Dichotomies in the Void
Our story begins from the void, birthing an ensouled world. To partake in an animistic sensibility, where the self and world are indistinguishable, is to encounter god everywhere. Shamans serve as visionary guides that operate in another dimension, invoking a map of the underworld, another world, initiating a new consciousness through rituals in the darkness of the cave. The void also births mythic consciousness. In ancient Greek cosmology, the progenitor of the pantheon emerges from Chaos, the primordial void, and thus springs forth a family of Gods and Goddesses who shape nature, culture and one's place within both. Agency arises from one’s relationship to these divine forces, as illustrated in Homer’s epics, where anything can happen at any time through dramatic personifications and confrontations with the gods.
Presocratic thinkers turned to nature, rather than divine intervention, to explain objective reality. Defending their ideas with reason over irrationality, they laid the foundation for laws of order through investigation of systematic knowledge of mathematical origins as defined by Mathematikoi like Pythagoras. Socrates birthed a humanistic perspective of critical inquiry encouraging freedom of thought and the pursuit of self knowledge. His wisdom came from his assertion that “I know that I know nothing” to combat the emergence of sophistry, where persuasion and suggestibility determined one's position and value of knowledge, distracting from contemplating transcendental qualities of the Good, True, and Beautiful. Socrates' methods of discourse sought to interrogate ideas to recognize truth through introspection and analysis with a goal to contact deep structures of the soul, the primal source, called arche.
As the development of the self takes shape through abstraction, the void opens inside the mind, inviting a place to engage with divinity. Plato posits that in the interiority of self, the mind and soul possesses a natural affinity for the perfect world of Forms, which exists in the intelligible realm. Plato’s ethical stance aligns with cynicism, which values living virtuously in accordance with nature, absolved from corrupting forces like wealth and power, engaging with abstract faculties of the mind. To Plato, ethical action moves top down, from innate ideas from God inherent within arche. By engaging with a higher place of timeless concepts through connection to the divine mind, forces pull the soul’s cognitive and intellectual capacity out of the body and out of this world, into an altered state of consciousness to engage with the One. His concept of noesis, the highest form of knowledge of forms and ideas, lives beyond the world of reason and logic, into an intuitive perception that brings one closer to unchanging, eternal truths.
For Plato, returning to the darkness of the cave signifies a regression to ignorance. The mind and soul become imprisoned by the distortions of sensory perceptions; Misleading images draw the soul downward. His student, Aristotle, countered his ideas by emphasizing the body as a vital conduit for cultivating sensory intelligence. Aristotle’s claim suggested that forms don’t exist without the world, therefore they must be found in it. His ethical position promotes hedonism, which prioritizes intimacy and pleasure to gain more consciousness and avoid pain. Developing systematic rules and procedures to evaluate rational thought, Aristotle set the groundwork to evaluate the many, collecting empirical fact through categories to see the whole. His teleological stance assumed that nature aims towards its final cause, fulfilling its inherent purpose leading to good order. For Aristotle, ethical action moves bottom up, where the divine works through material forms to be categorized by a cognitive process, establishing the foundations of science.
As psychology situates a human as the perceiver, through whom individual experience becomes the measure of what is true and real, judgements about method, perspective, and ethics give rise to the tensions that shape the zeitgeist and propel the mind’s future development. Plato turns attention upward toward spirit; Aristotle turns it downward toward science. Freud later turns his attention to the individual’s unconscious, grounding psychic life in instinctual drives, while Jung orients his theories toward the individual’s role in the collective unconscious, situating the psyche within a broader perspective of spiritual and archetypal meaning. Ultimately, these polarities have implications for how to be in the world, and from this position, the soul mediates between hierarchies of mind and body, spirit and matter, being and becoming, angels and ancestors. This draws us into the tension of opposites that expose the workings of the void, a continuum where each side reflects on what it is not, discerning its own incompleteness. Psychology walks a delicate line, ensuring that consciousness remains intimate in itself while sustaining the psyche’s capacity to turn and observe the other, enriching a reflective awareness of how to elegantly be both within the world and beyond it.
Note from the author: This essay was written in 2025 for a midterm exam at Teachers College, Columbia University in Dr. Mark Kuras class History and Systems of Psychology