Class Synopisis April 6th

We began talking about Plotinus' critique of discoursive reasoning. Discoursive reasoning poses a significant problem for talking about The One, because we always think in a subject-object distinction. Thinking isomorphically is impossible for us. Even when thinking ourselves, we always refer to ourselves as an object. Plotinus gives us the example of a sphere. We are asked to place ourselves in the sphere. Plotinus argues that we cannot imagine this without becoming the sphere (something that I find particularly hard to imagine). Now this is related to Plotinus' ethics: happiness is freedom from objects of thought.

With all this cynicism (modern use) towards objects of thought, there seems to be a danger of denying the goodness of matter. This sort of principle, as my Aquinas professor will contend, crops up every hundred to two hundred years. In Plotinus' time it was the Gnostics (in other times it is the Manicheans, the Albigensians , or some sects of the Reformation). Plotinus contends that creation is not entirely bad and the world is not providential. Furthermore, salvation is not something waited for, it is something in us.

We moved on to talking about the Intellect. The Intellect is out of time, and likewise experiences no change (for time is a measure of change). We are discrete particulars of this Intellect. A question naturally arises: How do I not have knowledge of discrete particulars? The answer would be that this sort of knowledge is not a virtue. But there is perhaps major critique of this: this is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing everything, discrete or not, is still not knowing everything.

Next we posed the problem: How do we get to the One? There is an overwhelming significance to ritual in this conception. There is also an acceptance of all religions, but puts their gods at the level of the Intellect. This is particularly troubling for the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, which describes their God analogously to the One (although that may be because of their influence from Neo-Platonism, especially the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. Earlier though, we said that Plotinus denied providence, a particularly central concept to many religions.

How to talk about The One

At the end of class, we reached a problem: How do we talk about The One? If the truth is non-representational, then is nearly impossible to form propositions that adequately represent it. So how do we talk about about. By calling it "The One," we are affirming some things. It is a being at the very least, although turns out to be Being, is undivided (thus one), and Plotinus argues, the cause of all other things. Now calling something the cause of other things is different than saying it is good. Calling something good supposes that it is composed of different parts, good being one (color might be another, body and soul would seem to also naturally be on this list. Denying something about it is also different. I deny that The One is composed, so is one. Yet Plotinus talks about The One, and says more than what has just been outlined. But how?

This question, I think can be answered by the Neo-Platonist Pseudo-Dionysius. Although Dionysius was a Christian, he was familiar with both Plotinus and Proclus. He came up with a theory to talk about God by using super immanent predication. First we affirm something of God like wise (or The One). Next we deny that of God (because He is not wise like us). Next we affirm that God is super-wise. Now I know that last one sounds silly, but the point is clear: if we talk about The One, it cannot be in the same way we talk about ourselves, we must talk by analogy. Clearly we must be able to talk about The One if we are to teach to others or even think about it, and the 2nd proposition of Dionysius theory gets around the critique of discoursive reasoning, because we do deny that The One is composed, but we also affirm something about it.

The One is Disney World

Title aside, I just want to type out some of the Plotinus' ideas in my own words, and with the use of discursive reasoning seek the multiplicity in unity.

The one thing that I really like about Plotinus is his use of relata and relations. He talks about how we can come to understand universals and particulars through a homogeneous unity. The individual is presented against this unity as an alterity, but an alterity that is only distinguishable through the possession of something denied to universal (I want to call this concept/Plotinus wants to call this Genera). What is this something that makes the particular stand out from the whole? I would guess it is the relationship between the subject and the object, the way in which the relata and relations make particulars and universals distinguishable only through the other. I can't have a concept of dog if I have only experienced one dog, but at the same time I can't understand dog without that first particular dog experience that is eventually supplemented by more dog experiences leading to a dog concept. There is a potential problem in this understanding of relata and relation based on a holistic view.

Things can only become individuals by means of how they relate to other things, but how could there be any objective relation at all? Maybe Plotinus would posit the One as the solution, but then that would make this issue an ontological one. Perhaps it is an epistemological issue. We can only grasp what things are through relations and through our subjective experience. This epistemological issue seems to have a strong footing in phenomenology, especially that of Merleau Ponty, in the sense that our knowledge or conception of the truth is limited to our ability to grasp the truth at a given time. This ability to grasp the truth is perhaps synonymous to our ability to grasp the One, but taking into account individual differences among people, different capacities would deny any Absolute, One, or graspable Totality. Where phenomenology went "wrong", in breaking things down to their essential structures and examining things in the "lived world", the Phenomenologist doesn't take into account Plotinus' ideal world and the sensible world as a unity and they are thus estranged. If the ideals are just useless simulacra symbolizing objects in the world, then the phenomenologist did not go wrong at all, they just took the good part (sensible world) and did away with the ideals. Perhaps Plotinus' whole system is, to quote Paul Elmer More, "a meaningless answer to an impossible question raised by a gratuitous hypothesis." But at the same time, a big part of me loves everything he says and can truly see how things become individuated through relations. The problem might be an ontological one instead of epistemological, or both problems are irrelevant and there is no raison d'etre (I've never studied French but it makes it sound more philosophical) of objective relation.

I was thinking that the diagram of the one, intellect, soul could be easily appropriated to the centralized power of Disney World and the layout of the maps, if we conceive of both as a sort of brain.


Somewhat random aside--Adventureland is Frontierland are located on the left side (masculinity) and Fantasyland and Tomorrowland are located on the right (femininity). What this has to do with Plotinus, I haven't figured it out, but you can force anything if you use enough discursive reasoning.

Plotinus Review for Wednesday

For Plotinus, it seems to me that unity is being, and that could tells us something important about The One. It is by the virtue of unity that beings are beings; he uses a slew of arguments about its role. As soon as we say that something is this or that, then we attribute unity to it.

Ex. A

X is y.

In example a, we’ve attributed unity. Don’t bother with x is; if we can predicate something, then we might know Being, and in turn The One. But as Plotinus wrote, “We can see the totality of things when we look inside.”

For Plotinus, neo-Platonism was about virtue. We practice philosophy so that the soul can turn inwards towards The Divine Intellect and know The One. But although Plotinus has given us a clear path towards the unity, descending in an unbroken succession of stages from The One, The Divine Intellect, and The Forms therein through Soul, he did not write systematically like our charts on the blackboard. Instead, he studied in Alexandria for decades until finally exploding with treatises of his own. Turning inwards seems to be a process.

In Plotinus’s sixth ennead, The One or the Good is beyond the reach of human thought or language, and though we can talk about it, this insistence is to be taken seriously. What we know is that it is the supreme existence, no predicates need-be-applied. It is more, not less than mind. And in this way Plotinus seems to me to be dogmatic at first.

According to the ancient Greeks, the Unity of Virtue is a well-known tenet. And especially with Plato we find that Virtue is the way to The One. In Platonic thought, resurrected in Plotinus, all the apparently different virtues—piety or temperance—refer to different aspects of the same single property. With Aristotle, however, having virtue is a matter of having a character that disposes you to do the right thing in the right way, at the right time, to the right person, for the right reason. More, one needs to know what’s important to discern if the costs are worth suffering for what benefits. In some sense for Aristotle, virtue requires knowledge to reach The One or Nature or Eudaimonia, as he refers to it. Since different virtues concern different spheres of activity, the knowledge most centrally required for one virtue will differ from the knowledge most centrally required for another.

I like discursive reasoning. Reason brings us to knowledge. As Bertrand Russell once said, “philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed, does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is akin to man. All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought.” The One just seems too good to comprehend, or rather, too good to be true. The primary object of Plotinus’s philosophical activity is to bring his own soul and the souls of others by way of The Divine Intellect to union with The One. But is the free will free to choose not to create? Plotinus believes that all must exist in unity; it seems we are already one.

Plotinus realizes in the sixth ennead that The One, the Being of the Particular, is a manifold, and that Unity cannot be a manifold; therefore, there must be distinction between being and unity. He posits: “Above all, unity is The First, but Intellectual Principle, Ideas and Being, cannot be so; for any member of the realm of Forms is an aggregation, a compound, and therefore—since components must precede their compound—is a later. The Unity cannot be the total of all things.”

Unity is paramount to our ascent to The One. But by not correctly identifying the target, we miss that, which is The Good. We should aim for Reason. Those whom existence comes about by chance and automatic action and is held together by material forces have drifted far from the concept of unity and The One.

The Philosophy of Eclecticism

To me the philosophy of Eclecticism seems like a cop-out. I find it hard to believe that all philosophies, as different as they might be, can be tied into one— forced together in some sort of “natural” way, gathered, sewn together— without being downsized. I feel as if Eclectics are just little the middle person in the argument who agrees with both sides, saying that both arguments are right in some way, just so that they won’t have to think to hard about solving the problem. I know that this school of thinking developed because there were no new philosophies coming out and everything was falling into repetition, but I would rather repetition than submission. I believe that it would be better to continue being Epicureans, Stoics, Pythagorean, Aristotelian, etc. than just abandoning logic and metaphysics, putting everything into a big bowl, mixing it up, and saying “this is what I believe!” There is no reason or sense in substituting one set of logical foundations for another; this leaves philosophy shallow and weak. This philosophy can also be interpreted as weak because of its lack of a purpose. Yes, it unified the philosophies but what ultimate question was it trying to solve? Or was it just trying to make everyone from Rome to Greece happy (appeasement of the masses)? I honestly don’t know but hope to find out. Some of the theories presented by this philosophy, especially those on the soul, seem to have some worth and seem to be very complicated to understand (I have come to learn that the more complicated the theory that the better the concept turns out to be in the end) so this philosophy seems worthy of further investigation. I just hope that I can understand the explanation of the soul given by Plotinus because I think that that would be something interesting topic to talk over with a stranger on the streetcar when there is a delay.

The One and the Christian conception of God

I have always been fascinated by the conception of the infinite. Buddhist refer to the infinite as emptiness, Christians as God, and Neoplatonists as the one. All of these terms, attempt to get at a singular conception that dominates the metaphysics of every religion.

While I don't find the One to be problematic for some philosophies, I have noticed that from Christianity's philosophy on the Infinite, the One, or God arises an issue. Like neoplatonists, Christian philosophy argues that all material things emanate or originate from God, whose Being represents all of creation and the cosmos. God is infinite, meaning that every thing finite is of God but God does not just consist of all finite beings. Wikipedia nicely summarizes the implication of this conception of the One, or God: "all finite things have their purpose in it, and ought to flow back to it. But one cannot attach moral attributes to the original Source of Being itself, because these would imply limitation." Christians however, unlike neoplatonists, do attribute moral significance to the "Source of Being." Christians argue God represents certain characteristics: mercy, wisdom, compassion, omnipotence, etc. Conversely, the Christian God does not contain other characteristics: cruelty, dishonesty, malice, wrath, etc. The Christian God also desires certain behavior from finite being: worship, devotion, chastity, selflessness, hospitality to strangers, etc.

By attributing certain desires and characteristics to God, Christian philosophy contradicts its argument that God is the creator of all things, omnipotent, and the eminence of all creation. An infinite God cannot have finite characterisitcs as this would imply a limitation to God's Being. I realize that this issue is widely discussed as the 'problem of evil' and that this is a VERY amateur attempt at dealing with this issue but I think that Neoplatonists philosophy articulates the problem with Christian philosophy quite clearly.

Blog for week of march28th-april1st

Eclecticism was very interesting to me. I felt like it solved a lot of problems other Hellenistic philosophers had. However, it was somewhat stagnate with innovative ideas. I feel like at this time period we are still in a eclectic age. It made sense that it evolved during a sterile time period where schools oh philosophy were not present. Ethical polarization was probably the bright spot in their philosophy. All throughout Hellenistic philosophy the metaphysical world view and the ethical world view were very much disconnected. Eclecticism demonstrated how influential it was to philosophy when Plotinus emerged. It is evident in his philosophy when he explains the three hypo-stasis, which I am still very confused on. So far, i can agree with it, but im still going to need further explanation and elaboration on the theory before i can form a complete opinion.