In this chapter, I want to look more closely at the Neoplatonic critique of discursive thinking, as part of a more general discussion of philosophical method in the Enneads. One issue that demands immediate attention is how we ought to conceive of philosophical method in Neoplatonic texts. This chapter will explore dialectic in the Enneads, with particular emphasis on its contrasts with both Stoic and Aristotelian dialectic, as well as with more contemporary philosophical methodologies. This chapter is largely negative in its conclusions, showing more what the dialectic is not than what Neoplatonic dialectic includes. In this respect, it introduces the subsequent chapters that explore a variety of dialectical strategies that nevertheless presuppose this central critique of discursive thinking.

Let me start with the modern distinction between ontological commitments and epistemological commitments invoked, for example, to examine versions of philosophical realism. Realism has been described as the belief that reality exists independently of any [human] representation of it. Expressed in this way, modern philosophical realism is not an epistemological theory and entails neither a theory of truth nor a privileged, unique description of the world. In other words, if one holds some version of philosophical realism, it may turn out that truth (one's representation of the world) and reality coincide – that our representations accurately reflect the way things are – or it may not.

In this chapter I survey allusions to the Orphic cosmology in the works of Plato and of subsequent Platonizing authors. My theme in this chapter is to look once more at a group of symbols accorded particular status among Neoplatonic authors. As in the previous chapter, I start from the text of Plato and work forward in history. In all likelihood, the central Orphic myth implied the ritual death, dismemberment, and reconstitution of the initiate. Plato makes use of this ritual motif to underscore his analysis of selfhood and self-transcendence. Later in the tradition, the initiatory associations with Orphic symbolism are appropriated to authorize supposedly esoteric interpretations of Plato's dialogues. Orpheus, from the enchanted visionary of the earlier tradition, becomes a metaphysically astute theologian for the later Neoplatonists.

Throughout its transmigrations over the centuries, one particular episode in this myth, the rending of Dionysus, enjoys perhaps the greatest celebrity or notoriety. This episode has clear ritual associations, as the initiated candidate and the suffering god undergo parallel experiences in different zones, so to speak. The mythohistory of the cosmos revealed in the Orphic theology contains as its final episode an etiology for specifically human consciousness, in the rending of Dionysus at the hands of the Titans. The physical details of the myth, with its elements of androgynous self-impregnation, solipsistic world swallowing, transgression, rebellion, and finally sexual sparagmos – collapse of the androgynous self into a gendered being – provide all the necessary elements for a psychoanalytic reading.

Throughout this book, I have been talking about the “Neoplatonic tradition” as if this phrase referred to a well-defined phenomenon such as a group of philosophers who, in company with each other, formulated a self-consistent set of doctrines. Yet it is not just the complexity of Neoplatonic scholasticism, particularly its subtle integration of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Platonism, nor the major shifts in its philosophical vocabulary, such as the influence of Iamblichean theurgy precipitated, that makes it so difficult to locate the factors promoting the continuity of the school. Although the broad outlines of what we today might call a philosophical system can be seen in many of the philosophers who today fall under this sobriquet, the fact remains that the Neoplatonists themselves traced their philosophical genealogy in strikingly different ways. A time span of three centuries makes an unbroken succession of teachers and students an unlikely way to account for the cohesiveness of the tradition.

I have ended this book with the work of Damascius, the last Platonic Successor. Despite his official ties to the ancient Platonic school, his own membership in the tradition is anything but straight-forward. In the midst of the upheaval, persecution, and ideological pressures exerted on him, with a millenium separating him from classical Athens, Damascius seemingly had to rediscover or renew the tradition whose last proponent he became.

The significance of imagery or symbolism in the Enneads has long been a source of scholary contention. In 1961 Beierwaltes published his well-known article, “Plotins Metaphysik des Lichtes,” in which he studied Plotinus' extensive employment of the image of light. Beierwaltes starts out with an assumption that governs the way he looks at the metaphors in the Enneads. He assumes that figures of speech can be more or less adequate to the task of representation, and that representational adequacy depends upon the ontological approximation of image and archetype. Since it is incorporeal, light turns out to be the most appropriate image for the task of representing philosophical truth.

In Beierwaltes's view, light is not merely a metaphor when it is used to describe intellect, since it can succeed as an image of the intellect only when “there is a presence of the original in the image”. Visual seeing differs from intellectual seeing because the visual object is external to the subject whereas the intellectual object is internal to the subject. Thus vision can be either intellectual or perceptual, but light, as the medium of vision, remains the same entity in either mode.

Replies to Beierwaltes have been both numerous and extensive, but most interpreters believe that in the Enneads symbols have no independent value. The majority of scholars insist that, far from speaking of the adequacy of symbols, one should speak of the subordination of symbols, since metaphor only redescribes doctrine.

In the last chapter, we looked at Plotinus' visionary approach to Plato's Demiurge and wondered if the unitary world of the soul threatened to elide and engulf the ordinary world of objective essences. The question before us is now, how does Plotinus' conception of the soul overcome, so to speak, the temptations of this unlimited enrichment and avoid falling into a solipsistic dream. In what follows, I will explore the limitations of the soul's world and the soul's vision, showing in particular that Plotinus' views on discursive thinking point to a form of knowledge that asks the individual soul to step outside of its own constructions and its own contents. As we will see in the following chapters, because non-discursive thinking ultimately circumvents the intentional structures of thought, the intentional stance cannot be reified in such a way as to substitute for an objective world order.

Plotinus' views on method and truth involve a rejection of essentialism and a generally cautionary attitude toward discursive thinking. Some features of his anti-essentialism might lead us to think that he does hold to a kind of subjectivism, but in what follows I would like to suggest that this is not accurate. To clarify the problems with characterizing Plotinus as a subjectivist, I turn to a modern critique of subjectivism. In his book, Subjectivity, Realism, and Postmodernism, Frank Farrell points out the hidden ironies of what amounts to a self-deception implicit within Cartesian epistemology.

Introduction: Exegetical Methods in the Platonic Theology

Proclus' Platonic Theology is an exegetical text that bears the unmistakable imprint of the Late Athenian school. Not only does it present the works of Plato in constant dialogue with competing theological systems to which the Neoplatonists accorded scriptural status, such as the Chaldean Oracles and Rhapsodic theology, but the Platonic Theology offers itself as a theurgic text in its own right. For Proclus, Plato's discourse on the nature of the divine constitutes a mystagogy, an initiation into theurgy.

Proclus sets out the plan of his work in chapter 2 of the Platonic Theology. There he outlines the book according to three central divisions: Plato's teachings concerning the nature of the gods, the structure of the divine hierarchy, and a miscellany of Platonic gods, hypercosmic and encosmic, that appear less systematically in the writings of Plato. Thus the Platonic Theology treats Plato's dialogues according to a scheme in which various aspects or attributes of deity are dispersed triadically within the Laws, Republic, Phaedrus, and Phaedo. The second part of the work describes, as Proclus promises, the central constituents of the divine world, although some of the plan is missing from the work as we have it. Beginning with the One (bk. II), the Platonic Theology continues down the grades of reality, to the Henads, the intelligible gods, the intelligible-intellective gods, the intellective gods, and the hypercosmic gods. This level is as far as our text reaches.

In this chapter, my theme is introspection: how does it function in Plotinus' dialectic, what are some of the philosophical issues associated with it, and most importantly, how does Plotinus think it can be practiced? Plotinus anticipates Descartes in arguing both that the soul as subject of perception cannot be an extended substance and that the mind necessarily knows itself. Like Descartes, Plotinus also invokes an introspective stance within his dialectical procedure. Methodologically, it will be seen, Plotinus shares with Descartes in a tradition of philosophy of mind that employs thought experiments as a method of persuasion. The special nature of this persuasion is effected through the textual representation of a highly structured form of self-reflection. I will be looking at the philosophical appeal to self-reflection, and asking whether and how it informs the contemplative pedagogy of Plotinus. In particular, in order to discuss his views about self-consciousness and self-reflection, I will concentrate upon Plotinus' use of thought experiments.

What does it mean to for someone to be a person – what is the essence of the human self? In the modern, Cartesian tradition, one answer to this question is that the self is the mind, whereas the mind in its turn is a substance uniquely endowed with reflexive consciousness. Recently, historicist challenges to this mentalistic conception of personhood have argued that the ancient Greek philosophers managed their psychology and epistemology quite well without the concept of consciousness.

Pythagoreanism, Oral Teachings, and Neoplatonic Textuality

The language of Neoplatonism is the language of symbols. In the next chapters I want to discuss two different systems that are quite pervasive within Neoplatonism: Orphic symbolism and Pythagorean symbolism. These systems are tied together historically, inasmuch as the traditions that their names represent are often conflated among ancient authors. Nevertheless, two distinctive series of metaphors are associated respectively with Orphism and Pythagoreanism. Whereas the Orphic tradition is cosmological (Orpheus sings about the birth of the cosmos, and so narrates a cosmogony), Pythagorean symbolism is essentially nonnarrative and involves mathematical and geometric concepts. Disparate as ways of framing the world, both these systems are central to Neoplatonic texts and become important vehicles through which the Neoplatonists attempt to convey their non-discursive methodologies.

The thought exercises that have been the subject of the previous pages involve mathematical and geometric symbolism. In this chapter, I show that the history of this symbolism in Neoplatonic texts helps us to enter into a reconstruction of Neoplatonic self-representation precisely because these symbols are so powerfully charged by their historical eminence and also by their traditional weight. Within the history of Platonism, oscillation between a tendency to Platonize and a tendency to Pythagoreanize forms the basis of an ongoing dialogue concerning the nature of philosophical purity and authenticity. By engaging with the Pythagorean tradition, the Neoplatonists bring about their own insertion into a tradition that they perceive as primordial or as a pristine form of philosophy.

LIFE AND WORK

Proclus was born in 412 in Byzantium in a Lycian family, still faithful to the old Hellenic religion in a society already dominated by Christianity. The talented young man did not opt for a career in the imperial administration as his father had done, but decided to devote his life to philosophy. After completing his studies in Alexandria, Proclus arrived in Athens in 430 where he joined the Platonic Academy and was first educated by the elderly Plutarch. Under Plutarch the Athenian Academy had turned to the new form of Platonic philosophy that was initiated by Plotinus and propagated by Porphyry. Under the influence of Iamblichus, this Platonic philosophy had become more and more linked to the old beliefs and rites of paganism, of which it offered a rational justification. This tendency increased when Syrianus became the new head of the Academy in 432.1 During more than fifteen years Proclus not only followed Syrianus’ courses, but was also initiated by him in theurgic rituals. Proclus was deeply influenced by his master and he often praises him lavishly (cf. In Parm. 1.618.2– 9). After Syrianus’ death (around 437), he became the head of the school and thus ‘successor (diadochos) of Plato’, a position he held for almost fifty years until his death in 485.

LIFE

The few facts we have about Simplicius’ life come from his own works and a few other sources. He came from Cilicia (south-eastern Anatolia) as Agathias tells us (Hist. 2.30). He was educated by Ammonius in Alexandria (fl. 490 ce, cf. In Cael 26.18–19) and Damascius (fl. 520 ce) in Athens (In phys. 601.19). Among influential figures on his philosophical outlook are Porphyry, the learned pupil and biographer of Plotinus (245–320), Iamblichus (fl. 300 ce, referred to as ‘the divine Iamblichus’, In phys. 60.7; 639.23 etc.), and Proclus (‘the teacher of my teachers’, In phys. 611.11–12, cf. 795.4–5). The expulsion of Platonists from Athens in 532 ce after Justinian’s ban on pagan teaching ended school activities in 529 ce (Malalas Chronicle 18.47), the cross-references between the extant works, and the lack of evidence after 540 ce suggests that his life-span comes roughly to 480–560 ce. Allusive comments in a discussion of the role of the philosopher in the city in his commentary on Epictetus (In Epict. 32.65.30– 9 D. with reference to Plato Rep. 496d) make it probable that he wrote that commentary before the others while still in Athens, as does his mention of the oppressive situation in Athens (ibid. epilogue). His personal note on friendship (In Epict. 87.39–44/354 Hadot) indicates that he experienced help from friends who looked after his family while he was away, but we cannot establish the nature and date of this event.

Plotinus is generally acknowledged to be, after Plato and Aristotle, the dominant figure in the entire history of ancient Greek philosophy. Beginning in the eighteenth century, German historians of philosophy gave Plotinus and his successors the pejorative label ‘Neoplatonists’. With this label ‘Neo’ they explicitly intended to indicate a decline in the rational purity of Platonic thought. Plotinus, however, in no way regarded himself as an innovator. He consistently maintained that he was explicating and defending the philosophical view that we know as ‘Platonism’ and that he believed was found primarily, though not exclusively, in the dialogues of Plato. Typical of all Plato’s disciples, Plotinus welcomed insight into the nature of Platonism from the testimony of Plato’s immediate disciples – especially Aristotle – and from what we can only suppose was the continuous oral tradition beginning within the Old Academy and leading up to Plotinus himself. At least part of the appearance of innovation arises from Plotinus identifying as authentically part of Platonism what he took to be necessary implications of claims made explicitly in the dialogues. In addition, Plotinus as well as his successors, taking Aristotle to be an Academic – albeit at times a dissident one – were content to articulate Platonic claims in Aristotelian language. We shall find throughout this book that Aristotelian terminology and arguments are regularly used by self-declared disciples of Plato to express the Platonic world view.