As later chapters will show, Plato’s political ideas were immediately and immensely influential. Aristotle’s own political thinking largely starts where Plato left off, and much of Hellenistic constitutional theory shows an indelibly Platonic imprint. However, at least at first sight, this influence seems to owe relatively little to the post-Platonic Academy itself. The major figures who immediately succeeded Plato, Speusippus and Xenocrates, seem by and large to have been more interested, or at any rate more innovative, in ethics (and metaphysics) than in politics, though Speusippus is reported as having written an On Legislation, Xenocrates a Politicus, in one book, and – interestingly – an Elements of Kingship for Alexander, in four. Polemon, who took over the headship from Xenocrates, and taught the Stoic Zeno, was also primarily known for his contributions in ethics. After him, with Arcesilaus, the Academy takes a sceptical turn; when Antiochus of Ascalon, in the first century bc, announces a return to the positive doctrines of the ‘Old Academy’, his version of ‘Platonic’ (and Aristotelian) political ideas turns out to be a heavily Stoicized one.

Yet this broad-brush picture cannot be quite right. There clearly was continuing and direct engagement with Plato’s political writings on the part of the Academy: the field was not left entirely to Aristotle. Thus the second part of the famous two-day disquisition at Rome, for and against justice, by the Academic sceptic Carneades seems to have exploited Glaucon’s case against, in Republic II; and we also have fairly secure, and reasonably extended, evidence of the close reading of both the Republic and the Laws within the ‘Old Academy’ itself.

Introduction

Cicero could read in his well thumbed text of Plato’s Republic that political constitutions did not endure forever. Experience reinforced the message of philosophy that the Roman Republic was unlikely to withstand the recurrent civil wars that marked the years of his adult life. Cicero, along with his contemporaries, preferred to analyse historical change in moral terms. Thus, he argued that the traditional constitution of the Republic was intrinsically the most stable available, and the only reason for its weakness was the corruption of the ruling classes. To the modern historian, his conservatism may seem nostalgic or impractical; yet his de Re Publica was received with immediate enthusiasm, while de Officiis proved one of the most influential of all Classical works. Cicero’s strength as a political philosopher lay in the creative and enduring expression that he gave to a remarkably fertile set of aristocratic ideals.

I have described Cicero’s political philosophy as creative. However, much scholarship since the late nineteenth century has been devoted to discovering the precise ways in which his thought is derivative. Cicero the philosopher has been supposed habitually to have imitated a lost Greek ‘source’; and his texts have been mentally translated back into Greek in order to learn more about their alleged author. Unsurprisingly, Cicero’s arguments have seemed both unoriginal and anachronistic. However, the presuppositions, the methods and the results of the source-hunters have not stood up to close scrutiny. In particular, we can no longer ignore the wealth of evidence for Cicero’s wide reading in Greek philosophy and history, and his easy familiarity with philosophical concepts (shown, for example, by jokes in his letters) as well as his outstanding ability to organize ideas and arguments.

Politics, the legislator, and the structure of the Politics

Aristotle’s Politics does not itself articulate any consolidated account of how the nature and scope of inquiry into politics are to be conceived. For that we need to turn to statements elsewhere in his writings, and particularly at the beginning and end of the Nicomachean Ethics. Adoption of this expository strategy is just one index of the fact that for Aristotle ethics and politics are not two distinct even if connected disciplines, but one and the same subject. The name for this subject is ‘polities’; and the systematic, drily analytical treatises which have come down to us under the titles of Ethics and Politics deal with different aspects of it. Politics so understood is a pursuit or a form of knowledge which has as its aim the achievement of the good for human beings – both individually and collectively, in their cities or peoples.

According to Aristotle that good consists in happiness or human fulfilment, which is analysed as ‘activity of soul in accordance with excellence’, i.e. a life exemplifying the moral and intellectual virtues. Roughly speaking, ethics – as its name indicates – is the subdivision of politics concerned with understanding the habits of character which constitute the moral virtues necessary for human fulfilment. The other subdivision studies politeiai or constitutions, construed as different ways of organizing government in a city or nation; it is presumably viewed as the more obviously or directly political part of politics. Under these rather bare and brute descriptions ethics and politics (in this narrower sense) might seem to have little to do with each other.

Introduction to Damascius and the Aporiai kai Luseis Peri Proton Archon (Doubts and Solutions Concerning First Principles)

Damascius (ca. 462–538) was scholarch when the Christian emperor Justinian shut down the Platonic Academy in 529, issuing a decree that banned all pagans from teaching in Athens. Damascius' title, Diadochus, marked him as last in the ancient lineage of Platonic Successors. His attempts to revitalize the foundering school no doubt made it a target of anti-pagan persecution, a persecution that followed in the wake of violent attacks directed against Neoplatonists active in the city of Alexandria. Upon the closing of the Academy, Damascius led a band of pagan philosophers out of their patron city and into exile. We learn from the historian Agathias that

There is some disagreement about the fate of the exiled philosophers after their disappointment over conditions in Persia. It is now disputed that they settled at Haran and thereby transplanted a branch of the school into Near Eastern soil.

In Reading Neoplatonism I discuss the history and nature of Neoplatonic textuality. Over many centuries, Neoplatonism, based now in Alexandria, now in Athens, associated itself with a fixed textual tradition – the corpus of Plato's dialogues and the exegetical tradition associated with it – despite or perhaps even because of this temporal and geographic breadth. And yet more than the adherants of any other ancient philosophical lineage the Neoplatonists insisted that wisdom could be located only outside all texts and outside all language.

Why were the Neoplatonists, who explored so intensively non-discursive or non-propositional thinking, and who subjected formal dialectic to such criticism, exegetical beyond all other schools of ancient philosophy? And how does their suspicion of discursive thinking manifest itself in their texts? Working with the texts of Plotinus, Proclus, Damascius, and others, I show how lack of confidence in discursive argument shaped the textual strategies available to these authors. These texts often appropriate elements from ritual, repeatedly investigate the limits of discursive thinking, and try to illustrate how non-discursive thinking is supposed to work. We find texts that are at odds with their own textuality, discourses that deny that anything has been asserted, and discursive strategies that set themselves against their very discursivity. What are the issues that shaped the very distinctive textual practices reflected in the Neoplatonic tradition?

Reading Neoplatonism touches on issues as diverse as Plotinus' critique of essentialism and Proclus' references to theurgy. What brings these strands of thought together, and how can a scholar justify tracing these disparate phenomena back to a single source? In this book, I claim that the wide variety of textual strategies we find in the Neoplatonic tradition arises largely as a means of circumventing the hestitations that the tradition as a whole has about discursive thinking. There is a diachronic movement to the book: I begin at the start of the Neoplatonic tradition and end with the last Platonic successor, Damascius.

What makes Neoplatonism a unified tradition, and what kinds of resources enabled Neoplatonists to maintain the continuity of this tradition? Formally, Neoplatonists remained allied over the acceptance of Plato's dialogues as constituting something like a foundational discourse. Yet obviously there is a great deal more to the tradition that brought about its cohesion, above all its metaphysical structures and its associations with pagan religiosity. In short, Neoplatonism was a textual tradition as well as a living school; its adherents practiced a minority religion that struggled to define and maintain itself against an increasingly intolerant mainstream ideology.

But if the Neoplatonists rely on the writings of Plato for their metaphysical enterprise, the central feature of this enterprise is nevertheless its insistence on the faculty of intuition, nous, for the truth of its deliverances.

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.