Page 440

Alexandr Korol
Site Admin
Posts: 5543
Joined: Wed Aug 30, 2023 7:38 pm

Page 440

Post by Alexandr Korol »

The World Soul created by the demiurge ensures the connection of this world of necessity to the higher mind. Because of this, a human being endowed with an individual soul combines both mind and necessity.

History of the Concept
Since here the World Soul is designated as the third original hypostasis of all that exists (Greek: ἡ τρίτη ἀρχική ὑπόστασις), some Church writers (especially Origen and his followers) identified it with the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. The idea of the World Soul, which disappeared during the Scholastic period, comes to the forefront again among the Platonists of the Renaissance and the early modern period (see Platonists), and in modern times — in the philosophical poems of Goethe and in some writings of Schelling. On the other hand, the metaphysics of blind will in Schopenhauer and the unconscious world creativity in Hartmann diverge from Platonism toward an even more ancient view of the World Soul, which inspired the philosophical and mystical minds of India (see Paramatma, Vedanta, Indian philosophy, Upanishads).
According to this view, the unconsciously acting and creating World Soul is an independent and singular essence of the Universe, not presupposing any higher absolute or ideal principle above itself. Any naturalistic monism, independently of purely metaphysical speculation, logically arrives at a similar view. Recognizing the real unity of all that exists necessitates acknowledging a cause of that unity as an actual essence. And if the partial elements of the universe (atoms) must be reduced to a dynamic definition (centers of acting forces), which in turn is exhausted by the psychic characteristics of striving and representation, then it must be admitted that the essential unity of these forces also has a psychic nature — or is the World Soul — as, among others, the well-known naturalist and Darwinist Haeckel was led to conclude. However, the idea of the World Soul as an unconditionally independent and singular essence of everything faces an insurmountable difficulty in the fact of a purposeful and orderly world process that gradually realizes in time something that is not actually present at the beginning. If the World Soul were assumed to be the only origin, such a process would amount to a constant production of something absolutely new or a continuous creation from nothing — that is, a pure miracle (see World Process).