25) Plotinus & Neo-Platonism

so our last session of the semester where we're going to be addressing some new content here we've got Platina s-- and we're reading selections from his Aeneid 'he's really only from two of the Aeneid zinni it means nine there are like nine books in the indians and we'll talk just about in just a second about about like how it was that those nine books are put together platonist didn't put him in that order his student porphyry did politeness wrote fifty-four tractates fifty two treatises nine books this is really did I say 15 - I think it's fifty four actually fifty four treatises or tractates and that's how Platina arranged these and then porphyry afterwards said like these can be grouped somatically and we have selections from and he had one the stuff on beauty there a lot of the stuff most of our reading especially most of the really difficult reading came from any of five where he talks it's mostly about epistemology he's talking about the he's talking he's talking about the one this is like if you had to sum up Platina s-- in one word two words let's do two words it's kind of like luxurious right this is all about the one we could nice man maybe we could stop here right I'm talking about the one it's ineffable it's ineffable you can't say anything about it good night folks yeah even though one is like we're we're like playing with fire there we'll get a little more into this first let's kind of situate platanus we can see at 2:04 C to 270 C II he starts writing the Indians and it's hard to say like exactly when he starts writing it it's definitely after let's see it's definitely after about 245 245 is when platanus moves to Rome he was born in Egypt I think this might were like we've talked about some other philosophers who weren't we were kind of like born in Asia Minor other folks who had been to Egypt I think there is at least one figure that we've mentioned so far I wish I can remember who it was that like maybe they were born in Egypt we're not really sure but papyrus was definitely born in Egypt where he got interested in philosophy and he studied under ammonius Zachos who like probably wouldn't be noteworthy except that his student was plutinos he eventually became a little bit bored with him like with the philosophical scene in Egypt in lakopolous the the city where he was became even like maybe even a little bit bored with the moaning Sakas and he wanted to travel he wanted to do the whole thing that we were talking about before with the sceptics where like like if you travel you will see people who think differently than you do and there's a lot to learn from that so Platonists definitely wanted to travel he signed up for an expedition a that was kind of being put together by the Roman Emperor Emperor Gordian and that expedition was supposed to go to Persia maybe even as far as India Platanos would have fit in like really if it's amazing that he didn't go to Persia India because the influence of like Indian thought especially the notion of kind of like yogic practices would have resonated in a really really big way with penises lighter later thought that expedition to the east gets cancelled because Gordian dies in fact I believe he's assassinated and so that the expedition gets scrapped it was supposed to be in about 243 this expedition to Persia which doesn't happen and then 2:45 he goes to Rome where he sets himself up as like he studied on a philosophy back in in like hopless that he was he was pretty good he was the foremost expert on the philosophy of ammonia stakus so he set up being a philosophy teacher and he pretty much mostly just kind of started out at least teaching people about like this is the philosophy of ammonia sacks he did this thing where he's like I will represent the philosophy of like my teacher he was an acolyte but then he starts kind of branching off on his own thought she starts talking with more people in Rome right starts getting exposed to like Rome's a cosmopolitan place starts getting exposed to all kinds of new ideas he discovers Plato and like that's like the end of it for palatinus once he discovers Plato he's like I'm totally in love with this and he starts developing what I think a lot of us look back on now as like Platina tsa's own thought or a very sort of perhaps a liberal sort of interpretation of Plato he doesn't he doesn't play it note by note he says he's an interpreter of Plato but like he's not just going to repeat what Plato says he's going to put a little bit of a spin on what Plato is talking about so somewhere around here when he goes to Rome he makes this transition to kind of elaborating on and interpreting Plato and porphyry hooks up with him somewhere around 263 C and porphyry reports porphyry is not only not only Platina tsa's student not only the person who kind of edits his 54 tractates into the indians into the nine books of the Aeneid kind of organizes them in this fashion but also somewhat Platina says biographer too so we got kind of like a student editor biographer rule and porphyry says an awful lot more than half of like the 54 tractates were already written by Platonist by the time porphyry had met him and he spent the rest of his life writing all the rest of them so this is like this is these nine books that represent the needs are a life's work for palatinus and so perhaps we might not even be surprised if we were going to read them in their entirety that there are places where like he doesn't necessarily agree with himself are you saying things differently than he did before and so perhaps we can read this as Platonists is thought kind of maturing and working through things the same way that we look at kind of early middle and late Plato but on the other hand perhaps we can look at this as like platonist because even in short passages even within a single tractate he'll talk about things in multiple ways sometimes in ways that seem like maybe they're they're not mutually coherent with one another and it seems like what he's trying to do is give you because he's talking about something ineffable he's going to say like there we can kind of talk about it like this or we can kind of talk about it like this or we can kind of talk about it like this or like this and every single one of them is not really quite right it's for lack of a better way of talking about it that like we have to talk about it in this way that's just an approximation but they're all kind of coming at the same thing from different angles that same thing I suppose being the one if there is like such a thing as the one then everything is going to be some different profile of the one it's almost logically necessary right there is a one everything we say is kind of about it but not really quite the whole thing in its entirety so now not really what it is but a weird sort of an image something that will get into this kind of almost mystical language not almost like it's totally a mystical language of everything else emanating from the one being caused by the one being explained by the one plet itís usually regard it as a neoplatonist started because he gets really interested in Plato he wouldn't have thought of himself as a neoplatonist this is a kind of like a modern historical invention that we want to break things up into eras but there was totally like a big break between what Platonists is doing and what plato was doing in fact we have the Academy going through several different iterations by the time by the template Imus is alive and writing there is no Academy in fact like there's the Academy has been destroyed the Academy was destroyed notes notes notes the Academy was destroyed somewhere around 86 BCE destroyed by the Roman Emperor sulla and by the time it had been destroyed it kind of morphed into a skeptical school kind of like a Greek skeptical school the skeptics that we read the skeptic that we read Sextus empirica as a Roman skeptic he came like well after but Pierrot and all of like the early Peron ian's in Athens and around Greece that was kind of like the the element of Plato's philosophy that survived by the time the academy was shut down destroyed in fact by sulla in 86 BCE later on in 410 C II so again we're talking about like well after Platonists is dead in four texts of the Common Era 10 410 AD the Academy is like rebuilt somebody's like we're gonna have a new Academy is like better from before then before I suppose and I guess the sense that it's not destroyed so a new Academy comes out and by the tendancy new Academy has come it's doing this whole kind of neo put me off lateness variations on platanus sort of a thing this way of kind of interpreting Plato as inflected by mysticism selected by theology in fact so from skepticism to theology it's like very different kind of schools of platonic thought in fact it's all contained within there supposedly already there's like everything is contained within the one and emanates from the one also to kind of situate what's going on here while Platina is more of a like a philosopher than a religious person one of the things that perhaps we've noticed that's happened as we made this shift from the early Greeks the kind of the Classical period to the Hellenistic period is we like crossed over that boundary between but like before the Common Era or BC to the Common Era or AD so like Christianity has happened in the mean time as well and some folks were mentioning that you can see some sort of like Christian influences little tightness perhaps it's the other way around you can see some neoplatonist influences on early Christianity Christianity is still very very new and like two oh four through to 70 AD so it hasn't really like come together you don't you don't have an awful lot of like the main texts even yet but it's certainly in the air and it's really shortly after plutinos it's only like early 300s maybe three fifteen eighty three eighteen of the three fifteen of the Common Era certainly like early 300 I think it was 3:15 when Constantine has the vision of like his army marching under the cross and converts to Christianity Constantine the emperor of Rome converts to Christianity basically converts all of the Roman Empire to Christianity then the Roman Empire splits into like an Eastern and Western Roman Empire then we get into medieval history and it's like a whole different class but it's only a couple of decades after Platonist dies that christianity becomes like the politically dominant religion in the Roman Empire it's going to be another couple hundred years before Mohammed and before Islam happens but the main trajectory of Platina so maybe one of the reasons here I'll get into this thing that I was saying before I'll talk about like why include plutinos here because he's a marginal figure not marginal in the sense of like not important marginal in a sense he's like on this boundary between the ancient era and the medieval era one of the if you can characterize what's going on in medieval philosophy in one main way and that's always a dangerous thing to do with an historical period because there's a wide variety of thought going on but the vast majority of it turns towards religion turns towards theology most of it's being done in Persia and northern Africa and on de Lucia and southern Spain most of its being done through in Islamic lands at least like a political political lens of like Islamism but there are plenty of Christians who are like part of these philosophical conversations about theology specifically monotheistic theology plenty of plenty of Jewish thinkers as well who are like part of this conversation plenty of Islamic thinkers as well and they all kind of like find common ground they all like seek each other out figure out that like ah you're a philosopher do you want to think about like the metaphysics of thinking about God this is kind of one way in which we can see that like metaphysics was deployed in one very particular way by the ancients in the pre-socratics there was this kind of tension between are we doing like abstract stuff or are we doing kind of like materialistic stuff are we kind of going to inflict this towards Natural Science are we going to inflict this maybe more towards in a like a quasi theological direction and that that tension seems to maintain itself maybe perhaps best represented in the tension between Plato and Aristotle but by the time like we've gotten to like where we are now in the class like excluding platanus you might have noticed that like most of our conversation has drifted back into this materialistic direction with the Epicureans it's about pleasure right pleasure is a bodily thing especially well the epicurean seem to think that like pleasure is a bodily thing it's at least in part a bodily thing right healthy body peaceful mind the Stoics when they talk about unity there's this sense in which like maybe we can think of like the Stoics as getting close to the sort of thing that the thymus wants to talk about and stoicism is definitely dominant in the Roman fire when the tightness comes on the scene but he's looking at the Stoics and he's saying like mom and you guys are close but you've got some like some very important aspects of this philosophy completely wrong mostly because the Stoics are seem to be like really really obsessed with matter and material they give a mechanistic deterministic materialistic picture of the world and you get it like pretty clearly from folks like Markus really as and Epictetus that like we're not somehow like magically special like understanding that like you're just part of the universe that's just kind of like floating along that like you have no control over so much of what's going we have control over your own mind but that's about it we even get like theories of soul from the Stoics where where your soul is amazed material stuff right this gets like mixed up with your body and you have like soul type atoms the big part of the sort of this attitude of resignation to a faith that you can't control in stoicism that comes from kind of like accepting that at the end of the day this is a material world that follows natural laws and most of like what we're doing can be like described scientifically the natural world is following these natural laws it's a material world following these natural laws then we're talking about like all of the things that can't be otherwise and that you're just kind of like floating along perhaps enjoying the ride perhaps not enjoying the ride that's the part that's up to you like how are you going to like turn your attitudes towards the things that you desire the things that you fear the things that you love the whole time it says like no no no no no I don't want a materialistic version of this I want to talk about like the oneness of the cosmos and the idea that like you're not separate from it but I want to talk about it in a way that's different than saying that the cosmos have like this oneness that comes from its matter or its materiality it's a matter of fact let's go ahead and put that down at the very bottom of the board down here we have and I'll even use a different color for I will use red for it in fact we have down here we have matter any it's matter with evil in fact we'll kind of parse that a little a little more carefully but he associates matter with evil almost like uh like the storks we're close but they got it completely wrong so completely wrong in fact that they're kind of like following a false RK you can think of that yeah for as far as flu tightness is concerned this focus on matter takes us to a false RK so the way that the stokes are the way that any sort of materialist philosophical cosmology would work is going to do this maybe like one of the ways they'll kind of jot this on the board now so I don't forget but we can think about Anaximander z-- a pay run as maybe they're kind of like this prime matter this matter that's like a unity in its undefined Mnet's limitlessness all right so we got matter way down here it's in a different color because it's not evil it's not even clear if this is like part of the things that we want to talk about when we talk about the one or at least not it's not one of these things that are referred to as the three hypotheses for Platonist these three fundamental metaphysical principles they're going to explain to us like what's going on here with the one I didn't want to draw it like that I want to draw it just slightly different I want to draw it like that the one is the first of these maybe it's the last of these it's the ultimate one what's the second of the three hypostasis soul is the third second well let's go ahead Oh give me a chance to sip some coffee yeah Jordan intellect yeah mmm intellect yeah good so we have the one we have intellect and we have soul and these are the three main principles and notice that this the articulating the relationship between these three things is part of the trick here because they can't really be three separate things right why can't they be three separate things because one of one of the three things is the one right it's kind of like ultimate unification of all things right so we might in fact think about this and this is where perhaps it becomes unsurprising that Plotinus even if he didn't kind of show his cards as far as his commitments to Plato go we can think of Platina says maybe doing a variation on something that we've already seen before this might help us out in thinking about like well what are we going to do with this relationship between like the one and intellect and and soul we saw this a little bit in the divided line with Plato that there was this sense in which like you have these ways of knowing things it's there's an order of being that we talked about associated with the with the divided line and there's an order of knowing and they link up the way things are known and the way that they be are like the one on the same Parmenides said is one of the first things that we read Parmenides said this it's kind of it's a bedrock of rationalism that it's the same for thinking as it is for being maybe it'll time this is going to take some issue with that but there's this description of like how it is that we know these things and there's this description of like what kinds of things that are known and we have the sensible x' down here and we have the intelligible x' up here and finer distinctions between like the intelligible x' in the sensible x' we have the things like shadows and actions and images of things of like concrete material like particular objects we have images of those things or shadows of those things or like third hand account of those things somebody else tell me about the big elephant that they saw I get an idea of the elephant but it's not the same as like a direct encounter with the elephant right so we have kind of like a secondhand version of knowledge of sensible when we have first-hand knowledge of sensible and clearly the first hand knowledge of sensible x' or we might say the actual elephant is more real than the picture of the elephant or it's more the real elephant interestingly enough Plato kind of holds back and says like I'm not going to say that like the picture of the elephant is has no reality at all it's clearly it's clearly a real picture of an elephant and it gets at the elephant in some way it allows us to know the elephant somehow it's just weaker it's somehow like a lesser form of being and that's the same sort of thing that like plutinos is talking about here and in Peck he employs a very similar strategy this idea that like the lower levels are images of the higher levels right in fact it's literal down here in the sense of alls we have like images of concrete particular things and up here we have like the things the concrete particular things that are available to our senses right to our sensory experience that are empirically known through the body this association with matter evil evil matter that distracts you can't be it can't be like completely different than the one right because then they're the one wouldn't be the one so we got to figure out like how is matter going to come from the one how is evil going to come from because we go nut we get lots of other words for the one we get the good and occasionally he just drops the Oh add like one of the O's out of the good and it just comes right out and says like this is God monotheistic conception of God that also somehow like maybe is like part like it kind of splits into three things but not really splitting into three things because it's the one is it familiar yet have you encountered this sort of like metaphysics the metaphysics that gets developed as a theology and has an enormous influence on Christian thought in the way that Christian body vaults over the medieval period so if we don't recognize it as Plato perhaps we recognize it as Christianity and if we can recognize it as both than perhaps we recognize Platonists as a bridge between Plato and Christianity all right the one the good God intellect some other things that are associated here with intellect being since being happens at the level of the intellect knowing happens at the level of the intellect has interesting implications because if being a knowing or down here with the intellect that means the one is like beyond being beyond like beyond knowing sure perhaps beyond being what the heck is beyond being the one the one is beyond being so we can think of maybe what's going on here with Plato's divided line as we get this whole idea of like the sensible x' down here and the intelligible is up here but then we we gestured very weakly when we were looking at Plato's divided line when we're looking at the allegory of the cave towards this notion that like the form of the good is this thing that kind of like stands above and kind of like outside of but also kind of suffuses through like all of this stuff there's the forms which are known at this level there's kind of like abstractions from sense experience and we might think about this as kind of like the natural laws of empirical science and then we have the forms and it seems almost as if like this is the end for Plato at least this is where he stops this is where he says like things get tricky at this level of the forums I'm not really sure what to say about this he writes Parmenides Parmenides like kicks Socrates his ass up and down the Agora and we have like all these questions now about a theory of forms but what happened to this like this jump outside of all of this what happened to this jump outside of the line that's supposed to be the Sun or the good we can think of Platina says picking up this question as saying like this is one thing that Plato failed to really elaborate on which is this question of like oh yeah what's going on with this relationship between the stuff in the divided line and the form of the good which stands like above and outside of the divided line yeah yeah perhaps or I might will I think what a lot of this comes down to is the structure of and maybe knowing wasn't even the greatest choice there thinking I think might be closer to what I wanted to get at but I think knowing is going to be a part of this as well there's something about the structure of thought and thinking that makes it impossible to be the sort of thing that the one does or at least not in the way that we think of thinking usually because all of this is possible while well Platonists is saying that the one is beyond being it's beyond oh maybe not I'm not sure about now that you bring my attention to it I'm not sure if I want to say knowing here thinking for sure it can't be thought it's beyond being but you can have an encounter with it Platina says it's a matter of fact I don't know if this was in like the little blurb before the text platonist claimed to have like had an encounter with the one four times he had four times in his life he's like four times throughout my life like I'm like the guy on nobody else is really talking about this except a bunch of like people in India that I don't know four times in my life how many how many times did the Buddha achieve enlightenment it was definitely at least the once right I don't know that much about Buddhism anybody here know more about Buddhism did he drift in and out he couldn't have been enlightened like for the rest of his life there's definitely a parallel trajectory right I'm like yogic practice in the wave it the way that Platonist talks about this he says like well you can't really talk about it you can't really think it it's beyond being the way that you encounter it is through kind of some sort of like habit of mind some sort of practice it's we can think of it as definitely a mystical tradition in the sense that like the experience that we're talking about is an experience that can't be talked about that if you had it you would know what we were talking about we kind of like be weakly gesturing towards something with words that really won't quite do if you'd had that experience you would know and this I think is like a big point of contention between like folks who are like who have religious faith because of some experience that they've had and those who haven't had the experience it's a little bit of a of an impasse a little bit of a standoff between folks like one person would say like I believe in God and say like why because I felt the unmistakable presence of the divine once I was like there it was there it was definitely God and you're like well tell me about it you're like I can't like words won't do it's something that needs to be experienced you know well can you show me how to do it like kind of like I can show you how to pray I can show you how to like stretch and like do these poses I can teach you how to meditate there are all sorts of things that like we can tell you how to do them and maybe we can even give you analogies for how to have this experience and once you've had it then you can come back and tell me like did you have it too but it can't be the sort of thing that's talked about this is maybe something that takes it outside of philosophy if it can't be yeah if it wasn't if it can't be falsified then perhaps it's not science it can't be talked about coherently perhaps it's outside of like the principles of logic and reason and then perhaps it's outside of the realm of philosophy then again who is going to handle this maybe there needs to be a philosophical discussion of mystical experience in the mystical experience itself will belong to another another sort of discipline perhaps theology and this is like this is the whole next hundred or so years of philosophy is people who are trying to wrestle with this all right so we have the intellect we have the soul which the intellect thinks what then does the soul do it does but Aristotle showed us how like it doesn't just act in certain ways it's trainable in certain ways as well there's a the rational part of the soul maybe this is what we'll associate with the intellect was the what was the other part of the soul the irrational part of the soul right these aspects that like are not even plausibly separable from the body and platino zeroes in on this notion of desire this is this is what's going on at the level of soul we have desire so this at least covers all the living things soul is separate from matter but yeah like at the level of soul what we're doing is we're talking about like soul as it's kind of like tangled up and matter matter we can think of as kind of representing and this is matter is going to be almost ineffable or this kind of like bottom level this we can think of it at the if this is the one up here if this is this kind of like ultimate unity of all being that's beyond being itself it has to be beyond being then matter is maybe this kind of like infinite plurality sometimes he talks about matter as separation and then like separation of things from each other separation of yourself from the one privation that's the word I was looking for privation so kind of an absolute privation at the level of matter it's always lacking something we're going to get there's a sense that this is we get an explanation of like what's going on with soul and desire because to desire something is to lack it right nobody desires what they have you always desire something that you don't have but you want so desire articulates a kind of a lack and we always desire things that are external to us at least well at the level of kind of like bodily desire right the irrational soul it wants food it wants six it wants a warm place to sleep like it wants all of these things that are outside of it and that it doesn't have so there's kind of a necessary separation in the arc in the activities and the operations of soul at this level where it's desiring things the structure of desire is one where you're always separate from the object of your desire yeah yeah so yeah yeah good good so this is I'm kind of almost got the board set like how much time do we have here now yeah about thirty minutes all right my plan for this was to try to get this board set like a little bit of a sketch of the one a little bit of sketcher the intellect a little bit of sketch of the soul and then as many times as we have time for just go round and round and round on this try to like understand like what's going on in the relationships between the one and the intellect between the intellect and soul between the soul and matter from matter to the soul the soul to intellect it's a it's a there are kind of like two aspects to the way that gluttonous talks about this in Annie at five we mostly get this aspect of talking about like how it is that you ascend to like knowing the one there's this kind of this question of like how is it that you're going to come to notice he talks about it frequently as a going home turning the attention of the intellect such that we have to be at the level of the intellect before you can even ponder the one something that kind of gets us from the intellect to the one something that also gets us from soul to the intellect which is this kind of this thing that he describes as a going home as a coming to know as an ascending this ladder of being going up the divided line as Plato would have described it leaving the cave also as Plato would have described it at the same time we have this kind of like notion of causation or this this metaphysical notion of it's perhaps it's the opposite of this mysterious participation that Plato was always talking about in the way in which like concrete particular things participate in forms and we found out in Parmenides that that's a weird idea and like even even starting to poke it a little bit makes weird things happen and it begins to fall apart we get this kind of opposite version of it about how being flows from the one down this ladder to the lesser the lesser registers of being so there's a kind of sometimes we'll talk about the language of emanation whatever the heck that means that things emanate from one intellect emanates from the one sometimes he uses this language of talking about virtuality that maybe helps clear some stuff up we'll think of like the one as virtually many it could be divided up into smaller things the intellect is the sort of thing that virtually does include desires although like when it's kind of operating in a pure way its whoo it hasn't been fragmented and desired just yet so we can talk about it in terms of emanation the sense of kind of like being so full of being up here at the one that it overflows and then being happens and then at this level this overflows and then the next thing happens so we can talk about an examination we talk about as virtuality sometimes patinas does he frequently uses the language of causation which don't forget especially for like anybody in the Greek or Roman world this idea of causation has also tangled up a little bit with explanation so we can think of the one as like causing the the kind of levels of being that are below it and the intellect causing the levels of being that are below it or we can think about that in terms of offering an explanation where the one is the ultimate explanation if we just keep asking why questions if we keep interrogating after things if we want an explanation for something notice that like you can't well maybe you can can you explain something in terms of its smaller parts if I'm like hey what's up with a car how does a car work and then I offer you smaller parts of the car and like that's how the car works it's like this arrangement of it's smaller parts don't I now have this new question of like yeah okay so how do the parts work tell me about the parts now and if those parts have parts now I need an explanation of how those parts work and the explanation seems like it will go on and on and on and on until perhaps it bottoms out down here and we get kind of like an indefinite up hey Ron right kind of like the materiality of matter itself completely unformed matter if that's a possible thing or we could go the other way and then end up with the one where we have a cause of everything below it that we can't ask new questions about perhaps we think about it as first cause an uncaused cause maybe a self caused thing we ended up exercising this or I ended up back sizing this from our reading list this semester but like you can find this in book twelve of Aristotle's metaphysics he talks about he doesn't really call it the one but he talks about like there has to be a first cause otherwise we have this infinite regress of causes and Aristotle himself is definitely using the word cause in a way that's synonymous with explanation this is this becomes clear in physics and metaphysics when you talk about the four causes these four registers of explaining something in a material way in a formal way in an efficient way in this kind of light sense of the final clause in a thule illogical way but there's got to be a first cause otherwise our explanation of the cosmos just keeps going on and on and on and on it's got to end someplace there's got to be some first cause and that if it's the first cause it has to be uncaused because if it's caused cause then it's not the first cause there was another one before it and I don't know about like have you have you ever been here before have you ever been in this mental space before perhaps aided by some sort of like controlled substance perhaps just one day when you were bored and looking out the window you were just kind of like yeah like every cause needs but like but there's got to be a like a first thing if there wasn't a first thing and you can't even ask these questions about like what caused what cause at the beginning of the universe well if something caused the beginning of the universe and that's not the beginning of the universe is it the cause would have been the beginning and if that thing has a cause then that's the beginning and I know this goes on and on and on forever or you find a way to cut it off and this notion of an infinite regress who apparently was so unpalatable to like even Aristotle certainly Plato definitely platini's that they're like no we got it we've got to cut it off here with this idea that there's a first cause there's an uncaused cause if we want to say that it's caused at all its causes itself and this is a radically different notion of cause than we're accustomed to right this kind of like starts to get into this this a depiction of like why it is that this is going to be such a strange idea why it is that this is going to be the sort of thing that like it's really difficult to talk about impossible to talk about in fact really difficult to even experience or rep your mind around much to the consternation of anybody charged with explaining what the hell platonist is talking about alright so we can think about this in terms of like there's definitely a like a chain of being right there kind of like higher levels of being lower levels of being this highest level of being is beyond being in fact and every lower level emanates from it we can also think about it in terms of this kind of epistemological project of like how are we going to know the higher levels and a pair leaplet honest is saying similar to the way the plato did that each step is a little bit it's an image of the next step if you want to understand what's going on here I can't talk about that but I can talk about this I can talk about this move and maybe that will give you some sense of like an analogy for what the next move is going to be like I can't really fully explain how it is that this sort of like overflowing from beyond being too now there being being can't really talk about how that works because it's ineffable it's beyond it's beyond what thought can handle mostly because thought has a kind of a grammar to it thinking always is a it's a always a thinking through it always is kind of like a linking up subjects with predicates and anytime I'm linking up subjects with predicates what I'm saying is like here are two parts right there's the subject and there's the predicate fire is hot I got fire and I've got hotness I separated them even in order to talk about them coming together and because of that like the way that thought works this necessary separating of like subjects and predicates of thinker and thought we might we might note note this that like any thinking seems to have the separation of like the thinking versus what is thought and that separation immediately excludes it from being the sort of thing that can happen up here with the one because there can't be a separation between the thinker and the thought at the level of the one God can't separate what God thinks and what God thinks about or the thinking from what what is thought about it has to be something different it has to be something more at the level of kind of like this parma nadine one perhaps the fingerprints have like all the folks who have come before are like all over this stuff we've got Parmenides up here at the level of intellect if we're talking about a substance that is intellect not your intellect my intellect but intellect simpliciter just like intellect this is annex a grass as news we mentioned down here we have Anaximander as a payer on all in between here you've got things that are going on with like Plato's divided line and some Aristotelian stuff going on as well the intellect what it does get known what does get thought here are the forms that's what's going on at this level and then still all these questions about yeah what about what about the next level what's going on up there how are we doing so far is this strategy working I've just kind of let's just keep going round and round and round and round until it gets clear maybe this is the time to like stop and say like questions yeah questions you start talking about this yeah yeah so the forms are separate the forms are plural right we should note that the forms are plural and apparently they're available to be thought that's what Plato said at least in fact when you are thinking in the purest sense like when intellect like really thinks about the things that can be known it doesn't turn its attention outward towards the body and like things that it desires the things that are desired or down here at the level of sensation right and Aristotle notes this too he says this is the this is the desiring soul right this is the irrational soul starting to warm to the idea of doing Platonists last well like if for no other reason we get to kind of retrospectively mention almost everybody else in the process of articulating what Platonists claims to be up to but yeah when we say that the intellect contemplates the things that are really the proper objects of the intellect not thought mixed up with kind of like bodily desire and bodily sense impression that brings us down here what the intellect is really capable of in its perfect sort of operation it contemplates the forms but those forms are still plural so it's not really quite the one yet it's something lower yep yeah well they up - no no no no no that is the lowest level of existence these are higher levels of existence Platanos agrees with Plato that there are at least like these two there's like the sensible world and then there's the intelligible world guess which one is more real the intelligible world that's the one that never changes that's the one that's eternal that's the one that you can know the best that's the one that's like more properly apprehended by the intellect y'all contemporary folks are like you just you're just waiting you think this is real you think that the matter stuff is really real and that's why you need Jesus that's why that's why well--perhaps Platanos would say like evil has kind of taken over you now a moral evil yes he definitely thinks there's a moral evil associated with this but we probably should make a distinction between the way that Platonist talks about this kind of evil as almost like a metaphysical principle with no sort of like ethical judgment made about it it's just a principle of separation separation from the one if you want to look at this as something that kind of like has no sort of like normative judgment that's that accompanies that if it's just metaphysics with no ethics at all you could certainly do that I think Platina s-- is particularly interesting in this sense where he's perhaps describing what's going on in the divided line and kind of getting outside of the divided line as well or trying to like fill in this gap between like what happens in that jump to the good but without necessarily taking this position of like one thing being more real than another perhaps this is just nothing more than a metaphysical exposition on like what it is that the relationship between the one and the many is all about we know there's got to be some sort of relationship because intuitively we all know that everything is one but also yet like look here's the thing and here's thing and I'm a thing and you're a thing and so everything is all so many but those things that are many are they come to be in they perish they don't last forever so they seem to like participate in being in a lesser way not no judgment there but something that is perishable seems to participate in being in a lesser way than something that's eternal now if we want to like make some judgments about it as well we can say something like you should be up here you should be contemplating the one you are capable of it it's the highest achievement when intellects like kind of perfect itself in a way that like it just can't do any better it kind of jumps out of itself and goes back to thinking the one so we're talking about like thinking has seems to necessarily have this kind of distinction between the thinking and the thought if there was a form of thinking where that distinction didn't happen then that would be the sort of thing that like stretch to describe whatever this analog for thought is that's operating at the level of the one would be sometimes this is talked about in terms of thought thinking itself instead of directing itself outwards the thought just kind of directs itself inwards this is maybe we can get a sense of like what's meant here by going home right this is like stop attending to everything out here start attending to what's going on in here and when you do that you'll see God not with your eyes of course with the intellect yeah yes all things that are material things except perhaps like the materiality of matter itself down at this like lowest level you have like the appear on yes diamonds are destructible that's how that's how you you cut them you have to use another diamond to cut it but like yeah or you can laser cut it but yeah diamonds are destructible for sure well some ideas might be destructible I suppose I'm not really sure like if you want to call hunger an idea it's kind of sort of like that it's a desire it's something that seems to be going on in my soul maybe it's going on in my mind I'm like cognate cognitively aware of my desire but as soon as I satisfy it seems like the idea maybe goes away we can think of it that way whereas yeah what about your idea of justice you are thinking about ideas in a way that platanus is going to say like yeah that's thinking about ideas down here ideas as like things that different people have right and they're kind of like they're caused by external forces perhaps maybe we could say like you can never kill an idea here's one reason why you could never kill an idea especially if you're a neoplatonist you can never kill an idea because we already have all of the ideas forget like going home here's a here's an convenient and familiar companion concept and an ASIS one design that makes this mean again hmm you know that route Nasus like mnemonic not nemesis man Isis like their word yeah refers to ya memory the and prefix yeah the mmm it's an N and then and AH it's a double negation so what so what's to not have a memory anymore is to forget something and to unforgettable eight missed he buys into the theory of recollection you already have the ideas in your soul this is why you can't kill him you can direct people's attention away from those ideas that they have in their soul we seem to do a pretty good job of it all on our own we focus our attention towards bodily desire we allow our irrational soul to lead our rational soul around by its nose we can think of this movement from the desiring soul to the intellect as perhaps exactly the sort of thing that Aristotle is instructing us to do in his Nicomachean ethics this is like get in control of yourself when you are not in control of yourself you are split your rational soul in your irrational soul are up to two different things your soul itself is like not unified with itself to unify your soul with itself it's to let intellect be in charge to kind of like hone your character traits so that doing the things that you really want to do not just that you want to do but that you want to want to do the things that you have rational wishes about because you want to have virtue virtue will get you in the Aristotelian sense at least version will get you from here to here but contrary to what the Stoics will say for platonist virtue is just not enough virtue gets you to the level of intellect but it doesn't get you that next step to the one something else is required there cuz virtue is concerned with kind of like getting your irrational soul in order it's concerned with getting your body right at least getting your body such that it's not separate from the intellect once you get them on the same page now the intellect has a prayer at just kind of like contemplating the things that are proper to the intellect not worrying about bodily desire if you're starving to death you can't you can't contemplate the forms you've got bigger things to worry about like other kind of like bodily ideas that are intruding on your contemplation of farms if you really want to like think about justice if you really want to think about the beautiful if you really want to think about virtue itself perhaps if you want to think about all the things that are proper forms not hair and mud and maybe not even me and you but these kind of eternal ideas then you've got it you've got to make this junk from soul - intellect from desiring soul at least to contemplating it's like does that part makes sense at least a little bit if you're kind of like here I see what's going on there and yeah I remember that's what Aristotle was talking about yeah maybe you can think about like a platonic version of this which is like how you ascend to the to like contemplating the forms I know they're going to be troubles with this I remember it from Parmenides if you if that makes at least a little bit of sense to you then like stay with that clarify it and recognize the next step is going to be an analogy this is this step is an image of this step yeah k ah because it's well because well he gets into this a little bit and then he had one he seems to say that like as you ascend what's what's your kind of engagement with the beautiful at the level of like the desiring soul things are Pleasant right pleasant to the senses that's that's the beautiful yeah he starts to talk about proportion but as soon as we start talking about proportion now we're talking about like intelligible things right we're talking about form like the formal structure of something so now we're kind of like we're drifting up in here and if we can get away from kind of like the proportion of the materials to talking about its share in an intelligible form of kind of like justice or beauty or something like the beautiful itself not just like a pretty flower but something that is reminding me of the beautiful [Applause] and it kind of like gets me to tap into this idea of like beauty itself now I'm up here so if that's if we end oh so yeah Kate's question was why like why do we want to do that well Platina says like isn't that a more beautiful beauty some of you might be like I don't know about that the time it certainly seems to think that it is a more beautiful beauty we already saw on one hand how the movement from the desiring soul to letting to like letting the intellect at least be in charge if not like get to do its own thing this seems to be the difference between living a life where like your soul is divided against itself where kind of like your your may be no different from a mere animal just a beast to something that's a little bit better that has the capacity to take pleasure in higher pleasures things that we might even not really call pleasures anymore but they're a different kind of pleasure at least it's the sort of pleasure that like you find in instead of saying that that thing is pretty it's have you ever have you ever played a song for somebody features kind of like this song has changed my life and you play for them and they listen to it and they're kind of like yeah okay yeah that sounds pretty good you're just like you didn't even really listen like you can tell they didn't pay attention and and you're just like you know focus on this because like it's good like you're going to see God when you listen to this song and then yeah yeah I heard it it's nice and you just kind of like no it's not nice it like makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up it makes me feel funny inside when I like it's a completely different sort of thing the difference between something that's pretty and something like that is what happens in this step and platino says like that's an improvement right that's a bigger beautiful it's a more beautiful beautiful you keep tracing it you're going to have something even better than that and you could take his word for it like you've never I don't know exactly what your experience has been but you're all perhaps too young perhaps to 'unschool than metaphysics to have ever possibly had an experience with the one this takes a whole lot of work and you're just at the beginning maybe you have had an experience with the one but presumably we would have to ask somebody who has had that experience and say like was it heli how was it hey Siddartha like how was enlightenment he was like oh awesome two thumbs up stars would do it again if you can find anybody who's like achieved enlightenment who is it like achieved they're kind of like this kind of nirvanic bliss of recognizing like the unity of all things and I'm not even separate from these things like I'm part of it too and not even a part because it like has no parts it's just one big thing and like everything is just emanating from it like I see things as they actually are I don't know if I've ever heard anybody like talk about that in a way with like end it was awful I hated it I never want to do it again now one of the interesting things about this is like well how many people have you talked about have you talked to who have done this unlike none really like I've read the writings of people who have claimed that they've done it I've never met anybody who's really achieved it themselves I talked to some Buddhist monks who seem to like they've reached what they claim to be a higher level of consciousness they claim they seem to claim that it was somewhat entertaining there are also accounts of people that have had brain damage where like this the way that they describe the experience like of having had this brain damage or they have a tumor in just the right place where suddenly they kind of like this activity of the mind that unifies thing it just goes into hyperactive overdrive and suddenly they're just kind of walking around like always seeing things as kind of like univille seed they'll see a dead bird on the sidewalk and they'd be like that's beautiful I'll say it so apathetically - that's beautiful and you're just like oh you mean just like you don't seem too excited about and you're like I'm as excited as I could possibly be about like wood floors video that's like down here like the desiring soul makes you kind of like oh my god it's all beautiful but like no I like up here it's just kind of like just kind of like washes over you it's not an animated sort of enjoyment and up here I don't know I never done it but seems Pleasant that step was good why wouldn't the next step be good how long does that answer the question Kate yeah all right fair enough to at least at least have you like intrigues at least me like I it's like somebody's talking about this I'd be curious I'd be curious to hear more and if somebody said like I have a set of exercises that you can do that will let you experience what this is like presumably they wouldn't they would if they're charging for it they're not up here they're down here my sense is the person who goes back down into the cave it's not going to say for three easy payments of $29.99 of those people want to be liberated from the cave right it's painful they kill the people who go down and like try to liberate them from the cave so not only will you have to not charge people for it this is like I'm glad you brought this up Socrates goes on on and on on and on and on I don't charge well it's just it's difficult to maintain and as you are a human being with a body you're going to have to eat you're going to have to sleep but that's that's matter that's matter pulling you away from the one this is why it's even this is why we can begin to talk about this in in terms of something that's more than like a metaphysical principle that separates things and keeps them distinct from one another that gets us down into this kind of like infinite mini and away from the one but it's like you are perhaps you are trying maybe you're not even trying but like perhaps you are trying to kind of ascend to higher levels of consciousness and matter just keeps pulling you back because you've got to sleep and you got to eat and the barbarians are knocking at the gates and they're going to kill us all if we don't defend ourselves like these are these are mortal concerns but perhaps yeah perhaps if you were up here you wouldn't care in which case you wouldn't last long you wouldn't last long as a distinct embodied soul but your soul would be liberated you'd be dead to be pure intellect separated from your body this is what Socrates is talking about means like the Philosopher's can is constantly preparing for death we shouldn't be sad that I'm dying this should be a party finally getting what I wanted the separation of the intellect from the body well the next move from this is the recognition that like it's not a distinct intellect it's not just like one thought it's not just one thinker it's thinking it's intellect in general and that's not even quite at the level of the one because we have to have thought that it's not directed towards other things thinking of thoughts that are separate from the thinker we have to have thought thinking itself and the way that Aristotle talks about this sometimes you can find a man he gets really close to some of this stuff in some other sections that I assigned but we didn't talk about it in class and they are weird in de anima in on the soul book three especially chapters four and five Aristotle drifts into talking about the difference between passive news passive intellect and active intellect and he starts talking about this kind of mind that seems to be unimpeded by any sort of materiality and perhaps inseparable from the rest of the soul sometimes this is referred to as the maker mind and this seems to be getting into this territory of like what's going on between like this level of pure intellect and thought thinking itself whatever it is that the mind of God is up to it's not thinking thoughts this is maybe like one of the one of the ways in which I don't know maybe maybe you won't like that I would say this maybe be like what the hell do you know about God Adam have not much I'll admit it but it seems to me at least that there's no way that God thinks if God thinks that God thinks a succession of thoughts there's no way that God like thinks in time God would have to be outside of time God would have to like always be in the eternal now and there's no way that God desires things there's no way that there's anything that's external to God that God is like I wish things were this way that doesn't make any sense not for the one it would have to be completely self-contained if such a style of thinking is going on it would have to be this like I don't even know how to explain it I've never experienced it myself but it would have to be something like thought goes from thinking about like distinct objects outside of itself to recognizing that like Oh what I really want is within focusing on that which was within until you can get to like that which can be contemplated by intellect alone the forms recognizing that all the forms are just profiles of the same one thing the good and eventually perhaps getting to the point where you recognize that like the contemplation of the good itself is thought thinking itself it's not oriented toward something outside of itself in order to contemplate the good this is what Parmenides says is the greatest problem for the theory forms in order to complement in order to like truly contemplate the forms in order to see them as they are as all just different profiles of like one form of the good you would have to be a God Platina says very well you're one with God at this level like when you've achieved this there is no distinction between you and God which is not like you become a God there is no God amongst many gods there's just the one and then matter pulls you back down you have to start all over again so that you only do it four times in a lifetime perhaps but worth it every time I wouldn't know never done it myself that's the last class of the semester kind of this like weird bizarre trajectory often to like the next historical phase of philosophy which is kind of just like treading water on this idea for almost a thousand years and then after that which we skip over and like don't really have a class on is modernity which starts with Descartes 1640 his meditations and yeah maybe I'll see you there maybe I won't have a good Thanksgiving and if you have any questions about the paper or the upcoming third slash optional exam feel free to email me

Channel: Adam Rosenfeld

Views: 9,325

Rating: 4.8585858 out of 5

Keywords: Plotinus, Enneads, Neo-Platonism, The one, Intellect, Soul, History of Ancient Philosophy

Id: z0It0FawigY

Length: 65min 58sec (3958 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2017