Oct-Dec Twitter Archive

[endymions_bower]

It took me a long time to get this archive together, in part I think due to a lack of enthusiasm about the quality and interest of my thoughts through this period. In any event, one consequence of the tardy assembly is that I've been especially remiss in capturing the threading of the exchanges; my apologies to all interlocutors.

4 Oct

@t3dy: [quoting Hankey characterizing Narbonne] “Henology is driven from one paradox to another in order to prevent the One becoming a being without becoming nothing”

I could go on and on… the blind leading the blind…

@t3dy: so is there really a danger of the "One" becoming nothing? And does it become a being?

If "the One" becomes a being, it's just Being (to hen on). "Becoming nothing": the One *isn't* anything. They don't want to do philosophy, they want Platonism as backstop for monotheism.

@t3dy: So none of the things that (say) Plotinus says about the One are such a huge mysterious problem as advertised by "negative theology"?

They are the same sort of problem as any of the confusing things you read in Hegel or Heidegger: a problem of understanding.

It's really pretty simple: everything we negate from "the One", we negate from any unit considered as absolutely unique.

@t3dy: So what do you think is the function of paradox in Platonism, if not this crypto-theological play with being and nothingness?

There is no function for paradox in Platonism. It's philosophy.

@t3dy: I'm not sure I'm getting you. Are you saying philosophy itself has no use for paradox? I can see how paradox can be otherwise used

Zeno's paradoxes raised problems that led to concrete philosophical advances. That's the use. Damascius's text is Aporiai kai Lyseis—"Impasses and Solutions". Most talking about "paradox" don't want solutions, want ascesis, paradox for the sake of paradox, for psychological effect. I'm talking about *problems*, whether in Zeno or the Platonists.

****

@Roewoof: Is a theosophist not also a philosopher?

Only according to a certain definition of philosophy. Suhrawardi, for example, would say yes; Kant, no. I'd say yes as well; I favor as broad a definition of philosophy as possible. But it's worth understanding why some would say no. The term *theosophia* arises in Late Antiquity in a context implicitly distinguishing it from Aristotelian "special metaphysics". "Special metaphysics", in effect, applies theses about the nature of being to determine the mode of being of the Gods. "Theosophy", by contrast, determines things about the nature of being from specific divine illuminations. Hence "theosophy" is used to refer to specific divine revelations and their interpretation. In Plato's Phaedrus, we can see both "special metaphysics" and "theosophy" going on. On the one hand, we have the characteristics of the "supracelestial place", which pertain to what it is, in general, to be a God. On the other hand, there is the notion of "following" some particular deity, which is a fundamental existential relationship.

@Roewoof: Do you mean following as in worshiping?

Worship is implied, but it's an intense devotion, deeper than explicit awareness, affecting the whole experience of beauty. This is the point in the dialogue when Socrates speaks about the different styles of erotic attachment.

To return to your original question about theosophy and philosophy, the issue concerns the status of the existential relationship of some mortal to some God(s): the status of these particulars. Is philosophy only of the universal, and of the particular only derivatively? What is the status of theosophical "knowledge"? These are the issues at stake: the relationship between experiential "wisdom" and reason.

6 Oct

Those things we deny of "the One", we deny of any unique unit qua unique. If "the One Itself" was, the unique units would not be unique.

12 Oct

@mailjones: What is life or the lived in post-human times? 

Most life is nonhuman. In Proclus, the hypostasis of Life (Zôê) is chiefly defined by self-motion.

15 Oct

Two examples Plato gives in the Statesman of bad conceptual divisions: 1) "Hellenes" and "Barbarians"; 2) "humans" and "all other animals".

2 Nov

I suspect "written laws" in Plato's Statesman stand for forms, and the opposition of henadic and eidetic is staged in the two kosmoi. In the "prior" cosmos, Gods govern directly, and all animals are autochthonous and unique, no species.

3 Nov

@t3dy: "Bergson turns to experience, to action and will, and to a mysticism...because in mystic union contemplation and productive action are one."

Now *that* is a concept of mystic union I can get behind.

@t3dy: I guess the question is whether Hankey is right that Bergson "inverts" Plotinus, or if this mystical unity is a platonic insight. 

It certainly becomes more evident in the post-Plotinian Platonists that there is nothing "static" about the intelligible—I'm thinking especially of the introduction of the hypostasis of Life, which is prior to Intellect and all about motion. Nor is this a novelty; already in the Sophist, the Eleatic Stranger affirms that there is motion in real being. In this dialogue, Plato clearly tries to stake out a middle position between Eleatics and Heracliteans, the former questioning the intelligibility of motion, the latter questioning the intelligible in virtue of motion. Plato seeks to mediate this dispute through the concept of power(s), and this is further developed in Aristotle. Whatever we find in Plotinus presupposes this evolution, even if some of his rhetoric obscures it—if so, we must read it back in.

5 Nov

@SawayRyanga: What really can I learn? 

I think that Plato's answer is underrated: we don't learn, we remember. I think it's about so much more than metempsychosis, too: about the historicity and intersubjectivity of knowledge as well. Another aspect of the significance of reincarnation in Plato has to do with trying to think through having chosen this life.

10 Nov

Discussion this morning brought home to me how useful mereology is in dealing with questions of religious praxis. A practice must be evaluated with respect to all the wholes of which it forms a part.

(And in this respect, even the interpretation of a divine attribute must count as a "practice".) A practice cannot be an immediate expression of divine agency unless it is an unqualified good part of every whole to which it belongs. Mediating structures with real causality are necessary to explain the ambivalence of a practice in a psychic or social whole. Hence a practice cannot be insulated from its negative social consequences on the basis of an ultimate hieratic derivation. This is because of the reality of all the wholes involved. The absolute causality of a deity is expressed in the one-to-one relationship; but perfect monolatry is a regulative ideal. In reality, every religious practice is a whole of which the God is only a part; indeed, many part-whole relationships apply. In summation, the henologist (henadologist) ends up doing a lot of mereological analysis.

In Plato's Statesman, the era of direct reign of the Gods in the cosmos is also that in which every animal is understood as unique; hence in this text we see evidence already in Plato for an association between the Gods and the henadic mode of unity. When the Gods hand over the administration of the cosmos, then, it is, in the first place, to eidê/species. The "written laws" of the Statesman symbolize this, I believe, just as the "lawgivers" of the Cratylus are actually primal philosophers.

15 Nov

@t3dy: How can henadology help explain Bruno's innovations on the classical memory theater? 

In what work I've done on Bruno—which is not a great deal—I've never focused on the memory texts. These texts come from different points in his career, while his monadology is most highly developed at the end. So I would expect the later ones to reflect his mature metaphysics more clearly. In any event, I think it would be safe to say that memory is ontological for Bruno in a way it isn't for, e.g., Cicero. Perhaps for Bruno, memory is in the final analysis subsumed under bonding.

@t3dy: Can you say something about how henadology helps explain his theory of bonds? I'm interested in the claim that there's a connection between his memory+magic systems, psychology...

Basically, I want to read Bruno's whole body of work through the monadology of De Triplici Minimo and the essay on bonding, and so everything, basically, amounts to minima of diverse sorts and the "figures" formed by bonding. So I'm thinking that the memory project can be seen as creating certain stable mental configurations through associative bonding. Forming a mnemonic system is actually changing one's substance, on this reading.

@Apophatos: Am interested in the bonds that connect ideas: narrative, hermeneutics, projection, logoi: narrative is easy to remember. 

Narrative is also a powerful means of patterning time, and patterning time is what a soul essentially does.

@Apophatos: Definitely agree! Narrative and time are quite intimate. Perhaps that speaks to where narrative operates? Memory?

"Essences" are basically narratives; in Aristotle, to ti ên einai: "what it *was* for something to be".

@Apophatos: "That which must exist for the following to unfold," perhaps. Unmistakeably narrative and hermeneutic-oriented, I suggest.

An old teacher of mine, Johannes Fritsche, favored a political reading of the appeal to the past in this phrase.

@Apophatos: I'm sure that is part of it: we inherit worlds from our ancestors. But there is a more immediate, intimate psych element too. The two readings are hardly exclusive. While the political view is important, I think the psych view carries more weight.

I think that it concerns an organism's effort to persist in being, but maintaining coherence in its states.

@Apophatos: I might agree - but your verbs sound active. Not sure meaning formation is so "willfull." Unconscious plays a big part IMHO

You're right, it's not the organism's effort; it's the "what", the coherence of the states that results. "Unconscious", of course, inasmuch as we're talking about plants, animals of all kinds, and even artifacts, by analogy. It's phrased as a third-party ascription.

@Apophatos: Plants and animals react to their environment and seem sensitive/creative to patterns, narratives. I agree. Though cannot say that the narrative formation of plants and animals is in any way the same as mine. Could be something else.

For Aristotle, our ability to articulate such narratives is the actualization of a system-wide tendency in nature. One could say that the very ability to assign to these phenomena a common horizon is for Aristotle a property of nature. It's not that he ignores the differences; but he wants to give due weight to the coherence, the "narrative", nature forms. For Aristotle, I tell a story because of my social nature, and to give structure to as much of my experience as I can. This is analogous to organic processes of growth and assimilation; but analogy *itself* is a natural phenomenon. The roots of analogy lie in the logical (metaphysical) structure of pros hen manifolds, "oriented" multiplicities.

@Apophatos: very interesting: Creatures other than humans make narratives, so narratives are not derivative of the human mind. perhaps (too much to ask?) that the analogic-reliant structure = a diff't hypostasis? It's at points like that I suspect a tautology and/or ouroboros.

17-18 Nov

On Plato vs. Aristotle

Aristotle in a dyadic opposition with Plato, rather than one of several Platonic schools, is an illusion.

Aristotle rises to a special prominence as a result of late Platonists making Plato unpalatable to Christians. Late Platonists (esp. Athenian school) made Platonism inseparable from Pagan theology and religiosity. Hence, after an interregnum in which Platonism was essentially repressed, an Aristotelian metaphysics, no longer fitting within a Platonic frame, as it had been regarded, was fashioned as a suitable philosophical complement to Christianity, albeit Platonic influence persisted through the vehicle of the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus. Two far-reaching consequences of this sequence of events: (1) Distortion of relationship between theology and philosophy in Aristotle (see Bodéüs); (2) Distortion of meaning and function of Platonic henology, collapse of henology and ontology.

Eros is a primary feature of both Plato and Aristotle's metaphysics, and in a rather similar form, too. Aristotle's doctrine of natural motion ultimately oriented toward unmoved movers compares to Plato's Phaedrus. The central problem for Plato and Aristotle alike is the nature of ousia, substance. Both recognize need for concept of form as heuristic guiding us in this inquiry. Neither commits to reified form.

All that Plato says about materiality is that we speak of matter aporematically (Tim. 51a): hard to dispute. There is no firm distinction of "realms" in Plato or Aristotle, because soul penetrates all "realms". The primary principles, for Plato and Aristotle alike, are conditions arising from the nature of being qua being. Plato does not say that "material objects descend from ideal forms", this is a stereotype. "Plato … uses only two causes, the cause of the whatness and the cause according to matter" (Met. 988a). *This* is Aristotle's criticism, and that "philosophy has become mathematics for modern thinkers" (992b) and thus they have lost sight of that "for the sake of which", i.e., Socrates's insight at Phaedo 97c & sqq. This is a struggle within the Platonic movement; note how Aristotle constantly says "we" in the Metaphysics.

25 Nov

@t3dy: What is Object-Oriented Henology? 

As far as I know, it's a neologism you just coined; perhaps a bit of an oxymoron. I've compared henology to object-oriented-ontology, but I don't think one can speak meaningfully of "object-oriented henology" unless there is a kind of henology that *isn't*. I regard henology as the study of units qua units, the "philosopher's arithmetic" of Philebus 56de, but inaugurated in the Parmenides.

Henology is necessarily a wider discipline than ontology, because it transcends what Quine called "ontological commitment". I have opined in the past that object-oriented ontology might productively be regarded, not as an ontology, but as a revived henology. I doubt, however, that its proponents would welcome such an intervention.

@t3dy: Have you written on this Quine connection?

I've had a soft spot for Quine--mostly "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"--since grad school; I've never written on him, though. I think of his holism in relation to the holistic tendencies in the late Plato, which becomes overt in Speusippus. I like Quine's center/periphery distinction as a way of reconceptualizing the hierarchical aspect of Platonic ontology.

3-9 Dec

@RoryGrant2: Do you have any suggestions for reading or thoughts on apriori knowledge of polytheism? How do you approach obtaining epistemological certainty of this metaphysical model, given that the system itself appears coherent? I realise, however, that might be a misplaced question as the account of Being it's built upon is meant to be apriori true.

If one wants a sense of what is a priori in Proclus's system, one should look to the Elements of Theology. The difference between the El. Theol. and that in the commentaries (and the Plat. Theol. counts as a commentary) is essentially that the commentaries concern texts emerging within a factical theological field; in Plato's case, Hellenic. It's key to understand this element of facticity not as inferior to the strictly eidetic account, but actually superior. Notwithstanding its lesser ontological status, however, the eidetic account has wider application than any factical theology. Certainty accordingly falls out into two kinds: the philosophical certainty in the dialectical procedure, on the one hand and existential commitment to this or that (or however many) factical theology or theologies, on the other. The former, in principle, allows us to say, even were there no concept of deities, we would have a notion of henads simply as unique individuals, even if they were just actual individuals in the world conceived "as if" unique. The latter concerns the divine henads we are willing to say actually exist. There are certain eidetic strictures limiting the giving or demanding of reasons for the existence of this or that God, though. In a sense, it is perfectly otiose to ask "Does God X exist?" What could count as a reason? In practice, of course, Proclus treats all the pagan traditions as true, while remaining silent on Judaism and Xtianity. And this is appropriate; a philosopher can operate hermeneutically upon whatever tradition(s) she likes, she's not legislating.

@RoryGrant2: it interests me how the henads resultant from dialectical procedure can marry with a rich vein of many mythological traditions

The key, as I said, lies in not seeing these rich traditions as mere illustrations of philosophical concepts; instead, concepts are in their essence translations, either arising hermeneutically, or in intersubjective conditions.