Psyche

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Psychē is the Greek word usually translated “soul,” but the translation flattens a long history. The term begins close to the breath — the word is cognate with psychein, to breathe or blow cool — and across roughly a thousand years of Greek writing it travels from naming what leaves the body at death to naming the immortal, rational core of the person. The single word carries that whole distance, which is why a Homeric psychē and a Platonic one are almost opposites wearing the same name.

In the Homeric poems psychē is barely a self at all. It is what departs at the last breath and goes down to Hades as a thin, witless shade — Achilles’ ghost in the Odyssey would trade its whole existence below for a day as a poor man’s hired hand. The living person’s thinking and feeling, in this early picture, belong elsewhere: to the thymos, the phrēn, organs of impulse seated in the breathing body. The psychē matters only at the edges of life, as the thing whose loss is death.

The decisive widening happens in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Among the Pythagoreans and in Orphic circles the psychē becomes a fallen, transmigrating self, bound to a wheel of rebirths; Heraclitus speaks of a psychē whose limits cannot be found, so deep is its measure. With Socrates and Plato the term takes its lasting philosophical shape. The psychē is now the true person, distinct from the body that houses it, the seat of reason and the bearer of moral worth — and, in the Phaedo, deathless: Plato has Socrates argue, on the last day of his life, that the soul existed before birth and survives the body’s end. Plato also divided it, setting a rational part over a spirited and an appetitive one, a structure that organized Greek thought about the self for centuries.

Aristotle pulled hard in the other direction. In his treatise On the Soul the psychē is the form of a living body — its organizing principle, the actuality of an organism with the capacity for life — not a separable passenger but what makes a given body the living thing it is. The two readings, Plato’s separable soul and Aristotle’s embodied form, mark the poles the later tradition argued between.

The Neoplatonists inherited both and built the Platonic line into a cosmos. For Plotinus, Soul is a level of reality itself, issuing from Intellect as Intellect issues from the One; the individual psychē is its descent into matter, and philosophy is the work of its return. Through the Latin anima and through Christian and Islamic philosophy this graded, immortal psychē passed into the wider inheritance, where the older sense — psychē as simply the breath that parts a living thing from a corpse — had long since dropped away. The same five letters had come to mean something the poets who first used them would not have recognized.

→ In the library: Plato — Phaedo (Jowett, 1892) · Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna): On the Essence of the Soul

→ Related: Soul · Nous · Plato · Aristotle · Neoplatonism