Skip to main content

A Word About Neoplatonism

Product Details

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more