Ancient
In homeric times, it is about being seen as virtuous, whilst in Plato and so on it is about being virtuous in yourself.
But God is a principle, which is interiorised in you in Augustine, intimior intimo meo. God is closer to me than myself.
Hannah Arendt says it is Augustine that first poses the anthropological question, ’who am I?’. In Plotinus it is about our position in the universe, Augustine adds the queston about myself. Of creating a notion of a self, as a unique actor in the whole interrelation, and in the relation to God. In the Confessions he presents his own journey, from his own point of view.
What you find in Augustine is now the position of the individual. This will take the lead in christian philosophy generally.
In Plotinus it was still a plural idea, always referring to humanity as a whole.
What you find in the generations after Plotinus, in the early 6th century, is a kind of pathology, a kind of sickness. The point is if we really have this emanation of reality out of the first principle, then how can we talk about the continuous movement of this emanation without interrupting this continuity? The later neoplatonists will try to find as many intermediate layers as possible. What Plotinus did with 3 hypostases is far too rough. It should be a complete continuity. They try to restore the continuity of things, whereas our human mind never thinks continuity. What we do is always to stop the movement and take a kind of snapshot, and compare the snapshot of today with that of yesterday. And say that the difference between the two is movement. The mind applies categories to the information that comes from outside, and what we do is analyse them into specific categorical structures (at least in Kant). What you do is cut reality into fries (bits), and we only have begriffen, which are subdivided parts of reality that coheres with what we do at one stage. Our mind is analytic, something that tears apart. And that’s what you do in science, you take things apart. You cut the whole that coheres with continuity and do one piece at a time. Hegel will in this ask where is the whole? And this is a similar move that neoplatonism did. Hegel is one of the few who appreciates what the ancient philosophers did.
Now a days the neoplatonists are not seen as epigones, but genuine philosophers. And their contribution is to expand the discursive mind, ie. how the things cohere in the whole in which they appear as coherent. The potato is the whole of the fry from which you have made sense in the pieces.
Why were they seen as epigones? Because what you find in these authors are authors who comment on Aristotle and Plato. But they are platonic commentaries on Aristotle. Syrianus has a commentary on the metaphysics of Aristotle, in which he says Aristotle is completely wrong; he didn’t understand what Plato actually meant. Often you’ll find direct adress to Aristotle in a funny way.
But then when aristotelianism came to the fore as the model of scientific research, they applied many platonic schemes to make sense of aristotle. Otherwise it would have been impossible to apply the aristotelian notion of God to the abrahamic God. Most neoplatonists would try to harmonise plato and aristotle, even when they contradict. Usually arguing that Aristotle is the one that points to the lower part of reality by discussing empirical things, and Plato discussing the heavens. Like the painting by Rafael in the sistine chapel.
This tradition also becomes religious. Plotinus himself does not talk too much of the Greek gods. But he is doing a kind of metaphysics still. It still becomes an anchor point in the religious tradition. They refer often to strange religious texts like the Chaldean Oracles and the Orphic hymns. The two Julians wrote these, father and son Julian. They interpret the speech of the gods. The Orphic hymns had a boom of interest in the second century. People became more spiritual at this point. There is again a mixture of pythagoreanism, though this is kind of read into Plato. These are however religious texts which lead the neoplatonists to religious practice; called Theurgy. Serving the gods. However they do not have a word for religion at this time. In their case now, they mean liturgy. They try to reach the divine by offering and sacrifice and study. By understanding the world and making sense of the world and making serivce to them in that way. The philosophical school is imbued with religion.
But you see with the ages that every god is invested with more and more speculation, even if the gods themselves are not related to the metaphysics as such. No god is ever identified with the first principle, and you don’t pray to the first principle. It is a religion of the gods who extoll the first principle. You should think of the greek gods as flexible and with a lot of different attributes.
The gods are souls who have eternal access to the intelligible realm, but there are a lot of layers in the universe.
Porphyry wanted to be seen as Plotinus’ successor. But the most influential neoplatonist was actually Iamblichus, not just as an adversary, but he disagreed with Porphyry’s interpretation of Plotinus. Iamblichus innovated the most by saying that if you say that the one is in itself ineffable, then you have to make a notional distinction, but a notional distinction is also always a metaphysical distinction. If you attach a lable like ineffable, then you have to accept that you are talking about a lower stage of the One. This is where we begin to see the lower emanations. We must make a distinction between the very first principle, and the ineffable principle. The One is the first presentation of the first principle, but not actually the One in itself.
The whole of the succession of the stages of reality in its ontological structure is a succession, it doesn’t make jumps. But in our thought we have to articulate this continuity by isolating one moment from another. Whatever we do in our minds it is always to cut up the continuity that is. At every stage you can extend the snapshot to require more and more intermediaries. The will always be new images that can be taken and compared, and even then you would have an incomplete continuity. This is how the discursive mind operates.
So what we need to do is to find a way to restore the continuity, without being able to restore the linear structure. The neoplatonists introduce a spiraling movement that goes in the same direction as the line of continuity. So it is straight in restoring the continuity, but requires intermediary stages that are the transitory stage to the next phase. You need to dynamise your concepts. You need to make the concepts develop out of themselves. The structure the neoplatonists use is a tripartite structure:
prodos (procession), epistrophè (return), and monè (remaining).
You have the one, which we add being to in intelligibility, but then it is actually still not a being, and so remains itself. Hegel’s logic has different moments, but he is applying the same structure of analysis.
Proclus says that the phase which we are now analysing, in which we reach identity over against difference, or what they would call from being to life, you also already involve that which life will become by associating the next phase. You have to realise the dynamics of the system even when you isolate a specific moment. By becoming a metaphysics of the system they also explain how we move from each realm. This must be explained.
This is the sickness of philosophers: they argue that they explain everything top down, but phenomenologically they actually begin from the multiplicity in front of them. It would be very easy for them to say that they can explain away the sensible world, like Parmenides does. But you have to explain the existence of things as we understand them, given that the general principle is One. We have to cope with reality, we have to save the phenomena. And you have to bring your understanding of this world to the highest reality. So the neoplatonists have to use the sensible world, even if they think it is less valuable than the one.
Any multiple thing you find constitutes a unity. Everything you can point at is a unity. And so thereby you see the priority of the unity of the plurality.
At every stage, the first thing to be affirmed is not the being of a thing, but the presupposed oneness of it, the henad. A new instance of existence of oneness. But as it interacts and is an entire thing, it is a one that is, it is a one that has such and such shape, etc. And it continues. We descend all the wya to the division of time relating to the object spoken of.
”The order of the affirmations are dicated by the order of negations.”
It is the negations that produce affirmations – Proclus.