William

Ancent Philosophy

Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism takes together everything from the previous schools, under the header of being footnotes to Plato. They make a synthesis of ancient thought. We’re not dealing with a revival of platonism. These people do not call themselves neoplatonists. In their mind they are just refounding the platonic tradition because it ceased to exist as a school around 86 Bc when Sulla destroyed Athens. As such the platonic academy ceased to exist as a building, and was only refounded 4th century ce. Of course Plato was still read in the mean-time, for example in Egypt where Plotinus originates from.
He is the founder of the neoplatonic school in Italy. He works close to Italy where he establishes the Greek-speaking school. Many of the neoplatonic authors are from the eastern roman empire where monotheistic religions will later rise and take over the achievements of neoplatonic thought.
We start with a return to what they consider to be orthodox platonism. In the centuries in between the school was destroyed and Plotinus, we find middle platonists. These are really a bunch of authors who don’t actually interact with eachother as an intellectual community. Some of them interact with each other but not really. They mainly base themselves on readings of Timaeus. For Plato it was the only dialogue which he devotes to the philosophy of nature, and the geometrical patterns which derive from the gods. The divine existence of mathematics is brought in.

What happens in neoplatonism is another shift of attention. What ocmes on the fore is the republic and the parmenides. In the republic we deal with the good beyond being, the transcendence of the good. Some kind of mysterious existence of the good which surpasses the highest stages of being as such. And then a distinctly but strange turn in the neoplatonists, is the turn towards the parmenides. The idea that the one is, or it is not, and if it is, it must be one – the points of parmenides. In Parmenides the old parmenides says regarding his theory of ideas that Socrates needs some training. He will give him training in the dialectical exercise of finding principles in reality. Namely the idea that the one is. And if the one is, what follows from it being?

1. If the one is one

2. If the one is

3. what are the effects for the one

4. what are the effects for the others

5. if the one is not

6. what are the effects for the one

7. what are the effects of the others.

It is a logical exercise which most people would simply deny. Many would also say that it is also a game that Plato is playing with the reader. You should however make sense of it. Professor thinks it is a demonstration of taking the concepts of reality like oneness, being, and movement, then you have to recognise that the concepts also entail their counterpart. In our conceptualisation of reality you end up with pairs of opposites which imply each other in their notional content. It is probably this kind of analysis.

The neoplatonists, what identifies them as such, is that they take it seriously, and say that it is about different ways of existence of the one. Of oneness in the universe. And if you follow the logic of the argument in Parmenides, then you can see that it is different layers of reality. A hierarchical system of identification of these layers, and Parmenides is how to find it; they ontologise this second part of Parmenides.

What happens if you say of something that it is one? The problem is that if you say that it is one, you are already saying two things: oneness and being. So then it is not one. This means that any accident, or anything you could attribute to it must be denied if you want to come to its oneness. Take any object whatsoever, like a sheet of paper, it is always a further explanation of something that is a bearer of certain attributes. If you took it down to its oneness, it would have to strip everything away from it. You have to take everything that is of a thing away from it in order to understand its oneness.

If you have a being, it’s always determined in one of those ways. It has come to be, it will come to be, it is right now etc. Anything that exists as a being can be described in temporal ways. Therefore the one in no way takes part of being. This oneness, which is the first part that is discussed in the parmenides must be detached from being. Because there must not be an opposite to it, at which point there would be two. The opposite would then be non-being. And then you could say that nothing can be said of what is not. And as such, oneness is not being, is not, then no name applies to it. Non-being cannot be described. No account, no opinion, no perception. Is it possible that these things are like this for the one? Plato does not think so.

So what they find in the text strangely enough is apophatic theology. Saying about the highest principle, the one, the good, that you cannot say anything that makes sense. It would lower its status to saying something about it which undoes its unity. It is there, and it is becoming the first principle from which they want to understand platonic philosophy.

The point is that we are talking about a layer of reality that is the source of all reality, but of which we really cannot say anything, because it would not make sense.

In their mind it is not theology as talking about the gods, but rather a henology – a talking about the one.

The pagan greeks never accepted any kind of influence of christianity, which they saw as a religion of slaves.

Even if they often say that they accept all that Plato says, they often contradict him on many points. There is a Greek edition of Damascius, where he criticises Plato entirely, and goes against the whole tradition but wouldn’t say so openly. Proclus had his house devastated and demolished by christian mobs who were trying to extinguish the last remainders of the pagan tradition. He refers to titans destroying the dwelling of the gods. They are very cautious in paying lipservice to Plato, because they had a very equivocal tradition as good teachers of the homeric and Greek tradition, but are also badly perceived and attacked.

They basically had access to all the works of Plato. In the beginning after Plato, platonists were skeptics and followed the maieutic works of Plato, whilst the neoplatonists sincerely base their fundamental attitude on the idea that there is a dogmatic scheme within Plato’s writing.
They are sometimes attacked for only doing half of Plato because they tear apart all the political messages in Plato, and only quote those passages that are metaphysical or moral. And they knew their Plato, like the protestants know their bible, and would often throw quotations at you, and mostly they were right to the letter. Not at all to the spirit.

Some mystics in the christian tradition thinks that God transcends being in the same way that the oneness does, whilst Augustine for example argues that God obviously is being. There is wide confusion, we attribute being to God but it is not a being we know, so what is it really?

So we are dealing with a principle, the one, the good. A combination of two passages in Plato. But we are talking about a principle that in itself is ineffable, which is probably the first and the last thing about it – and you have already said too much at this point. Ineffability becomes the main characteristic of this principle. And this name, which it gets from the platonic texts, namely good and one, are not just derived from Plato as exegesis, but rather they are connected to experience, especially in daily life. If you have something that you long for, whatever it might be, it is the good. The object of longing and perfection. This is a general idea for the Greeks. If we apply this nickname of the principle, of the good, you are referring to its desirability and the perfection you aim at. They make an argument similar to Aristotle that the first unmoved mover is the thing that attracts everything in nature to it by being perfect. It is the general object of longing. However, it is not thinking: because thinking involves a bipolar activity. And you find it in its perfect form in the ineffable principle. You can discuss many things in this tradition ex effectivus; out of its effect. You point at the things you find existing, and show that they are the effects of a causal effect elsewhere, at which point the cause also exist. If you show that all are longing , then there must be a first principle that causes all of this longing by being good in itself. And more importantly, anything that is a being, must be a unity. If you say: I am, you refer to the unity of your soul and body, all your characteristics. But it is one. You get its true constitution by being a unity.

Even more importantly than being good, this first principle causes unity. It unifies, and hence makes it possible for something to exist. One now gets a meaning prior to being. Before you can be, there must be a unity that installs being in what you are. So the neoplatonists advocate for the priority of unity to being. The point is that nothing can even be if there is no unity to it, and if the being is not an elaboration of that predisposed unity.

And then there are a number of other platonic starting points. Like the immortality of the soul, the immateriality of causes, and the bipartition between a sensible and intelligible world, with the soul as an intermediate level between the two. The soul is some kind of traveller between the two worlds which has to make the right choice and orientate its life in the right direction.

Plotinus mainly writes treatises and reflects on the meaning of Plato in a general way. Which then his pupil Porphyry imposes on the platonic works a hierarchical structure. The first one are the eleads, which are 6 books of 9 treatises. For neoplatonists this is a perfect installation 3 in all its forms. The only thing is that Porphyry had to cut certain treatises in two in order to make them fit. Though he tells us as much. He gives us even the chronology of the works, though there is not much to be made of it. Plotinus only started writing when he was 49, and didn’t really change his mind much after that. Whereas in Plato we would have liked to know the chronological order, but it has little bearing on the works. But there is a difference between Porphyry’s ordering and the chronology. Porphyry was a vehement anti-christian. He said we shouldn’t take over anything from the christians, but also tried to show that they were actively wrong in specific doctrinal points. Then people like Augustine attacks Porphyry as well; and his texts mainly survive from latin authors quoting him to destroy him.

The main point to take home from neoplatonism is what Plotinus stresses as oneness taking priority over being.

Whatever can be said of ontology, is always preceded by henology/theology. But the point for neoplatonists is that the greek gods remain in place in its multiplicity. And they try to explain how this coheres with this sort of monoprincipalsitic dogma they have. When it comes to the relation between metaphyscis and theology, no pagan at this point ever merged them. This was done by christianity in order to explain how one God heads the entire metaphysics. What we now have, is a principle which becomes the starting point of our analysis from which the rest of reality is derived. It is a reversal of Plato which now sees the horizon of metaphysics from which everything derives. So they explain how and when being enters the stage, how it reaches multiplicity, and even if you have to say that every individual thing exists because it is one, how can this oneness in plurality be maintained? Everything is an hypostasis of the first principle.
If you have oneness, and you want to multiply the first thing you will have is twoness. So there must be a first stage below the first principle, where you have two things and not more.

In Plotinus we now have a system derived which needs to be articulated of how it comes to be from the one. It involves a number of new problems. If the one is really transcendent and not being, then what is it to be a cause in this context? How come that there is multiplicity? Does the one multiply itself?

What we first needed to do is to explain the status of the first stage just below the one, the stage of two. This is the stage where Aristotle left things. He said the highest principle, God, is self-thinking thought, it is an activity of thinking that is oriented towards itself. The neoplatonists would say yes, but this does not undue the fundamental dualtiy in thought. It is directed to something, the object of thought, even if it is to itself, there is a duality. If the one were to look at itself, it would already be doubling itself as the one who sees and is seen. This means that if you have something that contemplates even without rational distinctions, something that even looks at the one, meaning that we are already leaving the stage of oneness per say. If something contemplates the one by being symbiotically attached to it, but still having it as its counterpart, there is already duality in it, and we have left the stage of total unity. Aristotle talks about intellect as something that thinks itself, but by that very fact, it leaves unity. It is a self development of emotion that in its very first stage leaves the principle per say. It is not anymore what the principle is. ”Intellect therefore had the power from him to generate and to be full of its own offspring, since the good gave what he did not himself have”. Intellect, by position itself over agains the one, looses unity, but gains the power of multiplying things, and that’s what the intellect does. By understanding itself, it brings into existence distinctions or differences which then operate as markers for discursive thought. In order to make sense of your thought, you need this kind of distinction to understand what is going on when you say oneness. Using the word one is distinguishing it from other possible names, and implies multiplication, which is the first task of intellect. In that continuous process, what you first have is an intellect that is not yet detached and is only symbiotically attached to the one. Plotinus calls this the intellect that is drunken off the nectar, like the homeric gods, that is how attached it is to the first principle: like a newborn baby. It doesn’t even know that it is distinct, and gradually the distance grows, in order to position yourself you have to break the symbiotic unity. When intellect understands itself out of the unity of the one. And then in the next stage, it will start to be discursive. It will have to install a larger multiplicity and there is no end to it. The intellect at its own level will start to multiply.
But we need to answer a quesiton: how can this happen? If the one doesn’t do anything itself. You should remember that the one really is nothing but one. It doesn’t start creating, there is no creation, because a god or a principle that is perfect cannot feel the need of having anything beside it. There is no room for something like that. Meaning that if the movement happens, it happens out of itself. In this scholarship, the movement is called emanation. The term is derived from latin, emanare, which means to flow out. If you will a bucket, then it is perfectly filled, whilst the rest flows over. The overflowing power of the one is not contained by whatever positions itself next to it keeps overflowing. A better way of understanding it could be in computer language: You have compressed files on a floppy disc, and all the information you might want is there, indistinct. And in order to read the file you need to decompress it. All of it was already implied in the first compressed file, but it was unreadable. It wasn’t adapted to the manner of reading. And in order to understand it you need to develop the content layer by layer and fold open the compressed folder. In the one is a totally compressed existence of everyhing that is so full that it eventually flows out of itself. With all this multiplicity, no information hasn’t been added, it was already there in the first instance of existance. It is like the bing bang where the whole universe was in one unit of space, which eventually unvelops itself. What happens is not matter expanding itself here though, but rather the intelligible world. The unity as such is too heavy to bear, so it emanates into many other instances, or hypostases.

The intellect is the first other which posits itself over agains the one. It plays a role in transmitting the movement of emanation to the lower stages. The good gives what thought does not have itself. The one doesn’t read itself either, but once you start feeling the need to read it, you are in the descent of multiplication.

What the neoplatonists do, is to take him seriously in thinking that you need knowledge to be a good person and understand metaphysics. There will be a mystical experience involved however. The Greek tradition in all its existence has always been very rationalistic, you need to understand the world and whatever is ununderstandable needs to be derived from what you do understand. Which is why they are quite different from mystical traditions.

Starts with the Good/One

Then the Intellect.

Then the Soul, which has the threefold existence of Aristotle’s soul. They will refer to the functions of the soul as Aristotle talks about, but they apply the rational, sensitive, and vegetative soul instead. Aristotle, as a good pupil of Plato, didn’t understand his master well.

By its metaphysical position, as a third hypostasis, it is limited only to the intelligible realm. These things do not belong to the sensible world. This soul has a very peculiar existence, because it is a kind of elevator. It can and should unite with the intellect, trying to make sense of the world. Plotinus even goes so far as to say that we have three parts of the soul, but there is even a part of the soul in the intellect which never descends. The rational soul is only discursive understanding. Whereas the soul that remained in the intellect is the contemplative soul, which understands the whole suddenly and as a whole. Some kind of understanding of the whole when everything falls in place. You cannot necessarily explain it, because that’s a discursive feature. And the soul can go even further, it can get to the one, and reunite with it. But Porphyry tells us that only happened to Plotinus 7 times in his life, but that’s very rare and only instantaneously. It is never going to be a way of life. You cannot build happiness on it, but you can experience it momentarily, though not explain it because that lowers it down to another level of emanation. But the soul can also misorientate itself, and look only towards the material nature below it at which point it becomes an evil soul. Then it does things which are against its own nature.

In Phaedo we even read about a soul that is so muc attached to the body that it is nailed to it like a slave on a cross, the soul is materialised. And when it dies, it immediately reincarnates in the first body that presents itself. That would be a soul that has not oriented itself towards the higher realm.

Matter is the final stage of everything that happened. We’re actually coming down to the existence of materialised form in ever more definition, the lowest emanation of the first principle, is always going to be matter – prime matter in Aristotle. Total indeterminancy and potentiality. It can only be receptive. You find a total reversal with the principle that exists which cannot but be passive, that is so empty of power that it is only passively receptive. And that’s where the system would must end, it must be the opposite of the intellect. Matter in its very own nature is totally improductive, and by that fact is at the bottom. Over against gnostic traditions, Plotinus refuses to take over the dualism of the gnostics. Because whatever is in the universe is the effect of the one single principle. If there is a reality outside of that, then that reality is not the principle.

What is evil then, if everything is always directed to the good? If the system is determined by goodness, and perfection always lie in the ideas that involve goodness? Then evil only resides in the sensible world, where the coexistance of good things actually make bad things. It is just because of the coexistance of things in the sensible world, the material nature of a tree does not make it evil.

So evil then is parasitic on the existence of goodness, everything in the world is designed to be good. And yet there is evil, but which lacks any force of its own. There is no dynamics of evil. It derives its ’force’ by taking the force of the good until it is exhausted: like a cancer. A cancer perverts good cells into bad cells and destroys the organism. But in that event, it also destroys itself. It is so destructive that it doesn’t mind being destroyed itself. That is evil in the neoplatonic way of seeing it. There is a force of growth in nature, which can be perverted to consume it against its own interest. But it has no existence of its own. Once all the forces of good are consumed, the evil itself cannot persist either. They call the existence of evil parhypostasis, a next-to-hypostasis. A way of existence that is parasitical.

Once you reach the highest stage of the system, you get to climb up with your elevator soul to the highest stages. It is totally mystical. The point being that you get to see and experience things which you by definition cannot explain. This unification is not in Plotinus’ mind excstasy. It is actually something interior to yourself, you move into yourself because you have this unity within yourself. It is the same unity that exists always in everything. It is the same one which posits itself in every individual thing. And hence unification is a turning inwards, in which you understand your innermost nature. The ascent is a kind of return back to yourself at which point you find a moment of unity, a unity with the one itself.