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A Word About Neoplatonism

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In my teen years, I went through a "Neo-Platonist" phase. I actually read the Enneads,  the work of the most prominent Neo-Platonist, Plotinus.  I was amused that the name seemed so fitting: did Plotinus just accidentally have a name that sounds like "Platonist"?  Still not sure of that,

Anyway, I burned through a good deal of notepaper writing obviously unprintable treatises of my own about how the Enneads rightly read can give us the answers to the problems of the 1970s, or something. I was doing this even after my first contact with the much saner writings of William James, though in time the latter rescued me from the former.

Anyway, since this is my own bloomin' blog, I'll indulge myself and say a few words on Neo-Platonism.

Paleo-Platonism

Before every neo there is a paleo. what about paleo-Platonism and what in it led to the neo?

Plato's dialogs were exploratory, digressive, dramatic, and not especially systematic or even consistent. That was and is their charm. The MENO for example ends with Plato's mouthpiece "Socrates" suggesting that we don't know what "virtue" means but we can be pretty sure it can't be taught. The PROTAGORAS on the other hand says, in essence, that it is pretty clear what virtue is, it is the branch of knowledge that allows one to make one's self happy. Further, since it is a branch of knowledge, it can be taught.

Which one of these represents THE Platonic view? Perhaps neither. Perhaps Plato changed his mind. Your guess is really as good as mine.

Making it a System

Long after Plato's day though, especially in the era of Plotinus (the third century anno domino) many philosophers with Platonic sympathies were unhappy about the open-ended nature of their master's works, and wanted to make something more consistent out of it. this was the itch that the Enneads scratched. The itch is scratched for me personally was another matter, or maybe sort of the same matter.

Anyway, out of such scratching came Neo-Platonism. Part of it involved the notion of the great chain of being. God, or The One, was at the summit of Being -- the top link in a chain. The Neo-Platonists largely took their idea of The One from Plato's idea of the Form of the Good, or the Sun in his allegory of the cave in THE REPUBLIC.

Christians soon thereafter incorporated the chain-of-being aspect of NP into their own developing understanding of God and the world. The different gradations of Being as it descended toward man and the natural world were translated into a list of the different levels of angelic intelligences.

That will suffice for today's cogitations.
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