History of Philosophy 28-10-24
Plotinus
Wrote a series of short treatises coming back to the same general problems. Did not properly publish. Are ordered according to the level of difficulty by Porphyry.
Plotinus actually wrote several treaties on beauty.
We read one of the first enneads.
Once people were introduced to the key feaatures of his thought he elaborated.
Was located in Alexandria, but worked mainly in Rome, and worked in Greek.
The text is subdivided into 3 portions.
The first: the first three paragraphs, deals with the sensible manifestation of beauty. Uses these as a starting point, but argues that beauty is not material instead.
However, he also accepts the claim that there are some bodies that are beauty in themselves, for example gold; it is a kind of simple object.
”The same bodies appear sometimes beautiful and sometimes not beautiful”
Plotinus invokes the 3 portions, that 3 different parts have to relate to eachother in a good proportion. Color, claritas, is the doctrine of the proper sensible – color is the proper sensible of sight. Color is a synechdochis, that indicates the relation to the perception of color. This notion is quite classical.
Plotinus works to depart from the classical position. It cannot have to do with proprtion, even though proportion approaches beauty.
In the third paragraph, he looks at a house, and wonders what it is that captures the beauty of a house – no single part can do that!
However, there is an external perception, of the inner-form, which is without parts but appears as having many parts. The manifestation of the form appears to be many, but the form is still one.
The second section: an analysis of what this kind of manifestation of the simple in the many could be, paragraph 4-6. This manifestation is a sensible manifestation that we can only perceive with our intellect (nous). Thus, he thinks beauty is a fundamentally inner thing, that manifests within one’s intellect.
In chapter 7-9 he finalises his inquiry. Augustine read and admired these texts, himself having been a neo-platonist. Beauty and Goodness coincinde, and are simple. He defines good quite Aristotelian-like, as the object of universal desire. His definition is not objective, but everybody indicates together what the good is.
In chapter 6, he analyses the intelligible manifestation of beauty. He uses a notion that is quite uncommon, but is mostly aristotelian, the notion of megalopsychea, the greatness of the soul. Plotinus is manifestedly platonic, but he also takes influences like this from Aristotle. It is clear that Plotinus knows Aristotle well.
What is the megalopsychologia then? The greatness of the soul is despising material, whilst wisdom turns away from things below. Phronesis, apotropetos. This is something that Plotinus does not really argue, but he intuits it. ”If we look at superior individuals, those with great soul, what characterises them is that they despise the material world, what is low, and looks upwards in ambition towards the Ideas”.
At the beginning of chapter 7, we find a literal quotation of Aristotle’s nichomachean ethics, ”good is that which every soul desires”, but at the end of chapter 6, he did not focus on the general soul of everybody, but rather selected some great souls who looked down upon the material world, but the general desire he invokes is not the same.
Here then is his analysis: a triad of thought. Being, Living and Intellecting. Esse, Divere, Intelligire.
Nous, Einai, Souess.
These 3 alone are the single and pure that which all depend on.
This is a way in which he defines Being in an intentional way, rather than extentionally. Being taken according to its extension is our most pure concept, but that does not give us much. Here Being is defined where we want to intensify what kind of knowledge we actually attain from the Being, what it says.
His use of Wonder is reminiscent of Aristotle’s use of it. It is functional to speak of what triggers philosophy, but the task of philosophy is to eliminate wonder such that he is not shocked or astonished by anything anymore (the sophistic mind). The notion of shock of delight which exists in Plotinus’ text, is actually the sign which shows us that we are getting close to Beauty in itself. He intensifies the desire of reaching what is really good and feeling that kind of shock of delight. Only the philosopher can experience this kind of shock.
Rather it gives the being a pointer to actually approaching the Good.
The Good is actually what every Great mind, megalopsychoi, desires. And not what every single one desires.
Plotinus shows us that when attaining simplicity we actually approach a kind of mystical unity with the Being.
2-3 times in his life, Plotinus claimed to have been united with the One.
Augustine thought that this text of Plotinus was compatible with a christian account of God, even though the expressions used are different.
In the last chapter, 9, all what has been constructed comes together.
The Great soul is the one that desires the Good, but the Great Soul that desires the Good becomes a Good soul. An assimilation takes place. What is desired and the desirer becomes One in the act of understanding. The thinker, the more they understand what the beautiful is, the more they understand the Good.
So how do we do this?
By going back into ourselves and look.
Then, we must polish ourselves to the point of being One, beautiful and good.
Our Self is a thing which we can return to and make better, make closer to the True Self.
The task of the sculpturer is to take away excesses, and liberate that which is already there. eg. Michaelangelo’s ”prisons”, which show incomplete sculptures, and thus they are prisons in that the artist failed to liberate the forms inherent within the blocks of marble.
The task of the philosopher is to see themselves in unity of their Being.
The One is superior to any quantity because any other quantity is produced by the One.
The Good is the primary beauty, but if one distinguishes between the Intelligible and the Beauty, we find that the Good is the spring origin of the Beauty.
The can be said to be slight of gaps in the argument, but this is rather because he follows a kind of dialectical argument.
The passage from Beauty to Good is negated by the Soul. But, if the soul is Mastered, it is not split by inner conflict, it becomes One and thus both Beauty and Good. The desire of the Good soul is Beauty.
What is crucial in Augustine, one part is sort of phenomenological analysis between the relationships in society, giving that their is some sort of natural trust that is not external but internal. I can know my feeling, but someone else can only infer it, despite the possibility of being deceived always existing.
Augustine made one of the first philosophical descriptions of lying. In lying you can say things that are technically true, but are misleading, thus there is a kind of intentionality inherent in them.
Should I belive in the promises made in these random letters that are part of the Bible? Well, they have already been fulfilled, and it makes sense to believe someone that thus far has kept their word. So far, we can show that that first set of promises were true, but we technically don’t know that the future promises will, but it is not weird to believe that they will.
The second part is mainly apologetic, but enables him to say what he says in the beginning.
He says, we can test from the external actions of my friends, for example by asking our friends for money, which will make most people weary of being friends with me. Thus we can test those close to us but also ruin our social lives whilst doing so.
There is a fundamental assumption, the distinguishing between internal and external, what we can perceive immediately and what we can only infer. We can assess ourselves perfectly, but everyone else can only infer from external signs. This is something he assumes, and does not really prove. The realm of intersubjectivity only contains the effects of the realm of the intentional.
This idea was challenged radically in the 20:th century: Benedetto Croce, who showed that there is no distinction between external and internal. When we speak of intention and extention, the intention is our act, he unifies the both. The intention otherwise seems to have no causal impact on our behaviour.
The other author regarding this is Elizabeth Anscombe. She translated the Logical Investigations to English. Wrote a book after WWII, called ’Intention’, where she vindicates what later followers of Anscombe the myth of interiority. There is no such thing as an interiority which is impossible to reach by other people. The reason that we sometimes fail in understanding intentions, is not because they are unreachable inherently, but because we simply sometimes fail. Anscombe’s text is truly seminal in this discussion.
In Wittgenstein, the feeling of pain and the expression of it is the same thing. The intention and the external is the same.
Thus, Augustine’s distinction is not really taken as very real anymore.
Anselm of Canterbury (or of Aosta), was not always in Canterbury, but only really towards the end of his life. Was born in Italy, mainly lived in France, and ended up in England. He lived quite a complex career. But the Benedictine’s were quite an international institution and thus it was not weird for the time.
The advantage of reading the Proslogion from cover to cover, is that you have to make sense of parts that at first sight seem redundant. If we have some notion of biology, we can see how in the genetic code there are a lot of pieces of redundancy, but research shows that this redundant material is important in other areas. This is the same in regards to Anselm.
So before saying something on Anselm’s proper argument: We hvae to understand that this is something written by a monk, on the request of other monks. He is not writing for normal people or merchants but for and by monks.
Anselm wants to strengthen his fellow monk’s faith.
There is always a play in the text between fides and intellectus. There is faith looking for intelligence, and there is intelligence looking for belief.
There is first the monologion, ie. A solilogquy, a discourse with oneself.
He reflects on why it makes sense to believe in a creator of all things, such as the argument of design. ”If we enter a garden, and we see that it is well ordered, we infer that there is a gardener that keeps things in order. Thus there is similarly someone who designs the world.”
All the arguments of the monologion are multiple, and always imply further reflection.
The argument of design: first we observe nature, and recognise that there is an order. After this order is perceived, we have to wonder from where it comes.
This work, the monologion, did not aptly satisfy Anselm. And so Anselm wonders if there is an independent argument that by itself, sufficiently, proves that there is a God, a supreme God, that no one can question. He wants to find an a priori kind of argument.
He did not find one, and was quite frustrated by it. Thus, there must have been a kind of perversion that made it impossible for him to find it. The devil seems to have distracted him from the ability to understand where to find this kind of argument.
However, he seems to have found a kind of argument anyways through revelation, the minute he stopped trying to ponder the specificities of this kind of argument.
He begins through a personal experience, that he is on the verge of a burnout, and on this verge, unexpectedly finds the joy of realising his argument into reality. We can say that he experiences a kind of metaphysical joy, which he wants to share with his fellows.
Chapter 1: Anselm tells us to shut ourselves in our mind for a while and only attend to God.
He invokes a prayer, through quotations from the Bible, inquiring on how to seek God.
Thus he personalises and presents this revelation as something has come to him specifically. For monks, revelations were a kind of common-place thing. Then he does phenomenological reduction lol and removes all the images in his mind epic Husserl-style.
The prayer can be said to transform itself into a confession of being without clue.
Then he introduces more and more texts from the Bible as if there was a kind of first element of an answer.
Anselm does not seek to understand, but he believes in order to understand (Intellect and fide). Becaue he is a monk, he would like to understand.
Chapter 2: We cannot comprehend God, but when we think of God, we think of what is more perfect than anything else: thus God is the greatest thing we are able to coneive of. The greatest I can think is still limited however, so let’s negatively say this, via negation we can reaceive a different type of universality: God is what nothing else could be greater than.
If God is thought of in this way, he has to exist, no matter the actual content of that thing which refers.
Deus non est. Incipience in the bible.
Incipience, comes from sapere, which means to taste. Incipient is the one who lacks taste. But it is not a fool who is incipient, because the fool is much too limited compared to the incipient.
The distinction between being as presence and being as perfection is important here. You cannot have degrees to existence. But Leibniz (and maybe Heidegger, I am uncertain what he meant here) in his discourse on metaphysics, why is there being and not nothing: being is thus instead seen as a value, to exist is nothing different to what the quality of what is there. This is being as the act of Being, and without degrees, it is more or less perfect. When Anselm thinks of the existence of God, he thinks of it as perfection, and not as effect. There is no more perfection in God existing or not makes no difference, but if Being adds to the perfection of God then God existing is more likely than not.
Anselm developed an argument, but it has a specific framework: it is presented as a sort of personal experience, it is not something you can reach in discussion. Even when it is conveyed in the written text, it is still a kind of meditation where he starts by isolating himself and paying attention, and realising that you are in darkness, and thus asks for help by declaring that he trusts these unknown things around him. This sort of framework cannot be removed from the argument, the argument cannot be aptly shown. This is not something against atheists, but rather an argument to help believes believe deeper and understand, so that they can have a kind of true belief. For him trying to convert atheists would be something that is more or less lackluster. You have to remove the impact of imagination on your argument, otherwise, this kind of argument might not really work. You have to neutralies your imagination, you are thinking of God, not imagining Him.
Descartes was inspired by Anselm’s kind of a priori argument.
Leibniz defends this kind of argument too, and furthermore Alvin Plantinga defends Anselm in detail. Anselm’s arguments remain important to us today.
Peter Abelard: wrote about the ethics of intention; what is good or wrong in human acts, is not determined by the results, but by the intention, someone who kills someone with good intentions is not a really a criminal ethically speaking.
Pascal argued against this because with a kind of ethical intention you can always argue that your intentions were good.
Anscombe is also arguing against this in her work on intention, because she believes that this can be dangerous, because you can never clearly determine that someone is responsible for a kind of sin. In her case intention is a form of action, and thus when judging on your action, you are also judging the intention. They are the same.
Karl Barth wrote an entire book on Anselm.