Damascius Tweets (8)

[endymions_bower]

Damascius tweets for 4/4.

4/4

150/113: Damascius says that the Gods "proceed each from the whole, rather than from one of the causes discriminated within it."

He calls the former "similar [homoeidês] generation", the latter "dissimilar", anomoeidês.

"Similar generation" is "common to all the Gods" (113.11-12).

In addition, there is "dissimilar generation" with respect to some of the Gods, e.g. "those called youths [êitheoi] or virgins [parthenoi]."

Ridiculous gaffe here from R., who thinks êitheoi is "demigods"; rather, means "unmarried youths", as ought to be obvious from parthenoi!

D.'s point is that such deities are without issue (agonos) in this respect, thus it must be a different mode of procession…

…otherwise, they would be like matter, a terminal procession.

Differential relations within the pantheon are thus of a different order than membership in the polycentric manifold.

Proclus makes the same point, especially at In Parm. 936. And we can see that this is a Proclean doctrine from D's critique following (113f)

Implicit in D's critique is that Proclus places the similar before the dissimilar procession;

but this is impossible for D. because these terms imply one another—a little logic-chopping, but very well—

—and so one may not "legitimately" (themiton) make this distinction ep'ekeinou, "concerning that one" (i.e., the One).

(R. again says "in the One"; R's standard translation for every prepositional relationship to the One?)

So we should "conceive the generation of all things from the One as each kind simultaneously":

"Similarly" insofar as all things are produced "according to the One" (kata to hen; R. has again "in the One"),

"Dissimilarly" insofar as the One is prior to all things (114.3-5).

Note that this renders the transcendence of the One relative.

Note also that the "dissimilar procession" is another way of conceiving the positivity of henadic uniqueness;

but since it is explicitly negative, it is of course insufficient.

On the one hand, the One brings them all forth alike; on the other hand, all differently. Correct, if inadequate, for D.

 

 

 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

At some point (it's probably not relevant to this review), would like to have you elaborate on how the generation described here renders the transcendence of the One relative.

Long ago (sigh), I thought a few youths were demigods, too.

KT

[lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com]

Because the One's transcendence arises from the dissimilarity of things to one another, which is relational. In the background here is the sense of likeness, homoiotês, as differential participation in the same forms; that is, it is difference against the background of an intellectual organization.

Likeness emerges thematically on the infra-intellective (hypercosmic) level, as though it's a purely psychical activity of discrimination, discrimination falling short of formal difference. (Is this animal a different species? A different breed? Different in temperament? Or merely different in history?)

And yet likeness/unlikeness is also the most fundamental principle of procession: post-intellective, it is also pre-intellective. (This higher principle/lower manifestation rule is of constant importance in Neoplatonism.) I'm reminded of how Hume makes the perception of degrees of intensity a primitive in his account: it's how we tell that something is an "impression", something else an "idea".

[(Anonymous)]

I can see why you bring up Hume, but not how that conception would do the work D seems to require. (D's One seems a *pretty great* candidate for being cast into the flames.) Wouldn't the scenario you describe reduce the "transcendence" in question to a matter of (purely human) mental acts of conceptualization and discrimination? This reminds me of the Platonic description of dialectics (qua generalization and division), which takes care of the discursive and conceptual, but which renders any "purely" formal category/Being unthinkable (e.g. in the Phaedrus acct of a Beauty which cannot be perceived).

[lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com]

That the acts in question are human is only a problem empirically, with respect to particular purposes of particular judgments. Their ontological significance is given by their structure. The particular structure that yields the transcendence of the One, I would say, is the judgment that something presupposes something else. The One as transcendent is simply the ultimate residuum of any act of hierarchization whatsoever.

As for casting it into the flames, this is certainly to be encouraged, since as long as there is something left to burn one is missing the point, as I am sure Damascius would say.

Regarding dialectics and "the real", as they say in fashionable circles, I think that, like Proclus, I tend to feel that philosophy is pretty well served, for its purposes, by the formalization of the real, once all its ramifications are taken into account.

I do not think that the Phaedrus ever speaks of a beauty that cannot be perceived. Rather, we read that the huperouranios topos, the place beyond the heaven (which is also beyond Ouranos, i.e., beyond the discrete topos of Hellenism) is "colorless", "shapeless" (aschêmatistos) and "without contact" (anaphês) (247c), and yet Plato uses many terms denoting the specularity of things in this realm. Indeed, given the function of negatives in Platonic thought, we may say that the immediate products of these entities are perceptions of color, shape and contact.

[(Anonymous)]

That (your explanation of transcendence) makes a lot of sense (no pun intended). I'm especially curious about the emphasis on structure in your rdg of D; it still sounds as though "transcendence" means something like "universality"---which is fine by me, indeed, it's ideal---but such transcendence can't do any theological work, nor any metaphysics that isn't critical, so it's a bit of a misnomer (sort of like the way the French existentialists took to that word).
Re: Plato and the Phaedrus (and Symposium) in particular---the Being that Really Is is perceived only by intellect (I take it), not sensuously perceived, and in the case in Beauty, which follows the same logic (of negative description, as you say) this produces a paradox. Qua Beautiful, a thing is a matter of sensuous perception. Or so I read it---not sure that this is relevant to your reading D, so don't feel obliged to sort it here.
Thanks for the great stuff & the clarification.
KT

[lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com]

There is a distinction in Platonism between transcendence and universality. A universal need not be transcendent; it can simply be the immanent character common to some set. On the other hand, a transcendent principle that is the cause of some set (as, for example, the paradigm of animality is the cause of encosmic animals) does not possess the class character univocally with the set members--though it does possess this character in some fashion, which I think is just the sort of thing that troubles Damascius relative to Proclus.

For Proclus, transcendence seems to be a theological character primitively. It pertains particularly to the activity of the "guardian" class of deities (e.g., the Kouretes and Korybantes), and thus has a lot to do with maintaining the distinction between the intellective and psychical planes. Thus for him its significance is largely anti-psychologistic; in this sense, it has a distinctly "phenomenological" character, and thus it is not surprising, perhaps, that phenomenology has taken a "theological" turn of late (though that turn has generally failed to produce anything very impressive thus far).

Damascius carries the analysis further, with his "Ineffable", which is essentially the givenness of the non-given as such: we have the idea of something completely unrelated to us, but this idea is itself a form of relation, one which is distributed across everything that is in any respect unrelated to anything else or that fails in its givenness in some local circumstance. I'm still working on understanding the full significance of this for the system as it plays out in Damascius' hands.

Real Being (to ontôs on) is sensuously perceived as Beauty, I would say. Beauty, proportion and truth are, for Plato, the conjunction of forms that primarily express the Good (Philebus 65a). So we can always express the being of something in the most radical sense through these coordinates (aesthetic, symmetric, alethic).

[(Anonymous)]

Extremely interesting. I do hope that after clearing the dead wood of this translation, you've some time in your review to probe D's Ineffable. The very notion of approaching absolute Otherness in terms of *our* own idea of relation (and one might add deep desire for such relation) seems to begin making the epistemological turn that (you know) I find necessary. Now I have to wonder if this might re-route us back to the pantheism discussion we began a little while back. Because this, to my mind, is what it's all about: doing justice to the interminable desire for/idea of a kind of transcendence, which we nevertheless will only ever engage on our own (fully immanent) terms. Actually (not to beat a beautiful horse), the negative descriptions of Beauty we've been mentioning take on just this task, as I read them. I don't want to push Damascius in a direction he doesn't go, but it sounds to me as though his take on ineffability might lead in a more genuinely Platonic (and less scholastic) direction---in terms of the necessary awareness of binding epistemological matters.
KT

[lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com]

"[I]t is not the One that we call 'one' when we use this name, but the understanding of unity which is in ourselves. For everything that exists—beings with intellect, with soul, with life, and inanimate objects and the very matter that goes with these—all long for the first cause and have a natural striving towards it. And this fact shows us that the predilection for the One does not come from knowledge …

"What else is the One in ourselves except the operation and activity of this striving? It is therefore this interior understanding of unity, which is a projection and as it were an expression of the One in ourselves, that we call 'the One'. So the One itself is not nameable, but the One in ourselves …

"Why, then, do we call the understanding of unity within ourselves 'one' and not something else? Because, I should say, unity is the most venerable of all the things we know. For everything is preserved and perfected by being unified, but perishes and becomes less perfect when it lacks the virtue of cleaving together and when it gets further away from being one. So disintegrated bodies perish, and souls which multiply their powers die their own death. But they revive when they re-collect themselves and flee back to unity from the division and dispersal of their powers. Unity, then, is the most venerable thing, which perfects and preserves everything, and that is why we give this name to the concept that we have of the first principle. Besides, we noticed that not everything participates in other predicates, not even in existence, for there are things which in themselves are not existents and do not have being. And much less does everything participate in life or intellect or rest or movement. But in unity, everything." (Proclus, In Parm. 54-56K, trans. Morrow & Dillon)

[(Anonymous)]

So good--yes--that's really fantastic.
Now given all this, I continue to be confused about how/on what terms the move to theology (as per the 3 possibilities I named in our earlier exchange): after what you've cited above, is it *essentially* a leap a faith (i.e., that the One is at all related to the human understanding of unity), a dogmatic assertion (i.e., that human reason is sufficient for grasping the intelligibility of divine sources), or some third, immanent handling of human modes of expression (such language and history) which strive to put the logy to the theos?
Again, really gorgeous citation; love that.

[lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com]

Perhaps we are never, for Proclus or for Damascius, in a position to make a "move to theology", because we are doing "theology" all the time that we are using proper names.

All proper-named individuals (i.e., any individual treated as the necessarily one and only of its kind) are problematic from a purely ontological perspective. Spatio-temporal individuals allow us to defer the problem, though, by treating it as simple underdetermination (empirical incapacity), while essences allow us to treat it as a problem of simple overdetermination (circularity of definition).

Gods are a privileged subject matter for the henologist because they are radically underdetermined empirically (the only law of their manifestation is that they appear whenever they wish (Plato, Tim. 41a)) and radically overdetermined formally (the manifold of each God's properties cannot be grasped by human reason (Proclus, In Crat. 97)).

Normally I emphasize the differences between the henadic and ontic manifolds. Reading Damascius, in particular, though, brings home to me that for the Platonist, the difference between the individuals in these classes can always also be regarded as a matter of degree.

Indeed, it's only because one can approach it this way that Proclus can do something like he does in the Elements of Theology, namely posit that there are Gods purely by virtue of the mode of unity they instantiate, rather than by any of the sorts of theological "proofs" that circulate in the Middle Ages. There's nothing of an argument by design, or of necessary versus contingent being. Basically, he just says that there must logically be a class of individuals like this, and it doesn't matter what you call them or whether you worship them or if you decide that you are them—all of these other issues can be taken up in a different, more expansive inquiry. In a way, the perfect reader of the Elements would be somebody who doesn't even know what the word "God" means.