Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 8

25 February 2024

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 8

1.  Not all ritual is an example of sacrifice.  Many rituals are meant to pay homage to, or honor, an event or a person.  Another common ritual is a prayer request for a future result.  Other rituals serve as reminders for particularly significant cultural or individual commitments.  Still other rituals are a way of cultivating historical memory.

 

My own understanding of ritual in life is shaped by the Confucian text, the Book of Rites which has something to say about everything from what we would consider etiquette to ancestor veneration.  In a Platonic context I think that rituals paying homage to our Platonic ancestors, or rituals honoring specific books of Platonic wisdom (for example, a celebration for the Enneads and/or The Consolation by Boethius, and so forth) could be beneficial. 

 

In contrast, sacrificial rituals would, I think, lead practitioners astray.  I say this because it seems to me that sacrificial rituals might be misconstrued as a form of purification and thereby sow confusion as to what the practice of purification entails.

 

2.  I’ve been reading a PhD dissertation on The Consolation of Philosophy.  In the opening sections the author bemoans the fact that the status of the Consolation has fallen in contemporary society; the author sees its status as having slipped over the last 200 years, though I suspect it started slipping earlier than that.  It used to be the case that Boethius’s Consolation was something that every educated person would read.  There are hundreds of manuscripts of the Consolation from the Medieval period that are available to researchers because the book was so popular.  Though the Consolation is still read, it no longer is felt to be essential reading for an educated person.

 

I’m not disturbed by this.  Of course I would prefer that the Consolation retain its prior status.  But things change.  And we live in a culture that despises its own past so it is not a surprise that the Consolation has lost some of its influence and presence.  I take a seasonal view of such things.  Our culture is now entering a deep Winter where all that is valuable must withdraw underground if it is to survive until Spring.

 

3.  We use non-material objects every day; I don’t think it is possible for us to get through a day without using them.  Just think of how often we use numbers.  What I’m getting at is that we don’t need to become mystics (although that would be nice) to comprehend the presence of real abstractions, or forms, or ideas.  There are many ordinary things we use all the time that are non-material and real abstractions.  A materialist might argue that this alone does not support a Platonist perspective; I would say it is not sufficient by itself but, on the other hand, it is consistent with a Platonist perspective.  A materialist might say that these abstract objects are derived from material experience through mental processes that distill similarities and essential features from sensory experience.  Even if that is true, it still means that the abstractions are real.  Just as a mental construct such as a piece of music is real, so also an idea, or form, is real even if it is a mental construct. 

 

I used to use this argument with atheists to open the door for them to non-material realities.  In a few instances it worked.  I don’t think it made them Platonists, but it was a step in the right direction.

 

4.  I am sometimes struck while reading Plotinus at how easily he views the cosmos as rational and fundamentally orderly, and how Plotinus sees in this basic order a distant reflection of noetic realities, and beyond the noetic, to the One; because the One is the source for all unity and the orderliness of the cosmos is a kind of unity.  To be honest, for most of my life I have thought of the cosmos as chaotic, meaning unpredictable and arbitrary.  That might be why I am more sympathetic with the view of the Gods found in popular Classical literature, such as the theatrical tragedies, and in the writings of Hesiod, than the view of the Gods found in philosophical works from the same period.  It has been difficult for me to begin a transition to seeing a deeper order in the cosmos and in some ways I am still not comfortable with that point of view.