillman 1992). The book is the central late-Hillman text on perception, imagination, and the soul of things — load-bearing for any seba page on the reason-of-the-heart, the thought-of-the-heart, or the anima-mundi.