Dec-Jan Twitter Archive

[endymions_bower]

23 Dec

More on the Hermetica

Recent exchange with @cole_tucker has me thinking again about the issue of second languages with regard to the Hermetica. For the author composing in Greek, using Greek concepts, but perhaps with Egyptian, say, as their first language, is there not a certain implied generality to what is written in the lingua franca? The language of commerce, of law? In this fashion, I suspect that the proper name/concept-word dichotomy which becomes thematic in later Platonic thought is tacitly, pragmatically present to some degree in texts like the Corpus Hermeticum, a stimulus to its later theoretical articulation. Another issue that arose is the relationship of the Hermetica to Middle Platonism. While it's not hard for me to see the superiority of the ultimate Platonic position of Proclus and Damascius to the Hermetica, I'm not so sure that the Hermetica isn't a more advanced position than, e.g., in Plutarch.

27 Dec

Neoplatonism and Gnosticism

Post-Plotinian, and especially post-Iamblichean Platonism successfully sublates the Gnostic problem.

On the one hand, this can be accomplished purely through polytheism, simply through the multiplicity of demiurges. But on a more profound level, when the priority of the principle of individuation to intellective determinations is affirmed, then existential freedom is restored to Gods and other animals, and it is no longer even coherent to put ends above means.

30-31 Dec

In reading over the Intellective Gods article, I am struck once again at how Hegelian Proclus' language often sounds in Plat. Theol. Bk. 5. One must bear in mind that Hegel had an unusual degree of familiarity with this text. Eric Perl told me that he likes to say to students that Proclus is the most influential philosopher you've never heard of—how true! The big difference between Hegel and Proclus, however, is that the Plat. Theol. begins from concrete individuals, not from abstract being. In this respect, the henadology is a kind of "noble nominalism". Henadology is thus the unrecognized forerunner of Hegel's absolute idealism, but also has elements typical of the anti-Hegelian reactions. The henads are existential individuals, who ground metaphysical knowledge in their own self-cognition, but also historicize it. But there is no single, encompassing prophetic telos, everything comes back to the particular pantheons, languages, revelations. In this regard, there is something resolutely Kantian about the Proclean system, because of the empty formality of the evolved categories. But the ontologies derivable from the local knowledges are at once dogmatic and utterly fluid, as can attest those who work in a sustained fashion in any of these paradigms—the pagan laboratories of Being.

@Apophatos: Seems like the motion towards a (presupposed?) henad is as relevant as the details of the steps towards it.

I find the paradigm of relationship with Gods, as Pagans tend to hold, truer to Platonic thought than ontological rollback.

@Apophatos: Not sure I get "rollback," but agree that the gods have a platonic forminess about them. Intergenerational conflict = hypostases? Ouranos and Cronus vs their children as allusion to tension bet/ from & matter?

Well, I've done a lot of work in this area, can't easily summarize, but lots of it is available on my site. In the first place, though, the Gods (henads) are prior to forms. In effect, the highest mode of being attributable to forms is thoughts in a God's mind. The intergenerational conflict you refer to is constitutive for hypostases below Intellect, not those prior. Those arise more, we might say, from the Gods' self-analysis. By "ontological rollback", I mean the stereotype of Platonism as having the goal of an anticosmic undoing of procession.

The issue between Ouranos and Kronos for Proclus pertains to separation between intelligible-intellective and intellective, that is, separation of the products of intellection from the scene of their emergence in the encounter with the intelligible. Conflict between, e.g., Zeus and his children pertains to the separation between the intellect and psyche (anti-psychologism).

@Apophatos: Could I impose to ask you to unpack "anti-psychologism?"

As in anti-psychologistic philosophical arguments, the issue of independence of intentional objects from psychical processes. This is a separate issue from the distinction of the intellective from the intelligible-intellective.

@Apophatos: But is the movement not contradictory? Ouranos fathered/ is the scene of Cronos... Cronus is "descending" from Ou (beneath the sky/cosmos perhaps?) and so emerges from that context?

Not contradictory; Ouranian sovereignty continues throughout that of Kronos, as does Kronian sovereignty through that of Zeus. Also Ouranos is not the physical heavens, but (together with Ge) the topos of the entire Hellenic pantheon. Intelligible-intellective manifolds are "spaces" of encounter between intellective subjects and intelligible objects. Pantheons are essentially intelligible-intellective multiplicities, emergent from absolute henadic polycentric multiplicity and providing the ground for intellective, formal multiplicity, which is the product of the activity of intellective Gods operating "in" the intelligible-intellective "space" of the pantheon.

@Apophatos: that sounds a bit like Zim-zum: space-making from which arises... logoi/henads? I realise I am mashing these metaphysics a bit.

No, the henads preexist this "space", which is simply their intersubjectivity, depicted in the Phaedrus as a banquet. I don't know what you mean by logoi; for a Platonist, this term refers to discursive unpacking of intellective contents.

@Apophatos: by logoi am referring to the bonds upon which like-objects in diff't hypostases rely for their likeness.

(I never got a chance to respond to this; note that in the Platonic system, "likeness" (homoiotês) is a determination arising from the activity of Gods on the hypercosmic plane of being, and which extends all the way back to the primary hypostases, this retrospective causality being essential to the construction of the philosophical system itself, viz. Elements of Theology prop. 29, "All procession is accomplished through a likeness of the secondary to the primary.")

@Apophatos: Does the Corpus H not envision the logos as the "ego" of g-d? The logos is produced by g-d thinking about self!

I don't really work on the Corpus Hermeticum, though I occasionally get drawn into others' discussions about it. But in any case, the ontology of the CH is rather more coarse-grained than the fully developed Platonic system. This makes comparison a little tricky. Do you mean logos=what Platonists mean by nous?

@Apophatos: Likely. I note the sequence of the triad is not always the same: theos-logos-nous vs theos-nous-logos.

Deities discussed in CH seem to belong to what Platonists consider the intellective class of Gods, so a narrower inquiry.

6-7 Jan

On mathematicians, from Plato's Republic: "If anyone attempts to cut up the one in argument, [they] laugh at him and refuse to allow it, but if you mince it up they multiply, always on guard lest the one should appear to be not one but a multiplicity of parts" (525e). Very interesting bit of henology here: "if you mince it up [kermatizês], they multiply <it> [pollaplasiousin]." It looks to me as though he's saying, if you claim to be dividing some one, they'll turn it around, into a multiplication. Plato is praising mathematicians in this passage for, in effect, turning one kind of multiplication into another.

This is similar to what he does in the Philebus, when he complains about specious one/many problems, then lays out a serious approach. In this part of the Republic, he's just been talking about the cognitive value of contradictory perceptions. In these perceptions, an apparent unity breaks down into a field of relations. It's actually the attempt to hold onto the unity that Plato wants one to resist.

@Roewoof: See, I thought he wanted us to resist the many

That's the mistake everybody makes about Plato. The value of unity is the value of number (arithmos), forming series.

The "One Itself" only has value in contradicting itself. If there's cognitive value in something seeming big relative to something, small relative to another, how much more so for unity to be many? This is exactly the point of Plato's Parmenides: the concept of unity can generate a whole epistemic field by its aporiai. This is why the "negative theology" reading is frustrating: we don't get to the logic of it, just the "music and incense". The theological reading of Plato's Parmenides in Proclus, for example, is anything but "negative". For "negative theology", the "One Itself" is an uncognizable eminence. Hence, I regard purely logicizing readings as less misleading.

@SawayRyanga: sounds like advaitadvaita, non-dualistic dualism. 

I'm utterly wary of making these connections. The only thing I'm prepared to say about Vedanta is I read it with same concerns. Hence I am suspicious about our reception of Vedanta being influenced by monotheism.

@SawayRyanga: my understanding is that brahman, not originally God, became The Lord in the later Upanisads; ergo Krishna

Brahman definitely originally something like the performance-dimension of scripture, Ishvara the object of devotion as such, hence no suggestion as to number of entities, except as how many are present in the theophanic encounter (i.e., one or two).

9 Jan

w/ @miniver, on "the politics of the word "Pagan"."

I've offered a definition of a "Pagan" religion as one "whose message is its Gods and whose revealed texts are its myths". This was in an article from Pomegranate 7.1 (2005). This contrasts them with doctrinal faiths, such as Buddhism.

12 Jan

w/ @t3dy and @davidbmetcalfe, on http://www.starrycave.com/2009/04/anatomy-of-archetype.html

I sympathize with the author's frustration; Jung responsible for so much mischief. I detest the glib reduction of Gods to "archetypes", even if it is more practiced by Jungians than by Jung himself.

@t3dy: Jung was drawing on an occult tradition of psychologization of myth+magic going back (thru Silberer) to Atwood.

To some extent this was predetermined by the foreclosure of henology in medieval "onto-theology" (i.e., diversity could only be recovered by enriching the "lower" hypostases), while in another respect, it is perhaps just the lack of nerve to confront monotheism head on.

***

"In ritual, one must return to the root and mend antiquity, not forgetting ritual's origin." (Liji, "Liqi" 10.25)

14 Jan

@t3dy: Dylan Burns vs. Ross Douthat on Gnosticism http://borbor-chan.livejournal.com/653875.html#comments (is inner knowledge or divorcing creator from first principle the key?)

I suspect it has to be the latter, because the former would be hard to distinguish from Hermeticism, I'd think. Gnosticism needs that strong sense of alienation, to the point that the inner knowledge may be paradoxical or antinomian. To put it in sharper relief, the divorce of these principles renders the project of a coherent epistemology inherently fruitless. By contrast, the "inner knowledge" in Hermeticism is generally in line with other sources of knowledge about the cosmos.

w/ @Demon_Writer on the importance of the personal daimon in Neoplatonism.

It's a very deep relationship; I just noticed today that Plato implicitly compares it to a marriage in the Republic. The role of the daimon is to help one to implement the paradeigma tou biou, the "life-pattern", that you chose before birth. But it's apparently interchangeable to speak either of choosing the paradigm, or choosing the daimon. Also, the daimon is called a "guardian" (phylax), explicitly identifying it with the "guardians" in the intellective "city".

15 Jan

I'm pretty sure people wouldn't have found Plato's "lecture on the Good" so confusing if he'd been talking about a One-that-Is: circumstantial evidence that he was speaking instead about a One-that-is-Not. The Good must be posited without hypostasis: now that's a doctrine to get you a reputation for obscurity. Contrary to popular belief, substance monism—even where the substance is, e.g., consciousness—has never been that hard to convey. What is difficult, and worthy of the efforts of the great thinkers of antiquity, is preserving phenomena and the unique.

17 Jan

@Llimoner_: Every "one" is divisible but the principle "oneness" is not. Or that's the idea.

Which is also why the principle of unity cannot, itself, be unified.

@ Llimoner_: the one proliferates infinitude of "ones"

The One is anything that is unique, just insofar as it is unique.

@ Llimoner_: Unique. Just like everyone.

Yes.

18 Jan

w/ @JohBri on the Grail, the cup as symbol of sovereignty with female keeper.

NB "grail"-->L. gradalus-->Gk. kratêr, w/cosmogonic significance in Plato's Timaeus, known to Med. Europe in Calcidius' translation. The kratêr from Plato's Timaeus (35a & 41d) was identified by later Platonists with Hera.

@JohBri learns that Calcidius translates kratêr by crater.

Interesting; gradalus and kratêr have an etymological relationship, but perhaps gradalus didn't suggest the right sort of vessel?

19-20 Jan

Had a look at Badiou's Republic today at the bookstore. Nah. While Badiou makes some nice choices on the details, in general this is just Plato bowdlerized. Badiou gives us a Plato that is narrower, more mundane, and ironically more Eurocentric, too. In his version of Er's account, Badiou drops the animals choosing lives as different kinds of animals, or as humans. That made me sad. The best thing about Plato's account of existential choice is that it's not just us doing it, other animals are too. The animals in Er's narrative are not just there for window dressing. Plato shows the point when he says that the power to choose wisely doesn't just come from philosophy, it can come from suffering. One thing it certainly doesn't come from, ironically, is being a citizen of a well-organized polis. Plato specifically says that a lot of these people make bad choices, because they've only been indoctrinated into good behavior. So much for the whole discourse on the ideal state! But souls are more than citizens, and the ideal state is populated by guardians (daimons), not mortals. As far as actual states go, Plato is a democrat, plain and simple: here there is "no lack of paradigms" (i.e., like the Meadow).

Badiou says Plato lacks a concept of the "Event", but two evental formations in the Republic get short shrift from Badiou: the evental choice of the next life, and the evental character of music.

@Karl_Beech: 'But perhaps, I said, there is a model of it in heaven, for anyone who wants to look at it and make himself its citizen..'

The city of the guardians exists purely in this appropriation. The most important word in the Republic is paradeigma. The paradigm, which is the highest concept of "form" in Plato, is inseparable from an intensely individual experience of beauty. The city of guardians is joined by us by joining with our daimon, realizing what we chose in choosing this life. The original paradigm is Animality, the most beautiful of intelligibles, according to which the cosmos is ordered. The cosmos as an animal itself, and as a city, is composed from the intelligible viewpoint of the paradigms adopted by individual animals. That is, the way in which the cosmos makes sense, is insofar as we grasp it through what living beings love and want. When Plato talks about "forms" of things like beds, or about things being "images", this is part of the "fever", the "dream". These things arise in the martial law conditions created by Glaucon's passions, Glaucon the breeder of hounds and cocks. Glaucon, like the encrusted Glaucus (611d), needs "form" as a purgative. Platonic "forms" are reducible to the conditions of integrity for animal units, and eidetics thus reducible to henology.

@vajramrita: it is very interesting when modern philosophers reference the ancients. I see you didn't think much of Badiou's Plato.

No, I didn't, because I think that Badiou leaves Plato narrower than he found him.

@vajramrita: is this narrowing inevitable every time moderns refer to the ancients as a method of construction of their own ideas? 

In a certain respect, of course; and Badiou's Republic is fine if taken as a genealogy of Badiou's own theses, perhaps, but the narrowing that concerns me is of the total ontological scope of the project in the Republic. I accord to the concepts of ancient philosophy widest possible scope, whether Plato, or Presocratics, or non-Hellenic thinkers.

@vajramrita: yes, so do I - then I consider why I wouldn't give all philosophers widest possible scope & what consequences of this would be.

The scope of a philosopher's concepts ought in large part be determined by their number--assuming the world is not wider now. Sometimes one restricts application of a thinker's ideas in light of a self-restriction they already seem to have undertaken.

@vajramrita: the number & the complexity of the relationships between them. There's a lot packed into that assumption - thinking empiricism ...

***

Love this, from the EEF list today: Sxmwy dj t3 r '.k: "the Two Powerful ones will give bread to your document" (from two OK legal docs).

21-27 Jan

The Republic

@sdv_duras: Plato the eugenicist… "it follows from our conclusions so far that sex should preferably take place between me and women who are outstandingly good, and should occur as little as possible between men and women of a vastly inferior stamp…." (Plato - Republic). (Which is perhaps why Badiou had to rewrite Republic in a contemporary mode to eradicate the base fascism…) Though this fact is secondary here as the long history of biopolitics, of eugenics, of mendalism not fascism, is what interests me here. It is this which should direct your attention to the potential radicalism of neo-darwinism, the selfish gene can be said to simply refuse the stupidities of eugenics. Any reading Plato is a selective misreading.

Don't forget that all these prescriptions apply to the "fevered" city.

@sdv_duras: surely that's irrelevant ? in no circumstances can such bad ideas be justified... now

Are you sure that Plato intends us to find these strictures palatable?

@sdv_duras: true, he was keen on such behaviour...

No interpretation of the Republic is sufficient that does not take proper account of the first city Socrates describes. This city, the "healthy city", provides for all its citizens' needs, but does not produce a surplus. Due to its lack of luxuries, Glaucon derides it as a "city of pigs", and in response, Socrates frames a city he calls "fevered". This is the city of the guardians, a state of total mobilization so that a surplus may be produced and defended. Eventually Socrates acknowledges that the city of the guardians will not be able to tolerate an unproductive consumer class. But this class was the raison d'être of the "fevered city" to begin with; a paradox. Hence the extravagant regulations on marriage, families, and artistic speech in the city of guardians rest under a question mark. Are they meant to cause the reader to decide that the goal of surplus production for luxury consumption is not reasonable? There are other indications in the text that Plato actually thinks the democratic state, albeit flawed, is ontologically basic.

@Karl_Beech: My impression was that Plato favoured a state where 'philosophers rule as kings..'

Plato says that the city of guardians will not become reality unless philosophers become kings. Not the same thing.

@Karl_Beech: After all is truth decided by majority vote?

This is glib; we should try to be more responsible to the text. The democratic state is ontologically basic because there "one does not lack for paradigms" (557de, 561e). The city of guardians is itself a "paradigm in heaven" (592ab), thus conditioned upon the plenitude of paradigms. "Truth" is not a simple matter in Plato; I would argue it is not prior to the existential plenitude of paradigms.

@Karl_Beech: Please elaborate why "Truth is not a simple matter in Plato"...

To begin with, because truth is not a primitive concept, but one of three "formalizations" of the Good (Phil. 65a), along with beauty and proportion. Plato indicates no priority among these; rather, they are co-constituting.

***

I'm increasingly convinced the function of the Republic's city of guardians is purely psychical, the paradigm of imaginal citizenship.

@Karl_Beech: I agree- amongst other things the Republic is a metaphor for the Soul

The "city in words" is an analogy of the soul; however, we must distinguish between this analogical function and a symbolic one. The city as analogy *of* the soul is not the same as the city's symbolic function *for* the soul. As Proclus remarks, "symbols [symbola] are not imitations of those things of which they are symbols" (In Remp. I 198). Imaginal citizenship has a causal efficacy beyond the narrowly "political"; this city is a synthêma, a theurgical "token".

22 Jan

"My proposal is that the term di is used as a generic or collective term, assignable to any one Power or denoting groups of Powers or all Powers, collectively, and that the Shang pantheon thus does not, in fact, possess an apex uniting its various segments." (Robert Eno, in Early Chinese Religion, ed. Lagerwey & Kalinowski p. 75f) Thus we see that the situation in early China was almost precisely like that in Egypt and in Greece. Early recognition (Bronze Age) by polytheistic civilizations of generic terms for the Gods, suitable for ethical or theoretical discourse. No need for further unification of the theological field.