THE THREE DISCOVERIES: THE ONTIC IN-ITSELF

The unsolved problem: the existence of the soul

Soul or spirit means “vital breath”. By “breath” the ancients meant something that was invisible but had visible effects. For all great religions the soul was a natural concept of man and represented his point of contact with the divine.
The ancient Greeks made the soul a philosophical concept, to be analysed through rational techniques. All those before Socrates discussed the soul and particularly the link between body and soul, the two fundamental dimensions of man’s existence. According to Plato body and soul are separate while for Aristotle they are closely connected. “The soul is the act before the natural body and has the potentiality of life. Therefore it is manifest that the soul is not separable from the body since some of its actions are the corresponding action of parts of the body”, wrote Aristotle, thus “natural bodies are tools (organs) of the soul”. With Christianity the discussions on the soul went from philosophical to religious and the studies made regarded the attempt to make the concept of “soul” coherent in a catholic sense to western rationality. With the enlightenment and the subsequent industrial revolution the scholar’s interest turned to reason and soul was often seen as a religious concept and thus not scientific. Philosophical interest in the soul continued however, shown by Schopenhauer, Kant and Hegel. In the nineteen hundreds there was the tendency to consider the soul as a mystic concept, even if some scholars such as Brentano, Freud with his Id, Jung, Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel highlighted that within the human being there were vital and creative impulses and intentionality that were not strictly pertinent to reason.
In the twentieth century there was still no answer to the question: does the soul exist? If it does exist can it be described and studied in a rational or even scientific manner?

The discovery of the ontic In-itself

“On beginning to cure the human being, I was looking for a principle for curing, the criterion that could give the direction to life, when I discovered that in the background of the unconscious there was not life or death, because these are consequences, rather there was a principle, a living transcendent criteria. Transcendent in that it was in that subject, but at the same time it was not there.
This principle was the ontic In-itself.
This principle worked from the phenomenology and operative results of the person, thus a subject was neurotic or a failure because he went against the specific properties of this elementary criterion, while everything that conformed to it would give the subject life, well-being, satisfaction, this was the criteria that meant being or not being, to be ill or healthy, successful or frustrated etc.”.
“The ontic In-itself is the foundation or criterion of Ontopsychology” writes the Professor. Therefore the ontic In-itself is the criterion that in ontopsychological analysis allows us to distinguish “what is good from what is bad”. It is an intelligent principle: “In our body there is a mind that organizes the existence of the whole and the single parts”. “This basic criterion is the same for everyone”, it takes the name of the human being’s In-itself or constant H, and it is the form of intelligence that differentiates man from other life forms. “But it specifies itself differently in each person”.
The definition of the In-itself is: “intelligent form principle that makes historical autoctisis”. For Meneghetti the soul has a metaphysical nature but is concretely embodied in the history of the human being. It is noumenon that becomes phenomenon.
Meneghetti wrote a fundamental text to formalize the ontic In-itself, The In-itself of the human being, and a section found in the Ontopsychology Handbook. More generally the ontic In-itself constitutes the criterion for Ontopsychology and therefore represents the founding principle for all the texts written by Antonio Meneghetti.
For many of today’s schools of thought the soul is not a scientific concept. What then is the novelty of the ontic In-itself compared to the concept of soul?
Meneghetti is two steps ahead of the religious and scientific-philosophic world; he describes and demonstrates the soul. He clinically demonstrates its existence through his results and he describes it through the fifteen characteristics.
Antonio Meneghetti’s innovation is that he has “individuated” (he has recognized it), “isolated” (he has distinguished it from other existing questions) and “specified” (he has described how it is manifested, what it does and why it does it) this first principle. “All ontopsychological practice consists in the individuation and application of the In-itself”, in teaching how to individuate it and make it work in every day life.
The ontic In-itself is coherent with humanity’s great books, Meneghetti himself affirms it. He realizes that the historical importance of his thought is not that he discovered something that nobody knew existed, the In-itself is, as Antonio Meneghetti identified it, what so many had searched for and hypothesized.
Meneghetti’s point of departure is the point of arrival for others. The innovation lies in giving this discovery scientific dignity. For Meneghetti the ontic In-itself is not a mystic idea but something concrete and real within every man, which when individuated and put into action allows success in every concrete aspect of man’s existence. It determines health, well-being, pleasure and economic and social success.
Instead of representing it with dogma or fideism, Antonio Meneghetti describes it almost automatically; he illustrates all the phenomenology with the precision of a careful researcher and makes understanding and personal application possible for every human being.
How did Meneghetti manage to give a scientific answer to the ancient question regarding the existence of the human soul?
“I used this criterion observing it, reading it and decoding it with all the arts and studies that I had behind me. I did not get there by chance; I possessed all the tools for reading it: the tools of mysticism, rationality, mathematics, evidence, physics, theory and many other things. The luck was that when I started the analysis of this process I had superior training, which Jung, Freud, St. Thomas Aquinas etc could not have had. I had more skills which allowed a more complete analysis”. “So at first I discovered that this criterion – which was observable, readable – manifested itself and following its indications always led to precise results: health, well-being, success. If this principle was forgotten, contradicted or altered it was always followed by illness, disorder, confusion etc.”.
But why would we contradict this principle? The answer can be found in the second fundamental discovery: the deflection monitor.