The Imageless

1 January 2023

The Imageless

I was listening to a Youtube channel called The Meditating Philosopher because the channel had a discussion about Platonism called ‘Valuing Plato’.  The participants were John Vervaeke and Eric Orwoll.  Vervaeke is a professor at the University of Toronto in Cognitive Science and Orwoll is a dedicated Platonist who uses social media to talk about Platonism.  Both Vervaeke and Orwoll have a facility with the technical vocabulary and structures of academic philosophy.

The third participant was Robert Gray who hosts ‘The Meditating Philosopher’.  Gray is not an academic and does not have facility with technical philosophical vocabulary and argumentation; in this Gray is more like me.

At about 37 minutes in, the discussion touched on the differences between Proclus and Plotinus, a topic that has interested me for quite some time.  The section of the discussion begins with Eric Orwoll asking John Vervaeke about the how the Good is also the One:

John Vervaeke:  “There is a history to the One and you [Eric Orwoll] know it.  The One isn’t the same in Proclus as it is in Plotinus.  So, I’ll take sort of a generalized One if you’ll allow me that.  And it’s unclear what the One is in Plato because the Parmenides is a very – [Robert Gray cuts in]

Robert Gray:  “Just for me can you say what’s the difference between Proclus’s and Plotinus’s One?”

John Vervaeke:  “Well, there’s a difference in terms more about how you relate to it.  Plotinus seems, no not seems, I think I’m pretty confident, I’m confident in saying Plotinus claims that we can have full blown henosis, that we can fully be one with the One, fully participate in It.  Proclus has a different view in which there is, and this sounds so Jungian (this is what I mean sometimes when I say Jung is the Plato of the psyche), what we can come to is the One within us that has a particular relationship of deep participation with the One, One qua One, ultimate One, but we can’t get full identity, full unity with that One.”

Robert Gray:  “OK, that’s great.  I can map that to Buddhism or Christianity as well. That makes sense.”

John Vervaeke:  “And this is something you see in the history; so Neoplatonism tends to put in levels of mediation that you don’t find, for example, in Plato, and Plotinus even has than later Neoplatonists.  Is that good enough?”

Robert Gray:  “That’s great.  Ya, I appreciate it.”

 

1.  I think the way to look at this is that Plotinus is a contemplative, while Iamblichus, Proclus, and the other theurgists, are focused on magic; that is to say they are focused on acquiring magical power.  This is a distinction that many have made.  But recently I have been running into books and Youtube videos that have increased my clarity regarding this distinction.

2.  I find Vervaeke’s identification of Proclus’s approach to that of Jung insightful.  For a long time, I have felt that Jungian thought sets up a barrier to transcendence (I understand unity with the One to be full transcendence).  This is because Jung regards the realm of images and archetypes to be as far as human beings can go.  I’m not even sure that Jung thinks there is any higher realm than that of images and archetypes, but whether Jung does or does not think so, the goal of Jungian understanding is to regard images and archetypes, and clarity about their nature and how they function in the human psyche, as the goal of spirituality. 

3.  I once talked to a psychology professor who said that Freud directly attacked religion, particularly in his last works such as ‘The Future of an Illusion’.  The professor went on to say that religions such as Christianity have a long history of contending with direct attacks on their world view and that therefore traditional religion was capable of handling Freud’s analysis.

But Jung’s attack was more indirect and harder to counter.  By substituting images and archetypes for unification with God, Jung takes over the idea of spirituality (I might say Jung ‘appropriates’ the idea of spirituality), removing it from religion, while at the same time changing the nature of what spirituality actually means.  It is a kind of spiritual bait and switch.

4.  A friend of mine, a dedicated Jungian who has a many decades long commitment to Buddhism, and I had a long discussion about Jung several years ago.  He argued that Jung was a great basis for a contemporary, Western, understanding of Buddhism.  I countered that Jung rejected notions such as Nirvana, which lies beyond image, beyond name and form, that Jung rejected the idea of transcendence.  My friend said that I was wrong; that ‘the archetype of transcendence’ was a Jungian archetype.  I responded that transcendence was not an archetype, that you could say that the transcendental was the source of all archetypes, but the idea that the transcendental is an archetype is precisely how Jungian thought creates a barrier to the transcendental and blocks access to the One, the Good, and the Beautiful.

5.  I would put it that the realms of images and archetypes are, from a Platonist perspective, sensory realms; they resemble the realm of the five senses but they are fundamentally the same in that the appearances in these realms of image, dream, and archetype are emanations from, ultimately, the One.  These realms are simply other realms of experience; the experiences differ, mostly, from the experiences we have in the material realm, but they are still sensory experiences and do not transcend sensory experience.  When Plato recommends turning away from, withdrawing from, sensory experience this includes turning away from these other realms as well.

6.  It seems like this conflict has been going on for centuries.  Among contemporary Platonists there seems to be, particularly among those whose understanding is rooted in Proclus’s interpretation, the idea that the purpose of Platonic spirituality is to align with deities rather than a ‘return to the One’. 

7.  In the thought of Plotinus, the soul contains within it a spark of the divine, the presence, in muted form, of the light of the One.  In other words, the soul never completely leaves the One; there is always a connection to the One and a remembrance, or recollection, of the One.  I think of this presence as the presence of eternity within the ephemeral individual.

When I think of an allegory for this, I think of the light of the One as a kind of ember in the psyche of each individual.  I think of the soul as the capacity for individual awareness, consciousness, growth, and understanding.  The soul is immaterial, but I wouldn’t say it is a trace of the One.  Rather the soul can forget its immaterial nature and turn to, and become fascinated by sensory stimulation, which is what happens to most people; or it can turn to the ember of light which is the light of the One and the presence of eternity within. 

If the soul turns to the ember of the One within it can cultivate that ember by becoming closer to it; whereupon it discovers that the ember is actually the blazing light of transcendence.  This is not easy to do; the pull of the senses keeps tugging at the individual.  But it is possible.

8.  You can think of the ascent to the One as a long journey as one practices the foundational practices of the Ascetic Ideal life after life.