Whether the goal was to convert, to console, to cure, or to exhort the audience, the point was always and above all not to communicate to them some ready-made knowledge but to form them. In other words, the goal was to learn a type of know-how; to develop a habitus, or new capacity to judge and to criticize; and to transform--that is, to change people's way of living and of seeing the world. If, then we remember that philosophy's assertions are intended not to communicate knowledge but to form and to train, it will come as no surprise if we find aporiai in Plato, Aristotle, or Plotinus in which thought seems to be enclosed--points at which there are reformulations, repetitions, and apparent incoherences.
Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? p. 274.
To lay the foundation for what I want to say about Christian Neoplatonism, we have to spend some time understanding what Plato was about. This includes correcting some rather entrenched misunderstandings about Plato as a rationalist obsessed with dessicated abstractions. This is the picture we get of him in the McGilchrist's Chapter 8: "The Ancient World" where he says talking about Plato and his impact--
The reliance on reason downgrades not just the testimony of the senses, but all our implicit knowledge. This was the grounds of Nietzsche’s view that Socrates, far from being the hero of our culture, was its first degenerate, because Socrates had lost the ability of the nobles to trust intuition: ‘Honest men, he wrote, ‘do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion.’‘What must first be proved is worth little,’ Nietzsche continues in The Twilight of the Idols : 'one chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive.'
...
In this later Greek world, truth becomes something proved by argument. The importance of another, ultimately more powerful, revealer of truth, metaphor, is forgotten; and metaphor, in another clever inversion, comes even to be a lie, though perhaps a pretty one. So the statements of truth contained in myth become discounted as ‘fictions’, that is to say untruths or lies – since, to the left hemisphere, metaphor is no more than this.
The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7731-52).
?!What Plato or Socrates is he talking about? Certainly not one that I'm acquainted with. Certainly not the Socrates of The Symposium or Phaedrus. The dialogues are teeming with metaphors, analogies, parables. I think McGilchrist is relying too much on Nietzsche's agenda-laden perspective and extrapolating in an unbalanced way from some unfortunate passages in The Republic, which are what they are. But Plato's political ruminations need to be understood in the context of what all his dialogs were--imaginative thought experiments, not doctrine.
Rationality was important for Plato, but he was not first and foremost a rationalist; he was rather a mystic and contemplative visionary. This side of Plato I think has been an embarrassment to most modern readers, and they either dismiss that aspect of his philosophizing as wink-wink-ironic or as his just using conventional phraseology of his time, the way atheists will say today, 'Oh my god', or that was a desperate 'Hail Mary' move.
Both Hadot and McGinn correct this error, and McGinn points out that even if Plato were not a mystic or visionary, everybody in his time and in the centuries following thought he was. And the whole goal of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy in the schools that they founded was theoreia, a contemplative vision of the Divine One. The meaning of theoreia is very different from our 'theoretic' or theoretical', which suggests abstract thinking. There is nothing abstract about the contemplative vision of the One, which was for the visionary an overwhelming, ineffable, ecstatic experience of the Really Real, and to try to understand ancient philosophy without that experience as foundational to its project is to deeply misunderstand it.
So the metaphysical speculations of the ancients were provisional attempts to articulate or make some sense about what the nature of the Real is in the light of such experiences. But isn't this true of all philosophers who are worth paying attention to? They have a foundational intuition, and their philosophy is their attempt to extrapolate from it. The quality of their philosophy depends on the quality and richness of their intuitions. You cannot understand any "original" philosopher unless you can grasp his or her foundational intuitions, which may or may not be foregrounded in his discursive explication of them.
It's with this in mind that we must understand Plato's so-called doctrine of the Ideas: He's trying to give an account concerning how the world that we experience with the senses relates to this other transcendent realm that was disclosed to him in awakened visionary experience. There is no doctrine here--just metaphors, analogies, myths to make some attempt to give an account of his experience. Experience, not abstraction is the foundation here. I'm not going to belabor the argument. If you need more evidence read McGinn (Chapter 2, "The Greek Contemplative Ideal") and Hadot (chapters in Part 2: "Philosophy as a Way of Life").
A similar misunderstanding relates to the idea of the 'Intellect' in the Greek transcendental philosophy. It's not about intelligence in the IQ sense or about being an intellectual in the modern sense. It's about Nous (See Note 1), the the divine part of the human soul, which is a dormant faculty that when awakened is capable of contemplating the divine and divine things like the transcendentals. Nous is the divine faculty that inheres in the human mind that must be activated or "remembered" in order to be capable of cognizing the divine. (See Note 2) This is a different idea than the biblical assertion that humans are created in the image and likeness of God, but it's kissing cousins with it, and it will play a role in Patristic thinking about divinization or 'theosis'.
I want to spend some time here developing what I began in Part 3 about the Socratic elenchus. Hadot argues that Plato's dialogues were simply provisional training exercises, models for the kind of thing that students undertook in his Academy. The idea was to use dialectic discourse to see if thinking in this format could "birth" an insight. Tibetan Buddhist monks use dialectic for the same "training" purposes. The exercise often ended in aporia, without any conclusion, i.e., without any insight having been birthed.Theaetetus provides a good example. The goal is an attempt on Socrates' part to think out loud mostly with his young interlocutor Theaetetus, a budding math prodigy, to see if together they can come to some understanding about what 'knowledge' truly is.
The foil here is Protagoras's doctrine that 'man is the measure of all things', which in the context of this dialog is interpreted to mean that every human being determines for himself what is true or not true, what is knowledge or opinion. Clearly for Socrates that's not satisfactory. This is one of my favorite dialogues for the way it depicts Socrates' charming garrulity--his menschy warmth, his wit, his sincere desire to understand and to help others to fully realize what lies sleeping within them--and his ability to admit when a question cannot be answered. That's how this dialog ends up:
SOCRATES And are you still in labour and travail, my dear friend, or have you brought all that you have to say about knowledge to the birth?
THEAETETUS: I am sure, Socrates, that you have elicited from me a good deal more than ever was in me.
SOCRATES And does not my art show that you have brought forth wind, and that the offspring of your brain are not worth bringing up?
THEAETETUS: Very true.
SOCRATES But if, Theaetetus, you should ever conceive afresh, you will be all the better for the present investigation, and if not, you will be soberer and humbler and gentler to other men, and will be too modest to fancy that you know what you do not know. These are the limits of my art; I can no further go, nor do I know aught of the things which great and famous men know or have known in this or former ages. (Jowett translation)
Socrates earlier describes himself as a midwife to bring out of or to birth in his interlocutors something that is latent in their minds or souls. In this dialogue the exercise failed, insofar as he and Theaetetus were unable to develop a satisfactory explanation for what knowledge is. Socrates has spent most of the dialog excluding all the things that people, Theaetetus and others, wrongly think knowledge is, but after all that, they cannot develop any satisfactory idea about what it is. But the exercise was not in vain, because the beginning of wisdom is to know what you don't know.
But that doesn't close off the possibility of future insight--the possibility of "conceiving afresh" in the future. There is a timing or kairotic dimension to birthing in this sense. One can prepare for it, but it cannot be forced. It comes as a kind of gift. It is in this sense that habitus becomes heuristic. A constellation of practices--habitus--structure a salience landscape that is open to, indeed aspires to, transcend its constraints.
The heuristic aspect lies in the hunch that self-transcendence is a possibility. So one becomes a philosopher as a way of life is to adopt a habitus that engages practices as a heuristic exercise on a hunch that such self-transcendence is a possibility for oneself. Philosophy is not primarily rational exercise. It uses rationality to subvert rationality. One trusts in the efficacy of the practices because of the testimony of those living and dead who have proved their effectiveness. But that doesn't mean that these practices will be effective in any particular case. But because they often fail does not prove them invalid.
One of the consequences of inhabiting such a habitus is that you come to see the world around you as a provisional mental construct--what I've been calling an imaginary. An imaginary organizes our experience of the world in more or less adequate ways, but its adequacy is measured by its approximation to ontonormative truth--truths glimpsed in states of higher consciousness. This points to the insight Plato's Allegory of the Cave would have the reader understand--the world construct we live in is, relatively speaking, an illusion, at least in comparison to how we might understand it if we had minds whose 'divine' potential was fully realized. In the meanwhile, aporia is the beginning of wisdom. Aporia is a heuristic that opens up the possibility for true knowledge.
A similar arrival at aporia is the result at the end of Meno in which the question is whether virtue is teachable. At first glance, most of us would think it possible if one finds a person of true virtue from whom one could learn, but Socrates is interested here in the particular virtue or wisdom of statesmen like Pericles and Themistocles. Neither stinted in his children's education, and yet this education did not produce men of notable statesmen-like virtue. So it seems surprisingly evident that virtue is not teachable. But even more surprising is Socrates' saying that these prodigies of statesmen-like virtue were effective because they had right opinion, which means that they had no knowledge, and so no real clue why their judgments proved so consistently reliable. They made good judgments, but could not give an account of how they came to them, and so they were incapable of teaching others how to develop this particular capacity for statesmen-like virtue--
SOCRATES But if not by knowledge, the only alternative which remains is that statesmen must have guided states by right opinion, which is in politics what divination is in religion; for diviners and also prophets say many things truly, but they know not what they say.
MENEXENUS: So I believe.
SOCRATES And may we not, Meno, truly call those men "divine" who, having no understanding, yet succeed in many a grand deed and word?
MENEXENUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES Then we shall also be right in calling divine those whom we were just now speaking of as diviners and prophets, including the whole tribe of poets. Yes, and statesmen above all may be said to be divine and illumined, being inspired and possessed of God, in which condition they say many grand things, not knowing what they say.
MENEXENUS: Yes.
...
SOCRATES Then, Meno, the conclusion is that virtue comes to the virtuous by the gift of God. But we shall never know the certain truth until, before asking how virtue is given, we enquire into the actual nature of virtue.
A few things interest me about this passage. First, that, as in Theaetetus, while there is no adequate insight birthed with regard to the question under discussion, that does not mean that this is the end of it. The question needs further thought, and perhaps before understanding whether virtue is teachable, one needs to understand what virtue itself is.
Second, clearly the Socrates depicted here near the end of his life is no enemy of poets, diviners, and prophets. To dismiss this as Socrates' being ironic is silly. Socrates often describes himself as being inspired by some god or muse, and I take him at his word. Nevertheless, this is not knowledge because individual human human agency has nothing to do with it--they are simply channeling the gods.
And third, following on this, his idea here of 'divine' strikes me as Homeric in its pre-Axiality. It's the kind of thing Dreyfus and Kelly are pointing to in All Things Shining, which is that the gods shine through certain people who are otherwise rather ordinary. It is not they as humans who have achieved any level of virtue by their own agency, but it is rather that they are virtuous because they are favored by the gods. Nothing is changed or transformed in them as a result of their being channels. There's no transformative self-transcendence involved.
The Socratic project--and the Axial project in general--is not about being a passive puppet of the gods, but about becoming an an autonomous, free, active moral agent, a fully realized Self who becomes such by the awakening/birthing/remembering of latent capacities of mind or soul. The goal is not just to do good, but to become formed by the Good. One adopts a habitus of virtue as a heuristic path of self-transformation. To act virtuously does not mean you are virtuous--the habitus is not virtue. It's a praxis that makes becoming truly formed by virtue more likely.
Dreyfus and Kelly in their book want to retrieve this pre-Axial sense of the "moods" of Being as a strategy to deal with the contemporary meaning crisis. As with John Vervaeke, I admire them for taking this on and the risks that are attendant to their reputations in the way they go about it, but I am not satisfied with what they are doing, and neither do I think would be Socrates for reasons explained in the preceding paragraph. And because neither purely naturalistic explanations (Vervaeke) or pre-Axial/Heideggerian (Dreyfus & Kelly) explanations are fully adequate or satisfying, even though both are definitely important parts of a bigger picture.
Now my point here is simply to elaborate on what Hadot points out in the epigraph: in the case of Theaetetus or Meno, the goal was for Socrates to "not to communicate to them some ready-made knowledge but to form them". The task, in other words, for Socrates was to assist them with his midwife's art to become self-transformative by their awakening of an innate capacity to cognize transcendental truth, which from other dialogs we know to be the only real knowledge. Socrates' purpose in his conversation with them was to see if he could help "birth" in them their own realization about what real knowledge and virtue are. If successful they experience an awakening in some small degree of their Nous, and in doing so move toward becoming more authentically, deeply who they are, i.e., more conformed to the divine, not just channels for it. (Again, see Note 2)
In both cases there were no births, but that doesn't mean that such a birth for either would not be possible in the future. Or maybe one or the other of them will wake up in the middle of the night with an insight or the kind of birth that Socrates is looking for. The point of using logic, with all due respect to Nietzsche, is not to deduce one's way to the truth, but to show the limits of logic, so as to open up a less constrained salience landscape that allows for a new insight--or perhaps even a visionary experience--to emerge.
That's the point Hadot is making in the epigraph. The task isn't to argue about who's right or wrong about this theory or that, but to have a transformative experience in a disclosure of some kind that breaks into our ordinary, day-to-day consciousness from outside of it. The experience is what it is, and the evidence that lots of people have these experiences is well established. The only controversy is how to interpret them, and that depends on your metaphysical frame. The task for me in this Genealogy series is to make the case that the Christian Neoplatonic tradition has an interpretation that provides robust interpretations of experience if we accept the criteria laid out in previous posts--scope, coherence, richness, and adaptability.
So there are certain practices--the use of Logos in dialectic is one of them and contemplation (theoreia) is another--that prepare the way insofar as they organize one's thinking and attention so that, first, one knows what he does not know (the use of dialectic), and second, that one does know when he has birthed genuine insight--in contemplation or in other contexts of awareness or attention. I like Vervaeke's explanation of 'insight' as the flash that occurs when we transcend the constraints of our current salience landscape. He talks about it as a 'transjective' process, and at some point I'll come back to explore that.
The use of 'Logos' is a horizontal practice that prepares for insights on the vertical dimension, but is used also to test their validity and to make sense of the world in the light of them. And in a broader sense Logos is exercised by the sapiential community that has a role in determining whether an individual's insight on the vertical dimension is valid or delusional and how it ought to be interpreted in a way that is most fruitful for the individual as well as for the broader community.
Fruitfulness is measured by the way insights increase the scope, coherence, and richness of one's personal imaginary, but also in many cases to support, enrich, or expand the broader cultural imaginary. In other words, certain tried-and-true traditional practices--habitus--work heuristically to frame individual and community aspirations so that they lead to insights that enrich, support, and expand the tradition. All this depends on these practices actually working to connect the individual and his community to the Living Real. Once they stop performing this connective function for whatever reason, a society starts to reel in ontological dizziness.
If I were not so prolix, I would stop here, but I wanted to say a word about Plato's dialogue Parmenides. When I first read it, I thought the second half was a spoof. It was rather like Colbert's mocking Sarah Palin or Kevin McCarthy for their abuse of language or stretching it beyond its usefulness. The conversation between Parmenides and Aristotles in the second half is an exercise in what Vervaeke calls combinatorial explosiveness in which the mind is either chased off or bludgeoned into submission by a superfluity of logic.
My first take was that Plato wrote this as a refutation of the monism propounded by a pompous Parmenides and his condescending student Zeno by allowing the man to condemn himself with his own bloviation, by the stupefying absurdity of his taking logic where it cannot go. This is a dialog that ends not in aporia but in dogma. And it is hard to believe that anyone is transformed by it unless being bruised and bloodied is what you mean by being transformed. If this is the use of logic or dialectic to which Nietzsche and McGilchrist are pointing, I couldn't agree more. But it should be pointed out that Socrates is not participating at all in this dialectical exercise. It has nothing to do with him. The young nineteen-year-old Socrates, if anything, is dubious about the monistic 'doctrine' of Parmenides and Zeno.
But I don't know if it's so easy to dismiss Parmenides. Socrates says in Theaetetus referencing this meeting with Parmenides--
that I have a kind of reverence; not so much for Melissus and the others, who say that "All is one and at rest," as for the great leader himself, Parmenides, venerable and awful, as in Homeric language he may be called;--him I should be ashamed to approach in a spirit unworthy of him. I met him when he was an old man, and I was a mere youth, and he appeared to me to have a glorious depth of mind. And I am afraid that we may not understand his words, and may be still further from understanding his meaning;
And it's interesting to me that Ficino thought this dialog was profound. So I remain open to there being something in it I cannot yet grasp, and in future might yet be birthed in me. But I suspect that the real import of the dialog will be best understood in a broader discussion of apophaticism, which will be an important focus in future posts. (See Note 3)
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Note 1: That McGilchrist misreads Plato, does not take away from the importance of his broader argument. He makes distinction between 'Reason' and 'Rationality' that is helpful in understanding the distinction between Nous and Logos.The distinction is rather like the one in German between Vernunft and Verstand:
Reality was not, as Goethe and the Romantics came to see, the fixed and unchanging state of affairs that the left hemisphere assumes. ‘The phenomenon must never be thought of as finished or complete’, Goethe wrote, ‘but rather as evolving, growing, and in many ways as something yet to be determined.’ Interestingly, in the light of the last chapter, he noted that ‘ Vernunft [reason] is concerned with what is becoming, Verstand [rationality] with what has already become … [Reason] rejoices in whatever evolves; [rationality] wants to hold everything still, so that it can utilise it’. That we take part in a changing world, and that the world evokes faculties, dimensions, and characteristics in us, just as we bring aspects of the world into existence, is perhaps the most profound perception of Romanticism. This was not an idea or theory, but, for the Romantics, an incarnate reality. One can see it in the paintings and feel it in the poetry of the period. It is related to the sense of depth which is everywhere conveyed in its art.
McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 9563-9569)
Reason/Nous/Vernunft operates on the vertical; Rationality/Logos/Verstand operates on the horizontal. The first is more the domain of the right hemisphere, the second the domain of the left. I hope I've made the case that McGilchrist ought to have understood that Socrates/Plato's use of dialectic was part of an unfinished, evolving quest of the mind for greater understanding in the sense that Goethe means it.
Note 2: One of the analogies Socrates uses in his conversation with Theaetetus is to liken the memory function of the mind to a ball of wax on which impressions derived from the senses are made and thus retained in memory. And so we know something to be true from our empirical experience through the senses--for instance my recognizing a person I know approaching in the distance because the gestalt of the person correlates with the memory impression on my mind-wax.
I thought that he would take the analogy further by arguing that before birth the mind/wax received impressions of the transcendental forms, and that this gives us the innate cognitive capacity to grasp real knowledge, especially as the phenomena experienced in this world participate in transcendentals like truth, beauty, justice, et al. This would be consistent with his ideas about knowledge as anamnesis that he explores elsewhere.
But he does not go there. I think this is explained by what Hadot says in the epigraph. The task is not for Socrates to inform Theaetetus that he has a Nous, a divine part of his mind that is in a state of slumber, but to see if he can awaken it.
The impressions made on the mind-wax from our empirical experience are acquired in a different way from the impressions made on Nous, and so function in a less reliable way. But Nous impressions don't function at all until they are awakened, and that's the whole point of Platonic praxis in the Academy, according to Hadot.
And while it might seem that this kind of a priori-ism bears some relationship to Kant, it really doesn't because of the need to awaken the a priori categories. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but Kant's precluding any kind of thinking that embraces metaphysical speculation would exclude the kind of a priorism that Plato's anamnesis points to.
I don't want to get into the weeds on this, but I think it points to where Vervaeke and I diverge. Vervaeke describes himself as a Kantian who is interested in providing a naturalistic account for the awakening phenomenon, and I have no doubt that he and those he collaborates with can develop such an account, but in the end the question will be whether it can account for anomalies that transcend the Kantian a priori programming, so to say.
To analogize from The Matrix, the Kantian a prioris are like the way all the people and agents within the Matrix are programmed. That program defines the limits of what's possible within the Matrix no matter how much flex there is in the system for people to develop their capabilities. I think--I'm not sure--that Vervaeke is trying to understand the mechanics of cognitive development within the Matrix, i.e., within naturalistic constraints.
But to do so doesn't account for minds that operate outside the constraints of the Matrix.Well, Vervaeke would say that's ridiculous, that there is no outside the Matrix to account for, but isn't that really the big question? Who's to say? Even le Tellier's anti-relgious thought experiment in "The Anomaly" presupposes a mind outside the simulation that designed it.
And what gives Neo his superpower is that he is able to enter from outside the Matrix and to operate within it in a way not constrained by its code--i.e., the aprioris that determine the limits of everybody, including the agents, who operate within the Matrix. This is what enables him to defeat Agent Smith and the other agents who are still constrained by their code, even though their a prioris give them abilities the humans they police don't have.
Now of course I know that this is fiction, but it is a metaphor for what the Axial Revolution says about the nature of reality: There is the world down here, it runs according to certain rules explained by science, but there is a higher set of rules that Nous knows, and the whole point of human existence is to align one's life with those rules. And people like Teilhard and Barfield argue that the long-term evolutionary task is for humans to become agents through which the higher rules come gradually to supplant the lower ones. (Obviously the case for the evolution of consciousness needs to be made; it can't just be asserted, but that's for the future.) This idea of the evolution of consciousness superseding biological evolution is the basic heuristic that shapes the mythos dimension I'm arguing for in this series. I can't, of course, prove it, but I do think I can make a case for its plausibility using my scope, coherence, richness criteria.
And so from a Christian point of view, if Jesus of Nazareth is who Christians says he is, then it is at least conceivable that he could come from outside the world limited by naturalistic constraints and not be constrained by them. If people constrained within a naturalistic frame say that's impossible, well yeah, it is, if you choose to think within the constraints of a naturalistic frame. All I'm saying is why should we be constrained by naturalism? That's just a belief system like any other, and if people want to live in that kind of imaginary, that's fine. But I prefer to live in an bigger, more richrly imagined world than is possible within those constraints.
In the long run, the model that gets accepted will be judged plausible not only by criteria that are acceptable within the constraints of natural science, but by its power to create a mythos that works most robustly to improve the chances of the kind of self-transcendence that Vervaeke is so interested in explaining. Mythos has to take into account what natural science 'knows', but it needn't live scupulously within its limits. I'm not saying that you can just make stuff up, but I am saying is that the limits are "limits" that can themselves be transcended.
I will at some point come back around to epistemological issues that make more sense than appealing to a ball of wax, but there's something to start with there. McGilChrist's M&HE and Dreyfus and Taylor's Retrieving Realism' will be my primary provocations, which I think can be integrated with Vervaeke's cognitive science within the context of the kind of the Christian Neoplatonic imaginary I am arguing for. But first the genealogy.
Note 3: 4/24/23--In the last week I've been listening to Princeton's Michael Segrue's Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues in the Great Courses series available for free if you have an Audible subscription. His Lecture 11 is on Parmenides, and I was surprised that he too thinks that the second half of this dialogue is parody of the over-the-top use of logic to point out the absurdity and fundamental incoherence of Eleatic monism. It's similar in this sense to Euthydemus. Most of Segrue's lecture, though, is about how Parmenides, in talking to the 19-year-old Socrates, points out legitimate flaws in Socrates' theries about the Ideas.
I think that this reinforces my contention that the theory of the Ideas was never meant to be doctrine but rather an attempt to develop a plausible epistemology and ontology that provides an imaginal or mythopoetic framework to support the really important thing, which is his moral project of self-transcendence. This project is most explicitly articulated in "The Allegory of the Cave" in The Republic, "Diotima's Discourse" in The Symposium, and the third speech on love in Phaedrus. I've found Segrue's lectures interesting, but they make no reference to Hadot and his intepretations seem to be developed more out of the Kantian and Analytic traditions. For that reason, Segrue seems to give too much importance to Socrates's use of logic as a tool to discover truth. I contend that the elenchus is primarily a tool to demonstrate the limits of logic, i.e., to deliver aporia. Logic and definitions do not give you the truth--only experience does. Aporia clears the space for awakening to or remembering the truth.
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Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.