Anima mundi: the world's soul, from Plato to Jung

"Anima mundi" is Latin, and in Plato's Timaeus it does not appear in those words. What appears is a claim: that the world is a living being, with soul and intelligence. From that sentence came one of the longest-lived ideas in the history of thought, and each age used it for something different. This project carries that name, and it is worth knowing where it comes from. Here is the path, with the texts I was able to read; what I only know second-hand I say so each time.

Plato: a living world, told as a "likely story"

In the Timaeus, the character who gives the dialogue its name explains how a Creator put the world in order. First he warns that he is a mortal and that those who judge him are too, so we should "accept the tale which is probable and enquire no further".¹ Keep that in mind: Plato offers this as probable, not as proven.

The Creator reasons like this: nothing without intelligence can be fairer than what has it, and intelligence cannot be present in anything without soul. So, when framing the universe, "he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body", and the world became "a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence".¹ Everything else follows from that sentence.

The world's soul comes with a recipe. It is made of three ingredients: the indivisible and unchangeable, the divisible that has to do with bodies, and a third, intermediate kind of essence, made of "the same" and "the other".¹ It is prior to and older than the body, and its task is to rule it. It is spread from the centre to the circumference of heaven, which it also envelops from outside; and though the body of heaven is visible, the soul is invisible and partakes of reason and harmony.¹

The recipe can be heard

After the mixing, the Creator cuts it into portions by a rule: 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8 and 27, which are two series, the powers of 2 (1, 2, 4, 8) and the powers of 3 (1, 3, 9, 27). He fills the gaps with means until intervals of 3/2, 4/3 and 9/8 appear; he fills the 4/3 intervals with steps of 9/8, and a remainder is left that the text gives as the ratio of 256 to 243.¹

There is no mysticism here: there is arithmetic, and it can be checked. In the block below, arithmetic with exact fractions shows that two steps of 9/8 and that remainder make exactly 4/3, and that the seven steps together make an octave. And when you press, you hear it. Mind what it is and what it is not: the passage speaks of proportions and intervals, not of notes. That these proportions are those of the scale tradition called Pythagorean is the usual reading, and I do not back it here with any commentary. What you can check yourself is the arithmetic.

Plotinus: the All-Soul and ours

About six centuries later, in the third century, Plotinus rereads Plato. In his treatise on the soul's descent into body he observes that in the Timaeus Plato "exalts the kosmos and entitles it a blessed god", and that the soul was given to the world through the goodness of the creator so that the total of things might have intellect. From this he draws a consequence: the soul of the All is sent into the world from God, and "in the same way the soul of each single one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete".² Our souls, in that text, are not an accident: they are part of how the world is completed.

That treatise opens with a personal confession, rare in an ancient philosopher: "Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty…". And from there comes the question of how the soul ever entered a body.²

In another treatise, "Are all souls one?", Plotinus asks the question that interests this project most. If the soul of each of us is a unity, why should that of the universe be otherwise? And if it were one, "yours and mine must also be one". He raises the objection himself: that would mean my feelings being felt by someone else, and "the very universe itself would feel whatever I felt".² His answer is that an identical thing in different recipients will have different experiences, and that for my feelings to be necessarily yours "the unity would have to be corporeal: only if the two recipient bodies made one, would the souls feel as one". Nor does he close the matter entirely: he admits that "some transmission of the experience may be expected, and is indeed undeniable", though not a full impression on the whole being.² I only read the opening of that treatise, not how it ends.

On the way: the Stoics, Augustine and Chartres

According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia (which I read; I did not read the original texts), the Stoics made pneuma the physical and rational principle of order in the world, a force they called animum mundi and identified with God.³ St Augustine considered the question of the world soul a "magna atque abdita quaestio", great and hidden, and never identified it with a divine person; he even seems unsure whether one can properly speak of a world soul and an animated universe.³ The doctrine reached the Middle Ages mainly through the Timaeus, and was often regarded as profane and contrary to Christian theology, until in the twelfth century, with the Platonism of the School of Chartres, it became a subject of speculation again: William of Conches treats it in his Philosophia mundi.³

Ficino: the world soul returns

When Aristotle's physics replaced the Platonic kind, between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, belief in the world soul gradually faded until the Renaissance.³ With Marsilio Ficino it comes back to the foreground. His Platonic Theology, written between 1469 and 1474 and published in 1482,⁴ places a World Soul immanent in all of nature and describes the soul as the node or bond between what is above and what is below: drawn towards the forms and the divine, and responsible for governing what lies beneath.⁵ After him, according to the same encyclopedia, Giordano Bruno spoke of a "universal soul" as a large mirror in which the divine image is reflected and infinitely fragmentized.³ I did not read Ficino or Bruno directly.

Schelling: a hypothesis of physics (1798)

In 1798 Schelling published Von der Weltseele, "On the World Soul", with a telling subtitle: A Hypothesis of Higher Physics for the Explanation of the Universal Organism.⁶ It is no longer a Creator mixing ingredients: it is about explaining nature. The book's own table of contents says: "The dualism in nature leads to an organizing principle = world soul".⁷

In the preface he describes this common principle as something "which, because it is present everywhere, is nowhere, and because it is All, can be nothing determinate", and whose idea the oldest philosophy handed down to us, he says, "only in poetic imagery". He also guards against an error: "I hate nothing more than that spiritless striving to wipe out the multiplicity of natural causes with invented identities". And he holds that philosophy must start from the organism and not from the mechanism: "Not where there is no mechanism is there organism, but the reverse: where there is no organism, there is mechanism". He adds that in the work he tries to prove it "from experience".⁷ Here the question changes: a hypothesis that wants to be tested against facts.

Jung: from physics to the psyche

Jung takes up the term with two uses. In the alchemy he studied, Mercurius is outwardly quicksilver but inwardly "a deus terrenus and an Anima Mundi—in other words, that part of God which, when he 'imagined' the world, was as it were left behind in his Creation", like the Sophia of the Gnostics "got lost in Physis".⁸ And in a letter he uses it in a psychological key: the structure of the psyche, which we find "everywhere and at all times", is that in which all individual psyches are identical with each other, and where they function "as if" they were the one undivided psyche the ancients called anima mundi or the psyche tou kosmou.⁸ The "as if" is Jung's. In another text he recalls that "ever since the Timaeus it has been repeatedly stated that the soul is a sphere".⁸

What changed at each step

• Plato: an image of order, which he himself presents as "likely".
• Plotinus: a place between Intellect and the sensible, and a question about whether souls are one.
• Schelling: a hypothesis about nature, meant to be tested against experience.
• Jung: a claim about the psyche, with an "as if".

Each time the idea became a claim about the world, someone asked how it could be checked. One attempt to check it with instruments was the Global Consciousness Project, which we tell in another article. And this path belongs to a single tradition, the one that runs from Greece to Europe. Others have their own ideas of a living world or a shared soul, and deserve their own article with their own sources, not a line here.

What we do with this

The project is named after this history, and it is worth saying what it does not claim. Anima Mundis does not claim that the world has a soul, or that ours are one, or that we feel what others feel. Plotinus already noted that even if souls were one, it does not follow that each of us feels what the other feels. Someone has to say it. That is what is done here: someone says how they are, someone receives it, and the Observatory counts how many times it was said and at what UTC hour. Whether the world has a soul, this site does not decide. What it can count is how many people wanted to say something at the same time.