Antonio Vargas has posted another installment of our ongoing conversation here, to which I’m going to contribute in my own typically rambling fashion.
Antonio helpfully responds to my own gestures toward a Kantian or Quinean approach to sense data with his own expressions of support for a position more like McDowell’s, as would be expected from the manner in which our discussion has evolved. Contemporary philosophical debates are rarely without far older counterparts in the tradition, if we are sufficiently sensitive to draw them out through our interpretations. Hence it is no mere coincidence, for example, that Speusippus, Plato’s first successor, was himself a holist with respect to meaning, like Quine, whereas Aristotle tended more toward the view that Antonio characterizes as “that our perceptions are conceptual through and through.” Of course, it’s not as though I would exactly disagree with this latter view. Rather, it’s the issue of the pluralism of fundamental values, what Aristotle criticizes as the Platonists’ “profusion of goods” (Metaphysics 1091b25), including the basic organizing principles of the cosmos, which leads both myself and, I think, Speusippus as well to a more ‘holist’ position.
This may seem a bit confusing; why should holism, the idea that to really know anything we need to know everything, essentially an immediate one-to-one correspondence of each unit with the totality, be at odds with the idea that our perceptions are always already fully conceptualized? The issue is that when someone like McDowell, or before him Hegel or Aristotle, puts forward this position, it generally comes with the tacit condition that there is just one adequate conceptualization of each thing and of everything. To resist this move, therefore, is not really about setting “a conceptual scheme … against raw sense data,” as Antonio characterizes it, so much as the plurality of conceptual schemes which is enabled by recognizing some space between things and their conceptualization. And when I speak of ‘conceptualization’, I don’t just mean the imposition of concepts upon experience by human knowers, from which anybody would reasonably allow that things themselves have some ‘space’, but even that which is carried on already in the formal strivings of beings themselves, especially living beings of all kinds. Things are more, I would say, even than their self-formulations.
It’s on account of the possibility of ‘thought’ that is truly alien to our own that I believe we must recognize a fundamental negativity of the conceptual—not to separate it from ‘sense data’, but in order to recognize that it is necessarily in constant negotiation with it. Being and thinking are one, as Parmenides said, but they are one as a continuum, a flexible and infinitely divisible, even dialogical space that extends both between and within all units; this is the importance of the ‘intelligible-intellective’ or ‘noetico-noeric’ in the thought of Platonists like Proclus. In this way units acquire dimension.
Hence “reason and the divine” are neither simply one, nor simply separate, and this underscores how very close are Antonio’s position and my own in many ways, as noted by the ever-astute Oluwaseyi Bello. We both seek a “via media between these two options”. I would hold it true, though, in a certain respect, that “No amount of rational inquiry alone can connect us to a God,” but this is chiefly on account of the word ‘alone’. Reason and what decenters it are always present together, and so no inquiry connecting us to a God—for that matter, no inquiry that results in a successful mundane judgment either—will have been accomplished by ‘reason’ alone. By the same token, we should not say that the “traditions and symbols handed down” by the Gods are merely “contingent”, as Antonio often does here. Reason can articulate the synthēmata, and therefore need not view any of them as ‘contingent’: the hermeneutical exegesis of sacred texts and rites, an exercise of reason carried out in all traditions in one fashion or another, never allows itself to rest at deeming any token of the God as merely ‘contingent’.
In the same way, it’s not that “universal principles such as the World, the Sun, Life, Beauty, Reason,” are not Gods themselves in a certain sense. But the Godhood of such a principle will be precisely as a “unique divinity”, and therefore not as a universal per se. Hence I see a certain equivocation when Antonio states that “the philosopher can know them as such,” that is, as Gods, “without relying on any tradition or name.” Because after all, the philosopher speaks a language. I speak, e.g., of the Sun, and not of Shams (شمس). These are translatable, but precisely on account of that translatability, they are not simply one; so to reach the divinity of either, that is, its ultimate unity, we must take them in precisely that fashion which does not abstract from anything in the tradition which has brought it forth—its divinity per se cannot lie just in what is successfully translated, but must also, by definition, embrace all of its ‘contingencies’.
This is not the divinity Antonio seeks, however; hence he specifies that “we must not conflate our logos of the Sun with the divine Nous that constitutes the Sun … When I speak of a universal structure embodied by the Sun, I mean the Nous.” The divinity of which he wishes to speak, therefore, is precisely the telos of successful translation, the end achieved in every successful communication. This telos, though, never exhausts the potential of all the components—subjective, material, conceptual—of the scene of communication. The end is achieved, but never eliminated; it remains in order to structure and organize the situation as a demiurgic unmoved mover, as intellective activity as such.
It would be helpful, I think, in this regard to return to my example of the ‘thoughtful extraterrestrial’. Antonio asks “Do these galactic intelligences truly challenge the uniqueness of this principle? Perhaps they only reveal that this principle is the origin of a system far more complex than we imagined—one that manifests itself through a multitude of stars, not just one.” I would agree with this; but then one must recognize as well that the noetic principle, ‘unique’ after its fashion, is also by its very nature an expansive and divisible continuum.
Some of the ancients may not have thought of ‘the Sun’ as something that could be plural. Indeed, there is a sense in which it is not, as we recognize by the definite article. But then, as I pointed out, the definiteness of ‘the’ Sun, in that very same sense, though not with the same reference, is available to our thoughtful extraterrestrial as well, for whom our Sun, though, is merely a particular sun and not ‘the’ Sun which is their own, and for us the case is exactly symmetrical. This is not a bug, but rather language working just as it is supposed to, including relativity. ‘The Sun’ is in this respect both definite and relative or general in its reference—like ‘the God’.
The noetic continuum, moreover, can expand in other directions as well. Let us imagine that our thoughtful extraterrestrial is someone akin to our cephalopods, but living in an ocean beneath a thick crust of ice on a planet to the life of which no star makes any contribution aside from its gravity, where the metabolic processes are driven instead by hot vents in the ocean floor caused by seismic forces or radioactive decay. A more alien form of life could scarcely be imagined, and yet intelligence is obviously possible there, and hence the same noetic structure as such—that is, qua noetic—as embodied in the dispositions of Sun, stars and planets that are such crucial elements of the Platonic account, even though these entities are unseen to our cephalopod philosopher and would have a much different significance for them even were they to learn of them.
It’s in no way a matter, as people often seem to think, of new data about the cosmos undermining ancient cosmologies, as though their concepts are somehow brittle compared to our own. In fact one might consider the situation quite the opposite. Plato already spoke insightfully of those whose idea of ‘higher’ studies is to “lean their head back and study ornaments on a ceiling” (Rep. 529a), and such are the results delivered by our scientific instruments if we are inadequate to the task of interpreting them. The ancients were, if anything, more capable of imagining radical difference and incorporating it into their world than many of our contemporaries, and our modern anthropocentrism, hardly the product of scientific progress, but rather of regressive sentiment, would undoubtedly have appeared crude to them. So I am pretty certain that Socrates would have relished the opportunity to dialogue with a cephalopod, and neither would have to check their difference, their incommensurability, at the door.
I spoke of the continuum that extends and expands within every unit as well as between them, and this brings me to another issue. I think that Antonio leans too heavily on the notion that one Zeus and another are different Gods. I don’t believe that Proclus would wish us to interpret him as though intellective and hypercosmic Zeus, e.g., are merely homonymous. Rather, when Proclus speaks of a “twofold [dittos] Zeus” (PT VI. 8. 35.7) in the two orders, he is literally stating that Zeus, in the singular, is twofold, not that these are two Gods who merely share a name. I suppose that this could be seen as a case of ‘half full/half empty’, how the identity of Zeus might not be evident to a reader without a fundamental pistis of Him, a knowledge of Zeus by acquaintance, in Russell’s terms, rather than description, and who would expect, therefore, that it is only by elements of Zeus’ description that we would participate Him, and which would thus be the sole content of that participation. But Zeus is not just what He is, but also, and primarily, who.
This is where I believe that people with experience of a continuous polytheist tradition are in a better position to understand the ancients. In Hinduism, for example, under the umbrella of a single Deva, such as Shiva, coexist cults so different as to demand a polycentric disposition akin to that which applies to cults of other Devas, so that as a practical matter, one treats these virtually as cults of a different Shiva, but this doesn’t lead to the kinds of inferences such statements would suggest to those raised in obligate monotheist culture, where we are taught to expect such differences either to be politely ignored (as in the case of folk Catholicism with its innumerable bespoke local cults), forcibly integrated, or else allowed to disintegrate the sense of an integral Godhead. Henadic individuality, however, entails that insofar as there are activities of Zeus resulting in intellectually inconsistent properties—such as being the sole demiurge or sharing this role with His brothers Poseidon and Hades—this is because Zeus Himself is beyond the intellect, and determines it rather than being determined by it. Zeus can be ‘twofold’ (or more) without failing to be a unit, a henad, because henads form series, it’s what They do. And precisely because it is the series of Zeus, we can grasp it from any of its points, and regard that one as the privileged manifestation of Zeus Himself.
This goes again to the issue of continually referring to the traditional names of the Gods as ‘contingent’. These names are ‘contingent’ only within a historicist worldview which was founded upon a reactive posture toward these traditions, disintegrating them at every point of difference. This posture can then be inherited so that all of these names and rites can seem like nothing more than an obstacle to ‘primal’ experience. Names, however, lend themselves to reason, and are not opposed to it, though reason does not exhaust them, either. Analogously, the henad lends Herself to having a name, but She is not constrained by that—instead, it is a gift She gives freely. For Proclus, the names “through which we call upon the Gods and by which they are praised,” that is, none other than the very supposedly ‘contingent’ cultic names, “have been revealed by the Gods Themselves, cause reversion back to Them and, to the extent that there is something luminous in them, lead to human understanding,” (In Crat. 31.30-32.3). Antonio argues that “proper names do not correspond one-to-one with Gods,” as if to distance the name from the God, but he also quotes Proclus (In Crat. 33.7-9) that among the Gods, naming and intellectual insight are united, and that only in our case is the insight one thing, and the name another. But this means that the proper name is present with the God in the highest way possible for things which are, nevertheless, distinguishable. Proclus is clearly sympathetic with those who hold that “names exist among the Gods themselves, even among those allotted the highest order,” (In Crat. 29.25-8); for when he states that “Not every class of the Gods is nameable” (32.18), he simply means that the God as such is distinct from Their name, as a matter of basic logic, for as he states, “it was necessary that the procession of the intelligibles terminate at this order” (24-5)—that is, there needs to be a class of highest referents for the highest referential terms.
Nous is a hypostasis, a product, an effect of the Gods, Their way of being, which, moreover, because They are Gods, is also the Way of Being (NB: Amazon affiliate link). The distinction between hypostases is necessary to honor the hypostatic economy, and understanding the different kinds of unity is needed in order to appreciate the comprehensive system they form. Polycentricity does not eliminate this hypostatic structure. The best philosophers I have known, even those who had no religion in the strict sense, have I believe attained through noēsis a certain divine participation. But I can recognize this form of purely philosophical salvation while also understanding it to be both ontologically distinct from devotion, and also ontologically subordinate to it, as when Krishna states to Arjuna that “I am the basis of brahman” (Bhagavad Gita 14.27), or when Parmenides’ Goddess maps out the road of Being to Her kouros. Noēsis, as the God’s ‘self-realization’, in Oluwaseyi’s apt description, is at once the God thinking Herself, and also thought thinking itself, and we need to hold onto both of these moments.
The hypostatic emergence of being from unity is indeed its telos, its goal as thinking, the will of thinking to be something itself. This ‘something’ is divine, and for Damascius, indeed, Being as such is even a henad. I discuss this doctrine at some length at the end of my recent book Polytheism in Greek Philosophy (affiliate link to independent bookseller site Bookshop.org; also available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.). I think that Damascius’ idea here is extremely important, and it’s going to continue to guide me. I see Damascius and Proclus as always in fundamental harmony, with Damascius probing where he finds inherent tension in the system they share. The transition from the henadic to the ontic is such a tension. Similar to his other major theoretical intervention, his affirmation of an absolutely negative first principle beyond unity (the so-called ‘Ineffable’), Damascius’ reconceptualization of the status of Being can also be seen in a certain respect as a reaction to monotheism. Whereas the Ineffable provides a negative bulwark against monotheist appropriation of the Platonic first principle, the idea of the henadic character of Being Itself is an attempt to occupy the very space of monotheism positively, but with something that does not endanger the fabric of polytheism. As such, it must be understood, not as any sort of concession to monotheism, but as an advance beyond it, not a unity presupposed, but a unity constructed.
After reading this, I wish Plato had written a dialogue between Socrates and a cephalopod philosopher!
Thanks for the part about the alien sun, that image is really giving my brain some traction regarding henads/polycentricity.