Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 9

1 March 2024

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 9

1.  One aspect of Platonism that I’ve found attractive is that Platonism does not suggest that its practitioners will reach perfection, however ‘perfection’ is understood; I mean that practitioners will not embody perfection in their daily embodied life at all times and under all circumstances.  For example, in the Phaedo the view is put forward that practitioners of philosophy should go as far as they can along the path to realization, but that complete realization is not possible as long as we have a body.  It is only after separating the soul from the body in contemplation and in the practice of wisdom, as well as physically, that full ascent to the One, the Good, and the Beautiful can happen.  This is why Socrates says that Philosophy is a preparation for dying. 

This contrasts with those traditions that argue that perfection is our natural condition and that it is only ignorance or some kind of misunderstanding that keeps us from realizing this in a flash of insight that completely erases hindrances and negativities.  Teachers who come from this perspective often get into difficulties because they are unable to recognize the inherent incompleteness of their realization; an incompleteness that will remain as long as they have a body.

I think the Platonist perspective on this issue is more realistic and has greater explanatory range.  It accounts for the great difficulty of the path and the tendency for experiences of realization to fade.  It also explains that necessity for continuous and dedicated practice that lasts a lifetime.

2.  Because the ultimate in Platonism is ineffable all descriptions and explanations are incomplete.  By incomplete I mean that statements about the ineffable are, at best, next to the ineffable but are not the ineffable, the One, itself.  A consequence of this is that in the history of Platonism there are various attempts to talk about the ineffable One and there are shifts in vocabulary and in what is emphasized.  Another consequence is that non-Platonic traditions can place their own understanding of the ultimate in that ‘next to’ location without feeling they are deforming Platonism itself.

3.  I read somewhere (it might have been A. H. Armstrong) that the Enneads of Plotinus have been translated into Japanese.  This started me thinking that I am only aware of a small part of Platonism in the world today.  I have a good overview of what Platonism is like in the anglosphere.  And I have some knowledge of Platonism in Europe, though it is significantly less than what I know about Platonism in my own cultural sphere.

Outside of those two areas I know almost nothing about how Platonism fares.  For example, I have no knowledge of Platonism in South American, Africa, Asia, and Russia.  I suspect that in at least some countries, like Greece, Russia, and others influenced by Orthodoxy, there is an ongoing and anciently rooted interest in Plotinus, but I don’t know how that actually manifests either historically or at the present time. 

As a response to this I sometimes wonder if it would be useful to have something like an “International Plotinus Conference.”  Its purpose would be specifically to create a forum for those dedicated to Plotinus and the Enneads to gather, to share and contrast their own understandings. 

4.  When I read the works of Plato and Plotinus, I feel happier, I have a sense of greater equanimity, I am more at peace.  Perhaps this feeling is what Classical philosophy meant by eudaimonia?

5.  Beauty is a visitor to our realm, the material world.  It is a welcome visitor, but beauty remains a visitor and is not truly at home here.  The home where Beauty naturally resides is the Good and the One.  That is why it is difficult to define Beauty, to talk about Beauty, to categorize Beauty; because Beauty itself, Beauty as such, is an aspect of the ineffable.